Greg Bankoff - Natural Hazards and Peoples in the Indian Ocean World: Bordering on Danger

The Author(s) 2016

Greg Bankoff 1 and Joseph Christensen 2

Danger never lies far from the lives and minds of the people bordering the Indian Ocean. It is present in the air above, it bides its time in the ground below, and it lurks in the waters in between. Recent historiography has taken a turn towards a more transnational perspective as scholars attempt to come to terms with the difficulty of writing about the past in a globalised age. The term transnational, of course, is older, rooted in the sociological fabric of nineteenth-century America whose migrants had transcended Old World nationalisms and had created in its place a world federation in miniature. The contributions in this collection respond to Boses suggestion that disasters act to bind the peoples of the Indian Ocean together and link them to the world beyond. By placing natural hazards at the centre of Indian Ocean history, examining cross-cultural and trans-temporal themes in how communities coped with danger across time, the volume seeks to present a new, transnational understanding of the regions past.

Any attempt at discussing the historical unity of the IOW must begin with the work of Kirti N. Chaudhuri. While acknowledging a great debt to Fernand Braudels recognition of the connection between the Mediterranean Sea and the peoples who live around its shores,

Chaudhuris writings reveal a conscious effort to move beyond a historiographical framework focussed on the modern nations based on former European colonial empires of the Indian Ocean rim.

It is perhaps to be expected that such histories would have a strong environmental bias in terms of both subject and method, that scholars who share a more transnational perspective would examine units that spill over and seep through national borders and study the connections across national boundaries and the circulation of ideas, people and products these enable.

Yet the environment has rarely figured in transnational histories even though environmental histories of change that had little to do with national borders was one of the original examples offered by Ian Tyrell as a fruitful direction for further analysis.

Might there be a different basis for investigating the unity or otherwise of Indian Ocean history? If the wind patterns are central to determining the pace and rhythm of trade and cultural exchange across this ocean world and beyond, so the sea was also responsible for much of the risks that bound the people of these littoral societies together. On the water, craft of all kind, from fishing boat to merchant ship, faced the perils of wind and storm that shipwrecked many a mariner and sent many a vessel to the bottom. Off the water came hazards of a completely different magnitude and scale: tropical cyclones that caused havoc to town and country alike, destroying homes and ruining crops, and tidal surges that often obliterated all traces of human activity along the shoreline. The changing relationship of land and sea with the planets rotation, the continental landmass to the north that warmed more quickly and the ocean to the south that cooled more slowly, not only generated the monsoons but also were partly responsible for the floods and droughts that all too frequently afflicted populations far into the interior. Danger, too, lay in the land itself, in the geophysical hazards that were more specific to certain sub-regional landmasses: the seismicity of its eastern edge (forming part of the Pacific Ring of Fire) and along its northern fringe (the AlpineHimalayan belt), the volcanism of the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos and its southern islands, Mauritius, Runion and the Comoros, and finally the devastating tsunamis that infrequently ravage coastlines from shore to shore. Climate and geology are therefore responsible for many of the hazards that afflict the lands and peoples of the Indian Ocean so that the peoples and nations that border it also share a common historical experience of risk.