When India was the center of the world

Large bodies of water like the Mediterranean made natural trading zones as under normal conditions trade was generally cheaper and faster by water than overland. And although storms and shipwrecks made sea travel dangerous, land travel had a parallel set of pitfalls, including physical challenges such as deserts and mountains, security-related problems, and if security was guaranteed, a multitude of tolls and tariffs. When a body of water connected with other bodies that served as corridors, as the Mediterranean did with the Aegean and Black seas, or with river systems that acted as branches like the Nile and Rhone, commercial penetration could reach far inland sometimes to another central trade zone. The Indian Ocean was many times larger than the Mediterranean but not

as large as the Pacific, which has become an effective trade zone only recently, and not as turbulent as the Atlantic, which has been tamed only in modern times. Protected by Africa to the west, peninsular and insular Southeast Asia to the east, and the world’s most massive mountains to the north, the Indian was the first ocean to become the center of its own commercial zone. Divided by the South Asian subcontinent into two arcs, the Indian Ocean is best seen as a set of interrelated commercial systems, each with overlapping circuits. Merchants did not try to sail from one end to the other. Ships picked up goods on one side of a link and dropped them off on the other where ships from the next link were doing the same. Any given stop could be a terminus as well as a place of transit, and goods could leave the sea routes and enter land systems or vice versa at specific places. More aggressive entrepreneurs often attempted to infringe as far as they could into the next link or skip a link in an effort to cut out rival middlemen. Competition became ever more heated as new elements from the fringes – Egyptians, Greeks, Levantines, and Chinese – joined the Arabs, Indians, and Malays who pioneered the central routes. By the first century CE some ships were strong enough, their crews had

learned enough about sailing conditions, and the rewards had become lucrative enough to make their circuits a full half ocean. Three great corridors, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Malacca Straits leading into the South

China Sea connected together East, South, and West Asia and Africa and Europe. As the peoples who lived around the ocean’s shore became integrated into this system, many prospered, although not equally. Different parts of the zone experienced fluctuations based on local and regional conditions. Trade balances shifted, opportunities changed as new products became available, and new markets materialized while old ones withered. Trade among the peoples of the Indian Ocean was well under way by the

Neolithic as was trade between the coasts and the interior. Products such as mother-of-pearl, unusual shells, and shell columellae cut into lamps, cups, and beads were much in demand far inland. The first direct long-distance maritime trading system goes back to the Sumerians and Harappans, but longer distance indirect contact also took place. The remains of cloves, which were produced only in the Moluccas Islands of eastern Indonesia on the border of the Pacific Ocean, have been found 5,000 miles to the west, in a pot excavated on the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia dated to 1700-1600 BCE, and peppercorns from India were in the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II, who died in 1213 BCE. The core of the Indian Ocean commercial zone was India itself, which

constituted a vast internal trade network reaching northward into Central Asia. Following the eclipse of the Harappans, India experienced a period during which the center of gravity shifted to the east and eventually to the south. By the late first millennium BCE, India had reemerged as an economic powerhouse; Strabo called it “the greatest of all nations and the happiest in lot.” From west to east five major exporting regions would dominate: the Indus delta, the Gujarat peninsula and Narmada valley, the Malabar coast on the southwest, the Coromandel coast on the southeast, and the Ganges delta in the northeast. The caste system, which was still in the process of developing, would ultimately discourage or even prohibit upper castes, particularly Brahmans, from traveling overseas for fear they would become ritually contaminated. Apparently this proscription was not yet strong enough, however, to dampen the ambitions of many Indians, Brahmans or otherwise, from seeking gain through trade and travel. Early vessels in the Indian Ocean and its corridors were a mixed lot, and

different areas developed different types ranging from small boats barely more seaworthy than riverboats to large ocean-going ships. Two pictures of boats from the Harappan period show one with masts and oar-like rudders and one made from bundles of reeds without a mast. The first Egyptian boats on the Red Sea were made of papyrus. Pliny reports that on the southwest coast of India pepper was brought from producing districts to major ports in canoes made of hollowed tree trunks. Strabo mentions leather boats on the tip of southwestern Arabia, and Pliny tells of Arab pirates using buoyed rafts consisting of a platform held up by inflated skins, often ox bladders. The trip from the Ganges delta across the Bay of Bengal to Ceylon, according to Pliny, was at one time done in reed boats, and Onesicritus, who

sailed under orders from Alexander the Great, reports that some ships on this run were “poorly furnished with sails and are constructed without belly-ribs on both sides.” Vessels known as sangara used on the tip of southern India were described in the Periplus Maris Erythraei as “very big dugout canoes held together by a yoke,” the largest of which were two-masted. Pliny puts the size of Bay of Bengal ships at “three thousand barrels” in reference to a system of measurement used in the Mediterranean based on a ship’s capacity for holding amphorae wine jars. This would make them about 75 tons. Ships that had to negotiate narrow channels, as in the passage between India and Ceylon, had bows at both ends so they would not have to come about (change directions) when conditions changed. Most trade goods were carried in craft Western observers referred to as

“sewn boats” because their planks were stitched together with ropes made of coir (fiber from coconut husks). In parts of southern India split bamboo was the main form of fastening, but in other places wooden dowels were used to fasten planks. The best wood for shipbuilding was teak, which was hard, durable, and highly resistant to warping, a product of the jungles of India. But the vessels themselves must have had problems with leaking that kept sailors bailing much of the time. Early ports lacked infrastructure, including quays, docks, and warehouses. Any settlement on or near the coast could serve as a port. Ships were simply run onto a beach, or cargo was unloaded onto lighters, small flat-bottom boats used in harbors and roadsteads (places offshore that were less sheltered and enclosed than harbors). Ships hugged the coastlines, risking shoals, reefs, and other hidden dangers, not to mention pirates, to keep the coast in sight so as not to risk getting lost. Sometime in the first millennium BCE, someone discovered how to navi-

gate across the ocean by using the wind pattern known as the monsoons. That someone may have been the Malays or, coming from the opposite direction, the Arabs, or from the north Indians sailing across the Bay of Bengal, or perhaps all three working independently, although it has been suggested, without any real evidence, that Harappan sailors had this knowledge earlier. A four-month travail inching along the coast became a 40-day ride across open waters using the stars at night and reading signs in the sea and sky to navigate during the day. The Malays traveled east to west across the ocean, settling in Madagascar and probably establishing trading stations at various points along the East African coast to trade in cinnamon, although speculation on the date of this ranges widely. A Malay settlement may have existed on the southwest Arabian coast, which fleets visited periodically, bringing products from Southeast Asia. Indian traders sailed to the “Island of the Black Yavanas” somewhere on the East African coast. Sailors from Ceylon, according to Pliny, developed their own system of open-water navigation: “The Cingalese take no observations of the stars in navigation … but they carry birds on board with them and at fairly frequent intervals set them free, and follow the course they take as they make for the land.”