Natural Hazards and Peoples in the Indian Ocean World

Bordering on Danger

Greg Bankoff, Joseph Christensen, Greg Bankoff, Joseph Christensen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781349948574
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud

Thisbook examines the dangers and the patterns of adaptation that emerge throughexposure to risk on a daily basis. By addressing the influence of environmental factors in Indian OceanWorld history, the collection reaches across the boundaries of the natural andsocial sciences, presenting case-studies that deal with a diverse range ofnatural hazards – fire in Madagascar, drought in India, cyclones and typhoons inOman, Australia and the Philippines, climatic variability, storms and flood inVietnam and the Philippines, and volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamisin Indonesia. These chapters, written by leading international historians, respond to a growing need to understand the ways in which natural hazards shapesocial, economic and political development of the Indian Ocean World, a regionof the globe that is highly susceptible to the impacts of seismic activity, extreme weather, and climate change.

© The Author(s) 2016

G. Bankoff, J. Christensen (eds.)Natural Hazards and Peoples in the Indian Ocean WorldPalgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94857-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Bordering on Danger: An Introduction

Greg Bankoff¹ and Joseph Christensen²

(1)

Department of History, University of Hull, Hull, UK

(2)

Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia

End Abstract

Danger never lies far from the lives and minds of the people bordering the Indian Ocean. It is present in the air above, it bides its time in the ground below, and it lurks in the waters in between. Recent historiography has taken a turn towards a more transnational perspective as scholars attempt to come to terms with the difficulty of writing about the past in a globalised age. The term ‘transnational’, of course, is older, rooted in the sociological fabric of nineteenth-century America whose migrants had transcended Old World nationalisms and had created in its place a ‘world federation in miniature’. ¹ The notion of breaking with the nation-state as the preferred norm, of writing a more inclusive and wider history that seeks to cross geopolitical and cultural boundaries remains a signature of scholars who pursue this approach. This is particularly the case among historians of the Indian Ocean World (IOW), a vast arena spanning the Indian Ocean basin from the shores of East Africa to the South China Sea. A region, moreover, that has regained much of its former cohesion over the last few decades. Sugata Bose writes of ‘the continuing relevance of the Indian Ocean as an inter-regional space in a time of intense global interconnections’. ² A fatal reminder of this spatial and temporal unity took place on 26 December 2004 when giant tsunami waves triggered by a magnitude (Mw) 9 earthquake off the north-west coast of Sumatra struck communities around the Indian Ocean. Within seven hours, coastal populations as far distant as Sumatra and Somalia were left devastated as the common danger faced by all peoples of the IOW was ‘demonstrated in the most tragic fashion by a great wall of water moving at the speed of a jet aircraft’. ³ The contributions in this collection respond to Bose’s suggestion that disasters act to bind the peoples of the Indian Ocean together and link them to the world beyond. By placing natural hazards at the centre of Indian Ocean history, examining cross-cultural and trans-temporal themes in how communities coped with danger across time, the volume seeks to present a new, transnational understanding of the region’s past.

Any attempt at discussing the historical unity of the IOW must begin with the work of Kirti N. Chaudhuri. While acknowledging a great debt to Fernand Braudel’s recognition of the connection between the Mediterranean Sea and the peoples who live around its shores, ⁴ Chaudhuri argues that the countries of the Indian Ocean did not share a common destiny but that they did constitute ‘a distinct sphere of influence’ in terms of travel, the movement of peoples, economic exchange and climate, which created cohesion amongst the diverse religions, social systems and cultural traditions of the Irano-Arabic, Hindu, Indonesian and Chinese civilisations. ⁵ Both Braudel and Chaudhuri discuss their respective spaces as physical units and human units, the frontiers of which are not coterminous, which permit them to discuss hinterlands that were, at times, quite distant from the shore. As the title of his book suggests, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (1985), Chaudhuri chose to focus on an historical study of long-distance trade in order to reveal the underlying sense of unity shared by the diverse civilisations and peoples that occupy the Indian Ocean rim. This trade was premised on climate, or more precisely on the monsoon cycle of alternating high- and low-pressure weather systems, which strictly governed regional food production and the sailing season and was thus indispensable to trans-oceanic economic activity across the basin. The monsoon, he writes, ‘brought the whole area within the operation of a single global variable’, and represented ‘a cyclical component of time’. ⁶

Chaudhuri’s writings reveal a conscious effort to move beyond a historiographical framework focussed on the modern nations based on former European colonial empires of the Indian Ocean rim. ⁷ As such, he lays a path for other authors to follow. Kenneth McPherson’s The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (1992) places the Ocean at the centre of a narrative that explores the common history of the societies and cultures linked through long-distance migration and trade regulated by the monsoon system. Michael Pearson, in The Indian Ocean (2003), also distinguishes a degree of unity and continuity revealed by the region’s natural geography and includes an underlying ‘deep structure’ through topography, wind patterns and other physical phenomena. ⁸ Pearson went on to elaborate upon the commonalities of littoral societies, of finding around the ocean’s shores a mixture of maritime and terrestrial influences where societies have ‘more in common with other littoral societies than they do with their inland neighbours’. ⁹ Like Chaudhuri before them, both McPherson and Pearson acknowledge the influence of Braudel’s monumental study of the Mediterranean and its central underlying theme of the role of climate and environment in regulating history across the longue duree of human civilisation. Their perspective is echoed more recently by Edward Alpers in his The Indian Ocean in World History (2014), where monsoons and ocean currents are described as the foremost of ‘many deep continuities in the Indian Ocean’. ¹⁰

It is perhaps to be expected that such histories would have a strong environmental bias in terms of both subject and method, that scholars who share a more transnational perspective would examine units that ‘spill over and seep through national borders’ and study ‘the connections across national boundaries and the circulation of ideas, people and products these enable’. ¹¹ While ecologies might be subnational or national in their focus, the environment per se and its principal manifestations such as climate, physical geography and hydrography would be recognised as inherently global or, at least, supranational in scale. In fact, one of the earliest attempts at a systematic transnational history, the concept of the Atlantic World, might seem to have just such ‘an inbuilt geography’. David Armitage went on to elaborate a threefold typology of Atlantic history: circum-Atlantic history or the history of the ocean as an arena or zone of exchange, interchange, circulation and transmission; trans-Atlantic history or the history of meaningful comparisons between otherwise distinct histories; and cis-Atlantic history or the history of any particular place (nation, state, region, specific institution, etc.) in relation to the wider Atlantic world. ¹² Some historians even talk about ‘planetarity’ and envisage human history in the context of planetary and cosmic evolution (Fig. 1.1). ¹³

Fig. 1.1

The Indian Ocean World, showing locations covered by chapters in this book

Yet the environment has rarely figured in transnational histories even though environmental histories of change that had little to do with national borders was one of the original examples offered by Ian Tyrell as a fruitful direction for further analysis. ¹⁴ Even if there has been an increasing interest in the notion of space and particularly the relationship between transnational spaces and politically bounded territories, ¹⁵ environmental historians, with few exceptions, have mainly continued to write histories that parallel the history of the nation-state, even if it is hard to see such boundaries in nature. ¹⁶ Histories of the IOW have long held the potential to challenge this wider neglect. On the one hand, the region has been often subdivided into subsystems based on ‘natural’ forces. Janet L. Abu-Lughod proposes circuits determined by the wind patterns of the separate monsoonal zones that limited any state’s ability to influence events in an adjacent zone. She divides the pre-1500 Indian Ocean into three circuits: a westernmost circuit from the Red Sea–Arabian Peninsula–Persian Gulf to the south-west tip of India; a middle circuit, from the south-eastern coast of India to the Straits of Malacca and Java; and an easternmost circuit, from the Straits of Malacca that includes the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos to the great ports of south-east China. ¹⁷ Similarly, Eric Tagliacozzo identifies three principal ‘ocean littorals’ in his study of changes in Ocean-wide trade and production between the start of the seventeenth and the close of the nineteenth centuries; one in the eastern littoral of Southeast Asia, another in the northern littoral of the Indian subcontinent and a third in the western littoral of coastal East Africa. ¹⁸ Even Pearson, despite his insistence on the role of ‘deep structures’ underlying the Ocean’s history, divides the region into separate systems, delimiting, for instance, an Afrasian Sea beginning at Sofala on the East African coast and extending right around the shoreline to the southern tip of India. ¹⁹

Might there be a different basis for investigating the unity or otherwise of Indian Ocean history? If the wind patterns are central to determining the pace and rhythm of trade and cultural exchange across this ocean world and beyond, so the sea was also responsible for much of the risks that bound the people of these littoral societies together. On the water, craft of all kind, from fishing boat to merchant ship, faced the perils of wind and storm that shipwrecked many a mariner and sent many a vessel to the bottom. Off the water came hazards of a completely different magnitude and scale: tropical cyclones that caused havoc to town and country alike, destroying homes and ruining crops, and tidal surges that often obliterated all traces of human activity along the shoreline. The changing relationship of land and sea with the planet’s rotation, the continental landmass to the north that warmed more quickly and the ocean to the south that cooled more slowly, not only generated the monsoons but also were partly responsible for the floods and droughts that all too frequently afflicted populations far into the interior. Danger, too, lay in the land itself, in the geophysical hazards that were more specific to certain sub-regional landmasses: the seismicity of its eastern edge (forming part of the Pacific Ring of Fire) and along its northern fringe (the Alpine–Himalayan belt), the volcanism of the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos and its southern islands, Mauritius, Réunion and the Comoro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Bordering on Danger: An Introduction
• 2. Revisiting Southeast Asian History with Geology: Some Demographic Consequences of a Dangerous Environment
• 3. ‘The Sea Becomes Mulberry Fields and Mulberry Fields Become the Sea’: Dikes in the Eastern Red River Delta, c.200 BCE to the Twenty-First Century CE
• 4. ‘The Most Horrible of Evils’: Social Responses to Drought and Famine in the Bombay Presidency, 1782–1857
• 5. Philippine Typhoons Since the Seventeenth Century
• 6. Bushfire in Madagascar: Natural Hazard, Useful Tool, and Change Agent
• 7. Emperor Tự Đức’s ‘Bad Weather’: Interpreting Natural Disasters in Vietnam, 1847–1883
• 8. Storm over San Isidro: Repeated ‘disasters’ and Civic Community Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines
• 9. Disaster Management and Colonialism in the Indonesian Archipelago, 1840–1920
• 10. Cyclones, Drought, and Slavery: Environment and Enslavement in the Western Indian Ocean, 1870s to 1920s
• 11. Their Inescapable Portion? Cyclones, Disaster Relief, and the Political Economy of Pearlshelling in Northwest Australia, 1865–1935
• Erratum To: Natural Hazards and Peoples in the Indian Ocean World
• Back Matter