The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [79]
Most political elites used intermediaries to handle their trade, rather than engage themselves in haggling and bargaining. In Gujarat Muslim governors and rulers often used Hindu and Jain intermediaries to handle their private trade. In southeast Asia port city rulers traded vigorously, and indeed sometimes may have taken advantage of their power position. Increasingly, however, they used a quasi official called the saudagar raja, typically a south Indian Muslim or chulia who was the local ruler's official business agent. These people acted as brokers or mediators between the economy and the court.127 The point to note here is that it is one thing for a ruler or a noble to trade, whether directly or through an intermediary, but it is quite another matter to pursue mercantalist policies by which the state as a state aims to control and direct trade.128
It is true however that this varied from port to port. The situation in the Malay world appears to be rather different. Here there were no vast territorial empires, but rather a host of smaller polities. All of these were more or less dependent on maritime trade. This area was much more maritime, more imbricated in the ocean, than were the other areas we have discussed. It is revealing to note that, unlike most other parts of the ocean, especially China and India, all great southeast Asian cities were either ports or were on navigable rivers. For the latter, we can instance Pegu, Ava, Phonpenh, Ayutthaya, and for the former Pasai, Melaka, Aceh, Palembang, Patani, Brunei, Manila, Makassar, Banten, Demak, Grisek/Surabaya.
This seems to have meant that the rulers of these port polities played a much larger role in sea trade than was the case elsewhere, for trade was more central both for them and for the usually rather limited inland areas behind them. In this insular world the inland was closely connected to the coast, and trade patterns in the ocean affected even basically inland states like Burma and Thailand, let alone the smaller coastal states in Indonesia such as Aceh, Perak, Kedah, and Johore.129
What examples do we have of state intervention? They are actually few and far between in southeast Asia. An extreme example was Srivijaya, a Sumatran thalassocracy, which controlled the Straits of Melaka from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries. More generally, Arun Das Gupta gives a picture of heavy state involvement: ports were dominated by sultans, coastal trade was under their control, and so was spice production, which was done by slaves.130 It may be that coercion increased once the Portuguese, with their attempts at monopoly, arrived. The ruler of Aceh began to control pepper production, and even wiped out cultivation in some areas in order to deny pepper to the Europeans.131 The best summing up for the southeast Asian case may be that there certainly was more intervention in trade from states than was the case in the rest of the Indian Ocean, and this was fundamentally a consequence of the geography of the area. Yet this is a relative matter. Obviously no Indian Ocean state or port polity got near the sort of economic control which any modern state routinely exercises.
I will end this long account of ports, products and merchants with a handful of more personal and individual accounts of actual travellers. Many of these men are petty