The Estado da India
During his formal reception by the Samudri Raja on 30 May 1498—after being warned the previous day by two prominent Muslim officials that the gift he had brought from Portugal ‘was not a thing to offer to a king’—Vasco da Gama (1469—1524) was forced to listen to the ruler of Calicut bitterly declare, in front of a large group of courtiers, that he ‘came from a very rich kingdom, and yet had brought him nothing’.1
From the very beginning of their expansion in the region, the Portuguese faced a high degree of commercial and cultural sophistication in the Indian Ocean, though they were not truly prepared to deal with such a reality.
And yet King Manuel I (r. 1495—1521) took little time in declaring himself ‘Lord of Navigation, Conquest, and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India’, a singular royal title adopted as early as 1499 that betrays his imperial project to transform the Indian Ocean from a (then) vague geographical concept to a political and economic space ruled from Lisbon. Six years later, in 1505, the Estado da India (State of India) was born as a peculiar kind of political and administrative entity. It was ruled by a governor or viceroy residing in the capital city of Goa after 1510, and was constituted by a long corridor of cities and fortresses stretching from Kilwa, in East Africa, to Macau, in the South China Sea. Besides Goa, located at the heart of the West Coast of Peninsular India, the main vertebrae of this spinal cord were Hormuz, in the Persian Gulf, and Malacca, in Insular South-east Asia. Controlling the Straits of Malacca, the latter was conquered by the Portuguese in 1511 and lost in 1641 to a Dutch—Johor alliance, while the kingdom of Hormuz saw the establishment of a Portuguese protectorate in 1515, though it came to an end with the conquest of the city by an Anglo—Safavid entente in 1622.2The Estado was a floating domain, anchored in the control (or in the desire to control) the main Indian Ocean axes of circulation and trading routes.
‘More than its spatial discontinuity’, writes the Portuguese historian Luis Filipe Thomaz, ‘it is the heterogeneity of its institutions as well as the imprecision of its limits, both geographical and juridical, that make it exceptional’.3 The Portuguese Empire in Asia held little territory and remained maritime in essence. It was a loose network rather than a cohesive space—a political body ‘written on water’.4 The Estado da India represents a unique model of empire, not necessarily more medieval and less ‘modern’ than the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) or the East India Company (EIC). The cleavage between ‘redistributive’ and ‘productive’ European enterprises in early modern Asia is a somewhat simplistic way of categorising these undertakings. Alternatively, one should insist on continuity over rupture, for the differences between the various European actors at stake were certainly not as pronounced as Niels Steensgard has argued.5While the creation of a ‘Portuguese Indian Ocean’ was facilitated by military and naval superiority, Portugal’s success was very much dependent on gaining knowledge of the region. As such, Dom Manuel, who liked to style himself ‘King of the Sea’, was frequently forced to play the apprentice, devoting considerable time to studying the economic and political geography of maritime Asia. He soon understood that the world east of Cape Comorin, from the Bay of Bengal to the South China Sea, was hardly controllable from Goa. It did not take long before the king’s subjects freely circulated in the region, ‘weaving’ together a myriad of small coastal settlements known as povoafies and bandeis. Such a string of informal colonies represents a ‘shadow’ or ‘improvised’ empire, the reverse side of Goa.6 This alternative empire was composed of adventurers and renegades, and marked by trade and military skills, mixed marriages and blurred ethnic boundaries, cross-cultural dressing and food. The Portuguese ‘tribe’, made up of different components, soon became a Southeast Asian recognisable ‘brand’.7
In many ways, the arrival of the Portuguese signified the entry of one more group in a long, complex cast of characters pursuing different interests in the region—sometimes as competitors, in other instances as partners. Far from a simple ‘stage’ on which Portugal, followed in time by other Western powers, would operate century after century without getting its hands dirty, the Indian Ocean was a dynamically evolving entity, with the presence of Europeans not always leading to dramatic changes.
The most interesting historical cases are those in which the newly arrived Europeans and the indigenous societies were transformed together, without the latter necessarily playing the active role or the former being consigned to a passive one.What impact did the Portuguese have on the Indian Ocean? Was it the mark of an empire that dominated and transformed? Or was it rather about integration and foundation? To this vexed question, the answer is probably: both.
The Estado da India was the manifestation of an expansionist project outlined and developed by an early modern European state. It resorted to the political, military and diplomatic instruments of legitimisation (war, negotiation, alliance), but also was concerned with mechanisms of economic domination and social control. It was a sovereign state that had marked the ‘discovered’ lands with stone pillars (padroes), and was always keen on displaying the main elements of the Portuguese imperial iconology—the crucifix and the armillary sphere, as well as the figure of Saint Thomas, the Apostle of the Indies. In this context, the Portuguese, in certain regions and during defined periods, managed greatly to influence circulation and trade within maritime Asia, deploying armadas and granting safe-conducts (cartazes) to their allies while denying them to their enemies.8 The empire established monopolies on commercial routes and commodities, blockaded ports and built fortresses, demanded tribute (pdreas) and instituted systems of vassalage modelled on relevant European and Islamic precedents.
In other instances, the Estado da India proved to be a flexible and accommodating entity, capable of practising a sort of ‘cultural relativism’ in early modern Asia. This certainly was the right formula for dealing with an extremely diverse cultural and social landscape, in which not everyone was necessarily acquainted with (nor eager to adopt) the European political conventions and diplomatic vocabulary of the time.
In such cases, Goa behaved as a partner or a ‘fair’ economic and political rival, ready to learn and accept the rules of the local game.‘Portuguese Asia’ constituted another—European, Catholic—stratum of life in the complex world of the Indian Ocean, contributing in turn to the urban, mercantile, social and religious networks that characterised the region around 1500 and beyond. Portuguese involvement led to the decline of some ports, but it also made others more prominent. Some mercantile communities and commercial networks were negatively affected by imperial policies, while others may have seen the Estado da India as an opportunity. The Portuguese brought more powerful ships and cannon to the Indian Ocean arena, but they quickly complemented these with local techniques and tools of war. They converted thousands to Christianity through the missionary structures of the Padroado, though they also learned the advantages of multi-ethnic cities and frontier societies. In an Indian Ocean traditionally keen on the integration rather than expulsion of ‘foreigners’, the Portuguese contributed to the region’s mix of merchants, political magnates, pilgrims, travellers, pirates and other groups constantly on the move.
The reactions the Portuguese inspired among Asians, with understandable variations from the Red Sea to China, reflected the region’s difficult balancing act between impact and integration. The Portuguese, then, appeared simultaneously strange and familiar.