India, Aug. 28 -- There's a bit of a problem with how we study history, says Mahmood Kooria, and it's limiting what we see.

We tend to study what happened on land. But most of the planet is water. And some of this water served as "highways of exchange", where people met, interacted, traded, invented, sought new horizons and built their fortunes.

The story of a place and its people changes when one factors in the seas around them, Kooria says. This is particularly true of India.

What we now know as the Indian Ocean has a recorded history that goes back more than 2,000 years; a lot further back than any other sea on the planet. In his new book, Indians in the Ocean, Kooria, 38, seeks to tell this story.

It is the tale of the world's fir...