Page:Indian Shipping, a history of the sea-borne trade and maritime activity of the Indians from the earliest times.djvu/20

 activity, and of commercial and manufacturing interests. A multitude of facts of special significance also come out vividly, and, in several cases, for the first time, in the author's presentation, e.g. the teeming ports and harbours of India, the harbour and other maritime regulations of the Mauryan epoch, the indigenous shipbuilding craft, the Indian classification of vessels and their build, the paramount part played by indigenous Indian shipping in the expansion of Indian commerce and colonization from the shores of Africa and Madagascar to the farthest reaches of Malaysia and the Eastern Archipelago; the auxiliary character of the foreign intermediaries, whether Greek, Arabian, or Chinese; the sources of India's manufacturing supremacy for a thousand years in her advances in applied chemistry, etc. In establishing these positions, the author, besides availing himself of the archaeological (including architectural and numismatic) as well as other historical evidence, has drawn upon hitherto unpublished manuscripts and other obscure sources. But the signal merit of the survey is that these facts of history are throughout accompanied by their political, social, or economic interpretation, so that the monograph is not a mere chronicle of facts, but a chapter of unwritten culture-history, conceived and executed in a philosophical spirit. The author's style combines lucidity with terseness, compresses a large mass of facts into a