The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [89]
I will argue later that the Portuguese introduced politics into the Indian Ocean. To set them in context, I will first provide a discussion of the attitudes of Asian rulers to sea trade and maritime matters more generally. In all this the crucial distinction is between Asian rulers of port cities, and those controlling vast landed empires in the interior.
As we noted in the previous chapter, the rulers of the autonomous port cities – such as Mombasa, Kilwa, Mogadishu, Aden, Hurmuz, Calicut and Melaka – were completely dependent on trade for their revenue: controlling only small areas of land, the usual Asian resource of a tax on land and its products was not available to them. Some of these rulers traded for themselves, especially those in southeast Asia, though we have claimed that this was done as a merchant rather than as a ruler. To advantage oneself as a merchant by using political power (such as monopolies or forced purchase) would be to drive away the visiting merchants on whom the ruler depended almost completely.
The link between politics and trade in the various port polities of southeast Asia was much closer to that of other port cities controllers in the western ocean than to the situation in the landed states, whether they be the three great Islamic empires or China. Kathirithamby-Wells has shown that in the Malay world the entrepot and the polity was always concentric. Controllers of port polities obtained prestige and luxury goods from their trade, and this flowed into economic and political power. The geography of the area dictated that agrarian matters were much less dominant and, unlike, say, India and China, were not set off from maritime matters: rather they were complementary. Some southeast Asian rulers at times tried to use their political control to give themselves economic advantage, such as by proclaiming a monopoly over some products. Most however acted in the way we have sketched above, in other words tried to provide fair treatment for merchants so that they would continue to call.
These rulers of port cities clearly would oppose any outside force which threatened this situation of peaceful trade. When Europeans arrived and tried to monopolise trade in some products, and tax or direct other trade, these port cities or polities had to resist: some were successful, others not.
The situation in the great landed states in this period was quite different. Historians have found these states exhibiting three attitudes to trade, to merchants, and to the sea. Some say the state took no interest, some say it took an exploitative and malevolent interest, and some see a fruitful conjunction between political power and economic interests. We can ignore East Africa in this discussion, for the only major state, the Mutapa, was far inland, and in decline anyway. We are then really dealing with the three great Muslim states of the period, the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals, and of them the Mughals deserve most of our attention. They ruled India, the area which has to be seen as the fulcrum or axis of the Indian Ocean. The Ottomans were far away and had landed, European and Middle Eastern, interests to pursue. The endemic wars between them and the Safavids show the landed focus of them both, and also means that they had little in the way of a maritime role in the Indian Ocean.
Nor, however, did seaborne Indian states. I will concentrate on the area of Gujarat, including the period after its conquest by the Mughals in 1572. The focus of the Muslim rulers of Gujarat is pithily encapsulated in a saying attributed to one of them: 'Wars by sea are merchants' affairs, and of no concern to the prestige of kings.' Their interest lay in controlling and taxing land, and the peasants on it. Customs revenues made up only a small part of their total revenue. Any activity which they may have undertaken at sea was very much auxiliary to land matters.
The attitude of the Mughals