#MaritimeMatters – India And The Sea Trade | Online Talk by Nick Collins: Talk 328
When much of Europe and northern Asia lay under ice, the Indian Ocean was already shaping the world. After the Flood (c. 5600 BCE), the first long-haul trade routes forged kingdoms and empires, pushing deep into the Mediterranean. Jain and Phoenician merchants carried Indian ideas as well as goods to Greece. In 700 CE, Europe's maritime trade was struggling to recover from centuries of collapse. Indian Ocean volumes surged east, birthing Srivijaya's choke-point empire and Song China's unmatched civilisation. Europe's stuttering re-embrace of trade through Venice, Genoa, Bruges, London, Antwerp and Amsterdam, reversed the picture by 1700. At our Online Talk #MaritimeMatters, author and maritime historian Nick Collins sheds light on how the Indian subcontinent was the economic powerhouse and cultural diffuser of the world from before the end of the Ice Age to medieval times. He explains how maritime India’s positive trajectory was altered when the region was conquered by continentalist powers from the north that eventually established the Mughal Empire.
About the speaker
Nick Collins spent nearly four decades working at the centre of maritime trade, across London, Tokyo, Singapore and Dubai. He holds a history degree from Cambridge. That combination – practitioner and scholar – enabled him to write a three-volume series that argues that maritime trade, not political history or ideology, is the primary driver of civilisation: of wealth, of ideas, of decline. The first volume, How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World was shortlisted for the Mountbatten Maritime Literary Award. Before the trilogy, Collins wrote The Essential Guide to Chartering and the Dry Freight Market, long regarded as the standard reference for the shipping industry.