Early Global Interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean World, Volume II: Exchange of Ideas, Religions, and Technologies

351 Pages·2019·6.11 MB·English

by  Angela Schottenhammer

PALGRAVE SERIES
IN INDIAN OCEAN
WORLD STUDIES
EARLY GLOBAL
INTERCONNECTIVITY
ACROSS THE INDIAN
OCEAN WORLD,
VOLUME II
Exchange of Ideas, Religions,
and Technologies
Edited by Angela Schottenhammer
Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies
Series Editor
Gwyn Campbell
McGill University
Montreal, Canada
This is the first scholarly series devoted to the study of the Indian Ocean
world from early times to the present day. Encouraging interdiscipli-
narity, it incorporates and contributes to key debates in a number of
areas including history, environmental studies, anthropology, sociol-
ogy, political science, geography, economics, law, and labor and gender
studies. Because it breaks from the restrictions imposed by country/
regional studies and Eurocentric periodization, the series provides new
frameworks through which to interpret past events, and new insights for
present-day policymakers in key areas from labor relations and migration
to diplomacy and trade.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14661
Angela Schottenhammer
Editor
Early Global
Interconnectivity
across the Indian
Ocean World,
Volume II
Exchange of Ideas, Religions, and Technologies
Editor
Angela Schottenhammer
University of Salzburg
Salzburg, Austria
and
Research Director of the Indian Ocean
World Centre (IOWC)
McGill University
Montreal, Canada
Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies
ISBN 978-3-319-97800-0 ISBN 978-3-319-97801-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97801-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951043
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P a
reface and cknowledgements
From 21 to 23 June 2012, we convened an international conference,
entitled “Crossroads between Empires and Peripheries—Knowledge
Transfer, Product Exchange and Human Movement across the Indian
Ocean World”. It took place in Het Pand, an old Dominican mon-
astery with a history extending back to the early thirteenth century.1
Nowadays, Het Pand serves as the beautiful cultural and congress cen-
tre of Ghent University, Belgium. The conference was part of an MCRI
(Major Collaborative Research Initiative) project.
The MCRI project was an undertaking of the Indian Ocean World
Centre (IOWC), established at the History Department, McGill
University, under the supervision of its director, Gwyn Campbell. It com-
prised ten research teams in total,2 including in their ranks scholars and
cooperation partners from universities worldwide. The project investigated
the first “global” economy in the context of human–environment inter-
action, from the early centuries BCE to the present. This is the economy
1 Cf. the website of Ghent University, http://www.ugent.be/het-pand/en/history.
2Our team 3 has investigated East and Southeast Asian maritime space (cf. http://
mcgill.ca/iow-mcri/teams/team-3-schottenhammer), and we focused especially on three
aspects of human–environment interaction: (i) East Asian nation states or “territorial” areas
versus the East Asian world, (ii) the nature of exchange relations in the Asian world with
particular emphasis on the roles played by the official Chinese state and private Chinese and
foreign merchants trading in the East Asian world, and (iii) the extent of military/political
or religious influence on the development of early maritime trade.
v
vi PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
of the macro-region of the Indian Ocean World (IOW), an area of
primary geopolitical importance that covers approximately 20% of the
earth’s total maritime space and includes eastern Africa, the Middle East,
Southeast Asia and now the emerging superpowers of China and India.
The Indian Ocean is the only maritime expanse on earth that has been wit-
ness to the nautical ventures of most, if not all, of the major sea powers of
world history. From East Africa to Southeast Asia and China, people living
along its coasts have all sailed along Indian Ocean trading routes at one
point or another during the last two-and-a-half millennia. The dependence
of seafaring on the periodic alterations of the monsoon wind system and
the use of ships made of wooden planks and stitched by coconut coir prior
to steam navigation are two major features of this maritime space.
Environment is key. The socio-economic foundations of the great vari-
ety of networks that have emerged across the IOW are very much related
to the monsoon winds and ocean currents. First, the monsoon rains under-
pinned agricultural production. Next, these same monsoon winds created
the possibility of direct trans-oceanic sailing, facilitating the rise of a sophis-
ticated, durable structure of long-distance maritime exchanges of com-
modities, ideas, technologies and people, as has been shown in basically all
the chapters of this publication. Involved is a system that economic histo-
rians refer to as a “global economy”.3 And despite all the improvements in
navigational practices and shipbuilding, shipping continued to be linked to
the monsoons up to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
This publication is consequently very much an expression of the
research of the various cooperating partners and team members par-
ticipating in the MCRI project. Each team has expressed its own
approaches even while also striving to express a group spirit. Given the
range of interests and the focus on intra-Asian connections, stressing the
exchange relations between various parts of the macro-region regard-
less of whether they were core regions or peripheries, we have chosen
to entitle our endeavour Early Global Interconnectivity across the Indian
3 See especially the recent publication of Gwyn Campbell, Canada Research Chair
in Indian Ocean World History and Founding Director, Indian Ocean World Centre
(IOWC), McGill University, Africa and the Indian Ocean World in the Context of Human-
Environment Interaction from Early Times to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, forthcoming).
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
Ocean World. This volume focuses on the exchange of ideas, religions,
knowledge and technologies, whereas Volume I concentrates on com-
mercial structures and exchanges. Needless to say, however, all of these
aspects are overlapping and cannot be strictly separated.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the colleagues and
institutions that made this publication possible. We also received gener-
ous sponsorship for our international and interdisciplinary conference.
First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to the IOWC and the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their
generous funding (10,000 CAD). My thanks go also to the Chiang
Ching-kuo Foundation and the Research Foundation of Flanders (FWO)
that sponsored the conference with 5,000 and 3,000 EUR, respectively,
as well as to Freddy Mortier, the former dean of the Faculty of Arts and
Humanities and former vice-rector of Ghent University who in his func-
tion as dean not only supported us financially with 3,000 EUR but also
provided us with substantial endorsement and kindly commenced the
conference proceedings with his welcome address.
Last but not least, I wish to thank all who supported me during the
organization of this conference and the preparation of this publica-
tion that sometimes seemed to be a never-ending story. My assistants,
first Thomas Steingruber, then Lukas Fallwickl for three semesters and
recently also Dr. Maddalena Barenghi, have invested immense amounts
of time and energy in assisting me with standardizing writings, transcrip-
tions and special terms as well as the layout throughout this publication.
Feryal Honarmand assisted me with Persian and Arabic transcriptions.
Sometimes, however, due to authors’ preferences, the reader may come
across names that are slightly differently spelled, especially as far as
macrons and diacritics are concerned. The Chinese transcription, as a
rule, follows the Pinyin system, the Japanese the Hepburn and the Korean
the McCune–Reischauer Romanization system; for Vietnamese, we have
tried to include diacritics and used the Royal Thai General System of
Transcription (RTGS) for Thai and the IJMES for Arabic script.
My thanks go especially to Dr. Mathieu Torck without whose con-
stant practical support the conference could not have been carried out.
Het Pand with its historical ambience was an ideal venue for this inter-
national conference, and I am glad to say that we convened there yet
another conference on a related topic in July 2017.
Salzburg, Austria Angela Schottenhammer
Montreal, Canada
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
Angela Schottenhammer
Part I Religions in the Indian Ocean World
2 Buddhism and the Maritime Crossings 17
Tansen Sen
3 The Transmission of Vaiṣṇavism Across the Bay of
Bengal: Trade Networks and State Formation in Early
Historic Southeast Asia 51
Pierre-Yves Manguin
4 Religion and Early Trade in the Western Indian Ocean:
Ideology and Knowledge Exchanges Across the Indian
Ocean World 69
Eivind Heldaas Seland
5 Islam Across the Indian Ocean to 1500 CE 85
Geoff Wade
ix
x CONTENTS
Part II Shipbuilding Technologies and Transportation
6 Shipping of the Indian Ocean World 141
Nick Burningham
7 Cross-Regional and -Chronological Perspectives
on East Asian Seafaring and Shipbuilding 203
Jun Kimura
8 Towards a Hybrid Seagoing Ship: The Transfer and
Exchange of Maritime Know-How and Shipbuilding
Technology Between Holland and Japan Before the
Opening of Japan (1853) 227
Leonard Blussé
Part III Transfer of Knowledge and Technologies
9 Mongol Empire and Its Impact on Chinese Porcelains 251
Morris Rossabi
10 Eurasia, Medicine and Trade: Arabic Medicine in
East Asia—How It Came to Be There and How It
Was Supported, Including Possible Indian Ocean
Connections for the Supply of Medicinals 261
Paul D. Buell
11 Mules in the Indian Ocean World: Breeding and Trade
in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1780s to 1918 295
William G. Clarence-Smith
Bibliography 319
Name Index 321
Place Index 331
Subject Index 341