The Portuguese and Violence in the Indian Ocean: some second thoughts By Michael Pearson [EMAIL PROTECTED] University of Technology, Sydney
"The use of violence is the critical issue when studying European trade in the Arabian seas."1 This short article is something of a mea culpa from me. Over many years I have consistently written that it was the Portuguese who introduced violence into what had been a peaceful maritime trading world.2 I have claimed that before 1498 the rulers of the great port cities around the littoral of the ocean used entirely peaceful means to try and promote the prosperity of their little échelles I have insisted that these Asian port cities prospered not by compulsion, but by providing facilities for trade freely undertaken by a vast array of merchants. What the rulers provided was opportunities, fair treatment, an infrastructure within which trade could take place. They ensured low and relatively equitable customs duties, and a modicum of law and order, but did little else. Visiting merchants enjoyed considerable juridical autonomy, and typically lived in defined areas with their fellows and handled most of their legal and commercial matters for themselves. Officials concerned with trade were instructed to encourage and welcome visitors. Any attempt by the rulers to give themselves any advantage in trade matters would fail, for such an attempt would simply lead to merchants taking their trade elsewhere. The initiative was very much with the merchants. Patricia Risso was not exaggerating very much when she ended a review of my latest book by saying that I seemed to think that "religious intolerance, nationalist exclusivity, and all significant violence came to an innocent and morally superior Indian Ocean from Europe." 3 I am at present engaged in a more detailed study of violence, at both macro and micro levels, in the Indian Ocean. This study will eventually include a discussion of piracy, with due attention to the difficulties in distinguishing between a pirate, a corsair, and a privateer: much piracy is in the eye of the beholder. This analysis is for another occasion. To return to my present concern, some detailed research has led me to reconsider and slightly modify my long-held views. The fifteenth-century Indian Ocean, or at least its littoral, was not as immune from violence and coercion as I have claimed. Rene Barendse some time ago pointed out that the Ottomans controlled all trade in the Black Sea, while the Mamluks had a fleet in the Red Sea, which may have been used to combat piracy, or possibly to control and tax some trade. Closer to home, Diu under Malik Ayaz had a considerable fleet. Why? 4 Tomé Pires in the early sixteenth century wrote of Hurmuz: "Next in order the civilized island of Ormuz is represented for us with all its kingdom and the many islands in the straits there.... It borders on Arabia Petrea [that is Arabia, or the west side of the gulf] on the [word missing] side, where it has cities under its sway, and on the Cambay side [it is bounded by] the Nodhakis, and on the mainland [it is bounded by] the great Persian province. The islands of Bahrein belong to the kingdom of Ormuz, and also all those in the Straits of Ormuz .... This kingdom stretches from Cape Ras el Hadd inwards along the straits."5 Hurmuz had been founded on the small island of Jarun around 1300, and had expanded considerably. Its jurisdiction went as far as Kharg, at the end of the Gulf, and also included all the islands grouped together at Bahrein, and all those in the Straits of Hurmuz. On the west side the island state controlled and developed the ports and littoral of Oman, including Muscat. Hurmuz also maintained a maritime hegemony over the Iranian coast, to the extent of preventing the construction of local fleets. 6 However, we know little about the maritime ambitions of this ruler. Did his control extend from coastal land to coastal waters? Did he have a navy which patrolled and forced ships to call at his ports; did he try to restrict trade in particular goods; did he attempt to control piracy, this being endemic in the Gulf? In our present state of knowledge it would be hazardous to equate the ruler of Hurmuz with the activities of the Portuguese state, which we will discuss presently. Professor Subrahmanyam, in his problematic book on Vasco da Gama, cites several instances of west coast Indian states using violence at sea. However, he concludes that these were not the same as the later actions of the Portuguese. First, they had cannon on board ship, second most of his examples are of naval action as an adjunct to a land campaign, and third these examples are all rather localised. He concludes "What was fundamentally new about the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean was thus not the fact that they used force on water: it was the degree of expertise with which they did so, the fact that they did so over such large maritime spaces, separated moreover by such a distance from anything that could be thought of as their home territory, and the relatively systematic effort that they brought to bear in this sphere." 7 I agree with Subrahmanyam to the extent that I still find the Portuguese effort to be innovative. However, my reasons are different. True, he gets closer to the vital matter when he writes: "The point was that Asian states in about 1500 do not seem in general to have conceived of the sea as a space over which sovereignty was exercised and regulated through systematic violence. Thus the articulation of maritime space and political imagination was different in the Indian Ocean and Iberia at this time ..." 8 What we need to do is to differentiate between coast and ocean. Here Philip Steinberg's work is very much to the point, for he writes that the sea consists of two regions: "One region, the coastal zone, is like land in that it is susceptible to being claimed, controlled, regulated, and managed by individual state-actors. In the other region, the deep sea, the only necessary (or even permissible) regulation is that which ensures that all ships will be able to travel freely across its vast surface." 9 The point then is that while possibly coastal control and taxing had occurred before the Portuguese, and Hurmuz at least had expanded to create a substantial littoral and possibly coastal-waters empire, we can certainly say that oceanic control was not attempted. Steinberg in fact shows how novel the Portuguese were, for he claims that the "deep sea" is, or should be, mare nullius or liberum. The latter means free, the former means unclaimed and this does mean that nullius is the better term, for liberum implies that a decision had been made that the Indian Ocean be free and open, while nullius implies no one had any opinion one way or the other, or indeed no one had any concept of rights over the sea, whether free or closed. The Portuguese claimed (correctly) that as there was no preceding claim to sovereignty over the ocean, they could come in and claim it for themselves. (A full disentangling of the legal situation would take too long for my present purpose, involving as it would concepts of mare liberum, mare clausum, mare nullius, res communis and vacuum domicilium.) Interesting here to find that Grotius ridiculed the Portuguese claim that they had now occupied the high seas, for many others had sailed over it before them. Yet Grotius seems here to be setting aside the Portuguese claim that while certainly people had travelled over the sea before 1498, no state had claimed either sovereignty or even suzerainty. Thus, he said, the Indian Ocean before Europeans entered was res communis, that is open to all. 10 True enough, but this presumably need not invalidate a Portuguese effort to change this. They carried with them baggage from the Mediterranean, such as the Roman claim to Mare Nostrum, and generally a tendency towards thalassocracy. As Mollat noted, from very early times in Europe "the domination of the sea was a natural objective of maritime cities." 11 What they did to put into effect this claim is too well known to need repetition here. Briefly, they claimed a monopoly over the trade in all spices, and the right to direct and tax all other trade in the Indian Ocean (note "the ocean" not just coastal waters). To implement this they conquered several important port cities, their fleets patrolled far and wide, and brutal atrocities were used in an exemplary fashion. The Portuguese unilaterally dictated a closed Indian Ocean, and then the king, instead of having to pay his men to enforce this, instead let the victims pay by letting his soldiers plunder those who infringed. Analogous to this is the failure to capture Aden. It could be that this suited Portuguese captains very well. They could patrol and plunder, seize prizes and take bribes; had Aden been Portuguese these opportunities would have been reduced. It is true that there were modifications and exemptions aplenty. Indeed, the whole "system" really failed, as evidenced especially by the way the spice trade to the Mediterranean, the area where the Portuguese tried hardest, increasingly took place outside of their control. Nevertheless, my claim is that Portuguese aspirations do not represent a continuation of a preceding system, nor even an intensification of what was already accepted practice. Rather, by operating ocean wide they were completely innovative. A brief look at the activities of the Dutch will help to locate the Portuguese effort more concretely. Following Steensgaard, it used to be thought that the Dutch and English companies were really businesses, modern corporations which acted much more "rationally" than the pre-modern Portuguese. The implication was that they used "modern" commercial tactics to achieve trade advantage, rather than primitive violence. This broad view is no longer tenable. Barendse points out that while "Europeans" and "Asian" were part of the same trade networks, au fond the European presence was built on the capacity and willingness to use force. Metropolitan governments gave the Dutch and English East India Companies the "righ" to use this state-like aspect, that is force. As one wrote "no fear no friendship, if no naval force no trade." 12 As regards specifically the Dutch company, essentially it was a company in Europe, but a state in the Indian Ocean. Apparently finding no contradiction, it vigorously upheld mare liberum in Europe, and ruthlessly tried to impose mare clausum in the Indian Ocean. 13 Thus the Dutch in the seventeenth century used violence at least as much as had the Portuguese, though they may have focussed it better in precisely targeted places: in the Malukas and Java, and to an extent Kerala and Sri Lanka. Ideally, and theoretically, they only used force if they had worked out this would result some time in a profit. The Dutch used the Portuguese pass system (called pascedullen, as compared with the Portuguese cartaz) more effectively and more ruthlessly than did their predecessors. They used blockades to impose treaties on the rulers of several port cities. These restricted greatly their ability to trade with others. The main Dutch effort was directed towards the trade which had also commanded the attention of the Portuguese, that is the trade in spices. However, to an extent they moved away from the Portuguese policy of patrolling the ocean to stop the spice trade, and instead, in a much more focussed way, they aimed to control production areas, not just trade in the harvested product. The Dutch achieved some success in controlling the pepper trade, but they did much better as regards the fine spices -- cinnamon, mace, nutmeg and cloves - where they finally achieved something close to a total monopoly. In large part this was because, unlike pepper, the fine spices grew in restricted areas. In Sri Lanka the Dutch obtained their first cargo of cinnamon in 1638, and the sale price in Amsterdam was nearly double the purchase price. After the Portuguese had been driven out of this island, by 1658, the Dutch, now having a complete monopoly, thought they could charge what they liked. They raised the price from 15 stuivers to 36 in 1658, and later 50. In the Maluka islands, home of the other three fine spices, the Dutch behaved with great ruthlessness. Under governor Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1619-23, 1627-29), pursuing his "policy of frightfulness," they deported much of the population of the Bandas, and then moved in Dutch settlers supported by a vast slave population drawn from such scattered areas as East Africa, Persia, Bengal and Japan. 14 In 1636 on one of these islands as a result of Dutch severity there were only 560 natives left, together with 539 Dutch and 834 free foreigners. To overcome the labour shortage they had to import 2000 slaves from Arakan and Bengal. On other Banda islands all nutmeg trees were cut down so as to avoid the possibility of smuggling. Their policy in the clove producing areas was equally bloody, indeed was too successful, for so well did they limit production that in 1665 there was a shortage of cloves. Production was closely controlled. In 1710 the directors of the VOC noted "with grief" that the most recent harvest of cloves on Amboyna was likely to be 1.85 million pounds. They did massive extirpations in order to get production down to an "acceptable" level of about 500,000 pounds. 15 Overall the profits were huge. Anthony Reid claims that by the mid seventeenth century the VOC could sell spices in Europe at about 17 times, and in India about 14 times, the price which they had paid in Maluka, and he notes that none of this profit went to any Asian. 16 All this was achieved by a skilful use of violence in selected areas. The question posed at the start of this article was to consider whether the violent actions at sea of the Portuguese, and later the Northern Europeans, were novel in an Indian Ocean context, or alternatively were they drawing on existing precedents? The answer seems to be clear: while before 1498 some port city rulers may have used coercion in coastal waters, the use of violence on the high seas by the Europeans was new, and was based on an equally innovative notion, that is that they could claim some sort of sovereignty, or at least suzerainty, over the ocean, and so control or direct trade. However, we have seen that the Dutch especially went beyond this to attempt to control production of some products. Attempts to control, or even monopolise, trade in particular products was not new. Various Asian political authorities had tried this from time to time, as had the Europeans. But control of production is a very different matter, and this was a harbinger of the massive European impact on India and other Asian countries in the nineteenth century. -- R.J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas, The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century, Armonk, NY, M.E. Sharpe, 2002, p. 494. For one example, M.N. Pearson, Os Portugueses na India, Lisboa, Editorial Teorema, 1991, pp. 43-53. International Journal of Maritime History, XVI, 1, 2004 Barendse email to author 10 Sept 1999. Tomé Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, ed. A. Cortesão, London, Hakluyt, 1944, 2 vols I, 19 André Wink, Al-Hind: the making of the Indo-Islamic World, Leiden, Brill, 1990-2004, 3 vols, III, 193. More on Hurmuz and its maritime empire in Duarte Barbosa, Livro, London, Hakluyt, 1918-21, 2 vols, 32-48, and for the best modern treatment see Jean Aubin, 'Le Royaume d'Ormuz au début du XVIe siècle' Mare Luso-Indicum, 2, 1973, pp. 77-179 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 109-12 Subrahmanyam email to author 1 Feb 2000. Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean, Cambridge, 2001, p. 115 M. Tull, 'Maritime History in Australia,' in Frank Broeze, ed., Maritime History at the Crossroads: a Critical Review of Recent Historiography, St. John's, Canada, International Maritime Economic History Association, 1996, pp. 7-8; Mark Vink, 'Mare Liberum and Dominium Maris: Legal Arguments and Implications of the Luso-Dutch Struggle for control over Asian Waters, c. 1600-1663,' in K.S. Mathew, ed., Studies in Maritime History, Pondicherry, Pondicherry University, 1990, p. 48. Michel Mollat du Jourdin, Europe and the Sea, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993, pp. 28-31 Barendse, pp. 493-4 Barendse, pp. 388-93 Willard A. Hanna, Indonesian Banda: Colonialism and its Aftermath in the Nutmeg Islands, Philadelphia, Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978, p. 63, and generally for the Dutch in the Bandas. Kristof Glamman, Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 1620-1740, Copenhagen, Danish Scientific Press, 1958, p. 109. Excellent data in Anthony Reid, "An 'Age of Commerce' in SE Asian History," Modern Asian Studies, 24, 1990, pp. 1-30, espec. p. 11. -- The author can be contacted at Michael Pearson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> This article is being circulated with the permission of the author. It was earlier published in Oriente [Lisbon], no. 12, pp.11-23. 2004. ----------------------------------------------------------------- GOANET-READER WELCOMES contributions from its readers, by way of essays, reviews, features and think-pieces. 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