Exchange

The conceptual opposition between Spain's territorial empire and Portugal's commercial empire was articulated for the first time by Cortes to justify (and obtain royal support for) his project to explore the Pacific Ocean from Mexico.^[2078] This opposition has structured the historiography of Iberian expansion for the past five centuries.

It is reproduced in current scholarship and reflects a long-lasting vision of essentialized national characters, transferred overseas. Such stereotypes are misleading. Colonial experiences were predominantly shaped by local conditions rather than national background. Ethnic, social, and territorial configurations within the Portuguese Empire varied substantially, from Asian ports to African enclaves and from Atlantic islands to Brazilian hinterland. While a commercial empire existed in Asia and Africa, a territorial empire characterized Brazil, a strategy that was later replicated in Africa under entirely different conditions. The Portuguese in Asia created a small territorial dominion in the Northern Province, in the region between present-day Mumbai and Daman (2,800 square kilometers) from 1521 to 1559. They controlled most of Sri Lanka, between 1597 and 1630, as a result of local conversion and political division. After losing most of the Northern Province to the Maratha Confederacy in 1737-1740, they conquered a territory of 3,600 square kilometers around Goa between 1741 and 1788. In Brazil, the discovery of gold in the 1690s led to the occupation of the hinterland, launching an extraordinary long-term process that resulted in the creation of the biggest country in Latin America.

A clear-cut opposition between territorial and commercial empires thus does not withstand serious analysis. Another interpretation, argued by Steensgaard, opposes seigniorial Iberian expansion, based on royal monopolies and the redistributive possibilities opened up by imperial trade, to capitalist northern European expansion, based on profit- oriented join- stock companies, and exemplified by the English and Dutch East India companies.^[2079] To consider rent-seeking companies, enjoying monopolies of trade guaranteed by the state, as models of capitalism is problematic, as Van Leur had already pointed out.^[2080] The Portuguese Empire differed in its nature from these chartered companies.

The Portuguese king was extremely involved from the beginning, leasing overseas lands, voyages, and trade. He had been granted Royal Patronage of the Church from the pope in 1455, which meant that he would collect the tithe, suggest bishops, dioceses, and ecclesiastic structures, as well as authorize and finance religious orders and missionary work inside and outside the Portuguese overseas empire. Evangelization was thus the justification for expansion; converting native people and slaves was the main goal imposed on colonists. '1 his religious stance went hand-in-hand with the redistribution of highly profitable captaincies and governorships to the nobility—all of which offered significant possibilities of legal trade—as well as the leasing of voyages and trade opportunities under royal monopoly or royal contract to mercantile groups.

These features of the Portuguese Empire might seem to endorse the redistributive role highlighted by Steensgaard’s vision. However, the Portuguese Empire was also profit oriented, a fact that is obvious from the role of the royal family and nobility as investors, as well as many small and large merchants and bankers involved in the oriental trade (e.g., spices, textiles, indigo, porcelain), and the Atlantic trade (sugar, tobacco, dyewood, and slave trade). Portuguese capital sent to Asia and invested in interregional trade there was significantly more important than the Dutch capital until the 1640s.^[2081] The hundreds of Portuguese ships that sailed annually on the Atlantic show that significant capital was in play, keeping operations afloat, even under difficult conditions of war and piracy.^[2082] On the other hand, chartered companies sooner or later became entangled in bad investments, driven by military and bureaucratic considerations.^[2083] This meant that local interests eventually prevailed over the interests of shareholders. The final result was not distant from the redistributive logic of the Portuguese Empire.

But there are also paradoxical situations. In the Atlantic, for example, the Dutch West India Company maintained a triangular trade between Europe, Africa, and America, with commercial and political operations centered on the Netherlands, while the Portuguese had established a much more efficient bipolar trade between Brazil and Africa, controlled by private merchants and taxed by the king, who remained only responsible for protection costs.^[2084] The Portuguese system proved to be more flexible in this area, less bureaucratic, and more business-oriented than the Dutch.

In addition, it needs to be stressed that profit-oriented companies engaged in extensive plunder, controlling markets by military means and piracy. The Dutch West India Company postponed its bankruptcy in the Atlantic through the systematic capture of loaded Portuguese ships (a reasonable estimate, between 1623 and 1673, is 1,500 captured). It was accepted practice for chartered companies to plunder resources from native people or other European powers in Asia and Africa, to say nothing of private traders. The British extensively engaged in the slave trade in the Atlantic, being second only to the Portuguese. The Dutch were unable to cope with fierce competition in this crucial market, but did excel in the transport of goods across the Atlantic.^[2085] Finally, Dutch and British companies engaged in diplomatic relations with native powers and created battalions of native soldiers. There were thus no radical differences between the Iberian and the Northern European methods of accumulating capital. In general, the Dutch and British model of jointstock company was much more efficient in the Indian Ocean than in the Atlantic; they outperformed the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, however, due to better access to European capital and manpower (though better naval organization also played a role).

Both the Dutch and the English extensively copied existing Portuguese imperial strategies.

Marriage or concubinage with native women was practiced by all European powers in Asia, although the decision by the British to exclude mixed- race people from positions in the East India Company in 1793 had long-l asting consequences of discrimination and segregation. It is true that miscegenation in the New World was infrequent in the English and Dutch cases, due to high percentages of female emigration, but in South Africa it was widely practiced until the end of the eighteenth century.^[2086] The main differences between these models occurred in the following spheres: settlement (which was extremely low in Dutch America), emigration (which was relatively insignificant in the Dutch case, based on temporary contracts), evangelization among native people or slaves (which was absent in the colonial projects of the Dutch and British until the late eighteenth century, except for the reconversion of Catholic Luso-Asian women), as well as recognition of the political and social status of mixed-race people (which was practiced in the Portuguese case—mainly in Asia—and not in the British and Dutch cases, due to their greater access to European manpower). Finally, the dependence of Portuguese royal income on overseas trade is unique, even compared to the Spanish state, which at its peak, in the second half of the sixteenth century, received 25 percent of its income from overseas trade, less than half the Portuguese average.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

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