For most of us today the sea has little practical significance. This is very recent. When I first went overseas from New Zealand in 1965 to America I travelled by sea, but this was just at the end of the sea era, for planes were becoming dominant, and I have only once travelled by sea again, except for pleasure. Yet, common perceptions aside, Australia is intricately tied in to the world, exporting raw materials and importing manufactured goods, and these are mostly carried by sea. Much of the world is dependent on oil from the Middle East, carried in great tankers across the Indian Ocean to First World destinations.
In the past the sea was much more central in our minds, connecting people and goods all over the world, inspiring great literature. Conrad, a novelist and a seaman, was one of the best. A ship is in the Arabian Sea, bound for the Cape of Good Hope:
The passage had begun, and the ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet. Round her the abysses of sky and sea met in an unattainable frontier. A great circular solitude moved with her, ever changing and ever the same, always monotonous and always imposing.
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Or more generally, this is what the open sea means to those who travel it:
The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land; and when He sends there the messengers of His might it is not in terrible wrath against crime, presumption, and folly, but paternally, to chasten simple hearts – ignorant hearts that know nothing of life, and beat undisturbed by envy or greed.
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This maritime literature, with its universal appeal, presented the sea as both mystical and utilitarian, and with a strong preference for sailing ships. The stunning series of maritime novels by Patrick O'Brian are, significantly, about men on sailing ships two hundred years ago. In contrast, how many great novels or poems have there been about air travel or container ships? Such sea literature as there is today reflects its recreational role.
For most of the past five millennia the sea was important for humans. Those who travelled long distances often went by sea. Today few travel by sea, some goods go by air, and bulk goods which do go by sea involve very little human experience with the sea. With the end of passenger ships, and the new container ships and oil tankers which have a minimum of crew (indeed it is technically feasible to guide a ship by computers and satellites from land, so that no one need be on board from port to port) fewer people than ever before have any sea experience. Containerisation has also shrunk dramatically the number of people needed on the wharves to unload a ship. This is a major change of the last few decades. One sign of this is seen in the Muslim pilgrimage, the hajj. Up to the 1970s most pilgrims had some sea experience on their way to the Holy Cities. Today nearly all come by air, arriving at the huge airport at Jiddah, designed specifically to handle the pilgrims. Similarly, in the sixteenth century the Portuguese complained of Muslim religious authorities travelling by ship and converting southeast Asia, but today swamis and godmen jet about. The air and the land have triumphed over the sea. Today's seafarers are mostly on cruise ships which are designed to replicate a floating block of luxury flats or a casino. Equally removed from the sea are the floating gin palaces in the harbours, and huge catamarans and hovercraft which treat the sea with negligent contempt. In 1993 I went on a Russian built hovercraft from Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar. I spent my time on deck trying to spot dhows and whales, but the locals all sat below in a large air-conditioned cabin and watched videos of 'Bollywood' movies. A western dilettante could experience the sea as exotic; the locals pragmatically saw it merely as a medium to be crossed to get from one place to another, no different from a trip by plane or bus, where indeed similar videos are provided to while away the time.
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Historians have too often neglected the role of the sea in world history. This has produced skewed, incomplete histories of human kind. They have forgotten that 'In any pre-industrial society, from the upper Palaeolithic to the nineteenth century AD, a boat or (later) a ship was the largest and most complex machine produced.'
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As Reade noted,
The sea has always offered our species a range of resources which, while sometimes seasonal, are more reliable, less vulnerable to factors like drought and over-exploitation, than those available inland. From deep prehistory up to modern times, many communities have found that gathering food along and off the shore constitutes an entirely viable way of life. Their historical significance has been underrated because of the agrocentric presumptions built into much archaeological thought.
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In similar fashion, the Indian Ocean, the subject of this book, has been known and ignored, dismissed and described. European scholars often saw it as a passive region, part of the unchanging East, on which impacted exogenous Roman, Islamic and Western European influences. The Indian Ocean was brought into history when some external force came to it. According to the great historian of the Atlantic, Pierre Chaunu, the Indian Ocean had no intrinsic importance, and no unity: he considered 'the problem of whether this universe of Arab navigation should be considered as really autonomous compared with the Mediterranean one. Obviously not: it was scarcely more than an extension of the eastern Mediterranean'.
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In this he echoes the great poet of the early Portuguese voyages, Luis de Camoens, who famously wrote that the Portuguese sailed 'por mares nunca dantes navegados' ('through seas never before navigated'). Contrary to this, we can note that the Indian Ocean is by far the oldest of the seas in history, in terms of it being used and traversed by humans. The first sea passage in human history was over its waters, regular connections between two early civilisations date back over 5,000 years. By comparison, the Atlantic is 1,000 years old, if one takes account of the Viking voyages, while the whole geographic Atlantic is just over 500 years old. The Pacific has seen long-distance voyaging for at most 2,000 years, though nowhere near the density of communication as that over the Indian Ocean. Indeed, Spate considers that
there was not, and could not be, any concept 'Pacific' until the limits and lineaments of the Ocean were set: and this was undeniably the work of Europeans…. The fact remains that until our own day the Pacific was basically a Euro-American creation, though built on an indigenous sub-structure.
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The Indian Ocean is not only older, it also has a fundamentally different history. The Mediterranean has always been dominated by people from its littoral; the North Atlantic is the creation of people from one of its coasts; the Pacific arguably was created by Europeans, but in the Indian Ocean there is a long history of contact
and distant voyages done by people from its coasts, and then a brief hiatus, maybe 150 years, when westerners controlled things. Andre Gunder Frank has claimed that the Indian Ocean area, extending to the South China Sea, has been central in global history in all the millennia up to about 1800, and now is re-emerging again as central. European dominance in the world covers at most 200 years out of a total of perhaps six millennia;
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so also external control of the Indian Ocean was transitory.
As I was writing my book I had the pleasure of reading Horden and Purcell's
The Corrupting Sea
. It struck many chords with me, as will be evident throughout this book. Indeed, I have had to restrain myself and try not to quote too often from their stunning book, and also from Braudel's older classic.
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It is curious that the Mediterranean has now inspired two brilliant books, Braudel's for long a classic, Horden and Purcell's unarguably destined to become one. These are books which appeal to the historical profession in general, and indeed also to a wider reading public. Other maritime spaces have failed to generate such works. Certainly there are a host of worthy accumulations of data, and perhaps the present book is one such, but there is nothing to match these two path-breaking books on the Mediterranean. I wish I could say, with Isaac Newton, that 'If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants', but the giants have not written about my ocean.
This may be because the Mediterranean is so much smaller, more manageable, than the oceans. Is the history of a sea different from the history of an ocean? Are the Baltic, North and Mediterranean seas in the same category as the Pacific or the Atlantic or the Indian oceans? The difference of scale is obviously vast: the Baltic covers 414,000 km
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, the North Sea 520,000, and the Mediterranean 2,516,000. The Indian Ocean, on the largest definition, going down to Antarctica, covers no less than 68,536,000 km
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, that is nearly twenty times bigger than the three seas combined. Horden and Purcell have created an interesting map which shows which parts of their sea are out of sight of land.
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There is surprisingly little, but of course this is very different for the Indian Ocean. But maybe this is a difference of scale, not a generic difference. Ties across oceans must be less strong than across seas, but perhaps the best way to investigate this is to consider all passages in seas to be merely coastal. Most passages in oceans are also coastal, but then they also have the vast voyages when ships were out of sight of land for weeks and even months, as we noted Conrad rejoicing in. Oceanic passages can connect people from very distant places; by definition passages across seas do not do this.
There is also a difference between a history of an ocean and a maritime history of a particular country. Braudel and Matvejevic
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were trying to write a history of a sea as a unity. I consider that these two histories of the Mediterranean failed to establish the unity they claimed, for both of them ignore, or are ill-informed about, the southern shores of this sea. Leaving this aside, their aim was similar to mine, to O.H.K. Spate's in his book on the Pacific, and to the other authors in this series on the seas in history. The contrast is with books which study the maritime history of
a particular terrestrial place, such as Broeze's book on Australians and the sea, Mollat's on Europe and the sea, and the collection that Ashin Das Gupta and I edited which was on India and the sea.
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My work differs from these others in two important respects. Braudel ostensibly wrote on the later sixteenth century, while Spate's book on the Pacific deals only with the period since the arrival of Europeans. My ambitious aim is, first, to write about the whole of the Indian Ocean over the whole of its recorded history. Second, I want to avoid the concentration on the material which characterises Braudel, and most books on the Indian Ocean. Horden and Purcell noted of Braudel that 'It is material life – especially towns, ships, and long-distance trade, that mainly captures Braudel's imagination… . Perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and symbols … all these are reduced to a relatively few pages.'
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The history of the ocean is not just a history of trade and warships. I aim to describe both material and mental frameworks, the psychological as well as the geographical.
Rather than look out at the oceans from the land, as so many earlier books have done, a history of an ocean has to reverse this angle and look from the sea to the land, and most obviously to the coast. There has to be attention to land areas bordering the ocean, that is the littoral. A history of an ocean needs to be amphibious, moving easily between land and sea. As a maritime historian, I will cover inland events only to the extent that they impinge directly on the ocean, so that my focus is the sea itself, and the coast. Yet often I have had to travel far inland, and well beyond the shores of the ocean: to Potosi and Rome, London and Mecca.
In thinking about maritime history, comments by the late Frank Broeze have been useful. Discussing a recent book on the Atlantic, he noted 'the vital conceptual problem of how far one should go in linking maritime themes and developments to their terrestrial sources and dynamics' and complained that
First, and perhaps most important, [the author] does not offer any definition of what I in shorthand would call 'oceanic history.' What is the grand design that holds his book together, and how far inland does the sea extend its influence when one is dealing with such various themes as naval history, shipping, the fisheries, colonisation, migration and ports? How can maritime communities be identified and what kind of relationship do they have with their hinterlands?
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These questions were on my mind as I wrote this book.
Chaunu wrote dismissively of 'The false concept of unity in the Indian Ocean.'
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The unity or otherwise of the Indian Ocean will be a recurring theme throughout this book, for this in turn raises the central question of whether the history of an ocean has any heuristic value. Is there something which we call the Indian Ocean and which can be studied, analysed, treated as a coherent object? Here I make an absolutely fundamental distinction between notions of unity, as compared with merely talking about intra-ocean connections.
At first glance it is difficult to find elements of unity in this vast ocean. Most of
the population of the littoral states today identify with their state, not with the ocean beyond the borders of the state. If they seek a wider identity, it would not be a maritime one but rather one based on religion, such as Islam, or a wider geography, such as Asia, Africa, the Middle East.
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As usual Braudel is helpful here. He made the essential point that geography is not enough: 'The Mediterranean has no unity but that created by the movements of men, the relationships they imply, and the routes they follow.'
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But statements which address this fundamental matter are often nebulous and imprecise (perhaps necessarily so). Consider the following statement about the unity of the Mediterranean from Horden and Purcell: