A new book on ancient Indian Ocean trade considers the effects of objects in motion

Sea of Treasures looks beyond a traditional reading of archives to explore the connection of commodity and experience.

By Sarah Steimer

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 and the College, 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 instead are 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 says. “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 UK, 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 very 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. 

“There were these encounters between what we think of as distinct human agents and passive objects that actually require a lot of interrogating,” Simmons says. “I think a history of the senses enabled me to think about these goods as greater than commodity. They, in fact, were experiential.”

In following these connections between object and experience, Simmons identified points of pleasure and enjoyment, but also more negative reactions. 

“Even if they're actually using them in their day-to-day life, there is this rhetorical value in dismissing these commodities as superfluous, or tagging them with seemingly negative associations in the ancient mindset, which is very patriarchal,” he says. “It automatically goes to places like gender: These are effeminate or feminizing commodities. Or to foreignness: In the case of eating something, there's this threat of invasion to human subjects that think themselves in control of their environment.”

In his study of ancient texts, Simmons found them to be more nuanced than they’re often perceived. He argues that 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. 

In the “Aromatics and Outrage” chapter — each chapter addresses a different encounter and its experiential effects — Simmons references a story in which someone in hiding is literally sniffed out by his executioners because he is wearing perfume (a new luxury commodity in the Roman Empire). Pliny the Elder implies that 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 symbolizes at this time: its role in dressing the dead in Roman society.

“This trope, as you start following it, occurs everywhere,” Simmons says. “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 says. “This was an important takeaway for me: You have to look at it from multiple perspectives.”

Simmons says there’s also been a recent shift in ancient historiography to rely on quantifiable data to make authoritative claims about the past, but he cautions that figures from this period can be unreliable and that ancient historians shouldn’t forfeit historical intuition. 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.

“Individuals who may not be the primary consumer of these goods are, in fact, beneficiaries of them through public sacrifice and the fact that these are conspicuously consumed,” Simmons explains. 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. “Everyone wants to feel valued. Everyone wants to feel attractive. Everyone wants to have an allure or charisma that these sensuous, new, almost numinous commodities can cater to. ‘Luxury’ collapses all this.”

As he worked on the book, Simmons says that he saw echoes of this ancient world in modern life. Then, as now, a more globalized economy can spark fears of the new, sometimes creating a fixation on what proper masculinity or citizenship means. 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.