Discuss the changes in the maritime trade between the 6th and the 16th Century AD. Highlight the changes that came with the voyages of Vasco da Gama.
The rise of Islam in the 7th Century led to the Arab conquests and political integration of Egypt, Syria, Iran and North Africa. This created a powerful zone of economic consumption with the growth of urban centres which quickened pace of long distance trade. Similarly, at the same time period, the Tang dynasty in China achieved economic and political unification to create a zone of economic high pressure. There was also a rise of regional polities who interacted with the larger forces of Islam and also engaged in maritime trade and voyages like the Fatimids of Egypt and the Chola King Rajendrachola.
Islamic religion and way of life was able to extend beyond the straits of Malacca. From the middle of the 7th century to the 15th century, there was a long line of traffic going all the way from south China to the Eastern Mediterranean which marked the general direction and structure of Indian Ocean Trade. The pattern that emerged from the 7th to the 10th centuries was one where Arab ships sailed all the way to China and back, calling at intermediate ports. This was uneconomic due to transaction costs involved.
Thus, the second typology of Indian Ocean trade, comprised of shorter, segmented voyages, stopping at major ports, with commodities going to the regional markets was preferred over the former from the 10th to 15th centuries. For example, merchants from Siraf in the Presian Gulf made voyages to China by making stops at Daybul, Calicut, Malacca and finally at Canton in China. Moreover, the sea lanes of trade were supplemented by a system of land caravans of camels, horses and mules.
This trade was founded on the silk, porcelain, sandalwood and black pepper from the East in exchange for incense (Arab gum), thoroughbred horses, ivory, cotton textiles and metal goods.
The Islamic expansion under the Arabs made it possible to unite both the arteries of the transcontinental trade of Asia. One is the Red Sea route and the other is the combined journey over sea, rivers and land across the Persian Gulf. The latter formed the main direction of trade in the 8th and 9th centuries as the Gulf had considerable advantages. The ships here were not impeded by coral reefs and strong winds.
The question arises why a direct maritime trade developed between China and the Near East when it would have been logical to have exchanged the commodities in some port in the Malabar. Due to lack of adequate information, K. N. Chaudhuri speculates that the large settlement of Muslims in Canton and their navigational skills enabled them to be universal carriers of goods and people in all major port towns of the Indian Ocean. It also seems probable that by tenth century, Chinese Merchants had become aware of the financial gains possible from direct involvement in the Indian Ocean trade. Port officials for customs bought high value imports and sold them at higher prices in the open market.
The Sung dynasty came into power in the 10th century and created an official partial monopoly in maritime trade. New commercial centres like Chuan Chou rose to prominence. Southern Arabia, Persian Gulf and South East Asia engaged in trade of luxury items like pearls, gems, silk, incense, perfumes, sandalwood and spices. They also exchanged bulk goods like sugarcane, dates, timber etc which added ballast to ships. The apparent wealth of Sung and Yung periods in China can be ascribed to income from sea customs and taxes. Hence there was incentive to encourage overseas trade.
There was a fragmentation of Arabs with the coming of Seljuk Turks in the 11th century but trade through the Silk route continued. The east to west trade was supplemented b a network of trade to East Africa with centres like Kilwa, Zanzibar and Mogadishu. Gold, Ivory and mangrove timber were main exports from this region.
From the end of the tenth century to the fifteenth centuries, important changes took places both in the direction of Indian Ocean trade and in the larger aspects of its political, religious, and artistic traditions. The decline of the Abbasid caliphate and the rise of the Fatimids in Egypt shifted the routing of long-distance trade away from Baghdad and Damascus to Aden and Fustat, a revival of trade in the Red Sea. In India, the Turkish sultanate of Delhi conquered Gujarat in 1303-4, and its rich maritime towns were now within the reach of Islamic social and political influence. At about the same time the trading ports and the coastal kingdoms of the Indonesian archipelago began to accept the Muslim faith. The expulsion of the Moorish rulers from Spain and the rise of Venice and Genoa to commercial supremacy signified the symbolic beginnings of realignment in the structure of the world economy. The Mamluks took over Egypt in 1260 AD and started exercising its control over the Red Sea by issuing safe conduct passes.
The total volume of Euro-Asian trade had become very considerable between AD 1000 and AD 1300. This would have made the ships and cargo of individual merchants trading by sea to India very vulnerable to pirates and political taxation. A convoy system, like that of the Karim system of Jewish Genizah merchants may have been in a position to buy protection from the political rulers of the Middle East and to organize better protection against attacks by the pirates of the Indian Ocean. S.D. Goeitien argues that the Karim was an annual convoy or a seaborne caravan and not a guild of merchants.
In China the economic policy followed by the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) produced contradictory effects on maritime trade, with an official discouragement of foreign trade and of the use of silver as money. In the reign of the third emperor Yung-lo, a huge series of seaborne expeditions were carried out, which suggest that political and military objectives were as much in the minds of policy makers as financial and commercial ones. When the expeditions were finally abandoned in 1433, it was against a background of dissident criticism from senior mandarins about the meager financial gains to the treasury. Future Ming emperors were determined to close China’s sea-coasts to foreign visitors and placed an embargo on the trade of Chinese merchants to overseas destinations. The reason for the change in policy was the problem of protecting the coastal provinces from ruthless sea bandits who infested the China Sea periodically.
By the 16th century, European newcomers, both Spaniards and Portuguese, made it possible for China’s silver-hungry economy to acquire the metal through a quadrilateral extension of trade between India, Japan, China and the new World.
The arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean abruptly ended the system of unarmed, peaceful oceanic navigation that was such a marked feature of the region. Vasco de Gama in 1498 dropped anchor before Calicut, the Malabar emporium.
At the time of the Portuguese arrival in the Indian Ocean, the sea was still a no-man’s territory, not in the power of any particular state or prince. The importation by the Portuguese of the Mediterranean style of trade and warfare, by land and sea, was a violation of the agreed conventions. Merchants of India, Aden, Cairo, Alexandria as well as Venice, by now the unquestioned maritime leader in the Mediterranean, had reasons to be concerned. But their domination did not succeed as initially feared. A large amount of pepper and spices were brought to Lisbon and marketed through Antwerp, but flow of goods continued through Red Sea and the Mediterranean.
The chronological divisions of the Portuguese empire, the Estado da India in the Indian Ocean during the 16th century are provided by Chaudhuri. The years from 1500 to the end of Albuquerque’s governorship in 1515 were years of ‘heroic deeds’ when Asian rulers were taken by surprise at the single-minded determination of Lisbon to seize the most profitable ports. The second period was from 1515 to 1560, when the viceroyalty of Goa reached the height of its sea-power and was able to enforce a semi-monopoly in the pepper and spice trade. Through a chain of fortified settlements and a naval patrol, Goa Dorado compelled many local traders to buy safe-conduct passes from the Estado da India and to pay its custom duties.
In the third phase from 1560 to 1600, first the pepper trade began to revive through the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, largely as a result of the Portuguese failure to curb the formidable maritime power of the North Sumatran sultanate in Acheh combined with the ineffectiveness of the naval blockade in Bab-el-Mandeb. The Portuguese created a Far Eastern branch of commercial voyages based on the ports of Macao, Nagasaki, and the Philippines. This was perhaps far more profitable and explains the gradual relaxation of the Portuguese hold on the Indian Ocean trade. The right to control the sea-lanes of Asia was never formally challenged by any local political power in the western Indian Ocean, though it was contested occasionally by Gujarati warships owned by great merchants. It was not until the appearance of the Dutch and the English that the Portuguese Empire was faced with new problems in terms of both international relations and the actual defense of economic interests.
During the first twenty years of the 16th century, the Portuguese imperial policy in Asia is characterized by the claim to an exclusive sovereignty in the Indian Ocean, which was expressed through the efforts to eliminate Muslim trade to the Red Sea and East Africa and to compel Indian merchants to buy “cartazes”, or naval passes, from the Portuguese officials. Also, in Europe, the objective was the diversion of the pepper and spice trade from Alexandria and Venice to Lisbon and Antwerp. These goals were supplemented in time by the growth of Portuguese inter-port or emporia trading in Asia, made possible by control over the formerly free maritime commercial cities.
The Portuguese voyages to India in the early years of expansion were organized primarily by the crown and not by the indigenous merchants of Lisbon. Goa was secure from attack by the forces of Bijapur, it became the official seat of Estado da India. The setting up an administrative structure in Goa and other settlements and exercising a quasi political control over Indian Ocean traders to the West of the Malaccas, were highly innovative steps taken by the Portuguese. They would try to control the commercial competition of the Gujarati merchants based on the northern ports of Diu and Cambay. The strategy was to organize a naval blockade of Bab al-Mandeb every year during the trading season and secondly to try and capture Diu itself which fell in the hands of the Portuguese in 1555. The Estado da India tried to create a territorial presence in the Gulf of Cambay. The Portuguese proved through their raids their determination to tax Gujarati trade and shipping through the system of cartazes.
In eastward expansion of the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese policy was perhaps more influenced by direct commercial considerations than in the west, though the element of armed trading was not given up. The annual trade from Goa to Bengal was even more profitable to the Portuguese than the coastal trade of Coromandel. By the end of the 16th century, the Portuguese had managed to create a highly profitable commercial network centred on the river Hugli, and as long as their control of the only large navigable port in Bengal remained strong no other European power could venture into the inland towns from the sea. The Portuguese maritime sovereignty as expressed through the cartaze system upon the Asian traders of Bengal.
In Malacca and the rest of the archipelago, Portuguese power was much more vulnerable to challenge. Malacca was dependent on rice supplies from Java and it was dangerously close to the military power of the sultans of Johore and the Sumatran kingdom of Acheh. It was difficult to patrol the inland sea passage between the scattered islands. From the commercial towns of eastern Java, the Portuguese pushed on to the Spice Islands with the four main producing islands Tidore, Ternate, Amboina and Banda. The Portuguese were never able to create a monopoly in the Moluccan spice trade. They also could not monopolize Black Pepper trade. Revival of Red Sea trade took place by running the naval blockade of Bab-el-mandeb.
The geographical limits of the Portuguese seaborne empire in Asia were reached in the Chinese port of Macau and in Japanese Nagasaki. The economic success of the Macau-Nagasaki trading voyages, as CR Boxer has pointed out, was made possible by a combination of factors. The official rupture of relations between China and Japan gave the Portuguese in Macau the opportunity to build up what was probably the most profitable part of their Asian business. Also, there was the fact that the Japanese ruling classes had a clear preference for Chinese silk cloth and raw silk for the manufacture of ceremonial clothing. The Portuguese were able to export silver from Japan in return for supplying Chinese silk. It was not until the appearance of the Dutch in Japan during the early 17th century that the court found a possible alternative to Macau’s intermediary circle. The downfall of the Portuguese in Japan was part of a larger threat of decline.
By the first decade of the 16th century, the period of peaceful sailing was over in the Indian Ocean. But absolute naval power was never within the grasp of the Portuguese. Their naval victories in the Indian Ocean were due to the fact that the land-based Asian empires and strong political kingdoms were not able to put to sea effective fighting ships. The Portuguese territorial gains were mostly made at the expense of rulers who had had no reason to defend their trading ports with strong military forces. No Asian power at the time considered the Portuguese to be a serious threat to the existing balance of power. This may be because of the indifference to trade by these rulers in the Indian Ocean. Also, the supply of goods demanded by the Asian aristocracy was not interrupted as such by the Portuguese.
Bibliography
- Chaudhuri, K.N. , Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean, Munshiram Manoharlal Pvt. Ltd.