East and South East Asian Piracy
In East and South East Asia piracy flourished on a huge scale during the early to mid sixteenth century, with later pulses in the early seventeenth and late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries.
Again, it was at about the time the Portuguese arrived in these seas that massive maritime violence broke out, with bands of pirates from south-west Japan, Korea and China's own coasts wreaking havoc on mostly Chinese merchant shipping and port cities. Here the Portuguese were not innocent bystanders, as they not only introduced firearms to both sides but also joined in the uproar of maritime raiding and slave trafficking. The so-called wako or ‘dwarf pirates' (who comprised Japanese kaizoku as well as other Asian ‘sea bandits'), who were famously fearsome, eventually organised large-scale attacks against European targets. The Chinese pirate Limahon or Lin Feng nearly took Manila from the Spanish in 1575. His was a large-scale invasion in which gunpowder technology figured prominently.[723]Chinese self-defence improved but European competition for monopoly control of spice nodes and other strategic outposts created new pretexts for piracy - and claims of piracy. The Portuguese and Spanish disputed claims to the Spice Islands and before long English, Dutch and other European interlopers were fighting for their piece of the Asian pie. As would happen in so many other colonial contexts, local folks who allied with one trading partner would be punished by that partner's competitors, touching off ‘piratical' vendetta cycles throughout the region. But this was in no way a European- dominated game. Old trade nodes like Makassar and Aceh were revitalised as they played off competing interlopers and expanded their reach. The embrace of Islam gave some fighters more energy while enabling alliances as far away as Istanbul.
Slaving and captive taking for ransom did occur in South East Asia as gunpowder-fuelled state building spread, but it appears that nothing quite like the formalised ransoming business of the Mediterranean emerged here. Before the arrival of a few random buccaneers in the late seventeenth century, most claims of piracy were between rival European traders, mostly Dutch and Iberian.
Indeed, it was here in South East Asia, near Singapore, that the 1603 capture of the Portuguese galleon Santa Catarina by the Dutch led to Hugo Grotius's monumental legal defence of maritime predation.[724] Before the arrival of Europeans, peoples and states of South East Asia had no notions of what the foreigners called ‘piracy'; this term was simply not in their vocabulary. What Europeans labelled as piracy to South East Asians was a form of warfare.[725]Another cycle of maritime violence shot through with claims of piracy occurred as China's Ming dynasty collapsed beginning in the 1640s. The Dutch and Spanish had already fought over control of Taiwan and access to Japan, but now the fall of the Ming pushed military men and merchant raiders out to sea in south China, including the great Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong).[726] As Robert Antony and Dian Murray have shown, piracy returned with a vengeance in the late eighteenth century, and it became an object of imperial suppression campaigns in the early nineteenth century. The great ‘pirate queen' Zheng Yi Sao reigned along the Guangdong coast between 1802 and 1810, commanding tens of thousands of raiders and over a thousand vessels.[727] If there was anything peculiar about pirate violence in East Asian waters, it was the year-round sustenance of whole floating cultures. As a woman, Zheng Yi Sao was unusual only in holding such a prominent leadership role, not in her constant presence aboard pirate ships.