Indian Ocean currency: the cowrie shell
As I mentioned in the previous slide, more than just material goods were exchanged along the Indian Ocean basin. However, non-tangible goods such as technologies, religions, political ideologies and the like followed the networks first designed to trade commodities such as cash crops, metals, and manufactured goods. With that in mind, let me here list some of the most significant goods traded along the Indian Ocean, highlighting the fact that the list of goods and their provenance make apparent that each of the regions involved came to specialize in particular goods from which they could make the most profit. / From all the regions of Africa, the most valuable export goods were gold, ivory, and slaves. This might perhaps surprise some of you, who might have thought the slave trade concentrated solely on the Atlantic. This, in fact, couldn't be farther from the truth. Rather, the trade of African slaves in fact pre-dated the discovery of the "New World", as demand for slaves rose, particularly from Muslim territories both within and outside Africa. In turn, peoples in the Arabic Peninsula exported mainly incense and horses, which to this day are considered among the best in the world. The major exports from India were a variety of cotton textiles, both rough and fine, as well as refined sugar, worked iron, and steel. The Chinese, of course, exported their famous silks and porcelains, while the South East Asian islands exported a variety of spices, among them not only pepper, but also nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and ginger, as I discussed earlier in this lecture. A final good exchanged deserves special mention, because of its unusual use. People from the Maldives, an archipelago of islands off the southwestern coast of India, exported cowrie shells. These pearlescent mollusk shells were so valuable that they were used as currency, preferred by African merchants over gold and silver bullion. As you can imagine, their trade was incredibly profitable to the inhabitants of the archipelago.