Page 88 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

trading patterns, indian ocean 1865

The coastal ports of
East Africa were one
terminus for the Indian
Ocean trade. This
drawing shows Zan-
zibar from the sea.

currents, clouds, stars, and the
habits of birds and fish to find
their way across the oceans.
While these voyages led to per-
manent settlement, it is proba-
ble that the initial incentive
was trade.
During this period, oceanic
trading links developed be-
tween the Persian Gulf soci-
breadth of the Indian Ocean was not commonly used eties and those on the northern coast of India. By the
before seventeenth-century European traders entered time an anonymous Greco-Egyptian trader wrote the
these waters from the Atlantic. Periplus of the Erythrean Sea (c. 50 CE) as a guide to trade
with the port polities along the length of the East African
Early Mariners and South Asian coasts, these trading network was
The Indian Ocean was probably the first ocean traversed already well established. A myriad variety of luxury
by mariners. Technologies of seafaring developed in the goods, including spices, aromatic woods, cloth, ceramics,
first human coastal settlements, whose inhabitants relied precious metals, and currency, as well as the forced
partly on fish for their subsistence. Various delta and migration of slaves, constituted some of the items of trade
coast-hugging maritime networks existed from the earli- in these Indian Ocean networks.
est known times. The regional networks of the Red Sea
and Arabian Sea, the East African coast, the coasts of Transmission of Religion along
South Asia, and in the archipelagic regions of Southeast Indian Ocean Trade Routes
Asia developed their own patterns of maritime trade and Cultural influence accompanied trade in the Indian
technology. Ocean, but the region has always been cosmopolitan
The Egyptians and Mesopotamian civilizations traded rather than unified. In the first centuries of the common
along the coastal networks of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf era, Hindu and Buddhist traders and religious specialists
over 7,000 years ago, but their maritime voyages did not were invited to settle in Southeast Asian polities.The first
extend into the open ocean. Overland trade was far more large-scale states of Southeast Asia adopted and adapted
extensive than maritime trade during this early period. Hindu and Buddhist cultural practices as part of their
Southeast Asian seafaring evolved as people migrated state formation. One such state was the Srivijaya mar-
from the mainland and established the first human set- itime empire on Sumatra. From its emergence in the sev-
tlements in the vast Indonesian archipelago. Linguistic enth century to its decline in the thirteenth, the Srivijaya
and archaeological evidence suggests that Austronesian- empire prospered because of its control of the Malay
speaking Malayo-Polynesian mariners from Indonesia Peninsula and the Strait of Malacca that linked Asia to
crossed the Indian Ocean in their single- and double- China by sea.
hulled canoe outriggers during the first millennium BCE. From around 1300, transoceanic trading links
These ships were stable and fast enough for transoceanic between the Middle East and South Asia and thence to
voyages, and the mariners used their knowledge of ocean Southeast Asia helped spread Islam in the Indian Ocean.