Indian Ocean Trade (Book)

The Indian Ocean had long served to connect facilitating trade among East Africa, the Persian Gulf, India Southeast Asia, and China. The Portuguese added a new element to these networks in the early 1500s. Yet despite their intention to create an empire, their military and political ambitions went largely unmet. The Dutch followed the Portuguese, stimulating the older oceanic trade networks while also building new ones.

In East Africa, the Portuguese encountered an existing commercial network. In West Africa, an entirely new oceanic trade began: slaves.

Henry the Navigator’s exploration of the Atlantic Ocean culminated in 1488 when Bartholomew Dias and his crew round the southern tip of Africa at the Cape of Good Hope. The Portuguese journeys has economic as well as religious motives: in seeking an oceanic trade link with Asia, as the Portuguese sought to outflank Muslim intermediaries who controlled the land routes through western Asia and North Africa.

The West

In 1497, the Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, sailed for India. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope, he arrived on the East African coast and hired a local pilot who used Arabic-language charts and navigational guides to lead him from Africa to western India. When they reached India, the Portuguese anchored their ships in cosmopolitan ports that were part of the world’s most extensive maritime trading system. In the western Indian Ocean, merchants transported East African gold, ivory, slaves, and timber to markets in Southern Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and western India. India exported many goods such as valuable cotton cloth.

The East

On the east coast of India, another set of maritime networks connected the Bay of Bengal and the markets of Southeast Asia with Ming China. Muslim-ruled Malacca, which controlled trade through the straits between Sumatra and the Malaya Peninsula, had a population of over 15,000 traders from all over the Indian Ocean world. From here, silk and sugar joined the list of traded commodities. Cinnamon was particularly precious. Whoever controlled the narrow straits at Malacca would profit handsomely from all this commercial activity.

The Portuguese’ Force

The Portuguese, like other Europeans, produced nothing that was valued by Asians: the first Indian king with whom they negotiated was insulted by the poor quality of their gifts. But their ship-mounted cannons allowed them to destroy the coastal defenses and seize important trading centers from East Africa to Malacca, so by 1582, the Portuguese controlled a huge area. Their aggressive behavior earned them a widespread reputation as rough, greedy, and uncivilized.

Swahili and Kilwa

In some cases, the Portuguese redirected trade to profit themselves at the expense of previous merchant groups, such as the Swahili. For centuries, East African gold trade had been dominated by the Swahili, African Islamic merchants who lived on the coast. The Swahili town of Kilwa was ideally suited for this trade, since it was the furthest point south to which mariners from India, Persia, and Arabia could make a safe round trip in the same year using the monsoon winds. The Portuguese used their cannons to destroy the sea walls of Kilwa and diverted the gold southward through their settlement in Mozambique.

Reactions to Portugal

The degree of disruption the Portuguese caused at Kilwa was exceptional. More often, they simply inserted themselves into existing commercial networks and used military force to extort payments from Asian and African rulers and traders. Portuguese officials required all ships trading in the ocean purchase a license \, and if an Indian Ocean captain was found trading without one, they risked Portuguese cannon fire.

The biggest cap between Portuguese ambition and achievement was in religion. While the Portuguese made few converts to Christianity, Islam continued to spread. The Portuguese did form an alliance with the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia. In 1542, Cristovão da Gama, son of the navigator, died while leading Portuguese forces against a Muslim enemy of the Ethiopian king. But the alliance did not last, and in Eastern Africa and across the Indian Ocean, it was Islam rather than Christianity that proved most attractive to new converts.

By the early 17th century, other powers, both European and Asian, were using ship-based cannons to challenge Portuguese fortifications. In 1622, the British allied themselves with Safavid Iran to take the strategic port of Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, from the Portuguese. But the most potent challenge to Portuguese commercial profit came from the Dutch merchants, who were developing both more efficient business systems and more advanced shipping technologies.

The Dutch’s Trade

Early Dutch trading ventures in Europe and the Atlantic were often very profitable, but merchants would be financially ruined if violent storms sank their ships or pirates stole their cargo. The spread the risk, they joined joint-stock companies. People of small means could buy a few shares in such a company and potentially reap a modest profit with little risk.

These joint-stock companies put the Dutch at the forefront of early modern commercial capitalism. Rather than seeking a single big windfall, investors now looked for more modest but regular gain through shrewd reinvestment of their profits. This was the core of the new capitalist ethos associated with the bourgeoisie, a rising social group in Amsterdam and other urban areas of western Europe in the 17th century. The bourgeoisie based their social and economic power, and their political ambitions, on ownership of property rather than inherited titles. Dutch culture reflected the rise of this commercially dynamic bourgeoisie. In many cultures, trade was a low-status activity, it being assumed a merchant could only be rich if he made someone else poor. In Holland, thought, the leading citizens were all involved in trade, and commerce was seen as a noble calling.

The Dutch and the World

In 1641, the Dutch took Malacca from the Portuguese, and after 1658, they riled the island of Sri Lanka. The Dutch presence in Africa focused on Cape Town, established at the southern tip of the continent in 1652 to provision Dutch ships en route to the Indian Ocean. The Dutch faced the same problems as other European traders: what goods could they offer Asian merchants? One solution was to engage in the Afro-Asian carrying trade, such as by selling Indian cottons in Africa and Southeast Asia. Another solution was silver.

The Dutch were lucky that at this time, the entire Indian Ocean economy was being stimulated by large quantities of silver mined by the Spanish in South America and shipped across the Pacific. In the 17th century, increased access to silver finally gave European traders bargaining power in Asia. The Spanish city of Manila in the Philippines became the destination for the Manila Galleons, an annual shipment of silver from Mexico. Silver was central to an emerging trans-pacific trade, which was from the beginning connected to the Indian Ocean network. This flow of silver between the Americas and Asia was helping to lay the foundation of a global economy, and the Dutch were perfectly positioned to benefit.

The Dutch East India Company made huge profits, especially from the spice trade. They sometimes violently intervened in local affairs to increase production, as on the Bandas Islands, where they killed or exiled most of the local population and replaced them with slaves drawn from East Africa, Japan, and India to grow nutmeg. Dutch investors were delighted with a rate of profit that ranged from several hundred to several thousand percent.

Africa and the Atlantic Ocean

While the East African coast had oceanic links connecting the Swahili city-states with the wider world, West Africa’s international networks were traditionally land-based, across the Sahara. When the Portuguese sailed down the West Africa coast in the 15th century, therefore, these were the first significant coastal contacts that West Africans had experienced. Portugal’s initial goals were the discovery of gold and transit to the East, as well as trade in commodities such as pepper and ivory. A new source of profit developed after the Portuguese settled in Madeira in 1454 and began growing sugar, already part of the Mediterranean economy, on Atlantic islands. Sugar production, and demand for slaves, boomed when plantations proliferated in Brazil and the Caribbean by the early 17th century.

The Kongo kingdom was one of the earliest African societies to be destabilized by the new Atlantic Slave Trade. When the Portuguese arrived at the capital city of Mbanza Kongo in 1483, they found a prosperous, well-organized kingdom with extensive markets in cloth and iron goods. King Afonso Mvemba a Nzinga converted to Christianity, renamed his capital San Salvador, sent his sone Enrique to study in Lisbon, and exchanged diplomatic envoys with both Portugal and the Vatican.

Aided by the Portuguese, Afonso undertook wars of conquest that added territory to the Kongo kingdom. Slaves were a byproduct of the fighting, not its purpose, but these battles had the side effect of further stimulating the slave trade. Portuguese merchants were anxious to purchase war captives. Alarmed at the escalation in slave trading, King Afonso complained to his “brother king” in Portugal.

Foreign goods and foreign traders had distorted the traditional market in slaves, which had previously been an accidental byproduct of warfare, into an economic activity in its own right. Afonso’s complaint fell on deaf ears.

As other European nations, including Holland, France, and Britain, became involved in slave trading and sugar production, the demand for slaves increased decade by decade. Only coastal West African societies were immediately affected, yet by the 18th century, the rise of the Atlantic slave trade would fundamentally alter the terms of Africans’ interactions with the wider world.