The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [107]
By the middle of the seventeenth century the Portuguese official position in the Indian Ocean area was in tatters. Most of its major forts – Melaka, Cochin, Colombo, Hurmuz – had been lost, usually to the Dutch. On the East African coast the Estado da India retained toe holds only in Mozambique, and Mombasa until the 1690s. Elsewhere it kept only Timor, Macau, and Goa, Daman and Diu on the west coast of India. In part the estado now moved from being a maritime entity to a land based one, for the northern provinces of Bassein (until lost to the rising Indian power, the Marathas, in 1739) and Daman became flourishing agriculture-based areas where many Portuguese did well: as the saying goes, rich men in a poor state. More important, the private Portuguese traders, the casados, continued to trade as they had done in the sixteenth century. The only difference was that while in the later sixteenth century they had loaded large private cargoes on the naus for Lisbon, they now, as the carreira declined, were forced to focus almost entirely on the Indian Ocean. They were to be found all around the Bay of Bengal, on the west coast of India, and along the Swahili coast. Like the private English traders, they by and large enjoyed no particular advantage over their Asian competitors. While the state declined, private Portuguese continued to operate. As British power expanded later in the eighteenth century they, like for example the Parsis, operated within its entrails, serving as middle men, petty traders, facilitators for the dominant British.
With this broad background, we can turn to the vexed question of the importance of the arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. I will look at several themes, but very briefly. We must first note that the linkages that the Iberians established were vast and pregnant with consequences. The Spanish linked the Americas and Europe, and via the Pacific the Americas and East Asia. The Portuguese connected southern America with Africa and Europe, and also the north and south Atlantic, as well as the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. (Later the Dutch linked the far western part of the Indian Ocean, the Cape, with the far east, that is western Australia and Indonesia.) Men began to travel widely, and serve these far-flung Iberian empires in many continents. Duarte Coelho Pereira served the Portuguese state in Morocco and West Africa. In 1509–29 he was in India, and this period included voyages to China, Vietnam and Siam. Then he returned to Portugal and was Portuguese ambassador to France, after which he had various navy commands. In 1534 he became the lord-proprietor of the captaincy of Pernambuco in northeast Brazil, where he remained for twenty years.37
Impressive and far-flung connections indeed, yet in the case of the Indian Ocean we must remember that Asia and Europe had been linked for centuries via the Red Sea and Gulf. Rome had an extensive trade with India 2,000 years ago. Later, Asian products continued to get to the Mediterranean and European markets. Spices were the most important here. Europeans needed them to preserve meat, and to flavour it. This was certainly an important trade for the European consumers, and for the Asian producers and traders. It was also important for the Mamluk rulers of Egypt, for a significant amount of their revenue came from taxing this trade.
Some historians claim that while certainly there had been some contact before 1498, commercial connections between Europe and Asia were greatly strengthened because the Portuguese had discovered a new, faster and more efficient route to join the two, that is the route around the Cape of Good Hope. It is true that the Cape route was, at least in theory, faster than the more difficult route from the spice production areas in the Malukus, across the Indian Ocean,