Empires of the Monsoon. Richard Hall

      Maps by Leslie Robinson

FOREWORD

      Turn a map of the world upside down and the Indian Ocean can be seen as a vast, irregularly-shaped bowl, bounded by the shorelines of Africa and Asia, the islands of Indonesia, and the coast of Western Australia.¹ Unlike the Atlantic and Pacific, merging at their extremes into the polar seas, this is an entirely tropical ocean; to mention it calls up a vision of palm-fringed islands and lagoons where rainbow-hued fish dart amid the coral. That is the tourist-brochure image, but behind it lies the Indian Ocean of history – a centre of human progress, a great arena in which many races have mingled, fought and traded for thousands of years.

      The earliest civilizations, in Egypt and the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, had direct access to the Indian Ocean by way of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. At the hub, stretching towards the equator, lay the Indian sub-continent, itself the site of ancient cultures in the Indus valley. Since long before the time of Alexander the Great, travellers had brought back tales of the rich and voluptuous East. The emperor Trajan, arriving triumphantly at the Persian Gulf in A.D. 116, and watching mariners set sail for India, had mourned that he was too old to make the voyage and gaze upon its wonders.²

      For almost a thousand years after the fall of the Roman empire the western side of the Indian Ocean, the focus of this book, was as much an entity as the Mediterranean, surpassing it in wealth and power. The arts and scholarship flourished there, in cities to which merchants came from all corners of the known world. There was also much turmoil, as conquering armies spawned in the remote parts of Asia swept down to overthrow old empires and impose new dynasties.

      The lives of ordinary people, however, were always ruled more by nature than by great events, by the perpetual monsoons rather than by ephemeral monarchies. The word ‘monsoon’ comes from the Arabic mawsim, ‘season’, and ever since sailors had dared to venture on voyages across the open seas these seasonal winds had borne their ships between India and its distant neighbours. For six months they blow one way, then in the reverse direction during the other half of the year. The summer monsoon, coming from East Africa and the southern seas, is pulled eastwards by the rotation of the earth after passing the equator, so that it sweeps across India and up through the Bay of Bengal. Winds are fiercest between June and August.

      The sea-captains of old might not understand why the monsoons happened (how colder air was being sucked northwards over the ocean in summer towards the hot lands of Asia, then southwards from the Himalayas and the Indian plains in winter); for them it was sufficient that the winds came on time, year in and year out, to fill their sails. For the farmers of India it was likewise enough to know that the summer monsoon would bring them rain.³ However, on sea and land,