Indian Ocean trade can anchor India’s growth aspirations
Indian Ocean trade: There is a papyrus that changed how historians think about ancient trade. Discovered in a sunken ship off the coast of Kerala more than a decade ago, the Museiris Papyrus is, at its heart, a commercial invoice: a detailed list of goods ordered by a Roman merchant from a trader at Museiris, then one of India’s most important ports. Scholars who have studied the document have calculated, from the quantities and values listed, that the taxes levied on Indian trade alone accounted for roughly one-third of the total revenues of the entire Roman Empire. One third. From a single trade route. Two thousand years ago.
It is a number that should reframe how India thinks about its relationship with the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) today. Not as a peripheral concern, not as a secondary theatre to rivalries in the Indo-Pacific or the Himalayas, but as the original arena of Indian economic power—an arena that is now, urgently and unmistakably, asking to be reclaimed.