## Introduction  
Between 830 and 840, the Batu Hitam sank in the Gelasa Strait while sailing towards the Arab world. Its cargo of Chinese gold artefacts and a vast quantity of mass-produced ceramic bowls from Changsha, China, went into the sea (Miksic, 2013). Between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the Bahraini city of Manama became part of a 'network of port settlements which connected the Persian Gulf to the world of trade, merchants and trans-continental routes extending from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea to South East Asia' (Fuccaro, 2009). In 1863, 'Bombay was buying 10,000 tons of Mauritian sugar while substantial quantities of rice, flour, lentils, and grains moved in the other direction' (Neveling, 2013). 'By the 1880s, a fleet of Indian-owned dhows of 60-100 tons each, sailed annually from Bombay and other western Indian ports directly to Maintirano and Mananbolo on the independent west coast of Madagascar before crossing to East Africa' (Campbell, 2008). In the nineteenth century, the rising price of pearls worldwide led to the growth of the slave trade between East Africa and Qatar (which then housed 50 per cent of the world's pearl production); East Africa, the Comoros, Mauritius and Madagascar had become the main sources of enslaved persons for the Gulf States. In the twentieth century, the Indian Ocean was a site of  
intense competition between the two Cold War powers, criss-crossed by oil tankers and huge cargoes of goods travelling between Australia, Asia, Africa and Europe. The newly independent countries on its rim sought to contain the hegemony of East and West, meeting in Bandung in 1955 and in 1970, creating the Indian Ocean Zone of Peace. In the twenty-first century, new air routes, ports, hub cities, technologies and digitized education and government services have further transformed the landscape.