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listed in many places. However, a flow of new varieties from one place to another was not an innovation in the sixteenth century. Some products and styles that are today spread all around the ocean originated in the distant past in one particular area. The best example is bananas, which came from Indonesia with the migrants to Madagascar, and subsequently were much modified and improved in Africa. The areca nut, a mild stimulant which originated in southeast Asia, again is ubiquitous around the ocean. Ibn Battuta was offered some in Mogadishu as a gesture of respect for his learning. Newitt and Middleton provide quite long lists of products, techniques and crops imported into, and indigenised in, East Africa: cotton, rice, bananas, coconuts, mangoes, outrigger canoes, looms, square houses and the use of coral cement in construction.22 Sub-Saharan Africa over many centuries received from further east, via Hurmuz, the Hadhramaut, northern Ethiopia and then the Sudan, bananas, taro, pigs, goats, sheep, cattle, chickens.

Most plants which came from the Americas to Europe were transmitted by the Spanish, but Brazil sent to all of Africa, and to India and China, Indian corn, manioc, sweet potatoes, peanuts, cashews, pineapples, hot peppers, papaya, pumpkins and squashes. The Spanish made available such American species as tobacco, chillies, pineapples, sweet potatoes, corn, avocado and guavas.23

Tobacco provides an excellent example of flows and adopting. In the early seventeenth century the rulers of both England and Mughal India fulminated against the disgusting habit of smoking the noxious weed. Within the Portuguese empire the main production area was Bahia, from whence it was exported either direct to Goa, or via Lisbon and so to the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese also sent it to Macau, and into Qing China. Indian peasants were cultivating it with some enthusiasm by the early seventeenth century, and indeed many crops were taken up in new locations as a market appeared.24 Coffee originated in Yemen, but once a demand for it appeared in Europe, around 1700, the VOC picked it up and established plantations in Java. Around 1715 Java produced less than 2,000 pounds, but twenty years later it was producing nearly 6 million.25

The source of other products did not necessarily change, but the pattern and extent of distribution did. Tea from China is the best example. In 1701 for the first time the EIC imported over 100,000 lbs of this mild stimulant; this soon rose to over 1 million, and from 1747 was very seldom less than 3 million. Cowry shells, a humble and very important currency, provide another excellent example which we have mentioned before (see pages 84–5). The best examples of this gastropod come from the Maldives. These shells were very widely used indeed. They were especially prevalent in the Bay of Bengal, but they were also used in Timbuktu, Benin, and in the valleys of the Ganga and the Niger. Most African slaves were purchased with cowries. Other wide connections are legion. There was a 'seal rush' in the 1770s. Sealers from New England hunted seals in the southern ocean, sold the skins in Guangzhou, and took home tea or silk. In the early eighteenth century the famous and luxurious 'gold cloth' of Gujarat was purchased by the mikado of Japan, the king of Thailand, and the Zaidi imam of Yemen. One of the best markets for madeira wine was the European communities in India and Guangzhou. Pirates operated globally (see page 000). The 250 or more blue and white willow-pattern tiles in the Cochin synagogue came from China around 1760. And so on....

Nor was it only people and products. Religious chains of authority spread, in the case of Christianity, all over the world, while Mecca was the sacred city for Muslims from all over the world. The vast seventeenth-century Baroque churches in Old Goa, especially the Sé Cathedral and the Basilica of Bom Jesu, are based on European models, albeit with some Indian input in decoration.

As people moved, so also did disease. The massive mortality in the Americas was not matched