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.
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