Professor McPherson provides evidence that for millenia the Indian Ocean had a profound influence on the lives of the people who lived on its shores. Fishermen, sailors and merchants travelled its waters linking the world's earliest civilizations from Africa to East Asia in a complex web of relationships. Trade underpinned these relationships but the Ocean was also a highway for the exchange of religions, cultures and technologies, giving the Indean Ocean region an identity as a largely self-contained "world". The expansion of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam helped define the boundaries of this "world" which by the 14th and 15th centuries was one of the most prosperous and culturally complex regions on earth. By the 16th century Europeans were part of this "world" as partners in trade with the indigenous peoples, but from the 18th century this economic relationship changed as the economies of the Indian Ocean "world" integrated with the capitalist economies of the West. The change from commercialism to capitalism ended the insularity of the Indian Ocean "world" and began its integration, as a region, into the global economy and its territorial division amongst various European powers.
This transition altered the ancient web of regional relationships and, with the arrival of European settlers and rulers, added yet another layer to the palimpsest of cultures which flourished on the shores of the Ocean. By the 20th century the Ocean was no longer a major force binding the peoples on its shores in a self-conscious entity, but the legacy of the past is still evident in their common religious, cultural and historical experiences.
- ISBN10 0195633741
- ISBN13 9780195633740
- Publish Date April 1994
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 8 October 1999
- Publish Country IN
- Imprint OUP India
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 328
- Language English