The Indian Ocean

by Michael Pearson

  Comparisons have often been made with Portuguese activities at the same time in the early fifteenth century. When the Chinese were travelling all over the Indian Ocean, say in 1422, the Portuguese had not even got to Cape Bojador, 26° N. Zheng He's greatest ships were 400 feet long, while Vasco da Gama's were between 85 and 100 feet. Many senior historians have speculated that Zheng He's fleets had the ability to round the Cape of Good Hope (indeed maybe they did) and proceed north to discover western Europe. World history would have been stood on its head.

  The reality is a little less exciting than this. There were a total of six expeditions between 1403 and 1433, sponsored by the Yong Le emperor of the Ming dynasty. These vast fleets travelled all around the littoral of the Indian Ocean, going as far as Jiddah, and far down the Swahili coast. Each had between 100 and 200 ships, and forty to sixty of these were the famed huge treasure ships, which could be 150 metres long. There were maybe 27,000 men in each fleet. However, most of the ships were much smaller, some for example being water carriers. Barker tentatively claims that even the size of the great treasure ships has been enthusiastically overestimated: they may have been only about 230 feet long (though this is still very large for the time).96 They are to be seen as a continuation of the tribute system, with its characteristic mixture of tribute and trade. However, the fleets also engaged in essentially pedling trade in the Indian Ocean, that is, they took goods from one place to another quite apart from any association with tribute. They took southeast Asian sandalwood and Indian pepper to Aden and Dhofar, Indian pepper to Hurmuz, sandalwood and rice to Mogadishu, and rice, probably from Bengal, to the Maldives.97

  Perhaps the most important point is that Zheng He (perhaps understandably) has bewitched historians, and led to their ignoring three important matters that place his voyages in context. First, his activities were really a continuation of a long tradition, albeit writ large. Second, the tribute system, so-called, hardly meant Chinese suzerainty all over the Indian Ocean. Third, for much of the time the expeditions engaged in humble Indian Ocean trade alongside many other merchants. We described Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo travelling in private, and very large, Chinese ships, and generally Chinese merchants, often ignoring official prohibitions on overseas trade, dominated the trade from their coast to southeast Asia, and at least up to the middle of the fifteenth century, well after the end of major state expeditions, participated fully in trade from Melaka to the west coast of India but not beyond.

  Overall then Chinese merchants, and state expeditions, played a rather small and transient role in the Indian Ocean proper. We can now turn to a discussion of ports, routes and traders in the Indian Ocean up to about 1500.

  There are several ways to categorise ports around the Indian Ocean at this time. Some owed much to geography, either because they were located on choke points, or because they had productive hinterlands. Some were pure exchange centres, others had some industry of their own. Some were subordinate to a larger inland state, while others were port city states, or perhaps, to borrow the southeast Asian term, port polities. We noticed earlier that port cities have connections with the near interior, that is the umland, with their hinterland, and with their foreland, that is the areas of the overseas world with which the port is linked through shipping, trade and passenger traffic. It is this characteristic which means that port cities by definition are cosmopolitan, much more so than the inland. The visitors are very different from inland peasant populations. These are

  some of the most enterprising and dynamic individuals, people whose horizons have been broadened by time and exposure, whose skins wear the deep hue of the 'tanning of travel.' They bring awareness of an enlarged macrocosm to their host community, transfusing resident populations with new ideas in the give of foreign expertise and the take of local hospitality.98

  Where were the major port cities in the Indian Ocean area in our period? We should start in East Africa. In the far south, Sofala provided gold and ivory from the far interior. The gold was mined or washed in the inland Mutapa state in present day Zimbabwe and brought to the coast to be exchanged for cloth and other manufactures from India and the Middle East. To the north, Kilwa was the great emporium on the coast between roughly 1250 and 1330, from which time date a great mosque and palace, the latter being the largest roofed stone building south of the Sahara until modern times. By 1500 the greatest port city was Mombasa, an important centre of exchange of ivory and gold from the south for manufactures from the west and north. Malindi was a smaller centre at this time, but Mogadishu benefited from its proximity to the Red Sea and Hadhramaut to be another important port. All of these ports on the Swahili coast were autonomous politically, and indeed engaged in much competition and even conflict with each other. The only substantial interior state at this time was the Mutapa empire, and its sway ended far from the coast. None of them were important centres of production: rather they acted as outlets for export goods from the interior, gold and ivory especially. Consequently connections with the interior were of crucial importance. Yet here and elsewhere the major products traded were humble bulk goods carried along the coast in a myriad of small dhows: mangrove poles, cheap cloth, food, even water.

  Moving along the coast, Aden was usually a great port city because of its location at the entrance to the Red Sea. It was also very much an exchange centre or echelle, for it was almost an island, cut off as it is from the inland by the mountains which surround it. It had no hinterland. There were several ports within the Red Sea, but the greatest certainly was Jiddah. It had been a major port for many centuries, occasionally helped by government policy. In 1429 the Mamluk sultan even decreed that spices from the east could only be sold in Jiddah, and only to his agents.99 In that century the port was known to the Arabs as the 'Bride of the Red Sea'.100 Portuguese accounts of trade before their arrival make clear Jiddah's central role. Barros wrote that it was the major focus of the spice trade, saying that Jiddah, with its buildings, trade and commerce, and because almost all the ships that come from India call at it, 'is the most celebrated and noble settlement of all this Arabian coast inside the entrance', and added that 'most of the residents of that city [Jiddah] were merchants, because of the merchandise that flowed through it, both entering and leaving'.101 Elsewhere he described how the goods came down from Cairo, and the ships called at Jiddah. From there the goods went off to the Arabian Sea directly, not calling at Aden, with their times of sailing determined by the monsoons. They left the Red Sea 'in the months of navigation, when the westerlies prevail', and came back with the easterlies.102

  The situation in the Gulf varied over time. At the beginning of our period, when the Abbasid empire was flourishing, the largest ships could not reach Basra, let alone Baghdad, because the estuary and the delta of the Tigris-Euphrates were very difficult to navigate. For a brief time, the first half of the tenth century, Sohar was an important port, with contacts up the Gulf and across to Africa. After it was sacked by the Buyids from Oman it was replaced by Siraf, on the east coast of the Gulf south of Shiraz, where large boats were unloaded and their goods taken in smaller ships to the great cities further north. Going south, ships went from Siraf to Muscat and Sohar, then either to Daybul or ports in Malabar, then around Sri Lanka to Melaka, up to Hanoi, and then to Guangzhou. Typically, this trade was at first handled in its entirety by Muslim traders, some Persians but increasingly Arabs, and from about 1000 became more segmented, with Chinese coming some of the way, and Indians also involved as goods were trans-shipped and sold on at one or other of these great echelles.103 The other great port in the Gulf in late Abbasid times, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was Qeys, Qais or Kish, on a small island down the Gulf from Siraf. Here Indians brought in spices, people from Yemen, Iraq and Fars provided silks and cloths, wheat, barley and millet. There was also a large slave trade, and ivory, gold, wood, skins and ambergris from East Africa. Horses were sent out to the Deccan. Pearls were another export from this major port, while there have been many f
inds of Chinese ceramics.

  Hurmuz, located on the choke point at the entrance to the Gulf, was always an important exchange centre, but rose to greater prominence in the fifteenth century. Most of these great marts were independent of any exterior political authority at this time. They acted as major centres for the exchange of Middle Eastern and even European goods for products from all over the Indian Ocean area. Located on barren foreshores, and deficient even in water, let alone food, most had no major productive role, nor extensive hinterland. Rather they were hinges linking areas to the north with those to the south and east.

  As we move southeast from the Gulf we begin to find variations on this pattern. Ports in the area around the Indus delta, the first part of South Asia to be conquered and converted to Islam, drew on a large and quite productive hinterland. Daybul, or Bambhore, at the mouth of the Indus, was a very old emporium which declined from the eleventh century as a result of silting. It was replaced by Lahari Bandar, but then there was also a major port at Thatta from the fifteenth century, located no less than 200 kms up the river from the coast.

  The great ports of Gujarat were certainly important centres of exchange, but they were located on the maritime fringe of important production centres for such products as indigo, saltpetre, and especially a vast variety of cotton cloths. Indeed, some of the manufacturing process was done in these very port cities. In our period the greatest port was Cambay, at the head of the Gulf of Cambay. This, like many other ports within and around the gulf, was not an independent city state: rather it was part of the important Muslim sultanate of Gujarat. Here were huge volumes of trade, skilful merchants, and a very well articulated network of production and exchange and credit. For such ports, that is those with productive interiors, connections with the land were obviously crucial, as compared with say Aden and Hurmuz, which being dependent on the exchange of products from all over the Indian Ocean, but not from their interiors, were less concerned about what happened directly inland from them.

  The ports further down India's west coast were less important, in part because the interior was less productive. The next major group of port cities were in Malabar, now the Indian state of Kerala. The dominant port here was Calicut, ruled by a powerful and independent ruler, the Samudri raja or Zamorin, and a market not only for a host of 'foreign' goods but also a great collection and distribution centre for the pepper which was harvested in abundance in the interior. Several other port polities were important at different times in this region. One of them was Cranganore, some 15 miles landwards from the seashore and located on several rivers. A vast array of merchants there dealt in spices.104 None of these Malabar ports were centres for manufacturing, yet neither were they merely exchange centres. In these cases location (they made obvious stopping places for trade from west to east and back again) joined with an interior where much pepper was found to ensure that for many centuries there would be major ports in this region.

  This also applies quite exactly to Sri Lanka, and its major port of Colombo, for its location paralleled that of the Malabar ports, while the island was the only place where true, fine, cinnamon was produced. Moving around to the Bay of Bengal, toward the end of our period the major ports included, on the Coromandel coast, Pulicat, which drew on production, especially textiles, from the great Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar, but was little affected politically by it. In Bengal the most important port was Chittagong, which similarly was little controlled from the political centre of Gaur. The last major port of which we need to take account was Melaka, located along the coast from modern Singapore, which rose to prominence in the fifteenth century both as a great trade centre, maybe the greatest of all in the second half of this century, and also as a dissemination centre for Islam. In this great mart were found products from all over the Indian Ocean and far beyond: Chinese silks and porcelains, Indonesian spices, textiles from India, and a host of European products also. Melaka functioned as a pure exchange centre. Local products, let alone local manufactures, were of very slight account. It was the great hinge in Indian Ocean trade at this time, connecting up what could be called the 'larger' Indian Ocean, which would include the South China Sea on one side, and the Mediterranean on the other.

  We now move on to consider the merchants who made these ports what they were. A merchant is a person who exchanges one good for another, or buys a good for money with the intention of selling it on to someone else. It would be tedious and pointless merely to list a confusing array of merchants in each port city. Rather, I will concentrate on the main communities, and attempt to describe the role of merchant communities in general rather than in specific terms. Some merchants were permanently located in a particular market place, though the goods they dealt with could come from far away. Others travelled widely, chaffering their way all around the shores of the Indian Ocean.

  In our discussion of merchants we can use, with care, evidence from the very early Europeans at the start of the sixteenth century. These men were concerned to understand how things worked in the Indian Ocean the better to participate, or even control, and so they left valuable accounts of what they found around 1500. Certainly they were impressed with the merchants they met in Gujarat. As a merchant from Florence commented in western India in 1510,

  We believe ourselves to be the most astute men that one can encounter, and the people here surpass us in everything. And there are Muslim merchants worth 400,000 to 500,000 ducats. And they can do better calculations by memory than we can do with the pen. And they mock us, and it seems to me that they are superior to us in countless things, save with sword in hand, which they cannot resist.105

  A famous early Portuguese observer, Tomé Pires, at about the same time said that

  They are men who understand merchandise; they are so properly steeped in the sound and harmony of it, that the Gujaratees say that any offence connected with merchandise is pardonable. Those of our people who want to be clerks or factors ought to go [to Gujarat] and learn, because the business of trade is a science in itself which does not hinder any other noble exercise, but helps a great deal.106

  We are often told that the trade of the Indian Ocean in our period was increasingly handled by Muslims: the ocean was a 'Muslim lake'. And to be sure there is much truth in this. Nor is this a matter for wonder, for Islam had spread from the heartland of the Red Sea all around the Indian Ocean over water. One would predict then that coastal people were most likely to be converted first, and indeed this was the case. However, there was an important change during our period, for while earlier it was Muslim Arabs from the Red Sea and Egypt who dominated Indian Ocean trade and its markets except perhaps for Calicut, later it was local converts from such coastal areas as Gujarat and Bengal, and Middle Eastern Muslims who often had migrated to the Indian Ocean area, who had the cream of the trade, especially that going past India to the Bay of Bengal and beyond.

  A brief tour around the markets which we have just listed will make this clearer. On the East African coast the coastal trade was done by local people, the Swahili, who had been converted to Islam in the twelfth century. These men also acted as brokers, connecting the interior with overseas markets. They seem to have been in a particularly, and atypically, advantageous situation. Over most of the Indian Ocean and its interior use values were relatively constant, so that a preciosity would be valued much the same wherever one was. However, this was not the case in the African interior. Gold and ivory were produced there, but these items had little value in their originating societies; cloth and glass beads did. The situation was reversed in the overseas areas of India and the Middle East. This happy situation gave the Swahili brokers who made the connection between these two different use value areas a great advantage, and they profited from it, as the wealth of Kilwa at its height in the fourteenth century makes clear.107 Much of the overseas long-distance trade was handled by Muslims from the Hadhramaut and Yemen, and they were important people in the Swahili port cities; indeed many of the rulers were descended from,
or married to, merchants from further north. However, there was also a sizeable Hindu presence, men from Gujarat who came in with the seasons and, unlike the Muslims, did not settle.

  Hindus were also to be found, this time often settled, in the great market of Aden, and indeed further into the Red Sea, but obviously this area was dominated by Muslims, in this case Arabs. Yet earlier in our period Jewish Karimi merchants played a major role in the Egyptian Mamluk state and the Mediterranean in general. Around 1100, as Goitein has shown, they were major participants in Indian Ocean trade. So also in the Gulf, where in the tenth century in the briefly important port of Sohar there was a large Jewish community. However, the main traders here were Ibadi Muslims from Oman, who ventured to ports all around the Arabian Sea.108 At its height Siraf had some fabulously wealthy merchants. In the early twelfth century Abul Qasim Ramisht, who traded as far as China, was very wealthy. The silver plate his family ate out of reputedly weighed about one ton.109 Later in our period in the Gulf, Hurmuz was one of the great cosmopolitan cities with a great variety of traders: some Europeans and Hindus, Muslims from various areas, but the majority of them local, that is Persians. In Gujarat the interior trade, and the domestic markets, were largely controlled by Hindus and Jains, and they also engaged in oceanic trade to an extent. However, more important were a bewildering variety of Muslims: local people, Persians, still some Arabs, others from Bengal. Both here and in Calicut it seems that the long-distance trade was handled mostly by 'foreign' Muslims, who were able to draw on far-flung family connections, while local converts were more likely to engage in coastal and inland trade. Around the corner, on the Coromandel coast, we find a larger role for Hindu traders, especially klings, who were south Indian Hindus more correctly called Marakkayars. Some members of the community had converted to Islam, and were known as chulias.110 Bengal, however, had an important Persian merchant community. Melaka, as the greatest market, had the greatest variety of merchants: all sorts of Muslims, and Hindus from both Coromandel and Gujarat, plus local people from the Malay world, most of them now Muslim, and of course Chinese traders.