The IOW is a macro-region of primary economic and geo-political importance that has played a major role in global history since antiquity at the latest. It includes eastern Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia and maritime East Asia, especially China and southern Japan. It is defined by a system of long-distance exchanges of goods, people, ideas, and technologies that, until the advent of steamships, has been dominated by a monsoon-based system of trans-oceanic trade and transfer. The IOW can thus be considered home to the first “global” economy, one that dominated the macro-region until at least the mid-eighteenth century (see https://indianoceanworldcentre.com/welcome/our-mission/). Like the IOWC we pursue an interdisciplinary approach, examining the history of diplomatic relations, the transfer of science and technologies, commodity and product exchange, trade, cultural aspects in their widest interpretation, religions, as well as migration and the organisation and functioning of networks.
The Indian Ocean World (IOW)
Research
Our research focus lies on the investigation of interaction, communication and exchange relations, and environmental aspects across the entire macro-region, with a main emphasis on China and Asian interactions. Since 2009, Angela Schottenhammer has been involved in a close cooperation with the Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC), based at McGill University and directed by Gwyn Campbell, and has acted as a close research affiliate of the centre between 2010 and 2019/20. She has supervised Team 3 (‘The East Asian Mediterranean’) of the $2.5 million Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI) grant, entitled “The Indian Ocean World: The Making of the First Global Economy in the Context of Human-Environment Interaction” (2010–2017), see https://www.mcgill.ca/iow-mcri/teams/team-3-schottenhammer. As a co-applicant, Angela Schottenhammer has actively been involved in gaining the $2.5 million Partnership grant “Appraising Risk, Past and Present: Interrogating Historical Data to Enhance Understanding of Environmental Crises in the Indian Ocean World” (2017–), see https://www.appraisingrisk.com/east-asia/ – both prestigious projects were awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Currently, we are mainly investigating the spread of diseases, the transfer of medical and naturalistic knowledge, the trade and exchange of medicinals, and the work of doctors, botanists, and naturalists in and across both the early modern Indian Ocean and the Asian and Pacific worlds, with Southeast Asia as a hub and intersection between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. We particularly focus on the integration of island communities, port cities, and coastal hinterlands into global structures.
In June 2024, the Taiwanese Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for Scholarly Exchange awarded a research grant to investigate “The Spread of Disease across the (South-)East Asian Seas: Environment, Health, and Medicine (1560 to 1850)”. It focusses on the spread of diseases, medical knowledge, and medicinal drugs between selected Asian port cities in mainland and island Southeast and East Asia.