As was the case along the routes of the Silk Road, the segmented nature of commerce along the Indian Ocean basin resulted in the involvement of many different peoples, both as suppliers and consumers of goods. While any number of people participated in this trade, there were four major areas - and their respective populations - upon which commerce in the Indian Ocean most clearly depended. Those areas were China, India, Arabia, and Africa. Of course, in a lecture of this nature I cannot go into great detail into each of these areas, particularly those which I have discussed elsewhere during our course. Therefore, here I want only to make some general comments about China and India, to concentrate instead on the Arabic and African peoples involved in the Indian Ocean network, since we have discussed Africa to a lesser degree than the other three areas. / Here, I want to make only two points about China as a hub for Indian Ocean trade: 1) China was the largest single market in this network, not only thanks to its population size, which meant extensive demand for goods, but also thanks to its political organization which, as I mentioned in relation to the Silk Road, meant greater ease of commerce thanks to an effective bureaucracy and to a streamlined currency. 2) By the 1300s, China had the most highly developed economy on the globe, which meant in part both the creation of sophisticated investment opportunities and the availability of extensive commercial networks through which goods could be moved efficiently. / As for India, here I would like to highlight specifically its place in the middle of the Indian Ocean, literally. Thanks in great part to India's geographical centrality, Indian ports along both its western and eastern coasts became crucial mid-points for ships coming and going in either direction. Naturally, this meant that Indian port cities became basically clearing houses for trade, as in them one could find goods from almost everywhere in the globe. Equally important, the centrality of Indian ports meant that peoples from around the Indian Ocean basin and beyond merged in these cities, making them incredibly cosmopolitan centers of cultural contact and exchange. / Let me now turn my attention to the Arabic Peninsula and its role in long-distance trade, both along the Silk Road and Indian Ocean. The Arabian Peninsula is a large land bridge suspended between Africa and Asia. It is among the largest peninsulas on earth, and is surrounded by water on all four sides. To the north lies the Mediterranean Sea and to the west lies the Red Sea. To the east is the Persian (or Arabian) Gulf, and to the south is the Arabian Sea, which is also part of the Indian Ocean. About three-quarters of the Arabian Peninsula is covered by deserts, making it mostly arid with inhospitable terrain, with fertile regions only around the periphery, along the mountainous Arabian Sea coast to the south. This means that the peoples of the Arabic Peninsula naturally turned to trade in order to supplement the limited foodstuffs and natural resources at their disposal. The fact that the peninsula is linked to both Africa (by the narrow isthmus of Suez, near the Sinai Peninsula) and to Asia (from the Mediterranean coast along the Tigris-Euphrates River system) means that Arabia is at the center of the eastern hemisphere's continents and waterways. It forms a land bridge between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and a crossroads between Africa, Asia, and Europe. Therefore, it is ideally located to participate in long-distance trade along both the Silk Road and Indian Ocean networks. As we shall see in a later slide, Arab merchants traded both local goods and foreign commodities. Still, perhaps their most important export was their religion, Islam.