Indian Ocean

Kenneth McPherson shows that for millennia the Indian Ocean had a profound influence on the lives of the people who lived on its shores. Fishermen, sailors and merchants traveled its waters linking the world's earliest civilizations from Africa to East Asia in a complex web of relationships. The ocean was also a highway for the exchange of religions, cultures and technologies, giving the Indian Ocean region an identity as a largely self-contained "world." This important study traces the history of the Indian Ocean from ages past to the present day.