Oceans Connect

The Marine Worlds 

In Chapter One, Sea Worlds: Pacific and South-East Asian History Centered on the Phillipines, Paul D’Arcy investigates the effects of colonialism on the Philippines, with particular emphasis on the how colonialists divided the sea worlds and how they restricted and controlled these spaces. The following chapter, Rila Mukherjee’s Chasing the Many Faces of a Marine Goddess Across the Eastern Indian Ocean reveals the fascinating interconnectivity between time, space, and culture facilitated by water. She achieves this goal by examining how littoral cultures are united by the worship of marine deities. Mukherjee uses the eastern Indian Ocean as her geographical point, looking at Indian, Malay, and Indonesian littoral groups. The author compares and contrasts the iconographies of their shared marine deities. Arvind S. Susarla’s article makes up Chapter Three, Bypassed Oceans. The author confronts the issues of classrooms ignoring the importance of ocean studies and the lack of public debate in India on the development of ocean space. Through his argument, he discusses the societal, political, and cultural ramifications of these actions – or lack thereof.

The Maritime Worlds 

The second section of the volume examines the history created in oceans and seas between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries by three great empires – Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. Ryan Tucker Jones begins this section with his article, Pacific Currents, Maritime Empires, and Russia’s Oceanic Moment (Chapter Four). His work looks at how the Russian Empire was indeed a maritime one. It shatters our pre-conceived notions and is a welcome corrective to the more conventional ways of visualizing the Russian Empire. The next four essays in this portion are united by their emphasis on knowledge transfer though the viability of mercantile empires. Ana Crespo Solana’s Networks and ‘National’ Communities in the First Global Hispanic Atlantic (Chapter Five) examines the many ways that the Spanish maritime enterprise influenced Atlantic-based communities and vice versa. Chapter Seven, Narrating Little Stories about the Portuguese in the Making of World History, by J.B. Owens, examines Portugal’s contribution to the First Global Age (1400-1800) through the narration of selected stories. It looks at entrepreneurship, gender issues, politics, and cultural exchange that were a result of Portugal’s interactions with the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea through sea trade. Amelia Polonia continues the discussion on Portugal in Jumping Frontiers, Crossing Barriers – Transfers Between Oceans: A Case Study of the Portuguese in the Making of World History (Chapter Seven). She writes that Portuguese maritime activities are the main agent for the exchange on a global scale, since they foster, historically, connections between local, regional, and global platforms. Their trade allowed for technological and intellectual exchanges, as well as global trade networks and human migration. Amandio Jorge Morais Barros extends Polonia’s study in Chapter Eight, The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean in the First Global Age: Transoceanic Exchanges, Naval Power, Port Organization and Trade. However, Barros specifically looks at technological and intellectual transfers across the Indian Ocean.

Maritime World as Space: Europe and the Indian Ocean 

This portion of the book focuses on the Indian Ocean from a European perspective. Chapter Nine, A Global Dream: The Indian Ocean in the European Trading Horizon, is written by Antoni Picazo Mutaner. He looks at how the Indian Ocean became a space to be explored and enjoyed by Europeans through medieval maps of the world such as those by Creques Abraham, Walsperger, and Fra Mauro. Rila Mukherjee contributes another chapter, Oceans Connect/Fragment: A Global View of the Eastern Ocean (Chapter 10). She looks at how the Indian Ocean transformed into a European social and political space, particularly between sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Formal and Informal Networks in Maritime Words: The Indian Ocean 

Lipi Ghosh examines the management of ports and trade in the Bay of Bengal through Thai sources in Chapter Eleven, Thai Trade in the Indian Ocean: The Contexts of Pre-Colonial Bay of Bengal Port Management. She successfully highlights Thailand’s great importance in facilitating trade between the east and the west. Radhika Seshan’s Human Networks in the Pre-modern World: Rumours of Piracy in Surat (Chapter Twelve) looks at information trade along the Arabian Sea. She does so by focusing on rumours of piracy in the great Indian trading port of Surat. In ‘A Profitable and Advantageous Commerce: European Private Trade in the Western Indian Ocean (Chapter Thirteen), Ruby Maloni focuses on the importance of European private traders and their creation of larger, global networks. In addition, Maloni looks at how private trade shaped the outcome of global trade and commerce. Finally, Chapter Fourteen, Connecting Seas: Indian Textiles in the Indian Ocean Trade in the Early Modern Period, looks at how the Dutch East India Company connected oceans and seas through the Indian textile network in the seventeenth century.

Publication 

Mukherjee’s book is a refreshing and necessary assessment on the history of the marine and maritime worlds. There is, however, some disconnect between the essays and, then, on the opposite side of the spectrum, overlapping and repetitiveness in subject matter. There are also some grammatical and spelling issues. The book would have also been more concrete if it solely focused on the Indian Ocean and its history. The few essays that do not focus on the subject seem a bit disjointed from the volume. However, they are insightful in their own right. Despite these shortcomings, this collection of essays highlights the importance of the world’s bodies of water and their historical, religious, social, political, cultural and economic implications. It is a pioneering volume in understanding the role of water worlds in global history, particularly during the Age of Exploration.

Rachel Parikh, PhD.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

rachel.parikh@metmuseum.org