In what ways did the advent of the Portuguese affect the dynamics of Indian oceanic trade?
From the tenth 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. 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 a realignment in the structure of the world economy.
The commercial dealings of the Jewish genizah merchants between India and the Maghreb relied on intermediaries. Business was done by consigning goods to friends and relatives in Fustat and Aden, while the principle remained in India. It is significant from the point of view of commercial organization that the leading Jewish merchants of the period with business connections in distant countries did not find it necessary to travel with their own goods.
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 organized by wealthy 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.
In China the economic policy followed by the Ming dynasty 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 peaceful oceanic navigation that was such a marked feature of the region. Vasco de Gama in 1498 dropped anchor before Calicut, the Malabar emporium. The way to the East around the Cape of Good Hope held out an exciting prospect, which was nothing less than the chance to liberate the vital arteries of trans-oceanic trade from Muslim political control. The early Portuguese conquistadores in Asia invariably claimed that their hostility against Muslim traders and shipping derived from the state of perpetual war between Christians and Muslims. The Portuguese discovery of the route to India in fact had long and solid historical antecedents and was based on a secure knowledge of seamanship in the dangerous and heavy seas of the Atlantic.
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. At sea, merchants feared only the pirates and the natural hazards. The importation by the Portuguese of the Mediterranean style of trade and warfare, by land and sea, was a violation of the agreed conventions. It was not only the merchants of India and those of Aden, Cairo and Alexandria who had reasons to fear the recent Portuguese exploits; the economic interests of Venice, by now the unquestioned maritime leader in the Mediterranean, seemed to be at stake as well.
The chronological divisions of Lusitanian presence in the Indian Ocean during the 16th century are fairly clear. The years from 1500 to the end of Albuquerque’s governorship in 1515 were years 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. Secondly, the Goa government 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 defence of economic interests.
Apart from the possibilities of long-term gains, there was an immediate urgency brought about by a general crisis in the Mediterranean spice trade. Political troubles in the Ottoman Empire and in Egypt had led to a drastic reduction in the supply of spices available for sale in Cairo, Alexandria and Beirut, and the price of pepper rose steeply. The authorities in Lisbon must have been aware of the difference between the cost prices of spices in Calicut and their selling price in Europe.
Cabral’s voyage is chiefly remembered for the large quantities of pepper and spices brought back to Lisbon, and for the bombardment of Calicut, which lasted two days. By firing on the leading port in Malabar, the Portuguese demonstrated to all Muslim ship-owners and no less to the local rulers that the period of unarmed trading was over in the Indian Ocean. Naval control of the Indian Ocean was strengthened by cutting off the spice trade of the Red Sea.
During the first twenty years of the 16th century, there were two main strands in Portuguese imperial policy in Asia. The claim to an exclusive sovereignty in the Indian Ocean 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. To the Asian dimension of the Estado da India was added the European one: the diversion of the pepper and spice trade from Alexandria and Venice to Lisbon and Antwerp. These fundamental objectives were supplemented in time by a third element, the growth of Portuguese inter-port or emporia trading in Asia, made possible by control over the formerly free maritime commercial cities.
The aggressive attitude adopted by the Portuguese and their Islamic adversaries in the Indian Ocean was a fixation that did not take into account that co-existence or peaceful trading might be more profitable than waging perpetual war by land and sea.
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. As soon as Goa was secure from attack by the forces of Bijapur, it became the official seat of Estado da India. After the death of Albuquerque, the most pressing task facing the Portuguese was to control if not altogether eliminate 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. It finally fell in the hands of the Portuguese in 1555.
Portuguese official policy in western India between 1515 and 1560 followed a consistent logic. 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 formally upheld. 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 principle of maritime of maritime sovereignty as expressed in the cartaze system was rigorously applied to 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. From the commercial towns of eastern Java, the Portuguese pushed on to the Spice Islands. There was never any question as to the Portuguese monopoly in the Moluccan spice trade.
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. Goa’s participation in the Far Eastern trade was made possibly by the fact that China was historically the meeting ground between “dear silver and cheap gold”. 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 Portguese in Japan was part of a larger threat of decline. Military exploits and violence at sea were extolled by the Portuguese; commerce and trade occupied a secondary place in the imagination and were regarded as unworthy of the dignity of the soldier-administrators in the empire. The key to Portuguese success in the Indian Ocean lay then in the military valour of Christian warriors sanctified by divine blessing.
Cut off by their geography from taking part in the military affairs of continental Europe, the Portuguese fidalgos found in Asian and African coastal kingdoms natural opportunities for acquiring a military reputation. For Asian merchants and trading cities, it was very difficult to suppress raiders from the sea who not only were equipped with ships and guns capable of destroying shore installations but came from a land-base many thousands of miles away. Whether or not the Asian political rulers had the necessary will to resist the Portuguese, it was impossible in practice to offer complete protection to merchant shipping crossing long sea-routes.
In such a situation, a compromise position is soon reached. The institution adopted to legitimize the usurpation of the maritime rights of the Asian merchants was of course the cartazes system. By issuing free safe-conduct passes to the powerful political kingdoms in the Deccan and Gujarat for their trading vessels, the Portuguese tacitly acknowledged the terms of co-existence.
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.