TRADE ROUTE: The Sea Roads If the Silk Roads linked Eurasian societies by land, sea-based trade routes likewise connected distant peoples all across the Eastern Hemisphere. Since the days of the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans, the Mediterranean Sea had been an avenue of maritime commerce throughout the region, a pattern that continued during the postclassical era.
Until the creation of a genuinely global oceanic system of trade after 1500, the Indian Ocean represented the world’s largest sea-based system of communication and exchange, stretching from southern China to eastern Africa. Like the Silk Roads, oceanic trade also grew out of the vast environmental and cultural diversities of the region. The desire for various goods not available at home—such as porcelain from China, spices from the islands of Southeast Asia, cotton goods and pepper from India, ivory and gold from the African coast—provided incentives for Indian Ocean commerce. Transportation costs were lower on the Sea Roads than on the Silk Roads, because ships could accommodate larger and heavier cargoes than camels. This meant that the Sea Roads could eventually carry more bulk goods and products destined for a mass market --textiles, pepper, timber, rice, sugar, wheat—whereas the Silk Roads were limited largely to luxury goods for the few.

The Sea Roads
Paralleling the Silk Road trading network, a sea-based commerce in the Indian Ocean basin connected the many peoples between China and East Africa.
What made Indian Ocean commerce possible were the monsoons, alternating wind currents that blew predictably eastward during the summer months and westward during the winter.
An understanding of monsoons and a gradually accumulating technology of shipbuilding and oceanic navigation drew on the ingenuity of many peoples—Chinese, Malays, Indians, Arabs, Swahilis, and others. Collectively they made “an interlocked human world joined by the common highway of the Indian Ocean.”

But this world of Indian Ocean commerce did not occur between entire regions and certainly not between “countries,” even though historians sometimes write about India, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, or East Africa as a matter of shorthand or convenience. It operated rather across an “archipelago of towns” whose merchants often had more in common with one another than with the people of their own hinterlands. It was these urban centers, strung out around the entire Indian Ocean basin that provided the nodes of this widespread commercial network.
Economic Exchange in the Indian Ocean Basin
Region
Products Contributed to Indian Ocean Commerce
Mediterranean basin
ceramics, glassware, wine, gold, olive oil
East Africa
ivory, gold, iron goods, slaves, tortoiseshells, quartz, leopard skins
Arabia
frankincense, myrrh, perfumes
India
grain, ivory, precious stones, cotton textiles, spices, timber, tortoiseshells
Southeast Asia
tin, sandlewood, cloves, nutmeg, mace
China
silks, porcelain, tea

Questions:
Why were sea routes preferable for trade in India over land routes?
What types of goods were being traded?
How did weather impact the Indian Sea routes?