Marts of All Commerce

Shah S​ulaiman, the 17th-century Safavid monarch of Iran, liked to spend his time drinking wine with his many wives. He avoided war with the Ottoman Empire and was largely uninterested in the European powers. Like many potentates on the Indian Ocean rim, however, he was fascinated by the other kingdoms surrounding this vast watery realm. In 1685, he sent a diplomatic mission to Ayutthaya, the capital of Siam, where a number of Iranian merchants lived. Among the delegation was Muhammad Rabi’ ibn Muhammad Ibrahim, an acute observer of manners and wielder of purple prose, whose Ship of Sulaiman is an indispensable record of the Indian Ocean region in this period.

The embassy set sail from the port of Bandar Abbas, near the Hormuz Strait, and two weeks later arrived at the ‘strongly fortified’ and well-appointed port of Muscat. The ship paid a 3 per cent cargo tariff to moor for three days, collecting fresh water and provisions. Muhammad Rabi’ noted that ‘one may find the same fruits here in the market as in India.’ The delegation then sailed for 47 days through stormy seas to Chinapatan (later Madras), on the Bay of Bengal. The port was at that time ‘rented’ by the British, who wined and dined the Iranian travellers.

From India, they travelled east through treacherous reefs and archipelagos to western Siam. They were met at the port of Mergui (in present-day Myanmar) by Haji Salim, the Siamese envoy to Iran, who provided them with meals of rice and fish. The delegation was conveyed to the court of King Narai in a caravan of elephants. Muhammad Rabi’ was particularly impressed by the orchards they passed, which contained ‘every sort of fruit tree, lemon, orange, coconut and mango, as well as the betel tree, which for beauty and grace rivals the free, swaying cypress’.

Their time at court was full of intrigue, since the Iranian merchant community in Siam had ceded influence over Narai to a Greco-French adventurer called Constance Phaulkon. Phaulkon had gained the king’s esteem through his ‘show of practical abilities and a counterfeit integrity’, but was in fact fleecing huge sums of money to be sent back to France. The embassy had to remain in Siam until the monsoon winds were favourable. In the interim, they were treated to tiger-hunting parties, choreographed audiences with the king, and feasts served on fine china and silver. Muhammad Rabi’ writes with relish about the food, entertainment, laws, punishments, trade and exports, which included fragrant oudh (or aloewood), medicinal sapanwood, vividly coloured jarang and lac resins used to varnish wood, camphor, pepper and ambergris (said to be extracted from the mouth of a ‘huge serpent-like fish’) as well as tin and porcelain.

The journey to Siam and back included stops at the islands of Aceh and Ceylon. In Aceh, the delegation found an ‘Arab’ ruler in a verdant landscape, and a gold-mining industry far more profitable than agriculture. Ceylon’s abundance enchanted Muhammad Rabi’: it was like the garden of Eden, he wrote. He learned that the Dutch had a monopoly over Ceylonese cinnamon. To manufacture scarcity and keep the prices high, they slashed and burned swathes of cinnamon groves, as they had with nutmeg and clove trees.

The Ship of Sulaiman also contains accounts of life on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and in Cochin, Manila, Japan and China. For the places to which the delegation didn’t travel, Muhammad Rabi’ recorded the news and stories that he heard on his journey. We learn about sword-making in Japan, that country at ‘the end of the inhabited world’, the causes of upheaval in China after the fall of the Ming dynasty and the conflicts of many islands and coastal sultanates.

Wonders of the natural world abounded everywhere. And everywhere, merchants from around the Indian Ocean basin had forged expatriate communities and beachheads of trade. Portuguese, Dutch, French and English adventurers had arrived with the power of their states behind them and were competing for control of commodity production and dominion over the sea lanes. Pirates contracted to the Europeans or local kings, or operating independently, imposed tributes on ships passing through narrower straits. Seats of power changed hands and alliances teetered precipitously. Only three years after the Iranian embassy left Siam, there was a revolution and King Narai was overthrown. Phaulkon, whom Muhammad Rabi’ had reviled, was put to death and French officers and missionaries were expelled from the kingdom.

The Ship of Sulaiman came in the wake of dozens of other travelogues and maritime handbooks recording the wonders of the Indian Ocean, from the Greco-Roman Periplus of the Erythraean Sea to the tenth-century account of travels to India and China by Abu Zayd al-Sirafi, to the many manuals of navigation by the 15th-century seafarer Ahmad ibn Majid. Since at least the tenth century BCE, merchants, soldiers, pilgrims and other travellers hopscotched between the ancient ports around the Indian Ocean and its many archipelagos and islands. Armenian traders from Julfa, Baghdadi and Cairene Jewish merchants, Hadhrami sayyids from Yemen and Swahilis of East Africa journeyed east; Gujarati, Bohra, Malabari, Chinese and Malay traders and pilgrims sailed west to the coasts of the Arabian peninsula and East Africa. Pilgrimage was bound up with trade. Fernand Braudel called the hajj ‘the biggest fair in Islam’ and quoted a 12th-century observer as saying that ‘no merchandise in the world is absent from this meeting.’ Until the age of steam, however, the seaborne leg of the pilgrimage was dependent on the monsoon winds and the lunar calendar. Maritime journeys to Mecca continued until well into the 1950s, when air travel finally replaced the ship as the preferred mode of transportation.

Diasporas, trade routes and financial and familial obligations connected communities across the ocean. Language, food, music and rituals circulated widely. Ships took the East African zār rite that cured spirit possession to the coasts of Iran and Arabia, where it was used to treat pearl divers and sailors who were afflicted at sea. The similarity of regional cuisines on coastlands thousands of miles apart reflected the routes of travel: fish stews flavoured with tamarind, rice dishes topped with nuts and fruits, and the spiciness of coastal cooking connected distant shores. Cargoes traded across the Indian Ocean before the 17th century include spices, aromata, precious resins, fine gems and gold, along with more mundane primary commodities such as timber and copper, and man-made products: textiles, pottery, porcelain and glass.

Among all these, spices most significantly shaped the politics of trade. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea records the Roman taste for black pepper, which led to trade with merchants on the Malabar Coast. Avicenna’s 11th-century Canon of Medicine describes many curative uses for spices that grow on the warmer shores of the Indian Ocean. In Exodus 30:23, God tells Moses to make an anointing oil of myrrh, cinnamon and calamus (myrtle). The authors of Revelation 18:12-13 recite a litany of Indian Ocean cargoes as emblems of opulence, even decadence: not just gold, silver, precious gems and ivory, but ‘cinnamon, and odours, ointments and frankincense and wine’. The more pernicious sources of such abundance – ‘slaves, and souls of men’ – are tacked on at the end.

In the seventh century, the hegemonic force in the Indian Ocean was the Sasanian dynasty of Iran. After the Rashidun Caliphate vanquished the Sasanians and gained control of their trade routes, the spread of Islam throughout the basin was assured. Over the following centuries, Muslims controlled vast networks of trade across the Indian Ocean and the Sahel. The historian Jairus Banaji has argued that Muslim trade ‘was conceivably the most lucrative sector of [capital] accumulation in the eighth to tenth centuries, generating the kind of wealth that was famously associated with Gulf ports like Basra and Sīrāf’. This affluence did not go unnoticed in western Europe, whose empires were, relative to the kingdoms of Byzantium and the Indian Ocean, uncivilised, wretched, poor and plague-ridden. They were, however, practised in waging war on land and sea, and needed to bolster their treasuries to better fight one another.

Portugal was the first European power to look south and east in search of riches. In 1415, Portuguese explorers began incursions into western Africa and finally landed in Senegal in 1444. Two papal bulls followed, Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455), granting King Alfonso V licence ‘to invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever … and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery’. As Sylvia Wynter argued in her essay ‘1492: A New World View’, the Portuguese ‘exchange of their goods for gold or slaves [in West Africa] was the necessary and indispensable prelude’ to the colonisation of the Americas and the ignominious enterprise of transatlantic chattel slavery. The patterns of force and exploitation that were to become the model for colonisation in the West were first developed in these entrepôts.

Though Africa was the first prize, Asia wasn’t far behind. Setting sail from Lisbon, Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope in November 1497, stayed on the east coast of Africa for a few months and arrived in Kozhikod in India the following May. Portuguese trading forts were gradually established around the western Indian Ocean; many of them survive, intact or in ruins, in Kenya, Oman, India, China, Mozambique, Hormuz, Bahrain and Sri Lanka.

While the Portuguese state directly managed both war and trade, the Dutch, British and French chartered merchants to act on the state’s behalf. Their companies usurped existing trade infrastructures and grafted their own commercial ventures, lending facilities, seafaring practices and forms of rule onto those already established in the Indian Ocean basin. But the power of the European empires also lay in imposing, by force of arms, their own rules. The progenitor of this approach was the lawyer Huig de Groot, better known to posterity as Hugo Grotius, the ‘father of international law’. Grotius had been retained by the Dutch East India Company to justify its capture in 1603 of a Portuguese merchant ship off the coast of Johor (near present-day Singapore). Grotius later explained that his copious juridical opinions protected ‘the commerce with India which … was of great importance for the security of the Fatherland, and it was apparent that this commerce could not be sufficiently maintained without arms’. His mare liberum, in other words, meant that you could enjoy freedom of the seas if you secured it with killing power. Even more significant, Grotius revived the Roman doctrine of res nullius to justify European appropriation of unoccupied land and argued that Europeans had the right – through the principle of ‘divisibility of sovereignty’ – to delegate to themselves some part of the authority held by non-European rulers.

Europeans didn’t rely only on law and force to extend their power. The British East India Company, which acted as a corporate state and both de facto and de jure colonial government until the mid-19th century, entered into treaties with Armenian merchants, giving them favourable treatment if they transported their cargoes on company vessels rather than via Ottoman land routes. The company forged relationships with several communities of merchants that travelled between British imperial nodes. Indian Parsis set up shop as clerks of empire and as business owners in ports controlled by the company. Europeans extracted concessions from local rulers and established monopolies in the trade of certain goods, shutting out both international and local competitors – the Dutch destruction of Ceylonese cinnamon trees is one example of this strategy.

The various European East India companies all employed Indian Ocean seafarers – lascars – on their ships, with lower wages and worse working conditions than sailors from home. When steamships arrived in the mid-19th century, lascars were installed as engine-stokers in the ships’ bowels: it was claimed they could better handle the heat. The European empires also took over the slave trade routes and, when formal European slavery ended, transported indentured labour across the seas to work their spice, tea, coffee, sugar and copra plantations. Until the 1860s, the US used the route around the Cape of Good Hope to trade in enslaved East Africans. In Yankees in the Indian Ocean (2022), Jane Hooper showed that of the 1500 ships from the US that visited East Africa between 1786 and 1860, roughly half were merchant vessels, most of them slavers. The rest were whalers, and the Indian Ocean was an important hunting ground: more than a third of Moby-Dick takes place there. Melville recognised that whaling went hand in hand with colonial conquest. ‘If American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbours,’ he wrote, ‘let them fire salutes to the honour and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages.’

As Romanus Pontifex had insisted, control over ‘islands, lands, harbours and seas’ was a prerequisite of dominion over trade routes. The son of Afonso de Albuquerque, the viceroy of Portuguese India in the early 16th century, reported that Malacca, Aden and Hormuz, the gateways to the South China Sea, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, were ‘three places in India which serve as marts of all the commerce of merchantable wares in that part of the world, and the principal keys of it’. These places continue to be the most significant bottlenecks in global trade, along with the Panama Canal. Before the Yemeni blockade in support of Palestine at the end of last year, more than a tenth of the world’s seaborne cargo went through Bab al-Mandab, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Around two-thirds of China’s imports and exports pass through the Malacca Strait, a quarter of the world’s trade in oil through Hormuz.

The islands of the Indian Ocean have always been of vital significance. Melville described the reefs and rocks thronging the ‘thickly studded oriental archipelagos’ as ‘ramparts’ protecting ‘the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of that oriental sea are enriched … from the all-grasping western world’. Before the East India Company colonised Aden in 1839, it had sought – and failed – to turn the island of Soqotra into a strategic outpost. Two centuries later, during the Saudi-Emirati war on Yemen, the UAE took control of the island, uprooting its distinctive dragonblood trees for replanting in Abu Dhabi. The larger islands of the western Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka and Madagascar, are gateways to whole continents. Ceylon was a prize for which the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British all fought, despite periodic revolts by the island’s people. During the late 19th-century European scramble for Africa, Madagascar was pacified by the French generals Joseph Gallieni and Hubert Lyautey, fresh from crushing anticolonial revolts in Tonkin. Both went on to become ministers of war.

The islands not only produced precious commodities but also acted as entrepôts of trade. In the early medieval era, the Sasanians used Sri Lanka as their emporium. Singapore is still the world’s foremost port of transit, and is usually ranked as the world’s largest or second largest port. In the age of sail, ships collected fresh water and victuals from the smaller islands, inhabited or not. After the introduction of the steam engine, the islands were used as coaling stations by the world’s great maritime powers. They became outposts for packet ships and landing sites for telegraph (and later internet) cables. The European imperial powers also used them as penal colonies and quarantine camps, or sometimes as both, as in the case of Zanzibar under the British. During the British mandate, Palestinian nationalists were exiled to the Seychelles and European Jewish refugees to Mauritius. Squalid jails on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands held Indian anticolonial dissidents. The political prisoners of the Cape Colony were transported to Mauritius, Robben Island and St Helena. Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands was used as a detention site for prisoners of the US war on terror. Although the UK finally handed back sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius last month, it has retained a lease on Diego Garcia to ensure the continued smooth operation of the American-run military base.

Darshana Baruah’s​ strange little book claims to be about the ‘contest for the Indian Ocean’, presumably because the publisher wasn’t content with the book’s more modest aim, which is to consider how India should craft its strategic relations with some of the Indian Ocean islands. Though Baruah disavows this singular focus in her preface, her book is essentially a guide to maritime security for India, where the definition of ‘security’ is the standard fare: guns, money and oil. Climate change, rising seas and the many refugees and workers on the move in the Indian Ocean scarcely feature. The transformation of the islands into offshore centres for the registration of companies and ships, for tax-avoiding financial institutions and (in the case of Comoros) for exiled dissidents from Gulf emirates isn’t discussed. Depleted fishing grounds do merit some attention, but only in so far as they affect the economies of the island nations.

Baruah recommends the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as possible bases for surveillance and intelligence-gathering. When the indigenous inhabitants of the islands are mentioned, it is not to consider their sovereignty and rights but the need for these putative ‘defence infrastructures’. Discussing the forcibly removed inhabitants of the Chagos Islands, Baruah makes an argument for ‘recognising the strategic importance and the need for Diego Garcia’ as a US military base ‘amid [India’s] own rising tensions with China’. She laments the lack of a cohesive ‘identity’ in the Indian Ocean, but offers little in the way of a solution beyond trite remarks about interstate connection. This is what geopolitical policy books have to offer: tired International Relations-speak about balance of power, sustainability and security, and speculation about things that haven’t and may never happen.

It’s true that the natural wealth of the Indian Ocean, its location amid the world’s most populous continents and use as a passageway for the vast majority of the world’s goods (by volume or value) have made it a contested space between global powers. But it isn’t dominated by China. As Britain’s dominion east of Suez faded, American forces claimed its holdings, not least by moving into the bases the British had vacated. During the Cold War, the US used paranoid fantasies of the Soviet search for ‘warm water ports’ as an excuse to set up a series of naval bases around the basin. Today, competition with China is the excuse for expanding the US military presence in the region. The Fifth Fleet operates out of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, while the Seventh Fleet covers the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. America, the richest country in the world, is bombing Yemen, one of the poorest, for its temerity in taking a geopolitical position not in keeping with US diktats. It has a logistical presence of some sort in every port of note in the Indian Ocean, all counted as strategic assets to be mobilised should the US choose to wage war in the region. Its plans for the IMEC (India Middle East-Europe Corridor) and I2U2 (a military partnership with Israel, India and the UAE) are intended to bolster India as a competitor to China. Meanwhile the UAE, which General James Mattis called ‘Little Sparta’ and whose interests converge with those of the US more often than not, has aggressively sought a naval or commercial foothold in Africa’s Indian Ocean ports.

There is much more that connects the people across the Indian Ocean than guns, oil and money. As Muhammad Rabi’ recognised three and a half centuries ago, food, music and human relations have travelled across the seas, as have religious and diasporic connections. European powers have come and gone, and so will the regional states that boast postcolonial credentials while seeking to control these littoral spaces. There was a time when it was hard to imagine the maps of Asia and Africa without the red splotches of Portuguese or British empires, but Portugal and Britain are much reduced now: one a middling country on the fringes of Europe, the other a warm-weather destination for digital nomads. The Sanskrit name for the Indian Ocean is Ratnakara, ‘mine of gems’. But most of the empires, admirals, conquerors and adventurers who have staked a claim to it have failed to grasp that its real wealth is the dense palimpsest of historical connections that defines the region and its peoples.