Conclusion

When dealing with the history of the Portuguese or any other European empire in Asia from the dawn of the sixteenth century onwards, the impact of the newcomer turns out to be a nodal issue.

Various examples illustrate the most important markers of difference concerning the Franks—religion, body and dress code, wine-drinking, dogs and black slaves, seafaring nature and unmatched expertise with firearms. Yet at the same time, there was an intri­guing indigenous search for similarities, often based on the ‘Asiatisation’ of the newcomers and/or the desire to emulate them. There certainly was an impact—economic, political, religious, social and visual. However, such phenomena are not measurable in a linear fashion. On returning to Lisbon in the summer of 1499, Vasco da Gama was questioned by Francisco de Portugal, count of Vimioso, who wanted to hear ‘what goods are available there to bring here, and what things they would like to exchange’. Finding out that Western gold and silver would be needed to obtain Eastern spices, the count made the following, deliciously sarcastic observation: ‘In the end, they are the ones who discovered us’.⁵¹ The web of Asian perceptions of the Portuguese underscores the sharpness of the count of Vimioso’s observation about the Portuguese ‘discovery’ of the Indian Ocean. We cannot say with certainty who discovered whom.

Notes

1 Anonymous (Àlvaro Velho), Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497--1499, E.G.

2 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History (2nd edn) (Chichester, 2012).

3 Luis Filipe Thomaz, ‘Estrutura politica e administrativa do Estado da ìndia no seculo XVI', in De Ceuta a Timor (Lisbon, 1994), p. 208.

4 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Written on Water: Designs and Dynamics in the Portuguese Estado da Indiai in Susan E. Alcock et al. (eds), Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge,

2001), pp. 42-69. Also see Anthony Disney, ‘Contrasting Models of “Empire”: The Estado da India in South Asia and East Asia in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries', in Francis A. Dutra and Joäo Camilo dos Santos (eds), The Portuguese and the Pacific (Santa Barbara, 1995), pp. 26-37.

5 Niels Steensgaard, Carracks, Caravans, and Companies: The Structural Crisis in the European-Asian Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century (Copenhagen, 1973).

George Winius, ‘The “Shadow Empire” of Goa in the Bay of Bengal', Itinerario, Vol. 2 (July 1983), pp. 83-101; George Bryan Souza, The: Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea, 1630--1754 (Cambridge, 1986); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Improvising Empire. Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1700 (New Delhi, 1990).

Leonard Y. Andaya, ‘The Portuguese Tribe in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', in Dutra and Santos (eds), The Portuguese and the Pacific, pp. 129-148; Stefan Halikowski Smith, ‘“No Obvious Home”: The Flight of the Portuguese “Tribe” from Makassar to Ayutthaya and Cambodia during the 1660s', International Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2010), pp. 1-28.

Luis Filipe Thomaz, ‘Portuguese Control over the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.

Frangue is the Portuguese form of Faranji (‘Frank'), an Arabic word designating the Western Christians. It sometimes applied only to Catholics, but in other instances all Europeans were subsumed within the label. Faranji—word and concept—passed on to a number of Asian lan­guages, namely Malay (peringgi) and Chinese folangji). See Luis Filipe Thomaz, ‘Frangues', in Luis de Albuquerque (ed.), Dicionario de historia dos descobrimentos portugueses, Vol. I (Lisbon, 1994), p. 435. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘On the Hat-Wearers, Their Toilet Practices and Other Curious Usages', in Kumkum Chatterjee and Clement Hawes (eds), Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern Encounters (Lewisburg, 2008), pp. 45-82.

R.B. Serjeant, Historia dos Portugueses no Malabar por Jinadim. Manuscripto arabe do seculo XVI, David Lopes (trans. and ed.) (Lisbon, 1898); The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast: Hadrami Chronicles. With Yemeni and European Accounts of Dutch Pirates off Mocha in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1963); Giancarlo Casale, ‘His Majesty's Servant Lutfi: The Career of a Previously Unknown Sixteenth­century Ottoman Envoy to Sumatra based on an Account of his from the Topkapi Palace Archives', Turcica, Vol. 37 (2005), pp. 43-81.

Painted by La'l, c. 1603-1604; London, British Library, Or. 12988, fol. 66a.

King of the World. The Padshahnama: An Imperial Mughal Manuscript from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, Milo Cleveland Beach and Ebba Koch (eds), Wheeler Thackston (trans.) (London, 1997), nos. 19-20, pp. 56-59, 179-180. Possible comparison with the Jarunnama, an anonymous seven­teenth-century Safavid account of the taking of Hormuz by Imam Quli Khan in 1622 (with ten miniatures); London, British Library, Add. 7801, fol. 43a.

Letter from Akbar to ‘Abdu'llah Khan Uzbeg, 1586, in Mukatabat-i-'Allami (Insha'i Abu’l Fazl).

Manohar, c. 1590; Paris, Musee National des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, 3619, Gc.

George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA,

1988), p. 321.

Putege Yazawin. Crònica setecentista birmane sobre o expansionismo portugues na Asia, Maria Ana Marques Guedes (trans. and ed.) (Lisbon, forthcoming).

Georg Schurhammer, ‘Three Letters of Mar Jacob', in Orientalia (Rome, 1963), pp. 334-337.

In Chandra R. de Silva (ed.), Portuguese Encounters with Sri Lanka and the Maldives: Translated Texts from the Age of the Discoveries (Farnham, 2009), pp. 19-20. For different possible interpretations of this descrip­tion, see Michael Roberts, ‘A Tale of Resistance: The Story of the Arrival of the Portuguese in Sri Lanka', Ethnos, Vol. 54, Nos. 1-2 (1989), pp 69-82; C.R. de Silva, ‘Beyond the Cape: The Portuguese Encounter with the Peoples of South Asia', in Schwartz (ed.), Implicit Understandings, pp. 295-322. Cartas dos cativos de Cantdo (1524?), Rui Manuel Loureiro (ed.) (Macau, 1992), p. 19.

Lisbon, Biblioteca da Ajuda, Jesuitas na Asia, 49-V-15, fol. 306.

Panduronga S.S. Pissurlencar, ‘Os Portugueses nas literaturas indianas dos seculos XVI, XVII e XVIII', Boletim da Sociedade Geografia de Lisboa, series 73, 7-9 (July-September 1955), pp. 367-383; Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in.Nayaka Period Tamil.Nadu (New Delhi, 1992), esp. chap. 6.

Stefan Halikowski Smith, Creolization and Diaspora in the Portuguese Indies: The Social World of Ayutthaya, 1640-1720 (Leiden, 2011), chap.

Luis Filipe Thomaz, ‘Os Frangues na terra de Malaca’, in Luis Filipe Barreto and Francisco Contente Domingues (eds), A Abertura do Mundo. Estudos de historia dos descobrimentos europeus em homenagem a Luis de Albuquerque, Vol. I (Lisbon, 1987), pp. 209-217; Reid, ‘Early Southeast Asian Categorizations of Europeans’.

Denys Lombard, Le carrefour javanais. Essai d’histoire globale (Paris, 1990), Vol. III, p. 80, ill. 75; Charles R. Boxer, ‘Asian Potentates and European Artillery in the 16th-18th Centuries: A Footnote to Gibson-Hill’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 28 (1965), pp. 156-172.

Pierre Yves-Manguin, Les Portugais sur les cotes du Viet-nam et du Campa. Etude sur les routes maritimes et les relations commerciales d’apres les sources portugaises (XVe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siecles) (Paris, 1972), pp. 204-209. See also Halikowski Smith, Creolization and Diaspora, chap. 9, for other continental South-east Asian cases.

Khwaja ‘Abdur Baqi Nihavandi, Ma’asir-i-Rahimi (1616), English summary in H.M. Elliot and John Dowson, The History of India as told by its own Historians: The Muhammad Period, Vol. VI (rpt, New Delhi, 1996), pp. 237-243; Abu’l Fazl, The Akbar Nama, Henry Beveridge (trans.), Vol. III (rpt, New Delhi, 1993), pp. 919, 972.

Aniruddha Ray, ‘Middle Bengali Literature: A Source of the Study of Bengal in the Age of Akbar’, in Hirfan Habib (ed.), Akbar and his India (New Delhi, 1998), pp. 225-242, 234-239.

Mirza Nathan, Baharistan-i Ghaybi: A History of the Mughal Wars in Assam, Cooch Behar, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa during the Reigns of Jahangir and Shahjahan, M.I. Borah (trans. and ed.), 2 vols (Gauhati [Assam], 1936).

Ng Chin-keong, ‘Trade, Sea Prohibition and the “Fo-lang-chi”, 1513-1550’, in Dutra and Santos (eds), The Portuguese and the Pacific, pp. 381-424.

S. Pathmanathan, ‘The Portuguese in Northeast Sri Lanka (1543-1658): An Assessment of Impressions Recorded in Tamil Chronicles and Poems’, in Jorge Flores (ed.), Re-exploring the Links: History and Constructed Histories between Portugal and Sri Lanka (Wiesbaden, 2007), pp.

Subrahmanyam, ‘On the Hat-Wearers’

Sinica Lusitana. Fontes chinesas em bibliotecas e arquivos portugueses, Roderich Ptak et al. (eds and trans.), Vol. I (Lisbon, 2000), p. 161.

The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India, Wheeler Thackston (trans. and ed.) (Washington, DC, 1999), pp. 133-134; Mansur, c. 1612, London, Victoria & Albert Museum, IM 135-1921.

John E. Wills, Jr., Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K’ang-h.si, 1666--1687 (Cambridge, MA, 1994), pp. 130-138, 243-245. A contemporary Chinese drawing of the lion is housed in Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Chinois 5444.

Lisbon, Biblioteca da Ajuda, Jesuitas na Asia, 49-V-18, fol. 336. Many similar examples concern­ing Akbar. Also see, for later cases, Ashan Jan Qaisar, The Indian Response to the European Technology and Culture, 1498-1707 (New Delhi, 1998), pp. 124-125.

Ronald Toby, ‘The “Indianess” of Iberia and Changing Japanese Iconographies of Other’, in Schwartz (ed.), Implicit Understandings, pp. 323-351.

C.1600, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 14.661.

Muhammad Arif Qandhari, Tarikh-i-Akbari, Tasneem Ahmad (ed. and trans.) (Delhi, 1993), p. 199. Reid, ‘Early Southeast Asian Categorizations of Europeans’, p. 277.

Abu’l Fazl, The Akbar Nama, Vol. III, pp. 37.

Subrahmanyam, ‘On the Hat-Wearers’, pp. 63-65.

Fok Kai Cheong, ‘Early Ming Images of the Portuguese’, in Roderich Ptak (ed.), Portuguese Asia: Aspects in History and Economic History (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries) (Stuttgart, 1987), pp. 143-155; Stefania Stafutti, ‘Portogallo e Portoghesi nelle fonte cinesi del XVI e del XVII secolo’, Cina, Vol. 19 (1989), pp. 29-51, 40-41; Fok Kai Cheong, ‘The Ming Debate on How to Accommodate the Portuguese and the Emergence of the Macao Formula. The Portuguese Settlement and Early Chinese Reactions’, Revista de Cultura, series 2, 13-14 (January-June 1991), pp. 328-344.

Jorge Flores and Maria Augusta Lima Cruz, ‘A “Tale of Two Cities”, a “Veteran Soldier”, or the Struggle for Endangered Nobilities: The Two Jornadas de Uva (1633, 1635) Revisited’, in Flores (ed.), Re-exploring the Links, pp. 95-124.

Jurrien van Goor, Jan Kompagnie as a Schoolmaster. Dutch Education in Ceylon, 1690-1796 (Groningen, 1978), p. 30.

47 Maria Ana Marques Guedes, ‘A historia birmano-portuguesa para alem das rela^oes oficiais. Assimilalo e acultura^äo nos seculos XVII-XVIII', PhD dissertation, New University of Lisbon, 1999, pp. 396-403.

48 Merle C. Ricklefs, Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi 1749--1792: A History of the Division of Java (London, 1974), pp. 362-414, 400-401, 410-413.

49 For a reassessment, criticising the thesis of deification of the Spaniards by the Aztecs, see Camilla Townsend, ‘Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico', The American Historical Review, Vol. 108, No. 3 (June 2003), pp. 659-687. As to Lono, see Gananath Obeyese- kere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, 1992). Contrasting opinion, accepting Captain Cook as the god Lono, by Marshall Sahlins, How Natives ‘Think': About Captain Cook, For Example (Chicago, 1995).

50 Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto, ‘The Stranger-Effect in Early Modern Asia', in Leonard Blusse and F. Fernàndez-Armesto (eds), Shifting Communities and Identity Formation in Early Modern Asia (Leiden,

2003), pp. 181-202, 189.

51 Anonymous, Ditos portugueses dignos de memòria. Historia intima do seculo XVI, Jose Hermano Saraiva (ed.) (Mem-Martins, 1997), p. 113.

Further reading

Bethencourt, Francisco and Diogo Ramada Curto (eds), Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400-1800 (Cambridge, 2007).

Boxer, C.R., The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825 (2nd edn) (Manchester, 1991).

Chatterjee, Kumkum and Clement Hawes (eds), Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern Encounters (Lewisburg, 2008).

Disney, A.R., A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, from Beginnings to 1807, Vol. II: The Portuguese Empire (Cambridge, 2009).

Elison, George, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (2nd edn) (Cambridge, MA, 1988).

Halikowski Smith, Stefan, Creolization and Diaspora in the Portuguese Indies: The Social World of Ayutthaya, 1640-1720 (Leiden, 2011).

Jackson, Anne and Amin Jaffer (eds), Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500-1800 (London,

2004).

Levenson, Jay (ed.), Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th & 17th Centuries, Vol. III: Essays (Washington, DC, 2007).

McPherson, Kenneth, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (Oxford, 1998).

Newitt, Malyn, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400-1668 (London, 2005).

Pearson, M.N., The World of the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800: Studies in Economic, Social and Cultural History (Aldershot, 2005).

Russellwood, A.J.R., The Portuguese Empire, 1415-1808:A World on the Move (Baltimore, 1998).

Schwartz, Stuart (ed.), Implicit Understandings. Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, 1994).

Silva, Chandra R. de (ed.), Portuguese Encounters with Sri Lanka and the Maldives: Translated Texts from the Age of Discoveries (Farnham, 2009).

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History (2nd edn) (Chichester, 2012).