Early Indian Ocean studies were concerned mainly with numismatics, which involved the cataloguing and recording of Roman and Chinese coins recovered in India during the British colonial period. Toponymy also informed archaeological discussions in the nineteenth century, with Western travellers connecting place names to those in classical studies (Seland 2014). However, these numismatic and toponymic studies were soon overturned and it was ‘the sunset of [this] colonial archaeology [which]…became the wellspring of the archaeology of Indian Ocean trade’ (Ray 2003). The first major excavation was of the port site of Arikamedu, located in contemporary Pondicherry, directed by Wheeler in 1945 and attached to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Arikamedu was subsequently excavated in 1989 and 1990 by Begley (Begley et al. 1996). Seland (2014) remarked that the excavations of Arikamedu became the ‘blueprint’ for archaeological research throughout the Indian Ocean. The next major port site to be excavated was the Omani site of Khor Rori (Sumhuram) in contemporary Dhofar, which was excavated by Wendell Phillips and the American Foundation for the Study of Man in 1952 and later again in 1996 as part of an Italian investigation (Office of the Advisor to His Majesty the Sultan for Cultural Affairs 2008). During the excavations at Arikamedu and Khor Rori, numerous material culture correlates suggesting links to other parts of the Indian Ocean were recovered, and the archaeology of Indian Ocean trade became a nascent discipline. In the post-colonial era, Indian Ocean archaeological research tended to focus on national sub-disciplines (Seland 2014:4). Hence, it adhered largely to particularistic micro-regional approaches, otherwise known as ‘culture-history’. This situation resulted in limited engagement with alternative frameworks to explain interactions at a translocal scale.
Early historical research coincided with the first excavations of major port sites. In the 1950s the pioneering research of Villiers (1952) promoted a history focussed on the remote islands in the region—the Mascarenes, the Seychelles, and Chagos. However, until recently the Indian Ocean has remained relatively understudied compared to the Atlantic and Pacific (Vink 2007). It was when attempts to deal with the conceptual challenges presented by the historical study of the Indian Ocean, involving an apparent
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‘hundred frontiers’ and a ‘globalized, interregional … seascape’, that a theoretical framework known as the New Thalassology was developed in the 1980s (Vink 2007). The new school represented a hybridization of both Braudelian Annales based research and world systems theory (WST), emphasizing the need to study process and to recognize unity in the Indian Ocean region (Wallerstein 1974; Vink 2007); consequently, Indian Ocean historians developed an appreciation of both long-term histories (la longue durée) and the cosmopolitanism of the space. The New Thalassology was also characterized by a search for ‘meaningful units of analysis’, such as ‘parallel Mediterraneans’ (Vink 2007:43).
Vink (2007) lists three major proponents of the school, including Chaudhuri (1993), Pearson (2003) and McPherson (2003). The first author borrowed from Braudel’s (1949) seminal Mediterranean research by accentuating a regional unity ‘cutting across geographical and cultural watersheds’, which was considered a consequence of the capitalist, long-distance trade in luxury goods and bulk commodities (Chaudhuri 1993). Chaudhuri also discussed flexible scales of analysis, suggesting that the Indian Ocean should be treated as a single unit; however, this was neither always beneficial nor relevant in other cases (Vink 2007:44). The discussion also highlighted four major ‘expansionary forces’ which included the rise of Islam in the seventh century CE, the Chinese presence and political power, and the periodic migration of Central Asian nomadic people in the first millennium CE, and the more recent European maritime expansion (Vink 2007). Michael Pearson also adopted a similar Braudelian perspective, by presenting similarities and la longue durée. He argued that the physical factors, or the invariant ‘deep structure’ elements, provided cohesion in the region (Pearson 2003). He discussed further common cultural factors including, ‘port-cities, shops and seafarers, long-distance trade in both luxuries and bulk commodities, religious activities among some communities; the dissemination of the lingua franca; and, in the early modern period, the politico-military presence of the Portuguese and their string of coastal forts’ (Pearson 2003:3-5). McPherson (1993:15) argued that cultural practices were often connected by trade that shared ‘certain cultural commonalities which set them apart from the peoples of the contiguous worlds’.
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Conversely, as Vink (2007) highlights, the New Thalassology has been criticized for an apparent ‘false concept of unity’ (Chaunu and Bertram 1979). For example, Horden and Purcell (2000) considered that the region was negotiated through the individual movements of agents, concerned with their associated political states. Outside of these major works, many historical studies exist which further debate this argument in addition to presenting large syntheses of the area, including those by Borsa (1990), Bose (2006), Chandra (1987), Chaudhuri (1985), Dasgupta (1982) and Mukherjee and Subramanian (1998).
Larger archaeological research programmes have been recently developed to mirror the larger historical studies, which examine the entire region and elucidate the processes associated with pervasive interaction in the region. Many discussions have borrowed from both disciplines, with archaeologists referring to the New Thalassology and also WST (e.g. Pearson 2003; Ray 2003; Beaujard 2005; Fuller et al. 2011; Boivin et al. 2013; Hoogervorst 2013; Walz and Gupta 2012–2013; Seland 2014). This thesis research introduces an alternative frame of analysis—Jennings’ (2011) model of a global culture, which enables an exploration of the cultural dimensions of globalization previously unrecognized in the New Thalassology and WST models, whilst also addressing the possibility for the existence of multiple past periods of globalization.