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.

In his influential book, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, Kaplan argues that the geopolitics of the twenty-first century will be decided by events in the Indian Ocean rim.

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.

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

This view was radically challenged by Alfred Wegener in 1912 and further elaborated in his book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, published in 1915. Wegener argued that today’s continents had once been part of a gigantic supercontinent and had later drifted apart like icebergs.

Bab-el-Mandeb or Gateway of Tears.