Suchergebnisse

To the vast and burgeoning literature on the rise, fall, and consequences of European empire-building, David Loades, a distinguished historian of Tudor England, adds this brief and stimulating book on the origins and course of the country's overseas expansion in the two centuries after 1490. He is not concerned with models or with the analysis of global balances of power. Taking a more modest perspective, he argues that between 1490 and 1690 England changed from being the decayed remnant of a once-formidable expansionist power on the Continent to a nascent oceanic and imperial state. By the mid-1500s, he claims, the foundations of the country's subsequent maritime and colonial achievements were already in place. He identifies the vital elements as the creation of a standing specialist fighting navy; the development, from the mid-sixteenth century, of an interest in long-distance voyages and trading ventures, sustained under Elizabeth I by an "enterprise partnership" between the queen and some of her subjects; and the emergence, in the years of the Commonwealth and the Cromwellian Republic, of the navy as an instrument of state rather than dynastic ambition. However, as the argument unfolds he admits the importance of other factors, not least the pursuit of profit and the desire of some of England's populace to escape from religious or political regimes they found intolerable.

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.

The quincentenary of Columbus' arrival in the New World is now safely past. The spate of timely studies, instant media wisdom, abysmal films, ecological outrage, mediocre drama and politically correct comment is subsiding. Yet ironically enough, despite such outpourings we know little more about the man himself than was known a century ago. His legacy is another matter. The successful crossing of the Atlantic, followed by European conquest and settlement of part of the Americas were eventually to affect most of mankind, though not always in such a manner as publicists in early-modern Castile predicted or as has been alleged by Columbus' modern detractors. But before we turn to this vast and emotive subject it should be emphasized that the Admiral's achievements in a brief, enigmatic and turbulent public career were of an astounding and probably unparallelled order. A man of foreign and obscure birth, he managed to secure employment in race and caste-ridden Spain, and from such unpropitious beginnings went on to prove himself a superlative seaman. He inspired and accomplished four voyages which revealed to Europeans a huge continent of which they were unaware. He discovered more unknown territory than any other navigator. He achieved some understanding of the true size of the Atlantic – and just how much of the globe was covered by water came as a horrible shock to his contemporaries – and, uniquely, he set in motion a staggering sequence of exploration and conquest.

For centuries Europeans were fascinated by rumours and legends of the wealth and wonders of the Orient and by stories of the supposed existence there of realms free from all those tiresome taboos and restrictions that prevailed in the West. Long before the arrival of Vasco da Gama, renegades were serving the Mongols in Iran and Marco Polo had been in the entourage of the Grand Khan himself. The Portuguese pioneers were disconcerted to encounter in 1501 a certain Benvenuto de Abano who had spent the previous twenty-five years sailing the seas of Asia, and his contemporary, the Muslim Khoja Safar Salmâni, an erstwhile Genoese or Albanian. But this was nothing compared with the flow that followed western penetration of the maritime economy of the East, scattering European adventurers and outlaws throughout the Orient anywhere from the shores of the Persian Gulf to those of the Pacific Ocean. And very soon these hopefuls were joined by European pirates, some working from ports in their mother countries, some from the Caribbean and North America, and some from bases in the Indian Ocean, of which Madagascar was, according to taste, the most celebrated or the most notorious. Such men, frequently of remarkable skills and fearsome abilities, exercised a considerable influence on the maritime history of the East in the early modern centuries, and it is with the origins, aspirations and activities of these elusive—indeed often anonymous—but nevertheless highly significant figures that this paper is concerned.

If the establishment of the Estado da India in the early sixteenth century owed much to indigenous aid, its survival in the ensuing two hundred years owed even more. The centuries after 1600 were indeed sad ones for imperial Portual. The mother country itself was under Spanish rule until 1640, whilst its colonies and colonial trades were everywhere attacked, and more often than not annexed by European rivals. Nowhere was the picture more depressing than in Asia where the heirs of da Gama and Albuquerque had to contend frist with the English and the Dutch and then with a whole host of indigenous opponents ranging from the ever formidable Japanese to the Mughals and the Marathas under the redoubtable Shivaji, once innocently hailed as another Ceaser, but soon identified as the 'new Attila'. Portuguese correspondence is full of eloquent descriptions of the lamentable condition of the Estado. Trade was at a standstill; war was ubiquitous; food was at the mercy of enemies; manpower was inadequate; the funds inevitably exhausted. In fact, under competent management, the surviving fragments of empire might well show a profit, as was the case in 1680. But not for long. Four years later there was talk of quitting Goa, too large and vulnerable to defend, and by the end of the century it was gloomily reported that all that remained of the erstwhile imperial glories were Goa, its local seaborne commerce, and what was described as 'the convoy of the China boats'.

In January 1635 there arrived in Goa a delegation from the English East India Company. The affluent air and dignified behaviour of its members, not to mention the obviously well-gunned and well-equipped ships that had brought them, greatly impressed the Portuguese, according to the then viceroy, the redoubtable Conde de Linhares. After the solution of the usual niceties of protocol, and after the viceroy had expatiated on the iniquities of England's erstwhile allies, the Dutch, a truce was agreed. So ended something like half a century of war at sea as the English had pushed—and surprisingly slowly, considering their reputation in Europe—into Portugal's Asian preserves. The peace did not, as Linhares had hoped, lead to the downfall of the Dutch, who went on to inflict grievous blows on Portugal in east and west alike. Nor did it establish England and Portugal as 'senores de tudo'.Nevertheless it opened an era of generally amicable relations between the two countries in Asia, and so forms a convenient point from which to survey their previous history, and to indicate what may be learned from English sources as to the condition and affairs of the Estado da India.

The rapid expansion of European power throughout much of the world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a matter of wonder at the time, just as its causes have remained a subject of contention ever since. To pious contemporaries it was simply the natural triumph of the True Faith over pagan and infidel. Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, wrote of his 'just war' against the tyrant Aztec emperor and his people addicted to unspeakable practices. Freedom to navigate the Indian Ocean, maintained João de Barros, the chronicler of Portuguese triumphs, was properly denied by his compatriots to those ignorant of Christianity and Roman Law. More recently, subtler explanations have come into fashion. The penetration by Portugal (with about 1,500,000 inhabitants) of the maritime economy of Asia (sustaining populations of millions), and the destruction by Castile (with a population of about 7,500,000) of the Aztec empire, some 27,000,000 strong, were the victories of superior morale. Europeans, with their will to win, overcame the adherents of stoic, passive and pessimistic religions, or, as M. Chaunu unkindly puts it, quality triumphed over quantity.3 Equally all-embracing is the thesis that meat-eating Iberian warriors had a natural advantage over the troops of civilizations whose grain-based diets were deficient in protein, or that Europeans, with their superior technology-their firearms and their sailing ships mounting artillery— were the predestined winners in any conflict with the less technologically advanced.4 The aim of this paper is to suggest that such arguments have little to commend them, and that European success very largely came from the adept exploitation of conflicts and divisions in indigenous societies, and from the securing of indigenous aid. Such behaviour reflects the pragmatic approach of European commanders in the field, typified by Afonso de Albuquerque, the captor of Goa–future capital of the Estado da India–who there pressed into service all from local dancing girls and musicians to war elephants and mercenaries.5 But such proceedings also reflect the attitudes of an age highly conscious, through resurgent knowledge of the classics, of the virtues of statecraft, just as they reflect, of course, the willingness of some elements in non- European societies to come to terms, for a variety of reasons, with alien intruders.