Europe's place in history is re-assessed in this first comprehensive history of the ancient world, centering on the Indian Ocean and its role in pre-modern globalization. Philippe Beaujard presents an ambitious and comprehensive global history of the Indian Ocean world, from the earliest state formations to 1500 CE. Supported by a wealth of empirical data, full color maps, plates, and figures, he shows how Asia and Africa dominated the economic and cultural landscape and the flow of ideas in the pre-modern world. This led to a trans-regional division of labor and an Afro-Eurasian world economy. Beaujard questions the origins of capitalism and hints at how this world-system may evolve in the future. The result is a reorienting of world history, taking the Indian Ocean, rather than Europe, as the point of departure. Volume I provides in-depth coverage of the period from the fourth millennium BCE to the sixth century CE.
This book breaks new ground by bringing together multidisciplinary approaches to examine contemporary Indian Ocean worlds. It reconfigures the Indian Ocean as a space for conceptual and theoretical relationality based on social science and humanities scholarship, thus moving away from an area-based and geographical approach to Indian Ocean studies. Contributors from a variety of disciplines focus on keywords such as relationality, space/place, quotidian practices, and new networks of memory and maps to offer original insights to reimagine the Indian Ocean. While the volume as a whole considers older histories, mobilities, and relationships between places in Indian Ocean worlds, it is centrally concerned with new connectivities and layered mappings forged in the lived experiences of individuals and communities today. The chapters are steeped in ethnographic, multi-modal, and other humanities methodologies that examine different sources besides historical archives and textual materials, including everyday life, cities, museums, performances, the built environment, media, personal narratives, food, medical practices, or scientific explorations. An important contribution to several fields, this book will be of interest to academics of Indian Ocean studies, Afro-Asian linkages, inter-Asian exchanges, Afro-Arab crossroads, Asian studies, African studies, Anthropology, History, Geography, and International Relations.
An adaptation of The Ocean of Churn for young readers When did the first humans arrive in India and how did they get here? What are Roman artefacts from hundreds of years ago doing in a town near Puducherry? How did merchants from Arabia end up near Kochi? From the east coast of Africa to Australia, one big blue body of water has connected diverse peoples and cultures for thousands of years: the incredible Indian Ocean. Read on to learn about the fearless travellers and sailors, pirates and conquerors who set out to cross the ocean in search of gold and glory, and discover how geography can shape the course of history.
Europe's place in history is re-assessed in this first comprehensive history of the ancient world, centering on the Indian Ocean and its role in pre-modern globalization. Philippe Beaujard presents an ambitious and comprehensive global history of the Indian Ocean world, from the earliest state formations to 1500 CE. Supported by a wealth of empirical data, full color maps, plates, and figures, he shows how Asia and Africa dominated the economic and cultural landscape and the flow of ideas in the pre-modern world. This led to a trans-regional division of labor and an Afro-Eurasian world economy. Beaujard questions the origins of capitalism and hints at how this world-system may evolve in the future. The result is a reorienting of world history, taking the Indian Ocean, rather than Europe, as the point of departure. Volume II provides in-depth coverage of the period from the seventh century CE to the fifteenth century CE.
The book integrates the latest scholarly literature on the entire Indian Ocean region, from East Africa to China. Issues such as India's history, India’s changing status in the region, and India's cross-cultural networking over a long period are explored in this book. It is organized in specific themes in thirteen chapters. It incorporates a wealth of research on India’s strategic significance in the Indian Ocean arena throughout history. It enriches the reader's understanding of the emergence of the Indian Ocean basin as a global arena for cross-cultural networking and nation-building. It discusses issues of trade and commerce, the circulation of ideas, peoples and objects, and social and religious themes, focusing on Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. The book provides a refreshingly different survey of India’s connected history in the Indian Ocean region starting from the archaeological record and ending with the coming of empire. The author’s unique experience, combined with an engaging writing style, makes the book highly readable. The book contributes to the field of global history and is of great interest to researchers, policymakers, teachers, and students across the fields of political, cultural, and economic history and strategic studies.
This book explores the Indian Ocean world as it is produced by colonial and postcolonial fiction in English. It analyses the work of three contemporary authors who write the Indian Ocean as a region and world—Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Lindsey Collen—alongside maritime-imperial precursor Joseph Conrad. If postcolonial literatures are sometimes read as national allegories, this book presents an account of a different and significant strand of postcolonial fiction whose geography, in contrast, is coastal and transoceanic. This work imaginatively links east Africa, south Asia and the Arab world via a network of south-south connections that precedes and survives European imperialism. The novels and stories provide a vivid, storied sense of place on both a local and an oceanic scale, and in so doing remap the world as having its centre in the ocean and the south.
The Indian Ocean and its Role in the Global Climate System provides an overview of our contemporary understanding of the Indian Ocean (geology, atmosphere, ocean, hydrology, biogeochemistry) and its role in the climate system. It describes the monsoon systems, Indian Ocean circulation and connections with other ocean basins. Climatic phenomena in the Indian Ocean are detailed across a range of timescales (seasonal, interannual to multi-decadal). Biogeochemical and ecosystem variability is also described. The book will provide a summary of different tools (e.g., observations, modeling, paleoclimate records) that are used for understanding Indian Ocean variability and trends. Recent trends and future projections of the Indian Ocean, including warming, extreme events, ocean acidification and deoxygenation will be detailed. The Indian Ocean is unique and different from other tropical ocean basins due to its geography. It is traditionally under-observed and understudied, yet plays a fundamental role for regional and global climate. The vagaries of the Asian monsoon affect over a billion people and a third of the global population live in the vicinity of the Indian Ocean. It is also particularly vulnerable to climate change, with robust warming and trends in heat and freshwater observed in recent decades. Advances have recently been made in our understanding of the Indian Ocean's circulation, interactions with adjacent ocean basins, and its role in regional and global climate. Nonetheless, significant gaps remain in understanding, observing, modeling, and predicting Indian Ocean variability and change across a range of timescales. As such, this book is the perfect compendium to any researcher, student, teacher/lecturer in the fields of oceanography, atmospheric science, paleoclimate, environmental science, meteorology and geology, as well as policy managers and water resource managers. - Provides interdisciplinary content with a comprehensive overview for students and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines as well as for stakeholders - Presents a broad overview and background on the current state of knowledge of the variability, change, and regional impacts of the Indian Ocean - Includes links to animations, slideshows, and other educational resources
The history of Africa's historical relationship with the rest of the Indian Ocean world is one of a vibrant exchange that included commodities, people, flora and fauna, ideas, technologies and disease. This connection with the rest of the Indian Ocean world, a macro-region running from Eastern Africa, through the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia to East Asia, was also one heavily influenced by environmental factors. In presenting this rich and varied history, Gwyn Campbell argues that human-environment interaction, more than great men, state formation, or imperial expansion, was the central dynamic in the history of the Indian Ocean world (IOW). Environmental factors, notably the monsoon system of winds and currents, helped lay the basis for the emergence of a sophisticated and durable IOW 'global economy' around 1,500 years before the so-called European 'Voyages of Discovery'. Through his focus on human-environment interaction as the dynamic factor underpinning historical developments, Campbell radically challenges Eurocentric paradigms, and lays the foundations for a new interpretation of IOW history.
