The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [117]
Local rulers responded in different ways to the activities of the northern Europeans. In the landed empires they were in a situation of subservience. In China they traded only on the sufferance of the port authorities, and were very closely supervised, not to say humiliated. In the Red Sea and Gulf they had to deal with less powerful states, especially once the Safavid empire unravelled in the early eighteenth century. Before this, their relative position is best shown by how the EIC helped the Iranians capture Hurmuz from the Portuguese. They got little credit or advantage from this.
In India there developed a standoff, but a different one from that which had confronted the Portuguese. It will be remembered that the Portuguese had power at sea, but very little on land, as they themselves well knew. In the case of the Dutch and English companies, they could not exercise the control over trade in, say, the Gulf of Cambay which the Portuguese had achieved, and more importantly they soon placed factories not only on the coast in the port cities but also inland at production centres. This made them very vulnerable indeed. Consequently, while the companies could, and did, seize Indian ships, including those belonging to the political elite, at sea, the Mughals retaliated by seizing European factors in the ports and inland. A stalemate resulted, which was broken only when Mughal power declined in the eighteenth century. One consequence of this, a fateful one, was that the English were able to take advantage of this to secure important concessions for themselves. In 1719 they paid money and were given freedom from internal customs duties in the Mughal empire. This gave them, at first potentially and later actually, an enormous advantage vis-à-vis their Indian competitors.
The response from the port city controllers was obviously different. As we noted, the Dutch took over many of those which the Portuguese had seized a century earlier. The independent ones, such as on the Coromandel coast, welcomed the northern Europeans as a counter to the Portuguese. Both here and on the west coast however the Europeans also set up their own ports, of which Chennai and Mumbai are the obvious examples. As European trade in the ocean increased, these ports flourished and slowly took over the trade of their contiguous Indian competitors.
This also happened in southeast Asia. Several of the controllers of port polities tried hard to compete. This often meant an increase in state control of the economy. Aceh engaged in state-directed pepper production, using slave labour, and also eliminated some pepper areas in order to deny them to the Dutch. The ruler of Banten forced the inhabitants to grow a certain number of vines, and in Makassar the ruler supervised trade, while in Ayutthaya much overseas trade was a royal monopoly. These efforts were in vain. Dutch effectiveness meant that from the mid seventeenth century many previously flourishing Malay ports were outcompeted.59
There was however another dimension to the work of the northern Europeans in the Indian Ocean. Both the English and Dutch companies traded extensively with Europe, and replaced the Portuguese in this sector. Here, then, we are writing a history in the ocean. Om Prakash has written the standard account of this.60 The first period, to about 1680, finds the VOC dominant. He stresses the success of their official engagement in the country trade. Its establishment in mid-century was crucial for Dutch success, and it was based on their continuing access to Japan, and their control of fine spices. Thus while the English by the end of this period were catching up in their share of the trade with Europe, the total Dutch trade was still far superior because of their huge inter-Asian trade. The second period goes from 1680 to 1740. During this time the VOC was successfully challenged by the EIC, and to an extent by other European