The Indian Ocean (27 page)

To demonstrate this conclusively would require much more quantitative research than has been done so far. But some things make one dubious of this blanket claim. For a start, sea trade as such was not affected by these declines, though certainly some port cities and some production areas were. The whole notion of Islamic decline in the eighteenth century has become a controversial one. Older European historiography wrote of decline, collapse and confusion, to justify conquest by the West. However, Ottoman decline in the eighteenth century is no longer universally accepted. So also in India, where the successor states of the Mughals were themselves perfectly viable. Even the Marathas, once stigmatised as lawless plunderers, have now been shown to be much more organised and benevolent than was once thought. In short, the whole notion of decline has been called into question.

In any case, to the extent that these vast empires were under stress, there were some compensations for trade and the economy. Most obviously, when the Mughal state began to release vast hordes of bullion accumulated over a century and a half, in order to fight its enemies, some parts of the economy obviously benefited from this increase in liquidity. In some areas it is clear that traders simply tried to avoid unsettled areas and avaricious land holders: routes changed, but trade continued. For many traders the political situation was only one element which determined their success, and the areas to which they traded. More important in their prosperity or collapse were such eternal verities as whether or not their goods met local demand, and arrived at a time when the market was not glutted.

If, then, the notion that the decline of landed states caused a decline in sea trade is not proven, we need to look instead at the activities of the Europeans, and assess whether it was competition from them which led to problems for indigenous Indian Ocean traders. This is the central concern of much of this chapter and the next: for now we can quickly say that this was indeed the case, but beginning only in the second half of the eighteenth century. An acceptable compromise would be to try and find a combination of causes for the decline of Indian Ocean trade done by local people, including both political changes in the interior and competition from Europeans.

The first Europeans to arrive in the Indian Ocean in numbers, and in an organised fashion, were the Portuguese. In one respect their attitude to trade and politics differed profoundly from what we have found for both emperors and port polity controllers around the shores of the ocean, for by claiming sovereignty over the ocean they claimed to be able to control and tax trade. In another respect they mirrored closely the position of the port polity controllers, but not the landed empires, in that the vast bulk of their revenue came from the sea, not from land. I have chosen to write rather extensively about the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. This is not to say that they had any profound effects there, but as so much of the historiography emphasises their actual or potential importance I have thought it necessary to locate them more correctly in their place and time. Such an analysis also casts much light on what else was happening, apart from the Portuguese presence, in the sixteenth century in the ocean.

The initial responses to the Portuguese varied from amazement to hostility to contempt. When the Kalabari people of the Niger Delta first saw white men, around 1500, they were perplexed.

The first white man, it is said, was seen by a fisherman who had gone down to the mouth of the estuary in his canoe. Panic-stricken, he raced home and told his people what he had seen: whereupon he and the rest of the town set out to purify themselves – that is to say, rid themselves of the influence of the strange and monstrous thing that had intruded into their world.

When the first Portuguese arrived in Colombo the locals reported to the king that

there is in our port of Colombo a race of people very white in colour and of great beauty; they wear jackets and hats of iron and pace up and down without resting for a moment. Seeing them eat bread and grapes and drink arrack, they reported that these people devour stone and drink blood. They said that these people give two or three pieces of gold or silver for one fish or one lime. The sound of their cannon is louder than thunder at the end of the world. Their cannon balls fly many leagues and shatter forts of stone and iron.
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The ethnocentric Ming Chinese accounts from the later sixteenth century depicted the Portuguese as malevolent goblins who acted completely outside norms of accepted behaviour. One said,

So they [the Portuguese] secretly sought to purchase children of above ten years old to eat.... The method [of preparing the child] was to first boil up some soup in a large iron pan and place the child, who was locked up inside an iron cage, into the pan. After being steamed to sweat, the child was then taken out and his skin peeled with an iron scrubbing-brush. The child, still alive, would now be killed and having been disembowelled, steamed to eat.
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The Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean with a background of equally fabulous ideas. Le Goff has written of the role of India and the Indian Ocean in medieval European thought. In these exotic fantasies there were fabulous riches, fearsome monsters, and even noble savages.
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The
Travels
of Sir John Mandeville circulated widely in Europe from the first half of the fourteenth century, including Portugal. His book is a curious mixture of 'fact' and 'fiction'. He said there were Christians and Jews in Malabar, and the tomb of St Thomas in Coromandel. He wrote about the pepper vine, and widow burning, but also of eels 30 feet long, and 5,000 islands in the ocean. He reported that Indians did not travel very much as they were under the planet Saturn. Some of the flavour of his account is given when he noted that Hurmuz was very hot:

But it is so hot there in that isle that men's ballocks hang down to their shanks for the great violence of the heat, that dissolves their bodies. And men of that country that ken the manner bind them up and use certain ointments cold and restrictive to hold them up, or else they might not live.
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Such benign fantasies on both sides soon gave way to harsher realities. The Portuguese identified quite quickly the main choke points and strategic places around the Indian Ocean littoral. Indeed, the early correspondence, histories and other accounts devote much effort to this sort of identification of where was vital to control. Goa (1510), Colombo (1505; a fort was built in 1518), Melaka (1511), Hurmuz (1515), Diu (1535) and Aden were seen as most strategically located to serve Portuguese ends, and all except the last were taken. These port cities were all flourishing before the Portuguese conquest, and all had strategic implications. Goa was centrally located to control the Arabian Sea. Colombo was strategically located, and provided access to cinnamon. Melaka and Hurmuz controlled choke points, and were also major emporia. Possession of Diu provided control over the entrance to the Gulf of Cambay, and access to the rich production areas around the eastern shore of the Gulf. In the case of East Africa, Mozambique in the south had several advantages. It was conveniently located to control trade on the southern coast, and to block trade from the hostile Muslim world down to the gold available in Sofala. Also, and here Mozambique was unusual as compared with the other ports which they conquered, it was to be the vital way-station for the
carreira
from the colonial capital of Goa to the metropolitan capital of Lisbon, fulfilling the same function that the Cape of Good Hope later provided for the Dutch. In theory this voyage was to be done in one passage, but in practice the great ships often needed to call in on the African coast to heal their sick, to get supplies, on the outward voyage to collect cargo for India, or to await the next monsoon. Mozambique became the vital link in the chain between Goa and Lisbon.

These strategic sites were acquired with several ends in view. Their conquest helped the Portuguese to undermine the Muslims who had previously dominated Indian Ocean trade, especially that in spices. They functioned as nodes in the vast seaborne network of the Portuguese maritime empire. They provided facilities for the vital armadas, and the carreira to Portugal. They were beach-heads from which conversion drives were launched. They provided places where the Portuguese elite could give themselves fancy titles and indulge in an anachronistically feudal lifestyle, and from which they made vast private profits during their terms of office. In a more general sense the Portuguese were trying to create or impose a hierarchy
de novo
in the Indian Ocean. From a situation of autonomous port cities and free trade in which competition was economic but not military, they now wanted to establish an articulated structure where Lisbon controlled Goa, and Goa controlled all the conquered port cities. The nature of the political aspiration, and also its extent, has to be seen as quite revolutionary.

What were the Portuguese trying to achieve by these conquests? What they set
up was not an empire, not even a maritime empire. Subrahmanyam and Thomaz note that

in the first half of the sixteenth century, 'Portuguese India' did not designate a space that was geographically well defined but a complex of territories, establishments, goods, persons, and administrative interests in Asia and East Africa, generated by or subordinate to the Portuguese Crown, all of which were linked together as a maritime network.
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Within this network, the aim was very largely economic. From early on they unilaterally declared that all trade in spices was to be done only by themselves, or by people licensed by them. Offenders against this, that is the traders who had previously handled this trade, were to be severely punished, and their goods confiscated. To achieve this aim they captured a series of strategically located port cities, and patrolled the waters of the Indian Ocean searching for 'illicit' traders.

The patrols and the capture of ports had a wider aim also. The Portuguese wanted to direct, and tax, all trade in the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese required that all ships trading in the ocean take a licence, or
cartaz
, from a Portuguese authority. The key point was that the cartazes required Asian ships to call at Portuguese forts or towns and there pay customs duties before setting off on their voyage. What the ship could carry, and where it could trade, was strictly limited. In particular, Muslims from hostile areas, weapons, and spices were prohibited. Portuguese fleets cruised around checking all ships they came across. Those without a cartaz, and those who infringed its terms, were subject to confiscation at best, and sinking at worst.

This system was a vast protection racket, for the Portuguese were selling protection from violence which they themselves had created. Obviously it was most effective only when the Portuguese had established customs houses at which the Asian traders could call. This took some time, and this ameliorated the harshness of the system. They were established quite early in Cochin and Goa, later in Diu, and much later again in Daman and Chaul. This in turn shows two things about the Portuguese system. First, while the Portuguese presence remained fundamentally maritime and littoral throughout, this is not to say that the priorities of this empire did not change, for they did. Around mid century the focus moved from one looking to the carreira and the trade to the metropole towards a much more Asian-centred one where, for example, the aim became to encourage and tax Asian trade rather than try to control it too closely. Second, the Portuguese were unable to conquer large areas of land, and so had to make their money from the sea. Hence this system, and hence their great reliance on maritime revenue. In this they contrast strongly with a landed state, such as Gujarat. The Portuguese Estado da India got fifteen times more revenue from sea trade than from land trade. Portuguese India got about 60 per cent of its total revenue from customs duties, Gujarat got only 6 per cent. Revenues derived by the Portuguese from their control of Diu made up a large part of official receipts. The surplus from Diu, in a good year
late in the sixteenth century, provided about one-sixth of Goa's total revenue. Similarly, when trade between Gujarat and Hurmuz was blocked by war, the puppet sultan of Hurmuz had to send a much smaller contribution to Goa, as most of Hurmuz's trade was with Gujarat. As a final illustration of the unequal nature of the relationship, the route from Goa to Cambay was the most important of all for the Portuguese, even more than the carreira to Portugal. However, from the Gujarati point of view this trade made up only a small part of total trade, roughly 5 per cent.
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We will turn to the matter of the success of these aims presently, but first we need to consider two controversial matters. The first area of controversy is, how did the Portuguese justify this system, and second, was this justification one which we can accept? The great chronicler João de Barros set out the justification. The Portuguese were, in Asia, lords of the sea, and made all other ships take a safe-conduct licence, or cartaz, from them. Ships trading to enemies of Portugal could be seized on sight. By common law the seas were open to all, but this applied only in Europe to Christians, who were governed essentially by the principles of Roman Law. Hindus and Muslims, on the contrary, were outside Roman Law as they were outside the law of Jesus Christ, which all men must keep to avoid the eternal fire. Further, Hindus and Muslims had no claim to right of passage in Asian waters, because before the arrival of the Portuguese no one had claimed the sea as hereditary or conquered property. There being no preceding title, there was no present or future right of passage.
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The concrete manifestation of this came early, when in 1499 the Portuguese king Manuel gave himself the title of 'Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India'. The late Charles Boxer several times pointed out dryly that at this time the Portuguese had no ships at all east of the Cape of Good Hope.