Indian Ocean globalisation started in 15th century, says book

Located strategically between the east and west, the Indian Ocean could be said to have occupied the centre-stage of history ever since Vasco Da Gama discovered the sea route to the East Indies.

That single event, which paved the way for global empires "" British, French, American "" changed the fortunes of the areas lining the Indian Ocean.

But what are the interconnections between the littoral states?

And did their people have a sense of common destiny?

India's economic, cultural, social and political connections with the Indian Ocean in the 19th and 20th centuries is the subject of 'A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Empire' by Sugata Bose, Gardiner professor of history, Harvard University, which was released in the city by the West Bengal governor, Gopal Krishna Gandhi.

Also present at the launch were Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and Ravi Roddar, chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry (eastern region).

Krishna Bose, ex-parliamentarian and Bose's mother and to whom the book has been dedicated, was also present. Describing his book a "subtly seditious critique" of globalisation, Bose said it offers an "interpretation of Empire that is very different from that propounded by Niall Ferguson" and was meant "not just for colleagues in the academic but for every man interested in empire, nationalism, globalisation".

Speaking at the launch, Sen, as Bose's colleague at Harvard, praised the book as the epitome of how history should be written, adding that it gave an account of many of the basic ideas that had moved the world and underlined how no nation stands in isolation.

The governor, however, sounded a dissenting note.

In a speech that was otherwise liberally peppered with praise, he felt that Bose had erred on the side of caution by underplaying the latent Islamophobia that had motivated the purveyors of empire "" Vasco Da Gama and those who came after him.