The Chinese challenged Arab dominance of Indian Ocean trade before Europeans arrived

Evidence

Once the Portuguese had rounded what was for them the Cape of Good Hope (and perhaps even before they reached that point), these voyagers had become actually an analogue of the Chinese who preceded them: we refer, of course, to the “seven massive” imperial expeditionary fleets commanded by the Muslim admiral Cheng Ho between 1405 and 1434 (Cheng Ho died that year) that had already confidently assayed these waters for trade and plunder. The Chinese ventures that with their fleets of junks carrying sometimes as many as 40,000 people, amounted to convoys of “impressive intercontinental missiles” according to William Appleman Williams. With its fleets the Chinese Empire successfully challenged the Arab and Muslim traders who had already grown accustomed to their own domination of the East African and Indian Ocean commercial trades. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 541

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in pre-European global trade systems and the deep history of the Indian Ocean world that precedes Atlantic slavery.