After Da Gama: Europe and Asia since 1498

In: Modern Asian studies, Band 34, Heft 3, S. 513-543

Abstract

The years 1997–1998 witnessed Britain's return of Hong Kong to
China; the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan;
and the much less publicized 500th anniversary of the arrival of
the Portuguese in Asia. So were marked the beginnings and end of European
empire in the East, and so, too, a new global distribution of power was
recognized. The appearance on 20 May 1498 of a Portuguese fleet commanded
by Vasco da Gama at Calicut (Kerala, S. India), combined with the
penetration of the Caribbean six years earlier by a Spanish flotilla
under Christopher Columbus were, it has
often and eloquently been urged, the prelude to a fearful saga. In next
to no time Europe was enriched, non-European populations and ecologies
destroyed, indigenous states and economies overthrown, a peculiarly
European violence introduced into lands previously innocent of such ways,
and the yoke of European colonial rule and hegemony eventually imposed. In
short, as India's Independence Day Pledge (1930) pithily put it,
subjection to empire meant economic, political, cultural and spiritual ruin.