• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 613 0

Mediterranean are connected not by the water, but by the peoples of the sea.'1 I am concerned now with people around the ocean, especially those in port cities and those strung along the coast outside the cities, with their attitudes to the sea, its role in their lives. There is also the related matter of the land boundaries of the ocean, that is connections not across and beyond the ocean, but inland: a maritime historian has to face the question of how far inland must we go before we can say that the ocean no longer has any influence? We must try to identify people whose social life is importantly tied in to the ocean, that is people of the sea, not just on it: for the latter the sea is optional, non-essential, for the former it is life.2 In all that follows it is important to realise that I am trying to sketch some constant, invariant aspects of the lives of people around and on the sea. But very emphatically this is not a matter of an unchanging East. I have chosen to draw out and examine certain structural elements; the rest of this book will be, I hope, suitably diachronic.

How have historians approached the central matter of the human frontiers of the ocean, with regard to the extent to which one must leave the margin of land and sea and go inland? K.N. Chaudhuri recognises the problem: 'How far the Indian Ocean made its influence felt in the vast sweep of land in the north and the south west, in the direction of Asia and Africa, is a fascinating question'3 and one he does little to resolve. Matvejevic has addressed this matter of land and sea connections, albeit somewhat opaquely. 'The city where I was born is located fifty kilometres from the Adriatic. Thanks to its location and the river that runs through it, it has taken on certain Mediterranean traits. Slightly further upstream, the Mediterranean traits disperse and the mainland takes over.' He then notes how hard it is to find boundaries. In some areas a mountain cuts off the sea area definitively, but in others it does not, despite analogous obstacles.4

The general problem is to be more precise about the frontiers of the sea. Years ago Braudel wrote poetically about this: 'The circulation of men and of goods, both material and intangible, formed concentric circles round the Mediterranean. We should imagine a hundred frontiers, not one, some political, some economic, and some cultural.' The Mediterranean is a very wide zone: 'We might compare it to an electric or magnetic field, or more simply to a radiant centre whose light grows less as one moves away from it, without one's being able to define the exact boundary between light and shade.'5

None of this is very precise. Yet in fact a certain fuzziness is in order; rather than try to lay down rigid borders where land takes over and the sea disappears, we should accept, and even celebrate, complexity and heterogeneity. We should proceed case by case, asking on each occasion what is the question or problem that concerns us at present, and then extending the range of the data to take account of all the material needed to answer this particular question. If I am looking at a coastal fisher catching for his local community I do not have to go far at all; if I am looking at factory prawn production in Bangladesh for the American market then I must go far and wide; if I want to write about the horses which mounted the Indian Army in the nineteenth century I have to go to New South Wales; if I want to write about where the Indian railways got their sleepers from, I have to go to Australia and also to the Baltic.

To cases, and some examples of very close and intricate connections between land and sea in the Indian Ocean. A young Portuguese scholar recently published an excellent book on the 'Mar de Ceilão,' that is the Gulf of Mannar.6 In the first part of his book, before the Portuguese arrived, he finds that this defined maritime area made up a 'world'. This world contained interaction in both deep structural and human terms. There were connections made by the sea itself, the coasts of both southeast India