How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World: Ice Age to Mid-Eighth Century

By Nick Collins

World-wide maritime trade has been the essential driver of wealth-creation, economic progress and global human contact. Trade and exchange of ideas have been at the heart of economic, social, political, cultural and religious life and maritime international law. These claims are borne out by the history of maritime trade beginning in the Indian Ocean and connecting to Southeast Asia, Japan, the Americas, East Africa, the Middle East especially the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean and Europe. This development predates the end of the Ice Age with worldwide flooding and stimulated the establishment of land-based civilizations in the above regions with particular effect on the Greek and Roman empires and even China's 'Celestial' empire. The Indian subcontinent was the original major player in maritime trade, linking oceans and regions. Global maritime trade declined with the fall of Mediterranean empires and the 'dark age' in Europe but revived with Indian Ocean and Asian maritime networks. Shipping and trade studies are hugely practical but can be technical, legalistic and even dull for non-specialists. But this history is a broadly based and exciting account of human interaction at multiple levels, for general readers, specialists and practitioners. It is based on huge reading and rare sources and with an attractive writing style, and full of fascinating sidelights illuminating the historical narrative - and from an author with lifelong experience in international shipping.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526786630

Nick Collins

Nick Collins read history at Magdalene College Cambridge, was pressed to continue academic research and writing but chose to go into maritime trade with H Clarkson& Co, now Clarkson-Plateau, the largest company in the field with world-wide connections. He was director of of the main company and of subsidiary companies in Asia including the Far East and India, Dubai and the USA. So he has done business with many of the countries in the regions featured in the book and brings practical hands-on experience to academic research to produce a unique work.

Book preview

Introduction

Maritime trade is an underestimated driver of the world’s story. It is the contention of this book that all great advances in knowledge have taken place in maritime influenced areas. In early world history, maritime trade routes favourably affected economies. But long-distance trade involved prolonged stops in distant lands, the establishment of merchant enclaves, whose members tried to understand markets and peoples. Monsoon winds in the Indian Ocean enabled great distances to be covered but also forced those trading in India and Southeast Asia to stay there for months until wind direction changed. So, ideas absorbed and transferred by early maritime traders were as consequential as the goods carried because unlike the last few hundred years no other groups were travelling so far and staying so long.

By pursuing the story of maritime interconnectivity, clear perspective and logical conclusions can be made, especially the severely underappreciated role of the Indian subcontinent, the most ancient of civilisations, the originator of all Indo-European languages, today spoken by almost three billion people. Stopping the narrative in the mid-8th century, an untypical watershed is the point at which from its heights and complexity in the first two centuries ad, built on Celt, Minoan, Etruscan, Phoenician, Greek and Carthaginian foundations, European maritime trade crashed in volume and virtually ceased. In the Indian Ocean and China Sea on the other hand long-distance trade continued to flourish between China and the Persian Gulf with Srivijaya and Indian ports crucially centrally placed in between. The start of an Indian Ocean ‘golden age’ contrasts with the European Dark Age.

Chapter 1

Philosophy and Themes

‘The real difficulty lies not in developing new ideas but in escaping from old ones.’

John Maynard Keynes

Overview

We tend to get history served up to us in bite size chunks; of a country, a region, a person, a war or revolution. Many have recognised that specialisation is a limitation. Michael Scott has complained of history in ‘unconnected, compartmentalized chunks.’¹ Stuart Laycock thinks ‘attempts to understand how Roman Britain ends and Anglo-Saxon England begins have been undermined by the division of studies into pre-Roman, Roman and early medieval periods.’² It is true more generally.

Others point out the value of stepping back to see the bigger picture. Steven Runciman wrote, ‘Faced by the mountainous heap of the minutiae of knowledge and awed by the watchful severity of his colleagues, the modern historian too often takes refuge in learned articles or narrowly specialised dissertations, small fortresses that are easy to defend from attack. His work can be of the highest value; but it is not an end in itself. I believe the supreme duty of the historian is…to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man.’³ Norman Davies thinks many historians ‘restrict their efforts to tiny periods of time and minute patches of territory’ and therefore ‘the difficulties…of attempting to paint large scale, inclusive panoramas are rapidly increasing’.⁴ He approvingly quotes Hugh Trevor Roper. ‘Today most professional historians specialise. They choose a period, sometimes a very brief period, and within that period they strive, in desperate competition with ever expanding evidence, to know all the facts. Thus armed, they can comfortably shoot down any amateurs who blunder into their heavily fortified field…theirs is a static world…they have no philosophy…To test it a historian must dare to travel abroad, even in hostile country; to express it he must be ready to write essays on subjects on which he may be ill equipped to write books.’⁵ This book’s multidisciplinary ‘sweeping sequence’ is indeed historical philosophy, that of maritime trade’s importance. As Davies says, ‘academic debate, indeed knowledge itself, progresses through newcomers challenging the methods and conclusions of their predecessors.’⁶

Apart from maritime trade, exploration, colonisation, piracy, raiding, war, plunder, gift exchange and tribute also form part of the story.Sometimes trade was between equally strong parties at mutually agreed prices, sometimes unequal, forced by one side by military superiority, while trade and tribute is often difficult to disentangle. But maritime interconnectivity, especially trade, encouraged cooperation although trade routes and the sources of the traded goods often produced conflict. Most historical writing is land-based and naval warfare usually deemed more dramatic than maritime trade. But the world’s main settlements are and were on the coast and major rivers because food supply from coastal plains and shipping recourses to where they were needed was vital. Waterborne trade, riverine or maritime, is cheaper, more efficient, often quicker, safer, involves fewer people and has economies of scale, enabling transport of low-value bulk goods like food. It therefore creates wealth, although risks are great and not all merchants become rich.

In the last half of the 20th century, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China as emerging economies deliberately targeted shipping and shipbuilding as powerful economic stimulants. They had the recent model of 18th and 19th-century Britain and the US whose booming trade and unsatisfied appetite had forced them out of isolation. Today’s shipping industry is one of the least visible to the public. As volumes surge, it has slipped below most people’s radar yet 95% of raw materials and manufactured goods are transported by sea. As early-19th-century volumes increased and ship sizes grew, docks moved out of city centres. London’s, Baltimore’s and Melbourne’s for example, have been transformed into leisure areas, offices, bars, restaurants and shops. Loading and discharging of seaborne trade is now out of sight and out of mind, or worse, considered dirty and polluting. Shipping is so far removed from most people’s lives that their only exposure are press reports of rare oil spills. The media cannot resist pictures of stranded ships or oil-covered seagulls. In fact, shipping is the most economical and greenest way of transporting goods and continuously improves efficiency, safety and reduces emissions. In contrast, the 17th to 19th-century British and 17th-century Dutch were acutely aware of how their fortunes and technical advances were directly linked to maritime trade. So were all ancient maritime societies described in this book.

Perhaps because shipping and trade dynamics are little understood outside the profession today, let alone in the past, there is a fear that the story of shipping and maritime trade is a dull, technical story of ship construction styles, planking, rigging, wind systems, sea currents and ship design. It could be written this way, but these subjects are well documented and largely uncontroversial. The story told here is how an industry, the backbone of successful economies, always in the forefront of economic and political development, the arts and education, has shaped world events throughout history. Philip Curtin has written, ‘seaborne trade was probably the leading sector of commercial growth in the world economy perhaps going back as far as the 9th century, certainly from the 15th-century maritime revolution well into the 19th century.’⁷ This book intends to show that it goes back thousands of years earlier, to the very origins of seaborne trade, that maritime growth brings commercial, technical and cultural benefits; its removal, rapid decline in wealth, skills and knowledge.

Evolving Historical Perspective

History is an evolving subject. As new evidence emerges and new interpretations made, historical consensus changes. The 19th century study of history developed quickly, aided by the new discipline of archaeology. In the late-20th and 21st century underwater archaeology, dendrochronology, genetics, carbon dating and other scientific aids have helped enormously. As a consequence, evidence from newer disciplines has forced, in some cases painful re-thinks, especially as Europeans’ world-view changed from one of dominance to relative decline in relation to fast-growing, emerging regions, from Caucasian dominated to increasingly Asian influenced. Historians are often unaware of their biases. Despite changing outlooks Eurocentric history still predominates among Caucasians. Michael Scott has noted numerous books with titles ending ‘in the ancient world’ which are actually only about the Greco-Roman Mediterranean.⁸ We now accept the Trojan War as real but the Mahabharata’s epic civil war is often ignored or described as exaggerated. It speaks volumes about tunnel-vision Eurocentric history. Arab scholars think of 6th to 14th-century Islamic conquests as a Golden Age. The ‘triumph’ of Christianity, once seen positively by Europeans is increasingly viewed more neutrally. German historians tend to think of Germanic conquest of the western Roman Empire as one culture replacing another of equal merit, despite not having writing, governmental institutions or maritime skills. After the Holocaust, racial titles of theories like the ‘Dynastic Race’ became unpopular, while European decolonisation led new independent nations to stress their unique origin. But Chapter Three intends to show that this and an unfortunate title hid the logical explanation of the origins of Egypt’s pharaohs.

Concentration on the last 100 years, or at best 500 and in patches, lacks perspective. Indian history has been distorted with most emphasis on foreign Aryans, Mughals and British, little on indigenous Cholas, Cheras, Guptas, Pandyas and Pallavas. Although some alternative studies are now available, it is not filtering down to the popular level. Moreover, until recently it has been a landlocked story. Some historians have started to redress the balance. Drawing on their and others’ research, my own has led me to go further. A lot of exciting work has been done in the last few decades, which is increasing our historical understanding. So this is also an opportunity to attempt a synthesis of work found in specialist books, articles, journals or websites and an update on historical controversies. Most historians do not mention conflicting opinions unless they get into debate, which is usually confined to specialist journals. But controversy can enlighten, for which reason this book will explain the protagonists’ theories, to which I will add my conclusions.

Ports and Economic Development

Maritime trade is uniquely important in history. Technical and commercial challenges encourage inventiveness. Shipbuilders, cartographers, sail, rope and mast-makers, painters, caulkers, customs and immigration officials, inspectors, stevedores, ships chandlers, lawyers, agents, repairers and shipbuilders and the industries whose products are carried and traded create employment and spread wealth. Accommodation, shops, restaurants and bars are needed to service them. Shipping has always been a huge generator of employment and wealth, promoting economic growth, technical innovation and independent thinking. The final part of David Attenborough’s Planet Earth 2 demonstrated that the complexity of urban life presents opportunities for animals living there to innovate and solve complex problems, by which they become better fed and more reproductive. And so with humans in ports; they became more innovative, creative and dynamic.

Maritime commerce encompasses both shipping and trading. Shipping involves shipbuilding, ownership and employment. Together they have always been one of the largest, most far reaching of economic activities. Taking to water presented problems to solve, buoyancy, the prevention of the ingress of water, provisioning for long periods, oar, sail and hull design, tides, winds, currents, the habits of seabirds, whales and fish had to be learnt and passed on to future generations; vital knowledge collection. The position of stars in different parts of the world through the year needed to be monitored to plot position and direction. Ancient navigators found their way thousands of miles from home using such techniques, maintained contact along the same route and returned to the same place. Various techniques were developed in different areas, depending on local conditions and materials but the common theme was that problems encouraged problem-solving, innovation and creative thinking.

As for trading, merchants have to be literate, numerate and it helps if they speak other languages. Currencies, legal codes, commercial cultures and markets had to be understood and mastered. Expatriate merchants in trade enclaves dealt with local commodity supply, demand, tastes and prices. Those operating from home needed to adapt or invent new products for distant markets with different climates and cultures. It demanded financial skills, forms of credit, calculation of risk, translation of different weights and measures, transport costs, assessment of qualities and grades of goods, knowledge of law and custom in various jurisdictions and above all trust. Problems needed solving by what today would be called ‘thinking outside the box’, in other words, questioning the way things had been done before, the opposite of accepting what was handed down. A 1993 Lloyds List article about the Baltic Exchange rebounding after an IRA bomb, undoubtedly overstated its case when it wrote, ‘A broker [representative of ship-owner, cargo owner or intermediary] is a rare breed needing to be a salesman, legal expert, financial wizard, geographical genius, cool headed in a crisis and able to react rationally in a split second to any opportunity that presents itself,’ yet it gives an idea of the range of skills that needs to be deployed. As a perceptive Secretary of the Carlisle Labour Party said to Richard Holt of the Blue Funnel Line at the height of its fame, ‘what strikes me about people like you is that you must know an awful lot of things about an awful lot of things.’⁹ Such recent examples are not only representative of modern times but all times. Only in shipping and maritime trade were there so many financial, commercial, technical, geographical, logistical, cultural and intellectual challenges to overcome and solve.

Today’s most important countries tend to have a significant coast. Inland countries tend not to be so internationally important. Most manufacturing takes place today in coastal regions. The most important cities in the Indus-Sarasvati civilisation and Mesopotamia, which intensified trade with each other in the 3rd millennium

BC

, were coastal or river ports, navigable to the sea. The pattern goes back to the Ice Age when prehistoric settlements were next to rivers and seas, many of which were lost to rises in sea levels caused by melting ice. Most modern capital cities and most important commercial cities are ports or are linked to one. This was also true in antiquity. Ancient Rome had Ostia, for example. Turkey’s modern inland capital, Ankara is dwarfed in commercial importance and size by Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, for centuries the capital, political and commercial hub of the Eastern Roman Empire. Constantine’s choice was based on its central position on trade routes embracing the Black Sea, Mediterranean and Europe and within easy reach of wheat from Alexandria. Despite voluminous tomes of economic history, the importance of maritime trade routes, commercial shipping and its ports as a driver of the historical narrative do not loom large in popular history. In ancient history, it may be because so many important ports are now situated well inland due to silting; Lothal, Uruk, Ur, Eridu, Troy, Miletus and Adria to name but a few.

Ports, Education and Toleration

Given this practical, problem-solving, creative mentality and widespread numeracy and literacy, wealth created in ports allowed some to think about other issues. Philosophical and practical scientific developments have always gone hand-in-hand with maritime trading societies. The first of three Tamil Sangams, the ancient academy of authors which catalogued their history, trade, governance, war, grammar, rhetoric, etc. was said to go back to the 10th millennium

BC

, the first and second wiped out in catastrophic floods. It was similar in intent to northwest India’s Vedas, the catalogues of knowledge on a vast number of subjects, botanical, medicinal, linguistic, philosophical, etc., which have an equally long antiquity. Some of these ideas were taken to Mesopotamia and to Mediterranean ports: Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, Miletus, Smyrna, etc. Even when Mesopotamian civilisation drifted north to Babylon it did not lose its maritime quest for knowledge. Its libraries collected world knowledge. That tradition was taken up in Athens and Alexandria. Oc-eo in the Mekong delta, the greatest Southeast Asian port in the early centuries ad had libraries. In Palembang, effective successor and centre of the Srivijaya trade empire from the late-7th century, learning was encouraged. In Mediterranean ports there was literature in Ugarit, engineering in Phoenicia, the first western philosophers, historians and scientists in Sidon then Miletus, which continued in Athens and Alexandria. It is no coincidence that ancient Indian, Phoenician and Greek ports, were supreme centres of learning and culture exactly at the time of their greatest maritime vigour. Phoenician merchants brought knowledge and ideas from maritime inspired northwest India and in trade with Miletus, Corinth, Samos etc., transferred them. Athens replaced Miletus when the Persians destroyed it. Thereafter, Alexandria became the hub of a larger, more voluminous trade network connecting the Mediterranean via the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean and became the intellectual centre of the ancient world. Roman writers acknowledged their debt to Greeks and Phoenicians.

North Italian medieval cities, then Flanders, the United Provinces and England demonstrated the same dynamic. Maritime cultures, especially ports, have produced the key advances and the most important inventions in human civilisation. Regional trade was and is more voluminous, but long-haul maritime trade was more important because distant goods are often more highly prized. When Roman traders finally reached China, they brought Southeast Asian exotic goods. Chinese officials were unimpressed with what was familiar as they thought distant west Asian products, routine to Romans, were ‘precious’ (see Chapters 8 and 10) More importantly, in long-haul trade, bigger problems needed solving: efficiencies in finance, capital and distribution, for example.

Of the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’, the Pharos at Alexandria and the Colossus of Rhodes were designed to guide ships into port. They were impressive precisely because Alexandria and Rhodes and the ships using them were vital to the Mediterranean economy. Rhodes was second only to Alexandria as a centre of learning where the principles of ‘General Average’, division of loss rules in the event of maritime casualties, were written, only possible in a sophisticated maritime society. Similar codes are found in much older Indian texts, attesting to their underestimated maritime nature. Wellorganised trade with well-understood common maritime principles and laws was ancient practice in many areas of the world.

Today’s world of instant communications where ideas travel fast is a very new phenomenon, since the invention of the telegraph just over 150 years ago. Before that regional rather than national languages and dialects were spoken as most people were tied to their localities. Proactive merchants and ships’ crew however, spent long periods abroad absorbing new languages and ideas. Maritime trade was thus the most important means of knowledge and idea-transfer over long distance. Moreover, familiarity with foreign cultures further led to philosophical thinking. Greek merchants noticed that people they encountered had gods that reflected themselves; blacks had black gods, Jews had a Jewish one, Slavs blond haired and so on. That got them thinking! Philosophising Greeks and practical Phoenicians, both maritime peoples, have sometimes been contrasted but are two sides of the same maritime inspired coin, which produced both academic and practical thought, enabling development and progress. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, commenting on the original people of the Canaries writes, ‘Contact with other cultures stimulates what we call development whereas isolation leads to stagnation.’¹⁰ Once seafarers reached Australia, with no shortage of food or space there were few incentives to innovate. Tasmanian aboriginals, isolated for thousands of years lost skills developed in the Stone Age. Madagascans, originally expert seafarers from Southeast Asia, migrated inland and lost those skills. Active involvement in maritime trade invigorates, lack of it leads to enervation and lassitude.

Trade also encourages toleration. Enclaves of merchants in unfamiliar lands had to learn languages and accept, even appreciate, differences. Although conflict over trade routes was common, commerce in general makes different people cooperate. Maritime commerce in particular involves people radically different from each other because of the distances involved. As an early historian of the Phoenicians wrote in 1889, ‘at a time when brute force was worshipped as the main source of power…they succeeded in showing that as much fame might be won…by the peaceful means of manufacturing, trade and commerce, as by the violent and bloody ones of war’ and ‘trade and commerce are…in themselves humanising and civilizing…they tend to substitute for violence and savagery a sympathy with others, a friendliness which softens manners and leads on to kind and human conduct.’¹¹ John Stuart Mill even more powerfully wrote, ‘the economical advantages of commerce are surpassed in importance by those of its effects which are intellectual and moral. It is hardly possible to overrate the value…of placing human beings in contact with people dissimilar to themselves, and with the modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar,’ and emphasised that trade was ‘one of the greatest instruments not only of civilisation in the narrowest, but of improvements in culture in the widest sense.’¹²

The Continental-Maritime Divide

Geographical themes recur in this book. Proactive maritime trade is a secular, enquiring and enterprising endeavour, encouraging new ways of thinking, questioning established wisdom, seeking new solutions and accepting, even embracing diversity. Inland people who practised agriculture lived their lives according to seasonal rhythms and accepted the way things had been handed down. When possibilities are limited, life appears constant. There is less willingness to question or be creative. Agricultural societies are inherently conservative. Innovative, practical problem solving was unnecessary. Continental philosophies reflected such tendencies. Confucius (c. 551–479

BC

) stressed loyalty to the ruler, the established order and filial piety; a static, ordered society. ‘Once superiors and inferiors are competing for profit, the state will be in danger,’ he wrote. Maritime people lived in a world governed not only by seasons, but tides, storms, the challenges of getting the right goods to their destination and competition from other traders; challenges to overcome, not be subordinate to. Competition, perhaps between superiors and inferiors, who might then change position as a result of success or failure is far more dynamic than a static continental view.

The world is divided into maritime and continental orientated areas, albeit nuanced, which can be traced back to prehistory. Continental powers are in general, aristocratic, authoritarian, agricultural and conservative. Examples include ancient Egypt, China, Russia, early modern France and Spain. Inland capital locations of Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Beijing and Moscow demonstrate that Spanish, French, German, Chinese and Russian history has been largely non-maritime, driven by an agricultural dynamic. Maritime powers have been more representative and in relative terms at least, freer thinking, more tolerant, more open to outside influence, more socially mobile and commercial. Examples in this book include the Indus-Sarasvati civilisation, Tamil India, Miletus, Athens, Phoenicia, Carthage, Alexandria, early Baghdad and Srivijaya.

There are actually two types of continental power. One is agricultural, settled and conservative, the other aggressive nomadic populations of the Eurasian steppe, which periodically drove destructively east to China, west to Europe and south to India or nomads of the Middle and Near East whose traditions included raiding caravans. Power in these societies derived from personal charisma of the leader, military force and brutality with no administrative capabilities or urban culture. They were impermanent but often destructive. Eurasian nomads’ violent incursions had lasting significance in weakening and sometimes destroying maritime inspired progressive cultures. China with its long steppe border had to spend considerable time and resources defending itself from Xiongnu, Jurchen, Mongols and Manchu, and were eventually overwhelmed. Chinese farmers looked on horse-riding nomads as a scourge, a deadly threat to their harvest and precarious livelihood. Steppe nomads gloried in their predatory military might, despising weakling farmers bowing their heads over a tiny patch of soil on which they scratched a living. So, China was doubly disadvantaged; agrarian, conservative and deeply traditional and preoccupied with aggressive nomads. Yet 8th-century China was on the verge of a great 750-year period of invention and cultural growth because they embraced maritime trade.

The Romans, not philosophically proactively maritime, inherited maritime trade routes from others. Pragmatically they protected them. But from the late-160s waves of Goths, Huns, Vandals and others breached the borders of the empire with devastating consequences. Violent incursions from Eurasia’s interior, whose nomads had no towns, writing or political constitution has been a recurring theme throughout history. Yet some still adhere to the Aryan invasion myth; pale-skinned Eurasians from the steppe with literature, geometry, astronomy and philosophy, invading northern India. As will be demonstrated, this was a 19th-century invention based on faulty chronology and a racial bias in favour of then dominant Caucasians. It distorted the world-changing contribution of the Indus-Sarasvati civilisation and its ground-breaking intellectual, technical, practical and philosophical thinking, fully developed in the maritime trade network with Sumer, south Arabia and east Africa. Yet Michael Pearson states that ‘economic exchanges by sea, even coastal ones, were not very important’ and that ‘trade between the Indus Valley Civilisation and Mesopotamia is of more interest to the modern scholar than it was to the economies of either area.’¹³ I could not disagree more, as will become clear in Chapters Two and Three. Historians often disagree and historical truth is not always absolute but the Aryan myth, challenged by others, needs final burial, and the importance of maritime trade recognised. The Indian subcontinent was central to world history, especially Indus-Sarasvati and Tamil lands, both strongly maritime. Because of destructive Hun, Islamic and Mongol invasions and the apparent 19th and 20th-century ‘triumph of the west’, it has largely gone unrecognised.

Uniformity rather than diversity is the hallmark of continental thinking. On Chinese unification its first emperor set the tone. The Great Wall to keep nomads out, the suppression of all opposition, book-burning and burying scholars alive, illustrate his huge authoritarian control, a recurring theme and a classic continental trait. Monotheism accentuated such tendencies. Polytheistic ‘pagan’ religions were inherently open-minded and rarely persecuted non-believers but monotheist Pharaoh Akhenaten obliterated earlier religious symbols. Fourth-century Christians burnt temples and libraries where the knowledge and wisdom of the ancient world had been carefully collected and preserved for millennia. Later, the Spanish burnt Mayan, Inca and Aztec religious symbols and books. The Taliban in 2001 dynamited the 6th-century Buddhas of Bamiyan, the world’s largest standing Buddha statue. IS bulldozed Nimrud and destroyed Assyrian statues and temples in Palmyra in 2015 as incompatible with a unitary, repressive Muslim dictatorship. Palmyra had already been targeted by 4th-century Christians and the Buddhas of Bamiyan by fanatical Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in the late-17th century. Philip II of Spain in the 16th century aimed to rule as ‘one monarchy, one empire and one sword’. His Ottoman opponent’s aim was ‘one empire, one faith, one sovereignty for the world’. One might think that Japan should have developed as a maritime inspired land, but detached from the ancient Southeast Asia to China trade route and heavily culturally influenced by China, (see Chapter 10) it followed its mentality. On annexing Okinawa in 1879 it pronounced its policy, ‘one nation, one people, one language’ and forbade the Okinawan language. When annexing Korea in 1910, not only was the language banned, Koreans had to take Japanese names. In the same vein, Hitler proclaimed ‘ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuhrer’. Attempting uniformity to achieve control is a continental default mechanism, unlike maritime acceptance of diversity and new ideas. Cicero’s On the Republic II disapprovingly expressed it thus, ‘corruption and moral revolution are characteristic of maritime towns; they welcome new ideas and new kinds of behaviour and together with merchandise, foreign ways of life are imported into them, so that none of the ancestral rules can remain intact.’ It was a continuing theme of Polybius, Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle who suggested a break between city and port to prevent pollution or infection.

Ancient Greek traders settled in Italy, Sicily, the Black Sea and Alexandria.Many in Anatolia were driven out of the newly created Republic of Turkey in 1923 in ‘The Exchange’. Half a million Muslim Greeks and a million Christians, the legacy of Greek traders and settlers 2,500 years before, were mutually expelled, forced to abandon houses and farms; the ‘katastrofe’. In Trebizond 164,000 ‘Greeks’ had to leave and go to an alien country which did not want them in the name of nationalism. Greek colonies’ legacy populations in the northern Black Sea had the bad luck to end up in the Soviet Union and 170,000 were expelled to Siberia and Central Asia after 1936, and after 1945 70,000 Crimean Greeks and Tartars to central Asia, victims of a continental and authoritarian control mentality. Alexandria’s Greek community was until a couple of generations ago, significant but is now tiny. Such non-inclusive continental tendencies to uniformity are still with us.

Human Choice or Geographical Determinism

The contrast between continental and maritime societies is a theme of military historian Peter Padfield’s excellent trilogy starting with Maritime Supremacy. The Opening of the Western Mind. He implies that Bourbons, Hapsburgs, Bonaparte, Hitler and Stalin failed against maritime powers because, although ‘the events leading to this outcome were contingent and unpredictable…the outcome…was determined by geography.’¹⁴ This is surely unduly deterministic. A wider view, both geographically and in time, sees many examples of progressive, wealth-creating ports and maritime civilisations damaged or extinguished by continental powers. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto also thinks ‘geography in the broadest sense…has shaped the world.’¹⁵ Jared Diamond asks how much effect geography has had on ‘history’s broad pattern’¹⁶ and answers, ‘all human societies contain inventive people. It’s just that some environments provide more starting materials and more favourable conditions for utilising inventions than do other environments.’¹⁷ He concentrates on animals’ suitability for domestication, which grains have protein, where they grow and continents’ geographical axis in determining which areas of the world advanced first. It is very persuasive. This book contends that the ‘favourable conditions’ most capable of continuing the process were maritime societies.

Taking a different approach, David Abulafia’s The Great Sea is, he says, a human history of the Mediterranean, stressing individual’s decisions. In doing so, he criticises Fernand Braudel’s geographical approach. He writes, ‘the human hand has been more important in moulding the history of the Mediterranean than Braudel was ever prepared to admit’ and while ‘some of these places were strategically important [which] did depend to a significant extent on geography,’ they were the background to human motivation and decisions, citing as an example, ‘merchant princes [who] placed their own profit above the cause of the Christian faith’.¹⁸ Individual decisions have moulded events and geography does not determine outcome. Yemen’s change from one of the world’s richest areas to one of the poorest was entirely due to individual decisions. The 7th-century Maharaja of Palembang’s control of routes from the Indian Ocean into the South China Sea, leading to the Srivijayan empire and Caliph Al Mansur’s mid-8th-century decision to locate his capital in Baghdad for the specific intention of maritime trade with China were human decisions, but were determined by geography (see Chapter 10).

The history of the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, indeed anywhere is governed by the geographical context, yes governed, but still outcome is not predetermined. Abulafia’s example of ‘merchant princes’ puts the cart before the horse. It is because they lived in ports pursuing maritime trade that they had different motivations and took different decisions to continentals governed by other dynamics. His objection to Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II is encapsulated in its last paragraph¹⁹ which begins, ‘so when I think of the individual, I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape.’ Abulafia’s point, that ‘imprisoned’ is far too strong a word, is surely correct but the narrative is still influenced to a very significant degree by the geographical context.

Choke points

Choke points on maritime trade routes, where shipping is constricted by geography, are a main factor in the historical narrative. Obvious examples include the Bosporus and Dardanelles, the English Channel, the Danish Sound, the Hormuz, Malacca and Sunda Straits. Choke points sometimes involve small land-bridges, such as that between the Gulf of Corinth and the Gulf of Argos or the Malay Kra Isthmus. Larger stretches of land include the Coimbatore Gap in southern India, the Carcassonne Gap from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic through southern France. Above all, the two land bridges connecting the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean were the most vital, especially for Europe. Egypt’s Red Sea access competed with the Mesopotamian route from the Persian Gulf to the Levant. The latter led to wars for control of intermediary trade by, among others, Sumerians, Kassites, Assyrians, Hittites, Egyptians and Babylonians. It terminated in the Bronze Age Mediterranean’s great ports; Ugarit, Miletus, Byblos Tyre, Sidon and Troy. Competition between the two routes was complex. There is more land via the Gulf so Egypt should have had the advantage, if not for the Tigris and Euphrates, which were used part of the way. But some goods came from east Africa and Arabia, so creating a Red Sea canal was important for some pharaohs. Alexander’s legacy, Alexandria became the greatest east-west hub before the Mediterranean was blocked from the Indian Ocean by Muslim conquest.

The Trojan War and the Egyptian drama leading to the formation of the Roman Empire often focus on two of the most famous women in history, Helen of Troy and Cleopatra. But it conceals the real issues; in the Trojan War’s case, access to Black Sea food sources and in Egypt’s, her grain and access to Indian Ocean goods. Another famous woman was the Queen of Sheba or Saba, the choke point that controlled the entrance to the Red Sea. The Malacca and Sunda Straits in Southeast Asia were where, in this book’s timeframe, Arab, Persian and Indian traders met Austronesians with access to China. At various times the Mekong delta, Palembang, the Kra Isthmus, Malacca, Aceh and Singapore have been its main trade hubs.

Most were and are vulnerable to attack. As John Keegan’s A History of Warfare notes, ‘Seventy percent of the globe’s surface is covered by water, most of it open sea, and most large sea battles have taken place in but a fraction of the area.’ His 15 decisive sea battles are subjective,²⁰ but most were conducted close to land in key strategic areas for commercial shipping; choke points. Many were in the same areas. ‘Camperdown, Copenhagen and Jutland for example were all fought within 300 miles of each other; Salamis, Lepanto and Navarino, the first and last separated by 2,300 years in time took place near the Peloponnese at points scarcely more than a hundred miles apart.’ He omits the battle of Actium, also fought nearby, not a classic battle in military terms but one of the most momentous in outcome. It ushered in centuries of peace and by it, a vast increase in maritime trade, with beneficial results for Europe and the Indian Ocean. Lepanto was as dramatic and bloody as any, but changed little beyond giving Mediterranean Christians a respite from Ottoman aggression. In his 15 decisive land battles he also omits the Trojan War’s final battle, considered in the classical world the most important event in history because Greek access to Black Sea food products, especially grain, was safeguarded, although the food security theme continued. It was a matter of survival against Persia and key to the Peloponnesian War’s outcome. Keegan stresses local geographical factors in his favoured battles, but the main reason is their choke point position for maritime trade. Whichever battles are chosen, the same geographical point remains.

Cultural Diffusion

Diffusionism, the idea that human interaction is the main force in cultural innovation and change, became unpopular in archaeological circles in the 1970s and is still largely marginalized in favour of independent invention. The origin was that 19th-century American archaeologists trying to identify the American mound-builders pointed to a lost tribe of Israel, Phoenicians, Vikings, indeed anyone but native Americans who were finally correctly identified in 1894, although the myth perpetuated into the 1920s. Others suggested that civilisation had been invented in Egypt and diffused. The 1970s backlash was that culture changed not by diffusion but in response to local population and climate variation. Much of it was driven by a political correctness, which strove not to categorise superior cultures influencing inferior ones. Peter James quipped, ‘Though perhaps politically correct, this line of reason is not correct politically’.²¹ The idea that all cultural contact and exchange is not influential is, on the face of it, absurd and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, a lover of the arresting phrase, surely goes too far in referring to ‘the diffusionist illusion.’²² While domestication of animals and crops is considered to have developed in different areas of the world independently, given very early maritime interconnectivity that will shortly be described, it is not certain. Diffusion of agriculture in Europe and diffusion of Polynesian language and culture, for example, is undeniable.²³

Diffusion does imply in some cases technologically superior and inferior cultures. As Philip Curtin stressed, ‘external stimulation’ is ‘the most important single source of change and development in art, science and technology.’²⁴ Much, though not all diffusion, occurred by sea. Peter Heather explains a principle that applies to all diffusion. ‘You can never expect to find the complete transfer of an entire material culture…only certain elements…some or much of the indigenous material culture…would probably continue and some entirely new items or practices be generated.’²⁵ This will be amply demonstrated. Before the age of mass communications, only merchants travelled long distances. Some stayed in merchant enclaves. Immersing themselves in distant markets, languages, beliefs and new ideas, they were the main way ideas, practical, religious and philosophical, diffused especially from India where they had to wait for changing monsoon winds. The sea’s importance in the spread of early pagan beliefs, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam is underappreciated. Shipping and trading by sea enabled valuable cultural inventions to be passed on, the Chinese compass, Arabic (actually Indian) numerals and Indian positional value notation, for example. In short, diffusion as a historical mechanism by seafaring merchants and crew has been of crucial importance to cultural development in many parts of the world.

Sources

Historians use Greek and Roman writers as sources but when they wrote something that does not accord with the current interpretation of the archaeological record they are dismissed as mistaken. Much of the Old Testament has also been dismissed as myth rather than portraying actual events. Either they are wrong as suggested, or the current archaeological and historical interpretation is wrong. Could it possibly be, in some cases, the latter? Moreover, foundation myths or local traditions are also usually dismissed as having no value. This is too cavalier. They must be based on something. While many will probably be always impenetrable, others are starting to be revealed as having validity and need to be treated with respect. Ancient Indian texts such as the Mahabharata, written in the area of largest population with greatest continuity, have been unfairly side-lined as myth instead of repositories of ancient wisdom. Thus much evidence has been ignored. Only in the past 20 years or so is this beginning to be reversed, but has not gone nearly far enough.

Maritime Revisions

Richard Miles’ Ancient Worlds stresses trade as ‘the great engine of civilisation,’²⁶ but admirable as the book is, he doesn’t put it at the centre of his story. The implications of various historical revisions of recent years have not been interlinked because of compartmentalisation in historical studies, yet with maritime perspective, many support each other and give insight into other historical conundrums. Realisation that the Flood was an echo of the end of the Ice Age, and that human development had evolved in warmer parts of the world long before, has not yet led to popular realisation that with the Flood’s submersion of Mudalu and Sundaland, India became the one remaining repository of ancient wisdom. That seafaring has great antiquity means Pacific and Indian Ocean maritime interconnectivity’s implications have been insufficiently appreciated. The origin of Egypt’s First Dynasty of pharaohs needs re-examining. The Aryan Invasion myth has not yet been finally laid to rest, which further hides India’s importance. Its gradual debunking has led some to realise that Indo-European languages did not originate on the steppe or Anatolia but from northwest India itself. This makes the story of their dispersal throughout Europe an important topic and Proto-Indo-European linguistic studies irrelevant.

If we follow conventional Mediterranean Bronze Age chronology it is impossible to satisfactorily describe maritime trade because there is a 300-year Dark Age between the Trojan War and Greek Black Sea expansion with nothing happening between. Those who support a blindingly obvious revised chronology have mainly focused on Egypt and biblical history. The huge importance of the 10th-century

BC

Hiram-Solomon treaty by which they sent trading ships to the Indian Ocean is revealed as the means by which Indian religious and philosophical ideas influenced ancient Greek philosophy. Similarities have been commented on for decades but the means of transmission, because of faulty chronology and underestimation of maritime trade’s influence has been hidden. Phoenician and Jain merchant interaction was the mechanism. It also influenced evolving Judaism and explains why Hebrews uniquely wrote down their religion, history and laws. Indian influence in early Christianity, as Roman trade with India grew strongly, has also largely gone unnoticed. Genetic research over the last 20 years helps clarify Indo-European language diffusion and has with archaeological support disproved the idea of an Anglo-Saxon invasion of a Celtic England. Hand-in-hand with the story of its maritime trade, it reveals a linguistically divided pre-Roman British Isles. This leads to examining how and when Slavic, Germanic, Romance and Celtic branches of Indo-European languages spread. One of many conclusions, when the right questions are asked and issues addressed logically is that the origin of Romance languages was not Latin and that Anglo-Saxon languages could not have overwhelmed England and is therefore not the origin of English.

When revisions are interlinked and robust examination of their implications examined, a far more credible version of our early story is revealed. The disappearance of the River Sarasvati, thought to be mythical because Indian texts were given insufficient respect, also had huge unappreciated implications. This is a hangover from 19th-century Europeans’ dismissal of India as primitive and superstitious, even if those values are not embraced today. Post-Constantine emperors, who ‘closed’ pagan temples, actually authorised zealous book-burnings, the destruction of the intellectual legacy of thousands of years. Julian was labelled an apostate, an inconvenience in the triumphal march of Christianity, rather than the most able and tolerant of late emperors. We see Muslim fanatics as terrorists, destroyers of our common heritage. It is an inconvenient truth that early-7th-century Islamic book-burners copied 4th-century Christians. In this period we lost many ancient books. A similar mind-set continued for over a thousand years.

The Indian subcontinent was central in early world history. Linguistics, genetics, dendrochronology, carbon dating and other scientific tools now available will, if properly used, aid understanding. Many recent archaeological discoveries are filling gaps in our knowledge. For these reasons a general synthesis is necessary. My approach is secular and despite a deliberate non-Eurocentric view, much less historical research has been done outside Europe and the Middle East, less translated into English, and there are fewer records in Asia except China. More archaeological studies are needed in Anatolia, the Indian subcontinent, Sri Lanka, China and Southeast Asia. A detective in an episode of a US cop show, frustrated at not being able to solve the case, was told ‘keep asking questions until the story makes sense.’ This has been my approach. Too much new research rests on outdated, disproven assumptions. This chapter’s subtitle, ‘The real difficulty lies not in developing new ideas but in escaping from old ones’, is important. This is an escape attempt.

Chapter 2

The End of the Ice Age and the Shaping of the World

The Antiquity of Seafaring

Man’s sailing ability is much older than appreciated. Until recently it was thought that the exodus from Africa was a small group, 90,000 years ago. However, human teeth dated to 80–120,000 years ago found in China have led scholars to rethink the exit as a series of migrations over thousands of years. What is often overlooked is that these journeys started with a voyage across the seven, now 19 miles Red Sea entrance. Earlier homo-species had undertaken more challenging voyages. Archaeologists researching what they thought were the first humans in Crete about 9000–7000

BC

were surprised to find in nine cave and rock shelter sites several hundred stone hand-axes similar to those made in Africa up to 800,000 years ago. Crete has been an island for five million years, so a homo-species sailed there from North Africa 130,000–190,000 years ago, perhaps earlier. Their survival seems to be due to geological uplift. Archaeologist-in-charge Thomas Strasser thinks that ‘as soon as hominids left Africa, they were long-distance seafarers and rapidly spread all over the place.’¹ Many questions remain unanswered but the number of tools and sites suggest a sustained presence and that they got there purposefully.

A 125,000-year-old boat-using settlement has been found on the Eritrean coast.² There is compelling evidence that a homo-erectus species crossed the difficult Lombok Strait to Flores in Indonesia, presumably in rafts, 80–100,000 years ago where they survived in pygmy form, Homo-Floresiensis, until around 10,000

BC

, if not later. About 65,000 years ago, 15,000 years earlier than recently thought, Australia was deliberately colonised by sea in groups, probably a few hundred strong.³ Low Ice Age sea levels meant that voyages across the Timor Sea of 60–100 miles, depending on the route taken, occured thousands of years before humans got to Europe. Recent research indicates that on the way they met hominids that had earlier crossed the Wallace