Indian Ocean imports shaped many lives across the ancient world.
In Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade, Jeremy A. Simmons, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, goes beyond the mechanics of long-distance travel or the economics of trade to offer a new perspective on Indian Ocean commerce.
The book refocuses a historical lens on the commodities involved and the resulting patterns of their consumption, and what Simmons ponders as the consequences of objects in motion.
“[Long-distance trade] conjures up the imagination of the Silk Road or ports that are teeming with traders and exotic goods,” Simmons said. “There's this initial attraction to it by both readers and scholars: We become enamored of this, but at the same time, that magic flattens some of the dynamics. We fixate on the lines crossing the Indian Ocean rather than the actual, tangible change that occurs as a result of these connections.”
To look beyond trade routes and connectivity, Simmons explored what he calls the lingering consequence of traded goods in new environments. For example, he points to pepper in the Roman Empire. This, he says, was not just about luxurious consumption, but about a “desire centered around sensuous qualities that not only prompts [pepper’s] importation but transforms the culture at large as a result.”
Much of Simmons’s research on the topic, which began with his dissertation at Columbia University, involved combing both textual and material archives.
Spending time in India, the Mediterranean and the United Kingdom, he dug through Indian Ocean trade items in collections and storehouses to gain a tangible understanding of the objects. Whereas many scholars might find a Roman coin in India and make note of the emperor pictured to ascertain when it was made, Simmons—in his physical examination of the coin—might find it to be a high-quality imitation that was made there, which tells a very different story.
This reading between the lines—or between the materials—informed much of the book. As Simmons explains it, he let the commodities guide his study. For example, spices in the Mediterranean world suggested a sensuous course, in which these objects were smelled and ingested.
“I think a history of the senses enabled me to think about these goods as greater than commodity—they, in fact, were experiential,” Simmons said.
In his study of ancient texts, Simmons found them to be more nuanced than they’re often perceived. He argues ancient testimonies are frequently read at face value, and their work is mined for facts. A literary perspective, however, can uncover more complex insights. Simmons uses Pliny the Elder as an example: It can be easy to assume that the ancient author is dealing in truths, but there are rhetorical flourishes and jokes that suggest his critiques of luxury goods may be his way of wrestling with this new, more global world.
Following that, Simmons references a story in which someone in hiding is literally sniffed out by his executioners because he is wearing perfume—what was then a new luxury commodity in the Roman Empire. Pliny implies this act makes that individual deserving of death.
But rather than read this passage simply as Pliny moralizing against this commodity, Simmons pushes further at what perfume symbolized at the time: its role in dressing the dead in Roman society.
“This trope, as you start following it, occurs everywhere,” Simmons said. “It's a pretty common satirical quip that people make. ‘Oh, he smells like a couple of funerals.’”
Sea of Treasures asks scholars and readers to reconsider the ways we’ve long approached the history of this trade route and its impacts. Simmons urges readers to think of the Indian Ocean on its own terms and not just for what it does for the Roman empire.
“By not engaging only with traditional source material for Roman history, but also looking at the Sanskrit material, the Indic inscriptions and the archeology in the subcontinent, too, [I was] trying to bring different parts of this interconnected world into a more balanced dialog,” he said. “This was an important takeaway for me: You have to look at it from multiple perspectives.”
Along this same vein, he notes that much of the ancient historical record is written by an elite population: People who have the privilege to make arguments about society at large, and who might also have more anxieties about it. Meanwhile, there are those at the margins who are also affected—but whose voices aren’t as readily found.
So while it may appear that a book on ancient luxury items only deals with a small, select segment of the population, these commodities and small-scale practices actually reverberate into a wider socio-cultural world.
As he worked on the book, Simmons said that he saw echoes of this ancient world in modern life. Then, as now, a more globalized economy can spark fears of the new, as well as deeper questions of identity. There’s a larger human story that’s told in Sea of Treasures, he says, one that speaks to the joys and woes of an interconnected world.
“Everyone wants to feel valued. Everyone wants to feel attractive,” Simmons said. “Everyone wants to have an allure or charisma that these sensuous, new, almost numinous commodities can cater to. ‘Luxury’ collapses all this.”
—This article originally appeared on the Social Sciences Division website.
