The “Green Sea”, one of the terms used by Arabic speakers for the Arabian Sea, was linked to the wider world of commerce from ancient times with the earliest recorded contacts dating back to the Roman Empire. But from the 15th century, contacts increased and diversified, to include, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam has pointed out, the slave trade and movements of merchants and migrants from different parts of the Indian Ocean World and, later, the Europeans.
Not to forget the travellers—whether of Asian and African origin—like Abdur Razzaq and Ibn Battuta or the innumerable European travellers, from Nicolo Conti, Italian, in the middle of the 15th century; Afanasius Nikitin, Russian, at the same time; Ludovico di Varthema, Portuguese, early 16th century; and in the 17th, Thomas Coryat, who went on foot from Europe to India and finally died in Surat. This was one part of the “connected world”, the concept that Subrahmanyam first put forward in 1997, and which has been accepted, contested, modified, or just dismissed by many since then.
Book cover of Across the Green Sea Histories From the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
The book is divided into four chapters, prefixed by an introduction and suffixed by a conclusion. The introduction spans a wide geographical and chronological range and identifies a key aspect of the book wherein Subrahmanyam notes that the heavy reliance on early 16th century Portuguese texts can now be supplemented to “recover a history with a far greater variety of actors and interests, written from a diversity of perspectives”.
Beginning with what he calls “An Epoch of Transitions, 1440-1520”, Subrahmanyam lays out the geographical contours (“Considered conventional, even obligatory”) before moving on to the “political geometry” of the century.
Across the Green Sea
Histories From the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
The next chapter takes us to the view from Makkah, to talk of the work of Qutv-ud-Din Nahrawardi, who, in the 16th century, wrote an account of the Ottoman conquest of Yemen. Scholars working on earlier texts have “been able to identify more than two hundred significant merchants based in Makkah, especially after the 1420s”. The third chapter takes us to the links between eastern Africa and western India and the “patchwork of polities” that was in many ways the distinctive feature of the time and space covered by the book.
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For many readers from India, much of what is covered in this chapter will be unfamiliar, given the woeful lack of knowledge of the east coast of Africa (beyond a very cursory awareness of the Hasbhi/Siddi presence on the west coast of India). The circuits of commerce linking Gujarat and the Konkan coast with the East African coast included trade in textiles, ivory and slaves. Many of these slaves came to play a significant role in the formation of the Deccan state in the 15th and 16th centuries.
The final chapter takes us to the slightly more familiar ground of the port of Surat. Surat looked out at the sea and into the land. As the premier port—the bandar-i-mubarak—of the Mughal Empire, it had as its hinterland that entire empire. And with extensive connections spanning the Persian Gulf, Red Sea regions, the Swahili coast, the Indian Ocean archipelagos, and further east to the networks of the eastern Indian Ocean, as well as along the Indian coastline, Surat held an unparalleled position in 17th century India. (Masulipatam, on the east coast, may have come close but was still a little less extensive in its reach.)
Descriptions of the port are innumerable. European accounts have a wealth of information, with employees of the English East India Company like William Finch, Peter Mundy, and John Fryer describing the city in great detail. Surat was the point of departure for ships leaving for Europe, often the first point of entry for the ships coming in, and provided access to almost every part of the Mughal Empire, as well as southwards to the entire peninsula. The French merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier was among the many who travelled from Surat to Burhanpur, Agra, Masulipatam, and Goa.
The final chapter begins on an autobiographical note, on Subrahmanyam’s own entry into the field on which he has since written a great deal. It goes on to discuss in greater detail an area that has been much ignored in writings on the Indian Ocean world, the region of Sind. Sind is ideally located geographically, connecting, as it does, to the Indus systems on the one hand and to Kandahar and parts further west and northwards on the other. Portuguese and English records do have a fair bit on both the importance of Sind and the problems they faced in the region. The English records make it clear that they saw “the Portuguese trading presence in Sind as a formidable obstacle by the 1610s”.
As with many of Subrahmanyam’s works, there is a wealth of source and historiographic material, in many languages. For readers who have read his earlier works, there is much that is familiar, for we have read some of what is in this book in his research papers and in his books (for instance, in his Writing the Mughal World, written jointly with Muzaffar Alam, and his Three ways to be an Alien). But there is much that is new. The detailed linkages between regions, states, innumerable political players, competitors, collaborators, adventurers, and traders are laid out in his inimitable style.
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For me, the introduction is the most interesting given the way it identifies the trajectories of his development of the idea of “connected worlds”, which began with a questioning of the established paradigm of comparative history. The idea of connected worlds, as he has said over and over again, begins with questioning the effect of nationalism and national boundaries on the study of a pre-colonial (and often pre-nation state) past. The ways in which this concept has been accepted, challenged, and critiqued by different scholars makes for a remarkable exercise in teaching and researching methodology and historiography.
This is not a book for students, nor for the lay reader: but both students and lay readers ought to read it, to perhaps get a hint of the fascinating worlds of history and the Indian Ocean.
Radhika Seshan retired as Professor and Head, Department of History, Savitribai Phule Pune University in 2019, and is now a Visiting Faculty at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune. Her most recent publication is Empires of the Sea: A Human History of the Indian Ocean World (PanMacmillan India, 2024).
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