The History of the Indian Ocean Trade - Essay Example

The History of the Indian Ocean Trade The Indian Ocean Trade played an important part in history and has remained to be the main aspect in the exchanges between the East and the West. The long distance in sailboats and dhows transformed it into a dynamic zone that facilitated interaction between cultures, civilizations, and peoples stretching from Java (in the East) to Mombasa and Zanzibar (in the West). The states and cities located along the rim of the Indian Ocean were faced with Janus. They looked towards the sea to t5he similar extend to that they faced the hinterland. For the greater periods of the 17th and the 18th centuries, the participation of the Dutch in the Indian and Atlantic Ocean slave trades was very active. For some shorter periods through the 17th century, they even established their dominance in the slave trade across Atlantic Ocean, while for an approximate of two centuries the Dutch were the dominants of a very big slave trade, one that has the most expansive characteristic of its kind in the Southeast Asia’s history (Machado 75-78). Though the slave trade across Atlantic Ocean has been mapped out in details that are somehow great in several studies, it is its counterpart, Indian Ocean that has remained enormously uncharted territory that is overlooked in the local historiography of Asia. As a matter of fact, the sufferings that were endured by the slaves in Asia normally took place in silence, and have been largely ignored both by the modern historians and the contemporaries (Machado 89-91). In addition, if we maintain our belief in the work of one colonial historian from Dutch, then the topic of Indian Ocean slavery will never have a major role to play as it has in the Caribbean. Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries both Muslims and Christians obtained most of their slaves from amongst pagan communities that lay along the western and southern fringes of the Christian kingdom, in regions such as Damot, Kambata, or Hadya. In 1520 Father Francisco Alvares, a member of the first Portuguese mission to reach the Ethiopian highlands, kept a journal in which he sketched the broad contours of the Christian kingdom's slave-extraction system. As he approached its southern frontiers, he encountered semi-independent pagan states that paid tribute to the Solomonic dynasty. With reference to Damot, one of these kingdoms, Alvares wrote, ‘the slaves of this kingdom were much valued by the Moors, and they did not them go at no reasonable price; all the country of Persia, Egypt, Arabia, and Greece, attained full of slaves from that country, and they observed that the slaves made great warriors and very good Moors (Machado, 165-170). These are pagans, and among them in this kingdom are many Christians.’ That is to say, although some Christians were to be found in this non-Christian kingdom-a tributary satellite of the Ethiopian state-those enslaved in Damot were pagans who, like Malik Ambar, were converted to Islam and sent to serve as warriors in lands far beyond Arabia Kambata, the region from which MalikAmbar appears to have come,lay directly south of Damot. Although Arab slave raiding readily caught the attention of foreign observers, the fewer conspicuous forces of international commerce seem to have played a more important role in Ethiopia's slave-extraction system. In one town in the northeastern highlands, Father Alvares found "merchants of all nations," including "Moors of India." Noting the importance of Indian textiles in the regional economy, and more particularly in the kingdom's clerical hierarchy, Alvares wrote that Ethiopian priests wore white cloaks made of Indian cotton. The emperor presented Alvares and five other Europeans with fine Indian clothes. Alvares also noted the enormous quantities of Indian silks and brocades consumed by the Ethiopian court, acquired both by gifting and by purchase. Writing a century later of a small pagan state in southwestern Ethiopia, the Jesuit priest Manuel de Almeida observed that whenever the king of that state bought foreign cloth from merchants, the price would be fixed in slaves, which the king would then procure and use to settle the transaction (Machado 115-118). This evidence points to an active Arabian Sea commercial system in which Indian textiles and African slaves were vital: cotton goods manufactured in India were reaching the Ethiopian highlands in exchange for Ethiopian exports, which included gold and ivory in addition to slaves as the Ethiopian highlands became more tightly integrated into Indian Ocean. In fact, the Christian kingdom seems to have collaborated with long-distance Muslim traders in exporting slaves to the wider world. Zealously claiming sovereignty over the trade routes that connected the interior with the sea, the Ethiopian state imposed taxes on all Muslim commercial activity in its domain. Court officials therefore protected an activity from which they benefited financially. In 1556, when Malik Ambar would have been just eight years old, a Jesuit account recorded that owing to the taboo against enslaving Christians, the Solomon kingdom actually refrained from baptizing neighboring pagan communities (Machado 125-127). This allowed the Christian kingdom to capture and send such peoples down to the coasts, there to be sold as slaves to Arab brokers and shippers, evidently in exchange for Indian textiles. In this way from ten to twelve thousand slaves annually left Ethiopia according to this account. The extraction of slaves from the Ethiopian highlands forms only part of the story; the other is the demand for slaves in the various hinterlands behind the ports that rimmed the Arabian Sea. The Habshis drawn into the Indian Ocean trading world were not intended to serve their masters as menial Laborers, but as Tom Pires had observed already in 1516, as military specialists-"knights," as he put it (Machado 175-183). As in most other forms of slavery, military slaves were attained from their natal kin group, rendering them dependent upon their owners. But unlike domestic or plantation slaves, military slaves were intended to perform the purely political task of maintaining the stability of state systems since in most cases their masters were themselves high-ranking state servants. Dating from ninth-century Iraq, the institution of military slavery was based on the assumption that political systems can be corrupted by the faction-prone webs of kinship in which such systems are embedded. A solution to this problem was thought to lie in the recruitment of soldiers who were not only detached from their own natal kin, but were total outsiders to the state and the society it governed-circumstances that in principle guaranteed their political loyalty. As the Seljuk minister Nizam al-Mulk (d. 1092) aptly put it, "one obedient slave is better than three hundred sons; for the latter desire their father's death, the former his master's glory:" On either side of the Arabian Sea, then, two very different kinds of markets (one commercial, the other political) were driving the slave trade. On the Ethiopian side, African manpower was extracted and exported in exchange for Indian textiles that were consumed by elite groups in the Christian kingdom. In the Deccan, a chronic instability caused by mutually antagonistic factions, the Decani and Westerners, created a market for culturally alien military labor. The other ingredient to the system was an increasingly commercialized international trading system in which goods, including slaves, were exchanged for cash, or for other goods calculated in cash, at agreed-upon prices (Machado 201-215). The underdevelopment witnessed in the historiography on slave trade and colonial slavery that is Asian-centric can be attributed to several aspects. First, an administrative super structure that is disjointed belied the unity of the world system of the Indian Ocean that is underlying, which makes the archival research a task that is very formidable to any serious scholar. The major European powers archival material of the period that is early modern, that is, British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese, are found in the national archives situated at the Hague , Lisbon, Paris, and London, along with the several archives that are overseas in India, South Africa, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Despite the availability of the central Asian headquarters situated at Batavia, modern Jakarta, even the several settlements of the VOC or the Dutch East India Company had administrations that were separate as well as the record keeping too. Second, dissimilar to the Atlantic slave complex, the bondage of the European and that of the indigenous forms that were preexistent seem to have many forms of similarities in common. There is the exception for South Africa, however, where the European colonial powers overtook and interacted with the systems of slavery of Indian Ocean that were existing , rather than coming up with their new system in the relative vacuum as it is in the New World (Machado 105-120). Third, Indian Ocean slavery, though challenged recently by revisionist historians, targeted the household, has been culturally portrayed by the apartheid apologists and the other settler historians as patriarchal, relatively benign, and paternalist, in comparison to its counterpart, Atlantic plantation. Fourth, the target area of study of the colonial historiography of Asia has been on coerced labor systems and indentured workers of a later period or the new systems of slavery, for instance, the Chinese, Indian, and Javanese “coolie” and the System of Cultivation and the Liberal period in 19th century Java and the Southeast Sumatra. The earliest mentions of the port of Masulipatnam as a significant trading port in its own right date from the late 1560s. We have at least two significant references at this point: first, mention in the customs-house regulations of Goa of coastal shipping from Masulipatnam; and second, a suggestion in a reformatory tract by an anonymous Jesuit author that the captain of the island fortress of Manar (in northern Sri Lanka) use his fleet to tax such ports as Masulipatnam.8 In the next decade, references begin to shed more light on the character of the port. That it was common in 1580 for viceroys of the Estado da India to give 'licenses' to privateers so that they could lie in wait outside Masulipatnam with ships, and attempt to capture the ships of the Moors 'who navigate without cartazes ' ( cartazes being passes or navicerts issued by the Estado ), in which enterprise, he reported, 'great gains are made' (Machado 115-130) . Many officially sanctioned privatizing expeditions of such a character were less than successful however, as evidence from the 1580s shows clearly enough. There were Portuguese captives from such attempts who were imprisoned and had to be ransomed from Masulipatnam by private Portuguese citizens, and we also encounter an extremely detailed description in one of the Portuguese chronicles of an expedition against three ships anchored at Masulipatnam in 1582-83 (Machado 130). Work Cited: Machado, Pedro. Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, C. 1750-1850. 2014. Print. Read More