• Features
  • Books
  • Teaching
  • Digital & Film
  • Blog
  • IHS
  • Texas
  • Spotlight
  • About

The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Episode 47: Indian Ocean Trade

Every American schoolchild knows that Columbus sailed west to reach Asia with the hopes of finding precious metals, expensive fabrics, and exotic spices: all goods that were being traded in the Indian Ocean, and had been for millennia. Ancient Greek texts describe an active Indian Ocean economy. Some scholars have even linked the peopling of Australia to a slow, methodic collecting of resources along the coastal route from east Africa. In the first of a two part episode, guest Susan Douglass, author of the Indian Ocean in World History web site, describes the murky beginnings of trade and travel in the Indian Ocean basin, and the cultural exchanges and influences that the trade had in the days before the Europeans arrived.

Posted March 26, 2014 More

Recent Posts

  • The Death of Yukio Mishima, 50 Years On
  • 15 Minute History – Black Reconstruction in Indian Territory
  • IHS Panel: “Rodney King and the LA Riots: 30 Years Later”
  • “Though she wasn’t a man, she was as good as one”: Labor, Seapower, and Nineteenth-Century Seafaring Stewardesses
  • IHS Climate in Context: “Oil, Water, and Climate: Environmental Histories of Texas” – Panel
NOT EVEN PAST is produced by
The Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
We are supported by the College of Liberal Arts
And our Readers

Donate
Contact

All content © 2010-present NOT EVEN PAST and the authors, unless otherwise noted

    Sign up to receive the monthly Not Even Past newsletter

    • Features
    • Books
    • Teaching
    • Digital & Film
    • Blog
    • IHS
    • Texas
    • Spotlight
    • About