In 1960, Prime Minister Macmillan said in Cape Town: “A wind of change is blowing through this continent”.
It was the wind of independence.
In 2023, a new wind is blowing across the Indian Ocean: the Kaskazi.
It is the wind from Asia.
The Cinnamon Peeler’s Wife, Robyn Denny
The object of this exercise
The Indian Ocean - besides being the now fashionable domain of this website: .io! - has long been the also-ran in the three great oceans of the world. It has played third fiddle to the ‘Atlantic Century’ for much of the past two hundred years just as it will likely do to the ‘Pacific Century’ for much of the next. But it was not always thus as will be related below: indeed, one might claim that until around 1700, the Indian was always the most significant of the three great oceans.
The current revival of this latter basin will not challenge the status of the Pacific and indeed Atlantic Oceans for many decades yet. But the Indian Ocean region including its insular territories is undoubtedly experiencing a renaissance: on its rim are four of the world’s most populous nations including its recently crowned biggest, India, together with Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. By 2100, the World Economic Forum estimates that number will have risen to six out of ten.
This website will aim to discuss today’s world - geoeconomically, geopolitically - from an Indian Ocean perspective, a view not heard frequently in today’s noise-filled world. This is not to say that this perspective is a singular one: far from it! Rather it aims to underline that that shape-shifting pronoun ‘we’ - variously used by globe-trotting Western politicians and often in that ‘royal we’ sense to imply presumptively ‘we means the world’ - that pronoun ‘we’ frequently does not include all of ‘us’, the nations of the Indian Ocean, herein called the IOsphere.
Kaskazi’s logo: A compass pointing East
“He, who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him. So it is in traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him if he would bring home knowledge.”
Samuel Johnson, quoting a Spanish proverb
It is important, before setting out on a new venture, to do your research first if only to find one’s bearings and to know where you start from. For only then can you expect to profit from that venture.
Why Kaskazi?
The modern era’s commercial history of the Indian Ocean trading basin is also intertwined with the spread of Islam - from Indonesia in the East to Zanzibar, the Comoros and the East African Coast in the West. The latter region would not have been reachable from Arabia - and Asia at large - without the two-way conveyor belt of the Monsoon Winds, the KASKAZI blowing southwest from Asia in November to February with the Kusi returning northeast to Asia between April and September.
Vasco da Gama fortuitously arrived in Malindi, Kenya, in April 1498, just as the Kusi began to blow. Said to have been aided by navigator Ahmad ibn Mājid - hailing from today’s Ras Al Khaimah in the UAE - Vasco da Gama was able to reach Calicut in India by mid-May 1498. The KASKAZI returned him to East Africa from India later that same year.
“The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
Winston Churchill
A Brief History of the Indian Ocean as a Trading Basin
Over the past two millennia, the extent of the Indian Ocean region’s commercial dealings both in and beyond the basin has been well documented. In the 1st Century manuscript The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea detailed the trade routes and ports of the western half. Trade was to develop rapidly from the reign of Octavian, the first Roman Emperor (27BC to 14AD). Supplementing caravans routed overland through the Middle East, sea-faring Tamils brought especially spices and incense from the Malabar Coast to the ports of the Red Sea, building upon previously established links between Ptolemaic Egypt and Tamilakam in Southern India. From these Red Sea ports, these ‘exotics’ were re-distributed throughout Rome’s Empire in North Africa, the Near East and Southern Europe.
The same Tamil traders also travelled from the Indian subcontinent east to Indonesia returning with other spices - notably cloves and nutmeg - which were also then onsold into the Roman Empire. This turned the port of Tyndia - later Calicut, today Kozhikode - into not just the epicentre of Malabar’s spice production but the main entrepot for Indonesia’s spice trade to all points West… as Vasco da Gama was later to discover.
The origins of the Malagasy people can be traced back to Borneo. Sometime between 700AD and 900AD, under Sumatra’s Srivijaya Dynasty, Austronesians from Borneo migrated some 6600 kilometres southwest across the Indian Ocean to an uninhabited island off the coast of Africa, today known as Madagascar.
This momentous journey stands testament to the claim that even before the mariners of Arabia made most of the Indian Ocean an Islamic lake, it was a Hindu (Tamilakam) and Buddhist one (Sumatra).
Al-Edrisi was a prolific Arab cartographer from North Africa. His 11th century maps illustrate clearly that the East Coast of Africa was well-known to the mariners of Arabia. This is hardly surprising as Islam arrived on the Swahili Coast in the 7th Century. Al-Edrisi’s map to the left is shown “upside down” (or are ours?!)
The oldest map that depicts Southern Africa - the Da Ming Hun Yi Tu - is Chinese and dates back to 1390.
The seven voyages of China’s Admiral Zheng He’s - from 1405 to 1433 - were mostly focussed on exploring what he would have called the “Western Sea”, known today as the Indian Ocean. In 1417, he reached the Swahili Coast of East Africa, which he was to visit three times. By all accounts, his dealings with the Sultans of Mogadishu, Malindi and Mombasa were entirely peaceful…and very commercial. He returned to China with a wide range of exotica, most notably including a giraffe.
67 years after Zheng He’s last visit to Malindi, Vasco da Gama also arrived in Malindi. His destination would be the epicentre of the global spice trade, namely Calicut in India, also the port where Admiral Zheng He had died.
The Portuguese explorer opened the way East for a host of European merchant adventurers. It became apparent their modus operandi were to be far less peaceful than that of China’s most fabled mariner.
The qilin - the African giraffe - was seen by the Chinese Emperor as a unicorn, thereby conveying great good luck on his reign.
“The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.”
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 (obviously speaking from a European perspective!)
The Genesis of Globalization
A new world of opportunity - most especially for Europe
When Vasco da Gama arrived in the Indian Ocean, he happened upon the most vibrant trading basin on earth. Columbus had only recently crossed the Atlantic and there is scant evidence that the Pacific might have been crossed by then, certainly not for meaningful commercial purposes. But in 1498 the Indian Ocean was criss-crossed by traders from Arabia, Persia, India and Indonesia as well as China. Having previously been a maritime thoroughfare for near ‘free trade’ between all its littoral states, from the early 1500s, this ocean became instead a Portuguese closed sea (‘“mare clausum”) and thereafter a Dutch one. From the 18th Century until the mid-20th century - it became a British patrolled sea.
Only today is the Indian Ocean restoring the commercial patterns that Vasco da Gama first intruded upon.
Vasco da Gama arrives in Calicut. The cargo he returned to Lisbon with paid for the cost of this maiden voyage five times over underlining the richness of the new world he could now access by sea.
October 12, 1492: the date that Americans discovered Europeans.
There is more than one lens through which one can view the world and its history.
Feel free to contact me to discuss anything on this site and more. I especially welcome challenges to my views.