While I sit here anxiously awaiting the start of my second comprehensive exam, here's a thread on premodern Lankan trade connections! We too often imagine S Asians as patiently waiting for Europeans to come along with their Big Boats but oh no this is very definitely not the case

It might seem odd for me to talk about maritime commerce when I mostly do Buddhist intellectual history. But these are the sea routes that Buddhist people, ideas and objects travelled along; you can't understand intellectual history without knowing a little economic history too!

Citations up front: most of this comes from Bandaranayake's edited volume "the Silk Road of the Sea," particularly Gunawardhana's typically excellent chapter. Some other stuff from Coningham's archaeological findings, some from the depths of my brain (citation needed)

Let's start early: there's pretty clear evidence of extensive trade networks based in major cities like Anuradhapura and ports like Mantai from REALLY early onwards. Mediterranean, African, Mid Eastern and East Asian trade goods are all evident from well before the CE

That's backed up by serious domestic industries, with evidence of iron and glass slag at Mantai and roads leading inwards to the capital dated between 3C BCE and 3C CE

My favourite early connection (to the region, not Lanka specifically) is Gunawardhana's guess at the origins of the name and design of the Tamil kaṭṭhumaram: both are very similar to the Polynesian catamaran, and given what we know about their long-distance navigation skills...

S Asian traders weren't just waiting for the world to come to them, either. There are Brahmi inscriptions found in the Red Sea region as early as the first century CE, and Lankan traders used this script from much earlier (predating the Asokan period)

One of the Plinys (Gunawardhana doesn't specify) records a Lankan trade mission travelling to Rome in person, sometime around the first century CE. The father of the Lankan envoy to Rome, Pliny tells us, had travelled to China several times on earlier trade missions

Chinese records show near-constant trade with Lanka in the centuries after this. Apparently by the eighth century Lankan ships are among the largest in Chinese ports

When we think about Chinese pilgrims like Faxian, we tend to focus on his arduous overland journey to N India and then south. But it's significant that his journal home, by ship via Indonesia, is so much less eventful - this is an established maritime route by this point!

Lankan monarchs are very aware of the significance of these trade routes. There are inscriptions from the first millennium mentioning "the watch of the sea," which Gunawardhana takes as an anti-piracy organisation

When we get into the early centuries of the second M, the dynamics have shifted dramatically. There are much fewer African and Mid Eastern trade goods evident, and it seems that trade priorities have shifted towards China

The Cōḻa Empire didn't seem to regulate merchants, so powerful "trade guilds" based on the peninsula began to dominate maritime trade and eventually became significant forces in internal Lankan politics

Here's a good example: there's an inscription at the centre of Polonnaruva's sacred quadrangle which refers to the Vēlaikkāra army as guardians of the Tooth Relic. Indrapala suggests that this was originally a mercenary army associated with the Valañciyar trade community!

Oh, let's not forget the Muslim communities (there's a pointed sentence if ever I wrote one): even with the shift in focus to China, trade with Muslim rulers continued at scale until at least the 15th C, and communities of traders made their home on the island as early as the 8th

One of Līlāvatī's coins (the ones I've tweeted about before) was unearthed as far away as Mogadishu! Not surprising when you think about these two places as significant nodes of Indian Ocean trade, but a fun connection nonetheless

SE Asian trade becomes increasingly significant around the turn of the millennium (i.e. the period that SE Asian Buddhists are increasingly turning towards Lanka as a "source" of Buddhism: see everything Anne Blackburn has published in the past decade and her forthcoming book)

Which all culminates in the great Elephant War of Parākramabāhu I against Burma, which most scholars seem to agree was motivated by the need to secure the trade in tuskers - because you can't be a reputable S Asian monarch without lots of tuskers

Okay, there were a few other factors as well, including the desire to cut out Burma as a middleman and trade directly with Kambodia - but I've run out of time so I'm leaving it with "Great Elephant War"