Ek ka teen from OUP

Oxford University Press has hit upon a great new wheeze, new at any rate to me.

It picks a theme, picks its two or three best books on that theme, photographs them, prints them, gets someone to write an introduction to the whole caboodle, binds them, and sells the resulting volume at a very affordable price.

This is not unlike what Reader's Digest, in a heroic attempt to educate Americans, used to do "" except that it would sell condensed versions of two or three literature classics as one 'book'.

In contrast, OUP puts entire books in one volume. Ek, if you like, ka teen. You have to be seriously disadvantaged not to fall for it.

Since, perhaps, everyone writes about the history of land, this volume is about the history of oceans.

The three books it contains are Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800, which is a classic by Holden Furber; Maritime India in the 17th Century by Sinappah Arasaratnam; and the more recent The Indian Ocean Kenneth McPherson. Sanjay Subramaniam, who has arguably emerged as one of the top five economic historians in the world, has written the introduction.

Together with it, these three volumes tell you pretty much everything about the means of expansion of European influence in the East.

It makes for a refreshing departure from the conventional stuff one gets about Surat, Bombay, Plassey, Buxar, Meerut, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Macau, Johore, Bencoolen, Jakarta, Aden, Egypt, Sudan, and so on.

If the conventional stuff is about what the Europeans did after getting there, this is about how and why they got there in the first place.

With great difficulty and to escape the wretchedness of European life, it would seem. As Subramaniam points out, the idea that they were coming from an economically developed place would have been incomprehensible to the Europeans of the day.

Conquest happened in increments because the locals were either too negligent until it was too late, or too greedy, or as was more often the case, both.

The central point of these volumes, however, is to take the work of Furber further. Thanks to a combination of things, not least of which was the availability of new records from about 1950 onwards, a different non-European-centric, view of the Indian Ocean started to develop.

Different and not new because K M Pannikar in his pioneering (if not very scholarly) book had already put forth the view that it was the European mastery of the seas that had led to Asia being dominated by the West.

But that view needed fleshing out by proper research and supported by archival material. What has emerged as a result of this effort that began in the late 1960s is, as it were, an Asian view of the Indian Ocean in the period from 1600 to 1900.

Many important lessons emerge. Thus, as Arasaratnam points out, although it was the coast that was generating most of the wealth in India, the sovereign never bothered to defend it adequately. The coast was seen primarily as channeliser of wealth to the interior. That was its sole function.

Nothing, it seems, has changed since then. Coastal India still funnels wealth to the heartland and Indian Navy is the worst-funded of the three arms of the India's defences. Amazingly, that is true of all the countries of the Indian Ocean, including China now.

Another lesson is that a sovereign power cannot afford to allow foreign economic powers to become major sources of local or central revenue.

The vulnerability this induces results not just in unequal commercial agreements, but also in an arrogant flexing of the military muscle by the foreigners, sometimes acting singly and sometimes acting jointly.

A third lesson is that it might not be a bad idea in this age of globalisation which is backed by the overwhelming military and economic power of the West for those charged with executing international agreements to be exposed to short courses in the history of such things.

MARITIME INDIA

Oxford University Press
Price: Rs 850