| Abstract: |
This paper is a study of maritime trade, direct and indirect, between the eastern and western extremities of the Indian Ocean in the ninth and tenth centuries CE, encompassing the worlds largest ocean space. The web of trade studied here also extended its filaments into the Mediterranean at the western end, and into inland China, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Japan at the eastern end. The particular aim is to outline the changing contours of this vast maritime trade system three centuries earlier than the one discussed by Janet Abu-Lughod and some five centuries before the early modern trading world resurrected in Fernand Braudels pioneering studies of The Wheels of Commerce, or Anthony Reid and The Age of Commerce. Changes are captured in the production techniques and volumes of two great industries, one at each extremity of the trading system, and in their reciprocal relations, and some of their implications for the web of trade that made it different from what went before and what came later are considered. The industries are ceramics made in dragon kilns in late Tang China and glass made in new furnace types in the Abbasid Empire. A basic premise of this study is that the existence of demand at a distance from the place of origin of these artifacts greatly enhanced the prices and profits of trade. Archaeological evidence assembled from wreck cargoes, ancient ports, ceramic kilns, and glass-making furnaces provides the primary data for some historical and geographical considerations of this special period of long-distance maritime trade.
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