Empire and economy in the premodern Indian Ocean,1400–1800

Abstract

The maritime history of the Indian Ocean in the years from 1400 to 1800 is very different from that of the Atlantic. Examining the two uncritically can, and does, lead to a misunderstanding of the practices and institutions – called empires generally, as if they were the same – that dominated in Asia and the Americas in the period. A group of six invited scholars examine different aspects of contact between Europeans and Asians, which stretched from cooperation to conflict.

The investigation of many of the issues discussed in the papers published here has its roots in issues raised in a meeting held in Leiden, the Netherlands, in September 2019. Its theme was ‘Rethinking Power in Maritime Encounters, 1400–1900’. The conference included a number of young scholars whose research had led them to more questions than answers. Given the focus of the meeting, it became clear that the speakers used ‘empire’ often, but that the word described circumstances and institutions in different times and places with very different structures. This sparked an interest in bringing together a group of people who could address the question of the European institutions that emerged in much the same years and in the context of commercial relations. More limited in its temporal and geographical scope, the goal was to clarify confusions of language among historians while being conscious of the evolving meanings.

A plan evolved to invite experienced scholars to focus on the questions at a conference scheduled for the fall of 2020. The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic forced the abandonment of that, however. As the disease receded, the revival of the idea led, eventually, to a two-day meeting in September 2023 at the University of British Columbia. Much had changed since the original discussions about convening potential participants. The meeting, titled ‘Empire and Economy in the Indian Ocean’, carried the elaboration ‘transformations in the political economy of the Indian Ocean during the formative era of European colonial expansion (1400–1800)’. The following contributions come from the papers given at that conference. They offer a taste of the range of topics and issues raised under the rubric. The authors have expanded on their papers, offering further evidence and more nuanced arguments. Their specific studies do not answer all of the questions, great or small, that vex historians. They do, however, refine those questions and offer evidence that should shape ongoing work. The authors have kindly included citations, often extensive, which form a valuable bibliography. Certain statements are clear and certain conclusions are reflected again and again in the papers. So too are possible implications for future work, both for the authors’ own and that of others.

The focus of the discussion both at the meeting and here is the Indian Ocean. The internal politics of the states on the shores of the ocean are important, but not a major topic. Rather, the research deals in many ways with the ocean and the exchange across it. The topic is matters maritime. The authors address trade across those waters and, with that, the nodes of contact (that is, ports), legal structures and practical considerations that shaped such trade. The Indian Ocean may be the smallest of the world's oceans but, then and now, it has more people and varied peoples living along its shores than any other body of water. On terra firma, there were – perhaps less well-known – Asian-based empires to go with the European maritime ones such as the Dutch and English. Land-based and sea-based empires have different characteristics, but that was not a distinction explored at the conference. Rather, the focus was the maritime activity of the Europeans once the all-sea route to India from Europe was known and viable – that is, in the years when Europeans became, slowly and then with increasing force, major actors in the commerce and politics of Asia – as well as the reactions of Asians to those European activities.

Around the Indian Ocean, the multiple, often old civilizations, states and well-organized polities had relatively large populations and established commercial practices. These states and practices, already known to Europeans, were in many ways different from what the Europeans found in most of the Americas. The differences and demographic history of these two parts of the world created a different kind of colonialism, as well as European imperialism, in the two regions. What the Europeans met with and the trajectory of change shaped the differing patterns of what they did. Examination of the practices around the Indian Ocean challenges the use of the word ‘colonialism’ and, indeed, the concept of imperialism, which are both traditionally and typically thought of in terms of events across the Atlantic from Europe.

The chronological limits, loosely observed at the conference, were 1400 to 1800. The fifteenth century marked the vigorous entry of China into, and then its withdrawal from, the Indian Ocean, as well as the beginnings of easier access for Europeans via an all-sea route to India. The eighth century was probably an equally, if not more, important period of change around the Indian Ocean in terms of seaborne exchange and expansion of settlement. On the other hand, the fifteenth century was marked by adjustments in the cast of characters, as well as greater change in Europe and inside Asia, with much of the change in Asia resulting from increased contact with Europe. While the use of an all-sea route by Portuguese seafarers came at the very end of the century, European contact with Asia rapidly gained pace and would continue to increase, expanding both in scope and the volume of trade. The end of the period covered by the conference was marked by the arrival of steam propulsion in the early nineteenth century. This date also points to major upheavals in Europe that had significant institutional repercussions in Asia. The European monopoly trading companies, which had taken on a political importance over time, disappeared or were reorganized. Events in Europe may have been critical to political changes in Asia but there were also pressures created by changes in the economics of trade, in the long run a product of greater efficiency and steam-powered ships. ¹

Four topics in general were central to organizing the programme of the meeting: the role of China in the fifteenth century and the way it set the stage for what was to follow; the presence and practice of enslavement; technology in the broadest sense of the term; and signs in the eighteenth century and beyond of the start of a reorganization of European institutions, with new people involved from among the native populations. While these topics may have only been tangentially included in the conference itself, the papers from the meeting do explore one or other of the central topics. Consistently, and in the background, there is analysis of the place of Europeans in the Indian Ocean world in the period. At the same time, the papers explore how and how much the world around them in Asia affected Europeans, all through the prism of maritime contact. The selected papers address those topics and provide an opportunity to think about the loose, and even improper, use of the term ‘empire’ when, in fact, what is meant is an institution in and of the Atlantic Ocean.

One general realization lies behind this entire exercise: the Indian Ocean is not the Atlantic Ocean. To Europeans, from the fifteenth century through to the eighteenth century, the former was more important commercially, biologically, culturally, economically, demographically and religiously. Despite this obvious fact, research and writing on the maritime history of the period concentrates much more on the Atlantic Ocean than the Indian. The political interests of many European states during the period and their former colonies in the years after 1800 are the principal reasons for the dominance of the Atlantic in scholarly as well as more popular history. The use of European languages on both sides of the Atlantic and the lack of linguistic barriers continues to be a factor. For much of the twentieth century, the United States, the richest of the offshoots of European countries and, as a result, a site of extensive research and publishing, was a prime example of the skewing of attention to the Atlantic Ocean and the tendency to assume that what applied there applied to all the world's oceans. Atlantic history is a field of study that emerged during the First World War to create the concept of an Atlantic community and, not incidentally, to get the former British colony to join the First World War on the British side. The Great Republic also needed to deal with the mystery of what kind of relationship should exist between, on the one hand, a revolutionary state that was committed to a ‘new world’ and divorced from a sclerotic old one, weighed down with sins and errors of the past, and, on the other, a country receiving a massive immigration of people from Europe, which was leading to greater integration of the not necessarily ‘United’ States into the cultural, political and religious world that it had revolted against in 1776. The reabsorption of the former colonists, confirmed by the Second World War and emergence of transatlantic institutions, led to a different vision from that of the founding fathers, the emergence of an Atlantic history, ² and, ultimately, the tendency to ignore the Indian Ocean world or at least accept assumptions regarding European connections with Asia and the nature of imperialism there, based ultimately on the belief that what went on around the Indian Ocean was just like what went on in the Americas. This myopic narcissism when it came to views held and expressed by historians about relations between Asia and Europe in the era of the first stages of global integration by sea thrived, despite the differing models Europeans used in their relations with local societies in lands east and west in establishing trading posts for the negotiation of trade and in establishing agricultural settlements to grow crops for export. The difference was understood among some historians, as pointed out, for instance, by Geoffrey Scammell in 1981. ³

Enslavement offers an obvious instance where research and writing about practices in the Atlantic dominates discussion and understanding of the phenomenon in the Indian Ocean. Both Eltis and Schotte offer differences between enslavement in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. Eltis discusses the ability to estimate the size of the trade and, by implication, its impression on the societies in these two parts of the world. In explaining the problems for those embarking on the task of counting people who found themselves at one point or other enslaved, Eltis points to differences in social and economic structures, as well as in volumes, routes and the purposes of moving people. Schotte, by taking on a smaller population and the records of one corporate body trading in human cargo, the French Compagnie des Indes, brings alive the people who found themselves bound up in a world of enslavement. Their stories are personal and illustrate the variations in a highly diversified trade – one very different from that which shows up in the statistical studies of the Atlantic slave trade. The enslaved in the Indian Ocean were not a monolithic group but, as Polónia found with women in general and especially in the sixteenth century in the region, ‘a category embodying a broad range of interconnected experiences, more or less shaped by ideological frameworks’. ⁴ The fact that the trade was organized, financed and controlled in the example by a relatively small monopoly company sets apart what went on in the Indian Ocean world. Within that company, the work of the enslaved created a structure that included salaried bureaucrats, whose relationship to the enslavers could be very different from the stereotype of that where plantation labour prevailed – a model assumed to be the norm, despite evidence that practices varied. In Asia, there were differences in the trade, hinting at possibly other differences in the diversity, competition and settlement patterns between the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Schotte and, to a lesser degree, Eltis also point to the differences in the sources that historians employ to study the trade, which not only complicates the task, but may also create distinctions, which only arise because of the whims of the agents recording what they chose to report.

From early in the seventeenth century, another telling difference in the Indian Ocean world was that trade with Europeans and the transport of trade goods was increasingly in the hands of monopoly companies. There were some monopoly companies in the Americas enjoying privileges granted by European governments. By the eighteenth century, most of them had disappeared. The dominance of the history of Europeans in the discussion of commerce in Asia comes largely from the fact that the companies in Asia kept records in languages familiar to Europeans and they have survived. In the last 200 years, these records have become more easily accessible. There are now greater efforts to surmount the language barriers, although this is recent. Schotte, by choice, is confined to company sources, with the advantages and disadvantages of that choice, which she outlines. As Polónia shows for the sixteenth century, in the absence of chartered monopoly companies, the situation for historians is different. The quantity of material is less and, in her case, she must rely more on literary works and the observations of travellers than those studying later years. Of course, her problem is compounded by her concentration on the actions and place of women, matters secondary to the interests of almost all those who wrote. Even more than Polónia, Girija sets out to add local voices as well as expressions of resistance to one company's efforts to monopolize trade in a region and the actions of members of an Asian dynasty to prevent the company from doing exactly that. Concentration on the use of the records of European companies obscures a fact that comes up now and again in studies of commerce in the Indian Ocean. Europeans did not eradicate traditional traders and trading routes. Many carried on, often effectively competing with the new players, who tended, it seems, to specialize in long-distance exchanges, as Unger suggests. These sources do tend to ignore or not speak highly of indigenous traders, although, as Ginji found, they continued alongside their new competitors from Europe and performed as well as they in a number of trades. The introduction of a broader range of sources does enrich research but, as is clear from virtually all the papers, careful examination and critical discussion about their intent and veracity is, as with all sources, necessary.

Another issue that is virtually impossible to avoid in any discussion of the place and the period is how to characterize and assess the interaction – the relations between Europeans who lived in Indian Ocean ports, often working as agents of exactly those monopoly companies, and the local populations. The choices for students of the relations between Europeans and Asians fall into three broad categories: domination by Europeans, resistance by Asians, and cooperation between the two or more populations. It is clear from the papers here that such divisions are too strict and inflexible to describe the situation on the ground. As is often the case, division of the world into strict categories in fact obscures what is a varied range of approaches and actions along a spectrum – in this case, from antagonism to cooperation. Because of a pattern set by Portuguese traders in the early sixteenth century, the use of greater firepower, especially at sea, meant that trading relations were unequal. European domination was in the background, if not foreground, constantly, as virtually every paper implies. At the same time, collectively, the authors make clear that the level and character of the domination varied. There were many political and cultural divisions in the rich civilizations of Asia. The extent of domination and of resistance to that domination, as a result, varied as well. Polónia, talking about the sixteenth century, finds a number of cases of women acting to move towards cooperation, in one form or another, along the spectrum. Girija examines one case of effective resistance on the Malabar coast with a nod to other similar cases. Unger finds rather limited technological transfer in ship design and construction even over the long term – another sign of movement along the spectrum towards resistance. While there were many reasons for this outcome – the slow adoption of design features from Europe in the Indian Ocean – there were earlier cases of transfer from other parts of the world in the centuries before European ships sailed into the Indian Ocean, which suggests that there were cases of resistance, especially after a flurry of interest in European technology in the early sixteenth century. Those cases of continuing and successful resistance to European trade, and European shipbuilding practices at the same time, stand out because their importance came, and comes, from the fact that there were many more cases of domination and cooperation, and so many options between the extremes at the ends of the spectrum. The varied political units around the Indian Ocean fed that variety of responses, from antagonism to domination, from resistance to cooperation. Trade, especially over long distances, favoured the Europeans because of the use of, or threat of, violence. It was never exactly a level playing field in disputes between Europeans and Asians. Women in the sixteenth century found ways to act as intermediaries, apparently without overt intimidation yet with force always a possibility, as Polónia shows. Even with relatively greater European military potential, as Girija shows, there were variations and some chances of successful resistance. Local circumstances and the potential for mutual benefits, which, it seems, became more clear over time, were driving factors, which meant that opportunities, so Girija and Unger suggest, over the long term led to a decline in barriers, with participants’ relations with each other edging towards cooperation along the spectrum, at least in trade and commerce, although by no means eradicating barriers of antipathy.

From later – that is, in the mid eighteenth century, Richardson finds other signs of cooperation and adjustment. The Dutch monopoly trading company set up a separate firm to take over a potentially profitable trade, drawing capital from local merchants to help finance the venture. The company, like other European companies, was unable or unwilling to finance the trade since it was already facing long-term losses. ⁵ There were well-to-do local native traders interested in cooperating in the monopoly trade and making money. The scheme failed, however, and this single case suggests that whatever the relations between Asians and Europeans, they evolved over time. The expansion of commerce created more opportunities for cooperation and also more possibilities for resistance, as the dominant position of European companies, at least by the late eighteenth century, had eroded.

In the adoption of alien technology, it was possible for the relationship to move along the spectrum from antagonism to cooperation, although it was a slow process. By the late eighteenth century, the construction of ships of European design in India, for example, was not especially unusual, just as it was apparently possible for both Asians and Europeans to work on the same company wharves. To some degree, there was always a melange of technologies with circumstances, personalities, politics and economics, determining what was adopted and by whom. People in both parts of the world took an interest in each other. Europeans in, and with access to, Indian Ocean waters were more concerned with plants and with political and religious thought. Asians, on the other hand, wanted, in general, to know more about useful or practical European knowledge, especially in astronomy and medicine, but not to the exclusion of other sciences.

The arrival of steam propulsion for ships in the early nineteenth century changed more than the ships, as Unger suggests. The novel arrangements of trade, exchange and politics took on new attributes once Europeans had access to and knowledge of steam power, on land but more so at sea. The roots of some of these changes were already in place in the previous 100 years, as Richardson reports. There were signs of greater cooperation and, at the same time, a long-term increase in resistance to European political engagement in the Indian Ocean world.

There were differences in empires – land-based and sea-based, European and Asian – in terms of their character, structure and goals over time. The authors do not find, in one way or another, a specific or purposeful evolution in ‘empires’. There was an evolution in the relations of the traders who came from overseas and the peoples who had long made the region their home – in short, an evolution of the maritime economy of the Indian Ocean.

As always, a look at the history of anything reveals complexity and the inadequacy of simplistic analysis. Such deep dives also always show that history is hard to escape. Above all, the maritime connection in the age of sail between Europe and the lands around the Indian Ocean mattered to that Asian world in the era once dubbed an ‘era of European expansion’. While this phrase is misleading, ‘the age of the great discoveries’ is misguided – not that the all-sea route from Europe to Asia was not for the Europeans a discovery. The peoples and commerce in Asia were known to them already from the tales of many medieval travellers. The period from 1400 to 1800 was not, around the Indian Ocean and the lands involved, and for Europeans too, so much an era of discovery but, as the authors show, one of conflict, adjustment, accommodation, cross-fertilization, integration and evolution.