Indian Ocean Monsoon: The maritime rhythms in Trade

15 Março 2018, 10:00 • Shiv Kumar Singh

 Generally speaking, however, traders would not travel farther than a monsoon’s trip from their home port.  Greeks and Arabs ventured as far as western India; Indians ranged between the mouth of the Red Sea and the Malay Archipelago; Chinese and Southeast Asian merchants went as far as Sri Lanka.  Along these limits formed a string of emporia, where merchants speaking a babel of different languages would haggle and barter as part of the long process that brought goods from one extremity of the Indian Ocean to the other.

Ethiopians trading gold and ivory, Malays trading pepper and nutmeg, Yemenis trading frankincense and myrrh–all would mingle in trade towns and ports scattered across the ocean, negotiating the trans-shipment of their precious cargo in some common trade tongue.  Thus the silk that reached ancient Rome, or the spices that reached Europe before the age of colonization, would be handled by a multitude of merchants during a journey that could last years.

When following the western side of the African coastline from the equator, however, the Cape of Good Hope marks the point where a ship begins to travel more eastward than southward. Thus, the first modern rounding of the cape in 1488 by Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias was a milestone in the attempts by the Portuguese to establish direct trade relations with the Far East (although Herodotus mentioned a claim that the Phoenicians had done so far earlier). Dias called the cape Cabo das Tormentas ("Cape of Storms"; Dutch: Stormkaap), which was the original name of the "Cape of Good Hope".

Once Portuguese explorers rounded the Cape of Good Hope and began a campaign of conquest that subjugated Asia’s richest ports, the complex network that had defined Indian Ocean trade began to unravel.  Starting with Vasco da Gama in 1498, heavily-armed caravels rode the monsoon trade winds up from Africa and blasted through the defenses of local princes to commandeer their share of the lucrative spice trade.  Successive expeditions pushed toward the point of origin of this valuable commodity, eventually setting up ports on the Spice Islands, which granted them a monopoly on the trade.

Portuguese hegemony did not last long, as armed merchant ships from Holland, France, and Great Britain soon arrived in the Indian Ocean with ambitions of their own.  Each of these powers, like Portugal before them, sought to bypass or co-opt the intricate chains of commerce that stretched across the ocean by creating mercantile zones in their conquered territories that excluded all foreign traders.  Over the course of a couple centuries, the trade system that endured for millennia was subsumed by European power politics. But the end of the monsoon trade system did not spell the end of monsoon trade.

Even after the age of steam replaced the age of sail, dhows plied the routes between East Africa and the Persian Gulf, carrying African ivory, spices from Yemen, and pearls from Abu Dhabi.  The seafaring habits that had persisted for millennia were slow to die off, only succumbing in the mid-20th century once the discovery of oil had permanently altered the economics of the region.  Massive supertankers replaced wooden boats as the flood of wealth into the Persian Gulf made it impossible to earn a living carrying small cargoes over thousands of miles.  The dhows that ferry tourists along the shores of Zanzibar and Dubai today are but a reminder of the great monsoon trade system that once spanned a whole ocean.

Indian Ocean Currents

•      Indian ocean is half an ocean, hence the behavior of the North Indian Ocean Currents is different from that of Atlantic Ocean Currents or the Pacific Ocean Currents.

•      Also, monsoon winds in Northern Indian ocean are peculiar to the region, which directly influence the ocean surface water movement [North Indian Ocean Currents].

The currents in the northern portion of the Indian Ocean change their direction from season to season in response to the seasonal rhythm of the monsoons. The effect of winds is comparatively more pronounced in the Indian Ocean.