The Indian Ocean (31 page)

The Kerala or Malabar coast was the second great area of concern to the Portuguese, for this is where they got pepper, and the naus for Portugal sailed from Cochin. There were several major changes in this area as a result of the Portuguese presence. Calicut, at 1500 the greatest market by far, and dominated by pardesi Muslims from the Red Sea and Cairo, declined as a result of Portuguese attacks. These foreign Muslims moved out to safer parts. The local Muslims, that is local converts called Mapillahs, perforce stayed, and continued to try to trade in pepper outside the Portuguese monopoly system. Cochin became a Portuguese puppet town, and a centre of their trade in pepper. The town included a large casado population, but trade except that to Portugal was dominated by Gujarati merchant groups, and locally by Malabar Hindu groups.

Sri Lanka was a somewhat aberrant part of the Portuguese estado, for it was only here that they attempted a large land conquest. The island was valued both for its strategic location, and for its monopoly supply of true cinnamon. Colombo was considered to be one of the lynch pins of the whole Portuguese system. Yet here also their sea patrols were unable to achieve a monopoly over the export of cinnamon. Encouraged by the conversion of a local king, the Portuguese later in the sixteenth century became embroiled in major land wars. These were unsuccessful, and their cost contributed in a major way to the increasing financial straits of the estado at the end of the century and later.

The Bay of Bengal was an area where the official Portuguese writ ran lightly. The most important port had been Pulicat, and during the sixteenth century the Portuguese dominated this and the neighbouring port of San Thomé, especially the very lucrative trade to Melaka. Consequently, local traders moved to Masulipatnam further north, which became the greatest market in the whole Bay of Bengal. This is yet another sign of the way local merchants could avoid the Portuguese, in this case by moving from Pulicat to Masulipatnam, in others from Diu to Surat, or Hurmuz to Bandar Abbas, or from Sofala to Mombasa. Masulipatnam drew on an extensive and productive hinterland in the sultanate of Golconda. Here the main merchant communities were Hindu groups like the Klings and Chettis, others Muslim such as the Chulias, but also some Gujaratis yet again and Persian Muslims. Further north in Bengal the main market was Chittagong, and later Hugli. While the local economy was controlled by indigenous Bengali traders, long-distance trade often was dominated by people from outside. For example, trade to the major market of Melaka was done by Kling merchants based in Melaka, and the pepper trade by Persians.

At the end of our tour we reach one of the greatest port cities, Melaka. This is another example of a market dominated entirely by foreign goods; very little came from the interior area of the Malay peninsular. Rather, goods from literally all over the world were available there. We noted above that there were four major merchant communities in Melaka at the time of Albuquerque's conquest in 1511. Portuguese control affected them considerably. Their attempts to centralise and tax trade led to an exodus, especially of the Gujaratis, who moved off to more welcoming and less corrupt ports. In particular, the decline of Melaka led to the rise of Aceh, in northern Sumatra, which during the century became a major centre for trade, especially pepper from the east and Indian products from the west.

How then can we sum up changes in Indian Ocean trade in the sixteenth century as a result of the Portuguese presence? The key word must be continuity. Most things did not change. Markets and trade remained controlled, at the most fundamental level, by the monsoons. The major markets needed either to be located adjacent to major production areas, as in Gujarat, or at choke points, such as Aden, Melaka, and Hurmuz. The goods traded in these markets changed little. The great mass of the trade remained coastal trade in humble port markets strung all along the littoral of the Indian Ocean. As to the dominant merchant communities, variety remains the key. A host of traders, both pedlars and princes, traded across the ocean.

In areas controlled more or less tightly by the Portuguese, that is the west coast of India, Muslim traders faced formidable opposition and moved away. Other communities were little affected. As to markets, at least four formerly important ones declined once they were taken over by the Portuguese: Sofala, Hurmuz, Diu, and Melaka. To be sure, Hurmuz and Diu had large surpluses from customs duties, but these resulted not from their roles as markets, but from Portugal's coercive trade control system. Calicut, while not taken over, was badly affected by Portuguese attacks. The only success was Goa, which prospered thanks to concentrated Portuguese efforts; but we must remember that its trade was, as noted, only one-tenth of that from Gujarat's ports. In any case, Goa's success was entirely dependent on the success of Portuguese trade control policies, and once these were challenged and rendered nugatory by the arrival of the Dutch Goa fell into decline, as also did Diu. We must now sketch changes in the seventeenth century.

By the middle of the seventeenth century the Portuguese official position in the Indian Ocean area was in tatters. Most of its major forts – Melaka, Cochin, Colombo, Hurmuz – had been lost, usually to the Dutch. On the East African coast the Estado da India retained toe holds only in Mozambique, and Mombasa until the 1690s. Elsewhere it kept only Timor, Macau, and Goa, Daman and Diu on the west coast of India. In part the estado now moved from being a maritime entity to a land based one, for the northern provinces of Bassein (until lost to the rising Indian power, the Marathas, in 1739) and Daman became flourishing agriculture-based areas where many Portuguese did well: as the saying goes, rich men in a poor state. More important, the private Portuguese traders, the casados, continued to trade as they had done in the sixteenth century. The only difference was that while in the later sixteenth century they had loaded large private cargoes on the naus for Lisbon, they now, as the carreira declined, were forced to focus almost entirely on the Indian Ocean. They were to be found all around the Bay of Bengal, on the west coast of India, and along the Swahili coast. Like the private English traders, they by and large enjoyed no particular advantage over their Asian competitors. While the state declined, private Portuguese continued to operate. As British power expanded later in the eighteenth century they, like for example the Parsis, operated within its entrails, serving as middle men, petty traders, facilitators for the dominant British.

With this broad background, we can turn to the vexed question of the importance of the arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. I will look at several themes, but very briefly. We must first note that the linkages that the Iberians established were vast and pregnant with consequences. The Spanish linked the Americas and Europe, and via the Pacific the Americas and East Asia. The Portuguese connected southern America with Africa and Europe, and also the north and south Atlantic, as well as the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. (Later the Dutch linked the far western part of the Indian Ocean, the Cape, with the far east, that is western Australia and Indonesia.) Men began to travel widely, and serve these far-flung Iberian empires in many continents. Duarte Coelho Pereira served the Portuguese state in Morocco and West Africa. In 1509–29 he was in India, and this period included voyages to China, Vietnam and Siam. Then he returned to Portugal
and was Portuguese ambassador to France, after which he had various navy commands. In 1534 he became the lord-proprietor of the captaincy of Pernambuco in northeast Brazil, where he remained for twenty years.
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Impressive and far-flung connections indeed, yet in the case of the Indian Ocean we must remember that Asia and Europe had been linked for centuries via the Red Sea and Gulf. Rome had an extensive trade with India 2,000 years ago. Later, Asian products continued to get to the Mediterranean and European markets. Spices were the most important here. Europeans needed them to preserve meat, and to flavour it. This was certainly an important trade for the European consumers, and for the Asian producers and traders. It was also important for the Mamluk rulers of Egypt, for a significant amount of their revenue came from taxing this trade.

Some historians claim that while certainly there had been some contact before 1498, commercial connections between Europe and Asia were greatly strengthened because the Portuguese had discovered a new, faster and more efficient route to join the two, that is the route around the Cape of Good Hope. It is true that the Cape route was, at least in theory, faster than the more difficult route from the spice production areas in the Malukus, across the Indian Ocean, up the Red Sea, and then overland to Alexandria. The Cape route also was cheaper, because taxes did not have to be paid to land controllers en route, especially the Mamluks. Furthermore, at this time sea transport was substantially more cost-effective than was transport over land (see page 29).

In practice it turned out that the Cape route was not really so much better. It was, after all, a long and arduous sea voyage which took many months. Quite often Portuguese ships were lost on the way, or had very long passages. Mortality was very high, so that often ships from Portugal had to stop over in Mozambique to cure their sick before they set off again for India. Many of the naus were overloaded, and the cargoes poorly stowed, so that the spices and other cargo reached Lisbon in very bad condition. Between 1497 and 1590 about 171,000 people, mostly Portuguese, left Portugal for India. About 17,000 were lost to shipwreck and disease en route, while of the 105,000 who set off to return to Portugal, 11,000 never made it. During the same period a similar 10 per cent of ships were lost. This data points to a quite high, but not surprising, attrition of men and ships.
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There are two other matters that we need to consider in this context. First, European historians have written extensively about changes in the spice trade to Europe. What we can say here is that this trade was no doubt important for Europe, but not nearly so much for Asia. Only about one-tenth of Asia's total production of spices went to Europe. Most of them were consumed within Asia. China, for example, was a huge customer for ginger and pepper, as was the Mughal empire. To focus only on the spice trade to Europe is to ignore the bulk of this trade, which was never destined to go anywhere near the Mediterranean. The Portuguese had very little control of this intra-Asian trade.

It could be that we are using the wrong geographical categories here. I have been writing of 'Asia' and 'Europe', but maybe this familiar terminology disguises more than it elucidates. When we write about this early modern period there is often an
undertone of a successful dynamic Europe as compared with a static, even backward, Asia. We might do better to think of an area called Eurasia. This would include the eastern Mediterranean, and would take in part of the Ottoman Empire. The area then extends down through Egypt to the Red Sea, and so into the Arabian Sea. These areas have all been intricately linked for centuries, even millennia, by trade and the movement of people. If we take this perspective then we could say that the Cape route opened up an alternative to trade within Eurasia, but that this route did not take over from the more traditional ones for some time yet.

But surely the Portuguese, being Europeans, stood out in Asia? Surely many of their feats, and many of the things they introduced, could not be emulated by Asians? Well, not really. One of the few areas where the Portuguese were unusual was in their naval prowess, for they had mastered the art of mounting cannon on board ships. This ability enabled them to achieve considerable maritime success all over the Indian Ocean, though they certainly never came near to controlling the seas and all ships on them.

In a more cultural area, it is sometimes claimed that the Portuguese brought the fruits of Renaissance Europe to India. This is a problematic claim. First, Portugal did not share fully in the series of developments collectively known as the Renaissance, mainly as the Church, and the Counter-Reformation, were too influential. The persecution of Portugal's important Jewish population, which caused many of them to flee north to the Low Countries, persisted after those who remained had converted. This had long-term effects on Portugal's intellectual life. As a specific example, what of the printing press, often considered to be a great symbol of the whole loosening up of the dissemination of knowledge which is characteristic of the Renaissance? A printing press arrived in Goa in 1556, thanks to the Jesuits. By 1679 it had published forty books, but only three of these were on secular subjects. The most famous of these is the work by Goa's great savant, Garcia d'Orta,
Colloquios dos simples e drogas
. The other thirty-seven were all on religious subjects, and some of them were mere anti-Jewish or anti-Hindu propaganda. And it is symptomatic that d'Orta's work had much more impact on the rest of Europe than it had in Portugal.

If we take a very long-term view, can we say that the Portuguese opened the door for other Europeans to come in and change Asia profoundly? Were they harbingers of a future when most areas in Asia were colonised by Europeans powers, with very dramatic and deleterious consequences? Again this claim is difficult to sustain. As we have been pointing out, in many areas the Portuguese had no particular advantage over the Asian states and peoples with whom they had dealings. They were, if you like, as premodern or early modern as anyone else. Generally speaking, westerners had no superiority in any area at this time. This was obviously the case in terms of culture, society or religion, and it would be racist to say otherwise. However, this also applies in material matters, such as the production of goods, trade practices and technology. Inequality appeared only when western Europe industrialised, and for the first time we have a rich world and a poor world. This happened only from late in the eighteenth century. One consequence of industrialisation in the west was that they now had the technological capacity to take over large areas of Asia, and this is
what happened. However, my argument is that the increasing economic and military power of the west led inevitably to their colonising Asia; this would have happened even if the Portuguese had not rounded the Cape in 1498. The Portuguese effort then must be seen as a tour de force, that is a prodigious effort which however had no flow on and no consequences – in short, a one-off achievement.