Community, Conflict, and Connections: The Indian Ocean Before 1500

Catalog description

This course covers the Indian Ocean’s long expanse from the ancient to the medieval period, roughly the 3rd millennium BCE to 1500 C.E. At its broadest, we can delimit the Indian Ocean as stretching around the Arabian Peninsula and South Asia east to the South China Sea, west to Africa’s east coast, and south to Australia. We interrogate how different ethnic, linguistic, religious, and social groups in a borderless world gave and took ideas, beliefs, and practices, making the oceanscape an arena of conflict and community. How did world religions, like Buddhism and Islam, and political forms, like empires and maritime city-states, integrate the seas into social, economic, and political life? From Madagascar to the Malay peninsula, this course navigates land and sea through coins, inscriptions, contracts, letters, travelogues, and legends about merchants, seafarers, pilgrims, and pirates, exploring oral and written traditions in translation from multiple languages – Sanskrit, Greek, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, and Malay. In the course’s epilogue, we consider some of the ways the Indian Ocean is reimagined and reused in more recent times. Readings include: Periplus Maris Erythraei, S.D. Goetein’s Documents from the Cairo Geniza, Roxani Margariti’s Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade, H.P. Ray’s The Winds of Change: Buddhism and The Maritime Links of South Asia, George Hourani’s Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean, Louise Levathes’ When China Ruled the Seas, M.N. Pearson’s Port Cities and Intruders, Lewis and Wigen’s The Myth of Continents.