Day 322: Monsoon

Al Bahr al Hindi is what the Arabs called the ocean in their old navigational treatises. The Indian Ocean and its tributary waters bear the imprint of that great, proselytizing wave of Islam that spread from its Red Sea base across the longitudes to India and as far as Indonesia and Malaysia, so a map of these seas is central to a historical understanding of the faith. This is a geography that encompasses, going from west to east, the Red Sea, Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, and Java and South China seas. Here, in our day, are located the violence- and famine-plagued nations of the Horn of Africa, the geopolitical challenges of Iraq and Iran, the fissuring fundamentalist cauldron of Pakistan, economically rising India and its teetering neighbors Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, despotic Burma (over which a contest looms between China and India), and Thailand, through which the Chinese and Japanese, too, may help finance a canal sometime in this century that will affect the Asian balance of power in their favor. Indeed, the canal is just one of several projects on the drawing board, including land bridges and pipelines, that aim to unite the Indian Ocean with the western Pacific.

On the Indian Ocean’s western shores, we have the emerging and volatile democracies of East Africa, as well as anarchic Somalia; almost four thousand miles away on its eastern shores the evolving, post-fundamentalist face of Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world. No image epitomizes the spirit of our borderless world, with its civilizational competition on one hand and intense, inarticulate yearning for unity on the other, as much as an Indian Ocean map.

Water, unlike land, bears no trace of history, no message really, but the very act of crossing and recrossing it makes this ocean, in the words of Harvard professor of history Sugata Bose, a “symbol of universal humanity.” There are Indian and Chinese, Arab and Persian trading arrangements creating a grand network of cross-oceanic communal ties, brought even closer over the centuries by the monsoon winds and, in the case of the Arabs, Persians, and other Muslims, by the haj pilgrimage. This is truly a global ocean, its shores home to an agglomeration of peoples of the fast-developing former “third world,” but not to any superpower: unlike the Atlantic and Pacific. Here is the most useful quarter of the earth to contemplate, pace Fareed Zakaria, a “post-American” world in the wake of the Cold War and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rudyard Kipling’s turn of phrase “east of Suez”—from the 1890 poem “Mandalay,” which begins in Moulmein in Burma, on the Bay of Bengal—applies more than ever, though few may realize it.

Cold War military maps highlighted the Arctic, owing to the geography of the Soviet Union and its principal ports. Former president George W. Bush’s so-called war on terrorism underscored the Greater Middle East. But the geopolitical map of the world keeps evolving. The arc of crisis is everywhere: a warming Arctic could even become a zone of contention. Because the entire globe is simply too general an instrument to focus on, thus it helps to have a specific cartographic image in mind that includes the majority of world trouble spots, while at the same time focusing on the nexus of terrorism, energy flows, and environmental emergencies such as the 2004 tsunami. Just as phrases matter for good or for bad—“the Cold War,” “the clash of civilizations”—so do maps. The right map provides a spatial view of world politics that can deduce future trends. Although developments in finance and technology encourage global thinking, we are still at the mercy of geography, as the artificiality of Iraq and Pakistan attest.

Americans, in particular, are barely aware of the Indian Ocean, concentrated as they are, because of their own geography, on the Atlantic and the Pacific. World War II and the Cold War confirmed this bias, with Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Korea, and Communist China all with Atlantic or Pacific orientations. This bias is embedded in mapping conventions: Mercator projections tend to place the Western Hemisphere in the middle, so the Indian Ocean is often split up at the far edges of the map. Yet, it is this ocean to which Marco Polo devoted almost an entire book of his travels near the end of the thirteenth century, from Java and Sumatra to Aden and Dhofar. Herein lies the entire arc of Islam, from the eastern fringe of the Sahara Desert to the Indonesian archipelago; thus it follows that the struggle against terrorism and anarchy (which includes piracy) focuses broadly on these tropical waters, between the Suez Canal and Southeast Asia. The Indian Ocean littoral, which takes in Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan, constitutes a veritable networking map of al-Qaeda, as well as one of disparate groups smuggling hashish and other contraband. Indeed, Iran has supplied Hamas by a sea route from the Persian Gulf to Sudan, and then overland through Egypt.

Here, too, are the principal oil shipping lanes, as well as the main navigational choke points of world commerce—the Straits of Bab el Mandeb, Hormuz, and Malacca. Forty percent of seaborne crude oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz at one end of the ocean, and 50 percent of the world’s merchant fleet capacity is hosted at the Strait of Malacca, at the other end, making the Indian Ocean the globe’s busiest and most important interstate.

Throughout history, sea routes have been more important than land ones, writes Tufts University scholar Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, because they carry more goods more economically. The sea silk route from Venice to Japan across the Indian Ocean in the medieval and early modern centuries was as important as the silk route proper across Central Asia. “Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hands on the throat of Venice,” went the saying. Another proverb had it that if the world were an egg, Hormuz was its yoke.

Today, despite the jet and information age, 90 percent of global commerce and two thirds of all petroleum supplies travel by sea. Globalization relies ultimately on shipping containers, and the Indian Ocean accounts for one half of all the world’s container traffic. Moreover, the Indian Ocean rimland from the Middle East to the Pacific accounts for 70 percent of the traffic of petroleum products for the entire world. Indian Ocean tanker routes between the Persian Gulf and South and East Asia are becoming clogged, as hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese join the global middle class, necessitating vast consumption of oil. The world’s energy needs will rise by 50 percent by 2030, and almost half of that consumption will come from India and China. India—soon to become the world’s fourth largest energy consumer after the United States, China, and Japan—is dependent on oil for more than 90 percent of its energy needs, and 90 percent of that oil will soon come from the Persian Gulf by way of the Arabian Sea. Indeed, before 2025, India will overtake Japan as the world’s third largest net importer of oil after the United States and China. And as India must satisfy a population that will be the most populous in the world before the middle of this century, its coal imports from Mozambique, in the southwestern Indian Ocean, are set to increase dramatically, adding to the coal that India already imports from Indian Ocean countries such as South Africa, Indonesia, and Australia. In the future, India-bound ships will also be carrying enormous quantities of liquefied natural gas across the western half of the Indian Ocean from southern Africa, even as it continues to import gas from Qatar, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This is how African poverty may be partially assuaged: less by Western foreign aid than by robust trade with the richer areas of the former third world.

~~Monsoon : The Indian Ocean And The Future Of American Power -by- Robert D. Kaplan.

Day 33: Book Excerpt : After Tamerlane

The Portuguese were the oceanic frontiersmen of European expansion. The Portuguese kingdom was a small weak state perched on the Atlantic periphery. But by c. 1400 its rulers and merchants were able to exploit its one magnificent asset, the harbour of Lisbon. Europe’s Atlantic coast had become an important trade route between the Mediterranean and North West Europe. Lisbon was where the two great maritime economies of Europe – the Mediterranean and the Atlantic – met and overlapped. It was an entrepôt for trade and commercial information and for the exchange of ideas about shipping and seamanship. It was the jumping-off point for the colonization of the Atlantic islands (Madeira was occupied in 1426, the Azores were settled in the 1430s), and for the crusading filibuster that led to the capture of Ceuta in Morocco in 1415. Thus, long before they ventured beyond Cape Bojador on the west coast of Africa in 1434, the Portuguese had experimented with different kinds of empire-building. Their geographical ideas were shaped not only by knowledge of the great Asian trade routes that had their western terminus in the Mediterranean, but also by the influence of crusading ideology. Ironically, the crusading impulse assumed that Portugal lay at the western edge of the known world and that the object was to drive eastward towards its centre in the Holy Land. Perhaps it was this and Portugal’s early forays into North Africa after 1415 (where it heard of Morocco’s West African gold supplies) that pulled the Portuguese first south and east rather than westward across the Atlantic. The tantalizing vision of alliance with the Christian empire of Prester John (supposedly lying somewhere south of Egypt) encouraged the hope of navigators, merchants, investors and rulers that, by turning the maritime flank of the Islamic states in North Africa, Christian virtue would reap a rich reward.

Prester John was only a legend, and so was his empire. Nevertheless, by the 1460s the Portuguese were pushing ever further south in search of a route that would take them to India – the goal triumphantly achieved by Vasco da Gama in 1498. But it took more than navigational skill to carry Portuguese sea power into the Indian Ocean. Two vital African factors made possible their sea venture into Asia. The first was the existence of the West African gold trade that flowed north from the forest belt to the Mediterranean and the Near East. By the 1470s, the Portuguese had managed to divert some of this trade towards their new Atlantic sea route. In 1482–4 they brought the stones to build the great fort of San Jorge da Mina (now Elmina in Ghana) as the ‘factory’ for the gold trade. (A ‘factory’ was a compound, sometimes fortified, where foreign merchants both lived and traded.) It was a crucial stroke. Mina’s profits were enormous. Between 1480 and 1500 they were nearly double the revenues of the Portuguese monarchy.6 In the 1470s and ’80s, they supplied the means for the expensive and hazardous voyages further south to the Cape of Storms (later renamed the Cape of Good Hope) rounded by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488. The second great factor was the lack of local resistance in the maritime wilderness of the African Atlantic. South of Morocco, no important state had the will or the means to contest Portugal’s use of African coastal waters. Most African states looked inland, regarding the ocean as an aquatic desert and (in West Africa) seeing the dry desert of the Sahara as the real highway to distant markets.

In these favourable conditions, the Portuguese traversed the empty seas and then pushed north from the Cape until they ran across the southern terminus of the Indo-African trade route near the mouth of the Zambezi. From there they could rely upon local knowledge, and a local pilot who could direct them to India. Once north of the Zambezi, Vasco da Gama re-entered the known world, as if emerging from a long detour through pathless wastes. When he arrived in Calicut on India’s Malabar coast, he re-established contact with Europe via the familiar Middle Eastern route used by travellers and merchants. It was a feat of seamanship, but in other respects his visit was not entirely auspicious. When he was taken to a temple by the local Brahmins, Vasco assumed that they were long-lost Christians. He fell on his knees in front of the statue of the Virgin Mary. It turned out to be the Hindu goddess Parvati. Meanwhile the Muslim merchants in the port were distinctly unfriendly, and, after a scuffle, Vasco decided to beat an early retreat and sail off home.

But what were the Portuguese to do now that they had found their way to India by an Atlantic route that they were anxious to keep secret? Even allowing for the lower costs of seaborne transport, it was unlikely that a few Portuguese ships in the Indian Ocean would divert much of its trade towards the long empty sea lanes round Africa. In fact the Portuguese soon showed their hand. The Malabar coast, with its petty coastal rajas and its reliance on trade (the main route between South East Asia and the Middle East passed along its shores), was the perfect target. Within four years of Vasco’s voyage to Calicut, they had returned in strength with a fleet of heavily armed caravels. Under Afonso Albuquerque, they began to establish a network of fortified bases from which to control the movement of seaborne trade in the Indian Ocean, beginning at Cochin (1503), Cannalore (1505) and Goa (1510). In 1511, after an earlier rebuff, they captured Malacca, the premier trading state in South East Asia. By the 1550s they had some fifty forts from Sofala in Mozambique to Macao in southern China, and ‘Golden Goa’ had become the capital of their Estado da India.

~~After Tamerlane -by- John Darwin