The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [124]
We have then a mix of prejudice and interaction, or antipathy and interbreeding. The Persian envoy Sulaiman reminds us of something else, namely that cross-cultural understanding was hard to achieve. We described how the first Africans and Asians to see Europeans found them to be bizarre creatures indeed, yet so did Sulaiman nearly two hundred years later. In Chennai, once he had got ashore, he was taken to an English party which was held to celebrate the coronation of James II in 1685. He found the whole experience extremely curious. The English did not take off their shoes, they sat on chairs rather than carpets, they had their dogs with them, and there were women present. This bit at least he liked:
Surely such women must be encouraged. Their beautiful straight backs sway like cypress trees and bring a rush of sap into the dry garden of the old lover's hearts. The rose-red glimmer of their cheeks, cheeks like those of heaven's Houris, sparked new life in the breasts of the company of friends. Thus the light of their beauty was admitted and they participated in the festivities despite the fact that they were women.
As the party got going,
the mart of hugs and kisses began to warm up. Everywhere slim-waisted women were being embraced while faces grew red with the rose-coloured wine. The festivity reached such an intensity the veils of modest restraint were on the verge of bursting into flame and burning away. It is another of their fixed rules that the degree of friendship one has for a person is expressed by the amount of affection one shows that person's wife. . . . when a [dance] turn was well done they plucked throat-burning kisses from one another's honeyed lips.76
This discussion of interaction leads us easily into a discussion of continuing structures in the Indian Ocean from 1500 to 1750. We have provided copious data already to show a minimal European impact in many areas: in the next chapter we reverse the focus and look from within the ocean rather than focusing on the activities of Europeans, their successes and failures.
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Chapter 6
The early modern Indian Ocean world
These Europeans, the estado, the companies, and the private traders, operated in a complex and confusing commercial milieu, one with which they often had trouble coming to terms. The intricate patterns of Indian Ocean trade required much study and accumulation of knowledge. In 1703 in Surat a Dutch merchant warned his superiors that the bazaar market was risky indeed, for
the bazaar [market] prices are diverse, for they differ not only from day to day, but from hour to hour. Also they differ as to the merchant with whom one is dealing for one has here – as in other places – large dealers, maritime traders, small merchants, shopkeepers and many different kinds of hawkers. One merchant is able to sell one pound [about half a kilogram] or less, another one maund [one maund is about 35 Dutch pounds], the third ten and the fourth 100 and so unto 1000 and 100,000. So one can well imagine the differences in bazaar prices if they have to fetch a profit from one trader to the next.1
We quoted the important VOC governor Coen on the country trade, which he hoped his company could enter (see pages 150–1). Things were much the same even later in the eighteenth century: there was still a complex kaleidoscopic world of trade for the Europeans to try and enter. James Forbes wrote of Mumbai in the 1770s how
Bussorah, Muscat, Ormus, and other ports in the Persian Gulph, furnished [Mumbai's] merchants with pearls, raw silk, Carmenia wool, dates, dried fruits, rose water, attar of roses, coffee, gold, drugs and honey. A number of ships annually freighted with cotton and bullion to China, returned laden with tea, sugar, porcelains, wrought silks, nankeens, and a variety of useful and ornamental articles. From Java, Malacca, Sumatra, and the eastern islands, they brought spices, ambergris,