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such as "the Asian Seas", might well be given)'.2 Despite my customary privileging of India, I also have some hesitancies about the term 'the Indian Ocean'. The terminology implies that India is the centre, the fulcrum, but this needs to be demonstrated, not just assumed. I recently argued that a better name for the part of the Indian Ocean known as the Arabian Sea was the Afrasian Sea. 'The Arabian Sea' seems to give Arabs a role much more prominent than is appropriate. Some years ago people began to write about Eurasia, the idea being to stress connections rather than the artificial separation between a reified (and implicitly successful) Europe and a timeless (implicitly backward, even redundant) Asia. We were reminded of millennia of contact, especially between the eastern Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea. Now some have urged us to go further still. In what seems to be the ultimate uniformitarianism, the desire to show 'one world' before capitalism, to stress links between areas long before the European voyages, the term Afrasia has been suggested. This would make up a vast area, with western Europe to be seen as a tiny appendage on the western edge. But this also is controversial, for it is stretching things to see most of sub-Saharan Africa sharing in the history of Eurasia before the European voyages. This however does not apply to the

Swahili coast. I suggested that the appropriate term for what used to be called the Arabian Sea could be the Afrasian Sea. This is an encompassing term and does include East Africa. Chandra de Silva recently wrote that it was incorrect to call this coast part of the Indian Ocean, and I agree with him, but to separate it out and call it the African Sea, as he suggests, seems unnecessarily divisive: the great advantage of the Afrasian Sea notion is its inclusiveness, and its failure to imply the dominance of any one area around the shore.3

Mutatis mutandis, I could now argue that this term would be even more appropriate for the whole area of what is conventionally called the Indian Ocean, for it would avoid assuming Indian centrality as implied in the Indian Ocean term, or Arab dominance as in the Arabian Sea, and instead would be all inclusive, taking in not only the Asian shores, which clearly are most important if only because of length, but including also the often ignored area of the East African coast. Yet this book is called The Indian Ocean so, a little reluctantly, I must continue to use this term. I will also use the familiar term of the Arabian Sea, while, to demonstrate impartiality, the Persian/Arabian Gulf will be simply the Gulf. My aim so far has merely been to alert the reader to the assumptions, arguably invalid, in the use of this term. It really all depends on where one is standing when one looks at and names an ocean. After all, Arabs refer to the Mediterranean as the Syrian Sea.

In any case, to assume that the Indian Ocean unduly emphasises India is to ignore the way a major group who were not Indian referred to the area. Arabs were happy to call the ocean al-bahr al Hindi, and indeed our term the Indian Ocean is an exact translation of this Arabic phrase. Hind derived from the Sanskrit, sindhu, to Persian and Arabic hind, and then via Greek and Latin to modern European languages as some variant of India. It is true that sometimes the Arabs were referring only to the Arabian Sea, but at times they also seem to have used the term to refer to an area that we today call the Indian Ocean.

The Indian Ocean covers some 27 per cent of the maritime space of the world. It is the third largest ocean in the world, and covers 14 per cent of the total globe. Before I try to delineate its borders, we can first consider the whole matter of borders as such. One of the great advantages of writing maritime history, or for that matter the currently fashionable world history, is that by definition one escapes the land/political borders which have shackled traditional history for so long. States fade into the background in this sort of history, and we can look rather at 'worlds'