A second published piece in one day is a trend that I'm going to have to continue. This paper is from my Global History Since 1500 course, one that I took last semester and enjoyed heavily due to the professor (David Thomas) and the subject matter (the whole world).
It pertains to an important part of economic history: the Indian Ocean as well as its role in regional warfare and widespread wealth. I mention one of my personal heroes - Ibn Battuta - constantly. It shares a lot of similarities (and I mean a lot) with my Globalization vs Tribalism essay, which was done for the same course. I learned a whole lot that semester in my History classes.
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Trade along the Indian Ocean was the result of much heroic exploration and a major impact in historic rises in power, such as the Portuguese Empire which grew wealthy, as well as collapses in structure, such as the caravan system across Central Asia. Among the first few to make the arduous journey to the Far East were three men of particular note for one specific reason: they did a fine job of recording their travels. The first individual was the intrepid Italian explorer Marco Polo, who wrote of his times on the islands in the Eastern Indian Ocean as well as many large cities in the Orient and the Muslim world; for years, he worked in Kublai Khan’s court at mythical Xanadu. The second individual was the Moroccan student Ibn Battuta, who travelled at length, sometimes unexpectedly, along the coasts of the Indian Ocean; his travels displayed the true impact of its cultural exchange and the importance of the area’s trade. The final of the great three individuals to survey and travel the Indian Ocean was the Chinese eunuch admiral Zheng He, charged with exerting Ming power over the rulers of the Indies; his attendant Ma Huan recorded much ethnographic information, ranging from the regional garb of women to the religions professed by far-off foreigners. As seen through the travels and discoveries of Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, and Zheng He, the importance of the Indian Ocean as a trading front is a historical contingency in that the ambitions of intrepid western travelers and the use of the Indian Ocean after sailing around Africa were the result of the collapse of overland trade routes and inaccessibility of the Eastern world to Europeans.
The reasons as to why the three men and their respective entourages trekked across the Indian Ocean shed some light as to why others may have also done so. Marco Polo’s reasoning for his journey, as the son of a prominent Venetian merchant who also travelled with him, was to establish direct links with the producers of the goods from which his family garnered wealth. Wealth may have been a driving force for many of those who looked to the Indian Ocean; it certainly turned out well for Marco Polo and his father, who worked under the employment of Kublai Khan, the Mongol-Yuan Emperor. The authors’ use of Marco Polo as an example of what could be gained from the Indian Ocean is a fine one: essentially, Polo and his entourage experienced vastly more than what they would have dealt with as simple traders in Venice. Polo’s systematic categorizing and recording of the land, including notes on the unique aspects of each place such as the valuable gemstones of Sri Lanka and linguistic isolation of Gujarat, has contributed much to interpretations by modern historians.
The background of Ibn Battuta’s travels from his home in Morocco to the Far East was not based on financial gain; instead, he was a scholar and tasked himself with experiencing the whole of the Dar al-Islam, the realm of the Muslims. His records are certainly scholarly, showing extensive observance of ethnographic observation and recognition of local customs that were heavily influenced by others in the Indian Ocean region. Ibn Battuta’s noting and questioning of the extent of the regional powers with which he dealt brings to light pointed observations; in the cases of the Bedouin banditry that controlled the reservoirs of Aden or the Hindu brigands who attacked Ibn Battuta’s entourage as he operated on the outskirts of the Delhi Sultanate’s territory, the scholar saw rich lands populated by those who were isolated from their rulers in practice and ethnicity . Ibn Battuta recorded huge amounts of information, citing meetings with dozens of political leaders and approximately two thousand separate people with whom he spoke, lending much information to modern-day historians for study.
The Chinese admiral Zheng He’s reason for travelling the Indian Ocean is much different than those of Polo and Ibn Battuta, as he was unconcerned with sole financial compensation or intellectual pursuits. Instead, the naval leader was tasked by the Yongle Emperor of Ming China to force the submission of the many rulers of the Indies to Ming rule, demanding tribute and allegiance from them with the use of the massive Ming Armada. Exertion of power is thus another reason many powers looked upon the Indian Ocean – while not looking to expand territorially like the Portuguese who would come less than a century later, military might aided in the journeys of Zheng He. The admiral’s translator Ma Huan took very extensive records of each place visited by the Ming Armada, explaining at length many ethnographical notations such as clothing, every possible available commodity, agriculture and craftsmanship, cultural practices and the amount of foreigners at any given place.
The Indian Ocean became very important to many powers, especially European or otherwise western ones, for one main reason: trade supremacy. To the Europeans, the Indian Ocean represented a method of avoidance of the Muslim world’s stranglehold on the Far East – using the body of water to travel, merchants and diplomats could avoid conflict with the ummah and do their business directly with the rich foreign lands beyond. However, a major aspect of this was that of how to access the Indian Ocean without notable Muslim interaction. As of the thirteenth century, Venice’s trade with the Far East was conducted through the conduit of Alexandria, which throughout its history had been ruled by followers of Islam. At one point, the Venetians had planned to outmaneuver the Egyptians and flank the Muslim powers by launching naval military expeditions into the Indian Ocean – a prime example of the importance of the Indian Ocean to westerners, and a display of frustration over the Muslim world’s hold on trade with the East. To the powers of the East, the Indian Ocean represented the next great trade venture after the fall of the Silk Road, which the armies of Tamerlane severed by conquering many major cities along the historic trade route. This was not just the case for the powers of the Near East such as the Sultanate of Delhi or the Ilkhanate (which was responsible for the end of the Silk Road in the first place as subjects of Tamerlane) but was also the case of Ming China, which grew concerned over its loss of trade revenue with the West and sought to find a new route for trade. Just months after the collapse of the caravan system across Central Asia, Zheng He was commissioned by the Yongle Emperor to begin his travels along the Indian Ocean to establish trade dominance.
The actions taken by the major regional powers in regards to the Indian Ocean allow for a better understanding of global history in that a major similarity can be made between all powers involved: despite cultural or societal differences, regional powers recognize the importance of trade and react accordingly. The Venetians, craving an open market with the Far East, nearly acted militarily against the Egyptian Sultanate to gain such a benefit. The Ming Chinese saw their trade collapse with the Silk Road and thus sought new ventures to continue on financially. Knowing the importance of trade supremacy and their position within the region, Ibn Battuta reports that the Sultanate of Delhi shunned casual visitors (including foreign traders) to their lands and forced pledges of allegiance and residence upon foreign guests. These are just examples of what can be seen as a whole chain of reactions as empires and regional powers continuously react to changes made by other powers, in turn making their own changes that must be reacted to; thus, the history of the Indian Ocean can be viewed as a string of historical contingency. This contingency can be linked to the topoi system, which is seen as a long series of recurring and almost cyclical ideas and methods pertaining to history. While the setting may be different, powers will follow familiar ideas in order to achieve their goals.
The end of the Indian Ocean as a prosperous global trading network can be blamed on the discovery of the New World by European powers as well as replacement sources of resources being found outside of the Indian Ocean region. The wealth found in the New World surpasses the resources provided by trade on the Indian Ocean; riches abound began to blow into the Christian and Muslim worlds, and even as far as China did travel silver mined in the mountains of Bolivia. The victories of the Spanish conquistadores over the native Aztec and Incan forces of Mesoamerica provided gigantic amounts of gold, drawing even more attention to the New World and away from the Far East. Spanish silver became common in foreign lands as far as China, the Latin “piece of eight” meeting with newly-discovered Japanese silver to choke the East. The focus of goods began to shift away from the East and focus on Europe and the New World, between which luxuries and precious minerals were shipped as they had been in the Indian Ocean years earlier. Europe began to manufacture goods that were once staples of the Eastern economy, even exporting them to the East and effectively destroying economic necessities there such as the once-plentiful textile industries of India and China.
Ultimately, the trade system of the Indian Ocean can be seen solely as a historical contingency in which the different regional powers of Afro-Eurasia reacted appropriately to outlying circumstances; in this case, trade. The Europeans searched for new methods to avoid the Muslim powers between the West and the East, eventually concluding upon the use of the Indian Ocean. The Muslim powers, on the other hand, sought to maintain their supremacy in the region despite the fall of the Silk Road and maintained their power through Indian Ocean trade. Finally, the powers Far East continued its importance in Afro-Eurasian trade by dominating the region in the face of foreign influence. The situation is a blatant contingency due to the reactionary nature of the situation. If the Muslims did not have a monopoly on Eastern trade, the Europeans would not have sought other routes; if the Muslims did not seek to consolidate their regional power and lose the Silk Road, the East would not have sought different methods of dominance. The Indian Ocean was a prime place of importance for those three civilizations due to the general path of history, as events branching off events.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Secondary Sources
1. Lunde, Paul. “The Indian Ocean and Global Trade”, July-August 2005. http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200504/default.htm (February 10 2008)
2. Tignor, Robert, Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Aron, Stephen Kotkin, Suzanne Marchand, Gyan Prakash and Michael Ts’in.. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the Modern World from the Mongol Empire to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.
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I'd hoped to work in the Ghaznavids and Ghorids in any huge capacity like I really want to but it never came to fruition within any essay's framework. The Delhi Sultanate gets a shout-out, though, and that's got a Ghorid legacy. I'll pull it off one day.
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