The book integrates the latest scholarly literature on the entire Indian Ocean region, from East Africa to China. Issues such as India's history, India’s changing status in the region, and India's cross-cultural networking over a long period are explored in this book. It is organized in specific themes in thirteen chapters. It incorporates a wealth of research on India’s strategic significance in the Indian Ocean arena throughout history. It enriches the reader's understanding of the emergence of the Indian Ocean basin as a global arena for cross-cultural networking and nation-building. It discusses issues of trade and commerce, the circulation of ideas, peoples and objects, and social and religious themes, focusing on Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. The book provides a refreshingly different survey of India’s connected history in the Indian Ocean region starting from the archaeological record and ending with the coming of empire. The author’s unique experience, combined with an engaging writing style, makes the book highly readable. The book contributes to the field of global history and is of great interest to researchers, policymakers, teachers, and students across the fields of political, cultural, and economic history and strategic studies.

The Indian Ocean in World History explores the cultural exchanges that took place in this region from ancient to modern times.

An adaptation of The Ocean of Churn for young readers When did the first humans arrive in India and how did they get here? What are Roman artefacts from hundreds of years ago doing in a town near Puducherry? How did merchants from Arabia end up near Kochi? From the east coast of Africa to Australia, one big blue body of water has connected diverse peoples and cultures for thousands of years: the incredible Indian Ocean. Read on to learn about the fearless travellers and sailors, pirates and conquerors who set out to cross the ocean in search of gold and glory, and discover how geography can shape the course of history.

This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born. In accessible, narrative prose, this book explores the unexpected forms that science took in the early modern world. It highlights little-known linkages between Asia and the Atlantic world.

The history of Africa's historical relationship with the rest of the Indian Ocean world is one of a vibrant exchange that included commodities, people, flora and fauna, ideas, technologies and disease. This connection with the rest of the Indian Ocean world, a macro-region running from Eastern Africa, through the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia to East Asia, was also one heavily influenced by environmental factors. In presenting this rich and varied history, Gwyn Campbell argues that human-environment interaction, more than great men, state formation, or imperial expansion, was the central dynamic in the history of the Indian Ocean world (IOW). Environmental factors, notably the monsoon system of winds and currents, helped lay the basis for the emergence of a sophisticated and durable IOW 'global economy' around 1,500 years before the so-called European 'Voyages of Discovery'. Through his focus on human-environment interaction as the dynamic factor underpinning historical developments, Campbell radically challenges Eurocentric paradigms, and lays the foundations for a new interpretation of IOW history.

This enthralling book offers a new approach to Indian economic history, placing trade and mercantile activity in the region within a global framework.

Trade, Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World is a collection which covers a long time span and diverse areas around the ocean. Many of the essays look at the Indian Ocean before Europeans arrived, reminding the reader that there was a cohesive Indian Ocean. This collection includes empirical studies and essays focused on particular area or production. The essays cover various aspects of trade and exchange, the Indian Ocean as a world-system, East African and Chinese connections with the Indian Ocean World, and the movement of people and ideas around the ocean.