By Sanjeev Sanyal
A lot of human background has performed itself out alongside the rim of the Indian Ocean. In a first-of-its-kind test, bestselling writer Sanjeev Sanyal tells the historical past of this crucial quarter, which stretches throughout East Africa, the center East and the Indian subcontinent to South East Asia and Australia. He narrates a desirable story concerning the earliest human migrations out of Africa and the nice towns of Angkor and Vijayanagar; medieval Arab empires and chinese language treasure fleets ; the rivalries of ecu colonial powers and a brand new sunrise. Sanjeev explores distant archaeological websites, historical inscriptions, maritime buying and selling networks and half-forgotten oral histories, to make interesting revelations. In his inimitable kind, he attracts upon present and new proof to problem well-established claims approximately well-known historic characters and the move of heritage. Adventurers, retailers, explorers, clergymen, swashbuckling pirates, revolutionaries and warrior princesses populate this vibrant and multifaceted narrative. the sea of Churn takes the reader on an awesome trip via medieval geopolitics and eyewitness money owed of long-lost towns to the newest genetic discoveries approximately human origins, bringing alive a area that has outlined civilization from the very starting.
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Additional info for The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History
Example text
Local time, on 26 December 2004, an undersea earthquake shook the ocean floor north-west of the island of Sumatra. 1 magnitude unleashed a tsunami that killed an estimated 228,000 people and caused tens of billions of dollars’ worth of damage. The devastation was not limited to nearby Sumatra or Thailand but was spread across the Indian Ocean—India, Sri Lanka and even as far away as East Africa. It was a reminder that the Indian Ocean is not merely a geographic term but an ecosystem interconnected by both human and natural forces.
This brings us back to why I decided to start this book with Nandi Varman II. His story draws together many of the elements that are explored in this book: the deep links of trade and culture across the Indian Ocean, the back-and-forth movement of people, the importance of the female lineage, but also the difficulty of piecing together history from random scraps of evidence. Moreover, it illustrates the contingent nature of history. The flow of events in southern India took a certain turn because a twelve-year-old boy in a faraway land decided to take a leap into the unknown.
In many places, people were forced to abandon old hunting grounds and move closer to the remaining rivers. The Sahara savannah had so far supported a significant population but desertification forced many to shift to the Nile. 20 Surrounded by desert, the people settling along the Nile ‘oasis’ became increasingly sedentary. The ‘oasis’ ran from Sudan to Cairo, around 800 kms, but was no more than a few kilometres wide. We have evidence that human population steadily increased over time, probably through a combination of local births and further inward migration.