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Angles
New Perspectives on the Anglophone World
9 | 2019
ReinventingtheSea
Teaching Global History and Geography Using the
Indian Ocean as a Unit of Analysis
IngridSankey
Electronicversion
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/angles/810
DOI: 10.4000/angles.810
ISSN: 2274-2042
Publisher
Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur
Electronicreference
Ingrid Sankey, « Teaching Global History and Geography Using the Indian Ocean as a Unit of Analysis
», Angles [Online], 9 | 2019, Online since 01 November 2019, connection on 28 July 2020. URL : http://
journals.openedition.org/angles/810 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/angles.810
This text was automatically generated on 28 July 2020.
Angles. New Perspectives on the Anglophone World is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
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Teaching Global History and
Geography Using the Indian Ocean
as a Unit of Analysis
Ingrid Sankey
1 The units of analysis historians and geographers use enable them to identify key
questions about the past and the present which, in turn, determine which stories are
told and, eventually, what patterns emerge. This is why units of analysis can be
regarded as framing tools that help scholars identify patterns at different scales in
their analysis of global processes. By focusing on seas and ocean basins, one can bring
out the processes of interaction that have connected peoples living in the various
regions around a sea and ocean basin up to the present day.
2 To illustrate this recent development in the fields of History and Geography, one may
recall the pioneering work of French historian Fernand Braudel who was the first to use
the large-scale unit of analysis of the Mediterranean Sea as a framework for his study of
the reign of Philip II of Spain, originally published in 1949. In a paper published in the
Journal of Modern History in 1972, Braudel wrote:
I contemplated the Mediterranean, tête à tête, for years on end and my vision of
History took its definitive form without my being entirely aware of it, partly as a
direct intellectual response to a spectacle — the Mediterranean — which no
traditional historical account seemed capable of encompassing. (Braudel 1972:
453-4)
3 Nowadays, as Global History is emerging as a dominant paradigm and develops new and
innovative approaches in various fields of the Humanities, large scale studies have
emerged in History, a field previously reluctant to such vast units of analysis. As Global
Geography is now being taught in French lycées (high schools), the Indian Ocean
framework, like Braudel’s Mediterranean Sea decades ago, can be used to explain the
early development of global trade networks and regional cross-cultural interactions in
what is commonly referred to as the Old World, as opposed to the New World
“discovered” by Christopher Columbus in 1492.
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4 The finest example of such large scale oceanic studies is that of French historian
Philippe Beaujard who published a rather exhaustive analysis of the history of the
Indian Ocean, recently translated into English (Beaujard 2012, 2019). In this vast study,
he displays a broad-spectrum analysis of a very large area that stretches from the
Eurasian Silk Roads network to the island of Madagascar, and from the Himalayas to
the African Swahili coast and the archipelagoes of South East Asia. The topics addressed
range from the economics and politics of the region through the analysis of maritime
and land-based trade networks, to an anthropological study of the ethnic diversity
found across this vast unit of analysis, from Antiquity to the arrival of Europeans in the
Indian Ocean in the 15th century.
5 This paper will deal with this recent and unprecedented use of the Indian Ocean as a
global framework for historical and geographic analysis in teaching and research fields,
showing why discussing in class the Indian Ocean world as a zone of dynamic
interaction between peoples makes more pedagogical, historical and geographic sense
in a globalized world than using traditionally delineated national or continental units.
6 One must acknowledge the limitations of the use of such a broad unit of analysis,
however, and the potential teleological bias that prompts historians and teachers to try
integrating the human past into a comprehensive big picture that emphasises the
shared experiences of all humans, sometimes at the expense of a more traditional
historiography focusing on the idea that the human past is marked by important
differences between peoples across space and time.
7 This is why the major issue for Global History and Geography is to reconcile the idea of
an increasing integration at the global scale with that of an increasing difference at the
local and regional scales, and to construct and teach a global historical and geographic
narrative of the past and of our contemporary world that may help students
understand the growing complexities and challenges of Globalization.
8 In an introduction to the history of the Indian Ocean World in a teacher’s resource
website in 2007, Erik Gilbert stated that, even though world historians do not seem to
agree on a common definition of World History, the majority concede that “if world
history has an opposite, something it strives not to be, it is national history” (Gilbert
2006-7: 6). Like most modern fields of study, History and Geography as we know them
today were born at the end at the 19th century, in an era of dynamic state building. The
preferred unit of analysis that emerged to frame historians and geographers’ narratives
of the world’s past and present was, and to some extent still is, the national scale. It is
easy to acknowledge the ideological background that has led most countries around the
world to build national histories to back emerging national identities, at a time when
another political unit, the Imperial one, was crumbling almost everywhere. Today, the
United Nations hosts 193 member states (South Sudan is the latest addition in 2011). All
are national political entities.
9 Nevertheless, over the past decades, History and Geography, like many other fields of
study, have had to adapt to a paradigm shift that has enlarged the scope of their
narratives from a national to a global scale. This new paradigm is what defines most of
our contemporary representations of the world: globalization. One could discuss the
validity or reality of such a broad and ill-defined concept and its consequences over
various fields of studies, including the Humanities, but this goes beyond the scope of
this paper.
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10 As world history emerged as a global alternative to the national narrative, it soon
became clear that a global perspective also had to include a transdisciplinary approach
in its analysis to provide a truly global perspective on history and geography. The fields
of History and Geography have thus become more connected than ever before. Broader
units of analysis have been added to the nation state, such as civilizations, area studies,
continents, language groups… All in an attempt to transcend the limits of the nation-
state. But as Erik Gilbert recalls, “the more we employ these units of analysis, the more
they start to seem like nation-states warmed over” (Gilbert 2006-7: 6). Some of these
broader units are geographic ones: natural spaces or ecosystems such as deserts,
grasslands, mountains or oceans. These harsh environments, which may look like
barriers limiting human contacts, have come to be regarded as “zones of interactions”
that have served as meeting places between peoples of different backgrounds (Gilbert
2006-7: 6).
11 The Indian Ocean is one such place and it provides History and Geography teachers
with examples of trade, travel, migration, imperial conquest and religious and cultural
interaction in almost every period that reach far beyond the limits of national state
borders. This approach aims at enabling students to analyse events and phenomena
with a broadened perspective and a less restricted focus, introducing the complexities
of writing historical and geographical narratives that manage to articulate the global
and the local in a coherent and comprehensive analysis of past and present events.
12 Seas and oceans, by their size and contact with multiple and diverse areas, look like the
perfect historical and geographic frame to display exchanges of all kinds and scales, an
aspect sometimes overlooked by classical history.
Figure 1. The Indian Ocean floor, by NatGeo dated 1967
Source: https://imgur.com/eIhUdNv
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13 Maritime networks provided important linkages between diverse ecological zones and
facilitated contacts between societies that had access to diverse resources. The richness
and complexity of these cross-regional connections set the pattern for the globe-
spanning interconnections we know today as globalization.
14 Jerry Bentley has argued that since the Second World War, historians have focused
more closely on large-scale processes that have deeply influenced both the experiences
of individual societies and the development of the world as a whole. These processes
include mass migration, campaigns of imperial expansion, cross-cultural trade,
biological exchanges, transfers of technology and cultural exchanges that have left a
mark on the world’s past. Therefore, “adequate study of these processes requires
historians to recognize analytical categories much larger than national communities”
(Bentley 1999:1).
15 Thus, the recognition of large-scale economic regions, for example, has laid the
foundation for Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory (Wallerstein 1974) and
that of large-scale ecological zones has developed our understanding of processes of
biological diffusions and their widespread and long-lasting consequences, such as the
Great plague in Eurasia or the so-called “Columbian exchange” (Crosby 1972) between
the Old World and the New World.
16 As History unfolds on different levels and scales such as local, regional, continental,
hemispheric, oceanic, global, and so on, processes of integration and differentiation
maintain tension at all levels.
In the lack of stable nailed-down categories capable of supporting historical and
geographical analysis at all times and places, sea and ocean basins offer particularly
useful alternatives to earlier constructs because of their capacity to bring focus to
so many large-scale processes of social and economic integration. (Bentley 1999: 9).
17 Nevertheless, seas and oceanic frameworks would not serve well as the absolute or
definitive categories of historical analysis because their contours and characteristics
have changed dramatically over time with shifting relationships between bodies of
water and masses of land (Wallerstein 1974: 1).
18 Despite their advantages, such categories no doubt mirror an era of globalization and
may represent a significant bias as they have the potential to serve at legitimising
altogether an ideology of globalism that endorses or promotes the contemporary
capitalist style of present-day globalization. In order to prevent such teleological
biases, large-scale processes and cross-cultural interactions that have long been
important ingredients in the development of human societies must be subject to
analysis and critique. This is why the study of sea and ocean basins must probe the
connections and dynamics fuelling processes of integration in individual maritime
regions without losing sight either of the local experiences or global interactions that
sometimes conditioned the experiences of the regions themselves (Wallerstein 1974: 9).
19 Connections made by water routes have helped integrate distant peoples through
trade, contact and cultural influences for thousands of years. It also led to the
spreading of religious traditions across distant regions as goods and commodities were
not travelling alone along these ancient trade networks. Furthermore, contacts made
through water-based as well as land-based trade also caused peoples to become more
aware of cultural differences and sharpen distinction between diverse societies.
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20 In a manual of World History published in 2013, Candice Goucher and Linda Walton
recall that World/global history looks for global patterns that emerge from the world’s
vast collection of historical narratives and for significant connections across both time
and space. In doing so, it aims to attenuate the tensions between the dynamics of
continued global integration, mostly through international trade, at the global scale
and the acceleration of proliferating differences at the local scale. These two opposing
trends are still important features of our contemporary globalization. Therefore, it is
fair to acknowledge that, even if historians create narratives of the past from records of
individual and collective experiences, they interpret the past in response to questions
shaped by the world they live in (Goucher 2013: 5).
21 French historian Fernand Braudel is usually credited with being one of the first to
acknowledge the sea as a unit of analysis in his study of The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, published in 1949. In those days, historians
were beginning to probe the impact of global processes that had caused two major
world-scale conflicts. As the title suggests, Braudel identifies the “Mediterranean Sea”
as the geographic physical background of his analysis and the “Mediterranean World”
understood and described as the cultural space and manmade territory created,
delineated and organized by successive waves of peoples who settled around the
coastline surrounding what geographers call this “body of water” that is the
Mediterranean Sea over past millennia (Braudel 1949, 1972).
22 Braudel’s work consists of three volumes, each dealing with different time scales. The
first volume deals with geological times and focuses on the physical geography of the
Mediterranean Sea and its surrounding lands, such as the climate, the landscapes, the
natural resources and raw materials available to the various peoples dwelling on its
shores. It seeks to analyse Mediterranean societies in their geographic context and
assess the impact of the environment on the history of the region and on the creation
of a somewhat unified Mediterranean space. He acknowledges that geography is not
enough, however, and that “the Mediterranean had no unity but that created by the
movements of men, the relationships they imply, and the routes they follow” (Braudel
1972: 276).
23 Following this methodology, the second volume deals with societies at large and
focuses on the long social time needed for the development of social processes that
contributed to the creation or evolution of specific cultures and civilisations. That is
the time that is needed to create social structures, to develop social processes, cultural
identities and long-lasting political structures — a time that measures the impact of
cross-cultural interactions or the creation of hybrid societies. These processes usually
develop and unfold over several generations.
24 The third volume deals with what previous historians regarded as real History, eventful
time, the time of historical individual events understood in the span of a human
lifetime.
25 Nowadays, world regions far from the Mediterranean can be referred to as
“Mediterranean Seas,” such as the Caribbean or the South China Sea. These
interconnected regions share common features that define the “Braudelian”
Mediterranean, thus shaping single space units forming what can be referred to as
unique maritime worlds. An example that shows the vitality of Braudel’s legacy in
France is the publication of a book by François Gipouloux on “The Asian
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Mediterranean, port-cities and trade networks in China, Japan and Southeast Asia from
the 16th to the 21st century” (Gipouloux 2009).
26 This leads us to another, much larger, maritime unit of analysis, that of the Indian
Ocean, which raises the question of the unity of such a vast, diverse but densely
interconnected, maritime region.
27 In his book on the history of the Indian Ocean first published in 2008, Michael Pearson
raises the following question: is there something which we call the Indian Ocean and
which can be studied, analysed, treated as a coherent object? For Pearson,
The Indian Ocean is not only older, it also has a fundamentally different history.
The Mediterranean has always been dominated by people from its littoral; the
North Atlantic is the creation of people from one of its coasts; the Pacific arguably
was created by Europeans, but in the Indian Ocean there is a long history of contact
and distant voyages done by peoples from its coasts, and then a brief hiatus, maybe
150 years, when Westerners controlled things. (Pearson 2010: 5)
28 He also recalls that Andre Gunder Frank in ReOrient, first published in 1998, has claimed
that the Indian Ocean area, extending to the South China Sea, has been central to global
history in all the millennia up to about 1800, and is now re-emerging as a major area of
exchange and interactions in the Old world. By contrast, European dominance in the
world covers at most 200 years out of a total of perhaps six millennia (Gunder Frank
2010: 4).
29 The first comprehensive study of the Indian Ocean as a unit of historical analysis
following Braudel’s footsteps was the K.N. Chaudhuri’s Trade and Civilization in the Indian
Ocean: an Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, published in 1985.
There was a firm impression in the minds of contemporaries, sensed also by
historians later, that the ocean had its own unity, a distinct sphere of influence.
Means of travel, movements of people, economic exchange, climate and historical
forces created elements of cohesion. Religion, social systems, and cultural
traditions on the other hand, provided the contrasts (Gipouloux 2009).
30 As Pearson recalls, Chaudhuri comes to the conclusion that, for certain kinds of
analysts, the Indian Ocean is a single unit of space, and that for others it is not and
must be broken-up into smaller entities (Pearson 2010: 5). Some scholars advocate that,
in spite of the great variety of landscapes and ecosystems (from rainforests to deserts,
and continents to islands), the lands bordering the Indian Ocean had a lot in common,
from the garland of harbours along the coasts where maritime trade met land-routes to
the common kinds of ships used, such as the elegant dhows which used to roam across
these oceanic territories long before Sindbad, the famous sailor of the Arabian Nights.
31 On the contrary, other scholars such as Frank Broeze suggest that the term ‘Indian
Ocean’ is inappropriate and refers to
a string of closely related regional systems stretching from East Asia around the
continent and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa, to which sea space a new
generic name such as “the Asian Seas” might well be given. (Broeze 1989: 3-21)
32 What makes the Indian Ocean unique is that it was the first real ocean that humans
could cross rather than just clinging to the shorelines, using the regular pattern of
Monsoon winds. Erik Gilbert adds that the Indian Ocean is more like a giant version of
the Mediterranean, the archetype of the manageable, human-scale body of water, and
quite unlike the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans which were, until fairly recently,
insurmountable barriers, crossed only by accident or out of desperation […] if the
Mediterranean may take the prize for earliest long-distance trade, as there seems
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to have been a maritime trade in Obsidian as early as 6000 BCE, it lacks both the size
and ecological variety of the Indian Ocean. (Gilbert 2006-7: 6-7)
33 Thus, when one compares the Indian Ocean to the unity of the Mediterranean world,
one may acknowledge, as Gilbert suggests, that what makes the Indian Ocean
interesting is its lack of unity. It is large enough to connect different cultures and
environments. Unlike the Mediterranean, which runs east-west, the Indian Ocean
includes environments as varied as tropical East Africa and its grassland, wooded,
mountainous and desert hinterland, the deserts that border the Red Sea and the
Persian Gulf, the hot and wet areas around Southern India and the tropical rainforests
covering both mainland and island Southeast Asia (Gilbert 2006-7: 8). Revealingly,
Fernand Braudel’s analysis of the Mediterranean Sea has sometimes been criticised for
the author’s clear focus on its Northern shores, rarely providing facts about the
Southern shore of Mare Nostrum.
34 Another element that makes the Indian Ocean such a interesting unit of analysis is that
it is, together with the Mediterranean Sea, one of two major and interconnected bodies
of water of what is commonly referred to as “the Old World” as opposed to the New
Atlantic and Pacific Worlds. The Indian Ocean is the only body of water of such
geographic scale that witnessed the early development of regular and extensive trade
networks long before the arrival of Europeans. It allows teachers using this unit of
analysis to adopt a different historical approach, one less influenced by 19th-century
Eurocentric perceptions of the world. To illustrate this point, teachers can use several
maps drawn before the arrival of European conquerors in the Indian Ocean, such as Al-
Idrissi’s world map designed in 1154 (Figure 2), or the Kangnido map designed in Korea
in 1402 (Figure 3). These maps provide visions of the world at different periods of time
that are not exclusively or specifically centred on the Mediterranean Sea or the
European continent.
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Figure 2. A map of the world by Al-Idrisi (1154) in The Book of Roger, Norman king of Sicily, showing
the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean
The map is centred on the Arabian Peninsula at the crossroads between the two bodies of water. Note
the southern orientation of the map.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1154_world_map_by_Moroccan_cartographer_al-
Idrisi_for_king_Roger_of_Sicily.jpg
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Figure 3. The Kangnido Map (1402)
A Chinese perspective on the Indian Ocean.
Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/KangnidoMap.jpg
35 Varied units of analysis may include the study of trade networks and areas of strategic
importance for communications around the Indian Ocean at different periods of time
and in different sub-regional areas such as the Persian Gulf, the Red, Arabian and South
China Seas, the straits of Hormuz, Bab El-Mandeb or Malacca in Southeast Asia, the
Swahili shores along the East African coast, the Mozambique Channel or the Bay of
Bengal.
36 Depending on the period studied, topics can range from the ancient maritime Spice
Routes network, or the Medieval Swahili coastal and urban network of trading city-
states to the Portuguese Estado da India in the 16th century, or the British colonial
Empire and its shift to the East after the loss of large parts of its American Atlantic
empire in the 18th century.
37 Students may be asked to evaluate the significance and impact of the development of
global trade networks in the history of the Old World that included the interconnected
system made of the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, as opposed to the New
Atlantic and Pacific Worlds “discovered” after 1492. They may also identify and
describe zones of interaction and areas of hybridity and creolization and assess the
impact of trade on local cultures and societies with respect to arts, religious beliefs and
syncretisms, food and diets, languages, science and techniques. Other ideas include the
evaluation of the consequences of trade on political, economic, social and cultural
structures of various societies in the rimlands surrounding the ocean and on their
natural environments. To further their analysis, students may present their network in
space and time. They may use different maps with different scales, identify core and
peripheral areas and describe the organisation of the trade networks included in their
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units of analysis. They may be asked to draw their own annotated maps and produce
their own timelines.
38 Having to describe unfamiliar time periods can help students identify periods of
continuity and change more easily as they are not locked in a traditional Eurocentric
chronology that identifies pre-determined slices of History from Antiquity to the
present day, through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Modern and Contemporary
Ages.
39 Eventually, students may identify areas where water-based met land-based trade
networks, emerging and declining key areas such as trade-posts or coastal urban
networks, using a systemic approach. Students may identify and describe big port cities
around the Indian Ocean such as those where the trans-continental Silk Roads met the
maritime Spice Routes network to form huge cosmopolitan hubs and crossroad areas
such as the trans-Saharan caravan trade network or the Frankincense routes from the
Arabian peninsula and the shores of the Oman Sultanate.
Figure 4. A map of the Indian Ocean
Dated c. 1519 from the Miller Atlas in La fabrique de l’Océan indien, Emmanuelle Vagnon and Eric Vallet
eds., Paris: Editions de la Sorbonne, 2017, p. 113.
Source: https://www.mapmania.org/map/63688/1519_map_of_the_indian_ocean_and_surroundings
40 Students’ analysis of such trade systems may also question the actors and the goods
and commodities exchanged throughout the delineated units of analysis. In such a
perspective, actors may include traders and customers but also intermediaries and
diasporas, lesser-known minority groups such as the Peranakan Straits Chinese — a
trade diaspora that established itself along the coasts of Malaysia and later on the
island of Singapore, developing a unique hybrid Chinese-Malay culture that survives in
the Baba Nyonya cuisine, still popular today in this part of the Indian Ocean.
41 Students may also ask themselves what types of goods and commodities travelled along
the various networks (spices from India or the Moluccas, porcelain from China), and
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analyse the supply and demand for such goods, the means of transport used and the
evolution of commercial, trading or navigation skills and techniques such as dhow
ships, the use of monsoon winds, mapmaking, the development of banking and
insurance, letters of credit, changes in supply and demand, and the evolution of
political systems along the way such as empires, kingdoms, city-states and informal
trade competitors such as pirates.
42 For thousands of years, connections made by water routes have helped integrate
distant peoples through trade, contact and cultural influences. Water-based trade and
travel have linked widely separated cultures since Antiquity. Therefore, water should
be seen as a connecting element rather than as a barrier.
43 Although water-based trade routes have not received as much historical attention as
land-based routes, they have been equally—if not more—important in the history of the
world. Studying water-based trade routes allows historians to understand the complex
interconnected network formed by the crossing of many maritime and land routes and
to evaluate the significance of important crossroads that developed over time as core
areas in a series of interconnected world systems which also included distant
peripheries. One example of such water/land interface was the urban coastal network
of Swahili city-states that developed along the East African coast from Somalia to
Mozambique. The rise of the Swahili people was only made possible because they were
able to profit from both land-based trade with Africa’s interior and seaborne trade in
the Indian Ocean.
44 As Michael Pearson recalls in his narrative of the history of the Indian Ocean from an
oceanic perspective,
Our perceptions of the sea have changed dramatically over the last few decades. […]
For most of us today the sea has little practical significance. This is very recent. […]
In the past the sea was much more central in our minds, connecting people and
goods all over the world, inspiring great literature. (Pearson 2010: 1)
Why have seas and oceans regained such importance as units of analysis in the recent
years?
45 In France, students in their final year in high school have to study a chapter in
Geography entitled: “Globalization: Territories in a global context”. The two examples
chosen to illustrate the key ideas developed in the syllabus are the network of global
cities and seas and oceans as global territories. The chapter recalls that, in the past
decades, global trade has experienced a boom in international maritime transport
activities. Nowadays, world freight amounts to 71% of global transports, with figures
rising to 90% for intercontinental transports.
46 As oceans cover more than 71% of the world surface, maritime hubs, networks, sea
routes, straits and passageways have gained considerable importance and global
geopolitics has gained momentum with ever more important issues: international
migrations, piracy, global transboundary pollution, the scramble for the Arctic and the
control of the Antarctic sanctuary, global warming, overfishing and the threats to
ocean sustainability, the emergence of India and China as major powers on the global
stage and the shift of global power towards the Asian-Pacific region, and so on.
47 The development of interconnected ocean territories constitutes a major trend in
globalization, along with the expanding garland of mostly coastal urban hubs called
global cities. Due to their geographic location, most of these are interfaces between
land and water-based trade networks. This reorientation of human activity towards
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coastal areas and seas and ocean basins have thus made the latter territories of
globalization in their own right and created new communication networks, global
power shifts, new areas of conflicting interests, and an updated international
legislation. These territories are also highly vulnerable to environmental challenges as
they attract and concentrate an ever-growing human population. Risk assessment
policies are being implemented in order to prevent major threats caused by the
challenges of global warming.
48 Very recently, a new reform in French lycées has included this topic in the syllabus for
the Baccalauréat. In the new syllabus, a whole chapter is now devoted to seas and oceans
as the heart of the global system. The latest reform also includes geopolitical studies
encouraging teachers to take a closer look at maps with their students, and focusing on
global environmental challenges. It also acknowledges the growing strategic
importance of the Indian Ocean as a central area in the global system through various
regional case studies on the Straits of Melaka or the Persian Gulf. Through various
cartographic analyses at different scales (global, local), students understand that the
Indian Ocean is to be regarded as a strategic territory torn between regional rivalries
and international cooperation.
49 Map analysis has become a key component in the French syllabi in History and
Geography. Teachers are encouraged to use more maps during classes and develop
students’ ability to read and analyse different types of maps as an important source of
information on the world’s past and on contemporary events. This encourages students
to adopt a global perspective and understand that some contemporary issues and
challenges affect multiple areas around the world and can only be addressed through
multilateral cooperation. Through the study of maps, students understand that
environmental issues such as global warming or transboundary pollution call for an
international response and cut across former conceptions of space such as the national
scale and the concept of territory.
50 The concept of territory is a rather new addition to the study of Geography in France.
The notion of space which was previously used was thought to be too vague to describe
areas under human control, whereas a territory can be bounded conceptually (as a
space) or physically (as a territory). Space is an abstract vision, but in Geography in
France, a territory can be defined as an area which is structured, organised, divided by
human activity. Sometimes, space and territory coincide. The analysis of a territory is
the analysis of man’s interactions with and impacts on his environment.
51 In Introduction à la géohistoire, French scholar Christian Grataloup explains his concept
of ‘geohistory’. He forged this term to display the growing need for transdisciplinary
approaches to understand the complexities of an ever-more connected world.
Géohistoire associates the tools of the historian with those of the geographer to insist on
the simultaneity of various events. Grataloup suggests that maps are important tools to
develop a global perspective on the history of the world. Traditional historical
narratives usually insist on the succession of events and the construction of parallel
histories with no immediate connections between them. Maps, on the other hand,
display a bird’s eye view that may help our understanding of past and present
connections between different parts of the world, particularly in the case of seas and
oceans.
52 Seas and oceans have become such important territories for our understanding of
global processes that entire research fields have now turned them into key categories
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through which to analyse the past, present and future developments of the global
system. They have become historians and geographers’ new units of analysis to
understand and teach students the growing complexities of globalization.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beaujard, Philippe. Les Mondes de l’Océan Indien. 2 vols. Paris: Armand Colin, 2012.
Beaujard, Philippe. The Worlds of the Indian Ocean: A Global History. 2 vols. Cambridge UP, 2019.
Bentley, Jerry. “Seas and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis.” Geographical Review
89-2 (April 1999): 215-225. DOI: 10.2307/216087
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ABSTRACTS
The units of analysis historians and geographers use dictate what questions are asked, which
stories are told and eventually which patterns emerge. Units of analysis are framing tools that
help scholars identify global patterns. By focusing on seas and ocean basins, one can bring out
the processes of interaction that link peoples living in the various regions around a sea and ocean
basin. Nowadays, as Global History is emerging as a new historical paradigm and as a form of
“global geography” is being taught in French high schools, the Indian Ocean framework, like the
Mediterranean Sea decades ago with historians such as Fernand Braudel, is commonly used to
explain the early development of global trade networks and regional cross-cultural interactions
in what is commonly referred to as the “Old World”, as opposed to the “New World” “discovered”
by Christopher Columbus in 1492. This article deals with this recent and unprecedented use of
the Indian Ocean as a global framework for historical and geographical analysis in teaching and
research fields and explains why teaching about the Indian Ocean world as a zone of dynamic
interaction between peoples makes more pedagogical, historical and geographical sense than
teaching about it through traditionally delineated national or continental units in a globalized
world. It also discusses the limitations of the use of such a broad unit of analysis and the
potential consequences of a teleological bias that prompts historians and teachers to try
integrating the human past into a comprehensive big picture that emphasises the shared
experiences of all humans sometimes at the expense of a somewhat traditional historiography,
focusing on the idea that the human past is marked by important differences between peoples
across space and time. The conclusion assesses how global historians and geographers are
attempting to reconcile the idea of an increasing integration at the global scale with that of
proliferating difference at the local and regional scales and envisages the ways in which they can
construct and teach a global historical and geographical narrative of the past and of our
contemporary world that may help students understand the growing complexities and
challenges of globalization, including global environmental issues such as the building of a
sustainable future for all.
Les unités d’analyse que les historiens et les géographes utilisent déterminent quelles sont les
questions posées, quelles histoires sont racontées et, en fin de compte, quels motifs récurrents en
émergent. Les unités d’analyse sont des outils d’encadrement qui permettent aux chercheurs
d’identifier les modèles mondiaux. Ainsi, en mettant l’accent sur les bassins maritimes et
océaniques, on peut faire ressortir plus clairement les processus d’interaction qui relient les
peuples vivant dans les différentes régions autour d’un bassin maritime et océanique. De nos
jours, alors que l’histoire mondiale apparaît comme un nouveau paradigme historique, et qu’une
forme de “géographie mondiale” est enseignée dans les lycées français, le cadre de l’océan
Indien, comme la Méditerranée il y a plusieurs décennies à l’instar de Fernand Braudel, est
couramment utilisé pour expliquer le développement précoce des réseaux commerciaux
mondiaux et les interactions interculturelles régionales dans ce que l’on appelle communément
le “Monde antique”, par opposition au “Nouveau Monde” “découvert” par Christophe Colomb en
1492. Cet article traite de cette utilisation récente et sans précédent de l’océan Indien en tant que
cadre mondial pour l’analyse historique et géographique dans les domaines de l’enseignement et
de la recherche. Il expliquera pourquoi enseigner le monde de l’océan indien en tant que zone
d’interaction dynamique entre les peuples a plus de sens pédagogiquement et historiquement
parlant dans un monde globalisé que l’enseigner à travers les unités nationales ou continentales
traditionnelles. Il examine également les limites de l’utilisation d’une telle unité d’analyse large
et les conséquences potentielles d’un biais téléologique menant les historiens et les enseignants à
essayer d’intégrer le passé humain dans un grand tableau complet qui met l’accent sur les
expériences partagées de tous les êtres humains au détriment d’une historiographie quelque peu
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traditionnelle axée sur l’idée que le passé humain est marqué par des différences importantes
entre les peuples, à travers l’espace et le temps. La conclusion évalue la façon dont les historiens
et les géographes mondiaux tentent de concilier l’idée d’une intégration croissante à l’échelle
mondiale avec celle de la prolifération des différences aux échelles locales et régionales et
envisage la façon dont ils peuvent construire et enseigner un récit historique et géographique
mondial du passé et de notre monde contemporain qui peut aider les élèves à comprendre les
complexités et les défis croissants de la mondialisation, y compris les problèmes
environnementaux mondiaux tels que la construction d’un avenir durable pour tous.
INDEX
Mots-clés: globalisation, histoire, géographie, unité d’analyse, enseignement, Braudel Fernand,
Océan Indien
Keywords: globalization, history, geography, unit of analysis, teaching, Braudel Fernand, Indian
Ocean
AUTHOR
INGRID SANKEY
Teacher of History, Geography and Globalization at ESPOL (European School of Political and
Social Sciences) attached to UCL (Université Catholique de Lille). Ingrid Sankey holds a PhD in
British civilization from the University of Lille 3. Her thesis (defended in 2008) dealt with the
issue of Indirect Rule in the Indian Princely States in the heyday of the British Empire. She is
currently teaching a course entitled “History, Geography and Globalization” at the ESPOL and
history and geography for an international OIB (option internationale du baccalauréat) section at
Thérèse d’Avila European High School in Lille. She has been a member of the SARI (Society for
the promotion of Research and Activities on the Indian worlds) since 2008 and contributed to
several SARI conferences and publications on India, Africa and Globalization. Her paper entitled
“Les princes et le Raj britannique ou les aléas du système d’administration indirecte dans
l’Empire des Indes” was published in Decolonization and the Struggle for National Liberation in India
(1909-1971), edited by Thierry Di Costanzo and Guillaume Ducoeur, in Anglo-American Studies (vol.
48), Peter Lang Edition, 2014. Her main research topics focus on the analysis of cultural
representations and intercultural issues, exoticism, colonial and post-colonial issues, industrial
Britain, British society in the 19th century, Global history and geography and Globalization.
Contact: iclairesankey2003[at]yahoo.fr
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