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Ecology and Beyond 111
And if one takes into account the European, African, and
American coasts as a whole, there is no global ecological
unity in the Atlantic. It was only in the northern, European-
American part of the Atlantic Coast that a form of general
connectivity could develop, but at a very late date. When it
was established, it obeyed mainly the rule of capital, not the
full constraints of the ecological milieu: the difference with the
Mediterranean could not be sharper.
With respect to the Indian Ocean zone, A. Wink has stressed
its main characteristics. 46 Rivers and river plains shaped as
deltas define the ecological milieus, whereas in the Mediterranean
area only the Nile and Egypt can provide a parallel. The
Tigris and the Euphrates, the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra,
Irrawaddy, and Mekong rivers, to cite only the main ones,
each gave birth to different civilizations with histories of their
own. These plains of high seed-yield ratio agriculture and of
high population densities sharply contrast with the neighbouring
desert zones, where pastoral life and low density is the rule.
Hydrological instability explains the frequent and important
changes in the environment and thus the frequent movement
of settlements. This also contributes to the characteristic fragility
of the Indian Ocean cities, which are not in any case clearly
differentiated from their rural context.
If all the ecological milieus of the Indian Ocean do not fit with
this general scheme (for instance the mountains of Yemen, which
benefit from the monsoon, are a comparatively high density
zone), its main features hold true. A consequence of this is the
contrast between the scarcity of the population in large tracks of
the coastal areas and comparatively highly populated zones, such
as Yemen, East Africa, or large sectors of western India and,
more recently, of Indochina and the Indonesian archipelago.
This is also of course an element of discontinuity. Another
characteristic is the general lack of good natural harbours.
Most of the time the great ports were situated at the mouths of
large rivers. In sofar as the rivers were not navigable over long
distances, traffic into the hinterland depended on caravans.
46 A. Wink, ‘From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean: Medieval
History in Geographic Perspective’, Comparative Studies in Society and History
44 (2002), 416–45, on whom I rely heavily.