Naval battles and the size of Mediterranean trade

[Eleatic Guest]

This topic deals with ancient naval history, but also trancends it by far. I have three related questions:

1. Is there an authoritative list of all ancient naval battles? Briefly giving key details such as opponents, date, place, outcome and sources?
2. Is there an authoritative list of all naval battles in history?
3. Is there any way to prove or disprove that sea trade and shipping on the Mediterranean was the largest in terms of size even after the end of antiquity? Or in other words that the Mediterranean continued to be the most important sea into the medieval period, still more important than the rising Indian Ocean (its likeliest rival)?

Now what have 1. and 2. to do with three? I can only think of one way to answer 3. and that is to determine the level of trade and shipping by way of the intensity and frequency of naval action. My reasoning for this is:
A. Unlike day-to-day trading, military action got regularly the attention of ancient and medieval writers.
B. Sea trade and naval assertion went historically speaking hand in hand. Both required a high level of naval competence and sea trading nations were compelled to defend their trade interests by war.

Now this is a somewhat crude approach, but it could be still useful, namely when the overall level of naval action in the Med and the rest would turn out to be on a very different scale. And this seems to me the case: from this unsourced List of naval battles and Byzantine-Arab naval battles I get the impression that the frequency and intensity of naval action in the early medieval Mediterranean was still much higher than in all other seas. Would you agree?

[Sean Manning]

The trouble is that war and trade are basically independent variables: you can get period with high trade and little naval war (the Principate in the Mediterranean, the 19th century worldwide), low trade and high naval war (like the early medieval Mediterranean), high trade and high naval warfare (the 16th or 18th centuries worldwide). War both encourages (increased demand) and discourages (increased risk) trade, and trade often increase after one side wins a struggle to control trade routes.

Another area of bias is areas which have lots of sea trade but few surviving histories until relatively recently (South Asia and Japan have this problem). Its likely that someone writing a list of naval battles in English knows the most about battles in the European-Mediterranean world.

You can test 3 with things like shipwrecks, documentary evidence, and remains of durable trade goods (mostly pottery and stone objects). It would be at least a long article's work, probably a book's.

[Eleatic Guest]

The trouble is that war and trade are basically independent variables.

Which, however, may well level themselves out in the longue durée I am thinking of (500 BC to 1500 AD). Consider the empirical evidence of the WP list. 80-90% of the naval battles in the period took place either in the Med or were between Western powers. I only identified a dozen or so engagement in the Indian and Pacific Ocean region and here more than half were riverine battles, not sea battles.

War and trade cannot be soo independent variables that this does not show that the scope of Med and Western sea shipping was higher than elsewhere even after 1500. Am I making sense?

[Sean Manning]

War and trade cannot be soo independent variables that this does not show that the scope of Med and Western sea shipping was higher than elsewhere even after 1500. Am I making sense?

Dear Stefan,

Its a clever idea, but I don't think so, for reasons I discussed above. In addition, there are lots of ways to fight at sea other than big naval battles! Your hypothesis would imply that trade was much higher in the last two centuries BCE than the first two centuries CE, and I don't think the evidence supports this.

Sean

[Eleatic Guest]

Pondered on it again and you are right. A high frequency and intensity of naval battles does not imply so much a high rate of sea trade as of general maritime activity and the general level of shipping (logistics, technology, size of fleets, manpower). Areas where naval battles occurred in the super-long run much more often than elsewhere were the most advanced regions. Not with logical necessity, but it is the single strongest indication.

The most evident example are the waters around America where not a single sea battle took place in pre-Columbian times. Why? Because the Indians did not know the sailship: No technology -> no sea battles.

The most evident example to the contrary is the Pacific where also no sea battles took place, although the Polynesians were undoubtedly great seafarers. However, the hypothesis still applies here as much as the Polynesians did not know ships, only boats. So here too, a lack of naval action indicates a relatively low level of maritime sophistication.