The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [4]
there was not, and could not be, any concept 'Pacific' until the limits and lineaments of the Ocean were set: and this was undeniably the work of Europeans…. The fact remains that until our own day the Pacific was basically a Euro-American creation, though built on an indigenous sub-structure.6
The Indian Ocean is not only older, it also has a fundamentally different history. The Mediterranean has always been dominated by people from its littoral; the North Atlantic is the creation of people from one of its coasts; the Pacific arguably was created by Europeans, but in the Indian Ocean there is a long history of contact and distant voyages done by people from its coasts, and then a brief hiatus, maybe 150 years, when westerners controlled things. Andre Gunder Frank has claimed that the Indian Ocean area, extending to the South China Sea, has been central in global history in all the millennia up to about 1800, and now is re-emerging again as central. European dominance in the world covers at most 200 years out of a total of perhaps six millennia;7 so also external control of the Indian Ocean was transitory.
As I was writing my book I had the pleasure of reading Horden and Purcell's The Corrupting Sea. It struck many chords with me, as will be evident throughout this book. Indeed, I have had to restrain myself and try not to quote too often from their stunning book, and also from Braudel's older classic.8 It is curious that the Mediterranean has now inspired two brilliant books, Braudel's for long a classic, Horden and Purcell's unarguably destined to become one. These are books which appeal to the historical profession in general, and indeed also to a wider reading public. Other maritime spaces have failed to generate such works. Certainly there are a host of worthy accumulations of data, and perhaps the present book is one such, but there is nothing to match these two path-breaking books on the Mediterranean. I wish I could say, with Isaac Newton, that 'If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants', but the giants have not written about my ocean.
This may be because the Mediterranean is so much smaller, more manageable, than the oceans. Is the history of a sea different from the history of an ocean? Are the Baltic, North and Mediterranean seas in the same category as the Pacific or the Atlantic or the Indian oceans? The difference of scale is obviously vast: the Baltic covers 414,000 km2, the North Sea 520,000, and the Mediterranean 2,516,000. The Indian Ocean, on the largest definition, going down to Antarctica, covers no less than 68,536,000 km2, that is nearly twenty times bigger than the three seas combined. Horden and Purcell have created an interesting map which shows which parts of their sea are out of sight of land.9 There is surprisingly little, but of course this is very different for the Indian Ocean. But maybe this is a difference of scale, not a generic difference. Ties across oceans must be less strong than across seas, but perhaps the best way to investigate this is to consider all passages in seas to be merely coastal. Most passages in oceans are also coastal, but then they also have the vast voyages when ships were out of sight of land for weeks and even months, as we noted Conrad rejoicing in. Oceanic passages can connect people from very distant places; by definition passages across seas do not do this.
There is also a difference between a history of an ocean and a maritime history of a particular country. Braudel and Matvejevic10 were trying to write a history of a sea as a unity. I consider that these two histories of the Mediterranean failed to establish the unity they claimed, for both of them ignore, or are ill-informed about, the southern shores of this sea. Leaving this aside, their aim was similar to mine, to O.H.K. Spate's in his book on the Pacific, and to the other authors in this series on the seas in history. The contrast is with books