AP ® World History 2006–2007 Professional Development Workshop Materials Special Focus: Teaching About the Indian Ocean World Note: This Special Focus document was developed prior to the course changes in 2011-12. While these materials are still relevant to teaching the revised AP® World History Curriculum Framework, teachers should be aware of the differences. connect to college success™ www.com The College Board: Connecting Students to College Success The College Board is a not-for-profit membership association whose mission is to connect students to college success and opportunity. Founded in 1900, the association is composed of more than 5,000 schools, colleges, universities, and other educational organizations.
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Visit the College Board on the Web: www. AP Central is the official online home for the AP Program and Pre-AP: apcentral. ii AP World History: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Table of Contents Special Focus: Teaching About the Indian Ocean World Introduction: AP World History and the Indian Ocean World Deborah Smith Johnston.3 Introduction to the Indian Ocean World Erik Gilbert.6 Indian Ocean Trade: A Practice Thesis-Writing Activity Susan Graham.13 Southernization Lesson Plan Deborah Smith Johnston.22 Studying Java’s Hindu-Buddhist Heritage Through Architecture Heyward Parker James.26 The Indian Ocean World Through Maps David Kalivas.43 The Indian Ocean Economy: Lesson on Secondary Sources Whitney Howarth.50 Continuities, Connections, and Changes: Using the Internet to Explore the Indian Ocean World Deborah Smith Johnston.66 Sources for Further Reading and Study Deborah Smith Johnston.73 Important Note: The following set of materials is organized around a particular theme, or “special focus,” that reflects important topics in the AP World History course. The materials are intended to provide teachers with resources and classroom ideas relating to these topics.
The special focus, as well as the specific content of the materials, cannot and should not be taken as an indication that a particular topic will appear on the AP Exam. AP World History: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Special Focus: Teaching About the Indian Ocean World Introduction: AP World History and the Indian Ocean World Deborah Smith Johnston Lexington High School Lexington, Massachusetts It makes a great attention-getting story in my world history classes: Did you know there were flush toilets in fourteenth-century East Africa? Traveling to Kilwa, Mombasa, and other former East African city-states in 1994, I was wandering through ruins of Islamic-inspired palaces, built with indigenous Swahili (coral rag) building materials. I saw two-story buildings with sewage systems that rivaled anything seen in Europe until the late nineteenth century. The amalgamation of cultural influences—Indonesian glass beads, Chinese pottery, Portuguese forts, and Swahili customs—heightened my interest in the connections that created this early cosmopolitan world.
Clearly, I could not teach about the wonders of East Africa (those toilets really were impressive) without placing the region in context. Kilwa had much more in common with Calicut then it did with Timbuktu at the time. Teaching about the “Indian Ocean world” as a zone of dynamic interaction between peoples makes more pedagogical and historic sense than teaching about it through traditionally delineated national or continental units such as “Africa.” However, our textbooks do not all agree with this premise. The materials provided here attempt to address what may be a void in background information and curricula for teachers about the region, despite the fact that the region is currently being heavily researched, and published on, by world historians.
A recent monograph encourages us to reconsider the validity of teaching in traditional units such as continents and civilizations and asks us to instead reflect upon using the best unit possible for the question at hand.* By looking at what some have called “circum-maritime” regions and others have called “zones of interaction” or world networks, such as the Indian Ocean world, we can ask better questions about how places have connected across time and place. Lewis and Karen Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. AP World History: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Special Focus: Teaching About the Indian Ocean World In these materials, Erik Gilbert’s “Introduction to the Indian Ocean World” develops this idea and provides an overview of the changes and continuities in this region.
He examines the many global connections that exist—migration, slaves, commodities, language, religion, architecture, food, fauna, agriculture, exploration, and empire expansion. David Kalivas encourages us to consider the importance of point of view and maps by looking at a variety of maps that show both perspective and content. By studying the human element, we see that the Indian Ocean world is not just about trade. The Internet lesson focuses on travelers such as Zheng He and Ibn Battuta.
We see the migration of peoples and religion, as well as technologies, through these materials. The “Southernization” lesson further emphasizes the diverse nature of these exchanges. The article by Parker James reminds us of the importance of Southeast Asia and provides us with several windows into thinking about the movement of architectural style, religion, and technology. As we look through the AP World History Course Description, it is apparent that the Indian Ocean world figures prominently in AP World History.
Within the “Foundations” unit, a major development is the growth of interregional networks, which includes the spread of trade as well as religion. Within that context, students should be able to describe that trading system as well as places within it, including what would later be known as India, China, and comparatively the Mediterranean world. From 600 to 1450, the height of the Indian Ocean world, the references are even more numerous: interregional trade, the Islamic world, Indian Ocean trade, the spread and contacts of major religions including missionary movements, initiatives of Ming China (a reference in part to Zheng He), Arab migrations (diasporas), and the spread of disease and urban growth due to trade. The entire question concerning the existence of a world economic system at this time can be answered through a look at the dynamic nature and large scope of Indian Ocean trade.
By 1450, changes in technology, trade, and encounters began to alter the balance in the Indian Ocean world. The effect of the Portuguese and later the British and the Dutch on trade and empire—as well as the spread of disease, the introduction of new foods to the region, and changes in forced labor systems—changed the region still further. Moving forward in time, issues of empire and industrialization are raised as one considers the British East India Company’s role. These materials were written specifically for AP World History teachers, thus satisfying the developments identified above, and yet this case study of the Indian Ocean world might also be used by regular-level world history teachers and professors in postsecondary schools.
Teachers might choose to utilize some or all of these materials chronologically as they proceed through the course. Alternatively, teachers may wish to spend a week discussing and writing about the Indian Ocean world within the AP World History: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Special Focus: Teaching About the Indian Ocean World 600–1300 unit, moving backward and forward in time to show the dynamism of the region. I hope these materials provide a starting point for teaching about the region and that you will be encouraged to delve deeper into the burgeoning historical research that is becoming available. The materials here are intended to model the historical thinking skills necessary for success in AP World History.
That includes strategies for working with images and maps, writing theses for essays that address comparison and change over time, answering a Document-Based Question, analyzing point of view, using primary and secondary sources, and using the Internet. My hope is that these materials provide you with not only background information and lesson ideas but also important skill-building ideas for the course. AP World History: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Special Focus: Teaching About the Indian Ocean World Introduction to the Indian Ocean World Erik Gilbert Arkansas State University Jonesboro, Arkansas One of the more interesting symptoms of the newness of world history as a field is that no two world historians seem to agree on exactly what world history is. But almost everyone will concede that if world history has an opposite, something it strives not to be, it is national history.
World historians have, like salmon battling their way through waterfalls and rapids, struggled mightily against academic history’s dominant unit of analysis—the nation-state. Instead we have substituted other units—civilizations, areas (in the area studies sense), continents, language groups—all in attempt to get away from the limits of the nation-state. The more we employ these units of analysis, however, the more they start to seem like nation-states warmed over. Continents and civilizations, in particular, have come to be employed much like big nation-states.
One answer to this challenge has been a growing interest in “zones of interaction”—places like oceans, deserts, and grasslands that have served as meeting places between peoples of different backgrounds. The Indian Ocean is one such place, and it offers the teacher examples of trade, travel, migration, imperial conquest, and religious and cultural interaction in almost any period. The Indian Ocean is central to world history. It is unique among the world’s oceans in that it was the first real ocean that humans could cross rather than just clinging to the shorelines.
At times when the Atlantic and Pacific were insurmountable barriers, crossed only by accident or out of desperation and effectively separating the Old World from the New, people were busy sailing back and forth on the Indian Ocean. In many ways the Indian Ocean is more like a giant version of the Mediterranean Sea—the archetype of the manageable, human-scale body of water—than it is like the Atlantic and the Pacific. It’s not just bigger than the Mediterranean; its place in the world allows it to connect far more and diverse people and places to each other. The Indian Ocean is where Africa and Eurasia come together.
A Sailor’s Ocean The Indian Ocean seems almost designed with the early sailor in mind. Most of its waters are warm.