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112 Ecology and Beyond
Whereas the Mediterranean world is fragmented into a series
of neighbouring micro-zones offering different and complementary
supplies, each with immediate access to the sea, the
Indian Ocean provides a limited series of larger zones, each with
sharply different potential and ecology. This provides an
excellent base for long-distance trade. But radical difference
between deserts and wet zones did not create the same background
of local, small-scale connectivity that can be observed in
the Mediterranean of the past. Internal connectivity by sea in
the different sub-zones cannot be regarded as a common feature
of the Indian Ocean. It existed between south-western Arabia
and East Africa, and between Oman and India. But nothing
similar can be found on either coast of the Red Sea. Whereas
climate instability and unpredictability as well as geographical
fragmentation are the main characteristics of the Mediterranean
world, it could be said that an everlasting extreme climate is a
basic feature of the larger part of the Indian Ocean coasts, with
the noteworthy exceptions of East Africa, Yemen and of the
largest part of India, where the monsoon rains prevail. So
management of the ecological milieu is even more a key factor
in this area, but not unpredictability as such.
It is fascinating that during antiquity, first under the Ptolemies,
then under the Roman Empire, the Greeks of Egypt
managed to be the people who played the role of ethnic gobetween
which had been theirs in the Mediterranean, although
this time they were clearly outsiders who were in control of only
a small part of the route—its extreme western extremity, which
put them in a key position for contact with the Mediterranean
Sea. 47 Their technical achievements and above all the capital
they could gather were surely key factors in this control, which
assured them enormous profits. Later, the Arabs took over this
role. At the end of the fifteenth century, it was by force, thanks
to the superiority of their guns, that the Portuguese could
impose themselves as the ‘go-between’ people in the commerce
between Europe, the East African coast, and India and gain the
47 G. K. Young, Rome’s Eastern Trade: International Commerce and Imperial
Policy, 31 BC–AD 305 (London and New York, 2001), 28–36, and 201–12
for the profits.