[3] Trade and Its Networks
The first two chapters of this book would have made little sense without reference to trade connections around the tropical seas. The presence of Chinese ceramics, Dongson (Red River valley) bronzes and Indian statues in seemingly remote corners of Southeast Asia from the beginning of the Common Era shows that long-distance trade affected them vitally for centuries before we have historical records. Nevertheless, the growing importance and measurability of trade in the age of commerce after 1400 makes this the point for a more systematic discussion of how it operated. The horizontal bonds of trust formed by different trading networks served both to integrate the civilizational patterns built by religion and written language and to link them with the broader worlds of Eurasia.
Land and Sea Routes
The commercial symbiosis of upstream agricultural centers and downstream ports appears to have been a feature of the river systems of the region for at least two millennia. As a missionary described the pre-Spanish Philippines:
The inhabitants of the mountains cannot live without the fish, salt, and other articles of food … of other districts; nor, on the other hand, can those of the coast live without the rice and cotton of the mountaineers (Loarca 1582, 121).
The trade centers near river-mouths or other strategic waterways could usually not provide themselves with rice. This was shipped down to them on the rivers from the more fertile and productive uplands. In return, however, all upland populations had need of salt, produced in tidal ponds for the most part. In exchange for their rice and other agricultural products, they also received dried fish from the downstream centers, and a variety of imported goods – precious metalware, ceramics, and cloth in particular, often produced as far away as India and China.
The movement of Tai peoples into northern Southeast Asia and the adjacent area of Yunnan in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, together with the expansive energies of Yuan (Mongol) and early Ming (1368–c.1450) rule in China, created a lively traffic across the mountain passes of the region. What is best documented (from Chinese sources) is the tributary trade, with 250 overland missions from the Ming Dynasty to the Tai and other principalities of the northern highlands, and double that number of “tributary” missions in reply. The emissaries from the south presented slaves, elephants, horses, ivory, rhinoceros horn, gold, spices, and gems, and received in return a generally greater value in silver and silks, as well as paper money no doubt used to purchase trade goods. Tai and Viet chronicles also attest to the large amount of trade in the form of diplomacy in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries between the principalities in northern Southeast Asia and Yunnan.
The increased population in Yunnan as silver mining was expanded under the early Ming appears also to have stimulated a lively private trade, illegal for the Ming rulers but very profitable for local officials. From the Tai and Bama principalities came cowries (used as base currency in the whole area until the seventeenth century), gems, ivory, cotton cloths (both local and Indian), raw cotton (from Burma), fish products, and salt, as well as spices and sandalwood from the Archipelago. In return the Southeast Asians sought Yunnan silver and copper, and Chinese silks and other manufactures. Human carriers were much the quickest way to traverse these mountains, and thousands of mostly Tai porters frequented the routes between the upper reaches of the rivers.
The long dry season and relatively open terrain of northern Southeast Asia made these overland routes somewhat less hazardous than was the case in the rainforests covering the center of the region, where roads were few and short-lived before the twentieth century. As against that disadvantage, a large and increasing proportion of the population lived within a day’s walk of some navigable waterway. Even the population of upland valleys where much of the early rice-growing was concentrated tended to cluster around rivers and lakes used for transportation and fishing as well as irrigating the fields. Familiarity with boats was therefore almost universal.
Small islands were, along with alluvial valleys, a favored area for early settlement because of their abundance of fish and coastal palms, and the defensive advantages which local knowledge of reefs and passages provided. Many of the major river estuaries, on the other hand, were dangerously malarial until tamed for permanent rice fields. This left a role in some of the crucial sea-lanes to the boat- or island-dwelling orang laut (sea people). The ability of successive Malay-speaking regimes – Sriwijaya, Melaka, and Johor – to control the Straits of Malacca and attract trade to their ports may have owed much to their magical-charismatic hold over the otherwise piratic orang laut inhabiting the innumerable islands off the east coast of Sumatra.
The important arteries of global trade that passed through the region were a further stimulus for commerce. Although it was possible to trade between China and India, the Middle East, and Europe by land (along the so-called “silk road”), the maritime routes through Southeast Asia were far quicker and more cost-effective at any time when they were not terrorized by pirates or rapacious states. The maritime route became dominant in the period of prosperity and enhanced trade associated with China’s Song Dynasty (960–1279), and remained so except for the remarkable moment when the Mongols united central and west Asia with China in the thirteenth/fourteenth centuries.
The earliest traders from whatever origin no doubt stayed relatively close to the coastlines, navigating primarily by familiar landmarks, currents, and shoals, and secondarily by the stars. By the ninth century the Arabs had established direct routes across the Arabian Sea to Indian ports such as Quilon or Calicut, and from the Falk Straits between Sri Lanka and India directly to the northern tip of Sumatra, touching only at the Nicobar Islands. Chinese Buddhist pilgrims to India had already followed this route in the seventh century.
The most convenient route further east was through the Straits of Malacca and Singapore when pirates or monopolists did not bedevil them. A more difficult sea passage was available down the west coast of Sumatra and through the Sunda Straits between Sumatra and Java. When the Portuguese dominated the Malacca Straits through control of Melaka in the period 1511–1641, the shipping of their enemies – first Muslim, later Dutch – preferred the Sunda Straits route, which favored the west Java seaports of Jakarta Bay and Banten. The other option, to cross the Peninsula by one of the difficult portages, was most used when the Straits were unsafe and when Siam was strong enough both to act as an entrepôt between east and west and to ensure order on the portages – as in the fourteenth century and the seventeenth. A dozen different routes across the Peninsula were known, but the most important were those between Kedah and Patani (used by Muslim traders), between Trang and Nakhon Sithammarat (more favored by Buddhists), and higher up the Peninsula from Tenasserim into the Siamese heartland (Map 3.1).
Map 3.1 Trade routes, by sea, river, and land.
In the South China Sea the usual routes went from the Singapore Straits and Pulau Tioman to the Champa coast of what is now southern Viet Nam, and thence across the Gulf of Tongking to Hainan and the Chinese ports. The main route of the first millennium CE through the river arteries of the Red River delta became a branch route by the fifteenth century, rendering the Vietnamese less active in trade. A more dangerous eastern route to China ran northeast from the Straits along the northern coast of Borneo and the western coasts of the Philippines to southern Taiwan and eventually the ports of Fujian. This may have been pioneered in the Song Dynasty (960–1279) when Butuan in Mindanao and Brunei in Borneo were reported as Chinese “tributaries.” In the mid-fourteenth century, traders using it were the likeliest candidates to have begun to commercialize the trade in cloves and nutmeg from Maluku. Some time in the following century it dropped into disuse, so that Chinese contacts with the Philippines and Borneo were carried out chiefly through the entrepôt of Melaka. It revived with a vengeance when the Spanish made Manila the major Asian market for American silver in the 1570s.
Specialized Production
Within the region the ease of communication by water encouraged specialized centers of production of cloth, metals, salt, and ceramics. Unlike the pattern in Europe or China, specialized market-oriented production was as often in female as in male hands. Textile and ceramic production were the preserve of women (except where Chinese example was strong), while metalworking was done by men. Some of these production centers expanded in step with commercialization of the economies in the long sixteenth century, but many of the coastal and urban centers were undercut by increased quantities of cheaper or higher-quality imports from manufacturing centers in China, Japan, India, and eventually Europe.
The earliest weaving of cloth was probably from plant fibres such as the abaca (Musa textilis) native to the wetter parts of the Philippines. The export of such cloth from the Philippines was mentioned in the thirteenth century and continued to modern times. Cotton, native to India, spread to Southeast Asia in the first millennium CE, and flourished in the areas with a substantial dry season – central Burma, Tongking, Cambodia, western Luzon, eastern Java, Bali, Sumbawa, and south-western Sulawesi. At the time for which we first have detailed information, in the sixteenth century, these areas were providing cloth to other parts of the region and to China through an established pattern of exchange. Indian cotton cloth was nevertheless a valued import ever since the Buddhist expansionary phase at the beginning of the Common Era. Its dyes were more colorful, its patterns more sophisticated, while Indian frame looms more efficiently produced in bulk than the back-strap looms used by Southeast Asian women.
Ceramics and metal tools followed textiles in importance among long-distance imports. Since prehistoric times specialized villages close to suitable sources of clay provided ceramic cooking utensils, containers, and water jars to the surrounding area. By the fifteenth century, at least, water transport had made it possible for the produce of northern Java ceramic centers to be marketed around Maluku and Borneo and for the huge Pegu jars (martabans) of southern Burma to travel throughout Southeast Asia and India. That such exchanges were not limited to luxuries is suggested by an English report of the 1680s, that almost 100,000 cheap Vietnamese bowls had been transported at great profit to west Sumatra in a single shipload.
The high-temperature glazes of China were in particular demand from the twelfth century. Much of the finest trade ware entering the international art market in recent years has been from burial sites in the Philippines and eastern Indonesia, and the retrieval of shipwrecked cargoes from around the South China Sea. These show large quantities of quality Chinese ware being imported to Southeast Asia in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. In the fifteenth, however, there was a “Ming gap” apparently caused by tighter export restrictions. There was no diminution of fine ceramics circulating in Southeast Asia, but the Chinese ware was largely replaced by high-temperature glazed ceramics of hybrid styles from new kilns in the northern Mainland. A transfer of technology, and perhaps of artisans themselves, wrought magnificent results in what the contemporary trade knows as Sawankhalok and Annamese ware.
Accessible sources of iron, copper, tin, and lead were unevenly distributed around the region, and were another key basis for the specialization of function and the development of trade. The richest sources of copper were probably in the northern hills of Viet Nam, where output in excess of 500 tons a year was reported in the eighteenth century. Many other centers were being exploited in north and central Sumatra, in west Java, and among the Igorots of the Luzon Cordillera, who were still able in the nineteenth century to mine and smelt the copper more economically than Spanish engineers. That copper working was even more widespread than copper mining is illustrated by the fine bronzes of Bali, cast from imported metal since neither copper nor tin occurs on the island.
Iron was found in the northerly areas of the Mainland, and in the hills between Siam and Burma, as well as in central Sumatra, Belitung, western Borneo, and central Sulawesi in the Islands. Weapons, tools, and plough-tips manufactured in these places had to circulate to many other populous centers, such as Java and Bali, where iron was not found. The famous kris (dagger) manufacture of Java had to draw its metal supplies from as far away as Borneo and Sulawesi. But Chinese ironwork began by the fifteenth century to take over the markets accessible by sea. A great trading city like Melaka around 1500 was provided principally from China with
copper, iron, … cast iron kettles, bowls, basins, … plenty of needles of a hundred different kinds, some of them very fine and well made … and things of very poor quality like those that come to Portugal from Flanders (Pires 1515/1944, 125).
These items could be produced more cheaply in China because of more advanced methods and economies of scale, so that Southeast Asian mining and metalwork tended to retreat with time to less accessible areas in the interior.
While the long-distance trade of Southeast Asia is better documented, as the vital link between the Indian Ocean and the eastern seas, the goods carried locally must always have been more voluminous. The river-systems were highways of interaction. The biggest of all the region’s river arteries, the Irrawaddy, could be navigated by substantial sailing vessels for 1,400 km, from the sea to Bhamo. The Mekong, even longer but more interrupted, had major navigable stretches of about 500 km in its middle reaches and 460 km in its lower ones, which formed the arteries for Lao and Khmer interaction respectively. But in between, the Khone falls were impassable, and only very rarely did traders attempt the arduous task of dragging their boats around them. Where rivers could not serve, over mountain passes and portages, humans were the most efficient and widespread carriers over frequently washed-out tracks. Shan porters serving the uplands between the Irrawaddy valley and the upper Mekong, for example, were reported to carry 36 kg about 24 km a day. Bullock-carts were of course in use over short distances, particularly in drier and flatter terrain, but only sporadically did such polities as Angkor, Pagan, and Mataram maintain an effective network of roads and bridges for them.
Integration of the Asian Maritime Markets
Because the region was a major crossroads of world trade, Southeast Asia’s products found their way early onto world markets. Striking evidence comes from Indonesian cloves found in the excavation of a pantry securely dated to 1700 BCE in the Mesopotamian town of Terqa. Until the eighteenth century CE cloves grew only in Maluku (the Spice Islands). Literary evidence for a trade in cloves as a medicinal item is available from ancient Rome and Han China. Until the commercial expansion that began around 1400, however, Southeast Asian contributions to the world’s trade were almost entirely items that grew wild in the tropical forests or shallow seas of the region. With the exception of the surface mining of gold and tin, Southeast Asia’s export economy was based on foraging, providing luxury items such as incense, aromatic woods, spices, ivory, and medicines.
The exceptional increases in productivity of China under the Song Dynasty (960–1279), which McNeill (1982, 25) has argued “tipped a critical balance in world history” in the direction of market-regulated behavior, undoubtedly created favorable conditions for the “charter era” described in Chapter 2. The Southern Song (1127–1279), having lost the northern capital and the main overland routes westward through Central Asia, devoted unprecedented attention to sea-going links to the south. From this period Southeast Asians began to see the effects of the technical progress made in domestic water-transport under the Song, as Chinese shipping joined the trade networks of the region. Chinese reportage on the southern “barbarians” also took a giant step toward more factual commercial manuals such as that of Chau Ju-kua (pinyin Zhou Rugua, 1170–1228), a port official in thirteenth-century Fujian.
In the thirteenth century the Eurasian trade system became more integrated than ever before, with all three of the major east-west routes functioning effectively. The Mongols established unprecedented ease of communication through Central Asia around 1300, which then collapsed in the mid-fourteenth century. Southeast Asia, we saw (Chapter 2), indeed underwent a kind of crisis in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but for climatic and political reasons rather than a collapse in the maritime trade that was its life-blood. Indeed, the fall of Baghdad (1258) and the break-up of the Mongol Empire ensured that the seaborne route through Southeast Asia would thenceforth dominate east-west traffic.
The most persuasive evidence that the sea routes through Southeast Asian waters continued to grow in scale and sophistication in the period 1300–1500 is the shift in power in that period from temple-building agrarian states to maritime trading centers dominated by Islam and Theravada Buddhism. The “charter era” gave way to what I call an “age of commerce” (Chapter 4), from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, dominated by a range of more compact trade-based negeri, the most successful of them becoming “gunpowder empires” that expanded rapidly with the new weapons (Chapter 5). The first of these arose along the trade routes in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries – Pegu in Mon-dominated southern Burma, Ayutthaya in the Tai world, Phnom Penh as the new center for Cambodia, Pasai, Aru, Baros, Palembang, and Melaka in the Straits area, Gresik, Japara, Tuban, and Banten in Java, and Brunei, Cebu, Manila, Ternate, and Banda further east. By the time European ships arrived in Southeast Asia (1509), these were the dominant political forces, sustained by a highly organized system of entrepôt trade.
China was the dominant external variable on this system between about 1000 and 1600. The prosperity and technological progress of the Song extended swiftly to Dai Viet, which learned quickly from its threatening neighbor. Although the Ming authorities banned private trade during their first century (from 1368), the loopholes for evasion were many and increasing. There was reason for the Sultan of Melaka to declare in 1468, “All the lands within the seas are united in one body, and all living things are being nurtured in love; life has never been so affluent in preceding generations as it is today” (cited Kobata and Matsuda 1969, 111).
Austronesian and Indian Pioneers
The pioneers of long-distance navigation in Asian waters were Southeast Asians. As befits their modern name, the Austronesians (southern islanders) linked Asia’s offshore islands with each other and the Pacific between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago. The dispersal of Austronesian-speakers is the widest of any language group in the pre-modern world, from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island (eastern Pacific) in the east and Taiwan in the north, embracing all the islands of Southeast Asia in between. They established commercial beachheads along the north coast of New Guinea, and eventually colonized also those parts of the Asian Mainland most strategically placed on the trade routes, notably the Peninsula, Champa on the Mainland, and Hainan. The prosperous Song Dynasty recorded 44 seaborne missions coming to it from Champa, twenty from Sriwijaya, and nine from other Austronesian trading centers in Island Southeast Asia such as Butuan, Java, and Brunei. Most of the 38 other seaborne missions were listed as Arabs (Da-shi) coming by sea through Southeast Asia from ports further west.
The older view that Austronesian settling in Madagascar and the more distant Polynesian islands was the result of some chance accident is no longer sustainable. Archaeological, genetic, and botanic evidence suggests that Austronesian traders were in contact with the East African coast and operating an exchange network between New Guinea and Fiji 2,000 years ago. Some peoples of the Indonesian Archipelago appear to have retained commercial contact with Madagascar from the initial settlement in the first Christian millennium until halfway through the second. The first generation of Portuguese travelers to Madagascar encountered the memory of this long-distance trade by people described as from “Jawa.” It is appropriate that the Malay culture hero, Hang Tuah, is depicted in epic stories as a great mariner sailing for his master, the ruler of Melaka, to Siam, India, the Middle East, and China. The Portuguese reported Malays, Javanese, Chams, and “Luzons” (natives of the commercial centers of north Borneo and the Philippines) still regularly trading to China in the early 1500s, at a time when China-based private trade was forbidden by the Ming.
Since the first millennium CE, people of the Indian sub-continent and Sri Lanka, predominately Tamils, were also engaged in Indian Ocean trade. Autonomous Tamil communities of maritime merchants played a major role, perhaps sharing capital on the basis of common ritual obligations like later merchant castes such as the Chettiars. Such communities, often likened to European medieval guilds, erected monuments regulating their religiously sanctioned trade arrangements in many parts of India, but also in the ninth century at Takuapa on the Peninsula, in the tenth in south-central Java, and in the thirteenth in Pagan (Burma) and Quanzhou (south China). The most compelling evidence for the way such communities operated in Southeast Asia is the large column they erected in the camphor port of Barus (northwest Sumatra) in 1088. Written in good Tamil by the Ayyavole guild of 500 Tamil merchants, the inscription prescribed, in the name of the patron god Durga, a tax in gold for each ship wishing to trade in the port. It should be paid by both nayana (supercargo or captain) and kevi (traveling small merchants or crew), probably ancestors of the nakhoda and kiwi encountered in Melaka documents of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries and discussed in Chapter 4.
Around 1500, when we begin to have more abundant sources, the most spectacularly successful of the diaspora capitalists in Southeast Asia were Hindu commercial castes, notably the Chettiars of south India and the Gujarati Sharafs of the north. In each of the major sixteenth-century cities of the region – Pegu, Ayutthaya, Melaka, Pasai, and Banten – there were a few Chettiars able to draw capital from a communal temple fund, and linked to each other through a system of letters of credit (hundi). The Portuguese were in awe of the wealth and skill of these money-managers. The leading financiers and shipowners of both Melaka and Pasai around 1500 were Chettiars well known in the sources, partly because they were as ready to use Portuguese as they had been Muslim shipping ventures for their investments. Naina Suradewana, probably the wealthiest of these, financed about eight large ships a year on the eastern route from Melaka to Java and Maluku. Another, Nina Chatu or Setu Nayinar, in 1513–14 partnered with the new Portuguese masters of Melaka to send large ships (junks) to Siam (twice), Pegu, Bengal, Coromandel (the Tamil coast), Palembang, Maluku, and China.
As conflict between Muslims and Christians grew intense in the sixteenth century, these Hindu networks tended to lose out in the Muslim ports to Gujarati Muslims. Less secretive and exclusive than the Chettiars, but with similarly advanced accounting methods, their rise may be seen as a step toward generalizing Indian commercial skills in Islamic Southeast Asia.
The East Asian Trading System of 1280–1500
We have seen that “Chinese” traders traveled to Southeast Asian waters in significant numbers from the Southern Song period (1127–1279). The ports of Quanzhou and Canton had become very cosmopolitan centers, and one must assume that the earliest Chinese voyagers drew on the example of Arab, Malay, and other shippers in their midst. The massive Mongol-Chinese invasion fleet sent to Java in 1292–3 reversed the flow by leaving hundreds of Chinese behind in Java and western Borneo. On both sides of the South China Sea there was intermittent ethnic mixing and cultural borrowing from this point onward. The suppression of a Muslim rebellion in the Fujian ports (1357–66), followed by the Ming ban on foreign trade in 1368, must have forced many China-based traders, especially Muslims, to move their base to Southeast Asia (see Chapter 5).
In the imperial world-view of Ming rulers, anxious to demonstrate the centrality of the Emperor under Heaven, the tributary system was the only valid relation between themselves and barbarian kings. They regarded the gracious acknowledgement of tribute missions, rewarding their gifts with Chinese products at least equal in value, as an important manifestation of imperial virtue. Such missions were sporadic at best, however, as long as they depended upon the commercial tactics of Southeast Asian or Arab traders in seeking access to a market. Only when the more ambitious world-ruler Kublai Khan sent imperial expeditions against Pagan (Burma) by land and Java by sea did the court gain first-hand knowledge of the southern countries, and expect them to send regular tribute according to prescribed norms. Following the Chinese seizure of Pagan in 1287, competing Tai and Bama rulers in the upper Irrawaddy and Chao Phraya river systems sent a steady stream of missions to the imperial court in the years 1290–1330. The system reached its peak during the first four reigns of the Ming Dynasty, covering the period 1368–1435, when envoys from a dozen Southeast Asian countries were received virtually every year.
The Ming system was put in place in the first instance by the large military missions despatched by the Hong-wu (1368–98) and Yong-le (1403–24) emperors, using a mixture of force and inducement to have tribute missions sent in return. But the trade advantages of tribute missions were such that continued coercion was not necessary. In addition to enjoying generous gifts, the envoys in both directions brought along their own trade goods, which were in 1384 granted freedom from taxation. The authenticity of tribute missions was established by a system of tallies stamped with a character and a number, each split in half so that the sending court had one set which had to be matched against the other kept in the Chinese port. In practice, particularly in Java where Chinese or Sino-Javanese merchants appear to have organized the tribute trade, this system probably strengthened the hand of particular Chinese shipping families that understood and controlled the tallies.
The extraordinary intensity of official relations between China and Southeast Asia in the early Ming period stimulated both the external trade of the region and the rise of the series of port-states along the trade routes that would dominate the politics of the next two centuries. The six imperial expeditions sent out under the eunuch Zheng He between 1405 and 1433 were unprecedentedly large, with as many as 48 junks and 27,000 men in the biggest of them. These expeditions created a new demand for Southeast Asian produce such as pepper and sappanwood, both of which were taken back to China in sufficient quantities to be used as part of the salary of hundreds of thousands of government officials. They thereby made the transition from elite luxuries to items of mass consumption. Ports which took early advantage of the Chinese missions, like Ayutthaya (Siam), Melaka, Brunei, Sulu, and Manila, gained the edge over their rivals not only by becoming entrepôts for the China trade but also through the prestige, and occasionally power, emanating from the Middle Kingdom. The map of Southeast Asia was refashioned by these rising ports, which in the course of the fifteenth century came to dominate their respective hinterlands.
The same Ming emperors who authorized this unprecedented official involvement with Southeast Asia imposed a ban on any private overseas trade. Southeast Asian traders other than those on official missions became a rarity in the Chinese ports, while Chinese traders had to engage in subterfuge. When the emperor moved his capital north from Nanjing to Beijing in 1421 he quickly lost interest in the exotic procession of foreign kings and envoys, and by the 1440s was writing to instruct Javanese rulers to send their missions less often. As the tribute trade waned, some of the demand for foreign goods was made up by smuggling through the many islands of the Fujian and Guangdong coasts. Another “legitimate” channel was provided by the island kingdom of Ryukyu (Okinawa), which became a base for Fujian merchants to trade between Southeast Asia, China, and Japan in the guise of Okinawa’s tribute trade to the two latter states. Ryukyu sent ships annually to the key Southeast Asian ports for about a century beginning in the 1420s. Each ship was provided with a letter full of compliments in Chinese from the Ryukyu king to his Siamese, Javanese, or Melakan counterpart, not requiring or giving tribute as in the China case, but expressing the hope “that all within the four seas will be regarded as brothers and that friendly relations will be maintained for ever through our intercourse” (Kobata and Matsuda 1969, 159).
Table 3.1 sets out the frequency of these East Asian exchanges as they are recorded in documents of China and Ryukyu respectively. This provides the earliest quantitative evidence of the relative importance of different ports in the century before the arrival of European ships. Siam, Champa, and Java were the long-term heavyweights in this traffic, though Champa’s missions may have been boosted above its commercial importance by its strategic position as a stopover for Chinese ships and its need for protection against the expansive Vietnamese.
Table 3.1 Frequency of seaborne official “tribute” missions to China (main figures) and of trade missions from Ryukyu (in brackets).a
| From | Siam Cambodia | Champa | Java | Melaka | Brunei | Pasai | |
| 1369–99 | 33 13 | 25 | 11 | 0 | 1 | 1 | |
| 1400–19 | 17 7 | 14 | 14 | 11 | 7 | 10 | |
| 1420–39 | 14 (24) | 19 | 21 (6) | 8 | 2 | 8 | |
| 1440–59 | 5 | 12 | 10 | 5 | |||
| 1460–79 | 5 (10) | 7 | 3 | 3 (15) | 1 (3) | ||
| 1480–1509 | 7 (2) | 8 | 2 | 2 (2) | 3 | ||
aDate periods given are those for tribute missions to China. The Ryukyu data for 1419–42 is inserted against the category 1420–39, for 1464–81 against 1460–79, and for 1490–1509 against the category 1480–1509.
The importance of Siam and Cambodia in the early Ming period reflects new concentrations of power around Chinese communities at their respective river-ports. “Siam” was a new Tai state, founded (according to legend in 1351) at Ayutthaya, situated at the limit of navigability for ocean-going ships on the Chao Phraya River, through the interaction of a hybrid Chinese merchant community and local Tai muang. Its rise owed much to the ability of its Chinese or Sino-Thai traders to mount missions not only to China but also to Korea, Japan, and Ryukyu in the following half-century. “Cambodia” was no longer the ritual and agricultural complex of Angkor, losing its long struggle with the Tais through the fourteenth century, but the new port-city of Phnom Penh at the confluence of Mekong and Tonle Sap Rivers. There too Chinese were prominent among the merchant community, which took only what it needed from the Angkor tradition of god-kings.
Java missions were sent from the ports of Majapahit situated in the Surabaya-Tuban area, and most appear to have been led by Sino-Javanese with Chinese names but Javanese titles. One of the same enterprising Chinese who had opened Siamese relations with Japan and Korea showed up later as an envoy of Java to Japan in 1406 and again in 1412 (Kobata and Matsuda 1969, 149–50). Melaka’s rise in the early part of the fifteenth century was largely due to its eagerness to exploit the China connection, its three first rulers making between them five royal visits to the Chinese capital between 1411 and 1434. By the successful reign of Sultan Mansur (1459–77) Melaka had made itself so strategically central that trade from its old rivals, Brunei, Pasai, and even Java, came to it for the China and Ryukyu trade, rather than attempting to trade directly. Thereafter Melaka appears to have declined again in relative importance due to internal conflict.
Among the first witnesses to the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia was Zhou Daguan, who visited Angkor (Cambodia) on a Mongol/Chinese mission in 1296/7. He recorded that
Chinese sailors do well by the fact that in this country you can go without clothes, food is easy to come by, women are easy to get, housing is easy to deal with, it is easy to make do with a few utensils, and it is easy to trade. They often run away here. (Zhou 1297/2007, 81).
Many Chinese members of the Mongol expeditions to Java were shipwrecked, captured, or lured away. A group of several thousand Cantonese, reportedly refugees from the Ming takeover in 1368, took control of Palembang, and grew rich like the Sriwijaya rulers before them on the Malacca Straits trade. Zheng He quarreled with their leader in 1407 and had him executed, installing another Palembang Cantonese as “pacification commissioner.” Not recognized as kings by China, this regime nevertheless managed to send envoys to Japan and Ryukyu in the 1420s, and received at least eight trade missions from Ryukyu in the period 1428–40.
In the key Java ports of Tuban, Gresik, and Surabaya there were also thousands of wealthy Cantonese at the time of the Zheng He visits, one of them reportedly the ruler of Gresik. The missions such men organized from “Java” were initially welcomed, but by the 1440s Chinese sources complained that they were troublesome and a burden on imperial finances. Official missions came very seldom after 1453, unauthorized ones were punished, and the direct Java-China link seems to have been abandoned in favor of trade via the entrepôt of Melaka. By the time of the Portuguese reports after 1500, “Chinese” as a separate category had virtually disappeared in Java. The dynamic class of trader-aristocrats the Portuguese encountered on the Java coast were described as “Javanese,” as the similar class of the Manila Bay area and Brunei were called “Luzons,” and those of the Sumatran ports “Jawi” or “Malay.” But Portuguese chroniclers reported that on the male side their origins and many of their institutions were Chinese.
In the jerky trajectory of commercial activity in Southeast Asia, there is reason to see an important upward turning point around 1398–1430 associated with these Chinese missions and renegades. Chinese or Sino-Southeast Asians appear to have been the first traders systematically to exploit the cloves of Maluku in the fourteenth century, encouraging commercial planting. Sumatra, which would dominate the world market of pepper from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, began commercial production at about the same time, presumably responding to a new demand from the Chinese voyages. In the mid-fifteenth century there was, however, a “bullion famine” in China and much of Eurasia, and another downturn in trade, so that we are on safer ground identifying the new commercial boom of the Early Modern period with the long sixteenth century.
The expansion of Chinese shipping to Southeast Asia after its legalization and licensing in 1568 was part of this age of commerce, discussed in Chapter 4.
The Islamic Network
The Arabian Sea had long been dominated by merchants based on its western shores, around the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. The rise of Islam unified both these regions by 700, and the traders were among the first to accept the new religion. “Arabs,” as the Muslim subjects of the Umayyad (Damascus, 661–750) and Abbasid (Baghdad, 750–1258) Caliphates were known, dominated the Arabian Sea and began to appear in Southeast Asian and Chinese ports from the eighth century. One Arab trader, Sulayman, visited the then greatest port of Guangzhou (Canton) in 851, and described a self-governing Muslim community there where a Chinese-approved qadi administered Muslim law. From the ninth century comes concrete evidence of direct Arab trade through Southeast Asia to China in the form of the wreck of an Arab-style vessel, with a sumptuous cargo of Chinese ceramic and precious metal objects designed for Middle Eastern customers, discovered off Belitung Island in 1998. Far south of the shortest Malacca Straits route, it was probably on its way to Java or Sumatra as an intermediate port. As early as the tenth century, Chinese chronicles report tributary envoys from the key Southeast Asian intermediate ports of Sriwijaya and Champa who bear Islamic names with the Chinese-style “surname” Li, perhaps Shi’a (Alid) refugees from Umayyad and Abbasid Sunni orthodoxy.
Islamic communities around the Indian coast and in the ports of Southeast Asia provided a remarkable network in which traders of many different ethnic origins could feel secure. With the fall of Baghdad (1258) the Arab label tended to yield to more diverse categories like Persian, Turkish, Gujarati, and Chulia, though Arabic remained one of the great world languages into the sixteenth century, holding this mercantile community together. The travel books of the Venetian Marco Polo at the end of the thirteenth century, and of the Moroccan Ibn Battuta in the middle of the fourteenth, are marvelous witnesses to the coherence of the essentially Islamic network of the Indian Ocean trade, increasingly intersecting with the other networks based in the ports of China.
Many of the earliest Muslim traders settling in South and Southeast Asia were Arabs from Hadhramaut or Persians from the Gulf, but they married locally and produced a localized progeny who attracted many other local traders to join their ranks. Islam in that time and place seemed the natural religion of commerce, with its established vocabulary and legal framework governing loans, partnerships, slavery, commenda, and commission agents. Where the older Hindu, Taoist, and animist faiths were tied to particular localities, tombs, and ritual centers, and Buddhism counseled renunciation of the concerns of this world, Islam provided a completely portable set of regulations appropriate to the traveling merchant. The Malay legal code first compiled around 1500 in the entrepôt of Melaka took most of its commercial and financial provisions from Islamic law, though not those dealing with the place of the king or with civil and criminal codes.
Self-ruling Islamic trading communities began to appear on the south Indian coasts from the tenth century, but the first to be authenticated in Southeast Asia were in northern Sumatra at the end of the thirteenth, paradoxically in a chronological order largely east to west – Aru, Perlak, Pasai, and Lambri (Aceh). These became useful footholds for Muslim merchants on the eastern side of the Indian Ocean, and entrepôts for manufactures from China and spices from Maluku. The Chinese imperial fleets of the early 1400s appear if anything to have stimulated the role of Islam as the religion of trade, for Zheng He and many of his leading commanders were Yunnan Muslims, and most of the Chinese left behind by them assimilated into the cosmopolitan Muslim society of the ports rather than the Hindu-Buddhist-animist ones of the interior. In the early 1400s Islamic communities were established and partly self-governing in the ports of Java and Champa, the rising dynasty of Melaka decided to throw in its lot with Islam, and even the elites of clove-producing Ternate and Tidore and nutmeg-producing Banda began to assimilate Islamic culture. The prominence of first Pasai and then Melaka as Islamic entrepôts in the fifteenth century confirmed the Malay they spoke as the language of commerce throughout the Archipelago and many of the Mainland ports. Southeast Asians from whatever background who joined the cosmopolitan community of the trading cities were likely to assimilate to both Malay speech and the Islamic religion.
In the West the commercial nexus between Venice and Cairo became dominant to the point of monopoly as the northern hemisphere began its recovery from the Black Death of 1346–8. A commercial treaty between these two powers in 1345 ensured that the seaborne route from the Indian Ocean through the Red Sea to Cairo and Alexandria carried the lion’s share of Asian produce destined for the Mediterranean through the fifteenth century. The Venetian Republic and the Mamluk regime in Egypt became prosperous and indeed dangerously comfortable on this monopoly, as subsequent events would show. But further east there was vigorous competition between the different Islamic ports and carriers bringing the pepper and spices of the East to Egypt. Southeast Asian ports such as Pasai (Sumatra), Melaka and Tenasserim (Peninsula), Gresik and Japara (Java), and Banda (Maluku), like those on the south Indian coast, had to treat the Muslim traders well or lose them to their rivals.
By the end of the fifteenth century the Islamic trading network had developed considerable efficiency in carrying spices and pepper to the increasingly prosperous markets of Europe and the Middle East. Malukan spices were arriving in Venice in the late 1490s in many times the quantity of a century earlier. By the 1490s these spices were traveling in Javanese and Malay ships from their source in Maluku to the Java ports and Melaka, from there to south India in Indian and Malay ships, and across the Arabian Sea in Arab and Gujarati ships. Pepper shipments to Venice grew more modestly, but Southeast Asia’s share in them grew from nothing in 1400 to a significant share by 1500, since the new production from Sumatra, stimulated by the China demand, was also shipped westward to add to the Indian pepper in the markets of the sub-continent.
The Portuguese onslaught on Muslim shipping after 1500 caused enormous disruption, so that the amount of pepper and spices reaching Venice through the Muslim route plunged to less than half in the following decade. But the Islamic route proved resilient. Once the Portuguese began to settle into a pattern of trading rather than raiding, and the Muslim ports reconstructed their network to avoid centers of Portuguese strength, the Muslim route proved more effective than ever. In the 1560s unprecedented quantities of pepper and Malukan spices reached Venice through Egypt, controlled by the powerful Ottomans since 1517. The period 1560–1600 marked the apogee of the Muslim route, and of direct connections between the heartland of Islam and the ports of Southeast Asia (see Chapter 5).
The Europeans
European enthusiasm for the spices of Indonesia had been one of the motors driving the growth in this Islamic trade route. Venice reached its florescence in the fifteenth century as it funneled an ever-increasing flow of pepper, clove, nutmeg, and cinnamon to a Europe growing in wealth and population, and apparently insatiable in its desire for garnish of its meat, fish, desserts, and drinks. European pepper consumption may have grown only about 25% in this century, but the increase in specifically Indonesian spices, cloves and nutmeg particularly, was in the region of 155%. Cut out of this crucial trade by Venice’s monopoly agreements with the Mamluks in Egypt, Genoa stepped up its financing of Spanish and Portuguese exploration of alternative routes. In 1498 these efforts were crowned with success, when Vasco da Gama reached the major south Indian entrepôt of Calicut from Lisbon. Thereafter Antwerp formed an even more important partnership with Lisbon, providing German silver and arms in exchange for eastern spices.
By 1504 Lisbon had eclipsed Venice as the European conduit for Asian spices. The disarray in Venice was exacerbated by conflict in Egypt, only ending with its conquest by Turkey in 1517. This entry of European ships into the Indian Ocean seriously disrupted the established pattern of trade. The ferocity that had long characterized naval warfare in the Mediterranean was introduced to a much vaster commercial network hitherto experienced only in combating low-level piracy. The Portuguese brought nothing that Asians wanted to buy except precious metals and firearms, neither of which they were much inclined to part with. But they claimed a right to plunder Muslim ships and cities as a continuation of the centuries of religious warfare they had conducted in recovering Portugal and penetrating West Africa. Their ships were small but well-armed and maneuverable by Asian standards. In their first twenty years in Asia, when they sent an average of eleven ships a year eastward, they wrought havoc on Muslim shipping. Until about 1519, nevertheless, the volume of spices and pepper that they were able to carry to Lisbon did not equal that which had been reaching Venice. Some of the precious goods were no doubt lost at sea, but most of the loss to Europe was probably diverted to safer markets in India and China.
This disruption was short-lived. To survive in Asia the Portuguese had to fortify some defensible strongholds (Diu, Hormuz, Muscat, Goa, Cochin, Melaka, Ternate) and to make local allies. By mid-century they were just another element in the pattern of Asian trade, distinguished by their strong fortresses and ships but very small numbers, and by a novel attempt to control trade on particular routes through a license system. The spice trade was in theory monopolized by the Crown, but in practice the greatest profits came from private partnerships with Asian merchants, of whom the wealthiest were south Indian Chettiars.
East of India the Portuguese had little military strength, and the long-term effect of their joining the competition for goods was predominately positive for Southeast Asian economies. Their major disruption was in capturing the great entrepôt of Melaka in 1511, and subsequently fortifying and holding it against a series of Islamic counter-attacks. But the Muslim trade established new routes and markets, notably in Aceh, Banten, Johor, Patani, and Makassar, creating a more developed urban culture than had existed earlier. Pepper-growing expanded in Sumatra and elsewhere, as the Muslims, and later the Dutch, avoided Portuguese interference in the previous pepper-coast of Kerala. Even the Portuguese began buying pepper from Southeast Asia, which became the major world supplier in the late sixteenth century. By then both Muslim and Chinese networks were more important than Portuguese in the rapid expansion of the region’s trade.
Beyond Melaka, the Portuguese established forts in Ternate and Ambon (for cloves), and Solor and Lifao, Timor (for sandalwood). Unlike their Dutch successors, however, they were never able to control more than a fraction of these products. In 1570 their heavy-handedness in Ternate produced a reaction that forced them to flee this principal center of the clove trade, and they thereafter played an even smaller role from neighboring Tidore. In Mainland Southeast Asia, Portuguese shipping played a useful minor role in the trade to Japan and China, and Portuguese mercenary soldiers helped to spread the new European military techniques.
The Spanish in 1492 had hoped to reach the fabled spices of Asia by setting out westward. In 1521 Magellan’s expedition achieved this, calling at Cebu in the central Philippines, where its commander was killed, as well as Brunei and Tidore in Maluku. Despite the 1529 Treaty of Saragossa, which allocated virtually all of Southeast Asia to the Portuguese sphere, the Spanish continued to be tempted by the wealth of Asia, sending periodic missions westward from Mexico. In 1565 Miguel López de Legazpi began at Cebu the permanent Spanish occupation of the Philippine Archipelago. He moved his headquarters in 1570 to Manila – more strategically situated both for the China trade and for the Pampangan rice bowl.
Although the Spanish were the least commercially active of the major European networks, the foundation of Manila and the annual galleon voyage which tied it to Mexico wrought massive change in Asia. The American silver annually shipped from Acapulco made Manila the most popular Southeast Asian destination for Chinese ships, which in turn ensured the prosperity of the city. Its customs revenue already surpassed that of Portuguese Melaka by 1600 and peaked at over 70,000 reals per year around 1612. Papaya, chili, maize, and tobacco were introduced from the Americas to Asia through Manila, transforming habits of consumption within two decades. For a time during the union of Spanish and Portuguese crowns (1580–1640) Spanish forces from Manila also attempted to sustain the Portuguese enterprise in Maluku, but never succeeded in taking a major share of the cloves.
The Iberians were remarkably successful for a century, through a mixture of force and secrecy, at preventing other Europeans from intruding into their lucrative Asian routes. In 1596 a Dutch expedition broke this monopoly by sailing directly to the Indonesian Archipelago, returning with a rich cargo of pepper, cloves, and other spices. This opened the floodgates, with 22 Dutch ships departing for Southeast Asia in 1598, and the English, French, and Danes not far behind. While the Portuguese had concentrated what military strength they had in the Arabian Sea, leaving their Southeast Asian possessions always vulnerable and isolated, the newcomers made directly for the pepper and spice ports in the Archipelago. The Dutch, English, and Danes each formed chartered companies to operate their commercial ventures in the East, though the Dutch version, the United East-India Company or VOC, with a founding capital of 6.5 million guilders in 1602, was ten times the size of its rivals.
By capturing Ambon in 1606 and the Banda Archipelago in 1621 the VOC became the dominant factor in clove and nutmeg respectively. Its monopoly of both key items was effective by mid-century. Pepper was much more widespread, and the Dutch always had to compete with English, Chinese, Islamic, and Portuguese networks who kept the buying price relatively high. In 1619 the VOC took control of Jakarta, an outpost of the major Java pepper-port of Banten. Renamed Batavia (after a Roman-era territory now in the eastern Netherlands), it became the headquarters of the whole Dutch Asian trade network. With far more ships at its disposal than other networks – an average of 148 in the 1620s and 257 by the 1660s – and methods of capital mobilization and bookkeeping as advanced as any in the world, the VOC represented a wholly new kind of commercial power spanning half the world.