The Indian Ocean

by Michael Pearson

  These rulers of port cities clearly would oppose any outside force which threatened this situation of peaceful trade. When Europeans arrived and tried to monopolise trade in some products, and tax or direct other trade, these port cities or polities had to resist: some were successful, others not.

  The situation in the great landed states in this period was quite different. Historians have found these states exhibiting three attitudes to trade, to merchants, and to the sea. Some say the state took no interest, some say it took an exploitative and malevolent interest, and some see a fruitful conjunction between political power and economic interests. We can ignore East Africa in this discussion, for the only major state, the Mutapa, was far inland, and in decline anyway. We are then really dealing with the three great Muslim states of the period, the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals, and of them the Mughals deserve most of our attention. They ruled India, the area which has to be seen as the fulcrum or axis of the Indian Ocean. The Ottomans were far away and had landed, European and Middle Eastern, interests to pursue. The endemic wars between them and the Safavids show the landed focus of them both, and also means that they had little in the way of a maritime role in the Indian Ocean.

  Nor, however, did seaborne Indian states. I will concentrate on the area of Gujarat, including the period after its conquest by the Mughals in 1572. The focus of the Muslim rulers of Gujarat is pithily encapsulated in a saying attributed to one of them: 'Wars by sea are merchants' affairs, and of no concern to the prestige of kings.' Their interest lay in controlling and taxing land, and the peasants on it. Customs revenues made up only a small part of their total revenue. Any activity which they may have undertaken at sea was very much auxiliary to land matters.

  The attitude of the Mughals seems to be very similar, at least as regards specifically maritime matters. It was Akbar who conquered Gujarat, and at this time he had his first and only view of the sea. He went out from Cambay on a brief excursion with a select party, and enjoyed seeing the spectacle of the ocean. His interest in sea matters was very slight.

  His main concern with the sea was a result of his desire to send pilgrims to Mecca, leaving from Surat and travelling by sea. Yet this concern did not lead to his taking the trouble to found a navy: as was noted of a successor, Aurangzeb, in the second half of the seventeenth century, he contented himself 'in the enjoyment of the Continent, and styles the Christians Lions of the Sea, saying that God has allotted that Unstable Element for their Rule.'3 The whole mind-set of the Mughal emperors and their nobles was land-based. Prestige was a matter of controlling vast areas on which were located fat, meek peasants. Glory was to be won by campaigns on land, leading one's contingent of cavalry, galloping over the plains. To courtiers, including the emperors, the sea was a marvel, a curiosity, a freak. This was not an arena where power and glory were to be won.

  In 1617 Akbar's successor, Jahangir, also came to Cambay. His account of what he saw is of a piece with his numerous other observations in his memoirs where he is describing curiosities, such as a rare fruit, or a brave man. 'In these days during which I was encamped on the shore of the salt sea, merchants, traders, indigent people, and other inhabitants of the port of Cambay having been summoned before me, I gave each according to his condition a dress of honour or a horse or travelling money or assistance in living.' He found out that 'Before the arrival of the victorious host some ghurabs from European ports had come to Cambay to buy and sell, and were about to return. On Sunday, the 10th, they decorated them and showed them to me. Taking leave they went about their business.' He concludes, 'As my desire was to see the sea and the flow and ebb of the water, I halted for ten days' and then went off to Ahmadabad.4

  The Mughals, and other Indian rulers of large states, by and large pursued a hands-off attitude to trade in general, including that by sea. As Barendse puts it, the Mughals and the Safavids neither exploited trade nor encouraged it: they had very little in the way of a trade policy at all.5 However, at times merchant and ruler interests coincided, and then the state could help the merchant while helping itself. Studies by Om Prakash and Van Santen show a closer nexus between state and merchant in Mughal India than was depicted in my own earliest work. For example, the Mughals actively encouraged the importation of bullion, and also provided a very sophisticated minting process.6 Om Prakash's characterisation of the essential element in Indian trade being that of 'bullion for goods' is completely appropriate. Obviously merchants were concerned to acquire bullion, but rulers also were concerned to accumulate their own stocks of precious metals. They also more generally wanted there to be plenty of precious metals in India. It seems that they shared some of the preconceptions of their European fellow-rulers at this time, that is that a rich country was one with a large stock of bullion. Given that few European products found markets in India, while Indian products had ready acceptance all over the Indian Ocean area and also in Europe, 'bullionist' aspirations were much more adequately achieved in India than in Europe.

  The general attitude of most Indian rulers, whether Hindu or Muslim, seems to be one of a rather remote benevolence. Trade could certainly provide revenue, and more inchoately it was meritorious for any ruler to rule over happy, prosperous people, but actual intervention either for or against was most unusual. A Marathi treatise on statecraft from the early eighteenth century describes this sort of attitude:

  Capitalists are the ornaments of the kingdom. The land is prosperous and populous because of them. Goods otherwise unavailable are procured through them. In times of crisis their loans enable the ruler to overcome difficulties. Protecting them brings great advantages. For this they should be respected and honoured. Do not allow them to be harassed or molested for any reason.

  Similarly,

  If a wealthy businessman is captured during raids on enemy territory or during sea expeditions, then he should pay a suitable ransom. Detain him until this is paid; when that is done treat him honourably and return him to his own land. It is not right to subject businessfolk to the severities reserved for the soldiers and employees of an enemy.7

  It has often been argued that the decline of great empires led to economic problems, including a decline in sea trade. The late Ashin Das Gupta was an influential proponent of this thesis. He claimed that the decline, in the eighteenth century, of all three of the great Islamic empires – the Ottoman, the Safavid and the Mughal – affected Indian Ocean trade deleteriously. At the least these states had provided a certain stability and law and order, and had defended their borders against raids from outside. Locally powerful figures in all of them were to an extent controlled, and where possible their revenue raising activities (often more or less plunder) were curtailed in favour of the central state levying a more routine tribute or tax. This sort of predicability was obviously good for merchants. As the countrysides were monetised merchants had a larger role, buying the crop for money which the cultivator used to pay land revenue, and then on-selling the produce at a regional market. Merchants need information and communications, and large empires do too. Imperial networks of communication served not only to keep a ruler informed of events in distant places, they also made it possible for merchants to learn of distant markets, and to transmit funds via letters of credit. All this, we are told, was ended as these empires collapsed into anarchy.8

  To demonstrate this conclusively would require much more quantitative research than has been done so far. But some things make one dubious of this blanket claim. For a start, sea trade as such was not affected by these declines, though certainly some port cities and some production areas were. The whole notion of Islamic decline in the eighteenth century has become a controversial one. Older European historiography wrote of decline, collapse and confusion, to justify conquest by the West. However, Ottoman decline in the eighteenth century is no longer universally accepted. So also in India, where the successor states of the Mughals were themselves perfectly viable. Even the Marathas, once stigmatised as lawless plunderers, have now been shown to
be much more organised and benevolent than was once thought. In short, the whole notion of decline has been called into question.

  In any case, to the extent that these vast empires were under stress, there were some compensations for trade and the economy. Most obviously, when the Mughal state began to release vast hordes of bullion accumulated over a century and a half, in order to fight its enemies, some parts of the economy obviously benefited from this increase in liquidity. In some areas it is clear that traders simply tried to avoid unsettled areas and avaricious land holders: routes changed, but trade continued. For many traders the political situation was only one element which determined their success, and the areas to which they traded. More important in their prosperity or collapse were such eternal verities as whether or not their goods met local demand, and arrived at a time when the market was not glutted.

  If, then, the notion that the decline of landed states caused a decline in sea trade is not proven, we need to look instead at the activities of the Europeans, and assess whether it was competition from them which led to problems for indigenous Indian Ocean traders. This is the central concern of much of this chapter and the next: for now we can quickly say that this was indeed the case, but beginning only in the second half of the eighteenth century. An acceptable compromise would be to try and find a combination of causes for the decline of Indian Ocean trade done by local people, including both political changes in the interior and competition from Europeans.

  The first Europeans to arrive in the Indian Ocean in numbers, and in an organised fashion, were the Portuguese. In one respect their attitude to trade and politics differed profoundly from what we have found for both emperors and port polity controllers around the shores of the ocean, for by claiming sovereignty over the ocean they claimed to be able to control and tax trade. In another respect they mirrored closely the position of the port polity controllers, but not the landed empires, in that the vast bulk of their revenue came from the sea, not from land. I have chosen to write rather extensively about the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. This is not to say that they had any profound effects there, but as so much of the historiography emphasises their actual or potential importance I have thought it necessary to locate them more correctly in their place and time. Such an analysis also casts much light on what else was happening, apart from the Portuguese presence, in the sixteenth century in the ocean.

  The initial responses to the Portuguese varied from amazement to hostility to contempt. When the Kalabari people of the Niger Delta first saw white men, around 1500, they were perplexed.

  The first white man, it is said, was seen by a fisherman who had gone down to the mouth of the estuary in his canoe. Panic-stricken, he raced home and told his people what he had seen: whereupon he and the rest of the town set out to purify themselves – that is to say, rid themselves of the influence of the strange and monstrous thing that had intruded into their world.

  When the first Portuguese arrived in Colombo the locals reported to the king that

  there is in our port of Colombo a race of people very white in colour and of great beauty; they wear jackets and hats of iron and pace up and down without resting for a moment. Seeing them eat bread and grapes and drink arrack, they reported that these people devour stone and drink blood. They said that these people give two or three pieces of gold or silver for one fish or one lime. The sound of their cannon is louder than thunder at the end of the world. Their cannon balls fly many leagues and shatter forts of stone and iron.9

  The ethnocentric Ming Chinese accounts from the later sixteenth century depicted the Portuguese as malevolent goblins who acted completely outside norms of accepted behaviour. One said,

  So they [the Portuguese] secretly sought to purchase children of above ten years old to eat.... The method [of preparing the child] was to first boil up some soup in a large iron pan and place the child, who was locked up inside an iron cage, into the pan. After being steamed to sweat, the child was then taken out and his skin peeled with an iron scrubbing-brush. The child, still alive, would now be killed and having been disembowelled, steamed to eat.10

  The Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean with a background of equally fabulous ideas. Le Goff has written of the role of India and the Indian Ocean in medieval European thought. In these exotic fantasies there were fabulous riches, fearsome monsters, and even noble savages.11 The Travels of Sir John Mandeville circulated widely in Europe from the first half of the fourteenth century, including Portugal. His book is a curious mixture of 'fact' and 'fiction'. He said there were Christians and Jews in Malabar, and the tomb of St Thomas in Coromandel. He wrote about the pepper vine, and widow burning, but also of eels 30 feet long, and 5,000 islands in the ocean. He reported that Indians did not travel very much as they were under the planet Saturn. Some of the flavour of his account is given when he noted that Hurmuz was very hot:

  But it is so hot there in that isle that men's ballocks hang down to their shanks for the great violence of the heat, that dissolves their bodies. And men of that country that ken the manner bind them up and use certain ointments cold and restrictive to hold them up, or else they might not live.12

  Such benign fantasies on both sides soon gave way to harsher realities. The Portuguese identified quite quickly the main choke points and strategic places around the Indian Ocean littoral. Indeed, the early correspondence, histories and other accounts devote much effort to this sort of identification of where was vital to control. Goa (1510), Colombo (1505; a fort was built in 1518), Melaka (1511), Hurmuz (1515), Diu (1535) and Aden were seen as most strategically located to serve Portuguese ends, and all except the last were taken. These port cities were all flourishing before the Portuguese conquest, and all had strategic implications. Goa was centrally located to control the Arabian Sea. Colombo was strategically located, and provided access to cinnamon. Melaka and Hurmuz controlled choke points, and were also major emporia. Possession of Diu provided control over the entrance to the Gulf of Cambay, and access to the rich production areas around the eastern shore of the Gulf. In the case of East Africa, Mozambique in the south had several advantages. It was conveniently located to control trade on the southern coast, and to block trade from the hostile Muslim world down to the gold available in Sofala. Also, and here Mozambique was unusual as compared with the other ports which they conquered, it was to be the vital way-station for the carreira from the colonial capital of Goa to the metropolitan capital of Lisbon, fulfilling the same function that the Cape of Good Hope later provided for the Dutch. In theory this voyage was to be done in one passage, but in practice the great ships often needed to call in on the African coast to heal their sick, to get supplies, on the outward voyage to collect cargo for India, or to await the next monsoon. Mozambique became the vital link in the chain between Goa and Lisbon.

  These strategic sites were acquired with several ends in view. Their conquest helped the Portuguese to undermine the Muslims who had previously dominated Indian Ocean trade, especially that in spices. They functioned as nodes in the vast seaborne network of the Portuguese maritime empire. They provided facilities for the vital armadas, and the carreira to Portugal. They were beach-heads from which conversion drives were launched. They provided places where the Portuguese elite could give themselves fancy titles and indulge in an anachronistically feudal lifestyle, and from which they made vast private profits during their terms of office. In a more general sense the Portuguese were trying to create or impose a hierarchy de novo in the Indian Ocean. From a situation of autonomous port cities and free trade in which competition was economic but not military, they now wanted to establish an articulated structure where Lisbon controlled Goa, and Goa controlled all the conquered port cities. The nature of the political aspiration, and also its extent, has to be seen as quite revolutionary.

  What were the Portuguese trying to achieve by these conquests? What they set up was not an empire, not even a maritime empire. Subrahmanyam and Thomaz note that

  in the first ha
lf of the sixteenth century, 'Portuguese India' did not designate a space that was geographically well defined but a complex of territories, establishments, goods, persons, and administrative interests in Asia and East Africa, generated by or subordinate to the Portuguese Crown, all of which were linked together as a maritime network.13

  Within this network, the aim was very largely economic. From early on they unilaterally declared that all trade in spices was to be done only by themselves, or by people licensed by them. Offenders against this, that is the traders who had previously handled this trade, were to be severely punished, and their goods confiscated. To achieve this aim they captured a series of strategically located port cities, and patrolled the waters of the Indian Ocean searching for 'illicit' traders.

  The patrols and the capture of ports had a wider aim also. The Portuguese wanted to direct, and tax, all trade in the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese required that all ships trading in the ocean take a licence, or cartaz, from a Portuguese authority. The key point was that the cartazes required Asian ships to call at Portuguese forts or towns and there pay customs duties before setting off on their voyage. What the ship could carry, and where it could trade, was strictly limited. In particular, Muslims from hostile areas, weapons, and spices were prohibited. Portuguese fleets cruised around checking all ships they came across. Those without a cartaz, and those who infringed its terms, were subject to confiscation at best, and sinking at worst.

  This system was a vast protection racket, for the Portuguese were selling protection from violence which they themselves had created. Obviously it was most effective only when the Portuguese had established customs houses at which the Asian traders could call. This took some time, and this ameliorated the harshness of the system. They were established quite early in Cochin and Goa, later in Diu, and much later again in Daman and Chaul. This in turn shows two things about the Portuguese system. First, while the Portuguese presence remained fundamentally maritime and littoral throughout, this is not to say that the priorities of this empire did not change, for they did. Around mid century the focus moved from one looking to the carreira and the trade to the metropole towards a much more Asian-centred one where, for example, the aim became to encourage and tax Asian trade rather than try to control it too closely. Second, the Portuguese were unable to conquer large areas of land, and so had to make their money from the sea. Hence this system, and hence their great reliance on maritime revenue. In this they contrast strongly with a landed state, such as Gujarat. The Portuguese Estado da India got fifteen times more revenue from sea trade than from land trade. Portuguese India got about 60 per cent of its total revenue from customs duties, Gujarat got only 6 per cent. Revenues derived by the Portuguese from their control of Diu made up a large part of official receipts. The surplus from Diu, in a good year late in the sixteenth century, provided about one-sixth of Goa's total revenue. Similarly, when trade between Gujarat and Hurmuz was blocked by war, the puppet sultan of Hurmuz had to send a much smaller contribution to Goa, as most of Hurmuz's trade was with Gujarat. As a final illustration of the unequal nature of the relationship, the route from Goa to Cambay was the most important of all for the Portuguese, even more than the carreira to Portugal. However, from the Gujarati point of view this trade made up only a small part of total trade, roughly 5 per cent.14