The last three years have seen an outpouring of works on ports, Rila Mukherjee ed. Vanguards of Globalization: Port-Cities from the Classical to the Modern, Sara Keller and Michael Pearson eds. Port Towns of Gujarat and Marie-Francoise Boussac, Jean-Francois Salles, Jean-Baptiste Yon eds. Ports of the Ancient Indian Ocean. Incidentally all three are Primus publications.
The book under review, a compendium of twenty-four essays organized under four sections—From the Red Sea to India, Through Arabia and the Persian Gulf; Ancient Ports and Maritime Contacts of India; Related Areas: Sri-Lanka, South-East Asia; French Archives, furnishing fascinating primary source material—is an outcome of a colloquium. It is evident from the subsections that the essays focus on material originating from the Red Sea to India, through Arabia and the Persian Gulf, looking at not only ancient Indian ports but going beyond to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. For people interested in maritime society, there is a need to know not only the pelagic but also the coast as Michael Pearson argues that a distinctive maritime society can be found not on the deep sea but in the jewels of the littoral, the port cities. Thus this volume on ports will be very attractive to maritime historians.