I continue to worry about the unintended consequences of development aid. We need to feed the hungry, but will massive food shipments depress prices on the market and drive local farmers off the land? International charities urge individuals to buy desks for schoolchildren so they do not have to sit on the dirt classroom floor. Would the money be better spent on population control, reducing average family size (and the number of schoolchildren)? In some countries, foreign aid accounts for almost half of the government’s annual budget and a significant percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Are we creating a culture of dependency, a neocolonial relationship between the donor and receiver countries, by making them continue to rely on foreign aid?
Put me down as ambivalent about development.
Postcards
I am from a generation that enjoyed sending and receiving postcards. I haven’t received many recently. It’s easier to post a selfie to Facebook from under a beach umbrella than to get out of your chair, find a shop, buy a postcard, write it, buy a stamp, and mail it. But I miss sending and receiving them. For me, the pro-forma “Weather lovely, wine cheap, pâté de foie gras gave me indigestion, wish you were here” greeting was never enough. I bought cards with the largest possible writing space and usually managed to cram more than one hundred words about my travels into the left-hand side.
This book, like Postcards from Stanland, combines personal experience, interviews, and research. It is not intended as a travel guide. It’s not an academic study or the kind of analysis produced by policy wonks, although it offers background and insights. Think of it as a series of scenes or maybe oversized postcards (with space for a few thousand rather than one hundred words) that I would have sent if you were on my friends and family list. Which you can be, if you send me your e-mail address.
two
Indian Ocean World
“Historians visualizing the Indian Ocean,” wrote the Sri Lankan academic Sinnappah Arasaratnam, “have been like the five blind men in the old Indian fable conceiving of an elephant by feeling different parts of its anatomy. They have come up with partial views of sections of the Ocean, or of the Ocean viewed from sections of bordering land or from the perceptions of different people who traversed the Ocean.”1 But not the ocean as a whole. The Indian Ocean world stretches far beyond coastal areas—in other words, it is a region linked to, but not limited by, a body of water.
The ocean-as-world perspective is generally attributed to the French historian Fernand Braudel of the Annales school who used the Mediterranean Sea, not territorially bounded units such as kingdoms or principalities, as the framework for study. Similarly, the Indian Ocean world is a vast interconnected region, from interior Africa to the Middle East to China, whose boundaries have shifted in time and space as military, economic, and cultural empires have risen and fallen. It was built on commercial networks, including the slave trade, the movement of peoples and their cultural assimilation, and the spread of religions, particularly Hinduism and Islam. In his introduction to the essay collection Trade, Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World, Michael Pearson concludes that “ties and connections, elements of commonality, stretching all over the Indian Ocean” mean that “we can indeed write of an Indian Ocean World.” With the rise of India and China and competition for sea lanes, oil, and African minerals and markets, “the Indian Ocean world represents a strategic arena where the forces shaping a post-American world intersect most visibly.”2 Foreign policy analyst Robert Kaplan describes the Indian Ocean as “the coming strategic arena of the twenty-first century.”3 The concept of an Indian Ocean world allows me to venture beyond coastlines and port cities to interior regions, linked to the ocean by rivers, colonial conquest, trade, migration, and culture.
MAP 2.1 The Indian Ocean world (map by Belén Marco Crespo)
What ties together four seemingly diverse countries—Madagascar, India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia—besides their proximity to the Indian Ocean and its historic trade and settlement routes?
First, there is the monsoon. It has different names and comes at different times, but it always comes. The monsoon determines when you plant and harvest, when and where you travel, even when you get married, have children, or bury your dead. It is both a curse and a blessing. It brings death and destruction yet provides the water vital to survival. In northeastern Madagascar, the cyclones of January and February sweep away bridges and roads and leave communities stranded; six months later, farmers harvest cash crops of cloves, lychees, and vanilla. In Bangladesh in 2017, the first rains came early (in April), ruining the first rice crop in several regions. When I returned in August, the waters of the Padma (Ganges), Jamuna (Brahmaputra), Meghna, and their tributaries had left northern regions under water, washed away roads, bridges, and railroads, and forced as many as eight million people to abandon their homes. Yet when the waters recede, they deposit the alluvial soil that makes Bangladesh one of the most agriculturally fertile countries in the world.
Second, each country is the creation of a colonial power—the British, French, or Dutch. Even Madagascar, which makes the most geographic sense because it’s an island, was formed only when one ethnic group subjugated others, a conquest that was administratively consolidated by the French. In the others, European powers cobbled together tribes, ethnic groups, and independent kingdoms (maharajahs, sultans, and emirs) into colonies where unity remained fragile. At independence, British India and the Dutch East Indies were sliced and diced, creating new fissures. Despite half a century of nation building, the boundaries drawn in the colonial era remain a challenge to unity and identity.
There are common threads to the national narratives of colonialism, and to a historical schizophrenia in which the colonizer is both resented as the agent of oppression and exploitation, and admired for transforming the economy, building infrastructure, expanding education, and establishing political institutions. As Shashi Tharoor, a former UN diplomat and Indian cabinet minister, notes: “Whether through national strength or civilizational weakness, India has long refused to hold any grudge against Britain for 200 years of imperial enslavement, plunder and exploitation.”4 This ambiguous relationship to the colonial past has shaped national development and public discourse. As my Malagasy colleague Richard Samuel puts it: “All actions by our government are taken in support of France. It’s neo-colonialism. More than half a century after we declared independence, we have still not achieved it.”
Third, all four countries face daunting environmental and climatic challenges—devastating floods, droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis, urban pollution, saline intrusion, deforestation, and desertification. The benefits of economic development—from mining to cash crops, from logging to tourism—come with social costs. Governments, foreign and domestic business interests, international agencies, environmental groups, and local communities are engaged in high-stakes conflicts over land, natural resources, and water. The technocrats who decided to address the Madagascar government’s budget deficit by leasing more than half the country’s agricultural land to a South Korean conglomerate did not consult with the people farming the land, let alone offer them any compensation. In the furor that followed, the government was overthrown in a coup.
Fourth is the movement of people. Internal and external migration are most often driven by economic factors: historically by the global and national slave trades and the transportation of indentured laborers to rubber and sugar cane plantations; today by economic