The Indian Ocean

by Michael Pearson

  Beneath these high policy matters, there are other roles for the region's navies to play. Coastguard duty, to stop smuggling, continues to be a major preoccupation. The other important task, especially in southeast Asia, is the need to combat piracy, which in the last few decades has had something of a revival. In the past, in the Sulu Sea, pirates ventured out in proas with matting sails and slave rowers. Today they have diesel-powered fast craft, armed with bazookas, machine guns and Molotov cocktails. Off Somalia they even have mortars and rocket propelled grenades. They use satellite navigation systems, and often have pre-arranged buyers for both the cargo and the ships they capture. In the first half of 1998 there were eighty-six recorded acts of piracy world wide. Of these, thirty-eight were in southeast Asian waters, and fourteen in the area around South Asia.102

  Combating piracy has to be a multilateral task, and indeed it may be that if cooperation between the states rimmed around the ocean is achieved there will be less need for navies. So far the results have been disappointing. The lead was taken by Jawaharlal Nehru shortly before Indian independence. At an Asian Relations Conference in March 1947 he put forward the idea of some sort of unity around the Indian Ocean. Nothing happened until the 1970 Non-Aligned Meeting in Lusaka, when the notion of a Zone of Peace, including all the Indian Ocean, was adopted. The next year Mrs Bandaranaike, Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, brought the concept to the United Nations General Assembly, where it was adopted in December 1971. Despite support from all the littoral states, neither the Soviet Union nor the United States were interested. India, perhaps hoping to become the dominant regional power, got the initial proposal watered down so that it referred only to limiting the activities of powers from outside the region. An Ad Hoc Committee on the Indian Ocean was set up to study the implications, but nothing came of this.103

  Some years later, in 1984, an Indian Ocean Commission was set up. The founding members were Mauritius, Madagascar and the Seychelles. Later France, on behalf of Reunion, and the Comoros, joined.104 In the last five years of the twentieth century a flurry of activity produced IOR-ARC: the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation. Founded in Mauritius in March 1997, by the end of 1999 it had nineteen members and two levels of activity. One level is inter-governmental relations, and the other involves academics and business people. The aim was to promote economic cooperation between the member states, which included Australia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mozambique, Oman, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Yemen, and Bangladesh, Iran, Seychelles, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates. Pakistan was required to change some discriminatory trade policies before it could join. Dialogue partners included Egypt, the United Kingdom, Japan and China.105

  The context for this initiative was the fall of the Soviet Union and so the end of the Cold War, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the trend towards globalisation which we described earlier. It is believed that there is now less ideological conflict in the world, with only the capitalist paradigm retaining any credibility. Be that as it may, the member states have very different interests, economies and political systems, and it difficult to see such a disparate grouping making any real progress towards regional cooperation and integration. Many of its members also belong to other, possibly conflicting, associations, such as SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation), ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and APEC (Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation). Furthermore, much economic activity in the whole region is oriented to the outside. In contrast with the close economic association of states around the Northern Atlantic, intra-Indian Ocean trade makes up less than one-quarter of total trade; the global dimension reduces the possibility of effective economic cooperation around the ocean. One's confidence is not enhanced by one of the actions of the meeting in January 2000, when it was agreed to set up a 'duty-free commissary for the sale of limited quantities of certain articles for personal use or consumption by members.'106

  We can conclude by considering whether these halting attempts at unity or at least some form of cooperation can be seen as a paradigm which reflects a general lack of unity in other aspects of the life of the Indian Ocean. Is there something called 'the Indian Ocean', which we can treat as a viable category for analysis and study, as valid as the more usual objects of historical study such as classes or states? We are here coming back again to the distinction between the history of the ocean, an internal one, and history in the ocean, where it is to be seen as profoundly influenced by wider matters coming from outside its geographical boundaries. In short, if the latter is most important serious doubt must be cast on the notion of writing a history of the ocean. My conclusion is that for much of the long timeframe of this book we can indeed write of the ocean. Indeed, given my scepticism about the degree of influence of the early Europeans, one could somewhat arbitrarily say that the Indian Ocean remains relatively discrete, something which can be studied in and of itself, until roughly the end of the eighteenth century. As I have tried to make clear in these last two chapters, it is only since around 1800 that forces from outside had any very profound influence: crudely put, first industrialised Britain, and now globalisation.

  Two interlocking matters are significant here. On the one hand, although nearly half the world's population lives within 80 km of the sea, maritime matters have little influence today. Certainly the mystique of the sea is gone. Most people fly over the ocean, rather than sail on it. Age-old routes connecting parts of our ocean are no longer plied by passenger ships; only a few short-distance ferries remain. Some people still do travel by sea: pirates, refugees, drug traffickers who find it much easier to import illicit bundles when there is no airport security involved. For most the ocean now is simply a place for recreation, and indeed modern technology has reduced this to a very sparsely maritime experience. An American scholar wrote scathingly about the ultimate in the alienation of people from the sea. The typical beachgoer today is a fat person in a huge four-wheel drive who speeds up the beach, scattering sand and crushing delicate marine life, to park facing the ocean. This person stays inside, with the engine running so that the air conditioning will keep working.107 He is writing about the American Atlantic shore, but this stage is getting closer by the day around the Indian Ocean also. Cruise ships try to replicate landed society, and come close to succeeding. The most important warships today, aircraft carriers, are not really maritime at all. Again landed society is faithfully created on board these monsters, and in essence they are airfields which happen to be able to float. But what of trade? Certainly most trade in the ocean is still done by sea: in the case of India 90 per cent of its overseas trade arrives over water. But then most economic activity in India is internal, so that for example the sanctions imposed after the nuclear tests of May 1998 had little effect. In any case, sea trade today is not carried on by a race of men set apart, the sort of people we have encountered so often in this book, and whom Conrad, Villiers, and many others celebrated. Rather it is handled in unappealing oil tankers and bulk carriers. The crews are essentially low-paid unskilled labourers, who could as well be working on a building site or in a factory. This separation of mankind from the sea is likely to be amplified in the near future, for today it is technologically possible to sail a ship from one port to another with no one on board. Labour would be required only to leave one port and enter the other.

  Yet in one ominous area the sea, and the Indian Ocean, may even see an expansion of interest from the land. Most of the oceans of the world are still part of the commons, that is the areas beyond the 200 nautical mile limit. One scholar wrote forebodingly,

  As the UN celebrates 1998 as the International Year of the Oceans, conflicts over multiple peaceful uses of the ocean and coastal areas – such as commercial and recreational fisheries, oil development, marine aquaculture, marine transport, marine recreation, etc – proliferate. The living resources of the seas are coming under intensifying pressures and military (ab)uses of the oceans
(such as refusing to share oceanographic information) continue despite the ending of the Cold War. Coastal-based communities are increasingly displaced and marginalised by the destruction of littoral and marine resources. The oceans are also being used as a dumping ground for effluents and even radioactive nuclear waste.108

  As vital supplies dry up the ocean will be under increasing pressure to make up shortfalls, in for example oil, or gas, or fish to feed an expanding global population. It could well be that the oceans at present are benefiting from only a transitory respite before full-scale exploitation begins. Very deep sea trawling, penetrating down 1.5 km, is already having profoundly detrimental effects. Deep sea mining is not yet a problem; the technology is not yet ready, and minerals' prices have been relatively low over the past few decades. There is no reason to assume that either of these will apply in coming decades. At present people ignore the sea: soon they may destroy it. The Indian Ocean cannot expect to be spared from this catastrophic prospect.

  * * *

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 Joseph Conrad, Typhoon, and other Tales, New York, New American Library, 1963, p. 42 (from 'The Nigger of the "Narcissus''').

  2 Ibid., p. 43.

  3 Himanshu Prabha Ray and Jean-Francois Salles, eds, Tradition and Archeology: Early Maritime Contacts in the Indian Ocean, New Delhi, Manohar, 1996, p. 1.

  4 Julian Reade, 'Evolution in Indian Ocean Studies', in J. Reade, ed., Indian Ocean in Antiquity, London, Kegan Paul, 1996, p. 13. For a similar complaint, and solution, concerning Malay history see V.J.H. Houben et al., eds, Looking in Odd Mirrors: the Java Sea, Leiden, University of Leiden, 1992, Introduction, p. viii.

  5 Pierre Chaunu, European Expansion in the Later Middle Ages, Amsterdam, North Holland Publishing Co., 1979, p. 218.

  6 O.H.K. Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1979–88, 3 vols, I, p. ix.

  7 Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998.

  8 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, London, Collins 1972, 2 vols; Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, Vol. I, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000.

  9 Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, p. 127.

  10 Predrag Matvejevic, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999.

  11 Frank Broeze, Island Nation: A History of Australians and the Sea, Sydney, Allen & Unwin 1998; Michel Mollat du Jourdin, Europe and the Sea, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993; Ashin Das Gupta and M.N. Pearson, eds, India and the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800, Calcutta, Oxford University Press, 1987, 2nd ed., New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1999.

  12 Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, p. 42.

  13 Frank Broeze, review of P. Butel, The Atlantic, London, Routledge, 1999, in International Journal of Maritime History, XII, 1, June 2000, pp. 266, 268. For his notions of what maritime history is see Great Circle, Inaugural Newsletter, October 1978, p. 7, and 'From the Periphery to the Mainstream', Great Circle, XI, l, 1989, p. 6.

  14 Chaunu, European Expansion, p. 219.

  15 The same point has been made about Europe: see David Kirby and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen, The Baltic and the North Seas, London, Routledge, 2000, p. 58.

  16 Braudel, The Mediterranean and The Mediterranean World, p. 276.

  17 Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, p. 523.

  18 K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 3.

  19 K.N. Chaudhuri. 'The Unity and Disunity of Indian Ocean History from the Rise of Islam to 1750: The outline of a theory and historical discourse', Journal of World History, IV, 1, 1993, especially pp. 1, 7.

  20 Niels Steensgaard, 'The Indian Ocean Network and the Emerging World-Economy, c. 1500–1750', in Satish Chandra, ed., The Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics, New Delhi, Sage, 1987, pp. 127–8.

  21 R.J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas, 1640–1700, Leiden, Research School, CNWS, Leiden University,1998, p. 60.

  22 R.J. Barendse, 'Trade and State in the Arabian Seas: A Survey from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century', Journal of World History, XI, 2, 2000, p. 173.

  23 A.J.R. Russell-Wood, A World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia, and America, 1415–1808, New York, St Martin's Press, 1992; Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, New York, Harper & Row, 3 vols., 1981–84.

  24 Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, pp. 104 et seq., 296–7.

  25 Romila Thapar, 'Early Mediterranean Contacts with India: An Overview', in F. De Romanis and A. Tchernia, eds, Crossings, New Delhi, Manohar, 1997, p. 1.

  26 Robert Harms Lecture, Brown University, 12 October 2000.

  27 James Heimann, 'Small Change and Ballast: Cowry Trade and Usage as an Example of Indian Ocean Economic History', South Asia, n.s. III, 1, 1980, pp. 48–69

  28 Jennifer Ackerman, 'New Eyes on the Oceans', National Geographic, October 2000, p. 113.

  29 Judith Gabriel, 'Among the Norse Tribes: The Remarkable Account of Ibn Fadlan', Aramco World, November–December 1999, pp. 36–42.

  30 David Parkin and Stephen C. Headley, eds, Islamic Prayer across the Indian Ocean: Inside and Outside the Mosque, Richmond, Curzon, 2000, pp. 2–3.

  31 Sydney Morning Herald, 9–10 June, 2001

  32 Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, p. 43.

  33 Quoted in Philip Edwards, The Story of the Voyage: Sea Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 1.

  34 This is a rough but valid comparison. I have included Egypt and Iran, but not all of Indonesia. Even so, this is not a book about India and the Indian Ocean, it is about the Indian Ocean tout court.

  35 Matvejevic, Mediterranean, p. 142.

  36 Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, p. 5.

  37 Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, p. 18.

  38 Spate, The Pacific, I, p. x.

  39 Tom Vosmer, 'Maritime Archaeology, Ethnography and History in the Indian Ocean: An Emerging Partnership', in Himanshu Prabha Ray, ed., Archaeology of Seafaring: The Indian Ocean in the Ancient Period, Delhi, Pragati Publications, 1999, p. 298.

  40 Sydney Morning Herald, 13 April, 2000.

  41 Janet Abu-Lughod, 'The World-System Perspective in the Construction of Economic History', in Philip Pomper et al., eds,World History: Ideologies, Structures and Identities, Oxford, Blackwell, 1998, p. 75.

  1 Deep structure

  1 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, London, Collins, 1972, 2 vols, p. 353.

  2 Frank Broeze, 'Introduction', in Frank Broeze, ed., Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th-20th Centuries, Sydney, New South Wales University Press, 1989, pp. 3, 21.

  3 Chandra Richard de Silva, 'Indian Ocean but not African Sea', Journal of Black Studies, XXIX, 5, May 1999, pp. 684–94.

  4 Alan Villiers, The Indian Ocean, London, Museum Press, 1952, pp. 5, 17; Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Atlas of the Indian Ocean, Washington, CIA, n.d., pp. 3–5.

  5 CIA World Factbook, 2000, available HTTP