Chapter 8
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 dan-
gerous, 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 thefirst ocean to become the center of its own com-
mercial 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 thefirst centuryCEsome 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