We can close this chapter with two accounts from the seventeenth century of life on board a Portuguese, and an Indian, ship. The first is based on Jesuit accounts. The fathers travelled in very cramped conditions, 'no more no less than sardines in a barrel.' Their cabin was so full of supplies and so small that they 'could neither stand nor sit; to enter [the cabin] it was necessary to drag one's body over barrels and crates, as snakes enter their holes.' The Jesuits, an enthusiastic and rigid new Order, were under a very strict regime, much more so presumably than the others on board. They were told not to spend time in their cabins, as these were unhealthy: rather they should walk around on deck. Clothes and cabins were to be washed frequently, and sheets changed at least every eight days. The food they took on board was very well chosen: water and wine to drink; cured meats, both hams and sausages, chicken, biscuits, dried fruits including figs and raisins, beans, cured olives, cheese, nuts and sweets like marmalade. This abundance meant that common passengers often begged food from the fathers. As is to be expected, they had an important religious role too. When the ship was in danger, or it was the feast day of the saint after whom the ship was named, they led processions around the decks. Apart from this they administered the sacraments and provided general spiritual counsel.71
Our Indian example is derived from an exemplary reconstruction by Professor A. Jan Qaisar, based on an important Persian text which describes a voyage to undertake the hajj. Some of the advice that the author, Qazvini, provides is very elementary. For example, the intending passengers should check the boat, and rely on omens too as to whether they will go on it or not. The ship should be neither small nor old, and its length must be greater than breadth. One also needs to check the masts and rigging, and find out whether or not the crew is industrious. Passengers had a choice of travelling either on deck, or in a cabin, but in either case they had to provide their own food. In theory they were checked in and a list of them was kept by the nakhoda, though on Qazvini's ship there were meant to be 474 passengers, but another 40 appeared after the ship had sailed. Heavy cargo went in the hold, but passengers kept their personal luggage with them. Qazvini advises potential travellers to try and keep near the middle of the boat, near the main mast.
Water was provided for all, stored in big cisterns, but the wealthy brought their own too. Being a Muslim ship, this was not a matter of Hindu pollution problems but simply of accessibility and purity. A variety of food was brought on board. Common items were rice, ghee, dal, salt fish and butter, also smoked fish, breads, fruits and so on. Some better-off people took goats and fowls on board, which were slaughtered as needed. Eggs were preserved by being kept in finely ground salt. There is no mention of liquids like coffee, and nor of course of wine, but Qazvini does recommend tobacco smoking.
He also had some suggestions concerning health. He recommended that ships carry a doctor and a blood-letter. Apart from this he suggests some remedies, such as fruits and juice for those with a bilious humour from sea sickness, and for phlegmatics sweet things like honey and sugar. He does not mention scurvy, but we can assume that this was less of a problem on Indian ships because the voyages were shorter, and there were numerous stops where fresh provisions could be obtained. Life was quite pleasant on board. People studied, and held discussions on devotional and didactic matters. There were poetry recitals and music sessions, while some just relaxed in their harems, or gambled.72
* * *
Chapter 7
Britain and the ocean
These final chapters of my book cover the history of the ocean over the last 250 years. The treatment is sometimes topical, sometimes chronological. Most of this chapter is concerned with the nineteenth century, but some subjects will be dealt with well into the next century. Similarly, the last chapter is mostly about events in the twentieth century, but on occasion I have looked back to earlier times. Ideally these two chapters should be read as a single unit.
From around the middle of the eighteenth century a long process began which led over the next hundred years to a very dramatic change in the history of the ocean and its peoples. Over this comparatively short stretch of time people from outside the ocean took over most of the lands around the ocean, while the ocean itself became dominated by one naval power. Government policy and technological advances combined to undercut millennia-old indigenous maritime activities, with naval force always available as a back-up.
The foreign power in question is of course Britain (not 'England', for Scots were important participants). From being a relatively minor participant in Indian Ocean affairs even at 1700, the English East India Company (EIC) advanced dramatically and increasingly was backed by, and an arm of, the state. This was a state which guided, and benefited from, seismic changes in the home economy, the process which historians still refer to as the Industrial Revolution. Qualitative changes in productive techniques opened up, for the first time in world history, a pronounced gap between industrialised Europe, led at first by Britain, and the rest of the world. Au fond it was these immense advances in economic and technological matters which enabled Britain to establish an unprecedented control over the Indian Ocean.
There had been other European players in the Indian Ocean. Indeed, we noted that the Dutch East India Company (VOC) for a century or so did much better than the English. The French made a charge in the eighteenth century, and fought a series of wars with the English. It may be that the relative success of Britain in the Seven Years War (1756–63) marks the beginning of their dominance: certainly in the Indian Ocean this was the period when the British began the long process of conquering India and taking over important choke points. The Dutch meanwhile were much reduced by the financial problems of the VOC. They lost the Cape colony to Britain at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and then turned more to the internal development of Indonesia. As part of this, in the nineteenth century they slowly took over large numbers of these scattered islands, and especially in Java intensified forced agricultural production. Meanwhile the French sought compensation in Indo-China, establishing a sizeable colonial presence there during the nineteenth century. The islands of the ocean also changed hands in this period, a matter we will come to presently. The Portuguese were reduced to operating for a time in the entrails of the British system, making good money from the opium trade in the early nineteenth century. Goa endured an occupation by British forces during the Napoleonic wars.
The central fact was British dominance of the ocean, and indeed of oceanic matters worldwide for a time. In 1890 sixty-three per cent of the world's combined ship tonnage sailed under the British flag. By late in the eighteenth century this industrialising country had major centres in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Penang, and beyond the edge of the ocean in Sydney. Over the next fifty years a series of vital ports were taken or created: Colombo in 1796, Cape Town in 1806, Singapore in 1819, Aden in 1839, and beyond the ocean, Hong Kong in 1842. So unchallenged was Britain in the Indian Ocean that they needed little force to ensure their control, as compared with what was needed in more contested oceans. At the height of imperialism, in 1914, the Royal Navy had 39 ships in commission in the Atlantic, 43 in the Pacific, but needed only 12 in the Indian Ocean.1
This British dominance characterised the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, and some way into the twentieth. In the next chapter we will see a reassertion of littoral Indian Ocean states in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Two small specific examples will begin to introduce the matter of British superiority. One is to see how European latecomers had perforce to operate in the interstices of the British system. In the early nineteenth century the various German states were left only with the crumbs, such as Siam, Zanzibar and Turkey. In 1846–48 a ship from the great port of Hamburg wandered the ocean looking for openings. It visited the Amirantes, the Seychelles, the Comoros, Massawa, Jiddah, Hodeida, Aden and Zanzibar, all to little effect. Things improved only after Germany was united, and acquired colonies in East Africa and the Pacific; these open
ed opportunities through and in the Indian Ocean.2 British dominance also acted to the detriment of those areas which remained independent for a time. For example, around 1800 Zanzibar could play off the British and the French, both of whom had a presence in East Africa and the islands. But once Britain had defeated France to end the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the sultans had no choice but to become staunch, and subordinate, allies of the British. Zanzibar's sultans had to tailor their policies to suit their de facto masters.
This dominance in material and military matters often flowed over into a belief in cultural and moral superiority. English writers were quite open in their expressions of superiority over and, as the inverse, contempt for the natives, often coupled with a desire to uplift them. Mrs Tompsitt visited Colombo in 1884: 'The poor peoples' huts seem to be very devoid of what we should consider necessaries. They all sit and take their meals on the ground, yet they look good-tempered and happy. I expect what little cultivation and refinement they show is owing to contact with and the example of the English.'3
So also in high policy matters. George Curzon, whose rotund late-Victorian pronouncements will embellish several themes in this chapter, began his history of Persia by writing, 'I endeavour to trace the steps by which Persia has passed, and is still passing, from barbarism to civilisation, as she exchanges the slow beat of the Oriental pendulum for the whirr and crash of Western wheels'.4 Isabel Burton, wife of the famous explorer and self-publicist Richard, wrote in 1876 that a few Europeans had been killed in rioting in Jiddah in 1858. This was not good enough, and the European powers should have used the opportunity to strike out at oriental superstition. They
should have insisted upon Mecca being opened to the world, and upon all travellers being protected there as they are at Jerusalem and other 'Holy Cities.' It is high time that these obsolete obstructions to the march of civilisation should everywhere be swept away; the world will endure them no longer. Mecca is not only a great centre of religion and commerce; it is also the prime source of political intrigues, the very nest where plans of conquest and schemes of revenge upon the Infidel are hatched; and, as I have before said, the focus whence cholera is dispersed over the West. Shall a misplaced sentiment of tolerating intolerance allow her to work in the dark against humanity? Allah forbid it!5
The broad sequence of the extension of British control sees at first the acquisition of a series of littoral bases, much like those acquired earlier by the Portuguese, and then the Dutch. Examples we have already noted are ports on the Indian coast, and Singapore, Aden and Cape Town. However, once the British economy made the transition from merchant capital to industrial capital, there was a need for control over the supply of raw materials for the new industries. Territorial acquisitions were the result. In terms of the schema we have been using (see page 114), the British now moved from controlling port cities, and then to having some influence over production, to the third stage of controlling territory and so the whole productive process.
The consequences of this extension of British control over large areas of land around the Indian Ocean have been much discussed. Our concern is with the maritime consequences of British dominance, but to set the scene we will provide a few suitable examples from India designed to show the broad impact on land. Arasaratnam's study of Coromandel in the later eighteenth century gets well the nexus between economic and political control. Cloth was the main product of coastal Coromandel, and the British were concerned to cut out competition from other purchasers, whether they be Indian or European. In the 1770s the English East India Company began to set up direct relations with the actual producers of cloth, the weavers. Middle men were cut out, and so the Indian version of the 'putting out' system was undercut as the EIC got closer to controlling and subordinating the weavers.
There was vigorous opposition from both the weavers and other would-be purchasers. However, as the area ruled or controlled by the EIC expanded, more and more coercion, some of it physical, was applied. Hand in hand with these events in India, in Britain machine-made cloth was being produced with greater and greater efficiency. By the end of the story, in 1800, the EIC had done away with all European competitors. The position of the weavers was greatly reduced. So also with Indian financiers and merchants, who suffered from a confinement of the space in which they could operate, and ended up losing their autonomy, and becoming instead intermediaries between the producers and the EIC.
Further north, in Bengal, much the same thing happened once the EIC acquired the right to collect land revenue in this prosperous province in 1765. Now Bengal weavers had to fill the demands of the EIC before they could sell their cloth elsewhere, and the compulsory price the EIC paid was, in the words of an historian of this process, 'extraordinarily poor'. We see again in Bengal the nexus between political and economic control, for these cloth purchases were largely financed with the land revenue the EIC collected from Bengali peasants.6 The opium trade is another example. In 1773 the EIC took monopoly rights over this and from 1797 no private cultivation was allowed: each peasant had to cultivate a specified area of land, deliver his entire produce to EIC at a fixed price, and was penalised if the area cultivated fell short of what the EIC wanted.7
On the other coast, in Gujarat, the advance of the British was slowed for a time by opposition from the Marathas, but once this ended in 1818 the result for merchants and weavers here was similar to what had occurred earlier on the east coast and interior.8 More generally, India as a colony was unable to protect its nascent industries. The contrast with the United States is revealing. Being independent, they were able to use government policy to get industries established to challenge the British. The American tariff on English woollen textiles was 35 per cent in 1828, and 50 per cent in 1832; and on some goods in 1842 it was 100 per cent ad valorem.9 Colonial India had no such option.
Maritime matters are our main concern. Before going into detail, a brief overview of the main themes which we will deal with in this chapter will help to set the scene. In the broadest terms what we are seeing is the creation of a world economy, and a consequent huge growth in transnational trade in the second half of the nineteenth century. International trade grew seven times faster in this fifty years as compared with the first half of the century. In 1850 the world's merchant fleet had about 9 million tons of carrying capacity, by 1910 it had 34.5 million. In terms of volume per capita, international trade grew twenty-five times between 1850 and 1914.10 People from around the Indian Ocean participated in this world economy, but were subject much more than before to its vagaries. As one example, around 1850 India supplied about 20 per cent of England's raw cotton imports, much less than the United States. During the American Civil War India's exports boomed, and there was a speculative frenzy in Mumbai. The Civil War ended, the United States again exported cotton, and a series of major projects in Mumbai collapsed.11
The context of European dominance in the Indian Ocean was very different from what applied in the Atlantic and Pacific. These two oceans were more or less created by Europeans. As we have noted so often, this was very much not the case in our ocean. Rather there was a very old and elaborate existing system which had to be undercut and replaced. This was achieved. As just one example, in 1913–14 of the tonnage of India's overseas trade 72 per cent was British, and 64 per cent of India's exports came to Britain.12
Frank Broeze provided a very neat overview of the general impact of the west on the Indian Ocean:
the nature of the European intrusion [was] intensified by changes in maritime technology. Important aspects of this intensification were the use of larger iron vessels and steam power, the greatly increased volume of trade, the development of new forms of trade to meet the import and export requirements of industrialising Europe, and the unprecedented increase in the volume of passenger traffic both within the region and through it.13
Three broad periods can be distinguished. The first is the era of the sailing ship, from 1750 to 1850, where locals still had a role, albeit a decr
easing one and only in intra-oceanic trade; they had no role in connecting the Indian Ocean with other parts of the globe. In the next, from 1850 to 1945, the era of the steam and then the motorship, locals were slowly replaced and denied meaningful participation. A very marked hierarchy appeared, and the locals were left with only niche, small-scale, areas of operation. Many were reduced to menial employment on European ships. The period from 1945, to be covered in the next chapter, sees the arrival of the specialised bulk carrier and container ship. In this period people from around the ocean come back to dominance. However, as ports developed to service these new ships, mechanisation and especially containerisation reduced dramatically the opportunities for unskilled labour.14
We have written many times of connections across and beyond the ocean. These now intensified. We will follow the distinction made by Horden and Purcell in their study of the Mediterranean, and distinguish between connections in the ocean and connections of the ocean. It will be remembered that they found 'a distinction between history in the Mediterranean – contingently so, not Mediterranean-wide, perhaps better seen as part of the larger history of either Christendom or Islam – and history of the Mediterranean – for the understanding of which a firm sense of place and a search for Mediterranean-wide comparisons are both vital.'15
The Indian Ocean Page 32