9 - East Africa, the Global Gulf and the New Thalassology of the Indian Ocean

Summary

Introduction

In recent years, there has been a revival in our understanding of the interrelationship between sea and land. Stemming originally from Braudel's classic study of the Mediterranean World (Braudel 1976), and refined as the ‘new thalassology’ by Peters (2003) and Horden and Purcell (2006), these new approaches have largely focused on the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds (Cunliffe 2001; Broodbank 2013) while the Indian Ocean has often lagged behind (Vink 2007). There is still lacking a comprehensive understanding of the Indian Ocean World that is able to transcend borders and periods in a convincing way (Figure 9.1).

The role of the Gulf in particular in the articulation of the Indian Ocean World has been neglected. While the Gulf in the pre-modern period was generally known for the supply of dates and pearls (Carter, Power this volume), the role of Gulf traders and their port cities in earlier centuries has centred on the spectacular voyages of the Abbasid period (750–1258 CE), with longdistance voyages to India, South East Asia and China in search of ceramics, cloth and spices for the courts of the Caliphate (Hourani 1995), celebrated in ship reconstructions such as those of the Sohar (Sevrin 1983) and the Jewel of Muscat (Vosmer et al. 2011). The excavations in the two key port cities in this Indian Ocean trade, Siraf (Iran) and Sohar (Oman), have only been partially published, and neither is fully understood (Whitehouse 2001; Kevran 2004; Priestman 2014).

Our understanding of the Indian Ocean World is often presented as a largely Eurasian-centred view – in which connections have been followed across an Asian world (typically between Western Asia, India and South East Asia), with links to Europe through either through the Red Sea or Gulf routes, either in Classical antiquity or from the early modern period (Chaudhuri 1985, 1990; McLaughlin 2014). When it has been visualised as a world system (Abu Lugard 1989), or as networks (Wink 2002), the entire western seaboard of the Indian Ocean is normally omitted – thus excluding the eastern African coast, typically from Ras Guardafui to Madagascar and southern Africa.

In this chapter, I want to argue that, rather than being irrelevant, the eastern African coast played a vital role connecting the Gulf with the Indian Ocean World and creating a form of proto-globalisation.