Session 60: Asian Maritime Diasporas before Da Gama

Organizer and Chair: John W. Chaffee, SUNY Binghamton

Discussant: Hugh R. Clark, Ursinus College

Keywords: pre-European Asian history, maritime trade, maritime diasporas, Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Muslims, Hindus.

This panel explores several of the many trade diasporas spawned by the system of maritime trade that flourished throughout Asian waters during the half millennium before the coming of the Europeans. In port cities from the Persian Gulf and Red Sea in the west to China and Korea in the east, diasporic communities flourished, involving, in different mixes, Persians, Arabs, East Africans, Indians, Malays, Sumatrans, Javanese, Vietnamese, Chinese and Koreans, among others.

The issues related to these trade diasporas are many. Patterns of settlement, ties with homelands, relations with host rulers and governments, community institutions of self-governance and worship, relations with other foreign communities, cultural exchange, and pressures for assimilation are just some of them. The panelists, historians specializing in different Asian regions, will explore these issues and the diasporic histories in which they were imbedded in four dispersed locales. André Wink will survey the development of trading diasporas in the Indian Ocean, looking especially at the role of intermarriage in distinguishing between sojourning and settlement. Tansen Sen’s focus will be upon the establishment and development of Chinese diasporas in India in the late thirteenth century. Kenneth Hall will explore the varied trade communities operating out of Southeast Asian ports, and critique the tendency of scholarship to ignore the role of Southeast Asia spread of trade diasporas. Finally, John Chaffee will analyze the multiple and often conflicting identities within the Muslim communities of southeastern China during the Song and Yuan periods.

Trading Diasporas in the Indian Ocean, c. 700–1500 A.D.

André Wink, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Scholars have argued that the Indian Ocean, prior to the arrival of the Portuguese, had become a ‘Muslim Mediterranean,’ i.e., that maritime long-distance trade was almost entirely in the hands of Muslims. Yet others have pointed at the presence of significant numbers of Hindus (including Jains) living in diaspora communities in East Africa, the Red Sea area, the Persian Gulf, or the Malay peninsula. These Hindu groups appear to have been important in moneylending and banking, as well as trade. In this paper it will be argued that the Muslims, by 1500, were indeed predominant almost everywhere in the long distance trade of the Indian Ocean, while the diaspora Indus never transcended the status of sojourners. Hindus to a large extent could ignore caste taboos against overseas travel but if they went overseas they usually stayed away for only a few years, often lived in exclusively male communities, and did not marry into the local populations, let alone convert. By contrast the Muslims almost everywhere settled down, established matrimonial ties with local populations, often through an institution called mutt or temporary marriage, and thus created large mestizo communities on the coasts, like the Mappillas of Malahar, which also increased through conversion.

Extending the Maritime Frontiers of China: Chinese Diasporas in Southern India

Tansen Sen, City University of New York, Baruch College

Advances in shipbuilding and navigational technologies, the enterprising Chinese merchants, and the support of the Yuan government facilitated the establishment of Chinese diasporas in the southeastern and southwestern coasts of India in the late thirteenth century. Chinese, Arabic, and Indian sources indicate that the Chinese perceived and used the Indian subcontinent as a major transit point for their commercial exchanges with kingdoms in the Persian Gulf and northern African regions. Consequently, the establishment of Chinese diasporas in southern India invigorated maritime trade across the Indian Ocean and gradually extended the maritime frontiers of China to the Indian subcontinent. The Chinese diasporas at the Indian ports not only contributed to the diplomatic exchanges between India and China, but also paved the way for the grand voyages of Admiral Zheng He in the fifteenth century. More importantly, the establishment of Chinese diasporas in southern India marks the beginning of the Chinese dominance of the Indian Ocean trade that hitherto had been monopolized by Arabian ships and merchants. This dominance by the Chinese seems to have lasted only until the sixteenth century, when the restrictions imposed on foreign trade by the Ming government and the rapid entry of Western commercial enterprises into the Indian Ocean trading channels resulted in the withdrawal of Chinese diasporas from India and the contraction of the Chinese maritime frontier.

Multi-Dimensional Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm: Communities of Exchange in Southeast Asian Perspective c. 1400

Kenneth R. Hall, Ball State University

Recent publications by non-Southeast Asia specialists highlight the importance of China, India, and the Middle East as the dominant centers in the development of the pre-1500 Indian Ocean maritime networks, not only as core marketplaces but as centers of cultural diffusion. Each of these studies is based in the documentation of these core regions, to the exclusion of the indigenous and contemporary evidence from Southeast Asia. While Southeast Asia was clearly a participant in the maritime trade, most of the current studies of Indian Ocean trade erroneously characterize Southeast Asia as important only because it supplied an intermediate entrepot, a commercial service center that met the needs of sojourning merchants for provisions as also a common marketplace, and they leave the impression that Southeast Asia was a region that was peripheral, not central, to the Asian commercial mainstream. This paper addresses this omission, by arguing that, minimally, Southeast Asian evidence corrects the ethnocentric views of the early Indian, Chinese, and Middle Eastern sources in ways that provide a more complete understanding of the early maritime trade network.

This paper centers on the specific maritime communities operating out of Southeast Asia’s ports in the first half of the fifteenth century, inclusive of indigenous Southeast Asians (including the emerging Bugis network) as also resident and sojourning communities such as the overseas Chinese and assorted "Muslim" traders (inclusive of South Asia-connected Muslim traders with extended Middle East links). It is interested in the trading patterns that develop in the Bay of Bengal/Straits of Melaka, region, which demonstrate overlapping/reinforcing religious and economic networking, as also the trading communities and networks of the Vietnamese coast and the eastern Indonesian archipelago. As a point of common reference, it examines the Chinese accounts of Zheng He’s voyages, but from a Southeast Asia perspective—i.e., in association with indigenous Southeast Asian records.

Diasporic Identities in the Maritime Muslim Communities of Song Yuan China

John W. Chaffee, SUNY, Binghamton

Who were the maritime Muslims of southeastern China and how did they change during the four centuries of the Song-Yuan era? Despite the model of semi-autonomous tightly-knit communities accepted by many Chinese and Arabic sources, the communities were anything but simple. This paper will not provide definitive answers, but will consider some of the factors that helped to shape the multiple and changing identities. They were linguistically, ethnically, and geographically diverse. They were subject to a host of economic and social factors that sometimes promoted and sometimes thwarted assimilation. They were influenced by such political institutions as the Superintendency of Foreign Trade (shibosi) and tribute missions, and during the Yuan, by the preferential policies of the Mongols. Finally, they were shaped by Islamic faith and culture, which not only help to structure their life in China but also made them part of the global Muslim ecumene. The paper will also suggest important ways in which these communities evolved from the tenth to fourteenth centuries, influenced by both political changes in China and the fortunes of the Asian maritime trading system.