## Metadata - Author: [[Robert D. Kaplan]] - Full Title: Monsoon - Category: #books ## Highlights - Despite the occasional ferocity of the southwest wind, the discovery of the monsoonal system, which so easily favored trip planning, nevertheless liberated navigators from sailing too often against the elements.1 So the Indian Ocean did not—at least to the same degree as other large bodies of water—have to wait until the age of steam to unite it. ([Location 382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003EY7JGC&location=382)) - Intrinsic to the Roman, Egyptian, Persian, and Syrian lifestyles, frankincense was to antiquity what oil is to the modern age: the basis for economic existence, and for shipping routes. ([Location 401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003EY7JGC&location=401)) - Globalization happened in Oman and the rest of the Indian Ocean in antiquity and in the early medieval era long before it did in other places, leading to an extraordinary level of sophistication. ([Location 459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003EY7JGC&location=459)) - Indeed, the challenge to America, ultimately, is less the rise of China than communicating at a basic level with this emerging global civilization of Africans and Asians. ([Location 5954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003EY7JGC&location=5954)) - It is the Indian Ocean that unites the energy-rich Middle East with the emerging middle-class fleshpots of East Asia at a time in history when 90 percent of all commercial goods travel from one continent to another by sea. ([Location 6016](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003EY7JGC&location=6016))