Sunset ports on the new trade routes
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Stephen Muecke
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When Ernestine Hill, the pioneering Australian journalist, visited what she called the "ports of sunset" on the West Australian coast in the 1930s, travelling rough with her swag and typewriter, she encountered bits and pieces of Australia's maritime history that have since largely been overlooked. For when it comes to the geopolitics of Australia's oceanic surrounds, the Indian Ocean is lapping at the less-significant back door of the national imaginary, while for the east-coaster, every new day dawns over the Pacific, the sun shining from the direction of our all-important easterly neighbours.
"From 1907 to 1914, Whim Creek," Hill writes of a Pilbara port, "with hundreds of employees, shipped 50,000 tons of oxidised copper ores to London in the Singapore ships and its own fleet of three-masted barques." And further south, at Carnarvon, she walks on the jetty, "a mile and a quarter in length, [where] five or six ships a month call, to carry away the loading of the six-ton wool trucks, and sandalwood from the desert, that is shipped to the East from Fremantle ..." Here she spies "the weirdest vehicle imaginable, a railway trolley with a mast and sail, tangible evidence of a faux pas of long ago. When the Singapore ships are in, this sober little truck heaves up her square of canvas and, to the amazement of onlookers, goes sailing along the jetty, gay as a pearling lugger in the south-easter, to scatter the seagulls and come to her moorings in the railway yards beside the respectable freight engine."
Well before the roads were built to "open up" Western Australia, the ports were there, extending the colony from Fremantle to Wyndham. The trade was local, to be sure, but the main wealth was gained through the export of minerals, as well as pearl shell from Broome, horses for the Indian army from Australind, jarrah sleepers for railways and, more recently, live animals. The volume of this trade is not the point, and it was certainly exceeded by the other states; the point is that Australia has a history of cultural and trading links to the earlier-established colonies on the Indian Ocean. These ports linked Australia to Calcutta, Madras and Singapore in the early days of the colonies, so that we weren't all that isolated. Geoffrey Blainey's famous "tyranny of distance" depended on the cultural myopia that created the anxiety of separation from a far-distant "home" in Europe. This was hardly a problem if your last home was India, or if you were used to going backwards and forwards on one of those Singaporean ships from Western Australia.
The foundations of my argument lie, however, in the pre-colonial Indian Ocean. This thesis is based on global economic history and suggests a geopolitical reorientation: that Australia's place, in terms of proximity and the weight of demography, is more logically south Asian than it is Pacific; India's population is more than a billion, China's is 1.3 billion, South-East Asia and Indonesia are home to another four hundred million people.
In the future, this geopolitical logic may be underpinned by an economic network that is less in thrall to the "free-trade" rhetoric of the northern global corporations and more interested in an "alternative" global economy of this region, a global economy that harks back to the only one worth speaking about before the rise of the European empires. The Indian Ocean was the nexus of Chinese and Indian trade and a generator, as they were wont to say, of "fabulous wealth". Such wealth can be knocked for a six when a tsunami strikes, or when resources are exhausted, suggesting the need for a new economic order that embraces the significance of cultural and natural value. Few of the current discussions link the economy to the environment. As China and India are congratulated for opening up to world trade, their natural resources are treated as global raw material, and as if they are not already tied up in peasant ‘eco-nomic' systems.
IN THE PRE-COLONIAL PERIOD, INDIA WAS THE CENTRE of an inter-regional world system, in the sense that Emanuel Wallerstein used the term. For the Arab world and East Africa from the west, and South-East Asia and China from the east, India was the intersection of trade, the imaginary of wealth borne on the waves of the Indian Ocean. This imaginary was eventually shared by Spain and Portugal, and realised in the most concrete way by Vasco da Gama's arrival at Calicut in 1498 and his aggressive demand for a trade monopoly there.
The "fabulous wealth" of the East became less legendary and more attainable, however, when Spain pursued this centre of trade, India, via a western route and unexpectedly bumped into the Americas. Because of this, says Enrique Dussel, "The entire medieval paradigm enters into crisis ... and thus inaugurates, slowly but irreversibly, the first world hegemony. This is the only world system that has existed in planetary history, and this is the modern system, European in its centre, capitalist in its economy."
With the precious metal wealth extracted from the Americas, Europe was able to buy its way into the Indian Ocean market and start working towards the "northern" hegemony we know today. Once much poorer than India, and perhaps more driven and less complacent, these European maritime states would cleverly continue to combine military power with trade as they competed with each other and forced new trading relationships, thus inaugurating the great European colonial period and the annexation of lands all over the world. Now that this period is over, and world capitalist hegemony is becoming more evenly networked, the Indian Ocean is re-emerging as a trading bloc. In the wake of the East Asian surge, even a tiny Indian Ocean country, Mauritius, a free-trade zone, can dub itself hopefully as a "little tiger". Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation (IOR-ARC) countries contributed about ten per cent each to world exports and imports over the past decade, economists of the Australia South Asia Research Centre report. The figures for current trade with Australia are minuscule compared with the Indian Ocean of the 1400s when China and India together accounted for more than half of the world's gross national product (GNP). Even as recently as 1820 – in the middle of the colonial period – China accounted for 29 per cent of the global economy and India for another 16 per cent. Today China's share of the global economy is about five per cent and growing rapidly.
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn have written of the great Chinese admiral Zheng He (originally a Muslim captured as a boy) in China Wakes (Random House, 1995). Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng He led seven expeditions, commanding the largest armada the world would see for the next five centuries. The fleet included 28,000 sailors on 300 ships, the longest of which were 120 metres, majestically ploughing the waves with nine masts carrying red silk (by way of contrast, Columbus 50 years later had three ships, each about 25 metres, and only 90 men). Zheng He travelled to East Africa to trade for ivory, spices, medicines and exotic wood. He was probably not interested in trading with a backward Europe with only beads, wine and wool to offer. Paris probably had a total population of about 100,000 in the fifteenth century, while Guangzhou in China appears to have had twice as many foreign residents: Arabs, Malays, Indians, Africans and Turks, evidence of very early merchant diasporas. In 1986, excavations in Guangzhou unearthed the remains of a large Hindu temple of the Yuan dynasty. The archaeologists who made the discoveries referred to this era as one in which "people from every country lived in harmony ... [and] made great contributions to the prosperity, economy and culture of Quanzhou".
WHERE DOES AUSTRALIA STAND IN RELATION TO THIS HISTORY? We were never part of the old global economy of the Indian Ocean, except for the limited indigenous trade with Indonesians and Chinese as Regina Ganter described in "Turning the map upside down" (Griffith REVIEW 9: Up North). Australia's trading orientations started off strictly colonial, and only in the latter half of the twentieth century did Australia begin to acknowledge the autonomy and significance of Chinese and Indian markets.
Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, these two countries are rivals in the computer and software industries and as the global factory supplying manufactured goods to a world of greedy consumers; they talk up their co-operation in terms of a new "Asian century". When, in April 2005, they settled a long-standing border dispute and signed an agreement designed to double trade over the next five years, the rest of the world began to take notice. As global attention focuses on the importance of China and India and concern about climate change mounts, pursuing an alternative economic model becomes more pressing.
Last year, the Pakistani foreign minister and the Indian commerce minister visited Australia, and the chairman of China's National People's Congress pursued a free-trade agreement. Prime Minister John Howard travelled to India in March 2006 and there have been numerous state and federal trade missions focusing on information technology, minerals (Western Australia), tourism and creative industries (Queensland), and coal, tourism and creative industries (NSW). In 2003-04, Australia-India bilateral trade was $5.86 billion, an increase of more than 50 per cent over the previous year. As journalist Geoffrey Barker has noted: "The trade opportunities in both countries [China and India] mesmerise the Federal Government."
The population of South Asia, led by India, will soon exceed the ageing population of China; India has a huge middle class that is attracting Australian exporters. The Australian diplomatic mind-set will have to change, to accommodate a realisation that Australia can be part of the return of Asian economic power. This could make the colonial period of the seventeenth to the twentieth century look like a temporary interruption in traditional global trade.
In 2001, the Economic Analytical Unit of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade released a report, India: New Economy, Old Economy. Its analysis shows that, while India was only picking up just over one per cent of Australian merchandise exports at that stage, growth in trade had been increasing by about twelve per cent a year, so that India moved from Australia's twenty-fifth to twelfth largest export destination. The pace has since accelerated.
Pitched in the language of neo-liberal economic reform, this report is addressed to businesses wanting to get in on this market. It is a challenge that has been accepted and is the new focus of corporate expansion. The neoliberal language is nothing new, being another northern ideological product that both India and Australia have come to share. It has effectively lubricated the gears of Indian business exchange ever since the country floated its currency exchange (devaluing the rupee) in 1991 in response to a serious balance of payments deficit. At that moment, India seriously went global, opening the economy to international trade and finance, and reducing export tariffs and regulations.
This is the context in which India has embraced the global economy. It is a second wave of reform, because the post-independence period saw the subcontinent modernising with a series of Soviet-inspired five-year plans. In the 1950s and 1960s, India sought assistance from foreign investors to gear up its industries for global competitiveness. As India played a supporting role in the global power struggle of the Cold War, its economic capacity was overlooked in the West, which continued to focus expansionist dreams on China. Now that China has become an indispensable part of the global economy, the factory of the world, attention has switched to India. The scale of the domestic market, the capacity to integrate with the global economy and the importance of fostering a (democratic) regional counterweight to China have combined to restore India at the crossroads of global trade. It is being restored to its traditional role.