Subrahmanyam Across The Green Sea

Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-0-86356-956-2
Verlag: Saqi Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean - 'the green sea,' as it was known to Arabic speakers - underwent vast transformation. An era of commercial and cultural exchange blossomed between the Red Sea and Mecca, the Persian Gulf, East Africa, Kerala and western India. In Across the Green Sea, Sanjay Subrahmanyam recounts the history of this ocean from a variety of shifting viewpoints. He sets the scene with the withdrawal of China's Ming Dynasty and explores how the western Indian Ocean was transformed by the growth and increasing prominence of the Ottoman Empire and the continued spread of Islam into East Africa. He examines how several cities, including Mecca and the vital Indian port of Surat, grew and changed during these centuries, when various powers interacted, until famines and other disturbances upended the region in the seventeenth century. Rather than proposing an artificial model of a dominant centre and its dominated peripheries, Across the Green Sea reveals the complexity of a truly dynamic and polycentric system through the use of connected histories, a method which he has pioneered.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is a Distinguished Professor of History and the Irving & Jean Stone Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA. He is the author of Europe's India: Words, People, Empires, 1500-1800 and Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500-1800.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay

Leseproben

Introduction
CONCEPTUAL ISSUES IN CONNECTED HISTORIES
In a word, let us cease if you please to speak endlessly between one national history and another, without ever understanding each other. MARC BLOCH, “A CONTRIBUTION TOWARDS A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN SOCIETIES” (1928) NO ISLAND IS AN ISLAND
Seas can be unfriendly, even to experienced mariners. Toward the end of the Islamic lunar month of Muharram in the year 962 AH (December 1554), the Ottoman admiral and intellectual Seydi ‘Ali Re’is found himself in Ahmedabad in Gujarat, putting the final touches to his work Kitabü’l-Muhit (Book of the Ocean).1 Seydi ‘Ali had not intended to be in Gujarat and found himself there only because of the vagaries of navigation, having suffered a shipwreck in a massive storm while trying to take his fleet around the Arabian Peninsula from Gwadar to Yemen. An experienced sailor in the Mediterranean, where he had served with the great Hayreddin Barbarossa, the Ottoman admiral was clearly unfamiliar and rather ill at ease in the more easterly waters where he now found himself. This is what seems to have motivated him to write his text, based on the experience of having “discussed nautical matters day and night with the pilots and mariners who were on board” during a period of roughly eight months spent first in Basra, then in the Persian Gulf, and eventually off the coast of western India.2 With remarkable ingenuity, he had also managed to lay his hands on several important geographical works in Arabic by earlier writers, whether classic medieval texts or those of more recent vintage written by men such as Ahmad ibn Majid and Sulaiman al-Mahri.3 As he had learned to his own cost, Seydi ‘Ali stated, “it was actually extremely difficult to maneuver in the Indian seas without them [such works], since the captains, commanders, and sailors, who were not experienced in these maneuvers always needed a pilot because they themselves lacked the necessary knowledge.”4 Constituted as a companion volume to his better-known travel text Miratü’l-Memalik (Mirror of Kingdoms), the Muhit may be considered a textual tribute of sorts from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, an admission that to know the one was not to know the other.5 To draw the obvious lesson, every ocean needs its own histories, just as it needs its own navigational treatises.6 Neither the Mediterranean nor the Atlantic can provide a simple model to be imitated, however much modern historians have been tempted to do so.7 The reasons for this may be evident, but they bear reviewing. The Mediterranean, after all, was a relatively small body of water, one-thirtieth the surface of the Indian Ocean, with only two very limited points of exit into the Black Sea and the Atlantic respectively.8 It could sometimes be dominated by a single political system, as had been the case with the Roman Empire, a model for the ambitions of later empires. Given its oblong shape, it was also relatively quickly traversed from its northern to its southern shores, with navigation on the east-west axis more cumbersome. As a consequence of this geography, the Mediterranean was the theater for a particularly dense set of crisscross interactions, the point of departure for Fernand Braudel’s exploration of the sea as an object of historical study in the early modern period.9 The Atlantic Ocean, for its part, poses problems of quite the opposite order. For centuries, until Iberian empire-building in the late 1400s, its eastern and western shores barely maintained any form of regular contact. Even after 1500 the ocean as a whole showed little or no coherence; and as even enthusiasts for Atlantic history have admitted, there are serious issues posed by “the real disjunctions that characterized the Atlantic’s historical and geographic components.”10 Atlantic history has thus usually been sliced into various segments corresponding to the various European empires that attempted to dominate one or the other set of circuits in the ocean. Furthermore, in the three centuries from 1500 on, the relationship between the two seaboards remained deeply asymmetrical, resembling neither the Mediterranean nor the Indian Ocean in this respect. Let us turn to our real object, the western Indian Ocean or Green Sea (al-bahr al-akhzar). Since histories must begin somewhere, this one may as well commence in the kingdom of Hurmuz in the Persian Gulf, a small but complex maritime state centered on the tiny and singularly arid island of Jarun, with its striking multicolored array of soils. Though the island was probably an ancient site of human habitation, its role as the center of a kingdom was consolidated only from around 1300, at a time when the Mongol Il-Khanid dynasty had come to rule over a good part of the mainland to the north after having ended the five-century-long career of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad in 1258.11 Jarun’s immediate neighbor farther up the Persian Gulf was the much larger island of Qishm, which was certainly much richer in natural resources but neither as defensible nor as strategically situated to control the waterways. By the middle decades of the fourteenth century Jarun and Hurmuz were well positioned to take over the dominant role as entrepôt that had once been held by the port of Siraf on the Iranian mainland, and then by Qais. The best known of the travelers of that time, the Moroccan Ibn Battuta, testifies to that; he seems to have visited it at least twice on his way to and from India. Ibn Battuta noted that the earlier settlement called Hurmuz had been on the mainland, in the region known as Mughistan, but that a newer town had then been created on “an island whose city is called Jarun,” separated from the mainland by a channel that he overstates as three farsakhs, or ten miles, wide. He describes it as “a fine large city, with magnificent bazaars, as it is the port of India and Sind, from which the wares of India are exported to the two ‘Iraqs, Fars and Khurasan.” This city was the residence of the sultan, who at the time of Ibn Battuta’s visits was Qutb-ud-Din Tahamtan bin Turan Shah. He had taken the island in the late 1310s after a protracted contest and then added various other islands and territories to its domains on the two shores of the gulf. The sultan initially made a poor impression on Ibn Battuta, who described him as “an old man, wearing long cloaks, both skimpy and dirty, with a turban on his head, and a kerchief for a waist girdle,” but he later came to realize that he was actually “one of the most generous of princes, exceedingly humble, and of excellent character.”12 Ibn Battuta also noted that the royal family was given to periodic bursts of internecine violence, notably between Tahamtan and his brother Kaiqubad and Kaiqubad’s descendants. However, it appears that the initiative to build up Jarun and make it a real political center had in fact come from outside this family. The most significant figures in the matter were a couple of enterprising former Turkish slaves, Baha-ud-Din Ayaz and Bibi Maryam, who in the last years of the thirteenth century had managed to stave off pressure from rival groups of Mongols on the mainland in order to carve out a coastal domain including Qalhat (in Oman), but centering on Jarun, where Ayaz himself settled and ruled for a time during the first decade of the fourteenth century. After the political consolidation that Tahamtan and his allies then brought about, the central place of Jarun and Hurmuz was assured in the next century and a half, despite regular bouts of internal political turbulence. Although there is a paucity of contemporary sources from the second half of the fourteenth century, Chinese sources of the Ming dynasty during the first three decades of the fifteenth century shed a fair amount of light on Hurmuz’s role in the Indian Ocean trade.13 Several of the celebrated expeditions of the admiral Zheng He put in at the port and usually followed a fairly regular pattern of spending two months there from mid-January to mid-March before embarking on their return voyage to China. As an authoritative analysis of these Chinese materials puts it: “All ‘first-hand information’ on Hormuz, as on many other distant ports and polities, was collected in the days of Zheng He—by Ma Huan, Gong Zhen and Fei Xin, who accompanied Zheng He on his expeditions. Later sources merely repeat what these three authors had to tell, without adding anything new to the stock of data then available.”14 The account by the translator Ma Huan is particularly intriguing, since he was himself a convert to Islam.15 Rather than an ethnocentric or condescending view, he paints a highly idealized picture of Hurmuz, in which everyone in the kingdom is a devout Muslim who follows every aspect of the shari‘a to the letter and beyond. Not only are the people “refined and fair,” but they are also “stalwart and fine-looking; their clothing and hats are handsome, distinctive and elegant.” Besides, he provides an extensive list of the different commodities traded on the market, though he omits to mention perhaps the most significant of them, the horses that were brought in from the mainland in order to be exported to Indian destinations in Gujarat, the Deccan, and Kanara and Kerala ports such as Bhatkal, Kannur, and Calicut (Kozhikode). The...