Istwa Nou

The commercial revolutions of the second and first millennia BCE set a process running that has never stopped. Piece by piece, and mostly through intermediaries who never saw both ends of a route, they joined more and more of Africa and Eurasia into one system of exchange. By the first millennium BCE the roads carried more than freight. Ideas moved along them, and religions, and craft techniques, and people, and the diseases people bring. The usual account of globalisation starts in the fifteenth century with Portuguese and Spanish ships. What those ships found were routes that had been working for two thousand years under African and Asian management, with West African gold reaching the Mediterranean, East African ports on the Indian Ocean circuit, and Southeast Asian crops growing in Madagascar. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the Atlantic system that carried Africans to Saint-Domingue is normally described as the moment Europe connected the world. It was Europe joining a network already three thousand years old.

As the long-distance trade networks of Africa and Eurasia joined up in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE, they produced something nobody intended. A disease appearing in one part of the system could now travel the whole of it, carried in the bodies of merchants, sailors and porters. From this period onward, pandemics are a recurring feature of human history. The routes that moved gold, frankincense, bananas and iron moved pathogens as well, welding the region from the Atlantic to the Pacific into a single zone through which infection could pass. The Antonine plague that struck Rome in the 160s CE, the plague of Cyprian in the 250s and the Justinianic plague of the 540s all belong to this new arrangement. Every increase in connection has carried the same charge. It is worth holding when the Atlantic system is assembled fifteen centuries later, and the ships bringing sugar and captive people bring smallpox with them.

By around the third century CE the Malagasy speaking community on the East African coast had lived among Bantu speaking neighbours long enough to have married into them. Some of them then sailed south, crossed the Mozambique Channel, and settled Madagascar. What they carried was a working farm system assembled out of two hemispheres: African livestock and African grain beside rice, bananas and chickens from Island South Asia, together with the practices that belonged to each. Madagascar has been that combination ever since. Its people speak an Austronesian language whose nearest relatives are in Borneo. They raise cattle bred in Africa and poultry domesticated in Southeast Asia. They grow African sorghum in the same country as Asian rice. Their ancestry is Bantu and Austronesian together. The island is the clearest surviving record of how far the ancient Indian Ocean trade reached and what it did on arrival, which was to move people, crops, animals and languages until two ends of the world were permanently joined in one place.