While shipping and trade studies are hugely practical, technical, legalistic and even dull for non-specialists, “How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World” is a broadly-based and exciting account of human interaction at multiple levels, for general readers, specialists and practitioners.
The book is based on huge reading and rare sources and with an attractive writing style, and full of fascinating sidelights illuminating the historical narrative, also citing an author with life-long experience in international shipping.
According to the book, world-wide maritime trade has been the essential driver of wealth-creation, economic progress and global human contact. Trade and exchange of ideas have been at the heart of economic, social, political, cultural and religious life and maritime international law.
However, the author, Nick Collins, explains that these claims are borne out by the history of maritime trade beginning in the Indian Ocean and connecting to Southeast Asia, Japan, the Americas, East Africa, the Middle East especially the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean and Europe.
As a matter of fact, this development pre-dates the end of the Ice Age with world-wide flooding and led to the establishment of land-based civilisations in the above regions with particular effect on the Greek and Roman empires and even China’s ‘Celestial’ empire.
During this period, Mr. Collins notes that the Indian subcontinent was the original major player in maritime trade, linking oceans and regions. More specifically, the book analyzes how trade collapsed in Europe in the 5th-7th centuries, but then continued in Asia, which is how the book concludes its story.
