• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 664 0

of attention to the Malay maritime world that a southeast Asian specialist would expect. Data to be presented throughout the book makes clear that in many important matters India was the fulcrum of the ocean around which all other areas swung. India, now called South Asia and including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, has by far the bulk of the population – about 70 per cent of the total populations of all the countries ringing the ocean.34 South Asia has a combined economy which dwarfs all the others around the ocean's rim. There are also compelling geographical reasons for not going much beyond the Straits of Melaka. The Malay world often was more tied in to the Chinese world than to the Indian Ocean one. The eastern boundaries of the ocean are porous, with the Indian Ocean flowing imperceptibly into the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. There is a clear contrast with the other areas of the ocean, and especially the western side, the East African coast. Littoral boundaries are easy here, as there is no connection with some other sea, and so also all around the shores of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. To limit my study to around the Straits of Melaka also accords with my own expertise, such as it is, and the task in front of me becomes slightly more manageable if I can avoid going too far into Indonesia.

Even so, my task is a gigantic one, Obviously I have not been everywhere around the ocean, but then Matvejevic pointed out that 'Like Ibn Khaldun and Mercator, I have followed Ptolemy's lead and used the testimonies of travellers who have been where we have not been and seen what we have not seen.'35 Similarly, Horden and Purcell quote Epiphanius, who said 'the discoveries which our insignificant intelligence… has been able to make come from the times and opportunities available; we in no way promise information about everything in the world.'36 Nor have I read every book, visited every archive. In part this is because to do this would be not to write any book at all. Braudel noted of the small and young Mediterranean that the sources are vast: 'To prospect and catalogue this unsuspected store, these mines of the purest historical gold, would take not one lifetime but at least twenty, or the simultaneous dedication of twenty researchers.'37 So also Oskar Spate when he introduced his great history of the Pacific; his caveats apply very precisely to my book too:

If it would take a lifetime to visit all the shores and islands of the Pacific, one sometimes feels that it would take nine lives to master fully the vasty literature of the deep…. The work is inevitably based on secondary source and on printed collections of primary and sub-primary sources.... I can only say that I have tried to arrive at a synthesis drawn from reputable authorities. I have no doubt at all that specialists will find superficialities and errors in my treatment of some of the multitudinous topics which a study of this scope and scale involves. But this is the occupational hazard of playing the generalist game, and I have also no doubt that it is a game well worth playing, as an effort to see the theme as a whole, and not as cut up into discrete sectors.38

As Braudel stressed for the Mediterranean, there is still a vast mass of documentation to be studied, and how much more so for the Indian Ocean. Only a minuscule part of the coasts of the Indian Ocean have been searched by maritime archaeologists so far.39 We are told that less than 5 per cent of the deep sea has been seen at all;40 so also for the potential sources available to write a history of the Indian Ocean. I have not even read all the books, but I take heart from Janet Abu-Lughod's claim that at a certain point the historian reaches closure, which we can do regardless of how many other books there may be, because we have already achieved pattern recognition (not that I would endorse all of the patterns that she finds).41 Specialists will no doubt find gaps and even misstatements or lack of familiarity with the most recent esoteric article, but I hope that they will find