Dominating the waves
As the third largest body of water in the world, the Indian Ocean has a mystique all its own, with an extraordinarily diverse history. The Indian Ocean waters cover an estimated 73.5 million square km, incorporating half the world's latitudes and seven of its time zones, along with 48 independent littoral and island countries consisting of 2.6 billion people – some 39 percent of the world's population. The early history of the Indian Ocean, especially with the development of human civilisation, is as diverse and rich as any terrestrial region on Earth. 'Turn a map of the world upside down and the Indian Ocean can be seen as a vast, irregularly-shaped bowl, bounded by the shorelines of Africa and Asia, the islands of Indonesia, and the coast of Western Australia,' wrote the historian Richard Hall. The area's significance, he continued, was as 'a centre of human progress, a great arena in which many races have mingled, fought and traded for thousands of years.'
For thousands of years, much of the commerce and inter-civilisational contact in the Indian Ocean was facilitated by Muslim, Indian and Chinese traders, who sailed in dhows and junks and populated the bazaars of key port cities. Until around 1700 the Indian Ocean's thriving seaborne trade was deemed the most significant in the world, with the exchange of silk and porcelain from China; spices from Southeast Asia; pepper, gems, pearls and cotton from India; incense and horses from Arabia and West Asia; and gold, ivory and slaves from East Africa. As a result of this extraordinary commercial and cross-cultural interaction, bustling ports emerged along the Indian Ocean littoral, in places such as Aden on the Red Sea, Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, Kilwa and Mombasa on the East African coast, Calicut on the western Indian coast, and the seaside port of Malacca astride the Malacca Strait.