History week 4 journal entry

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18

Trade and Empire in the Indian Ocean and South Asia 1450–1750

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Trading Cities and Inland Networks: East Africa

FOCUS How did Swahili Coast traders link the East African interior to the Indian Ocean basin?

Trade and Empire in South Asia FOCUS What factors account for the fall of Vijayanagara and the rise of the Mughals?

European Interlopers FOCUS What factors enabled Europeans to take over key Indian Ocean trade networks?

COUNTERPOINT: Aceh: Fighting Back in Southeast Asia

FOCUS Why was the tiny sultanate of Aceh able to hold out against European interlopers in early modern times?

backstory For centuries before the rise of the Atlantic

system (see Chapter 16), the vast Indian

Ocean basin thrived as a religious and com-

mercial crossroads. Powered by the annual

monsoon wind cycle, traders, mainly Muslim,

developed a flourishing commerce over thou-

sands of miles in such luxury goods as spices,

gems, and precious metals. The network

included the trading enclaves of East Africa

and Arabia and the many ports of South and

Southeast Asia. Ideas, religious traditions—

notably Islam—and pilgrimages moved along

the same routes. The vast majority of the

region’s many millions of inhabitants were

peasant farmers, many of them dependent on

rice agriculture.

World in the Making In this exquisite miniature painting from the 1590s, the Mughal emperor A kbar receives the Persian ambassador Say yid Beg in 1562. The painting is an illustration commissioned for A kbar’s official court history, the Akbarnama, and thus would have been seen and approved by the emperor himself. The meeting is emblematic of the generally amiable relationship between the Mughals and their Safavid neighbors in Iran.

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Born to Persian immigrants in the Afghan city of Kandahar, Princess Mihr un- nisa (meer oon-NEE-sah), known to history as Nur Jahan, or “Light of the World,” married the Mughal emperor Jahangir (jah-hahn-GEER) in 1611, at the age of thirty-four. As the emperor turned to science and the arts, as well as to his addic- tions to wine and opium, Nur Jahan assumed the ruler’s duties throughout the last decade of her husband’s life, which ended in 1627. She had coins struck in her name, and most importantly, she made certain that a daughter from an earlier mar- riage and her brother’s daughter both wed likely heirs to the Mughal throne.

As her husband withdrew from worldly affairs, Nur Jahan actively engaged them. After a visit from the English ambassador in 1613, she developed a keen interest in European textiles. She established domestic industries in cloth manufacture and jewelry making and developed an export trade in indigo dye. Indigo from her farms was shipped to Portuguese and English trading forts along India’s west coast, and then sent to Europe.

In 1614, Nur Jahan arranged for her niece to marry Jahangir’s favorite son, Prince Khurram, known after he became emperor as Shah Jahan. The niece, who took the title Mumtaz Mahal, died in 1631 while bearing her fourteenth child. Heartbroken, Shah Jahan went into mourning and commissioned a mausoleum for Mumtaz in the city of Agra. This graceful structure of white marble is known as the Taj Mahal.

Nur Jahan attended court and rode horses proudly in public without her husband. Such conduct was not considered inappropriate for a woman of her status in her time. Like other South Asian noblewomen, Nur Jahan expressed her rank through public piety, commissioning religious buildings and elaborate gardens, several of which survive. She played an active and sometimes controversial role in politics until her death in 1644.

For most of the early modern period the lands surrounding the Indian Ocean re- mained in the hands of powerful local rulers, as exemplified by Nur Jahan. Some, like her, engaged in maritime trade. Trade on the Indian Ocean followed the monsoons, alternating dry and humid winds generated by the seasonal heating and cooling of air masses over Asia. To exploit these winds, Arab sailors developed swift, triangular-rigged vessels that carried them to and from East Africa. Southeast Asian sailors developed other vessel types influenced by Chinese shipbuilders. Large populations, a wide array of luxury trade goods, and religious pilgrimage sites such as Mecca and Benares, made this area a vibrant saltwater crossroads.

India, with its huge, mostly Hindu population, lay at the center of the basin’s trading system. India’s black pepper was world-famous, as were its diamonds, but it was

monsoon A wind system that influences large climatic regions such as the Indian Ocean basin and reverses direction seasonally.

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India’s cotton fabrics that were most profitable. Gold from sub-Saharan Africa and later silver from the Americas lubricated Indian Ocean trade. Nur Jahan minted rupees in American silver and African gold.

American silver was first brought by the Portuguese, who arrived in the region with three main goals: to monopolize the spice trade to Europe, to take over key shipping lanes, and to fight the expansion of Islam and spread Christianity instead. For a time they succeeded with goals one and two, but the third proved impossible—in part because Portuguese arrival coincided with the emergence of Eurasia’s so-called gunpowder empires, most famously the Mughals, Safavids, and Ottomans.1 Some historians also apply the term “gunpowder empire” to the Portuguese and other Europeans who took their powerful weapons abroad in the name of commerce and Christianity. Control of the sea paid off, and with the decline of the Muslim gun- powder empires in the eighteenth century, Europeans—primarily the English and the Dutch—gained control of Indian Ocean shores.

OVERVIEW QUESTIONS

The major global development in this chapter: The Indian Ocean trading net- work and the impact of European intrusion on maritime and mainland South Asia.

As you read, consider:

1. What environmental,

religious, and political

factors enabled trading

enclaves to flourish in

the Indian Ocean basin?

2. How did the rise

and fall of India’s land

empires reflect larger

regional trends?

3. How did Europeans

insert themselves into

the Indian Ocean trad-

ing network, and what

changes did they bring

about?

Trading Cities and Inland Networks: East Africa

FOCUS how did Swahili coast traders link the east african interior to the indian Ocean basin?

The history of early modern East A frica is best understood in terms of linkages among Indian Ocean traders from as far away as China and the cities and peoples of the A frican interior. Brokering A frica’s ties to Asia were merchant families and

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princes clustered in port towns and cities stretching from Ethiopia in the northeast to Mozambique in the southeast.

By 1500, Muslims predominated in these East A frican trading ports. Some were descendants of early Persian, A rabian, and South A sian overseas trad- ers and missionaries, but most were native A fricans, mostly Bantu speakers. Swahili, still spoken throughout this region, is a Bantu language laced w ith A rabic terms. In early modern times, scribes recorded transactions in Swahili using A rabic script. Thus, the societ y and culture of East A frican trading ports blended A frican and A sian elements, reflecting the economic connections be- t ween the t wo regions.

Portuguese and Ottoman traders arrived in these ports around 1500, but nei- ther managed to control more than a few of them at a time. Dutch, French, and English merchants arrived in the seventeenth century, but they, too, failed to mo- nopolize East A frican trade. Offshore, the French established a minor presence on Madagascar and then on much smaller Réunion, but neither island had been vital to the ancient monsoon trading circuit. As free from each other as they were from outsiders, the hundred-odd ports of East A frica’s Swahili Coast remained largely independent until the imperial scramble of the late nineteenth century (discussed in Chapter 24).

Port Towns and Beginnings The East A frican coast had served as a regional crossroads for more than a thou- sand years. A rchaeologists have determined that Muslim trader-missionaries had reached many East A frican port towns by the eighth century C.E ., soon after the founding of Islam. Seaborne trade in ivory, gold, and ceramics dated back to classi- cal antiquity. Early modern East A frican traders continued this commerce, bring- ing luxury goods from Central, South, and even East Asia to the coast in exchange for A frica’s treasured raw materials. Traders also exchanged slaves for luxuries, but the scale of the Indian Ocean slave trade seems to have remained small in this period.

By modern standards, most East A frican trading ports were towns. The largest, such as K ilwa, Sofala, Malindi, and Mombasa, had perhaps ten thousand inhabi- tants at their height. Most towns were much smaller, home to only several hundred permanent residents. Quelimane (keh-lee-M A H-neh) and Mogadishu fell some- where in between, with a few thousand inhabitants. Nearly all of the region’s cities were walled, but only the most opulent had mosques of stone or coral block rather than adobe. Merchants occupied house blocks clustered within each city’s walls.

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In  exchange for tributes, local princes protected merchant families, negotiating with inland chiefdoms for trade goods and subsistence items.

Indian Ocean Connections East A frican traders exported elephant tusks and gold in exchange for South Asian cloth, much of it from Cambay in the Gujarat region of northwest India (see Map  18.1). They also imported Persian and even Chinese ceramics, along with spices, tobacco (after 1500), and many other items. A frican ivory was prized

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1000 Miles

INDIAN OCEAN

East China Sea

South China Sea

Bay of Bengal

Arabian Sea

Black Sea

Caspian Sea

Persian Gulf

R ed

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Philippine Is.

Sumatra

Java

Bali

Banda Islands

Celebes

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ETHIOPIA

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CHAMPA

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INDIA

JAPAN

KOREA CHINA

SAFAVID EMPIRE

O�OMAN EMPIRE

Gobi

Sahara

Himalaya Mts.

Aden

Malindi

Mogadishu

Mombasa

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Sofala

Mozambique

Saga

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Aceh Pasai

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Istanbul

Cairo Alexandria

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Indian Ocean Trade, c. 1500

Spices

Delhi Sultanate, c. 1500

Vijayanagara, c. 1500

Arab and Indian trade route Indian and Chinese trade route Trade good

AUSTRALIA

EAST AFRICA

ASIA

Cotton cloth

Porcelain Bronze coins

Silk

Cotton cloth Dyes Gems Pepper Spices Sugar

Gold Ivory Slaves Timber

Gems Ivory Spices

Cotton Gems Metals Teak

Camphor Pepper Spices

Cotton cloth Pepper

Diamonds

Camphor Pepper

Sandalwood

Spices

MAP 18.1 Indian Ocean Trade, c. 1500 Often manned by East A frican and South Asian sailors, swift-sailing A rab dhows carried traders, pilgrims, and luxury goods all over the Indian Ocean. Farther east, Chinese junks plied the warm waters of Southeast Asia, trading porcelain and silk for spices and aromatic woods. The two trade circuits overlapped, and interactions were largely peaceful, both circuits benefiting from the markets of opulent land empires such as southern India’s Vijayanagara and sponsoring city-states such as Melaka.

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throughout Asia for its soft texture, and A frican gold, mostly from the southern interior, was in high demand as currency. In much of India, women brought dow- ries of gold when they married, displaying it in the form of fine jewelry. As we have seen in previous chapters, A frican gold was an essential world currency prior to European expansion into the Americas.

Most goods were carried in dhows (dowz), swift, single-decked ships with trian- gular sails and about two hundred tons’ capacity. Traders used smaller vessels and dugout canoes to navigate rivers such as the Zambezi and to ferry goods through the treacherous coral reefs that lay between East A frica’s towns.

Despite the value of most Indian Ocean trade goods, shippers traveled only lightly armed. A lthough piracy had long been known, and was even expected in waters such as India’s Malabar Coast, violent theft at sea seems to have become a serious threat to Indian Ocean commerce only after the arrival of the Portuguese, who sought to establish trading monopolies through brute force. Their actions in turn encouraged contraband trade and the fencing of stolen goods.

Chinese maritime visits to East A frica, though memorable, were few. As we saw in Chapter 14, the famous Ming admiral Zheng He arrived first in Malindi in the late 1410s, and then at Mogadishu in the early 1430s. Zheng He’s vessels were enormous, more than double the size of the largest Portuguese ships to arrive about a centur y later. In addition to gold and ivor y, the Ming admiral filled his ample holds with local items, including a veritable zoo for the Chinese em- peror. There is no evidence of attempts to conquer or to establish trading posts or colonies, and after ward Chinese goods came to East A frica again only through Southeast Asian intermediaries, often Muslim Malays. The Chinese retreat from the Indian Ocean left a void that early modern European interlopers were happy to fill.

Links to the Interior Less often described than East A frica’s ties to overseas merchants were its links to the A frican interior. Each port’s hinterland was small, but coastal towns and cities did not simply face outward, as once believed. A lmost all Swahili town-dwellers relied on nearby agricultural plots for survival, and many traded with independent cattle herders. Swahili elites owned slaves purchased from the interior, who pro- duced food for both their masters and themselves. The A frican products in great- est demand overseas, however, came from the more densely populated southern interior.

This was most true of gold dust, traded northward from the mouth of the Zambezi R iver (see again Map 18.1). Its main sources lay in the Mutapa kingdom (formerly

dhow A small sailing vessel with triangular rigs used in monsoon trade to East A frica.

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Great Zimbabwe), located on the Zimbabwe Plateau. Here, as in parts of contemporary West Africa, men and women panned for gold in the agricul- tural off-season. A few mines went underground. It appears that an annual average of about a ton of gold entered the Indian Ocean trade circuit during the sixteenth century.

Ivory was a different sort of product; collecting it re- quired the hunting and slaugh- ter of wild animals. Although modern demand for ivory has led to the extinction of ele- phants in parts of Africa, it ap- pears that most of the tusks fed into the early modern Indian Ocean circuit were a byprod- uct of subsistence hunting. Hunters went out only seasonally, and without firearms. Bringing down an adult elephant with spears and longbows was extremely danger- ous, and the compensation was not attractive enough to make it a livelihood. Aside from the dangers of ivory procurement, interior peoples such as the Shona speakers of the Mutapa kingdom were not easily pressured into market exchanges of any kind. With no particular need for Asian products, they carried ivory and gold to the sea- ports at their leisure.

By 1500 trade was thriving between East A frica and partners in the Indian Ocean basin. The arrival of the Portuguese at about that time would disrupt that valuable balance. With nothing to offer the well-off merchants of East A frica, India, and the A rabian Sea region, the Portuguese turned to force. Using their guns, stout vessels, and Mediterranean fort-building techniques, they sought to profit from the Indian Ocean trade by impeding it—that is, by enforcing monop- olies on certain items and taking over vital ports. Ultimately this worked better in India than elsewhere, but the Portuguese tried desperately to gain control of East A frican trade, and even to penetrate the continent’s southeast interior in search of Mutapa’s gold. A lthough they failed to conquer Mutapa, the Portuguese traded

Exchanger of Cambay In this early-sixteenth-century watercolor, apparently by a self-taught Portuguese artist, a merchant in Cambay, on India’s northwest coast, collects and changes gold, silver, and other coins of many mint marks and denominations. A tiny balance hangs behind him on one side, and a strongbox seems to float in midair on the other. To the right, people of many faiths, clothing styles, and colors come to seek his services. At least two are women bearing gold coins.

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with its rulers and gained control of gold exports. As they had done in western A frica, in East A frica the Portuguese concentrated fortified posts, or feitorias, which they established at Mozambique, Sofala, and Mombasa. The Dutch and English would soon follow.

Trade and Empire in South Asia

FOCUS What factors account for the fall of Vijayanagara and the rise of the mughals?

A s in East A frica, dozens of independent trading enclaves in South A sia pros- pered in early modern times. Many coastal cities and their hinterlands were subject to Muslim sultans or Hindu princes, most of whom drew their suste- nance from the merchants they protected. Trading populations were larger than those of East A frica and more diverse. Religious minorities included Jains, Jews, Parsis (Zoroastrians), and Christians. A s densely packed commercial crossroads, India’s port cities maintained close ties to the subcontinent’s rich interior, at this time home to t wo major empires. One was in ascendance, the Muslim Mughal Empire in the north, and the other in decline, the Hindu k ingdom of Vijayanagara (v izh-ah-ya-na-GA R-ah) in the south (see again Map 18.1).

Vijayanagara’s Rise and Fall 1336–1565 Vijayanagara grew into an empire around 1500, only to disintegrate due to inter- nal factionalism and external, mostly northern Muslim (although not Mughal) attacks. Because of its swift demise and the near-total loss of its written records, Vijayanagara remains one of the most enigmatic empires of the early modern period. With Muslim kingdoms dominating much of the subcontinent by the time the Portuguese arrived around 1500, Hindu Vijayanagara appears to have been something of an anachronism. Like the contemporary Aztec and Inca Empires of the Americas, Vijayanagara was neither a gunpowder empire nor an early modern, bureaucratic state. Massive stone temples and lively artistic works hint at great opulence and power, but the nature of daily life for commoners remains obscure, although it has been reconstructed in part by archaeological work and from the observations of early European visitors.

Literally, “cit y of triumph,” the k ingdom of Vijayanagara was said to have been founded by t wo brothers in 1336. They chose the tow n site of Hampi, in

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the southern interior, to rev ive a purist version of the Hindu state. According to legend, the brothers had been captured in northern frontier wars and forced to convert to Islam in Delhi, but once back in their homeland they renounced  that  faith and sought the adv ice of Hindu Brahmans. Hundreds of temples were built along the Tungabadhra R iver gorge to venerate the state’s patron deit y, Virupaksha (vee-rooh-PA HK-shah), among others. By 1370, the empire covered most of southern India, w ith the exception of Malabar in the far southwest.

W hereas Muslim and Christian rulers were generally regarded as pragmatic “warriors of the faith,” Hindu rulers were often seen as divine kings. Their most important duties involved performing the sacred rituals believed to sustain their kingdoms. W hether in Vijayanagara or in distant Bali in Southeast Asia, Hindu kingship relied on theatricality and symbolism quite removed from the everyday

Hampi This is an aerial view of part of Hampi, ancient capital of the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagara in south-central India. The main temple rises in the smoky distance, marking the end of a long ceremonial promenade fronted by stone structures. The Tungabhadra R iver winds alongside, and all around are hills strewn with granite boulders, giving the city a primeval, almost timeless feel. Hampi fell to northern invaders in 1565.

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concerns of imperial administration. Hindu kings participated in warfare and other serious matters, but their lives were mostly scripted by traditional sacred texts. Their societies believed that they would ensure prosperity in peacetime and victory in war by properly enacting their roles.

Life in Vijayanagara cycled bet ween a peacef ul period, when the k ing re- sided in the capital and carried out rituals, and a campaign season, when the k ing and his retinue traveled the empire battling w ith neighboring states and principalities. Like so much under Hindu rule, even v ictor y on the field was scripted, and the warring season itself ser ved as a reenactment of legendar y battles. Each campaign started w ith a festival reaffirming the k ing’s div init y. A lthough he was renow ned for his piet y, it was his martial prowess that most set him apart from mere mortals. He was the exemplar of the K shatriya (K-SH A H- tree-yah), or warrior caste, not the technically higher rank ing Brahman, or priestly caste.

Celebrator y temple inscriptions record the names and deeds of many mon- archs, but thanks to the records of foreign v isitors the Vijayanagara k ing we k now most about was K rishna Deva R aya (r. 1509–1529). Portuguese mer- chants and ambassadors traveled to his court on several occasions, and all were stunned by the monarch ’s wealth and pomp. At his height, K rishna Deva R aya controlled most of India south of the K rishna R iver. Most Indian diamonds were mined nearby, prov iding a significant source of state revenue. But it was the constant flow of tribute from the rajas, the subject princes, that built his “cit y of triumph.” Imperial demand drove the rajas to trade their products for Indian Ocean lu x uries such as A frican gold and ivor y. The k ing sat upon a diamond-studded throne, and t wo hundred subject princes attended him con- stantly at court. Each  wore a gold ank le bracelet to indicate his w illingness to die on the k ing’s behalf.

Krishna Deva Raya welcomed the Portuguese following their 1510 conquest of Muslim-held Goa (GO-ah), a port on India’s west coast that would become the keystone of Portugal’s overseas empire. His armies required warhorses in the tens of thousands, and an arrangement with the Portuguese would give him easier access to horses from Arabia and Iraq. As they had done in western A frica, the Portuguese happily served as horse-traders to conquering non-Christian kings in exchange for access to local goods. Krishna Deva Raya used the imported mounts to extend Vijayanagara’s borders north and south, and the Portuguese sent home some of the largest diamonds yet seen in Europe.

Vijayanagara shared some features with the roughly contemporaneous Aztec and Inca states—it was a tributary empire built on a combination of military force

Kshatriya A member of the warrior caste in Hindu societies.

caste A hereditary social class separated from others in Hindu societies.

Brahman A member of the priestly caste in Hindu societies.

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and religious charisma. Subject princes were required to maintain armies and give surpluses to their king at periodic festivals; material display reaffirmed the king’s divinity. Proper subordination of the rajas was equally important. Krishna Deva Raya was said to require so much gold from certain rajas that they were forced to sponsor pirates to generate revenue. Most tribute, however, came from the sale of farm products, cloth, and diamonds.

Above the rajas, K rishna Deva Raya appointed district administrators called nayaks. These were usually relatives, and each oversaw several lesser kingdoms. The system was intended to both replicate and feed the center, with each raja and nayak sponsoring temple construction and revenue-generating projects. Large- scale irrigation works improved agricultural yields, and at bridge crossings and city gates, officials taxed goods in transit. The demands of the city and empire placed great pressure on southern India’s forests and wetlands, and increased di- amond mining sped deforestation and erosion of riverbanks. Environmental con- sequences of expansion were noted but were not, as far as we know, a major cause of decline.

Dependent as it was on trade, the expansion of Vijayanagara required a policy of religious tolerance similar to that later practiced by the Mughals. Jain merchants and minor princes were vital subjects since they helped link Vijayanagara to the world beyond India. Brahmanic or priestly law largely restricted Hindu trade to the land, whereas Jains could freely go abroad. Muslim coastal merchants were also allowed into the imperial fold, as they had far greater access than the Jains to luxury imports and warhorses. They had their own residential quarter in the capi- tal city of Hampi. The early Portuguese policy in India was to exploit niches in this preexisting trade system—not to conquer Vijayanagara, but simply to drive out competing Muslim merchants.

Though connected to the outside world mainly through the luxury goods trade, the empire’s economy was based on rice cultivation. W hile kings and Brahmans reenacted the lives of the gods, most of Vijayanagara’s subjects toiled their lives away as rice farmers. Around 1522 the Portuguese visitor Domingos Paes (see Reading the Past: Portuguese Report of a Vijayanagara Festival) described work on a huge, stone-reinforced reservoir: “In the tank I saw so many people at work that there must have been fifteen or twenty thousand men, looking like ants, so that you could not see the ground on which they walked.”2

Vijayanagara’s rice fed its people, but it was also exported. Special varieties were shipped as far abroad as Hormuz, on the Persian Gulf, and Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea. More common rice varieties, along with sugar and some spices, provisioned the merchants of many Indian Ocean ports, including those of East

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A frica and Gujarat. It was through the sale of rice abroad that many subject princes obtained A frican gold for their king, with annual payments said to be in the thou- sands of pounds each by the time of Krishna Deva Raya.

Following K rishna Deva R aya’s death in 1529, Vijayanagara fell victim first to internal succession rivalries, and then to Muslim aggressors. In 1565, under K ing R amaraja, a coalition of formerly subject sultans defeated the royal army. Hampi, the capital city, was sacked, plundered, and abandoned; it was an over- grown ruin by 1568. Remnant Hindu principalities sur vived in the southeast but eventually fell to the expansionist Mughals. By the seventeenth centur y only a few Hindu states remained around the fringes of South Asia, including remote Nepal. The Hindu principalities of Malabar, meanwhile, fell increasingly into the hands of Europeans and Muslim Gujarati merchants. Still, the memor y of

READING THE PAST

Portuguese Report of a Vijayanagara Festival The Portuguese merchant Domingos Paes (PAH-

ish) visited Vijayanagara in 1520 with a larger dip-

lomatic and commercial mission sent from Goa,

the Portuguese trading post on India’s southwest

coast. Paes’s report of the capital of Hampi and

King Krishna Deva Raya’s court, apparently written

for Portugal’s official chronicler back in Lisbon, is

among the richest to survive. Paes describes a por-

tion of a multiday festival that served to glorify the

king and reaffirm the hierarchy of the state but also

to reenact cosmic battles:

At three o’clock in the afternoon everyone comes to

the palace. They do not admit everyone at once (they

allowed us to go into the open part that is between

the gates), but there go inside only the wrestlers

and dancing-women, and the elephants, which go

with their trappings and decorations, those that sit

on them being armed with shields and javelins, and

wearing quilted tunics. As soon as these are inside

they range themselves around the arena, each one

in his or her place. . . . Many other people are then at

the entrance gate opposite to the building, namely

Brahmins, and the sons of the king’s favorites, and

their relations; all these noble youths who serve

before the king. The officers of the household go

about keeping order amongst all the people, and

keep each one in his or her own place. . . .

The king sits dressed in white clothes all cov-

ered with [embroidery of] golden roses and wear-

ing his jewels—he wears a quantity of these white

garments, and I always saw him so dressed—and

around him stand his pages with his betel [to

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chew], and his sword, and the other things which

are his insignia of state. . . . As soon as the king

is seated, the captains who waited outside make

their entrance, each one by himself, attended by

his chief people. . . . As soon as the nobles have

finished entering, the captains of the troops ap-

proach with shields and spears, and afterwards the

captains of archers. . . . As soon as these soldiers

have all taken their places the women begin to

dance. . . . Who can fitly describe to you the great

riches these women carry on their persons?—

collars of gold with so many diamonds and rubies

and pearls, bracelets also on their arms and upper

arms, girdles below, and of necessity anklets on

their feet. . . .

Then the wrestlers begin their play. Their wres-

tling does not seem like ours, but there are blows

[given], so severe as to break teeth, and put out

eyes, and disfigure faces, so much so that here

and there men are carried off speechless by their

friends; they give one another fine falls, too. They

have their captains and judges who are there to

put each one on equal footing in the field, and also

to award the honors to him who wins.

Source: Robert Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (London: Sonnenschein,

1900), 268–271.

Examining the Evidence

1. W hat does the selection suggest with regard to social hierarchy and prescribed gender roles in Vijayanagara?

2. How does this description of divine kingship compare with, for example, the Incas (see chapter 15)?

Vijayanagara’s greatness and wealth lived on, to be revived much later by Hindu nationalists.

The Power of the Mughals Another empire was expanding rapidly in India’s north as Vijayanagara crum- bled in the south. Beginning around 1500, under a Timurid (from Timur, the famed fourteenth-century Central Asian ruler discussed in Chapter 14) Muslim warlord named Babur (the “Tiger,” r. 1500–1530), the Mughal Empire emerged as the most powerful, wealthy, and populous state yet seen in South Asia. By the time of Nur Jahan in the early 1600s, the Mughals (literally “Mongols,” the great fourteenth-century emperors from whom the Mughals descended) had over 120 million subjects, a population comparable only to that of Ming China.

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Accumulating wealth from plunder and tribute and employing newly introduced gunpowder weapons and swift warhorses to terrifying effect, the Mughals sub- dued dozens of Hindu and Muslim principalities as they pushed southward (see Map  18.2). Like many early modern empire builders, the Mughals were outsid- ers who adapted to local cultural traditions to establish and maintain legitimacy.

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Bombay

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Territory under Babur, 1525

Gains by Babur and Hamayun, to 1539

Gains by Akbar, to 1605

Gains by 1707

Mughal territory lost, by 1707

Major ba�le

�e Mughal Empire, c. 1700

7 0 ºE

60 ºE

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MAP 18.2 The Mughal Empire, c. 1700 Descendants of mounted Central Asian raiders, the Mughals expanded their control over the Indian subcontinent after 1500 with devastating, gunpowder-backed force followed by ethnic and religious accommodation. By 1700, the empire was approaching its greatest extent, after which rebellions and invasions began to force it to contract.

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In terms of Indian Ocean commerce, their rapid rise drove up demand for luxury imports, and, as in the case of Nur Jahan, some high-ranking Mughal nobles in- vested directly in exports of items such as indigo and gems.

Despite rule by Muslim overlords, most South Asians remained Hindus in early modern times, but those who converted to Islam enjoyed some benefits. Initially, conversion to Islam brought tax exemptions, but these were suspended in the late sixteenth century under Emperor A kbar. As we will see, during and after his reign, lasting fusions between Hinduism and Islam emerged in various parts of the subcontinent.

Like its religion, South Asia’s dynamic economy was little changed after con- quest. Under Mughal rule, South Asia’s legendary textiles, grains, spices, gems, and many other products continued to find buyers worldwide. Truly new markets for Indian goods emerged in the Americas and parts of sub-Saharan A frica, sup- plied by Portuguese and other European shippers. Lacking commodities Indians wanted, European traders paid for South Asia’s goods in hard cash. As a result, India, like China, enjoyed a consistently favorable balance of trade throughout early modern times. A long with funding armies, this wealth from abroad fueled construction, especially of religious buildings. With royal sponsorship like that of Nur Jahan, many of India’s most iconic structures, such as the Taj Mahal and Red Fort, were built along the Ganges R iver plain.

True to the Timurid heritage it shared w ith its Safav id Persian and Ottoman Turk ish neighbors (discussed in the next chapter), Mughal rule in India was marked by both extraordinar y court opulence and near-constant power strug- gles and rebellions. Indeed, factionalism and succession crises eventually led to Mughal decline. Soon after 1700, this decline in central authorit y left Mughal India v ulnerable to European as well as Persian imperial designs. Persian raid- ers sacked the capital of Delhi in 1739, and by 1763 the English East India Company won rights to ta x former Mughal subjects in the prov ince of Bengal, effectively exercising sovereignt y in the Indian interior. Despite these reversals of fortune, life for the bulk of South A sia’s millions of poor farmers and artisans scarcely changed.

Gunpowder Weapons and Imperial Consolidation 1500–1763 The emperor, or “Mughal,” Babur spent most of his life defeating A fghan warlords. Horses and archers were still critical in these early victories, as was Babur’s charis- matic leadership, but by the 1510s some of the emperor’s forces were using match- lock guns in battle. By the 1526 Battle of Panipat, outside Delhi, Babur’s armies had perfected the use of cannons (see again Map 18.2). As Babur recalled nonchalantly

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in his memoir, the Baburnama: “Mustafa the artilleryman fired some good shots from the mortars mounted on carts to the left of the center [flank].”3 Some sixteen thousand men were said to have died in this battle, and Babur celebrated by plun- dering the city of Agra. In 1527, although hugely outnumbered by a Hindu Rajput alliance of some eighty thousand cavalry and five hundred armored war elephants, Babur and his army won handily. Gunpowder weapons continued to prove decisive as Babur and his successors drove south.

Humay un, as Babur’s son was k now n, took over the emerging Mughal Empire at his father’s death in 1530, but he suffered setbacks. In 1535, he employed Ottoman militar y engineers and Portuguese gunners to attack the k ingdom of Gujarat, a major textile ex porter facing the A rabian Sea, but sources say his crippling addiction to opium cost valuable time, forcing a w ithdrawal of troops. In the course of this ill-fated adventure, an A fghan warlord rose from the ashes to reconquer almost ever y thing Babur had won in the north. Humay un went into ex ile in Safav id Persia, but he returned to India aided by gun-toting Safav id forces. By 1555, Humay un had used this ex panded firepower to regain his fa- ther’s conquests, only to die in 1556 after hitting his head on the stairs of his librar y. Councilors decided the next Mughal would be Humay un’s t welve-year- old son, A kbar.

India’s historic role as an interfaith crossroads was only heightened during the long reign of A kbar (literally “the Great,” r. 1556 –1605). Though founded by Timurid horsemen who regarded themselves as warriors of the Islamic faith in the Sunni tradition, by the time of A kbar a quick succession of marriages had linked Shi ’ ite Safav id and Hindu royalt y to the central Mughal line. For over a centur y Persian remained the language of the court, and relations w ith the Safav ids were friendly. Most notable, however, was the steady “Indianization” of the Mughal emperors themselves. The wealth and diversit y of the subcon- tinent, not to mention the beaut y and charm of Hindu R ajput princesses, ab- sorbed them. A kbar was no exception: his son Jahangir, the next emperor, was born to a Hindu princess.

Th is process of absorption was accelerated by A kbar’s eclectic personalit y. Fascinated w ith ever y thing from yogic asceticism to the fire worship of In- dia’s Parsi, or Zoroastrian, minorit y, by the 1570s A kbar began formulating his ow n hybrid religion. It was a variet y of emperor worship forced mostly upon high-rank ing subjects. Somewhat like the early modern Inca and Japanese royal cults that tied the ruling house to the sun, A kbar’s cult emphasized his ow n div ine solar radiance. Staunch Muslim adv isers rebelled against this seeming heresy in 1579, but A kbar successf ully repressed them. In the end, A kbar’s faith won few lasting converts—and left v isiting Jesuit missionaries scratching their

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heads—yet its mere ex istence demonstrated an enduring Mughal tendency toward accommodation of religious difference.

Despite his eclecticism and toleration, A kbar clung to core Timurid cultural tra- ditions, such as moving his court and all its attendant wealth and servants from one grand campsite to another. He was said to travel with no fewer than one hundred thousand attendants. He also never gave up his attachment to gunpowder warfare. Recalcitrant regional lords such as the Rajput Hindu prince Udai Singh defied A kbar’s authority in the 1560s, only to suffer the young emperor’s wrath. A protracted 1567 siege of the fortified city of Chitor ended with the deaths of some twenty-five thousand defenders and their families. A kbar himself shot the commander of the city’s defenses dead with a musket, and his massive siege can- nons, plus the planting of explosive mines, brought down its formidable stone walls. A similar siege in 1569 employed even larger guns, hauled into position by elephants and teams of oxen. Few princes challenged A kbar’s authority after these devastating demonstrations of Mughal firepower.

By the end of A kbar’s reign, the Mughal Empire stretched from A fghanistan to Bengal, and south to about the latitude of Bombay (today Mumbai; see again Map 18.2). Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–1627) was far less ambitious than his father A kbar, and as we saw in the opening paragraphs to this chapter, his addictions and interests led him to hand power to his favored wife, Nur Jahan, an effective ad- ministrator and business woman but not a conqueror. Jahangir’s reign was nev- ertheless significant. A devoted patron of the arts and an amateur poet, Jahangir took Mughal court splendor to new heights (see Seeing the Past: Reflections of the Divine in a Mughal Emerald). His illustrated memoir, the Jahangirnama, is a candid description of life at the top of one of the early modern world’s most popu- lous and wealthy empires.

New conquests under Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658) and Aurangzeb (aw-W RONG- zeb) (r. 1658–1707) carried the empire south almost to the tip of the subcontinent. These rulers had made few innovations in gunpowder warfare; as in the days of Babur, religion was as important a factor in imperial expansion as technology. Shah Jahan was an observant but tolerant Muslim, whereas Aurangzeb was a true holy warrior who called for a return to orthodoxy. Aurangzeb’s religious fervor was a major force in the last phase of Mughal expansion.

The emperor’s main foe was Prince Shivaji (c. 1640–1680), leader of the Hindu Marathas of India’s far southwest. Aurangzeb employed European gunners, whose state-of-the-art weapons helped him capture several of Shivaji’s forts, but he mostly relied on muskets, cannons, and other weapons designed and cast in India. Large swivel guns were mounted on camels, a useful adaptation. For his part, Shivaji

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SEEING THE PAST

Reflections of the Divine in a Mughal Emerald In the seventeenth century, foreign visitors repeat-

edly claimed that the Mughal court was the richest

in the world. The Mughal emperor and his family

wore delicately tailored silk garments and other

luxurious clothes, dripping with jewels. Many great

stones, such as the one pictured here, have sur-

vived in museums or private collections. Fabulous

gemstones weighing hundreds of carats were rou-

tinely exchanged and given as gifts to important

visitors, loyal subjects, and favored heirs.

India’s early modern rulers had direct access to

precious metals, diamonds, rubies, and pearls, but

emeralds—especially prized because green was the

color of Islam—were hard to come by. Old mines in

Egypt had long since played out, and sources in

Afghanistan and Pakistan remained unknown, or

at least untapped. Emeralds were found, however,

in faraway New Granada, the Spanish American

colony now roughly comprised by the Republic of

Colombia. Beginning in the late sixteenth century,

Spanish mine owners traded emeralds dug from

the high Andes to Spanish and Portuguese mer-

chants with ties to Goa, Portugal’s most important

trading post in India. From there, merchants traded

the stones inland to intermediaries and even to

the Mughal emperor himself. Once in the hands

of the renowned artisans of the world’s most opu-

lent court, raw Colombian emeralds were faceted,

tumbled, and carved into a wide variety of royal

jewels. Some were carefully inscribed with Arabic

verses from the Qur’an or special prayers. The one

pictured here contains a Shi’a prayer praising the

Twelve Imams. It was meant to be sewn into a ritual

garment, prayer-side in, as a protective amulet.

Examining the Evidence

1. How does this precious object reflect patterns of early modern globalization?

2. W hy would the royal owner commission a religious object of such magnificence?

Mughal Emerald

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was never able to field more than a few hundred musketeers, relying instead on swift mounts and guerrilla raids. Despite a major offensive sent by Aurangzeb after Shivaji’s death, the Marathas bounced back within a few decades and won recog- nition of their homeland.

Only under Aurangzeb’s successor, Muhammad (r. 1720–1739), did Mughal stagnation and contraction set in. Rebellions by overtaxed peasants and nobles alike sapped the empire’s overstretched resources, and Muhammad ’s guns proved increasingly outmoded. Europeans were by this time shifting to lighter and more mobile artiller y, but the Mughals were casting larger and ever-more- unwieldy cannons. A cannon said to be capable of shooting one-hundred-pound balls, dubbed “Fort Opener,” was so heav y it had to be pulled by four elephants and thousands of oxen. Most of the time, it remained stuck in the mud between siege targets. Muhammad Shah finally lost Delhi and the great Mughal treasur y to Iran’s Nadir Shah, successor to the Safavids, in 1739. The empire fell into disar- ray until the reign of Shah A lam II, who took the throne in 1759, only to fall under British influence in 1763. He ruled as a puppet of English East India Company until 1806.

Typical of early modern empire builders, the Mughals shifted between peaceful pragmatism and deadly force. They made alliances with subject peoples, offering them a share of power and the right to carry on established livelihoods. W hen not engaged in wars of expansion, emperors such as A kbar and Shah Jahan mediated disputes, expanded palace structures, and organized tribute collection. Elite tax-collectors and administrators called zamindars (SAW-mean-dars) lived off their shares of tribute, ruling like chiefs over zones called parganas, similar to the Ottoman timars (discussed in the next chapter). Somewhat medieval in structure, this sort of decentralized rule bred corruption, which in turn led to waves of mod- ernizing reform.

As in the similarly populous and cash-hungry empire of Ming China, Mughal tax reform moved toward a centralized money economy (India’s rulers had long enjoyed the privilege of minting gold, silver, and copper coins), stimulating both rural and urban markets. By A kbar’s time, most taxes were paid in cash. Meanwhile, European merchants, ever anxious for Indian commodities, reluctantly supplied their South Asian counterparts with precious metals. As in China, this boost to the Mughal money supply was critical, since India had few precious metals mines of its own. The influx of cash, mostly Spanish-American silver pesos, continued even after the 1739 Persian sack of Delhi, but it was arguably a mixed blessing. As in contemporary China, and indeed in Spain itself, the heightened commercial activity and massive influx of bullion did not beget modern industrialization in

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India. Instead, it bred increased state belligerence and court grandeur. In a sense, the old “Mongolian” notions of governance were simply magnified, financed in a new, more efficient way. Even gunpowder weapons became little more than objects of show.

Everyday Life in the Mughal Empire Despite its Islamic core and general policy of religious toleration, Mughal India remained sharply divided by status, or caste, as well as other ty pes of social dis- tinctions. India’s caste divisions, like the so-called estates of Europe (nobility, clerg y, and commoners), were thought to be derived from a divine order, or hi- erarchy, and could scarcely be challenged. Women’s lives were circumscribed in virtually all but regal and wealthy merchant circles. The Hindu practice of sati, in which widows committed suicide by throwing themselves onto their husbands’ funeral pyres, continued under Islamic rule, although there is much debate about its frequency. A kbar opposed the practice, but he did not ban it. Polygamy, sanctioned by Islam and embraced by A kbar and other rulers, was practiced by any man who could afford to support what amounted to multiple households.

Lower-caste folk, meanwhile, suffered regardless of gender. Worst off were the so-called Untouchables, who were relegated to disposing of human waste, animal carcasses, and other jobs requiring the handling of filth. Like those in many other parts of the early modern world, Mughal elites defined their own dignity most clearly by denying it to those around them—all the while display- ing their innate goodness and superiority through ritualized, ostentatious acts of charity.

Most Mughal subjects were subsistence farmers, many of them tied to landlords through tributary and other customary obligations. The Mughal state thrived mostly by inserting itself into existing tributary structures, not by reordering local economies. Problems arose when Mughal rulers raised tax quotas sharply, or when droughts, floods, and other natural disasters upset the cycle of agricultural pro- duction. Unlike the Ming and Qing Chinese, or even the Spanish in Mexico, the Mughals devoted very little of their tremendous wealth to dams, aqueducts, and other public works projects. W hat was new, or modern, was that paper-pushing bureaucrats recorded farmers’ tax assessments.

Even in good times, most South Asians lived on only a small daily ration of rice or millet, seasoned with ginger or cumin and—lightly—salt, an expensive state-monopoly item. Some fruits, such as mangoes, were seasonally available, but protein sources were limited. Even in times of bounty, religious dietary restrictions

sati The ancient Indian practice of ritual suicide by widows.

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Building a Palace This Mughal miniature from the 1590s is quite unusual in depicting ordinary working folk, along with a pair of animal helpers. Men of several colors, ages, and states of dress engage in heav y labor, transporting and lifting stones, beams, and mortar; splitting planks; setting stones; and plastering domes. Several women are sifting sand or preparing mortar, and at center right are two well-dressed men who appear to be architects or inspectors. Two similar inspectors appear in the upper right, and only in the upper left corner do we glimpse the elite palace inhabitants, seemingly oblivious to the goings-on below.

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kept most people thin. A fter centuries of deforestation, people used animal dung as cooking fuel. Intensive agriculture using animal-drawn plows and irrigation works was widespread, but mass famines occurred frequently. The Columbian Exchange was marginally helpful. A fter about 1600, American maize and tobacco were planted, along with the capsicum peppers that came to spice up many South Asian dishes. Maize spurred population growth in some parts of India, whereas tobacco probably shortened some people’s lives. Most tobacco was produced as a cash crop for elite consumption.

India’s cities grew rapidly in Mughal times, in part due to stress-induced migra- tion. Nine urban centers—among them Agra, Delhi, and Lahore—exceeded two hundred thousand inhabitants before 1700. A fter A kbar’s rule, the shift to tax col- lection in cash was a major stimulus to urban growth and dynamism. Even small towns bustled with commercial activity as the economy became more monetized, and all urban centers formed nuclei of artisan production.

Several South Asian coastal and riverside cities produced abundant cotton and silk textiles. They usually followed the putting-out, or piecework, system, in which merchants “put out” raw materials to artisans working from home. As in China and northern Europe, women formed the backbone of this industry, not so much in weaving but rather in the physically harder tasks of fiber cleaning and spinning. Other, mostly male artisans specialized in woodworking, leather making, black- smithing, and gem cutting. Perhaps the most visible artisanal legacy from Mughal times was in architecture. Highly skilled stonemasons produced A kbar’s majestic Red Fort and Shah Jahan’s inimitable Taj Mahal.

Some men found employment in the shipyards of Surat, Calicut, and the Bay of Bengal, and others set sail with their seasonal cargoes of export goods and pil- grims. Gujarati Muslim merchants were dominant in the Arabian Sea even after the arrival of Europeans, but Hindus, Jains, and members of other faiths also par- ticipated. Unlike the Ottomans, the Mughals never developed a nav y, despite their control of maritime Gujarat since A kbar’s conquest of the region in 1572 (see again Map 18.2). On land, by contrast, the empire’s military absorbed thousands of men. Frontier wars with fellow Muslims and southern Hindus were nearly constant. Christian Europeans were mostly seen as tangential commercial allies, technical advisers, and arms suppliers.

In the northwestern Punjab region an internal challenge emerged, this time mounted by leaders of a relatively new religious sect, Sik hism. Sik hism was something of a hybrid bet ween Islam and Hinduism, but it tended more toward the latter and thus found deeper support among Hindu princes than among Islamic ones. Merchants and artisans were particularly attracted to the faith ’s recognition of hard work and abstinence (as we saw in Chapter 14). Peasant and

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artisan followers of Guru Gobind Singh (1666 –1708) rebelled in 1710, and their plundering raids reached Delhi. The rebellion was v iolently quashed by Shah Farruk hsiyar (far- ROOK-see-yar) (r. 1713–1720) in 1715, but sporadic raids and upris- ings continued until the end of the eighteenth centur y, when the Sik hs at last established a separate state.

In sum, the might y Mughals ruled over the richest and most populous of Eurasia’s early modern Islamic em- pires, and theirs remained by far the most culturally diverse. Mounted warriors used guns to crush or intimidate neighbors in new and terrif y ing ways, quick ly absorbing huge swaths of terrain and millions of subject peoples. Yet generally, the resulting rule was neither in- tolerant nor authoritarian. A s long as they paid cash tributes, regions could pre- ser ve their religious diversit y and a degree of autonomy. Problems arose w ith imperial overstretch, succession crises, and excessive ta xation. Rebels, partic- ularly non-Muslim ones, increasingly shook imperial foundations. More subtle but ultimately more serious were the inroads made by European commercial agents, in particular those of Britain’s East India Company. These men, from Connecticut-born clerk Elihu Yale to governor-general Robert Clive, formed the spearhead of a new imperialism.

European Interlopers

FOCUS What factors enabled europeans to take over key indian Ocean trade networks?

Direct trade for Indian luxuries had been a dream of Europeans since the days of Marco Polo. Unfortunately, as the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama and his followers quickly discovered, Europeans had little that appealed to South Asians. With the exception of certain types of guns and clocks, the Portuguese had no products that could not be had in some form already, often more cheaply, and guns would soon be copied. Like Portugal, India was an ancient crossroads, but it was far larger and richer, and vastly more productive. Complex trade circuits had long

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Delhi

Samana

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AmritsarLahore

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Sikh Rebellion, 1710–1715 Sikh homeland Major ba�le

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Golden Temple

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linked India’s rich interior and bustling ports to the wider world. In such a crowded marketplace, only silver and gold found universal acceptance because they func- tioned as money. Frustrated, the Portuguese turned to piracy, financing their first voyages by plunder rather than trade.

Portuguese Conquistadors 1500–1600 As would prove true in China, only precious metals opened India’s doors of trade to newcomers. Even with powerful guns and swift ships on their side, the vastly outnumbered Portuguese had no choice but to part with their hard-won A frican gold and Spanish-American silver. They were fortunate in that silver soon arrived in quantity through Portugal’s growing Atlantic trade with the Spanish, particu- larly after 1550. Profits made in the slave trade were routinely reinvested in spices and other goods from India. Meanwhile, the security of all exchanges was guar- anteed with brute force, and in some places, such as Goa in India and Melaka in Malaysia, outright conquest.

Genuine Portuguese conquests in Asia were few but significant. Crown- sponsored conquistadors focused on strategic sites for their fortified trading posts, mostly traditional mercantile crossroads and shipping straits not effec- tively controlled by local princes. These feitorias resembled those already estab- lished along the western coast of A frica, but most proved far more expensive and difficult to maintain. The Indian Ocean’s sea traffic was huge, and competition was fierce.

The Portuguese grand plan—never realized—was to monopolize all trade in the Indian Ocean by extracting tolls and tariffs from local traders, regardless of polit- ical allegiance. For a time they sold shipping licenses. If traders failed to produce such licenses when passing through Portuguese-controlled ports, their goods were confiscated. On top of this, they had to pay duties.

Within a half-century of da Gama’s 1498 voyage to India the Portuguese con- trolled access to the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, South China Sea, and Atlantic Ocean, along with many major coastal trading enclaves (see Map 18.3). Being so few in a region of millions, the Portuguese strategy was pragmatic. By tapping existing trade networks and setting up feitorias, they could efficiently collect spices and textiles, along with what were essentially extortion payments. Friends would be given silver, enemies lead. The method worked as long as the Portuguese faced no competition and remained unified.

Despite early Ottoman attacks, serious competitors would not arrive until about 1600. Portuguese unit y was another matter. Given the distance to Lisbon, it proved impossible to enforce consistent policy in dealing w ith Indian Ocean merchants and princes. Ironically, it was “ friendly” local merchants, rajas, and

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sultans—A rab, Hindu, and other w ise—who benefited most from Portuguese sponsorship and protection. A s in western A frica, for several centuries the Portuguese unw ittingly did as much to facilitate local aspirations as to real- ize their ow n. W hat they grandly called the “State of India,” Estado da Índia,

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Arctic Circle

Tropic of Cancer

Equator

40ºE 60ºE 80ºE 100ºE 120ºE 140ºE

INDIAN OCEAN

PACIFIC OCEAN

South China Sea

Bay of Bengal

Arabian Sea

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Malindi 1520

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Melaka 1511

1570

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Makassar 1545

Fort Larantuka 1557

1520

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Syriam 1520

Macao 1555

Fuzhou 1547

Ningbo 1553

Nagasaki

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Cambay 1539

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Portugal’s Seaborne Empire, c. 1600 Trade goods

Cinnamon Cloves Co�on cloth Cowry shells Diamonds Gold

Ivory Nutmeg Opium Other gems Pearls Pepper

Porcelain Sandalwood Silk cloth Silver Tea

Portuguese claims Spanish claims Portuguese trading enclave Date of acquisition Portuguese trade route Route of Spanish galleons from the Americas

1535

AUSTRALIA

EAST AFRICA

ASIA

Seat of Portuguese

Viceroy

MAP 18.3 Portugual’s Seaborne Empire, c. 1600 With their castle-like sailing vessels and potent gunpowder weapons, the Portuguese inserted themselves violently into the greater Indian Ocean basin beginning in 1498. From their stronghold in Goa, they monopolized regional and export trade in luxury goods, either by shipping these items themselves or by forcing others to purchase licenses. A fter 1580, the Portuguese were under Spanish rule, which linked the lucrative Asian trade routes to New World silver arriving in the Philippines.

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gradually proved more “Indian” than Portuguese, though for a short time it was highly profitable to the Crow n.

Portugal’s grand religious project was similarly absorbed. In 1498 Vasco da Gama expressed confidence in the spread of Roman Catholicism to East Africa: “On Easter day the Moors [Muslims] we had taken captive told us that in the town of Malindi [a Swahili port on the coast of Kenya] there were four vessels belonging to Christians from India, and if we should like to convey them there they would give us Christian pilots, and everything else we might need, including meats, water, wood, and other things.” 4 Da Gama wrongly took this to mean that there was a preexist- ing Christian base or network in the region upon which the Catholic Portuguese could build. Ultimately, Portuguese efforts to convert the many peoples of the Indian Ocean basin failed even more miserably than in Atlantic Africa, though not for lack of trying. Francis Xavier, an early Jesuit missionary (see Chapter 19), worked tirelessly and died an optimist. W hereas he focused on converting slaves and lower-caste people, others sought to bend the will of monarchs such as Akbar, hoping they would set an example. Small Christian communities formed at Goa and other strongholds, but everywhere they went, Portuguese missionaries faced literally millions of hostile Muslims and perhaps equal or greater numbers of unin- terested Hindus, Buddhists, Confucianists, Jains, Parsis, Sikhs, Jews, and others. In short, Christianity, at least in the form presented by the Portuguese, did not appeal to the vast majority of people inhabiting the Indian Ocean basin. As we will see in Chapter  20, only in Japan, the Philippines, East Timor, and other select areas, mostly in the western Pacific, did early modern Catholic missionaries strike a chord.

Despite the failure of Christian missionary efforts, trade was brisk. The so-called carreira da Índia (cah-HEY-rah dah EENDJ-yah), or India voyage, became leg- endary in Portuguese culture. Even on successful trips, death rates on this annual sail between Lisbon and Goa were high due to poor sanitation, prolonged vita- min C deprivation, questionable medical therapies, and other health challenges. A lso, although early modern navigators were arguably more adept than medieval ones, shipwrecks plagued the India voyage. Unlike local dhows, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese vessels were huge, round-hulled, and built for cargo rather than speed or maneuverability, and foundered due to overloading. The coral reefs of southeast A frica became a notorious graveyard of the carreira.

By the later sixteenth century, Portuguese monopolies had weakened. With so much wealth at stake and so few enforcers on hand, corruption and contraband flourished. Shipwrecks and piracy became more frequent, as did competition from better-armed northern Europeans. As Luiz Vaz de Camões (cah-MOYSH), veteran of adventures in the East Indies, composed the triumphant poem that would become Portugal’s national epic, The Lusíads, Portugal was on the eve of

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losing not only its heirless king but also its hard-won conquests in the Indian Ocean. It was the Spanish under Philip II who would offer the first humiliation. Shortly after, Spain’s sworn enemies, the Dutch, would deal the Portuguese a series of crushing blows.

The Dutch and English East India Companies 1600–1750 As Portuguese fortunes declined and Mughal expansion continued toward the turn of the seventeenth century, South Asia’s overseas trade underwent reorgani- zation. This shift involved many players, including the familiar Gujarati merchants, the increasingly powerful Ottomans, Persia’s expanding Safavids, and others. But ultimately it was Dutch and English newcomers, and to a lesser extent the French, who would have the greatest long-term impact. A ll formed powerful trading companies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, each backed by state-of-the-art cannons and first-rate sailing ships.

Despite these important changes, it would be highly misleading to project the later imperial holdings of these foreigners back onto the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Only the Dutch came close to establishing a genuine “Indian Ocean Empire” during early modern times. Meanwhile, East A fricans, South and Southeast Asians, and other native peoples of the Indian Ocean continued to act independently, in their own interests. It was the sudden, unexpected collapse of the Mughals and other gunpowder-fueled Asian states in the later eighteenth cen- tury that allowed Europeans to conquer large landmasses and to plant colonies of the sort long since established in the Americas.

The Dutch East India Company, known by its Dutch acronym VOC, was founded in 1602. The company aimed to use ships, arms, and Spanish-American silver to displace the Portuguese as Europe’s principal suppliers of spices and other exotic Asian goods. Though not officially a state enterprise, the Dutch East India Company counted many ranking statesmen among its principal investors, and its actions abroad were as belligerent as those of any imperial army or nav y. In the course of almost two centuries, the VOC extended Dutch influence from South A frica to Japan. Its most lasting achievement was the conquest of Java, base for the vast Dutch colony of Indonesia.

A lthough they never drove the Portuguese from Goa, the Dutch displaced their Iberian rivals nearly every where else. Their greatest early successes were in south- ern India and Java, followed by Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Bengal, Melaka, and Japan (see Map 18.4). In Southeast Asia conquest was followed with enslavement and even- tually plantation agriculture of the sort established by the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas. The VOC also imposed this sequence on Ceylon (see Lives and Livelihoods: Cinnamon Harvesters in Ceylon).

trading companies Private corporations licensed by early modern European states to monopolize Asian and other overseas trades.

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LIVES AND LIVELIHOODS

Cinnamon Harvesters in Ceylon Long before the arrival of Europeans in 1506, the island of Sri Lanka, or Ceylon (its colonial name), was world-renowned for its cinnamon exports. This wet, tropical island off India’s southeast tip, largely under control of competing Buddhist kings, was also famous for its sapphires, rubies, pearls, and domes- ticated elephants. Like India’s pepper and South- east Asia’s cloves, mace, and nutmeg, Ceylonese cinnamon fetched extraordinary prices throughout Eurasia and parts of A frica where it was used as a condiment, preservative, and even medicine. As late as 1685 a Portuguese observer noted, “Every year a great number of vessels arrive from Persia, Arabia, the Red Sea, the Malabar Coast [of India], China, Bengal, and Europe to fetch cinnamon.” Attempts to transplant the spice elsewhere, including Brazil, all failed, and early conquistador claims of finding cinnamon in Ecuador’s eastern jungles proved false. As part of the Columbian Exchange, Ceylonese cinnamon became an ingredient in hot chocolate, a beverage developed in colonial Mexico that took Europe by storm.

The spice grew wild in forests belonging to the kingdom of Kandy, in Ceylon’s southwest high- lands. In 1517, the Portuguese struck a deal that al- lowed them to use and fortify the port of Colombo to monopolize cinnamon exports in exchange for cloth, metal ware, and military assistance against rivals. The Portuguese did not engage directly in cinnamon production, but rather traded for it with the king and certain nobles. The king and his

nobles in turn collected cinnamon as a tribute item produced on feudal-type estates called parawenia. A special caste of male workers known as chalias was responsible for planting, harvesting, slicing, drying, and packaging Ceylon’s most prized crop. The chalias were not enslaved, but rather served as dependents of the king and various noblemen and military officers in exchange for use rights to land for subsistence farming in the off-season, plus ra- tions of rice and occasionally a cash wage.

Cinnamon is derived from the shaved and dried inner bark of the small Cinamomum verum tree, a va- riety of laurel. Although the spice can be harvested wild, Ceylon’s chalias pruned, transplanted, and even planted the trees by seed in order to maximize output and improve quality. At harvest time the chalias cut ripe cinnamon trees and then removed the bark to meet quotas set by the king and other estate holders.

Next came peeling, the key process, and the one for which the chalias were best known. As a seventeenth-century Portuguese writer described them, “These cinnamon peelers carry in their girdle a small hooked knife as a mark of their occupation.” Working in pairs, one chalia made two lengthwise in- cisions on the ripe sticks using his hooked knife and carefully removed the resulting half-cylindrical strips of bark. His companion then used other tools to sep- arate a gray outer bark from the thin, cream-colored inner bark. The inner bark was then left to dry, curl- ing, thickening, and turning brown as it oxidized. The chalias then packaged the resulting “cinnamon sticks”

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in cloth-covered bundles weighing about one hun- dred pounds. These were given to overlords; the king of Kandy alone was said to demand over five hundred tons each year. Cinnamon was often bundled with

black pepper for long sea voyages to help draw out moisture.

We have no documents written by the chalias to give us a sense of their views, but we do know that a leader of a 1609 rebellion against the Portuguese was a member of this caste and the son of a cinnamon cutter. Tapping into local dis- content, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) displaced the Portuguese in 1658 after making an alliance with the king of Kandy. Once estab- lished on the island, the Dutch shifted to direct planting and harvesting, using enslaved laborers and totally monopolizing trade in cinnamon in order to maximize profits. The king was reduced to the status of client. Dutch work demands were rigorous and punishments harsh for even light offenses. Dissatisfaction with the VOC ran deep. The British took over Ceylon in 1796 following the collapse of the VOC, but their management of the cinnamon economy was not as careful, and both price and quality fell. Ceylon’s export sector

would be revived after 1800 with the introduction of American tropical crops adapted by British bota- nists: cinchona (quinine), cacao, and rubber.

Questions to Consider

1. How was cinnamon grown, harvested, and prepared for export? 2. How did cinnamon harvesting fit into traditional, precolonial landholding and labor systems? 3. How did Dutch rule change the lives and livelihoods of cinnamon harvesters?

For Further Information:

Valentijn, François. Description of Ceylon. Edited by Sinnappah Arasaratnam. London: Hakluyt Society, 1978. Winius, George D. The Fatal History of Portuguese Ceylon New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

Harvesting Cinnamon This engraving, based on a simpler one from 1672, depicts cinnamon harvesters in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The Portuguese were the first Europeans to attempt to monopolize the global export of this spice, but local kings were difficult to conquer and control. Only in the later seventeenth century did the Dutch manage to establish plantation-type production, with the final product, the now familiar cinnamon sticks, monopolized by the Dutch East India Company (VOC).

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The monopolistic mentality of contemporary Europe drove Dutch aggression: profits were ensured not by free trade but by absolute control over the flow of com- modities and the money to pay for them. The VOC began by monopolizing spices. A fter seizing the pepper-growing region of southern Sumatra, the VOC turned to the riskier business of establishing plantations to grow coffee and other tropical cash crops. Like the Portuguese before them, the Dutch devoted at least as much cargo space to interregional trade as to exports. Thus clever local traders and many

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MAP 18.4 Dutch and English Colonies in South and Southeast Asia, to 1750 A lthough the Portuguese remained active in the Indian Ocean basin and South China Sea until the twentieth century, after 1600 the Dutch and English had largely displaced them. The East India Companies of these two countries sought to conquer and defend key trading enclaves, both against each other and against the later-arriving French.

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thousands of Chinese merchants benefited from the Dutch determination to mo- nopolize trade.

The VOC, like other Indian Ocean traders, relied on Spanish-American silver to lubricate commerce. Between 1600 and 1648, when these rival empires were at war, some silver was plundered from the Spanish in the Caribbean by Dutch pirates, but most was extracted through trade, both official and contraband. Recent research has revealed the importance of illegal Dutch slave traders in Buenos Aires after a major peace agreement was signed with Spain in 1648. The silver of Potosí in this case bypassed Europe entirely to go to Dutch trading posts in India, Southeast Asia, and China. Mexican silver, meanwhile, flowed out of Dutch Caribbean ports such as Curaçao, through Amsterdam, and into the holds of outbound company ships. Trade in Manila extracted still more Spanish silver. Though ever more divided in its political loyalties, the world was becoming ever more unified in its monetary system.

Dutch Headquarters in Bengal Th is painting from 1665 depicts the Dutch East India Company (VOC) trading for t at Hugly, on the bank s of the Ganges R iver in the Indian prov ince of Bengal. A s they did elsewhere along the rim of the rich and populous Indian Ocean basin, the Dutch sought to establish exclusive control over speci fic commodities, usually a fter driv ing out the Por tug uese. In Bengal, the main ex por t items were fi ne cotton print fabrics, which, along w ith a variet y of products already circulating in the region, they traded mostly for Spanish- A merican silver.

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Compared with the VOC, the English East India Company (EIC), founded two years earlier in 1600, had more modest aims and much less capital. Nevertheless, it used force and a royal charter to displace the Portuguese in several strategic ports, especially around the Arabian peninsula and on the coasts of India. Given England’s internal problems in the seventeenth century (discussed in the next chapter), progress was slow and uneven. Only in the late seventeenth century did English traders in India begin to amass considerable fortunes, mostly by exporting spices, gems, and cloth from their modest fortresses at Surat, Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta (see again Map 18.4). Like the VOC, however, the EIC grew increasingly powerful over time, eventually taking on an imperial role.

COUNTERPOINT: Aceh: Fighting Back in Southeast Asia

FOCUS Why was the tiny sultanate of aceh able to hold out against european interlopers in early modern times?

The province and city of Aceh (A H-cheh), at the northwest tip of the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, was transformed but not conquered in early modern times. Like many trading enclaves linked by the Indian Ocean’s monsoon winds, Aceh was a Muslim sultanate that lived by exchanging the produce of its interior, in this case black pepper, for commodities supplied by other, distant kingdoms. Aceh’s rulers participated directly in trade, dictating its terms and enjoying many of its benefits. Yet unlike most such enclaves, which fell like dominoes to European in- terlopers, Aceh held out. For many reasons, but perhaps most importantly a new- found religious fervor, the Acehnese defeated many would-be conquistadors.

The Differing Fortunes of Aceh and Melaka Aceh’s rulers were probably related to those of the less fortunate Malay trading city of Melaka. Melaka was a former fishing village with a fine natural harbor and strategic location on the east end of the narrow Melaka Strait. It was said to have been founded by a Hindu prince who converted to Islam in around 1420. Melaka’s rulers forged profitable alliances to regions as far away as China, but ties to the in- terior were weak, drawing predators. Melaka was attacked repeatedly by Javanese sultans, and in the end it fell to Portuguese cannons in 1511. A lthough Melakan forces had guns and fought valiantly against the Europeans, when the tide turned they found themselves without a backcountry into which they might flee and reor- ganize. The Dutch followed in 1641, displacing the Portuguese.

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Unlike Melaka, Aceh’s influence reached deep into the interior and across hundreds of miles of coast. A fter defeating Portuguese invaders in 1518, Aceh emerged as one of the most assertive sea- borne Islamic states in the entire Indian Ocean, tapping military aid from the distant Ottomans and shipping considerable quan- tities of pepper to the Mediterranean via the Red Sea. But Aceh’s repeated efforts to conquer Portuguese-controlled Melaka failed, and by the late seventeenth century the kingdom declined. Still, it was not until the nineteenth century that the Dutch reduced Aceh to colonial status.

Aceh, “the Veranda of Mecca” Aceh’s early modern history has been gleaned from several outside sources, and also local, sometimes official, chronicles, including epic poems written in Malay and Acehnese in the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries to celebrate the deeds of its sul- tans. A lthough poets tended to exaggerate the greatness of their patrons and to conflate or compress events, the epics express Acehnese Islamic pride, mostly as the region’s bulwark against the militant Christian Portuguese. Ottoman, Portuguese, Dutch, and English sources note that Aceh was a great meeting place for Southeast Asian pilgrims on their way to Mecca, and it came to be known as Serambi Mekkah, the Veranda of Mecca.

Despite its intensely Islamic identity, Acehnese culture respected female inde- pendence. Women controlled and inherited nearly all property, from houses to rice fields, and at marriage men moved to their wives’ households. Men in fact spent much of their time away on business or engaged in religious study, leaving women in charge of most everyday life. Pre-Islamic kin structures governed daily affairs, while ulama, or religious scholars, oversaw matters of business and state. Criminal cases reveal that local custom could override Islamic prescriptions, es- pecially when it came to capital punishment. The result was a somewhat mild, woman-friendly Southeast Asian blend of secular and religious life reminiscent of West A frica.

Aceh was immediately recognized as a powerful state by northern European vis- itors in the early seventeenth century. The first Dutch envoys were jailed from 1599 to 1601 for mishandling court etiquette, but soon after, English visitors represent- ing Queen Elizabeth I and the newly chartered East India Company made a better impression. Of particular interest to the Acehnese shah was Dutch and English hostility to Portugal, which also sent ambassadors. Playing competing Europeans

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off one another soon became a profitable game. And the Europeans were by no means alone—sizable trading and diplomatic missions arrived in Aceh from east- ern and western India, Burma, and Siam. Sultan Iskandar Muda used English and Dutch traders to drive the Gujaratis out of the pepper trade in the 1610s, only to force the Europeans out of it in the 1620s. He continued to ship pepper to Red Sea intermediaries, but steadily lost out to both English and Dutch merchants, who turned to other Southeast Asian sources.

Aceh’s decline has been traditionally associated with the rise of female sultans in the seventeenth century, much as occurred in the Ottoman Empire at about the same time (as we will see in Chapter 19). Sultana Taj al-A lam Safiyat al-Din Shah ruled from 1641 to 1675. She was the daughter of the renowned conqueror Iskandar Muda Shah (r. 1607–1636), but her politics focused mostly on domestic affairs, in part because Aceh was in a period of restructuring after her father’s failed 1629 attack on Portuguese Melaka. Like her counterparts in Istanbul and Agra, Safiyat al-Din was a great patron of artists and scholars. Under her sponsorship, Acehnese displaced Malay as the language of state and the arts.

Safiyat al-Din was succeeded by three more sultanas, the last of whom was de- posed following a 1699 decree, or fatwa, from Mecca declaring women unfit to serve as sultans. Careful reading of sources suggests that female sultans were not the cause of Aceh’s declining power in the region, but rather a symptom of a gen- eral shift toward the Malay style of divine kingship. Even in decline, Aceh held out throughout early modern times and beyond against European attempts to subject it to colonial rule.

Conclusion Thanks to reliable monsoon winds, the vast Indian Ocean basin had long been interconnected by ties of trade and religion, and this general pattern continued throughout early modern times. The region’s countless farmers depended as they had for millennia on the monsoon rains.

Change came, however, with the rise of gunpowder-fueled empires both on land and at sea. Beginning about 1500, seaborne Europeans forcibly took over key ports and began taxing the trade of others, while Islamic warriors on horse- back blasted resistant sultans and rajas into tribute-paying submission in South Asia. Smaller sultanates and kingdoms also adopted gunpowder weapons after 1500, both to defend themselves against invaders and to attack weaker neighbors. A lthough such armed conflict could be deadly or at least disrupt everyday life, for most ordinary people in the long run it meant a rise in tribute demands, and

fatwa A decree issued by Islamic religious officials.

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in some places a turn to forced cultivation of export products such as cinnamon or pepper.

Despite the advances of belligerent Islamic and Christian empires throughout the Indian Ocean, most inhabitants did not convert. Religious tolerance had long been the rule in this region, and although the Portuguese were driven by an almost crusading fervor to spread Catholicism, in the end they were forced to deal with Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and Muslims to make a profit. Later Europeans, most of them Protestants, scarcely bothered to proselytize prior to modern times, choos- ing instead to offer themselves as religiously neutral intermediaries.

The Mughals, like the k ings of Vijayanagara before them, followed a tradi- tion of divinely aloof religious tolerance, although conversion to the state faith had its benefits, particularly in trade. As with Christianity, Islamic practices varied greatly throughout this vast region, and these differences were visible in customs of female mobility, dress, and access to positions of power. Nur Jahan represented a temporar y period of Mughal openness to feminine power and public expression, and Aceh ’s “Sultanate of the Women” represented another in Southeast Asia.

Europeans adapted to local cultures of trade when using force was impractical. For most of the early modern period, they had no choice, at least outside their tiny, fortressed towns. Only with the decline of great land empires such as that of the Mughals in the eighteenth century did this begin to change. Though it happened much more slowly than in contemporary Latin America or western A frica, by the end of the early modern period European imperial designs had begun to alter es- tablished lifeways throughout the Indian Ocean basin. Expansion into the interior, first by overseas trading companies such as the English East India Company and the Dutch VOC, would grow in the nineteenth century into full-blown imperial- ism. Only a few outliers, such as the Muslim revivalist sultanate of Aceh, managed to hold out, and even their time would come.

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review The major global development in this chapter: The Indian Ocean trading network and the impact of Eu- ropean intrusion on maritime and mainland South Asia.

Important Events

1336–1565 Vijayanagara kingdom in southern India

1498 Vasco da Gama reaches India

1500–1763 Mughal Empire in South Asia

1509–1529 Reign of Krishna Deva Raya of Vijayanagara

1510 Portuguese conquest of Goa, India

1511 Portuguese conquest of Melaka

1517 Portuguese establish fort in Sri Lanka (Ceylon)

1526 Battle of Panipat led by Mughal emperor Babur

1530 Consolidation of Aceh under Sultan Ali Mughayat Shah

1556–1605 Reign of Mughal emperor Akbar

1567 Akbar’s siege of Chitor

1600 English East India Company founded in London

1602 Dutch East India Company (VOC) founded in Amsterdam

1605–1627 Reign of Mughal emperor Jahangir

1641 Dutch take Melaka from Portuguese

1641–1699 “Sultanate of Women” in Aceh

1658 Dutch drive Portuguese from Ceylon

1701 William Kidd hanged in London for piracy

1739 Persian raiders under Nadir Shah sack Delhi

1764 English East India Company controls Bengal

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KEY TERMS Brahman (p. 650) caste (p. 650) dhow (p. 646)

fatwa (p. 674) Kshatriya (p. 650) monsoon (p. 642)

sati (p. 660) trading companies (p. 667)

CHAPTER OVERVIEW QUESTIONS 1. W hat environmental, religious, and political

factors enabled trading enclaves to flourish in the Indian Ocean basin?

2. How did the rise and fall of India’s land empires reflect larger regional trends?

3. How did Europeans insert themselves into the Indian Ocean trading network, and what changes did they bring about?

MAKING CONNECTIONS 1. In what ways did Indian Ocean trade differ

from the contemporary Atlantic slave trade (see Chapter 17)? W hat role did A frica play in each?

2. How did traditional kingdoms such as Vijayanagara differ from those of the A mericas prior to the Spanish conquest (see Chapter 15)?

For further research into the topics covered in this chapter, see the Bibliography at the end of the book. For additional primary sources from this period, see Sources for World in the Making.

M a k i n g C o n n e c t i o n s