The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [6]
Chaudhuri, a distinguished historian of the Indian Ocean, has also circled around this problem of unity.
There was a firm impression in the minds of contemporaries, sensed also by historians later, that the ocean had its own unity, a distinct sphere of influence. Means of travel, movements of people, economic exchange, climate, and historical forces created elements of cohesion. Religion, social systems, and cultural traditions, on the other hand, provided the contrasts.18
Yet he elsewhere asked, 'Does the history of the civilizations around and beyond the ocean exhibit any intrinsic and perceptible unity, expressed in terms of space, time, or structures, which allows us to construct a Braudelian framework?' He found 'a basic underlying structure, the ground floor of material life, which remained invariant while displaying variations within certain limits.' Yet his conclusion is that for certain kinds of analysis the Indian Ocean is a single unit of space, for others it is not and must be broken up.19
More particularly, scholars have written about such elements of commonality as monsoon winds, ports, ships, sailors, and long-distance trade. Pirates and fisherfolk are ubiquitous, the former to be seen as macroparasites, human groups that draw sustenance from the toil and enterprise of others, offering nothing in return, the latter equally predatory, for unlike peasants they extract but do not cultivate, take but do not give. Niels Steensgaard is sceptical, claiming that at the least the Indian Ocean had less unity than did the Mediterranean, the Baltic, or the Malay–Indonesian archipelago. This opinion is based on his finding that long-distance trade was marginal to the total economy of the area.20 But this concern with the material may have led him to ignore other elements which perhaps do demonstrate some unity.
Rene Barendse has also ruminated on this matter. He claims there were elements of it in the seventeenth century:
In spite of this great variety of landscapes the lands bordering the Arabian seas still had a lot in common. It is well justified to speak about a single maritime world. There was the garland of harbours along the coasts: échelles where maritime trade met land-routes. There were the common kinds of ships used. There was the current of new products cultivated – moving generally west to east, like tobacco, coffee, tea and maize in our period. There were the coins used, like the ubiquitous larin in the sixteenth century and the Maria Theresia Taler in the eighteenth.21
Yet he later provided an important caveat, namely that we must be careful, in our search for elements of unity, to avoid negatively contrasting an essentialised Indian Ocean with an implicitly dynamic Europe.22
World historians have been discovering areas which make up 'worlds', thanks to interaction and connections within them. One influential schema found that the three main forms of cross-cultural interaction are migration, commerce and conquest, or MCC for short. Yet one could certainly add other criteria: the movements of people who go out and return, or of disease, or of cultural elements like religion or ideology. In any case, this preliminary discussion is designed not to provide an answer, at least not yet, but merely to raise the question of whether or not we can find enough strands to depict a firm rope which binds together the ocean. Tentative answers will appear throughout what follows. Unity may be too big a word anyway. No one would think of writing about the unity of the United States, or of the Christian religion. Historians usually deal with diversity and change, not with some static monolith. At times it may be more useful to disaggregate this vast body of water, and focus on the Bay of Bengal, or the Gulf, or one of the islands.
We certainly can find links and connections; the real problem is their significance. Many historians have stressed