From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 27-29:
In 1498 the crew of the ships of Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama became the first people known to sail between Europe and India, landing at Calicut on the south-west coast of India. By 1512, the long arm of Portuguese merchant adventurism had reached almost 5,000 kilometres further, to its ultimate eastern destination, the Banda archipelago, most distant of the fabled Spice Islands.
But this historically crucial surge of European expansion was a minor navigational achievement compared with those of the maritime peoples whose lives the Portuguese were now disrupting. Some 1,500 years earlier sailors from this region had pioneered voyages which linked the Spice Islands to India and China and on to the coasts of Arabia and Africa. These were the pioneers who settled Madagascar, traded along the African coast and may well have sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and north as far as the Gulf of Guinea.
By 500 CE, and probably earlier, the sea, not the more famous overland Silk Road, was the pre-eminent mode of east–west trade. The sea was unquestionably hazardous, but it was easier and sometimes quicker to move 50 tonnes of goods on a ship compared with having to lead camels and pack animals over mountains and deserts, fending off robber bands, and across political boundaries where rulers were eager to extract tolls. According to Roman estimates it was 27 times more expensive to transport goods by land rather than water. Similar estimates were made for eighteenth-century Europe.
It was these sailors who guided the Portuguese from Melaka to the Bandas. That was a journey through the heart of a zone which rivals the Mediterranean as a locus of global trade and cultural interaction. This region comprises the almost countless islands and coastlines of the interlinked South China, Java, Sulu, Sulawesi and Banda seas and is joined to the Indian and Pacific oceans by the straits of Melaka, Sunda, Lombok, Makassar and Luzon. Its land is primarily composed of the islands of the vast Malay archipelago but includes the Malay peninsula and touches modern Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, as well as southern coastal China. India is a hop away across the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal.
This is a story of seafaring, of the drivers of global commerce, of cultural interchange and of the rise and fall of states and political systems. It is the story of a sea-girt region that remains predominantly Austronesian-Malay by language and original culture but has been subject to successive waves of influence from India, Islam, the west and China. It is the story of a sea which enabled ancient Rome to know cloves and camphor, of sailboats and of navigators who linked Maluku to the Bab el Mandeb and the coast of Africa and settled Madagascar. While ships and goods moved westward other ships and merchants moved eastward, bringing Indian and Islamic cultures to east Asia. Trade in spices was also the spur to Europe’s involvement in the region, which began more than 500 years ago. Nusantaria lost its leadership in boatbuilding and navigation, but to this day remains at the heart of global commerce, supplying some 40 per cent of merchant marine crews.
Despite its illustrious past, the region’s sense of identity is not what it was even in the 1880s when mariner and novelist Joseph Conrad was sailing its seas and José Rizal was awakening the nationalist aspirations of a wider Malay world. Steamships, airplanes and, above all, new nation states created from maps drawn haphazardly by western empires have eroded its sense of itself. Religious divisions have done the same. The economic dominance of western and east Asian countries has for now marginalized indigenous Nusantarian strengths. Many books of ‘South East Asian’ history are written with scant, if any, acknowledgment of the separate identity of the Austronesian linguistic and cultural heritage of the islands and coasts. For their different reasons, Indian, western and Chinese writers tend to generalize about ‘South East Asia’ mainly by reference to the mainland. Although the populations of states of the archipelago and Malay peninsula outnumber by 40 per cent those of the mainland they receive far less attention, partly because of a shortage of early documentary history.
But nothing can obliterate the common history and shared culture of the maritime region. So this is a book which largely ignores modern state boundaries to give a picture over time of the region, of the role of the sea and of the peoples who have lived near its shores for the past 2,500 or so years.
Far Outliers 