The Indian Ocean

by Michael Pearson

  The main difference between these two companies was in their attitude to trade within Asia, that is a history of the ocean. The Dutch East India Company engaged massively in the 'country' trade, and did very well indeed from it. The great Dutch governor J.P. Coen well described the complexity of the trade which the Dutch East India Company hoped to enter:

  Piece goods from Gujarat we can barter for pepper and gold on the coast of Sumatra, rials [silver currency] and cottons from the [Coromandel] coast for pepper in Bantam, sandalwood, pepper and rials we can barter for Chinese goods and Chinese gold; we can extract silver from Japan with Chinese goods, piece goods from the Coromandel coast in exchange for spices, other goods and rials, rials from Arabia for spices and various other trifles – one thing leads to the other.61

  Private trade by its employees was actively discouraged, another sign of the rigidity which seems to characterise their total presence. The company opened up some new and long-distance routes, and were able to compete successfully with Asian traders. One of their main successes was a result of their being the only Europeans allowed to trade in Japan from the 1640s: their profits here were immense. In another niche they had an unusual success. The Maldives produced the best, because smallest, cowry shells, which we have noted being very widely used as an alternative currency (see pages 84–5). The VOC was able to centralise this trade on Sri Lanka. In 1763 fourteen ships came from the Maldives carrying 80,000 kgs of these shells, a total of 85,740,000 shells.62

  Meanwhile, the English company concentrated on the trade to Europe, and allowed its own servants, called factors, to engage in local trade on their own behalf. Private English trade in the Indian Ocean had expanded greatly by the end of the seventeenth century, and even more during the eighteenth, especially once the swing to the east and China became apparent in the last quarter of the century. Many EIC ships, carrying both company and private goods, spent their lives chaffering around the littoral of the Indian Ocean, engaging in what was in many respects a peddling trade.

  Despite this large and often successful engagement in the country trade, the Europeans still had to send out large quantities of bullion to the Indian Ocean area; few European products found a market in the area. As Furber noted, 'if silver had not been available to the Europeans in sufficient quantities, the East India trade could not have been carried on.'63 This in turn reinforces our view of a world beginning to be integrated, for the bullion came from south America, and much of it flowed on to the Indian Ocean, either via the Mediterranean and the Middle East and so to our ocean, or around the Cape in European ships. On average two-thirds of VOC exports from Europe were in bullion; in the seventeenth century Peruvian silver, in the eighteenth Brazilian gold. Between 1660 and 1720 Dutch imports into Bengal, one of their major trading areas, were only 12.5 per cent goods, the rest being bullion. So also with the EIC. Over the period 1660–1720 only 20.6 per cent of English imports to all of Asia were made up of goods: the rest was bullion.64

  Most rulers at this time, whether English kings or Mughal emperors, were bullionists who believed, with prevailing economic thought, that a rich state was one which had huge stocks of precious metals. Despite this, the influence of both of the companies in domestic politics, and their contribution to home revenues, was so great that they were allowed to export huge amounts of bullion. It must be stressed how fortuitous this all was. The consequences of the discovery of the Americas, and then of huge silver deposits there, generated the bullion without which Europeans could hardly have entered Indian Ocean trade. The ramifications of this are clearly enormous.

  There was also a fluctuating, and ultimately unsuccessful, French effort in the ocean. The French seem never to have quite got it right. Several companies, usually undercapitalised, and often created de novo by the state as compared with the Dutch and English examples where the state recognised merchant pressure, had difficulty in competing with their European rivals. Often the French arrived too late, to find a trade, or a port city, already dominated by someone else. They did however attempt to plant colonies in Madagascar in the 1640s, and on the Ile de Bourbon (Réunion) in 1670. In 1710 they moved from there to Mauritius, now renamed the Ile de France. This island had been sighted by the Portuguese. In 1598 the Dutch named it and claimed it, but even in 1617 it was still uninhabited. Later the island was meant to serve as a way station between their other important territory, the Cape Colony, established in the 1640s, and Indonesia. They even tried to colonise it, but their settlements there failed, and they withdrew in 1710, having taken all the ebony and made the dodo extinct. Both these islands were captured by the British in 1810 during the Napoleonic Wars. The British at this time also acquired Rodrigues, which the French had settled in 1750, and the Seychelles, colonised in 1770.

  The French were one of the European groups engaged in the slave trade in the Indian Ocean. This trade had a long history, and we have noted extensive trade from East Africa to the Middle East over many centuries. In the seventeenth century there was little demand for slaves in India, but there was a lot in southeast Asia, where various forms of bondage, right through to slavery, were common. This was especially so in Aceh, where expanding pepper plantations and tin mines needed slaves, as also did agriculture to feed a growing population. The Dutch entered this trade with some enthusiasm, doing especially well in buying people when there was famine in India. In famine years in Coromandel the Dutch shipped a thousand or so each year to Indonesia. The Dutch also took labour from Madagascar to work in their Cape colony, and even took some to the Americas.65 Later in the century the EIC took some hundreds of slaves from Africa, and especially from Madagascar, to Benkulen in Sumatra.

  The French participated in this trade in the western part of the ocean. Indeed, the trade only became important when the French developed plantation agriculture, especially sugar, in the Mascarenhas islands. Again Madagascar was the first place to supply slaves, but later the East African coast was also exploited.

  Europeans in the Indian Ocean were making important advances as the eighteenth century progressed. Even by 1750 the VOC and EIC were handling nearly 40 per cent of Bengal's silk exports, and this was a major export from the area.66 In global terms, Steensgaard worked out figures which show how important the Europeans were becoming. He claims that the total Indian overseas trade around 1600 was about 60,000 tons. The VOC alone by the 1620s had 10,000 tons, and around 1700 had 30,000 tons. By the middle of the eighteenth century European demand for Indian Ocean products was probably bigger than the total internal trade in the ocean, though this takes no account of inland markets.67

  Our schema concerning the degree of influence of port cities claims that the third stage is when a controller of a port city not only interferes in production, but actually seizes the land on which production was occurring. The Dutch did this early on in the Malukus, but this was atypical for the time. It was only when the British acquired revenue rights in Bengal in the 1760s that a seismic change occurred. Their political power was used ruthlessly to the advantage of the EIC and more particularly the English private traders. For the first time producers could be coerced, and new trade networks created. English private traders in Kolkata and Mumbai came to dominate the trade of the Indian Ocean and the South China sea, and the EIC rose to superiority in trade to Europe. Bullion for goods no longer applied, for the English could finance purchases in Bengal from land revenue collections, and could also borrow money from private European merchants in Bengal against bills of exchange payable in Europe.

  Ashin Das Gupta linked the beginning of European dominance with Asian decline, and this he explained was caused by the decline of the great Islamic empires. He sees an important transition. Once European ships had carried Asian traders, and Asian goods, to Asian markets, European ships being preferred increasingly as they were less likely to be attacked by pirates. Now, in the eighteenth century, European ships carried European goods to European controlled ports. He also described how Europeans began to move inland. At
first they merely protected their inland trade with small bodies of troops, but this soon moved on to interfering in actual supply. By mid century Surat's trade had been taken over by Mumbai; as Das Gupta put it, 'there can be no doubt that by the turn of the nineteenth century not only was the European ship dominant in the ocean but the Indian ship has sailed into oblivion.'68 But this story will be taken up again in the next chapter.

  Involvement in the country trade got Europeans closer to Indian Ocean patterns and rhythms. They fitted in, acculturated, in the milieu. We described how there developed a tacit understanding between Gujarati merchants and the Portuguese officials in Diu. So also in East Africa, where below the official pronouncements there was a whole other layer which was to do with cooperation, acculturation and dependence. This was even to be seen in relations with Muslims, in theory so hated and seen to be so threatening. Especially in the early days the Portuguese relied heavily on existing Muslim trade networks in the south to get their goods. To ensure their cooperation the Portuguese treated them well, gave them presents, and tried to work with them on matters such as choosing a new sultan for those ports in the south where puppet sultans ruled.69

  Other examples of very human interaction are numerous, best seen perhaps in copious intermarriage or at least interbreeding, and in the practice of Christianity, or for that matter Islam, in the area. Boxer described an 'amicable mixture of Christian, Muslim and pagan practices', and these syncretic practices were followed not only by newly converted Bantus but by whites, mulattos and Goans as well, despite the opposition of the clergy. Such happy mixing and intermingling was also found at Sena in 1633, where the church school was attended by the children of Portuguese, and also people of Chinese, Javanese, Malabari, Sinhalese, and various African backgrounds, in a way reminiscent of the College of St Paul in Goa.

  This sort of low level intermixing was seen in a variety of other contexts. In 1606 Padre Gaspar de San Bernadino arrived at Siyu. There were no Portuguese, or indeed Christians, in the area so the status of priest was unknown to the locals. However, two Hindu merchants from Diu did know what they were. They spoke good Portuguese and acted as interpreters for the Fathers and told the local king all about how Christian fathers behave. At Takwa, on Manda Island, is a blue and white sixteenth-century Portuguese dish set into the base of the cistern beside the mosque, that is the ablution trough.

  There have been many studies of the Portuguese all over the Indian Ocean area 'going native', assimilating to the intricate long-standing networks of trade, especially in the Bay of Bengal area and many parts of southeast Asia. These people operated outside official Portuguese channels, spoke various Asian languages, and indeed very seldom had the opportunity to be counselled by a priest. They were in a position no different from, say, Armenians, Jews, Shirazis, Turks, and the host of other people trading and living and marrying in this polyglot and heterogeneous maritime world.

  Most Portuguese outside the official structure were men who had served in the forts, and then by getting married had become casados ('householders'). Many of these people found better trading opportunities outside the forts and strips of the coast controlled by the state. They went to other areas and traded alongside all the others found there, whether Swahili, other Muslims, or Indian Hindus. Many of these people can be seen as transfrontierfolk, the appropriate term for people who do not straddle a frontier, but rather move right over to the other side and acculturate more or less fully. These men were to be found all over littoral Asia, up and down the Swahili coast, in Cambay, all around the Bay of Bengal.

  The same interaction can be seen in the 'search for the similar' which the early Portuguese did both in East Africa and in India.70 In both cases they tried desperately to come to terms with, even appropriate, unknown people and religions, and understand them in terms familiar to themselves. In both cases what happened was that they met Hindus, followers of a religion at that time unknown to nearly all Europeans, and thought their religion was a form of Christianity. They were also predisposed to find Christians because they hoped to find Prester John, the Christian emperor who would ally with them and smite the Muslims from the south.

  In a more social area, it is clear that many Portuguese in India acculturated and fitted in to the Indian Ocean littoral environment. Portuguese doctors, including even Garcia da Orta, recognised that often Indian remedies were better than European ones. Some aspects of pollution were picked up from Hindu practice. There was copious sexual interaction, and hence reproduction, between Portuguese men and Asian and African women. The result was the creation of a very large mestiço population. Even in their capital city of Goa the Portuguese were far outnumbered by Indians: the total population in 1600 was about 75,000, of whom 1,500 were Portuguese or mestiços, 20,000 Hindus and the rest local Christians.

  The medical intermingling can stand as a type for this whole topic.71 Until the sixteenth century medical knowledge and practice in Europe, in the Muslim world and in India seems to have been relatively evenly spread. No area had any decisive advantage, although in different specialities different areas were ahead. There was a considerable degree of interaction between the traditional systems of these three areas. Yet there also was a recognition that some illnesses were geographically specific; some Indian illnesses, for example, were seen by foreigners as 'different', and best treated by indigenous methods. This was especially to be seen in the first European city in Asia, the Portuguese capital of Goa.

  One example of both difference and interaction was bleeding. Bleeding was almost a universal cure, prophylactic and restorative in European medicine. They continued to rely on this when they got to India. In January 1542 Francis Xavier, later to be a saint, was ill. He ended a letter by writing, 'I would very much like to write at greater length, but sickness does not now permit it. I have been bled seven times today, and I am only passing well.'72 In the 1670s the Abbé Carré fell ill with a fever, and insisted on being bled. Great quantities were hacked out of him by enthusiastic amateur bleeders, and

  This made me so feeble that I cannot bear to speak of it. Yet, though I felt very weak, I was not surprised that the fever grew less, as it no longer had the cause [that is, excess of blood] which had kept it up; and I further reduced it by refusing for eight days to eat many little delicacies that I would have liked – sometimes one thing, sometimes another, though I must confess I refrained with very great difficulty. For eight or ten days I still had my sight, my memory, and my senses, but so feebly that I did not remember anything that happened to me.

  In the Royal Hospital of Goa bleeding was widely prescribed, being done up to thirty or forty times, so long as 'bad' blood came. Here we can see interaction, as Tavernier tells us:

  I forgot to make a remark upon the frequent bleedings in reference to Europeans – namely, that in order to recover their colour and get themselves in perfect health, it is prescribed for them to drink for twelve days three glasses of pissat de vache [cow's urine], one in the morning, one at midday, and one in the evening; but, as this drink cannot but be very disagreeable, the convalescent swallows as little of it as possible, however much he may desire to recover his health. This remedy has been learnt from the idolaters [that is, Hindus] of the country, and whether the convalescent makes use of it or not, he is not allowed to leave the hospital till the twelve days have expired during which he is supposed to partake of this drink.

  This mingling presumably explains why long after Portuguese political power had declined their language remained a lingua franca in maritime Asia. When the Dutch conquered Sri Lanka they were forced to use Portuguese to communicate with their new subjects. At the battle of Plassy in 1757 Clive used Portuguese to communicate with his troops. So also at the Cape, where in 1765 Mrs Kindersley wrote vigorously that the slaves of the Dutch were

  brought originally from different parts of the East Indies. What seems extraordinary is, that they do not learn to talk Dutch, but the Dutch people learn their dialect, which is called Portugue
se; and is a corruption of that language, some of them are called Malays or Malaynese, brought from that country of Malacca, and the islands to the eastward of India, subject to the Dutch company.

  She found the same in India. She wrote of Indian Christians, whom she considered to be very low people, 'Their language is called Pariar Portuguese, a vile mixture of almost every European language with some of the Indian. This is however a useful dialect to travellers in many parts of Hindostan, particularly on the sea coast, and is called the lingua Franca of India.'73

  Yet we must not exaggerate the extent of interaction, let alone of tolerance. Portugal's official policies were brutal and ethnocentric. Yes, there was mingling on the ground, yet there also was racism. Portuguese colonial society was very strictly graduated. At the top were those born in Portugal and who had no hint of Jewish blood. The newly converted Jews, New Christians, were regarded with very considerable suspicion. The great savant Garcia da Orta was posthumously convicted of Judaising. His bones were dug up and burnt. His sister was burnt alive. Next in the hierarchy were casticos, people born in India of Portuguese parents. There were very few of these, as few Portuguese women came to the east. These people in any case were considered to be inferior to those born in Portugal, because their wet nurses were Indian and hence they had drunk 'contaminated' milk. Next was the large mestiço, mixed blood, population, who were subject to many slurs and disadvantages. In nearly every case the father was Portuguese, the mother Asian. Those of mixed African and Portuguese descent were lower again. Then came Indian Christians, then non-Christians, and at the bottom black slaves. Goa had a considerable slave population. They were used in domestic work, and sometimes were hired out by their owners to work as seamstresses, nurse maids, or prostitutes. Often they were treated very brutally indeed. Their value can be seen in the fact that the dearest slave in the Goa market would be a young woman who could cook, sing, sew, and was a virgin. She would sell for 30 cruzados, a fine Arabian horse for over 500.