The Indian Ocean Trade Route

The Mongol armies used the Silk Road to expand their empire. The first Mongols on the Silk Road were nomadic warriors who attacked and looted the markets along the trade routes. Since the Mongol conquest and other conditions disrupted the trade routes- people thought about safer and faster routes-

1) Traveling by boat and you could escape the Mongols and some of the other warfare. 2) Traveling could be quicker. Caravans could take over 4 months to move goods from Xi’an China to Samarkand in Uzbekistan. With good seasonal winds the trip would just take weeks. Of course you have to know that they blow south in the winter and north in the summer.

And you could carry a lot more! The Indian Ocean trade network was a crucial method of exchange and created significant increase in trade. Unlike the Silk Road which exchanged chiefly luxury goods such as silk and spices - bulk goods such as lumber, spices and rugs were exchanged across the Indian Ocean.

Improvements in seafaring technology allowed increasingly larger cargoes, which resulted in bulk goods being shipped enormous distances. The boats, the dhow and the junk, were important to the development of the network.

6 Chinese sternpost rudder Arab lateen sail Chinese compass Muslim portolan charts and maps

The long-distance trade helped to connect people from Canton, China, to Java, Indonesia, around India to Aden, Yemen and as far away as Mogadishu, Somalia and Madagascar The routes helped to spread Islam, uniting diverse peoples throughout the region through commercial cooperation, not political authority.

In 1498, strange new mariners made their first appearance in the Indian Ocean. Portuguese sailors under Vasco da Gama rounded the southern point of Africa and ventured into new seas. The Portuguese were eager to join in the Indian Ocean trade, since European demand for Asian luxury goods was extremely high. However, Europe had nothing to trade. The peoples around the Indian Ocean basin had no need of wool or fur clothing, iron cooking pots, or the other meager products of Europe

As a result, the Portuguese entered the Indian Ocean trade as pirates rather than traders. Using a combination of bravado and cannons, they seized port cities like Calicut on India's west coast and Macau, in southern China. The Portuguese began to rob and extort local producers and foreign merchant ships alike.

In 1602, an even more ruthless European power appeared in the Indian Ocean: the Dutch East India Company(VOC) The Dutch sought a total monopoly on lucrative spices like nutmeg and mace. As the European powers established political control over important parts of Asia, turning Indonesia, India, Malaya, and much of Southeast Asia into colonies, reciprocal trade dissolved. Goods moved increasingly to Europe, while the former Asian trading empires grew poorer and collapsed. The two thousand year-old Indian Ocean trade network was crippled, if not completely destroyed