HeyJaredMaritime Trade History
The history they got wrong. Essays on maritime trade, ancient India, and the decisions that made and destroyed civilisations. By Nick Collins - Cambridge-educated historian, forty years in shipping.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 9
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 10, 2026
Latest issues
Up to Half of Rome's Empire Was Paid For by Trade with India (opens the original)
Read excerpt
In the first century AD, the richest city in the western world was running a long, lopsided account with a land its armies never reached. Goods moved west out of India, gold moved east to pay for them. The men who audited the empire, Pliny (23-79), Strabo (64 BC-24 AD), Seneca (4 BC-65) and Tacitus (56-120) among them, understood exactly what this meant and wrote it down. The customs duties the empire collected made this trade the fiscal spine of the state until the plague of 166 wiped out a sig
How Indian Ideas Influenced Half of Asia (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Subscribe nowOver roughly a thousand years India converted much of Asia to its religions, its epics, its scripts and its models of kingship. It managed it almost without conquest. There was no Indian empire in Southeast Asia, no army of occupation, no fleet demanding submission. From India, merchants, monks and manuscripts sailed east on the twice-yearly reversal of the monsoon. When they landed, local kings looked at what they had brought and decided that the religious ideas and the apparatus o
How Ancient Greece Got Its Philosophy From India via Phoenicians (opens the original)
Read excerpt
ShareWestern histories describe the Greek awakening as an event without a cause. Somewhere around the seventh century BC, in a corner of the Aegean, men who had spent the previous few hundred years farming among rocks began asking whether the universe was made of water, whether the soul survived the body, whether justice had a mathematical shape. Bertrand Russell called Thales of Miletus the first p
When the Sea Took Half the World (opens the original)
Read excerpt
<img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="816" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7mI_!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08de70c4-be4e-481a-8bbc-bdf1cb87cc6c_1456x816.png"
Migration Out of India Seeded the Ancient World (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Subscribe nowTwo hills stand on the border of Cork and Kerry, in southwest Ireland. Locals still call them the Paps of Danu. They are shaped like breasts and named for a goddess. Every spring at Beltane, the old fire festival, farmers used to light fires around the base of the hills and drive their cattle between the flames for protection and a good harvest. The same ritual is recorded in the Vedas, four and a half thousand miles east, in the language and liturgy of ancient India.<div class="cap
Publishing over time
Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.
Recurring subjects
Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.
Audience
No verified audience measurement yet.
About this data
Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.
Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.