3. First forays

2015 ◽  
pp. 29-39
Author(s):  
Stewart A. Weaver
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Bay Of Biscay ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Marco Polo ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Silk Road

‘First forays ’ considers several notable figures in the history of exploration including: Harkhuf, who in 2270 bce explored the Nile River; Pytheas of Massalia, who around 325 bce sailed out north of the Bay of Biscay and circumnavigated the British Isles; Alexander the Great who introduced the Greeks to Arabia and India; Zhang Qian, in 139 bce, who provided the geographical stimulus to the further opening of the Silk Road; Ptolemy, whose second-century treatise Geographia encouraged exploratory ambitions for centuries to come; thirteenth-century Friar William of Rubruck; the traveller Marco Polo; and the accidental explorers Zheng He, who lead maritime expeditions through the Indian Ocean, between 1405 and 1433, and Moroccan pilgrim Abu 'Abdallah ibn Battúta.

Zheng He’s Seven Voyages into the Namoli Ocean–the Indian Ocean

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-125
Author(s):  
Wan Ming
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Silk Road ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Specific Meaning ◽  
Historical Issues ◽  
The Silk Road

In the history of the development of human civilization, the Silk Road has been an important route of traffic and exchange between the East and the West. From Zhang Qian’s 張騫 opening up of the Silk Road across the Western Regions (Xiyue 西域) to Zheng He’s 鄭和 sailing to the Western Oceans (xia xiyang 下西洋) more than 1500 years later, China had a continuous desire to explore beyond its borders. At the time of Zheng He, the term “Western Oceans” (xiyang 西洋) had a specific meaning. As shown by the account of Ma Huan 馬歡, who personally joined Zheng He on the voyages, the people of Ming China considered the “Western Oceans” to be the Namoli Ocean (Namoli yang 那没黎洋), later called the Indian Ocean. Thus, it could be concluded that the Western Oceans where Zheng He’s fleet went meant the Indian Ocean. Even today most scholars still divide the Eastern and Western Oceans at Brunei, with no clear understanding of where the Western Oceans to which Zheng He sailed were actually located. It is therefore important to make clear that the Western Oceans in his time referred to the Indian Ocean, before moving on to investigate the purpose of the voyages and related historical issues. Even more important is to point out that Zheng He’s expeditions in the early fifteenth century reflected that Chinese people took to the seas on a scale larger than ever before and joined the maritime and overland silk routes together. The place where this occurred was the Indian Ocean.

Editorial Introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Editors of the JIOWS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Shed Light

The editors are proud to present the first issue of the fourth volume of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. This issue contains three articles, by James Francis Warren (Murdoch University), Kelsey McFaul (University of California, Santa Cruz), and Marek Pawelczak (University of Warsaw), respectively. Warren’s and McFaul’s articles take different approaches to the growing body of work that discusses pirates in the Indian Ocean World, past and present. Warren’s article is historical, exploring the life and times of Julano Taupan in the nineteenth-century Philippines. He invites us to question the meaning of the word ‘pirate’ and the several ways in which Taupan’s life has been interpreted by different European colonists and by anti-colonial movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. McFaul’s article, meanwhile, takes a literary approach to discuss the much more recent phenomenon of Somali Piracy, which reached its apex in the last decade. Its contribution is to analyse the works of authors based in the region, challenging paradigms that have mostly been developed from analysis of works written in the West. Finally, Pawelczak’s article is a legal history of British jurisdiction in mid-late nineteenth-century Zanzibar. It examines one of the facets that underpinned European influence in the western Indian Ocean World before the establishment of colonial rule. In sum, this issue uses two key threads to shed light on the complex relationships between European and other Western powers and the Indian Ocean World.

Australianama

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samia Khatun
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asian ◽  
South Asian Diaspora ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Asian Diaspora ◽  
Broken Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of 'Muslim-majority' countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonized by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of non-white people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future.

The Paving Stone Theory of World Tectonics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Livermore
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Plate Tectonics ◽  
Earth Science ◽  
Transform Faults ◽  
Plate Motions ◽  
Euler’S Theorem ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Entire History ◽  
The Indian Ocean

Tuzo Wilson introduces the concept of transform faults, which has the effect of transforming Earth Science forever. Resistance to the new ideas is finally overcome in the late 1960s, as the theory of moving plates is established. Two scientists play a major role in quantifying the embryonic theory that is eventually dubbed ‘plate tectonics’. Dan McKenzie applies Euler’s theorem, used previously by Teddy Bullard to reconstruct the continents around the Atlantic, to the problem of plate rotations on a sphere and uses it to unravel the entire history of the Indian Ocean. Jason Morgan also wraps plate tectonics around a sphere. Tuzo Wilson introduces the idea of a fixed hotspot beneath Hawaii, an idea taken up by Jason Morgan to create an absolute reference frame for plate motions.

scholarly journals Coffee: An Indian Ocean Perspective

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-81
Author(s):  
Shane J. Barter
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Coffee Production ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
History Of ◽  
Coffee Farmers ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Abstract Studies of coffee production and consumption are dominated by emphases on Latin American production and American consumption. This paper challenges the Atlantic perspective, demanding an equal emphasis on the Indian Ocean world of Eastern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. A geographical approach to historical as well as contemporary patterns of coffee production and consumption provides an opportunity to rethink the nature of coffee as a global commodity. The Indian Ocean world has a much deeper history of coffee, and in recent decades, has witnessed a resurgence in production. The nature of this production is distinct, providing an opportunity to rethink dependency theories. Coffee in the Indian Ocean world is more likely to be produced by smallholders, countries are less likely to be economically dependent on coffee, farmers are more likely to harvest polycultures, and countries represent both consumers and producers. A balanced emphasis of Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds allows us to better understand coffee production and consumption, together telling a more balanced, global story of this important commodity.

Sailing to the Britannic Isles: Some Mediterranean Perspectives on the Remote Northwest from the Sixth Century bc to the Seventh Century AD

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wilkes
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Astronomical Observations ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
A Minor

If you were training to be an athlete you would not spend all your time doing exercises: you would also have to learn when and how to relax, for relaxation is generally regarded as one of the most important elements in physical training. To my mind it is equally important for scholars. When you have been doing a lot of serious reading, it is a good idea to give your mind a rest and so build up energy for another bout of hard labour. For this purpose the best sort of book to read is not merely one that is witty and entertaining but also has something interesting to say. This advice from the satirist Lucian, sometime itinerant lecturer and at other times a minor government official, seems as valid today as it was in the second century AD. For students engaged in the history and archaeology of Europe in the first millennia BC and ad, I can currently think of no better respite from the structures, models and databases, that are the currencies of modern research, than Barry Cunliffie’s monograph on the explorer Pytheas published in 2001. Unencumbered with footnotes and with minimal bibliography, a text of barely 170 pages introduces one of the great mysteries of antiquity, the fantastic voyage of exploration by a citizen of Massalia, the Greek ancestor of modern Marseilles, to the British Isles and beyond to Iceland and the Arctic Circle and then in the direction of the Baltic (Cunliffe 2001). Nothing is known of Pytheas himself and the only reasonably certain fact we have concerning the voyage is that it was undertaken around the time of Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC). No less remarkable is that all we know of Pytheas’ own account of his travels is preserved in later writers, who at the least denigrated his achievement and often branded him a downright liar with considerable vehemence, while still exploiting his detailed account of the lands and seas he saw. Despite this the value of his astronomical observations was recognized by some of the greatest minds of antiquity and as a result his place in the development of the geographical sciences is assured.

Gujarat in the History of the Indian Ocean

2019 ◽  
pp. 52-67
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Maritime History ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
History Writing ◽  
New Methods ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean

This chapter takes a stock taking exercise of the history writing on Gujarat and Indian maritime history over the last five decades. It identifies the major shifts and emphases that mark the nature of historical knowledge. What these hold for the discipline of history in general and how these inflect the case study of Gujarat in particular are examined. The intention of such a stock taking exercise is also to consider the importance of recovering and reading new and local archives and of incorporating new methods into standard historical work. The author also explores the most significant shifts that have emerged in the recent historiography of the Indian Ocean and of maritime Gujarat: study of law and piracy and Muslim seafaring and sailing practices in the western Indian Ocean.

The Indian ocean: a history of people and the sea (review)

Parergon ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-276
Author(s):  
John H. Pryor
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean

The Portuguese and the Indian Ocean : a review

Antiquity ◽  
1948 ◽  
Vol 22 (85) ◽  
pp. 4-7
Author(s):  
Elaine Sanceau
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Century Literature

It was from the Portuguese that Europe first learned something about India. Their 16th century literature abounds in information on the subject. Duarte Barboza, Tomé Pires, Castanheda, João de Barros, Gaspar Correa even, though he says that he will only write about the exploits of his countrymen, have each one given to the world many interesting facts regarding the ethnology, the customs and beliefs, and some account of the history of that baffling sub-continent which Portugal, of European nations, was the first to observe at close quarters.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document