Another view of colonial history which those nostalgic about the past on Goanet would surely not agree with. Any other perspectives? I found this debate interesting. It came up on the what-if group on Usent (http://groups.google.com ) We from Goa seem to be often living in a what-if world. FN
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Search Result 52 From: Doug Muir ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Subject: Re: WI the Spanish and Portugese stayed in charge in the Far East? View: Complete Thread (9 articles) Original Format Newsgroups: alt.history.what-if, soc.history.what-if Date: 2003-07-29 09:38:17 PST "Hairy Harry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > During 1500-1600 Spanish and Portuguese explorers dominated not only the > America's but also the far east. Well, problem #1 is, no they didn't. Unless you're using a very strange definition of "dominate". The Spanish got a toehold in Luzon and gradually expanded it, and used it as a base for trade with China. That was about it for the Spanish in Asia. The Portuguese, more complicated, but basically they set up a network of heavily armed trading posts and used them to extort protection money by land and sea. This worked pretty well in the Indian Ocean. East of Malaysia, though, they never managed to do much more than trade. The Portuguese empire was hugely influential and it had an enormous effect on both European and Asian history. However, it's really a mistake to say that it "dominated" much of Asia, never mind the Far East. They never made any significant conquests, and their resource base was always painfully limited. > They had strong bases in India, Indonesia, China and Japan. And in Japan and > China they had also successes with missionaring the natives. Later in that > century they were replaced by Dutch and English explorers and entrepreneurs > who wheren't particularly interested in converting the natives to > Christianity. After a few decades most native christians were back to > paganism or killed as happened in Japan. Not really. The Spanish were interested in conversion, and eventually succeeded in converting coastal Luzon and later the rest of the Philippines plus a few Pacific islands. But they didn't send many missionaries outside their immediate sphere of influence, so they were never going to convert anywhere else in Asia. The Portuguese showed some interest in converting the Japanese and had some success there for a while. Everywhere else, though, they were only modestly interested in conversion. They eventually established small convert populations in and around their trading posts -- Macao, Timor, Goa -- but none of these ever amounted to much. This had nothing to do with them being replaced by the Dutch or the English. The Portuguese never were replaced in those places, and they still didn't do much. In fact, the Portuguese stayed in places like Mozambique and Angola for >400 years without converting many natives. They just weren't as interested in conversion as the Spanish. They were traders more than conquerors, and conversion efforts could interfere with trade. Doug M. ########################################################################## # Send submissions for Goanet to [EMAIL PROTECTED] # # PLEASE remember to stay on-topic (related to Goa), and avoid top-posts # # More details on Goanet at http://joingoanet.shorturl.com/ # # Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others # ##########################################################################
