The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700

A Political and Economic History

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118274026
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire prémoderne

Featuring updates and revisions that reflect recent historiography, this new edition of The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500-1700 presents a comprehensive overview of Portuguese imperial history that considers Asian and European perspectives.

• Features an argument-driven history with a clear chronological structure
• Considers the latest developments in English, French, and Portuguese historiography
• Offers a balanced view in a divisive area of historical study
• Includes updated Glossary and Guide to Further Reading

1

Early Modern Asia

Geopolitics and Economic Change

The world between the Cape of Good Hope and Japan, where the Portuguese strove to build an elaborate network of trade and power between 1500 and 1700, was not a static one. It was characterized by change, at times almost imperceptible, at other times more clearly visible, both at the institutional and at the functional level. To understand Portuguese actions in Asia, therefore, and to comprehend the accommodations they had to make as well as the avenues they used, one needs to do more than describe the “Asian stage” on which they were actors. Rather, it is necessary to consider the problem of the dynamics of Asian history over these two hundred years.

The population of Asia in about 1650 was around 300 million, from a world population of perhaps 500 million. A hundred years later, in 1750, the continent still accounted for roughly 60 percent of the world's population, which had by then risen to around 700 million. Over the century and a half prior to 1650, when estimates are much harder to obtain, it is likely that there had already been a fair degree of expansion in numbers; after the mid-fifteenth century, all over Eurasia, the recovery from the Black Death takes decisive shape in the form of a demographic expansion. We would probably not be far wrong to place Asia's population in 1500 at between 200 and 225 million, which means that the Portuguese “saw” over the first two hundred years of their presence in Asia something like a doubling of the continent's population.

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This population was, needless to say, unevenly distributed. It appears clear that tropical and semi-tropical Asia accounted for a far larger share of the total population than regions farther north, but this was a difference that was not quite so marked at the end of our period as at its beginning. At the farthest limit of the space we are concerned with was Japan, whose modern historians are agreed that the period between 1500 and 1700 witnessed a far more rapid growth of population than either the fourteenth or the eighteenth century, which respectively preceded and succeeded it. Indeed, if the estimates of scholars like Akira Hayami are acceptable, we may conclude that population growth rates in early modern Japan (which are said to have ranged between 0.8 and 1.3 percent per annum) were amongst the highest anywhere in Asia (Hall et al. 1981). In sharp contrast is Southeast Asia, whose historians suggest very slow population growth over the period 1600 to 1800; while this periodization does not permit us to speak directly of the sixteenth century, the impression is certainly left that rates of demographic change in that area (whose population may have been some 22 million in 1600) rarely exceeded 0.2 percent a year over the entire period from 1500 to 1800 (Reid 1988: 11–18).

Sandwiched between Japan and Southeast Asia, the two outliers in early modern Asian demographic history, lie other regions, some closer to Japan in their experience, others better approximating the Southeast Asian case. In the former category is China, whose population grew from about 60 million in 1400 to 180 million by 1750, even if a significant acceleration to this growth was given only after 1680 (at which point China's population has been estimated at a mere 120 million) (Banister 1987: 3–7). In the latter category, we must include much of South and West Asia, where one has to proceed on the basis of largely qualitative evidence, since population statistics are largely dubious until the eighteenth century. Taking one thing with another then, it is possible to assert that the balance of population in Asia gradually shifted from south and west to north and east over the period.

Not only did total population rise and its balance shift; the period also saw the consolidation of some great urban centers, and the decline of others. Cities like Delhi, Agra, Vijayanagara, Aceh, Kyoto, Isfahan, and Istanbul (the last lying in a sense between Europe and Asia), were comparable in order of magnitude and complexity of social structure to any of the European cities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nor was the change purely an urban phenomenon: partly under the pressure of population and partly for other reasons, land under cultivation expanded, as did manufacturing production, with India and China in the seventeenth century possibly accounting for over a half of the world's textile production. To reiterate our initial point, then, even the most obvious of indices do not support the idea of a static Asia that had to confront a dynamic and expanding Portugal.

Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century States

The changes that took place in Asia over these centuries are most obvious and visible, however, at the level of elite politics. In the sixteenth century, two very substantial and powerful states – of the Mughals and the Safavids – were formed in southern and western Asia, while still another state, the Ottoman one – grew considerably in strength. In southern India, the great political system centered around the metropolis of Vijayanagara first consolidated itself and then, in the latter half of the century, entered into decline. Equally dramatic changes are to be observed in the careers of states of Southeast and East Asia: in the former case, Aceh, Arakan and to a lesser extent Makassar are three remarkable sixteenth-century success stories, while in the Far East, the turmoils of the sixteenth century eventually throw up a lasting institution in the bakufu – the “shadow” government of the warlord house of the Tokugawas in Japan, who ruled behind the façade of imperial sovereignty until as late as 1868.

And yet, these changes can quite easily be dismissed as of no real consequence, as indeed they have often been by adherents of the “Omar Khayyam approach,” who insist – like the author of the Rubaiyat in its English version – that early modern Asian state-formation is well encapsulated in this verse:

Think, in this batter'd Caravanserai

Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day,

How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp,

Abode his destined Hour, and went his way.

(verse XVII)

That is to say that these changes represent no more than a replacement of one regime by another, all of which were much the same in essential character. This has, after all, for long been the central thrust of such theories as the “Asiatic Mode of Production,” or “Oriental Despotism,” which stressed the static and unchanging character of both Asian societies and the states that ruled over them. If it is indeed our contention that the states formed in Asia in this period (which we will call early modern) differed from those of an earlier epoch (extending from say the eighth to the fourteenth centuries, which we might term “medieval”), how did they do so?

Before we enter into this question, however, it may be useful to differentiate between types of states in early modern Asia. It has been usual to distinguish Asian states of the period under two broad heads: first, the massive, agrarian-based imperial formations, such as the Ottomans, the Safavids, Vijayanagara and the Mughals, the Ming, and Qing in China, and Mataram in Java; in contrast, the relatively small-scale (usually coastal) states like Kilwa, Hurmuz, Calicut, or Melaka, which are thought to have been essentially trade-based, thus drawing their resources not so much from the harnessing of force under prebendal systems as from the control of strategic “choke-points” along key trade routes. Let us consider the Ottomans as an example of the first type. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, their central fiscal institution is seen as the timar, a revenue-assignment given to timariot prebend-holders who rendered military and other services to the state. Despite the attempts to develop central institutions designed to reduce the dependence of the state on such dispersed forces – attempts that are located by historians in particular during the reign of Sultan Süleyman “the Magnificent” (r. 1520–66) – it is argued that the Ottomans could never throw off their character as a state whose fundamental institution was a combination of the classic Islamic iqta’ assignment, and a “feudal” land-grant deriving from the Paleologues, the last dynasty to rule Byzantium. The timar, like its counterpart the jagir in Mughal territories, is thus often seen as holding the key to an understanding of how the Ottomans functioned, and also why they failed to modernize and compete with the West (Shaw 1976).

It is implicit in most characterizations of states like the Ottoman and Mughal empires that the bulk of their revenues must have come from the “land,” rather than from “trade.” In practice, these categories prove rather difficult to disentangle in contemporary documents. Often, taxes on agricultural produce were collected through the control of trade in these goods; further, “land” was a convenient category for purposes of assignment, since it concealed the fact that what was in fact being parceled out was the right to use coercive force. Still, it is certainly true that if we were to examine the Ottoman budgets of the sixteenth century, the revenues of the greater part of the provinces under their control would show a preponderance of collections under categories other than “customs-duties.” Thus, the provincial budget of the Yemen province in 1599–1600 shows that of total current revenues of 13,675,239 para, no more than 35 percent came from port-duties, and this in an area with a relatively poor agricultural base. Again, the budget of Egypt in 1596–7 shows customs-duties accounting for a mere 8.2 percent of total provincial revenues, and taxes on Cairo-based traders and artisans for another 6.6 percent. Even for earlier years, such as the early 1560s, it has been suggested by Salih Özbaran that the land-tax (harac-i arazi) dominates the Yemen budgets (Özbaran 1986; Özbaran 2009: 183).

This is what is often thought to distinguish such states from, say, the Southeast Asian Sultanate of Melaka, or the East African Sultanate of Kilwa, ruled over from the late thirteenth century by a family of Yemeni sharifs, the Mahdali. In the case of Kilwa, or its northern neighbors and rivals Mombasa and Malindi (which emerged into prominence in the fourteenth century), we are not aware of any data on the fiscal foundations of the state, though links between the prosperity of these states and the Indian Ocean commercial triangle of Gujarat–Red Sea–East Africa are often asserted (as is the importance in the case of Kilwa of control of the gold trade) (Pouwels 1987). In the case of Melaka, we are rather better served, for early Portuguese observers resident in the town (after it fell into their hands in August 1511) meticulously described how the erstwhile Sultanate had functioned. In the early sixteenth century Melaka, which had been founded under somewhat obscure circumstances a century earlier, was the metropolis-capital of a state whose shadow reached to the other extremity of the Indonesian archipelago. The population of the city, variously estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000, was large by Asian standards of the time; in the late fifteenth century, Istanbul had a population of no more than 100,000, while only Kyoto of the Japanese cities of the early sixteenth century could boast of a population over 150,000.

While the greater part of the population of Melaka was made up of Malays of the laboring class (including a substantial slave sector – perhaps 7 percent of the total population), there were also sizeable resident foreign communities, amongst whom the most prominent were the Gujaratis and Kelings (Tamils), followed by the Javanese and the Fukien Chinese. There is little doubt that these merchants were accorded a high status in Melaka's society: in the Hikayat Hang Tuah, a Malay prose-epic, even the semi-divine progenitor of Melaka's Sultans (a certain Sang Perta Dewa) is constantly escorted in Heaven (the Malay Keinderaan or Kingdom of Indra) by a retinue of merchants! At a more mundane level, what we know of the Melaka Sultanate's revenue-base confirms that foreign trade was indeed the lifeblood of the kingdom. A complex system of taxes differentiated ships coming from the negeri di-atas angin – which is to say west of Melaka – from those coming from the negeri di-bawah angin (parts east of Melaka). In both cases, the rates of customs-duty are however much lower than those obtaining in contemporary Burma, Bengal and elsewhere (though not lower than in, say, Calicut). Despite this lower rate of duty, customs-collections and related surcharges accounted for something like 90 percent of the Sultanate's revenues, swamping by far the tributes paid by the provincial governors and vassal kings of the Sultan. Besides this, Melaka's Sultans also participated directly in commerce, owning ships and plying routes between Melaka and the Indian coast of the Bay of Bengal. The presence of these ships, manned at times by the slaves of the Sultan, gives the state in Melaka a markedly mercantile character, thus strengthening the implicit divide between the character of large, agrarian states and small, trading ones (Thomaz 1986a).

We are aware that in about 1500, Melaka was one of the key nodes in Asian maritime trade, linked to China and eastern Indonesia, but also to India, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. In the last two areas, one equally finds political power seeking expression in the form of relatively small and compact trading states not dissimilar to Melaka, of which the two clearest examples are Yemen in the Red Sea, and Hurmuz in the Persian of Gulf, both of whic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Abbreviations
• Maps
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Introduction
• 1: Early Modern Asia
• 2: Portuguese State and Society, 1200–1500
• 3: Two Patterns and Their Logic
• 4: The Mid-Sixteenth-century “Crisis”
• 5: Between Land-bound and Sea-borne
• 6: Empire in Retreat, 1610–1665
• 7: Niches and Networks
• 8: Portuguese Asian Society I
• 9: Portuguese Asian Society II
• 10: Conclusion
• Glossary
• A Note on Quantitative Data
• Bibliography
• Maps
• Index