Courses

Image: The image of a ship on Borobudur bas relief

Prayer Winds and Profit: Indian Ocean Trade (1st - 15th c) is an ambitious  15 lecture series that examines the Indian subcontinent's central role as the crucible of global maritime exchange from antiquity to the early modern era. We trace how South Asia’s strategic ports, dynamic merchant communities, and coveted commodities created enduring economic networks across continents. The series focuses on how religious traditions like Buddhism and Islam facilitated commercial systems, while the monsoon winds shaped seasonal patterns of exchange. Through fifteen centuries of transformation, we examine how Indian Ocean trade routes became the world's first truly global marketplace, with the Indian subcontinent serving as a nexus for the flow of goods, ideas, and cultural influences across Asia, Africa, and Europe.

The series opens with an exploration of the Periplus Maris Erythraei, the remarkable 1st-century CE Greco-Roman navigational guide that maps the Indian Ocean's earliest trade circuits. We follow its routes to bustling ports such as Berenike on Egypt's Red Sea coast and Muziris and Barygaza on the Indian coast. Through analysis of precious commodities, including pepper and gems flowing west and Roman gold and glassware moving east, the lectures consider how monsoon patterns and enterprising merchant networks created the first durable economic bridges between the Mediterranean world and South Asia.

While Indian Ocean trade with the Roman world has been relatively well studied, the role of Buddhist monastic institutions in facilitating trade between India and the Mediterranean is less well known. The series gives special attention to the spread of art, relics, and ideas along with material culture across the world. The aesthetic influence of India’s trade with Southeast Asia, particularly through Hindu-Buddhist networks and guilds, is a major point of focus.

The impact of the medieval monsoon trade via Jewish and Muslim merchants from across the Indian Ocean world is highlighted in the series through a close study of the Cairo Geniza documents and ports along western Indian coastline, where Arab, Persian, and Indian traders converged. We also examine pre-colonial trade between East Africa and the Gujarat and Malabar coast, including the exchange of ivory, gold, and Indian cloth, and the role of Swahili and Arab intermediaries in supporting these networks.

The series closes with a concise assessment of Sino-Indian trade, from Buddhist pilgrim-sailors to Zheng He’s famous expeditions, examining how artefacts such as Chinese ceramics, Indian pearls, and cotton helped anchor a pan-Asian commercial sphere.

Led by a global cohort of scholars at the forefront of their fields, the series blends archaeology, textual sources, and material culture. Through this innovative framework, the series aims to investigate the relationships between religion and commerce, the critical role of environmental factors such as the monsoon, and the shifting fortunes of empires in fostering an interconnected premodern world with South Asia at its axis.