Braudel introduced an important concept of the longue duree to understand the truly great movements (and not moments) of history, focused on the dialectical relationship between human beings and their environment. For more than fifteen centuries before the coming of the Europeans, processes of economic and socio-cultural interaction in the Indian Ocean were not hampered by monopolistic continental or seaborne empires, and even after their intervention, some of these processes continued to operate under their radar screen, with long-term consequences. The inhabitants could thus share in the biodiversity of the world to obtain new plants and animals, exchange complementary commodities, and create larger social and cultural unities centred on the ocean.

      The sea has played a vibrant role in the life and psyche of coastal peoples around the rim of the Indian Ocean, and has given rise to a maritime ethos and disposition, a distinctive maritime culture which differs fundamentally from a continental one. For more than 2000 years the wooden sailing vessel, the dhow, has been the principal medium linking many regions around the western Indian Ocean, not only commercially, but also socially and culturally. As it has been said, of all things, the ship is the most cosmopolitan(1).

      While commerce was generally the primary motive, its influence extended to the social and cultural arenas. Commerce necessarily demands exchange of goods among peoples of different ecologies, regardless of racial, religious or cultural differences, and calls for continuous expansion of inter-community relations between the native and the foreigner. They exchanged not only goods but also ideas, and they engaged in intimate social relations that were not confined to the market place, but often extended to the bed. From the earliest times there is evidence of intense interaction and intermarriage, and some settled down, gradually becoming indigenised.

      Mercantile communities are therefore necessarily open societies, cosmopolitan and thriving on diversity, especially considering the fact that in the political economy of trade profit is based essentially on differing notions of value between two trading societies. While this does not lead automatically to a harmonious blend - particularly during the sad chapter of slavery and the slave trade, which became a base for social disharmony - it was nevertheless remarkably tolerant towards other religions and cultures.

      The ‘dhow culture’ represents an earlier phase of globalisation, but one that was of a fundamentally different type. Indian Ocean was largely an arena of free trade. None of the major states in the continental heartlands around the Indian Ocean played an important role in maritime affairs. Not even the Chinese attempted to establish commercial or political hegemony over the Indian Ocean. A century before the coming of the Portuguese, they had launched a series of gigantic expeditions that traversed the ocean seven times. They were certainly awe-inspiring - but they were diplomatic missions intended largely to show the flag, to obtain a symbolic acknowledgement of China’s cosmological centrality, rather than to impose military or political domination.

      Maritime trade was instead cultivated by a string of small port/city states that depended predominantly on it for their livelihood and prosperity, and developed distinctive mercantile cultures that often attained high levels of development and civilisation. They were threaded together by trans-oceanic exchange of goods, culture and ideas. Often they had more in common with other ports across the ocean than with their individual hinterlands. The heroes of Indian Ocean trade were places like Kilwa and Mombasa on the East African coast, Aden and Hormuz at the mouths of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, Calicut on the Malabar coast, and Malacca at the Straits of Malacca.

      It was left to the Portuguese and their European successors to set up a series of seaborne empires whose initial objective was to monopolise the spice trade, and ended up imposing colonial empires. However, despite the imposition of colonial empires and modern-day neo-liberal world hegemony, some of the elements of the old Indian Ocean world - such as what has been called the ‘bazaar nexus’ and the ‘hawala system’ of promissory notes (2), as became clear during the ‘war-on-terror’ campaign to choke off all financial transactions not going through the recognised banks - and cultural intermingling across the Indian Ocean, continue to persist. It is a very broad field of scholarly investigation that has great relevance to the current debate on globalisation, and the differing conceptions of ‘clash’ or ‘dialogue of civilisations.’