470 elizabeth ann pollard
but became mixed up in Atlantic world exchange. While the slave markets of the
Indian Ocean continued, those of the Atlantic world intensified. Goods that had
once only been available in the Indian Ocean region, for instance sugar, were
cultivated by colonial European powers in the comparable climate of Atlantic world
colonies such as Brazil.
Yet the interest of Mediterranean power-brokers, and later global super-powers,
in the strategic value of the Indian Ocean never seems to fade. Echoing the tenor of
Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius’ c. 1600 doctrine that seas in general, and the
Indian Ocean in particular, were free (mare liberum) in contrast to Portuguese
claims that the Indian Ocean was clausum was United Nations Resolution 2832
(XXVI) from December 1971. This resolution, citing “great power rivalries and
competition as well as bases conceived in the context of such rivalries,” called upon
members to recognize the Indian Ocean—“together with the air space above and
the ocean floor subjacent thereto”—as a “Zone of Peace.” Yet even in the early
third millennium ce, US and European powers continue their strategic reliance on
former Portuguese, and later British, territories such as Diego Garcia in the middle
of the Indian Ocean. In 2003, Turkey (situated in ancient Anatolia, home to Pontic
King Mithridates of theriac fame) refused air and land passage to US troops attempt-
ing to gain access to Iraq (the modern location of Dura Europus on the Euphrates)
from the direction of the Black Sea. What Roman troops could do in the mid-third
century ce, namely deploy from the Danube to the Euphrates, US troops were
denied. In this moment, the enduring significance of the trans-thalassal connectivity
encircling Southwest Asia was clear, as American plans were delayed by the need to
re-situate troops for deployment from the Mediterranean and elsewhere: and all this
effort expended, in part, to secure global access via the Indian Ocean for a relatively
new, anxiety-fraught commodity vital to the world economy, namely oil.
A study such as that undertaken in this essay is susceptible to critiques about the
impossibility, given Immanuel Wallerstein’s capitalist model, of pre-modern world
systems such as those described herein, the unviability of early models for “incipient”
globalization given the limited long-distance exchange in bulk/vital goods, and finally
incomplete coverage or the sacrifice of depth for coverage. Despite such possible
critiques, the evidence presented demonstrates that enduring world systems do
become visible when Mediterranean connectivity with the Indian Ocean is examined
across the longue durée. Continuities in imperial powers’ investment in facilitating
these connections, the directional flow of goods versus “currency”—from the
Harappa, through the Romans and Abbasids, until today—to the point of an arguable
trade imbalance, and in many of the mechanisms by which trade was achieved suggest
that such a study, even with its potential flaws, is worth tracing. The goal of this essay
has not been to suggest that the novelties traditionally granted to post–1000 ce actu-
ally have much earlier precursors (although that end has certainly been achieved), but
rather to show that the developments of the modern era are merely the most recent
points on a long continuum.
To see Mediterranean, and global, exchange and connectivity with the Indian
Ocean as primarily a post–500 or even post–1000 ce phenomenon, and even attempts
to connect the two regions via the Atlantic Ocean as a post–1500 ce nationalist
enterprise when pharaohs, conquerors, and emperors two millennia earlier were