A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
chapter twenty-eight
The Far East taken as a whole, consisted of the three gigantic world economies: Islam,
overlooking the Indian Ocean from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and controlling
the endless chain of deserts stretching across Asia from Arabia to China; India, whose
influence extended throughout the Indian Ocean, both east and west of Cape
Comorin; and China, at once a great territorial power—striking deep into the heart of
Asia ... (Braudel, 1984: 484)The Mediterranean, as Braudel was well aware, was always situated on the margins
of Asia and its larger gravitational centers, which included the Middle East or
West Asia, China, India and the Indian Ocean trading networks. These “Asias”
would act as the principal generators of change in the eastern hemisphere from
the Neolithic through to the onset of the early modern era. It was the
Mediterranean’s close geographical proximity to the oldest of these centers, West
Asia, which accounted for the early appearance of states, writing and urbanization
in such places as Crete, Greece, and Italy. Persia, India, South East Asia, and
China produced commodities and precious materials (for example, pepper, silk)
that made long-distance trade highly profitable, and which empowered the groups
that controlled their distribution within the Mediterranean. For such reasons,
these rich and densely-populated Asias played a significant role in the way the
Mediterranean functioned, and in determining its fortunes. Completely different
influences that were no less important emanated from Asia’s arid and semi-arid
margins, specifically from the central Eurasian steppe and the Arabian Peninsula.
It was Muslim tribesmen who created the most capacious cultural system, “the
domain of Islam” (dar al-Islam), and who placed the Mediterranean within a vast
but intimate cultural order that stretched between Sinkiang, the Yemen, and
Morocco. Meanwhile, peoples of the Central Asian steppes, who were largely
responsible for maintaining overland trading links across Eurasia, peoples like the
Scythians, Huns, Mongols, and Turks, were critical in shaping the history of state
formation and warfare throughout Eurasia.
The Mediterranean and Asia
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