CHAPTER TEN
Whatever the aspirations of the thousands of migrants who left Europe for Asia, and whatever the plans of colonial administrators, Europe’s presence in Asia between 1500 and 1750 was surprisingly precarious. Everyone who left for Asia had first to survive two daunting hurdles before becoming established participants in colonial society.1 The trip to Asia obviously was risky, but few participants had a true appreciation of the risks they would confront. Administrators downplayed those risks and recruited a gradually expanding stream of new soldiers, sailors, merchants, and agents. Despite the growing number of new recruits, the number of Europeans in Asia grew slowly. In part that slow growth reflected high mortality rates on the trip out and during the first years in the tropics. The European presence was also undermined as men drifted away from their European identity and, through intermarriage, assimilation, and desertion, blended into the societies that surrounded them.
Few of the thousands of migrants bound for Asia would have been aware that two of every five (40 percent) of them would be dead within two years of reaching their destinations. The first hurdle they faced was the voyage itself. Of the 2 million men who sailed for Asia between 1500 and 1750, only 1.7 million actually arrived. Whether they took ship from Lisbon to Goa, from Amsterdam to Batavia, or from Acapulco to Manila, an average of 15 percent of passengers and crew died in transit.2 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ships were crowded and unsanitary beyond anything we would find acceptable. The larger Portuguese ships left Lisbon with five to nine hundred people on board. The Spanish galleons left Acapulco for Manila with between 400 and 450 people. Primitive medicine, limited ways of storing food, scurvy, bad weather, and shipwreck killed about 10 percent of those on board the Portuguese ships of the sixteenth century, a figure that soared to 20 percent in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Dutch ships did not do much better. Twelve to 15 percent mortality en route was considered normal. The number of people sent abroad by the English East India Company was relatively small, but one of the worst cases of shipboard mortality hit the second company fleet. Having left England with four hundred men, the fleet reached Bantam on the island of Java with only fifty men well enough to bring the ships into port.3
Having reached their Asian destinations, European immigrants faced another biological hurtle. Twenty-five to 30 percent of the 1,700,000 men who arrived in Asia were dead within two years. Much as Native Americans had no resistance to European diseases, Europeans had very little resistance to tropical diseases. This lack of resistance was compounded by the continued use of hot, heavy European clothes and by a heavy European diet. Malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, and dysentery reduced the total to about 1,200,000 survivors. Finally, of the 1,200,000 who survived the “seasoning” of the first two years, about 950,000 returned home once they had fulfilled their work contracts. In everyday seventeenth-century terms, the Portuguese Royal Monopoly and the Dutch and English East India Companies together could count on adding an average of no more than fifteen hundred “seasoned” men a year to the long-term staff that operated their trading empires.
Portuguese Goa offers a concrete example of this demographic problem. Between 1580 and 1630, after accounting for men who returned home, the Estado da India was left with a net gain of about seven hundred men every year. Two years of exposure to tropical diseases, however, reduced that total to fewer than five hundred seasoned immigrants. Table 10.1 gives the estimated number of migrants and survivors for selected years between 1550 and 1750.4 This left a total of 250,000 people who, over 250 years, survived to become long-term residents.
The migrants who survived the trip from Europe to Asia landed at one of three cities: Goa, Manila, or Batavia. From those cities they were dispersed into dozens of garrisons, seaports, and trading posts. Between 1530 and 1550, Portugal sent out two thousand men every year, but as of 1550 Goa had only two thousand European householders, and the entire Estado da India contained only fifty-five hundred Europeans. In 1600 Portugal was sending out three to four thousand men a year to garrison half a dozen major strongholds, staff as many as fifty feitorias (factories, or agencies), and make up for the high levels of mortality. A single important feitoria, like the one in Siam, had a staff of fifty, while in 1574 the fort at Hormuz alone had a garrison and staff of 675 soldiers, sailors, and agents. Disease, desertion, and repatriation left the entire Portuguese trade network of 1600 with barely fifteen thousand Portuguese.5
The problem was aggravated by the fact that once new immigrants were a seasoned part of a colony’s European population, their numbers continued to decline, reflecting the relatively short life spans typical of preindustrial societies.6 A twenty-five-year-old seasoned colonist had a 50-50 chance of living to age forty-five. This normal attrition, on top of high mortality brought on by tropical conditions, helps explain the limitations on colonial manpower.
Clearly it was difficult for the Portuguese to sustain a European population abroad, and the Dutch and Spanish faced the same problem. By the 1670s the Dutch East India Company needed to staff forts at Batavia, Melaka, Colombo (in Sri Lanka), Zeelandia (Taiwan), and Makassar (Sulawasi) while also maintaining fifty-seven factories. Given that the Dutch East India Company also maintained an army of ten thousand soldiers, finding enough European personnel was a chronic problem.
Until the late seventeenth century, the English East India Company operated with fewer European personnel than the Portuguese or Dutch. Only near the end of the seventeenth century did the English company bring in large numbers of long-term residents. Nevertheless, they also had problems of high mortality. In one case, four hundred soldiers were sent to occupy the fort at Mumbai on the west coast of India after it was handed over to the English in 1661. A year later, thanks to official neglect and miserable conditions, only a quarter of the original four hundred soldiers were still alive.7
Between 1498 and 1750 the number of Europeans in Asia gradually increased, but the total was never very large. The combined European populations of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English “empires” in Asia did not reach twenty-five thousand people until well after 1700. While death and repatriation to Europe help explain the modest size of the European population in Asia, a look at the social demography of the colonial capital cities reveals other limiting factors.
If the European population in the colonies was limited by distance, shipwreck, malnutrition, and tropical disease, it was also eroded by the changing loyalties of men who arrived as Europeans and assimilated to Asian society. Chapter 2 tells us that early modern European identities were complex and oriented more strongly to clan and family than to country or ruler. With Europe far away, elements of European identity faded and were supplemented, even supplanted, by Asian counterparts. This was a complex process, sometimes drawing men away from European jurisdiction altogether, and sometimes changing the nature of European identity within the colonial capital cities.
Much of this erosion of European identity can be traced to the little-noted fact that almost all the migrants from Europe to Asia were unattached men, men who found themselves in a world with no European women. In this context the word “marriage” should be understood to include informal liaisons as well as formally wed couples. European men routinely entered into interracial or interethnic marriage almost everywhere. While such intermarriage was suspect back home in Europe, Europeans had not yet developed the degree of prejudice against racial and ethnic differences that emerged in the nineteenth century.
European-Asian intermarriage began as soon as the Europeans arrived in Asia. Whatever reticence authorities in Europe may have felt, the speed with which intermarriage, both informal and formal, developed is striking. The first direct European contact with Asia came in 1498. As early as 1502 the Portuguese were given permission from the local ruler to install a garrison of 150 men in Cannanore, near Goa.8 Ten years later there were already thirteen children born of marriages between soldiers and local women. In 1512 Afonso de Albuquerque, viceroy of the Estado da India, hoping to encourage men to marry and stay in the colonies, offered substantial bonuses to soldiers who found local wives.9 Only the seventeenth-century English East India Company tried to stop its employees from marrying Asian women; as a result, most Englishmen living in Asia formed long-term, informal liaisons. Whether or not formalized in European terms, from Southeast Asia, West Africa, Brazil, and Spain’s American Empire to French Canada, intermarriage between European men and local women was routine.
A man arriving in the colonies found himself confronted by a very small European marriage market and a very diverse set of Asian possibilities. All things being equal, the first preference for a marriage partner was a Eurasian woman, followed by an Asian woman who had business and family contacts. The selection got more complex once the marriage market included Asian and Eurasian widows of varying ages and wealth. Depending on the geographic and class context, European men married Arab, Hindu, Dravidian, Burmese, Malay, Japanese, or Chinese women. Both the Portuguese Estado da India in the sixteenth century and the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century accepted intermarriage, rationalizing it as a way to maintain the “European” population. The Spaniards in Manila were more reticent about intermarriage, but as in Goa and Batavia, the European population was almost entirely male. Since they came from colonial Mexican society, where interracial liaisons were common, single Spanish men soon began to live with, and sometimes marry, Asian women. In Manila these women were almost always Chinese.
Despite the official acceptance of intermarriage, colonial society turned formal marriage into something that was limited to the middle and upper classes. The act of formal marriage became a complicated, class-conscious process supervised by the Catholic or Dutch Reformed clergy and by the Dutch East India Company. Despite official rhetoric in favor of formal marriage, the ruling elites did not make it easy. In Batavia, the Dutch East India Company’s patriarchal policies required unmarried employees to live in company housing and follow rules about clothing, church attendance, and socialization. When an employee chose to marry, he had to request permission from the Dutch East India Company. He then had to obtain company approval of the woman he wanted to marry.
The selected bride had to be interviewed by members of the church, take religious instruction, and join the local church (Catholic in Portuguese and Spanish colonies, Dutch Reformed in the Dutch colonies). She was then baptized. Only then could the actual wedding take place. The duly married new bride was now officially Portuguese or Dutch. The children of properly vetted and formally solemnized interracial marriages were also officially European and, by definition, part of bourgeois society.
Dutch society and law heavily favored men as family patriarchs, but the frequency of intermarriage and high European death rates created an unplanned, alternative reality that left colonial Dutch society in the hands of Asian and Eurasian matriarchs. Widows, Asian or Eurasian, often survived two or three European husbands and became the de facto matriarchs of extended families. These women controlled family finances and businesses and negotiated the marriages of their children. One side effect of the high death rate among European men was that relatively young Asian or Eurasian widows with both business assets and small children appeared on the marriage market. The matriarch’s task of knitting together the extended family network was more complicated than it might sound. The result was that these “European” households were distinctly not transplanted bits of Europe.
Intermarriage was important because it was one of the things that allowed European traders access to local trade networks. The bedrock of European trade was the family partnership in which commercial networks depended on family ties, fictive relationships, the fostering of apprentices from other families, and short-term inter-firm partnerships for specific ventures. In maritime Asia, as in Europe, trade networks and family structures depended closely on one another.
Interracial or interethnic marriages, often used to cement relations between families and family-owned trading companies, were routine in the commercial societies of the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia long before the Europeans arrived. Given that the arriving Europeans were eager to trade, and that almost all were male, intermarriage with well-connected Asian women was not a surprising outcome.
The commercial world of southeastern Asia had also developed temporary, self-terminating marriage contracts designed to provide long-term visitors with temporary wives and useful business connections. The Dutch East India Company helped arrange some of these temporary marriages. The Taungoo Kingdom (now Myanmar), with its capital in the city of Ava, went so far as to provide local wives to all long-term visitors, but it insisted that the wives and their children stay in the country if the husbands decided to leave.10 Since Asian women often played an important part in retailing, managed large businesses, and acted as moneychangers, a local wife, temporary or not, could connect a newcomer with the local economy.11 At the same time, divorce was straightforward and could be initiated by either partner.
Most colonial authorities recommended intermarriage for a variety of reasons, but the most concrete was simply to discourage men from returning home. Married men were more likely to stay in the colonies with their wives and family connections. This was reinforced by policies that prevented European men from taking their Asian wives and Eurasian children with them to Europe. Colonial authorities also recommended formal marriage as a way to produce new generations of Europeans, but these recommendations were largely ignored among the working classes.
The English East India Company took a more rigid approach to intermarriage than the Portuguese or Dutch. The company simply did not allow its employees abroad to marry indigenous women, nor did it allow employees to take their English wives abroad with them. The English EIC accepted the idea that in England the right marriage to an Englishwoman could enhance the husband’s business opportunities in England, yet its somewhat inconsistent rationale for forbidding marriage abroad was that a wife would distract the employee from his work for the company. Nevertheless, virtually all the Englishmen who went abroad were single, and most found long-term partners despite company rules against marriage.
Englishmen simply took mistresses, concubines, or slave companions. Their children could be partially legitimized by baptism, but they were stuck in the lower levels of employment in colonial cities. These marital partnerships broke up if the Englishman had to return to England; in those cases, the father usually legitimized his sons as well as he could. The reality was that he could legitimize his children within Indian society, but not within English society.12 The prohibition on intermarriage by the English EIC did not reduce the number of interracial liaisons, but it did put a higher social barrier in front of Anglo-Indian children than that confronted by their Indo-Dutch counterparts.13
One notable example, Cornelia van Nijenroode, illustrates the degree to which being legally Dutch in Batavia was more relevant than racial background.14 The story centers on a woman in Batavia who had married a wealthy Dutch merchant. The marriage lasted long enough for Cornelia to have two children before her husband died. Dutch society was uncomfortable with unattached adult women, and the Dutch East India Company pressured Cornelia to marry again. In a marriage market with few respectable and wealthy women, the pressure was strong, and Cornelia soon married an unscrupulous, newly arrived Dutchman. Although Dutch law automatically put a wife’s property into her husband’s possession, Cornelia had negotiated a prenuptial understanding meant to protect the estate of her first husband so that it would pass to his children.
The second husband became physically abusive and, in violation of his prenuptial agreement, began raiding the assets that Cornelia had inherited from her first husband. Cornelia sued for divorce, something almost unheard of under Dutch law. Thanks to her connections in Batavian Dutch society, she managed to keep the suit going for some years. The second husband then got the case transferred to the courts back home in the Dutch Republic, where he had political and family-based influence. After a series of hearings, Cornelia lost most of her estate to her husband and was ordered to return to his house and live with him peaceably.
Cornelia appears to be a tough, determined Dutch woman well entrenched in the higher levels of Batavian society. Then we learn she was the daughter of a liaison between a Dutch merchant and one of the Japanese women who had been provided to the Dutch merchants on Deshima Island in Nagasaki. The Eurasian Cornelia was sent to Batavia, where she grew up in an orphanage. Her first husband was a wealthy Dutch merchant, and she became legally Dutch. At the same time, she continued to correspond, in Japanese, with relatives in Japan. It is a story of oppressive control over women, but it is also a story in which race seems to have been irrelevant.
Once a European man married an Asian woman, what was legally a European family gradually became culturally Asian. In Europe it was traditional for the wife of a family to manage the household, and this tradition carried over into colonial society. As manager, however, an Asian woman drew on her own background and lifestyle. Thus her “Portuguese” or “Dutch” household lived with Asian furnishings, ate Asian food, wore local clothing, and was more likely to speak Malay or pidgin Portuguese than Dutch.15 The children in these families were raised by Asian household servants and often spoke Malay or the Portuguese lingua franca as their first language and formal Portuguese or Dutch primarily as the languages of business.
While the children of these households were half Asian, their civic status was that of full-blooded Europeans. The children were baptized with their father’s Portuguese, Dutch, or Spanish surname and a Christian first name. Throughout Dutch colonial society, including the highest levels, civil status descended through European paternity, which took precedence over race or color in the definition of social status. This approach to intermarriage produced men and women who were officially Portuguese, Dutch, or Spanish. While European in the civic sense, however, within a couple generations, many officially European men were more Asian than European. They were integrated into Asian family networks for social and commercial identity, and they were more fluent in indigenous languages than they were in Portuguese or Dutch.
Marriage was a different matter among the sailors, soldiers, working-class men and shipyard workers who had been recruited from the streets of Europe’s maritime cities. These men were regarded by the middle and upper parts of society as rough, uncouth, and troublesome. Soldiers and workers were encouraged by their officers or the colonial authorities to marry local women, partly because the bourgeois elite saw marriage as a form of social control. Colonial authorities apparently assumed that married roughnecks would give up their immoral behavior, stay home, have sex with their wives, and produce legitimate children.
While in the abstract this policy made sense, it was not very practical. The details of a formal marriage, the fees and churchgoing involved, and the condescending process for vetting would-be marriage partners were alien to the working class. Not many men from this part of urban society bothered with a formal marriage; few could even afford it. They did, however, marry after a fashion, forming long-term partnerships with local women. Often they were married according to local custom, even though European authorities did not recognize the wedding. Their children were not only mestizo but were branded as illegitimate and ineligible for employment by the Estado da India or the Dutch East India Company.16
While colonial authorities assumed (or hoped) that marriage would curtail antisocial behavior, official attitudes toward intermarriage were largely irrelevant. Single men quickly formed partnerships with Asian women without waiting for anybody’s approval. Such liaisons were considered illicit by the “proper” parts of society, even though they may have had the desired quieting effect.
Numerous cases of intermarriage also emerged on the west coast of Africa during the slave trade. Governors or agents from European countries often lived in West African ports for years, sometimes for decades, and it was not unusual for them to marry prominent local women and adopt many aspects of local society, including its animist religion. Richard Drew is a good example. For thirty years, beginning in 1746, Drew, an English merchant, was governor of Anomabu Fort on the coast of what is now Ghana. Drew apparently developed complex connections throughout the region’s African society. After his first African wife died, he married the African daughter of the chief political figure in the area. She bore him at least five children. One of his sons married into the town’s leading African family. When three of his children died, he arranged for them to be buried in accordance with local funeral customs.
Goa, Manila, and Batavia were bridges between Europe and the East. Big as they appear in history, these three projections of Europe into Asia were remarkably small in human terms. Despite a steady stream of migrants from Europe, the European core of each of these cities was modest. In each case, the number of registered European households was never bigger than the number of registered householders in a medium-size European market town.
Meanwhile, the distinction between European and Asian was blurred by intermarriage and exposure to Asian customs. Marriage to a local woman tended to erode a man’s European identity. He found himself living with local servants, eating local food, and wearing local clothes, at least in private. If married to a woman from the commercial part of local society, the European used his new family to connect with local trade. After two or three generations of intermarriage, many of the “Europeans” on these urban registers were hard to distinguish from their Chinese, Malay, or Indian neighbors.
Personal and family status was identified not by skin color but by symbols of office, by articles of clothing, and by the size of the retinue of slaves that followed you around. Not surprisingly, many European migrants found the commercial opportunities in a dynamic Asian economy, available through his Asian family network, more rewarding than the work he did for the government or company that had brought him to Asia. Literally hundreds of men were attracted by such opportunities and moved to places outside European jurisdiction. The process resembles the pathways taken by immigrants from Europe to the United States in the later nineteenth century, many of whom saw opportunity in the dynamic American economy around them.
This blurring of identities challenged the effectiveness of Portuguese, Dutch, or Spanish control over their own agents, brokers, and other employees, opening the way to corruption and contraband among the employees of the Estado da India and the Dutch and English East India Companies. The limited amount of cargo space on the fleets being sent to Europe and the high prices paid for Asian spices and textiles put a premium on a technically legal form of smuggling.
By tradition, each passenger and member of a ship’s crew was allocated a small amount of space for privately owned merchandise. Crew and passengers alike exploited their right to bring aboard either personal goods or goods on consignment from other merchants. In the Spanish case, the Crown allocated cargo space to merchants in proportion to the size of their businesses. The potential profit from selling even a small amount of Asian merchandise in Europe or Mexico encouraged both crew and passengers to use their legal privileges as loopholes that allowed them to bring on board more cargo than their allocated space could contain. This was particularly a problem for the large Portuguese carracks sailing from Goa to Lisbon and for the Spanish galleons sailing between Manila and Acapulco.
Officials in charge of enforcing cargo regulations were open to bribery, and ships preparing to sail had many silent nighttime visits by small boats loaded with fraudulently labeled goods. As a result, passengers and officers often brought aboard surprising amounts of extra cargo. The officers on the ships also participated in the smuggling—and in some cases even displaced food supplies. So much private cargo made its way onto the ships of the Portuguese king that in some cases it accounted for 40 percent of the total cargo by weight and 60 percent of the total cargo by value. This overloading made the clumsy Portuguese carracks hard to manage in stormy weather and contributed to the heavy Portuguese losses between 1580 and 1630.
The big Portuguese carracks and Manila galleons were formidable fighting machines if properly managed, and only four or five were ever captured in naval battles. On long and lonely routes, confident that no European enemy could be in the Indian Ocean or the Eastern Pacific, these overloaded ships often carried piles of deck cargo. With decks covered with cargo and blocking the use of the ship’s guns, the big carracks and galleons could neither fight effectively nor run away.
The most dramatic example of this involved the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Covadonga. Nearing Manila in 1743, the Covadonga encountered the English ship Centurion, a sixty-gun two-deck man-of-war. The Centurion was part of a small English fleet sent to raid the Pacific coast of Spain’s American Empire. By the time Centurion reached the Philippines, the ship was in poor condition and half of its crew had died of scurvy. If properly ready for the encounter, Covadonga should have been able to defend herself. To make room for deck cargo and passengers, however, a third of the Covadonga’s guns had been stored in the hold and the deck was cluttered with cargo. After a short battle, Covadonga surrendered. The silver the English found on the captured ship was enough to pay the budget of the Spanish navy for the better part of a year.
Such captures were rare, but losses to bad weather were not. These losses also highlight the degree to which unregulated “private trade” took place on ships that were a key element in maintaining control of the national monopolies at the heart of the European enterprises in Asia.
In addition to participating in the private trade that smuggled goods onto ships bound for Europe, a steady stream of European men became “private traders” in the sense that they stopped working for the official trade monopolies. The export trade that sent goods to Europe was only a small part of the trade that moved back and forth around the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. As used here, the phrase “private trade” is code for two kinds of unofficial trade. The Portuguese, Dutch, and English administrations all had to deal with the fact that, with or without permission, their factors and employees engaged in private trade alongside their work on behalf of their employers. This kind of trade enriched individual employees at the expense of their employer and helped them develop profitable unofficial contacts. Many of the men who worked for the Portuguese, Dutch, or English participated informally in trade between Asian locations, evading European taxes and control. Highly placed officials, including even the Portuguese viceroy in Goa, engaged in this kind of private trade.
The next step for many European merchants was to leave their employers and move to an independent seaport. The second meaning of “private trade” relates to the activities of these men, men who left the jurisdiction of the Estado da India or the East India Companies and became private merchants in Asian communities outside European influence. The assimilation of European merchants into Asian commerce was closely intertwined with intermarriage and changing identities. In both Europe and Asia, the core of one’s personal identity derived from family. Family and clan were probably more important than one’s identity as the subject of a distant European monarch. Literally hundreds of European merchants took this step and decided to trade exclusively within the Asian commercial network. This is not really surprising, since many of the Europeans who came to the Indies were not actually Portuguese, Dutch, or Spanish and had no particular loyalty to the colonial power that recruited them. Cut off from their European networks for years, and married to Asian women, many European men assimilated into Asian families and businesses. The result was a network of once-European private merchants that spread across maritime Asia. Each of Europe’s Asian trade diasporas, whether Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, or English, had a different policy about private trade, and each of those trade diaspora “empires” had a different fate, one that in part reflected its handling of private trade.
Private trade was inherent in the structure of the Portuguese Estado da India. Its network of feitores, or agents, had evolved in an ad hoc way, with treaties tailored to local conditions in each of about fifty ports. Each agreement was a unique response to local conditions. It was difficult for the Estado da India to impose general policies on fifty different trade agreements, much less verify that agents were operating within the terms of local treaties. This gave individual agents room for personally profitable trade that evaded Portuguese controls. This lack of consistency within the Estado da India hampered its effectiveness in the sixteenth century and encouraged hundreds of nominally Portuguese merchants to scatter to seaports outside Portuguese jurisdiction, forming an unplanned “informal empire.”
These private traders ignored most Portuguese policies but kept up their contacts in the Estado da India so as not to miss new opportunities. Meanwhile, the Estado da India kept up the fiction that these private traders were part of the official establishment because their Asian commercial connections were sometimes useful.17 In the later seventeenth century, when the Estado had lost Melaka, Colombo, Nagasaki, Hormuz and its East African ports, as well as its trading privileges in Japan, the employees of the surviving Portuguese outposts came to rely on trade between various parts of Asia rather than on long-distance trade with Lisbon. The surviving local agencies of the Estado da India, already decentralized and flexible, survived by renewing trade with the “hidden empire” of Portuguese private traders. Portugal’s Asian “empire” had become just another component of Asia’s interdependent commercial world.
From its beginnings, the English East India Company allowed its agents to trade privately. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the company simply ignored the private trade of its factors. The reorganization of the 1650s and 1660s explicitly allowed its factors to participate in intra-Asian trade. While this “country trade” did not bring direct profits to the company, it did provide the English EIC with up-to-date information on economic and commercial trends. This flow of market information allowed the company to make timely shifts in its investments and concentrate on new commodities and markets, keeping it solvent into the nineteenth century.
Trade was managed differently in Spanish Manila. The Crown owned the great trans-Pacific ships that sailed between Acapulco and Manila, but the actual trade was in private hands. The merchants belonged to a guild that controlled trade and provided commercial justice. The Crown regulated the amount of cargo space available on each ship, initially allotting amounts to individual merchants based on the size of their businesses. The merchants in turn traded directly with the Asian shippers, merchants, and brokers who came to Manila when the galleons were in port. Rather than owning or controlling this trade, the Crown collected import and export taxes on it.
Unlike the English, the Dutch East India Company did not allow its factors and agents to engage in trade outside the company. The Dutch treated their commercial agents as salaried employees and penalized them if they were caught trading on their own account. Unfortunately, this restriction of employee participation in private trade insulated management from important economic trends. While the Dutch East India Company did take some initiatives in sugar and coffee, it failed to keep up with competitors in the sale of sugar, tea, cotton cloth, and opium and went bankrupt in the 1790s. The Dutch East India Company did, however, grant private trading privileges to retiring employees who stayed in the colony. After several decades, some of these private trading houses became important players in regional trade, and because of high mortality among European men, many of these firms were run by their Asian widows.
Private trade and intermarriage reinforced each other. They diluted the European nature of the colonial cities and created a persistent drain on the personnel essential to the main purpose of the Estado da India and the Dutch and English trading companies. Sometimes called lanzados,18 or freelance traders, these men were able to assist their local Asian colleagues in avoiding European authority.19 One group of renegade Portuguese in an area north of Goa not only married locally but also converted to Islam and developed a thriving (if illegal, from the Portuguese perspective) trade in Indian pepper.20 The acceptance of these “renegade” merchants in a wide variety of Asian locales suggests the openness of the Indian Ocean commercial system and the limits to European control in the area.
The fact that these lanzados left European jurisdictions makes it hard to document the number of traders and workers who assimilated into the Asian world, but we have one credible contemporary source. A report from the early seventeenth century estimated that more than eighteen hundred Portuguese left the Estado da India and became private traders just in India and the Bay of Bengal. The report identified at least a thousand Portuguese living in the Indian-controlled ports of the Coromandel Coast on the east side of India. Another two hundred to three hundred lived north of Chennai in the city of Pulicat; three hundred more had settled in Patani on the Malay Peninsula. Farther afield, another two hundred Portuguese had settled in various Chinese ports. Given that Goa in the seventeenth century received only five hundred to seven hundred net new migrants in a typical year, the fact that nearly two thousand men had abandoned Portuguese jurisdiction clearly hints at an important drain on the European population of Portugal’s Estado da India.
There are fewer references to Dutch and English private traders. The English East India Company gave its agents and brokers free rein to engage in private trade, so there was less incentive to break away. The accounts of Dutch renegades say little about assimilated merchants, but there are reports of Dutch renegades in Asian armies, including some three hundred Dutchmen who provided artillery support for the Chinese attack and capture of Fort Zeelandia.
Between 1500 and 1750, the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English recruited thousands of soldiers for service in their Asian colonies and soldiers made up the largest part of most shiploads of men bound for Asia. While they were needed for garrison duty and for occasional small campaigns, their presence was a mixed blessing—these same soldiers were also a large part of what the Portuguese, English, Spanish, and Dutch elites regarded as the undisciplined and potentially dangerous working poor. Since most soldiers were either conscripted against their will or hired as mercenaries, every ship sent to Asia carried sailors and soldiers whose loyalty was tenuous and lasted only as long as they were paid and supplied.
While most soldiers were assigned to garrison duty, the Portuguese Estado da India often brought troops from Portugal for specific campaigns. In practice they were paid only when military operations were actually under way. Between campaigns, the soldiers were left to fend for themselves. The Dutch provided for their troops somewhat better, and the Dutch East India Company’s private army included up to ten thousand men, many of them mercenaries from various European countries. Their loyalty was strongest when they were paid properly.
This points us to one of the reasons European governments in Asia were always short of soldiers. Even in Europe itself, the advantages of joining a non-European army were well established by the 1400s. The Ottoman Empire, Europe’s immediate neighbor, recruited large numbers of European mercenaries, and we know there were Europeans in the Moroccan army in 1500. Many of them were “renegades,” who began as prisoners being held in Morocco for ransom. They chose not to be ransomed, stayed in Morocco, converted to Islam, and married Moroccan women. Integrated into local society, some of them became soldiers in the Moroccan army and often ended up as officers.
Thus, the presence of European mercenaries in Asian armies was not new when the Portuguese reached India. Thousands of men, disillusioned by service in European armies or navies, signed on as mercenaries in various Asian armies. The first Portuguese soldiers to join Indian armies in the early 1500s reported the presence of long-established Italian and French mercenaries.21 By 1600, Asian armies included Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, Germans, Greeks, Danes, and Swedes. Rulers in Turkey, Iran, India, Thailand, and Japan were especially interested in European seamen, engineers, gunners, gun founders, ship pilots, commanders, and shipwrights.22 Some of the Indian principalities went so far as to post professional recruiters outside the gates of the larger European forts. Attracted by the possibility of better pay and greater social mobility, thousands of European soldiers could be found in the armies of almost every country from Morocco to Japan.
Aside from better, or more reliable, pay, Asian armies offered more possibilities for advancement than were available in European armies. In a European army, appointment as an officer required noble status and good patronage connections. Few mercenaries had that kind of background. In India the same soldiers, once they had “gone over” and converted to Islam, often rose to command positions in charge of other European mercenaries. More than a few European soldiers working as mercenaries in Asia achieved fame and command authority that exceeded anything that they could hope for at home.23
One source suggests that in the early 1600s, some three thousand Portuguese mercenaries were serving in Bengal, five hundred in Makassar, and fifteen hundred in the Southeast Asian mainland kingdoms.24 Another contemporary source estimated that as of 1627, there were five thousand European mercenaries in the Mughal army alone and another thousand Portuguese sailors in the Mughal navy.25 Assuming these are not overlapping reports, their estimates suggest that in the seventeenth century, the various Asian armies included more than ten thousand European mercenaries.
If we add the desertion of a possible ten thousand soldiers to the loss of two thousand assimilated or renegade civilians—and remember that before 1750 there were fewer than twenty-five thousand Europeans in all of Europe’s Asian trade empires—the European presence in Asia was precarious. It survived in good measure because no major power felt it worth the trouble to shut it down. As it was, the Chinese kept the Europeans at arm’s length, hoping to avoid corrupt Western influences. The Japanese appear to have shut out foreign influences except when they looked useful. At the western end of the Portuguese trade network, the sultan of Oman drove the Portuguese out of East Africa, and until the eighteenth century, the Mughal Empire used clever diplomacy to pit the Europeans against one another. The Portuguese Estado da India was a weak remnant of its old self after 1639–1641, when it lost both its Japanese trade and the crossroads port of Melaka.
One estimate suggests that the European trade around Africa was never more than 20 percent of Indian Ocean trade, while the Asian trade of the Dutch East India Company accounted for only 20 percent of Dutch foreign trade. The key to understanding the position of Europeans in Asia rests in part on the fact that no one felt it worthwhile to send the Europeans home. Just as important is the human dimension. Two million men left Europe for Asia; one-third of them eventually returned. The major European trade empires lost their migrants from Europe to high mortality, assimilation assisted by intermarriage, and outright desertion to join Asian armies. Several thousand new colonist recruits left Europe every year, but the attrition in Asia was such that the official European population in Asia grew slowly. The major centers of European residence—Goa, Manila, and Batavia—rarely had more than two or three thousand Europeans of record, while the practice of registering Eurasian offspring as Europeans makes us doubt the credibility of those numbers. Many of the people recorded as European were as much Asian as European, and many of them would end up assimilated. Chapters 2 and 5 show similar patterns evolving in West Africa and Brazil.
As part of the process of building their Asian trade diasporas, Portugal, Spain, and the Dutch Republic each created a capital city from which they could coordinate their commercial networks. Goa, Batavia, and Manila were the gateway cities between European markets and Asian suppliers. They collected the cargoes for the ships returning to Europe and regulated the volume of Asian goods they carried. Because the European market for high-value goods was limited, it was easy to glut that market, causing prices to fall enough to eliminate any profit margin. Although lower prices allowed a few more people to buy imported luxuries, there were not enough new buyers to offset the loss of revenue created by falling prices. The national monopolies allowed importers to aim for an optimal combination of price and number of customers. The Dutch and the English learned this quickly in the 1590s when several shiploads of spices arrived in Europe at once, overloading the market for more than a year. These attempts to regulate sales help explain the readiness of the Portuguese, Dutch, and English to use the Armenian merchants’ overland courier service. Reports on incoming cargoes traveled overland faster than the ships sailing around Africa, allowing the Portuguese royal monopoly and the Dutch and English East India Companies to adjust European markets while the next shipments were still in transit. Only with the development of the sugar and tobacco trades did demand become elastic enough to absorb a steadily increasing supply.
Goa, Manila, and Batavia, and the trading empires they maintained, loom large in the history of the Early Modern era (1450–1750). They are often regarded as projections of European power that anticipated the imperialism of the Industrial era (see chapter 3), yet they were governed by surprisingly small colonies of Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch men. They did function as bridges between Europe and the East, bridges crossed by religion, technology, crops, and cultural material, but they were far from able to exercise European hegemony. They channeled high-quality Asian manufactures and spices to Europe, provided shipbuilding and refitting services, and organized networks of agents. Contrary to many perceptions of these ports as projections of European power, however, these cities were surprisingly fragile outposts.
Located on the West Coast of India, Goa was the first Asian city to become a Eurasian capital and was the only European capital in Asia until 1571, when Spain captured Manila. Goa was occupied by the Portuguese in 1510 and soon after was selected as capital of the Portuguese trade diaspora in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. As capital of the Portuguese Estado da India, Goa was ruled by a viceroy in the name of the king of Portugal. Nominally a kingdom parallel to that of Portugal, the Estado da India had a full set of councils and committees meant to oversee the affairs of state. As in most Old Regime bureaucracies, these councils served two purposes. Officially the councils administered aspects of the state, including finance, war, and foreign relations. At the same time, each council had several members who were appointed by the king. This made the Estado da India a major new source of royal patronage. This meant that appointees often had little relevant experience, with corresponding possibilities for corruption.
Goa’s most important role was to act as coordinator of a trade network that supported the royal monopoly on the supply of spices to Europe. The secondary goal was to get control of as much Indian Ocean trade as possible. Historians often refer to this trade network as the Portuguese Empire, but the realities of time, distance, and scarce resources meant that the Estado da India was in fact a decentralized collection of trading posts, or feitorias. At the height of Portuguese influence, Goa was the center of a trade diaspora that stretched from Mozambique to Makassar in the Maluku Islands and to Japan.
Near its height in 1600, Goa had a population of about sixty-five thousand people, roughly the size of sixteenth-century Antwerp, and controlled a sizable inland province. The European society inside of Goa, however, was surprisingly small. In 1600 Goa counted fifteen hundred Portuguese households and five thousand individual Portuguese. Looking beyond Goa, the Portuguese apparently never had more than ten to fifteen thousand men in their Asian network.
Like Batavia and Manila, Goa was a cosmopolitan city. A large part of the population came from other parts of Asia. Because of its location on the west coast of India, Goa attracted many Arab and Persian merchants, along with Chettiars and Gujaratis, even a few Chinese and Malays. In Goa the Hindu Gujaratis filled a role in the urban economy similar to that of the Chinese in Manila and Batavia, providing bank services, credit, and commercial services as well as small-scale retail stores. The Gujaratis also played a major role in the trade between India and Africa, and between India and the spice-producing Maluku Islands. As we saw, they helped connect the Portuguese with the spice trade when the Portuguese first captured Melaka in 1511.
Under the protection of the Sultanate of Brunei, Manila had been a port of call on the spice route from the Malukus to China long before being captured by the Spanish. Led by Miguel López de Legazpi, the Spanish established a base in the Philippine port of Cebu in 1564 and went on to take Manila in 1571. The modest port was officially chartered as a Spanish city in 1574, making it the second-oldest of the three Eurasian crossroads.
The Spaniards never had the resources in Manila to build a trade network like that of the Portuguese, nor could they effectively challenge the influence of the Sultanate of Brunei in the region. Spain attempted to set up its own purchasing agencies (factorias) in the Spice Islands. This was an invasion of Portugal’s sphere of influence and the Portuguese soon forced the Spaniards to leave. The Sultanate of Brunei was an important power in the South China Sea and was sponsoring the spread of Islam into the southern Philippines in the decades before the Spaniards arrived. Once established in Manila, the Spaniards brought missionaries from Mexico to start the process of converting the people of the northern Philippines to Christianity. Hoping to forestall the further spread of Islam, the Spaniards tried twice to invade Brunei but were easily driven off. Blocked from expanding to the south by Portugal and Brunei, Manila was also cut off from direct trade with China. The Chinese government would not allow the Spanish to trade in Chinese ports, forcing the Spaniards to depend on the Southsea Chinese for their trade with China.
In the end, Manila attracted a large population of immigrant Chinese, many of whom were members of Southsea Chinese trade networks. Over time this commercial community came to include several mestizos born of marriages between Spanish merchants and women from Chinese merchant families. In addition to controlling Manila’s trade with China, the Chinese also provided the city with its mundane, everyday services and its routine retail trades. Even the ships that carried the Acapulco–Manila–Acapulco trade were built near Manila using Chinese credit and Chinese shipwrights.
Manila was governed by a combination of royal authority, as in the Portuguese Estado da India, and private enterprise, as in the Dutch and English East India Companies. The authority of the Spanish Crown was represented by a governor who was appointed by, and reported to, the viceroy of New Spain in Mexico City. Given that it took a year for correspondence to travel from Manila to Mexico City and back, the governor had extensive discretionary power. To implement any policy or legislation, however, he had to obtain the cooperation of the Cabildo (City Council) of Manila, which was controlled by the local merchant community. In practice, the royal governor depended on the cooperation of the Cabildo and on annual subsidies from the viceroy in Mexico for the administration and defense of Manila.
Beginning in 1594, Manila’s commercial sector was supervised by the Consulado de Mercaderes (Merchant Guild) of Mexico City. The Consulado was an association of private merchants chartered by the Crown. In return for various trade privileges, the Consulado provided a court for commercial disputes and collected certain taxes and revenues for the Crown. Within that framework, individual merchants dealt directly with brokers and agents who put them in contact with the Chinese, Malay, Japanese, and other merchants active in the South China Sea.
Manila’s commercial life depended on China’s demand for silver and the arrival of annual shipments of silver from Mexico. Silver was one of the few Western commodities the Chinese were willing to buy. The quantities sent from Mexico were so large that historians measure the amount in tons of silver rather than in Spanish reales de a ocho. The actual amount varied over time, from a low of about 60 tons a year to a high of more than 150 tons.26 Merchants in Manila exchanged silver for silks and porcelains from China, spices from the Maluku Islands, and cotton textiles from India, all within a regulated framework supervised by the Consulado.
In the early seventeenth-century Manila was about the same size as Barcelona. Manila’s dependence on the Southsea Chinese and China is evident in the fact that most of the time 75 percent of her population was Chinese. Early in the seventeenth century, at a time when Manila had thirty thousand people, twenty-four thousand were Chinese. The population also included fifteen hundred Japanese and five hundred Africans. Many of the Africans originally were slaves taken from East Africa by Arab slave traders and then sold to Chinese merchants, who in turn brought them to Manila. Some of these African slaves were sent on to Acapulco, but over time, many of them obtained their freedom and became soldiers, laborers, and sailors.27
The Southsea Chinese dominated trade across the South China Sea, and without direct access to China, the Spaniards in Manila had no choice but to depend on Chinese merchants and ships to complete the exchange of American silver for Chinese silks and porcelains. Chinese control of the all-important China trade, combined with Chinese control of most of the wholesale and retail trade in Manila, created a potentially explosive setting. An economic crisis, a riot triggered by hunger, or rumors of a Chinese coup readily provoked violence and orders expelling the Chinese. If the violence had government support and the militia and army garrison were called in, the slaughter in the Chinese district could be appalling. In one such pogrom, almost twenty thousand Chinese were killed; the remainder were expelled. Without the resident Chinese, however, the urban economy ceased to function, and work in the shipyards came to a halt. Within a short time after each expulsion, the Chinese were invited to return to the city.
Manila’s existence as a colonial capital was inherently tenuous. The trip from Acapulco to Manila was relatively easy when compared with the route around Africa, but the return trip from Manila to Acapulco was the riskiest of the long-range trips from Asia to the European world. At best the two annual galleons carried about eight hundred people each way, and quite a few of the men who arrived in Manila were Catholic missionaries, who presumably did not reinforce the city’s European population. Meanwhile, Europeans in the Philippines were vulnerable to the same tropical diseases that limited the European populations in Batavia and Goa. One observer noted that Manila had only 150 established Spanish households in 1637.
Far from being part of a collective European hegemony, Manila was a sharply clear example of the limits of European power in Asia. Its story illustrates the importance of commercial collaboration as the central theme of Europeans abroad in the Early Modern era.
Batavia was the capital of the Dutch trade diaspora in Asia and was created and operated by the Dutch East India Company. Chartered by the Dutch government, the Dutch EIC was a joint stock company similar to a modern corporation (see chapter 9) and had a monopoly on trade between the Dutch Republic and Asia. It was also authorized to act as a government and to operate its own army and navy.
Originally named Jayakarta, Batavia had been a dependency of the sultan of Bantam, who controlled the western end of the Island of Java. In 1619, fifty years after the Spanish takeover of Manila, Jayakarta was the object of a complicated struggle involving the Sultanate of Bantam, the Sultanate of Aceh, the Dutch, and the English. The Dutch ended up in control of the town, renamed it Batavia, and built it up as the center of a trade network that reached from Sri Lanka to Japan and included over fifty Dutch factories. The city of Batavia evolved around the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company, which came to include a large fort, warehouses, housing for unmarried employees, and offices for management. At its peak in the 1670s, Batavia had a population of about 135,000 people, making it a bit larger than sixteenth-century Venice but only one-third the size of Amsterdam. By 1673 the Dutch East India Company had built a defensive wall around the inner city, surrounding the company’s headquarters and warehouses and including the residential area favored by company employees and investors.
While Batavia’s total population was substantially larger than that of Manila or Goa, the city had a similar demographic profile. Protected from urban unrest, the walled inner city housed about a quarter of Batavia’s population. About half these people were household slaves. Typically, they did the household work done by hired servants in the Dutch Republic. The rest of the core population included the city’s two thousand Dutch inhabitants, three thousand Malays, and 726 “Eurasians.” It also included three thousand Chinese merchants, contractors, and creditors.28
While salaried agents conducted most Dutch trade in Asia, the Dutch East India Company, like the Spanish in Manila, depended on the Southsea Chinese to arrange its trade with China. Looking out into the harbor at Batavia, half the ships were Chinese junks. As in Manila, most of the storefront shops that provided the retail infrastructure of the city, including the bakeries, tailor shops, laundries, handicraft shops, and grocery stores, were run by Chinese or by people with Chinese fathers and local women as mothers.
Since Batavia was built on low-lying ground near the sea, it was crisscrossed by canals. While it reminded observers of Amsterdam, the canals were a major health problem. In Amsterdam, tidal flows kept the canals reasonably clear, but in Batavia there was nothing similar. As a result, the canals were stagnant breeding grounds for various diseases and contributed to the city’s high mortality rates.
While each of these three cities has its own history, they also had important things in common. All three were modest in size compared with cities in China or India. Being trade centers, most of their residents came from distant places around the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea rather than from their surrounding regions. The European citizens of these cities intermarried with local women, and over time their families blended into the societies around them. Some European residents simply assimilated a large part of the local way of life. Others integrated themselves deeply into Asian trade, left European jurisdiction, and moved to towns that were outside European control. These European populations included a large proportion of soldiers and sailors, who deserted in large numbers to become mercenaries in Asian armies and navies.
Travelers entering either Batavia or Manila could easily have wondered if they were entering a Chinese city; Goa could easily have been mistaken for an Indian city. The most prominent clue that one was in a European city was the European architecture of the main religious and administrative buildings. At the center of each of these cosmopolitan and largely Asian cities was a colony of Europeans. In Goa they ran the Estado da India, in Manila they managed the Manila galleon trade, and in Batavia they operated the Dutch East India Company. These iconic institutions get full exposure in most textbooks, with the result that these key cities appear to be grander and more European than they really were.
Ethnic identifications were more than a little problematic in all three cities. In Manila they were further blurred by the fact that most “Spanish” colonists actually came from Mexico or Peru, where the boundary between Spaniard and mestizo was far from clear.29 The survival of these European enclaves in Asia depended on a steady flow of migrants from Europe. The fragility of the European position in Asia reflects the fact that both cultures were part of the same technological tradition. Different Eurasian societies used that technology to solve different problems, but their solutions were easily understood and borrowed by one society from another. Indian armies quickly hired European artillerymen, while Europeans hired Indian gunners. Chinese shipbuilders in the Philippines built galleons for the Spanish. Business practices were similar from England to the East Indies.
A global perspective tells us that by 1500, Europe had developed an advantage over Africa and Asia in naval warfare, but not much else. The immensely long supply line from Europe to Asia posed costly logistical problems. European vulnerability to tropical disease and the ease with which European men assimilated to Asian societies posed constant drains on the European presence in Asia.
The Europeans who went to the Americas between 1498 and 1700 created four new societies. The conquest empires in Mexico and Peru produced enough silver to change the global economy. The conversion of the tropical coasts of Brazil, the islands of the Caribbean, and the southern part of English North America to plantation societies populated by imported Africans helped create a dynamic Atlantic economy in the eighteenth century, but left a legacy of marginalized peoples and island countries in the longer run. The creation of agrarian neo-Europes along the coast of Atlantic North America provided another key component in the rise of the Atlantic, one that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reinforced European hegemony. In various ways, all three American scenarios created a fourth American culture—that of Native American societies, which Europeans shoved aside, expropriated, and marginalized.
Conquest played a role in Europe’s Asian maritime trade, but commercial collaboration, not military hegemony, was the dominant theme until the later eighteenth century. Europe’s arrival in Africa and Asia was basically an encounter between two similar preindustrial cultures.