The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  However, there were suspicions about the political loyalty of the Portuguese towards the Habsburgs and about their religious loyalty towards the Catholic Church. When it came to politics, the Portuguese merchants doubted whether spending vast sums on a war with the Dutch rebels, renewed in 1621, made sense; from a commercial perspective war with the Dutch rendered contact with their fellow Portuguese, the Sephardim of Amsterdam, much more difficult. Worse still, the existence of sugar-rich Portuguese colonies on the coast of Brazil acted as a magnet drawing Dutch naval forces towards South America. The feitorias and little towns in Brazil, as well as Portuguese shipping out of Africa, were much more exposed than the Spanish treasure fleets, for the Spaniards had learned some lessons from Francis Drake and his friends, and made sure their fleets were well armed. Even so, the Portuguese were so keen to gain the contracts offered by the Spanish Crown that they managed to reach an agreement in 1626, and the king’s favourite, the Count-Duke Olivares, was not seriously worried about employing New Christians. Indeed, he took the view that Spain should openly encourage wealthy New Christians to settle in what for many was the land of their Spanish Jewish ancestors.

  The Portuguese who worked with Olivares in the financial offices of state in Madrid were not all New Christians, but many were: Manuel Lopes Pereira was born in Lisbon to a New Christian family and went to live in Seville in 1621, before Olivares’s rise to power; and then he worked under Olivares as contador, or auditor, during the 1630s, which left him little time for commercial business of his own.23 In many respects the New Christian elite replicated the role that the Jewish elite had played in medieval Castile and Aragon, as royal financial advisers and as tax farmers. Public display by New Christians aroused envy, and the fact that some of them lived in the most fashionable parts of Madrid was not appreciated by their often virulent critics, who included the poet Francisco de Quevedo and the playwright Lope de Vega. Despite its heavy dependence on them, the Crown was reluctant to offer leading bankers noble titles or membership of the great Military Orders, for these positions were supposedly reserved for Old Christians of pure blood; but even here exceptions were made. Inevitably there were constant complaints about their political and financial influence, heavily coloured by traditional antipathy to those of ‘impure’ blood, even where there was no evidence that these people had an interest in the Jewish religion; and the New Christians themselves did not like to be called by that name – still less by the common nickname Marranos, which meant ‘pigs’.24

  As with the Genoese and the Germans, these intimate ties to the royal court could not be maintained in the face of constant crisis. Olivares fell from grace in 1643, meaning that the Inquisition was once again able to stake out powerful victims who lacked a protector. Moreover, Portuguese rebellion against the Habsburgs and the re-establishment of a national monarchy in Portugal in 1640 undermined the strong economic base on which the relationship between the New Christians and the Crown had rested. Portugal found itself under increasing pressure from the Dutch, especially in Brazil, and lacked the resources to defend its empire effectively.25 The Portuguese merchants had moved beyond maritime trade into public finance, but their capacity to keep the Spanish Crown in funds depended on the operation of the Portuguese trading network that encompassed the globe. The collapse of their influence was hastened by the decline in influence of Portugal itself, in the face of Dutch and other competition. Many of the most talented Portuguese businessmen now lived in the Dutch United Provinces. As members of this diaspora in many cases found their way back to Judaism, the Portuguese diaspora began to revolve around Amsterdam rather than Lisbon, Seville or Madrid.

  IV

  Trading diasporas are found across the world, and they often consist of people distinctive by religion as well as ethnic origin. Another example of a religious and ethnic minority is the Armenians, though it too is a complex one, as the Armenians were split between those who had, since around 1200, accepted loose papal authority and those who rejected it. As exotic Christians within Muslim and Christian states they were able to avoid being sucked into the internecine strife between Sunni and Shi‘a or Catholic and Orthodox.26 Their trading networks were less exclusively maritime than those of the Sephardim, reflecting their very long history of both deportation and trading enterprise. Their major base was at New Julfa, a suburb of Isfahan in the Iranian hinterland. Shah Abbas, the great Safavid ruler of Persia, invited them there in 1605, after he deported about 300,000 Armenians from territories he had conquered during one of his wars with the Ottomans. Many of those who settled in Isfahan came from a town in the Caucasus already called Julfa, and the Julfans had traded in silk as far as Aleppo and even Venice, where the Armenians were so well installed that they were able to set up their own monastery that can still be visited on the island of San Lazzaro.27

  From New Julfa, Armenian merchants had access to the Persian court, while the relative proximity of the Indian Ocean drew them towards the trade of India – there Madras (Chennai) was their most important centre of operations. The shah conferred commercial privileges on the New Julfans, knowing that they were heavily dependent on his goodwill; particularly valuable was the right to export Persian silk. However, the New Julfans diversified into Indian textiles and jewels. Although they did not ignore other opportunities, such as the cinnamon of Ceylon or the coffee of Arabia, silk, textiles and jewels dominated their activities, with the result that their trading network, despite its impressive physical extent, was always narrower in its focus than that of the Sephardim, who handled spices, sugar and hides among many other goods. All the same, Shah Abbas achieved his aims, which made New Julfa into ‘one of the most important mercantile centres in Eurasia’.28

  The geographical spread of their interests is impressive: by sea, as far west as Cádiz, and as far east as Mexico; by land, as far north as Archangel, London and Amsterdam – overland connections to Russia were generally manageable, as the Englishman Anthony Jenkinson had discovered while travelling on behalf of Queen Elizabeth; they even appeared in Tibet in the 1690s.29 At the start of the sixteenth century, Tomé Pires had already found Armenians who traded in Melaka by way of Gujarat.30 Burma and Siam were also familiar ground; they could hardly ignore the commercial attractions of the great Siamese trading city of Ayutthaya. New Julfans turned up in Guangzhou in the 1680s, at a time when India was thirsty for China tea, which they exported to Madras. Mateos ordi Ohanessi, who died at Guangzhou in 1794 (half a century after the New Julfa network had largely fallen apart), took a Portuguese passport and based himself in Macau; he was said to be so wealthy that the annual budget of Macau represented a fraction of his resources. From Macau, New Julfan merchants looked eastwards towards its great trading partner, Manila, and made use of the Manila galleons plying towards Acapulco. In 1668 an Armenian merchant named Surat sent his ship the Hopewell to Manila on its maiden voyage.

  These Manila voyages were something of a scam. The Armenians sent their own ships across the waves, flying the red, yellow and red flag of the Armenians, decorated with an image of the Lamb of God. This was in effect a neutral flag, respected by the Spaniards and the Portuguese. Indeed, Armenian-owned ships as a rule travelled without cannon, which may sound like folly, when one takes into account the violence between the colonial powers and the widespread piracy in the Indian Ocean, but this practice was understood as a guarantee of their inviolability. Sometimes the English took advantage of this neutral status and used the Armenians to negotiate on their behalf with tricky parties such as the Safavid shahs or the Mughal rulers of India. Yet these Armenian ships were often trading on behalf of the English or the French – the English East India Company entered into an agreement with the New Julfans in 1688, in the hope that the Armenians would send their silks to London around the Cape of Good Hope, rather than using a route through Turkey and the Mediterranean, in return for which Armenians were encouraged to settle in English forts and trading stations in India, ‘as if they were Englishmen born’, to cite the
agreement. In 1698 an Armenian khwaja, or merchant, named Israel di Sarhat, arranged for the English East India Company to receive a rent farm in south-western Bengal; this eventually became the site of Calcutta (Kolkata); and they performed similar services for the French, as well as using the longstanding French base at Pondicherry in their south Indian trading operations – these were particularly lucrative, because they opened up the route to the diamond mines of Hyderabad.

  The Spaniards had already got the measure of the Armenians and attempted to crack down on what they saw as contraband trade conducted on behalf of the English and other rivals. They confined the Armenians living in Manila to the area outside the city walls given over to the Chinese, the ‘Moors’ and others they wished to keep at arm’s length. Probably there were never many Armenians in Manila, but they did make use of the port to reach Mexico, where the distinctive nature of Armenian Christianity attracted unwelcome attention from the Inquisition. Silver drew them to Mexico: by selling their goods there and acquiring American silver, they could fund their purchases of Chinese silk in Macau or Manila. Occasionally too international rivalries made things awkward; rather than being treated as neutral, the Armenians were classified as Persian, or in some cases Turkish, subjects; if the latter, they were banned from bringing silk to Marseilles in 1687, but the answer was to pose as Persians, since the French had no quarrel with the shah.31 Ultimately, what counted was the hunger of consumers in western Europe and other markets served by the New Julfans for the goods they brought from India and beyond.

  In their vast diaspora, nowhere compared with Madras in importance; the New Julfan merchants were there by 1666, and they had their own church in Madras from 1712 onwards, even providing aldermen who helped run the city council. They could not set up a church everywhere, for fear of arousing the suspicion of the Christian authorities or because of scanty numbers; on the other hand, they seized what opportunities they could; in the eighteenth century they possessed several churches in Burma, and they also acquired the right to use a chapel in one of the churches of Cádiz, testimony to their ability (at the best of times) to convince Spanish Catholics that they were not heretics, just very different in their practices. And, although the Calvinist Dutch placed tight limits on Catholic worship, the Armenians of Amsterdam were able to exploit their distinctive identity, acquiring a church of their own in 1663–4 – in this period the Amsterdam authorities were keener to allow Jewish worship than Catholic. Most of the Amsterdam Armenians were New Julfans, and they are thought to have numbered only about a hundred people, with a similar figure for other major Armenian bases around the world. Their strength did not, therefore, reside in numbers; but the fact that this rather small number of merchants and their dependants could build a church, and rebuild it early in the next century, suggests no lack of resources. In the same years they set up an Armenian printing press in Amsterdam; setting up these presses was a trademark of the Armenians, as it was of the Sephardic diaspora, and Armenian printing houses were found across the Julfan world, in Venice, Calcutta, even Lvov.32 However, the Armenian communities were predominantly male, so one reason it was often an advantage to accept normative Catholicism, in Catholic cities such as Venice, was that they could then take local wives.33

  Looking at the Sephardim and the Armenians, one can see that these diasporas did not conform to a strict model. The Portuguese could bury themselves within a host society when it was safer to do so, notably when the Inquisition was stalking outside; the Armenians were conspicuous in their identity, because they faced less severe threats. Even so, when given the chance to come out into the open, a good number of Portuguese New Christians, even many of mixed ancestry, did declare themselves to be Jewish, in the safety of Amsterdam, London and other places of welcome – even in far-off Senegal. Yet by far the largest diaspora was that of African slaves, a very diverse mix of peoples, mainly from west Africa and Angola, who were to be found not just within the Atlantic world but on the shores of the Pacific. At the same time, there were plenty of other diasporas that added to the variety and enterprise of trading cities around the shores of the oceans that were not particularly exotic: Bretons and Basques and Scots, all (apart from the slaves) seeking the opportunities that the emergence of the great trading empires of the early modern world had brought into being. Willingly and unwillingly, the peoples of Europe and Africa were on the move across vast tracts of sea.

  40

  The Nordic Indies

  I

  The history of western European contact with the Americas and with the Indies has been written largely from the perspective of the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch, the English and the French, and with good reason: their imprint can still be felt in ports as diverse as Melaka, Macau, Santo Domingo and Curação. By the late seventeenth century, other European powers also wanted their share of the products and profits that could be drawn from long-distance maritime trade. The Danes and the Swedes created global networks of their own, although their importance does not lie in the scale of their trade, for the Danish slave trade at the end of the eighteenth century accounted for not more than 3 per cent of the European total, while their trade with China accounted for just over 5 per cent of the European and American total – the figures for the fledgling USA are closely comparable, while Great Britain stood highest, with well over one third of Canton trade, followed by France.1 Nonetheless, looking at the maritime achievements of the Danes and Swedes offers a valuable, oblique slant on the activities of the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch and the English, with whom, neutral or not, the Danes found that their affairs were closely intertwined.

  The Danes and the Swedes bore witness to significant changes in maritime commerce, notably the explosion in the consumption of tobacco, tea and coffee in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They did not stand on the sidelines but participated in the transformation of the maritime world in those centuries. Their involvement in the tea trade was particularly important: Great Britain consumed about three quarters of the tea imported into Europe from China in the late eighteenth century, and around one third of that tea was handled by Swedish merchants based in Gothenburg or by their Danish rivals. The tea trade is not just interesting because it was massive and a good source of profit. It also says much, if the pun can be excused, about taste and the revolution in consumption that was taking place in eighteenth-century Europe, amply revealing the imprint of maritime trade: the passion for chinoiserie; the attempts to develop porcelain or its substitutes in Europe; attempts to replicate Chinese silks and their much-admired colours in Europe, whether by natural or by artificial means. Just as medieval spice-handlers in France or Italy had adulterated and fabricated eastern condiments, fake tea became all too common in Britain, Holland and other centres of consumption. The inclusion of such tasty ingredients as sheep’s dung did nothing, of course, to satisfy the craving for caffeine that the tea, and also the coffee, trade had brought into being.2

  Scandinavia was the centre of interconnected global operations.3 By looking at the maritime ambitions of the Nordic peoples in these centuries, one can see how what happened in the West Indies was entangled with what happened as far away as Guangzhou and southern India – how, for instance, many of the cloths carried on Danish ships to the West Indies had arrived in Danish ports from India and even China before being passed on down the Danish maritime trade routes. In the case of the Danes, their insistence that they were a neutral power enabled them to act as intermediaries for other Europeans who were officially in competition with, even at war with, one another, so that Danes could be found supplying goods on behalf of English merchants to the French inhabitants of Mauritius during the Napoleonic Wars.4 From the very earliest days of Danish operations, intimate ties to other nations came into being: among the founders of the Danish East India Company were Dutch businessmen with past links to the VOC; and later on Copenhagen attracted Portuguese New Christians, who were allowed to set up a small Jewish community there, as they had done in H
amburg and the Danish town of Glückstadt.5

  Denmark became home to a great many trading companies, eighteen of which were founded between 1656 and 1782, which is something of a European record: an Africa Company based in Glückstadt, close to Hamburg, in 1651; a Morocco Company in 1755; companies trading to and beyond Iceland; the United East India Company of 1616, which evolved into the Danish Asiatic Company, under direct royal control, in 1732.6 The West Indies and the Guinea coast were also the focus of attention, and Denmark won control of three Caribbean islands, to which its companies exported African slaves.7 Denmark lost its slice of what is now Sweden, the region of Scania, in 1658, although attempts to recover it continued for many decades; but Denmark was not the small north European state that it became following the loss of Norway and Schleswig–Holstein in the nineteenth century. One should really write not of Danish merchants but of Danish–Norwegian ones, since the Norwegians took part in the enterprises of the Danish trading companies. As overlord of those territories, which in the case of Norway gave access to fishing grounds, furs and other Arctic products, as well as the Faroes, Iceland and (at least in theory) Greenland, Denmark was a significant maritime power even before it acquired colonies and trading stations in the Caribbean, in Guinea and in India.