The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History

by Sanjeev Sanyal

We can gauge this from how the Dutch considered it a victory when they forced the English in 1667 to hand over the tiny nutmeg-growing island of Run in the East Indies, now Indonesia, in exchange for a much larger island in North America’s eastern seaboard. That island was Manhattan.

Suez Canal in 1869

deployment of steam-powered ships heralded a period of rapid globalization.

Marthanda Varma of Travancore who decisively defeated the Dutch and ended their dreams of colonizing

Great Man Theory

Thomas Carlyle,

Eric Hobsbawm puts it, ‘Marx wanted to prove a priori that a certain historical result, communism, was the inevitable result of historical development.

In other words, history is not a predetermined path but the outcome of complex interactions that, at every point in time, can lead down many paths.

Mark Twain is said to have remarked, ‘History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.’10

Niall Ferguson is to explore the counterfactuals or ‘What ifs’ of history.

Khoi-San people of south-western Africa are the oldest surviving human population as they have the greatest genetic variation.

Khoi-San

San people,

‘bush...

Sea of Galilee in Israel.

Rice and pigs were domesticated in China.

Sesame and cotton appear to have been first cultivated in India.

Great Flood.

Noah and his Ark.

The Indians have the legend about Manu who was warned about the coming fl...

Vishnu, in the form of a fish, then guided Manu’s...

We also find animal bones in the central Indian sites including cattle, deer, goats, wild boar and, hold your breath, horses.

discovery of horses painted on rocks at Bhimbetka, a Stone Age site further to the south in Madhya Pradesh.

horses from a very early age which goes against the common view that the animal was domesticated in Central Asia and came to India in the Iron Age.

In other words, these hubs of riverine civilizations were born out of adversity and culminated in the creation of the first kingdoms/states.

The earliest recognizable Harappan site at Bhirrana in Haryana, on the banks of the Saraswati–Ghaggar, has been carbon-dated to 7000 BC.

Perhaps they imported perishables like dates and wine.

Another possibility is that they imported copper from Oman as the remains of several ancient copper mines have been found there.

Khetri near the Haryana–Rajasthan border, but the Gujarati Harappans may have...

according to the Rig Veda, defeated an alliance of ten tribes on the banks of the Ravi in Punjab.

Archaeological finds over the last two decades suggest instead that India was the likeliest place where iron

was first mass produced.

University of Hyderabad made a startling discovery in 2014–15 while doing excavations in their campus.25 They found a number of iron artefacts, including weapons, that dated from around 2400–1800 BC. This is arguably the oldest systematic use of iron in the world.

Persians are descendants of the Parsu

Another possibility is that the cultural links merely reflect the fact that the Iranians and north Indians were part of the same continuum until the Bronze Age.

Jiroft civilization

moved west towards Fars province.

‘Parsa’

Mitanni migrated from the east into northern Iraq in the middle of the second millennium BC and came to dominate the region.

Hittites.

Vedic gods Indra, Varuna, Mitra ...

it is no coincidence that the arrival of the Mitanni in the region also witnessed the introduction of a te...

Prior to the arrival of the Mitanni, iron was treated as a precious metal in the Middle East.

It is likely that the Mitanni used iron to carve out their empire in northern Iraq.

The wars ended with the Hittites winning and, with the rise of the Assyrians, the Mitanni found themselves crushed between two powers in the thirteenth century BC.

Roman empire

solar god Mithras).

The pagan Romans used to celebrate a big festival called Saturnalia that went on for a week from 17 December.

Sol Invictus or Unconquered Sun.

Orthodox Church still celebrates Christmas on 7 January.