The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [71]
Perhaps the most important point is that Zheng He (perhaps understandably) has bewitched historians, and led to their ignoring three important matters that place his voyages in context. First, his activities were really a continuation of a long tradition, albeit writ large. Second, the tribute system, so-called, hardly meant Chinese suzerainty all over the Indian Ocean. Third, for much of the time the expeditions engaged in humble Indian Ocean trade alongside many other merchants. We described Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo travelling in private, and very large, Chinese ships, and generally Chinese merchants, often ignoring official prohibitions on overseas trade, dominated the trade from their coast to southeast Asia, and at least up to the middle of the fifteenth century, well after the end of major state expeditions, participated fully in trade from Melaka to the west coast of India but not beyond.
Overall then Chinese merchants, and state expeditions, played a rather small and transient role in the Indian Ocean proper. We can now turn to a discussion of ports, routes and traders in the Indian Ocean up to about 1500.
There are several ways to categorise ports around the Indian Ocean at this time. Some owed much to geography, either because they were located on choke points, or because they had productive hinterlands. Some were pure exchange centres, others had some industry of their own. Some were subordinate to a larger inland state, while others were port city states, or perhaps, to borrow the southeast Asian term, port polities. We noticed earlier that port cities have connections with the near interior, that is the umland, with their hinterland, and with their foreland, that is the areas of the overseas world with which the port is linked through shipping, trade and passenger traffic. It is this characteristic which means that port cities by definition are cosmopolitan, much more so than the inland. The visitors are very different from inland peasant populations. These are
some of the most enterprising and dynamic individuals, people whose horizons have been broadened by time and exposure, whose skins wear the deep hue of the 'tanning of travel.' They bring awareness of an enlarged macrocosm to their host community, transfusing resident populations with new ideas in the give of foreign expertise and the take of local hospitality.98
Where were the major port cities in the Indian Ocean area in our period? We should start in East Africa. In the far south, Sofala provided gold and ivory from the far interior. The gold was mined or washed in the inland Mutapa state in present day Zimbabwe and brought to the coast to be exchanged for cloth and other manufactures from India and the Middle East. To the north, Kilwa was the great emporium on the coast between roughly 1250 and 1330, from which time date a great mosque and palace, the latter being the largest roofed stone building south of the Sahara until modern times. By 1500 the greatest port city was Mombasa, an important centre of exchange of ivory and gold from the south for manufactures from the west and north. Malindi was a smaller centre at this time, but Mogadishu benefited from its proximity to the Red Sea and Hadhramaut to be another important port. All of these ports on the Swahili coast were autonomous politically, and indeed engaged in much competition and even conflict with each other. The only substantial interior state at this time was the Mutapa empire, and its sway ended far from the coast. None of them were important centres of production: rather they acted as outlets for export goods from the interior, gold and ivory especially. Consequently connections with the interior were of crucial importance. Yet here and elsewhere the major products traded were humble bulk goods carried along the coast in a myriad of small dhows: mangrove poles, cheap cloth, food, even water.
Moving along the coast, Aden was usually a great port city because of its location at the entrance to the Red Sea. It was also very much an exchange