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By Root 602 0

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.'3 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.4

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'.5 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