To put it bluntly, the idea of pillage and piracy of the world oceans originated with the European expansion in the 16th century. The Europeans learned to organize this piracy into legal corporations chartered by the state and financed by wealthy investors. The divergence of mercantilism, usually seen as a system of
European Empire building by financing its maritime empires of the 16th
and 17th centuries needs to be viewed in the context of earlier
attempts at state support, as in the Ming Dynasty’s support for their late 14th
and early 15th century development of the Indian Ocean trade. Mercantilism, may be defined as a system of
state supported merchant companies, as in the Dutch support for their Dutch
East Indies Company, or the English for their East India Company contrasted with
the Arab and Indian Ocean based mudhārabah system described by
Al-Naqeeb. Whereas the mudhārabah system passed considerable risk on to
the owners and seamen, the late 18th century British
mercantilist factory system that ran commercial ships from Basra in Iraq, and
Bushire in Iran, partly ensured the safety of their shipping through the
requests by local agents of the East India Company for a naval cruiser to
accompany ships with valuable cargo (Jervis, 1763)[1]. This British reliance on naval cruisers was
also in response to armed resistance by a local ruler, Mīr Muhanna, who held up
the British woolen trade between Shiraz and Bushire[2].
The effect of the Portuguese arrival
after 1500 is seen in the destruction of the Oman port town of Qalhāt. In Ibn Majid’s Fawa’id, Qalhāt was a
notable destination for Arab mariners making their way out of Hormuz, who
depending on the route and the navigable may have needed to plan an extended
stay of four months to a year. (ibn Mājid al-Saʻdi &
Tibbetts, 1971, p. 225).
For evidence of the Omani port town of Qalhāt’s enduring commercial
importance up until its raid and destruction by the Portuguese in the early 16th
century we must rely on the recent archaeological projects at Qalhāt that have
shed much light on the importance of this seaport town of Southern Arabia (Rouguelle,
2010)[3]. The town flourished from the 12 to 16th
centuries, when it was abandoned in large part because of the disastrous attack
by the Portuguese (de Albuquerque, 1874). At its peak the
Portuguese presence lasted from about 1507 until 1620 when separate but
successive military operations by Persia, the Dutch and British forced the
Portuguese to withdraw from the Gulf. The occupation began in 1507 with the
sacking of various Arab Gulf towns and islands, including Hormuz and Muscat,
and again in 1515 as led by the notorious captain Affonso de Albuquerque. The Arabic sources from this period were
written a few decades after these invasions.
These include Qutb al-Din Muhammad al-Nahrawali’ text from 1582 of the
Ottoman conquest of the Hejaz and attempts to conquer Yemen (al-Nahrawali
al-Makki, 1967).
As the Portuguese arrival into the
Indian Ocean brought systematic pillage and war crimes it also required a legal
system to handle disputes. The temporary
solution was a tribunal system of justice for handling power struggles among
the elite command of the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean. An inquiry into
De Albuquerque’s for atrocities, included allegations of abuse of local women
in Hormuz[4].
On the other hand, the case of four runaway Portuguese sailors who sought
refuge and may have claimed conversion to Islam as a means of seeking
protection, was handled with direct negotiation with local Arab leaders and
threats of attacks if they were not returned[5].
Despite the assaults on the coastal
port towns by Portuguese, in about 1530-31 Malabar merchants continued to send
small trade ships up the Indian coast to trade at Surat, and even as far as
Basra in Iraq. Only a few of these ships
that had harbored in Basra escaped the Portuguese attacks and destruction of their
ships (Zayn-al-Dīn & Rowlandson,
1833, p. 127). The long term devastation of destruction of
the ships was emphasized by Zayn al-Din, who noted that it was only during a
period of armistice between the Zamorin rulers of Calicut (Calcutta) and the
Portuguese that a return to normalcy and seafaring was possible (Zayn-al-Dīn & Rowlandson, 1833, p. 128). An attempt by
merchants from along the Malabar coast to send a direct shipment of pepper and
ginger to the port of Jeddah in the Red Sea was intercepted by the Portuguese (Zayn-al-Dīn & Rowlandson, 1833, p. 140).
These events immediately preceded
the arrival of the Ottoman fleets that besieged and attacked the Portuguese
positions at Diu in 1537-1538 (al-Nahrawali al-Makki, 1967)[6]. After the Ottoman fleet’s withdrawal, the
Portuguese continued to consolidate their hold along the Malabar coast and ruled
out as contraband any unauthorized shipment of pepper, ginger, cloves and
fennel. The Portuguese also cut off all
long-distance, cross-ocean trade to Arabia in one direction and to the Malaccan
Straits in another. The only goods
Muslim merchants were allowed to trade along the coast were limited amounts of
nuts, cocoa-nuts and cloth. Rice
especially was made contraband, thereby cutting off the historic routes of
shipment of grain across the Arabian Sea to Arabia.
What is more troubling is the
overlapping coexistence and expansion of slavery out of the natural economy of
the Indian Ocean into the rise of the world system of the 16th
century and subsequent development of plantations for larger scale commodity
production. In the Arabian Seas region
where the plantation system was never feasible, slavery persisted with the
development of local manual labor needs.
Instead of large farms and plantations that required millions of new
slaves in the New World, the Arabian Peninsula and adjoining regions grew
dependent on slaves of African and sometimes Indian origin as labor for ship
crews, pearl diving, agriculture, and domestic labor. Such slaves were bought, inherited or passed
on as gifted family assets.
[1] See the October __, 1763 letter from
Benjamin Jervis, East India Company Resident at Bushere [Bushire], to Charles
Crommelin, President and Governor at Bombay.
Ref: IOR/R/15/1/1, f 58-58v.
Retrieved from Qatar Digital Archives on May 15, 2015 from http://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100024196150.0x000082
[2] See the
October 13, 1763, letter from Benjamin Jervis, East India Company Resident at
Bushere [Bushire], to Charles Crommelin, President and Governor at Bombay [58v] (2/2). Retrieved
from Qatar Digital Archives on May 15, 2015 from http://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100024196150.0x000082. It appears the British strategy was to use
the visible presence of a naval cruiser in support of gaining one local elite, Sadiq
Khan Zand, the ruler of the Zand Dynasty in Iran, who the British perceived
benefited from the sale of imported British woolen trade, to threaten or put
down the resistance of another local ruler, Mīr Muhanna, who did not.
[3] My thanks are
due to Professor Axelle Rouguelle for providing a personal copy of this
article.
[4]
See the Annex (Portuguese Archives Records, Sheikh Dr. Sultan Al Qassimi Gulf
Studies Research Center), Dal Relações, page 16 . Cartas II pp. 159-231. [Cananor], 20(?) June 1508. Inquiry to be carried out in India concerning
the conduct of Afonso de Albuquerque in Ormuz (comprising 52 sections).
().
[5] See
Annex 21, Portuguese Archives Records, and Antonio Dias Farinha, Afonso De
Albuquerque’s double conquest of Ormuz. Studia Revista, No 48 1989.
[6]
Among the earliest commentaries on this Ottoman campaign against the Portuguese
at Diu is the late 16th century account by Qutb al-Din Al-Nahrawali, al-Barq al-Yamani fi al-fath
al-'Uthmani (The Yemeni Lightning concerning the Ottoman Conquest),
(Riyadh: Mansuhurat Dar al-Yamamah,
1967), of which only the portion related to the Ottoman invasion against Yemen
has been translated into English by Clive Smith, Lightning Over Yemen: A
History of the Ottoman Campaign in Yemen, 1596-71 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002).
