The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [10]
Organising my material has been a perplexing task, though no doubt this goes with the territory of the historian. Conventionally the history of the Indian Ocean has been divided into four periods: before Islam; from then to the arrival of Europeans in 1500; early Europeans, to about 1800; European dominance. In the 'modern' period the important dates are considered to be 1498 (Vasco da Gama), 1757 (beginning of British conquest of India) and 1869 (Suez Canal). Perhaps perversely, I find only two major periods. The first chapter of this book will deal with the deep structure of the ocean, and here my debt to Braudel is plain to see. This will include climate and topography, currents and winds, all of which are easy enough, but the picture becomes more complicated once people are introduced, for this again raises questions about limits and boundaries and connections and littorals. The first historical period will deal with the history of the ocean from its beginnings in geology and myth to around 1800. There are two assumptions here. First, it implies that I do not find the early Europeans introducing any qualitative change into the ocean for the first three hundred years of their presence there. This is a familiar, yet difficult, claim. The difficulty lies in the fact that from 1500 we have much more documentation, most of it European. The task then is to write an autonomous history of the Indian Ocean using documentation mostly generated by those Europeans who later came to dominate the area. Second, I claim to be able to find some broad continuities right through these millennia. This is, however, very definitely not to say that this is the unchanging and mysterious East where time stood still until the northern Europeans took over. Certainly there were changes as well as continuities, and these will be presented, but in an old-fashioned way I still believe that modern industry and capitalism, the Great Transmutation in Europe, did make a difference. The impact of these important exogenous economic and technological changes into the ocean around 1800 marks a systemic or qualitative change, and introduces my second broad historical period. It was in the early nineteenth century that many of the deep structure elements outlined in my first chapter become much less important: monsoons, currents and land barriers are all overcome by steam ships and steam trains in the service of British power and capital; the Indian Ocean world becomes embedded in a truly global economy and for the first time production, as opposed to trade, is affected. This tendency to global integration continues to today, so that, pace Horden and Purcell, so strong is this integration to worlds far beyond the ocean that it is now impossible to write a history of the Indian Ocean. All Indian Ocean history is now a history in the ocean, part of a larger, indeed a global, story.
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Chapter 1
Deep structure
Braudel wrote of the first part of his classic study of the Mediterranean that it dealt with 'all the permanent, slow-moving, or recurrent features of Mediterranean life. In the pursuit of a history that changes little or not at all with the passing of time, I have not hesitated to step outside the chronological limits of a study devoted in theory to the latter half of the sixteenth century.'1 This is what I aim to do in this chapter. And like Braudel I am not limiting my study to any discrete time period. I then can draw data from about five millennia, always however being aware that this must be data to do with invariant matters. I will discuss the name of the ocean, its geographical boundaries, its topography, winds and currents, and then introduce people. This is when the whole study of deep structure will become problematic and complicated, as we will see.
Frank Broeze suggested that the term 'Indian Ocean' is inappropriate. He wrote of 'a string of closely related regional systems stretching from East Asia around the continent and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa (to which sea space a new generic name,