The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea.

• Author: Ptak, Roderich

Traditional histories of the Indian Ocean tend to be treasure boxes full of precious details. Very often this makes it difficult to see the nature of long-term developments. McPherson's book is different. It does not flood the reader with thousands of mosaic pieces; it concentrates on what is necessary to understand the "evolution" of a gigantic regional system, it analyzes structural shifts and changes, and it surveys the factors underlying them. Differently put, it is not an account based on an endless chain of seemingly static elements, but it focuses on the "dynamics" of a well-defined scenario from a bird's-eye view.

The geographical area covered by this book is broadly defined in terms of the coastal lands around the Indian Ocean; this includes the shores of the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the Red Sea, the Gulf, different parts of Indonesia, and some stretches of continental Southeast Asia. Where needed, developments in the "hinterland" of these areas are also discussed or briefly mentioned; examples are the mighty inland states of the Indian subcontinent which were in constant touch with the ports along the Indian coasts. In several cases, the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean, China and other "outlying" regions beyond the "hinterland" are considered as well, the reason being that they exerted tremendous commercial and cultural influence on the ports, polities and civilizations around the Indian Ocean. By contrast, the southern segments of this ocean and the western part of Australia are only briefly referred to because they were of little significance in pre-modern times.

The book covers the entire time span from the archaeological period to the twentieth century. There are four major chapters, their titles being "The Early Maritime Trade of the Indian Ocean," "Commercial Imperialism," "The Age of Commerce 1450-1700," and "From Commerce to Industrial Capitalism." Within this chronological order much room is given to the early periods while Europe's involvement in Indian Ocean trade and politics after 1500 is reduced to the very essentials. This rather unusual arrangement is quite consistent with the author's effort to present Indian Ocean history in its own light and not through the "conventional" set of Euro-centric spectacles. The central ideas discussed in the well-known works of Braudel, Wallerstein, Abu-Lughod, Chaudhuri, van Leur, and others are also taken up, in the introduction and elsewhere, but McPherson makes it clear...