The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [66]
Other African slaves were found even further afield. Habshis, that is a corruption of the Arabic Habash, or Ethiopian, were being sent to India at least from the early thirteenth century, while Arab traders brought them to China in Tang and Sung times. Slave trading was widespread in southeast Asia also, though here using local people rather than those from far-away Africa.76
We have been writing about luxury long-distance trade, and indeed this was important, but it was by no means dominant. As one example, much has been made of finds of Chinese porcelain in various Middle East sites in the period from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries. Yet these products from far away are very minor, representing less than 1 per cent of total finds. Nor do these rare finds show that Chinese traders came to the Middle East in any numbers: rather, the porcelain took part in the relay trade from port to port, proceeding by stages and passing through many hands.77
These relay trades were very complex indeed, linking small production and exchange locations with the great port cities. One could study this theme in any area around the ocean, but East Africa can stand as a type case, to give some impression of the complexity of items traded, and of the cosmopolitan trading community in Malindi. The Muslim inhabitants
are great barterers, and deal in cloth, gold, ivory, and divers other wares with the Moors and Heathen of the great kingdom of Cambaya; and to their haven come every year many ships with cargoes of merchandise, from which they get great store of gold, ivory and wax. In this traffic, the Cambay merchants make great profits and thus, on one side and the other, they earn much money. There is great plenty of food in this city, rice, millet, and some wheat which they bring from Cambaya.78
Porcelain, precious stones, spices are the sorts of trade items which have left records or remains behind. However, much more basic things were traded. The two most essential were food and water. In the case of Hurmuz, Ibn Battuta wrote that 'On this island [of Jarun] water is an article of price; it has water-springs and artificial cisterns in which rain-water is collected, at some distance from the city. The inhabitants go there with waterskins, which they fill and carry on their backs to the sea [shore], load them on boats, and bring them to the city.'79 Mozambique similarly had to 'import' its water.
There was a very extensive trade in foodstuffs, especially rice. Several of the great port cities produced almost no food for themselves. Melaka and Hurmuz in the fifteenth century both had very large populations, maybe up to 50,000. It is revealing that in the former there was no land tax, such was the lack of significance of agriculture. All of Melaka's rice came from Pegu, Java and Siam.80 Hurmuz got its necessities from far afield: rice from Chaul and other places, grain from the Punjab via Sind, and grain also from the Persian mainland. Rope, iron and coconuts came from Kerala, wood from East Africa.81 Aceh got supplies from Pegu, Bengal, Arakan and Sumatra. From the great inland state of Vijayanagar rice was exported to the coast, to Sri Lanka and the Gulf. Bengal and Pegu supplied rice to western Indo-China, Sumatra, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. There was even an extensive exchange of new varieties of food crops. African types of millet went to