The Indian Ocean

by Michael Pearson

  What was the position of these merchant communities in these great markets? Ibn Battuta again will provide an entrée to the topic. He left several detailed accounts which show the typical situation. In 1330 he arrived at Mogadishu:

  It is the custom of the people of this town that, when a vessel reaches the anchorage, the sumbuqs, which are small boats, come out to it. In each sumbuq there are a number of young men of the town, each one of whom brings a covered platter containing food and presents it to one of the merchants on the ship, saying 'This is my guest,' and each of the others does the same. The merchant, on disembarking, goes only to the house of his host among the young men, except those who have made frequent journeys to the town and have gained some acquaintance with its inhabitants; these lodge where they please. When he takes up residence with his host, the latter sells his goods for him and buys for him; and if anyone buys anything from him at too low a price or sells to him in the absence of his host, that sale is held invalid by them. This practice is a profitable one for them.111

  A little later he arrived in Zafari, that is Khafar or Dofar, in southwest Oman:

  The population of Zafari are engaged in trading, and have no livelihood except from this. It is their custom that when a vessel arrives from India or elsewhere, the sultan's slaves go down to the shore, and come out to the ship in a sumbuq, carrying with them a complete set of robes for the owner of the vessel or his agent, and also for the rubban, who is the captain, and for the kirai who is the ship's writer. Three horses are brought for them, on which they mount [and proceed] with drums and trumpets playing before them from the seashore to the sultan's residence, where they make their salutations to the vizier and amir jandar. Hospitality is supplied to all who are in the vessel for three nights, and when the three nights are up they eat in the sultan's residence. These people do this in order to gain the goodwill of the shipowners....112

  And finally some years later in the Maldives:

  It is a custom of theirs when a vessel arrives at their island that kanadir, that is to say small boats, go out to meet them, loaded with people from the island carrying betel and karanbah, that is green coconuts. Each man of them gives these to anyone whom he chooses on board the vessel, and that person becomes his guest and carries his goods to his host's house as though he were one of his relatives. Any of the visitors who wishes to marry may do so, but when it is time to leave he divorces the woman, because their women never leave the country.113

  Ibn Battuta's experiences were the norm. In Quilon in the twelfth century a European visitor, Benjamin of Tudela, said that when foreign merchants arrived three secretaries of the king came on board, wrote down their names, and reported them to the king. The king then gave them security for their property, which he claimed could even be left in open fields without guard.114 Marco Polo wrote generally, and perhaps over-flatteringly, that Indian merchants

  are the best merchants in the world, and the most truthful, for they would not tell a lie for anything on earth. If a foreign merchant does not know the ways of the country he applies to them and entrusts his goods to them, they will take charge of these, and sell them in the most loyal manner, seeking zealously the profit of the foreigner and asking no commission except what he pleases to bestow.115

  We also have an account demonstrating practice in the great Gujarati port of Cambay in the sixteenth century. While this is beyond the period of this chapter, Cambay was little affected by the policies of the Portuguese. The Frenchman Vincent Le Blanc was in Cambay in the mid 1570s. He wrote:

  Trade is very faithfully carried on there [in Cambay] for the Factors and Retailers are persons of quality, and good reputation; and are as careful in venting and preserving other persons wares, as if they were their own proper goods; they are also obliged to furnish the Merchants with dwelling houses, and warehouses, diet, and oftentimes with divers sorts of commodities: the houses are large and pleasant, where you are provided with women of all ages for your use, you buy them at certain rates, and sell them again when you have made use of them, if you like them not you may choose the wholsomest and the most agreeable to your humour: all things necessary to livelihood may be made your own at cheap rates, and you live there with much liberty, without great inconveniences; if you discharge the customs rates upon merchandizes, nothing more is exacted, and all strangers live with the same freedom and liberty as the Natives do, making open profession of their own Religions.116

  It could be that the allocation of a local to act as agent led to some fleecing of the ignorant arriviste. Tomé Pires described how in Melaka, before the Portuguese conquest, when a ship came in the captain or leading merchant negotiated a price with a group of ten or twenty local merchants, and they then divided the goods up among themselves. This did mean that sales were quick, an important consideration given the monsoon system.117 So also in Calicut, again at the end of our period. When the foreign Muslim traders, the pardesi, arrived, 'As soon as any of these Merchants reached the city, the King assigned him a Nayre, to protect and serve him, and a Chatim clerk to keep his accounts and look after his affairs, and a broker to arrange for him to obtain such goods as he had need of, for which three persons they paid good salaries every month.'118 This account is confirmed by Ma Huan, from Zheng He's fleet, and his account seems to show a very considerable degree of state control or facilitation: the two seem to merge in rather. He wrote that in Calicut pepper was held in a state storeroom, and sold at a fixed price, but one had to have an official's permission. When a ship arrived an official and the people on board negotiated fixed prices for the goods it carried, and also for what the people on ship wanted to buy from the locals. These prices had to be observed, with no deviation. 'Foreign ships from every place come there; and the king of the country also sends a chief and a writer and others to watch the sales; thereupon they collect the duty and pay it in to the authorities.'119

  Two earlier examples again point to a rather benevolent situation, where merchants were able to counter attempts to fleece them from land powers, and port controllers. A Jewish merchant who left Oman poor, but made a great fortune, came back thirty years later in 912 to Sohar with a huge cargo of Chinese merchandise. Envious people persuaded the Caliph in Baghdad to confiscate his goods, but the governor of Oman was worried about this as he knew that he would lose trade in his port if word of this got out. He summoned all the heads of the merchant communities, and told them what had happened. They closed down the markets, and sent a petition to the Caliph, and the governor was able to avoid having the Jewish merchant arrested. Buzurg recounts a very similar tale, one perhaps based on this actual event. He tells how a rich Jewish merchant in Oman was unjustly arrested by the rulers. This was seen as prejudicial to all merchants and foreigners, and once word of his arrest got around no ships would come to Oman. The markets all closed and foreign merchants got ready to leave. Upset, the locals pointed out that 'We shall be deprived of our living when ships no longer come here, because Oman is a town where men get everything from the sea.'120

  In sum, there is very little evidence of the use of force in the Indian Ocean before 1498. The bottom line is competition. None of these port cities could afford to be too abusive, for then merchants would go elsewhere. The crucial point is that these Asian port cities prospered not by compulsion, but by providing facilities for trade freely undertaken by a vast array of merchants. What the rulers provided was really opportunities, fair treatment, an infrastructure within which trade could take place. They ensured low and relatively equitable customs duties, and a certain law and order, but did little else. Officials concerned with trade were instructed to encourage and welcome visitors. In short, visiting merchants wanted a level playing field. If they did not get this, they could retaliate by going elsewhere.

  What was the basis of these merchant communities? The main distinction between various natios (a word deriving from the Mediterranean, which can be used to refer to Indian Ocean merchant communities) was not power or wealth, and certainly,
in this pre-modern and pre-national age, it was not nationality: these people did not carry passports, and knew little or nothing of frontiers between sovereign states. The senior historian Philip Curtin some time ago wrote a book about 'trade diasporas', which he thought characterised much premodern trade. The notion is that various traders spread out from some place of origin, like say Jews, or Armenians.121 However, his stress on their being dispersed, and on the importance of kin and connections, seems to be to a degree invalid; all merchants at this time operated through these sorts of connections, regardless of whether they were an Armenian trading in Tibet or a Gujarati Jain trading in Cambay. Indeed, the whole concept of a diaspora seems problematic, for many of the groups he classifies in this way did retain strong ties with some base or home area; this certainly applied to India's Hindu and Muslim overseas traders, and even to Armenians, who had no country but did have centres, notably New Julfa in Isfahan.122

  If these merchant communities were not all trade diasporas, on what criteria were they based? Obviously not all merchants were itinerant. Rather, various merchant groups had agents, often kin, located in the major trading centres. There were at least two reasons for this. First, someone based in an echelle for some time would learn the local languages and customs, and provide good information for his visiting kin folk. Some port controllers, as we saw, provided mediators for visitors, but in many cases merchants preferred to use their own locally based men. Second, the monsoon pattern necessitated a local permanent contact. A merchant who arrived and was dependent on leaving on the next monsoon would be at a massive disadvantage, as the locals would merely put up their prices and he would have no bargaining power as he would have to leave at a set time in order to catch the monsoon to get home. But someone there permanently could buy when the market was low, and sell when it was high, throughout the year.

  Merchant networks could be very extensive indeed, stretching all around Eurasia. From the early fifteenth century the Venetians, who dominated the trade in spices in the Mediterranean, had networks of correspondents and associated merchants' firms going from Venice to Aleppo, Baghdad, Basra, Hurmuz, Diu and Tabriz, and probably to Mashad and Samarkand as well. The aim, successfully realised, was to get information on planned movements of goods. The Armenians had similar networks, spreading from Amsterdam to Moscow and from Istanbul to Cochin and Abyssinia.123

  Some of these were kin based networks, in which family ties and a common religion intersected. Armenians practised a particular form of Christianity. Jews had their own faith. Larger trading groups were internally divided: Hindus most obviously by caste, as were Jains. But the best information we have on these religious divisions relates, fortuitously, to the major dispersed trading communities in the Indian Ocean, that is Muslims. As we commented extensively earlier in this chapter, merchants and religious specialists worked hand-in-hand in our period, indeed could be the same person, in that a trader could well adhere to a particular Sufi (Muslim devotional) order, and a religious specialist would trade on his own behalf. In the fifteenth century we know of a group who came from a town in Iran called Kazarun, whose community solidarity was based on locality as well as common religious practice. These merchants were all adherents of a Muslim saint of this town, and his successors sold 'spiritual insurance', in that the merchants would get a blessing and in return, once back from a successful voyage, they would pay a sum of money. This particular network had people in Cambay, Calicut, Quilon, and Guangzhou in China.

  Yet we must not let a communal flavour come in to our discussion. There is clear evidence that in Gujarat Hindus and Muslims interacted economically, with for example Muslim traders being happy to use Hindu brokers to secure their goods. Similarly, Jews traded with Armenians, and so on. Indeed it could be, reverting to our discussion of littoral society (see pages 37–41), that all those who travelled and traded by sea had a certain commonality which gave them some identity with those who also did this, as compared with those of their own religion who did not. A Muslim sea trader may have felt more at home with a Jewish sea trader than with a Muslim peasant, or for that matter a mullah, located far inland. The physical aspect of the sea, and the port – the ship, the prostitutes and taverns, the role of the monsoon, haggling over customs – made up an experience which differentiated sea travellers from all others.124

  These merchant groupings acted relatively autonomously within the port polities. In Melaka at the time of the Portuguese conquest in 1511 four merchant communities were important, each of them living autonomous lives with their own headmen, called shahbandars, and governing themselves with little or no reference to the ruler, the sultan. The most important of these four groups were the Gujaratis. Many were resident, but some 1,000 merchants from Gujarat visited each year. The other main groups were other merchants from the west, that is from India and especially Klings from Coromandel, Malays from Indonesia and as far east as the Spice Islands and the Philippines, and the East Asians, mostly from South China but also from Japan and Okinawa. They lived in ethnically based quarters, here called kampongs, and each group was represented before the 'state' by a shahbandar. The sultan participated vigorously in trade, but apparently gave himself no particular advantage from his position as ruler.125 Similarly, in the great Gujarati ports different merchant communities had recognised leaders, though their power here, being located not in an independent port city but in a city which was part of a major landed state, must have been less. In Calicut there was a clear distinction, and considerable autonomy, for Gujarati Hindu merchants, foreign Muslims from various places of origin (the most important being those from the Red Sea and Cairo, known as pardesi), and local Muslims, known as Mapillahs. 'They sail everywhere with goods of many kinds and have in the town itself a Moorish Governor of their own who rules and punishes them without interference from the King, save that the Governor gives an account of certain matters to the King.'126

  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 Strai
ts 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 traders or, in F.C. Lane's felicitous phrase, the sea proletariat. They travelled mostly short distances – up and down the coasts, or on the inland waterways, the backwaters of the Kerala near interior or in the marsh area of the Tigris-Euphrates delta. They visited many strange places well outside the interest of the established great merchants. The fictitious but still arguably prototypical Sindbad the Sailor visited one place, probably the remote Andaman Islands, and found that the inhabitants rode their horses bareback. He got a saddle made, and they were all delighted and gave him many presents.132