The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [5]
My work differs from these others in two important respects. Braudel ostensibly wrote on the later sixteenth century, while Spate's book on the Pacific deals only with the period since the arrival of Europeans. My ambitious aim is, first, to write about the whole of the Indian Ocean over the whole of its recorded history. Second, I want to avoid the concentration on the material which characterises Braudel, and most books on the Indian Ocean. Horden and Purcell noted of Braudel that 'It is material life – especially towns, ships, and long-distance trade, that mainly captures Braudel's imagination… . Perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and symbols … all these are reduced to a relatively few pages.'12 The history of the ocean is not just a history of trade and warships. I aim to describe both material and mental frameworks, the psychological as well as the geographical.
Rather than look out at the oceans from the land, as so many earlier books have done, a history of an ocean has to reverse this angle and look from the sea to the land, and most obviously to the coast. There has to be attention to land areas bordering the ocean, that is the littoral. A history of an ocean needs to be amphibious, moving easily between land and sea. As a maritime historian, I will cover inland events only to the extent that they impinge directly on the ocean, so that my focus is the sea itself, and the coast. Yet often I have had to travel far inland, and well beyond the shores of the ocean: to Potosi and Rome, London and Mecca.
In thinking about maritime history, comments by the late Frank Broeze have been useful. Discussing a recent book on the Atlantic, he noted 'the vital conceptual problem of how far one should go in linking maritime themes and developments to their terrestrial sources and dynamics' and complained that
First, and perhaps most important, [the author] does not offer any definition of what I in shorthand would call 'oceanic history.' What is the grand design that holds his book together, and how far inland does the sea extend its influence when one is dealing with such various themes as naval history, shipping, the fisheries, colonisation, migration and ports? How can maritime communities be identified and what kind of relationship do they have with their hinterlands?13
These questions were on my mind as I wrote this book.
Chaunu wrote dismissively of 'The false concept of unity in the Indian Ocean.'14 The unity or otherwise of the Indian Ocean will be a recurring theme throughout this book, for this in turn raises the central question of whether the history of an ocean has any heuristic value. Is there something which we call the Indian Ocean and which can be studied, analysed, treated as a coherent object? Here I make an absolutely fundamental distinction between notions of unity, as compared with merely talking about intra-ocean connections.
At first glance it is difficult to find elements of unity in this vast ocean. Most of the population of the littoral states today identify with their state, not with the ocean beyond the borders of the state. If they seek a wider identity, it would not be a maritime one but rather one based on religion, such as Islam, or a wider geography, such as Asia, Africa, the Middle East.15
As usual Braudel is helpful here. He made the essential point that geography is not enough: 'The Mediterranean has no unity but that created by the movements of men, the relationships they imply, and the routes they follow.'16 But statements which address this fundamental matter are often nebulous and imprecise (perhaps necessarily so). Consider the following statement about the unity of the Mediterranean from Horden and Purcell:
the region is only loosely unified, distinguishable from its neighbours to degrees that vary with time, geographical direction, and topic.