The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [88]
Few writers today would follow the Indian scholar-diplomat K.M. Panikkar and write about a Vasco da Gama period of Asian history, beginning in 1498 when the Portuguese navigator arrived in southwest India. Some however would accept his succeeding claim, that it 'was a great event from the point of view of the results that followed from it.'1 The tendency here, much to be found also in Victorian English accounts of their empire, is that this was the crucial insertion of the wedge which later led to European dominance. My whole argument is that the presence of Europeans is one thing, and certainly there were increasing numbers of them in the Indian Ocean region in the period covered by this chapter, but to see this as the beginning of the demonstrable dominance of the nineteenth century is to take a very teleological view indeed. There had, after all, been 'foreigners' in the Indian Ocean for millennia: Romans, Greeks, a host of others. Early Europeans fitted into a very broad and diverse complex of people living around and sailing across the ocean. There was contact certainly, both hostile and peaceful, but until the power dimension changed in the later eighteenth century this did not become an impact, let alone dominance.
One useful way to get a perspective is to remember Zheng He's expeditions, which we described in the previous chapter (see pages 90–1). He commanded massive fleets. The first one in 1405 included sixty-two large ships, some of them over 100 metres long. There were about 28,000 men in this expedition. The best perspective is to remember that in the early fifteenth century, as the Portuguese began their slow progress down the West African coast (they took Ceuta, in Morocco, in 1415), Chinese fleets came close to the Cape of Good Hope; some think they sailed around it. At the end of this century Europeans rounded the Cape, and soon after reached the Straits of Melaka, at the other end of the ocean. Thus at the beginning of this century these straits saw a great Chinese fleet, and at the beginning of the next a much smaller European one. At these two times the port city of Melaka became first a sender of tribute to the Chinese emperor, and then at the end was conquered by the Portuguese.
Another even wider comparison is also instructive. Andrew Hess points out that between the Portuguese capture of Ceuta and 1522, when Magellan set off around the world, the Europeans began maritime expansion, or even empires. The Ottoman Turks did this at the same time, and the two collided in the northern Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century. By the accession of Suleyman in 1520 the Ottomans ruled a coastline stretching from the Crimea to Yemen, and also including the Black Sea and much of the Mediterranean. Yet the Portuguese and Ottoman empires were very different. As we will see, the Portuguese version was essentially maritime, but for the Ottomans taxing and controlling land was always the key, with maritime matters merely an adjunct. In 1526 Suleyman lost interest in the Indian Ocean and instead turned to Hungary.2
Broadly speaking, the evolution of the European presence goes like this. From 1500 to well into the eighteenth century Europeans controlled some ports: some they created, some they conquered. In this period these ports had a totally maritime focus; the Europeans controlled little except some mostly long-distance oceanic trade. Only the umland was usually also taken, this being where food came from. Indigenous ports were different, for they had connections with the inland as well as the umland, even if they were not part of an inland state. The at least tacit support and patronage of land-based powers was essential for them to survive. In the eighteenth century some European ports began to be more closely linked to their hinterlands, and soon after, Europeans conquered these hinterlands, fundamentally