The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [105]
Along most of the west coast of India coastal trade was dominant, with small local ships carrying goods to the major nodes, of which Surat and Goa were the most important. As one example, the area of Kanara was a rice surplus region which provided food to other areas all up and down the coast, and indeed as far as Hurmuz. The next major market that we must notice is the Portuguese capital of Goa. Goa was analogous to other exchange markets in that it drew very little from its hinterland. Rather, its vaunted sixteenth-century prosperity was a result of Portuguese policies. It was the focus of their military–economic attempt to centralise Indian Ocean trade in their ports. The result was that Goa rose from being a relatively minor port to be a major exchange centre, based on coercion. Within the Portuguese system Goa was most important as their capital, and as the place where private traders could collect cargoes for their trade both within Asia and also to Europe on the state-owned or licensed naus. Yet although Goa had the advantage of military backing from the Estado da India, as a market it ranked far behind the great ports in Gujarat. At its height in the late sixteenth century Goa's trade was worth at most one-tenth of that of all the ports of Gujarat, and Surat alone far outtraded Goa. As the Estado declined in the next century the gap widened: Surat alone around 1640 had four times the trade of Goa. It and the other Portuguese port cities were, in terms of merchant communities, atypical in one important respect, in that alone in the Indian Ocean world they had no important Muslim groups. This was the result of the Portuguese antipathy to Muslims in general, and Turks in particular. Goa was ruled by the Portuguese, but its internal economy was dominated by a caste of Saraswat Brahmins, while its main financiers were banias from Gujarat.
Goa was also the home of a considerable number of other European merchants who had come to feed on the Portuguese body. Some of these people were very substantial. They often held the most important of the government tax farming contracts, and syndicates of them ran the pepper trade for the state later in the century. One of the biggest was Ferdinand Cron, a German who had a great trade in Goa in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He acted as agent for substantial merchant houses back in Europe as well as trading on his own account. Part of his success was based on his control of information, achieved through a network of couriers which enabled him to be first with news of markets and prices. This network, which he took over from the Fuggers, went from his home town of Augsburg to Goa (a distance of over 8,000 kms) and on to Melaka and Macao.36
The Kerala or Malabar coast was the second great area of concern to the Portuguese, for this is where they got pepper, and the naus for Portugal sailed from Cochin. There were several major changes in this area as a result of the Portuguese presence. Calicut, at 1500 the greatest market by far, and dominated by pardesi Muslims from the Red Sea and Cairo, declined as a result of Portuguese attacks. These foreign Muslims moved out to safer parts. The local Muslims, that is local converts called Mapillahs, perforce stayed, and continued to try to trade in pepper outside the Portuguese monopoly system. Cochin became a Portuguese puppet town, and a centre of their trade in pepper. The town included a large casado population, but trade except that to Portugal was dominated by Gujarati merchant groups, and locally by Malabar Hindu groups.
Sri Lanka was a somewhat aberrant part of the Portuguese estado, for it was only here that they attempted a large land