A CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISON OF SECTORAL LINKS: MALACCA

The multifaceted nature of Europe’s assault is highlighted when contrasted with the overseas activities of the Chinese and the Arabs. The ideal site for comparison would be a place distant from Europe, China, and Arabia, hence unlikely to be controlled by any of them, where people arriving by sea from all three areas were present at about the same time.

The city and strait of Malacca were extraordinarily cosmopolitan places several centuries ago. A well-placed Portuguese observer wrote in the 1570s, “One may well and truly say that Malacca, in point of fact, and merchant trade, is the most extensive place in the world.”³⁷ The city was visited by Cheng Ho on at least two of his voyages and thereafter by many Chinese sailors and traders. The great Arab traveler Ibn Battuta passed through the strait in 1345-46, and several thousand Muslims, includ­ing some from Arabia, resided in the city in the early 1500s. Ibn Battuta’s Italian counterpart, Marco Polo, passed through the Malacca Strait in 1292 on his return to Europe from China.

By studying Malacca in 1511 one comes as close as possible to a historical laboratory experiment. Are sectoral features of European countries present as well in China and in Arab (and, more generally, Muslim) societies? If so, for reasons given in chapter 2 my argument about the importance of sectors is weakened. If not, the argument is strengthened.

The Chinese government’s impact on Malacca was far more limited in scope and duration than might be expected given the country’s size and wealth. Cheng Ho’s armada of huge junks, with thousands of well-armed soldiers aboard, was designed to ensure attention and respectful deference to China’s rulers from elites elsewhere. Presumably Admiral Ho was instructed to urge monarchs he met to establish sym­bolic tributary relations with the Celestial Court. But the admiral was unwilling to use the military might at his disposal to conquer Malacca, there being no plan to claim and administer distant lands as integral parts of the emperor’s domains.³⁸ Moreover, as noted earlier, the impressive voyages undertaken by Cheng Ho ended abruptly in 1433. The emperor politely received the king of Malacca when the king later journeyed to Beijing, bearing tribute. But assertion of China’s superior political status was made by the inferior party visiting the Celestial Court, not by the latter reaching out aggressively beyond its borders. The contrast with the European pattern is obvious.

China’s private profit sector had a more substantial and long-lasting impact on Malacca. One indicator was the existence, as of the early 1500s, of a separate section of the city reserved for Chinese merchants. These traders were on their own when residing overseas. This was manifestly the case after 1433 when they could not count on even an intermittent visit of ships to demonstrate the home government’s power.

The imperial court disapproved of Chinese settling elsewhere because this meant abandoning the graves of their ancestors. The court took this view to its logical conclusion in 1712 with an edict forbidding its subjects to live or trade in Southeast Asia. Though poorly and inconsistently enforced, the edict nonetheless expressed an attitude toward overseas settlers diametrically opposite to that of west­ern Europe’s rulers.⁴¹

China’s public and private profit sectors thus had minimal contact with each other in dealing with Malacca. When cross-sectoral contact did occur it tended to be competitive and conflictual rather than cooperative. The profit-sharing and char­tered company options were ruled out. This stands in sharp contrast with the Euro­pean pattern of linking the two sectors in mutually beneficial ways.

The Chinese did not carry a missionary religion to Malacca because they had none. As noted in chapter 8, the imperial court’s Confucian creed was a civil religion, not available for export or readily separable institutionally from the public sector.

Arabs visited Malacca as long-distance merchants, staying in a quarter of the town set aside for Muslims. Unlike the Chinese they did bring a missionary religion. They used their wealth and external connections to persuade Southeast Asia’s politi­cal elites to let them build mosques and invite mullahs to lead the Islamic commu­nity’s religious life. In many instances Muslim merchants pressured local rulers to convert. Malacca’s rulers had been Muslim for about a century before the Portuguese arrived. One may thus speak of an alliance between Arab mercantile and religious interests resembling the European pattern.

But Arabs in the Indian Ocean basin were not like Europeans. First, they were not agents of a polity eager to assert itself overseas. Home bases for Arab seafarers were port cities—Jiddah, Aden, Muscat—along the periphery of a vast, thinly popu­lated desert peninsula not effectively governed by anyone. These cities faced outward to the sea. But they were not linked to a densely populated, economically productive, politically controlled hinterland in the way that western Europe’s port cities were. They were urban areas on their own, not urban areas embedded in states.⁴² Their prospects for profitable trade were most favorable if none of them advanced political claims beyond its immediate domain. Traders and sailors moved on monsoonal winds from one trading center to another, intermediaries among several autono­mous units rather than agents of any particular one.⁴³

Second, Arabs were not the only—or even the principal—propagators of Islam in southeast Asia.

The successes of traders as proselytizers meant that diffusion of Islam in Southeast Asia did not depend on soldiers and administrators brought in from outside. If public sector support was deemed necessary it was provided on site: once Malacca’s ruler converted, Islam became in effect the kingdom’s official faith. Fur­ther, the spread of Islam did not depend on full-time specialists in conversion recruited, dispatched, and reporting to an institution headquartered in Arabia or any other Muslim country. Islam indigenized itself as it expanded rather than serving the ambitious designs of a distant state or missionary agency.

To summarize, the Chinese public sector had only a fleeting interest in reach­ing out to Malacca, no interest in conquering the city, and competitive rather than cooperative relations between itself and private profit sectors; the religious sector had no will or autonomous institutional capacity to assert itself overseas. China’s impact on Malacca as of the early sixteenth century was confined to the activities of a single sector functioning on its own. Arabs had two sectors interested in influencing the outside world, hence the potential for a sectoral coalition. But Islam’s spread to Malacca and elsewhere in Southeast Asia was not essentially an Arab activity. Neither was it directed by religious agents accountable to their own sectoral institutions, as in the European pattern.

The limited, functionally diffuse character of Chinese and Arab/Muslim rela­tions with Malacca posed an insoluble dilemma for the city’s sultan when he encoun­tered Europeans. The first ship sent out in 1509 from Goa, administrative capital of Portugal’s Estada da India, consisted of traders. But Muslim merchants resident in Malacca who came from Gujarat and other Indian ports knew from experience that the Portuguese flag accompanied trade and that the Portuguese were Christians implacably hostile to Islam. Warned in effect that the Portuguese constituted a triple threat to his regime, the sultan imprisoned and mistreated several members of the trade mission. His actions precipitated the very attack by Portuguese soldiers two years later that he hoped to forestall. But the Muslim merchants could offer only warnings. None of the cities from which they came was in any position to supply military aid, even to coreligionists threatened by Christian infidels.

The only powerful polity to which the sultan could turn was China. But if he was able to contact the Chinese emperor his efforts were in vain. The tributary system binding Malacca to the Celestial Kingdom symbolized superior/inferior rela­tions. But it did not contain a mutual defense clause. Help was not forthcoming. At a critical moment in world history, when Europeans first intervened in Southeast Asian affairs, the Chinese court was unwilling to assert its stake in a nearby region. The sultan faced toward Mecca when praying and toward Beijing when offering tribute. But for quite different reasons he could count on neither to help counter the new foe.

Beijing, in other words, was the capital city of a powerful state lacking both an expansionist foreign policy and an expansionist religion. Mecca was the central city of an expansionist religion but not of a state. Lisbon was the capital city of a state with an expansionist foreign policy and a strong commitment to spread an expan­sionist religion.

As the Muslim merchants predicted, the Portuguese launched a triple assault on Malacca. The city was captured in 1511 by an armada of ships carrying fifteen hundred soldiers whose commander, Viceroy Afonso d’Albuquerque, saw himself as an extension agent of the Portuguese state.⁴⁵ That the invaders intended to assert permanent political control soon became dear. Albuquerque allegedly cried out to his men in the heat of battle, that “We [should] build a fortress in this city... and sustain it, and... this land [should] be brought under the dominion of the Por­tuguese, and the King D. Manuel be styled true king thereof.”⁴⁶ Construction of a stone fortress was begun as soon as the battle was won, and it was kept well supplied with soldiers and cannon. The city was a Portuguese possession until the Dutch took it in the seventeenth century. Once secured, Malacca became a vital outpost used to establish other Portuguese endaves in the Moluccas and on the China coast.

The conquest of Malacca, in turn, was an integral part of a grand scheme to capture gains from Indian Ocean trade. Political control of enclaves throughout the ocean basin was considered a necessary as well as desirable means to an economic end. Albuquerque appealed to the profit motive as explicitly as one could: “If we take this trade of Malacca away out of [the Moors’] hands, Cairo and Mecca are entirely ruined, and to Venice will no spiceries go except that which her merchants go and buy in Portugal.”⁴⁷

Portuguese actions also reveal the religious dimension of their drive for domi­nance. Albuquerque waited to launch his attack until the day of Saint James, patron saint of Iberian crusaders. That the crusading mentality was alive and well can be seen in his reference to “the great service which we shall perform to our Lord in casting the Moors out of the country, and quenching the fire of this sect of Mofa- mede so that it may never burst out again hereafter.”⁴⁸ Non-Muslims were spared following the battle. But “of the Moors, [including] women and children, there died by the sword an infinite number, for no quarter was given to any of them.”⁴⁹ A church was constructed, and in 1557 it became the Cathedral of the Bishop of Ma­lacca. Priests working among non-Muslims in the local fishing community made many converts. The famous Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier visited the city in 1545 on his way from India to Japan.

By one estimate between half a million and a million people, from Mozambi­que to Japan, converted to Roman Catholicism by the end of the sixteenth century.⁵⁰ Malacca’s history and its role as missionary way station to other parts of Asia illus­trate the strong expansionist impulses of Euro-Christianity.

By examining actions, motivations, and institutions at a critical juncture of world history when representatives of the three leading candidates for global domi­nance were present at the same place and time, the case study of Malacca in 1511 tests—and supports—the book’s central proposition. The Portuguese were unlike the Chinese and Arabs in the number and variety of sectoral institutions at their dis­posal, in the stretch of these institutions far from home base, and in the way agents of different sectors worked together for mutually beneficial ends. The Malaccan case highlights not only the contrast between Europeans and others who might have formed equivalent empires, but also the empowering effects when cross-sectoral coalitions were assembled.

The Malaccan case highlights the significance of sectors in another respect. European states were not active rivals to control the Indian Ocean when Viceroy Albuquerque launched his attack in 1511. Granting that desire to preempt Spain from controlling the nearby Spice Islands was a strategic consideration lurking in the background, interstate competition probably played a smaller role here than in any subsequent European overseas initiative. The international system’s relative insignificance in this story increases one’s confidence that the pattern of sectoral institutions within European states is a causal variable analytically separate from the system in which those states were embedded.

The case study helps answer a secondary question raised earlier: why Euro­peans concentrated phase i settlement and conquest activities on the New World. The point can be made by comparing the capture of Malacca with another world- historical event occurring less than a decade later: conquest of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, by forces led by Cortes. Portugal’s grand strategy in the Indian Ocean was to capture gains from a lucrative seaborne trade that had functioned for a long time. Malacca was valued as an enclave facing the water, where profits literally floated past in the form of ships carrying spices, precious stones, textiles, chinaware, carv­ings, and so on through a narrow strait. There was no economic or strategic reason for Albuquerque to invade the Malayan interior. Nor would he have been able to do so, since the key to Portugal’s strategy was to disperse the small number of soldiers at its disposal to several posts separated by vast distances. A successful invasion of Malaya would have come at the unacceptable cost of abandoning Goa, Cochin, Hormuz, or Mombasa.

In contrast, Spaniards in the New World encountered no preexisting maritime trade. The wealth they sought would have to be captured at its source, deep in central and south American hinterlands. Vera Cruz, where Cortes landed in 1519, was seen not as an enclave facing the sea but as the staging area for an arduous march inland. The key to Cortes’s success was not the geographic dispersal of his soldiers but suffi­cient concentration in one place to defeat the enemy’s equally concentrated forces.

Portugal and Spain both took to the oceans in search of economic gain. But whereas Portugal could attain this goal in the Old World by controlling the high seas, Spain could attain wealth in the New World only by conquering and settling the land. Portugal’s aim was not to revolutionize the Indian Ocean basin’s economy but rather to extract a hefty share of gains from an existing pattern of trade. But Spain had to revolutionize the New World economies it encountered in order to gain from con­quest. Portugal, having an essentially conservative economic agenda, felt no need to send settlers to Malacca or to set up plantations or prospect for minerals outside the city. Spain, facing both the necessity and the opportunity in the Americas to design radically new patterns of extraction, production, and trade, exported its people across the Atlantic and fostered large-scale, labor-intensive agricultural and mining operations.

The Portuguese in Malacca found they could prosper without altering indige­nous political structures in the city’s immediate environs. Not so Cortes and his successors, who could not prosper unless state structures run by Europeans were in place to coerce indigenous peoples to labor long and hard for minimal reward. It was possible for a metropole to profit from an Old World enclave while keeping political claims outside enclave boundaries to a minimum. It was not possible to profit from a New World plantation or mining economy without superimposing political control over large areas. A minimalist colonial strategy that worked well in phase i Malaya was insufficient for New Spain.

Not until the nineteenth century did Europeans consider the Malayan interior worthy of their attention. Under British direction, exports from rich tin mines were increased and rubber plantations laid out. The plantations marked a transfer to the Old World of a plant Europeans had found in the New (Hevea brasiliensis) and of a mode of production perfected earlier in the Americas. More recent Malaccan history thus illustrates, in microcosm, how Europe’s concentration on transforming the New World in phase i facilitated conquest and transformation of much of the Old World in phase 3.