Piracy in the Indian Ocean
Whereas the Mediterranean basin seems to have been a fairly compact cradle for piracy, the vast Indian Ocean appears more complex and perhaps less conducive to such intimately violent relationships in the long view.
Only in more enclosed areas such as the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea did raiding appear with some frequency, although historians are looking closely at India's Malabar coast, parts of Madagascar and other pockets or islands for evidence of pre-European raiding. While previously historians spoke of a long medieval stretch of mostly peaceful trade dominated by the monsoon wind cycle,[717] others more recently argue that the Indian Ocean had been a sea of rampage and violence long before the appearance of Europeans.[718] No matter, the arrival of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century radically changed the geopolitical dynamics of the ocean region and with it the nature of maritime raiding.Beginning in about 1500, well-armed and militantly Christian Portuguese conquistadors waving papal grants seized Indian Ocean trade nodes and imposed a system of passes, taxing all traders and punishing resisters. The Mughals were not in a position to protest at this time, but the powerful Ottomans soon interrupted Portuguese efforts to monopolise seaborne violence by dispatching naval expeditions to the Arabian peninsula and to northwest India. As Giancarlo Casale has shown, when these expensive measures failed, the Ottomans shifted to a Mediterranean-style policy of sponsoring corsairs.[719] Some Indian Ocean raiders, such as Sefer Reis, disrupted Portuguese trade and monopoly claims into the 1580s.
It seems clear that the Portuguese introduced a much higher level of maritime violence to the Indian Ocean than had previously existed, and it is also clear that much of the despoliation that resulted, whether sponsored by the Portuguese or the Ottomans, felt like simple piracy to its victims.
Things did not get better with time. Instead, as other Europeans entered the Indian Ocean, piracy - or claims of piracy - followed in their wake.Concerning ‘intrinsic' pirates or piratical sea peoples in the Indian Ocean prior to the arrival of the Portuguese, Sebastian Prange has argued that the Malabaris of India's south-west coast combined raiding with trading as a way of life. Documentary evidence suggests a deep-seated Malabari raiding culture with established rites of passage, potlatch-like redistributions of booty, and such, but it remains a difficult story to document before 1500. The same might be said for the so-called Qasimi pirates or part-time raiders of the Persian Gulf. These were pearl fishing tribes living near modern Bahrain who occasionally captured merchant vessels that hove into view in hard times. The raiding activities of the Qawasim, as they were collectively called, would be harshly suppressed only in the first decades of the nineteenth century when the British Navy sought to monopolise violence in the region. By that time, many coastal dwellers had embraced Wahhabism, which lent some of their attacks a new and - to their frequently Brahmanic victims - alarmingly violent energy.[720]
It was only in the late seventeenth century that piracy of the sort long familiar to Caribbean settlers and merchants appeared in the Indian Ocean. Driven out of Atlantic and even Pacific waters by new anti-piracy laws, Anglo-American, Dutch and French buccaneers flowed into the Indian Ocean in search of safe havens and booty. Safe haven was found on Madagascar, and booty in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, giving rise to what became known as the ‘pirate round'. Muslim pilgrim vessels from India and South East Asia, often loaded with jewels and other luxuries, fell easily into the hands of seasoned Western pirates. When exotic treasures began to flow through old pirate fencing networks in Bermuda, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina and other secondary colonies where anti-piracy laws were weakly enforced, the call for more such booty went out. Some prominent colonists outfitted new voyages, often under the guise of licensed privateering ventures.[721] Unfortunately for the pirates, the English East India Company used these attacks - on their allies, including the Mughals - to launch an even harsher anti-piracy campaign. Its first famous victim was the pirate hunter turned marauder William Kidd, executed in London in 1701. Kidd, in turn, was blamed for sadistic and murderous outbursts against his own men, a violent man for violent times.[722]