Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400-1800 / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400-1800 / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0521608910
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521608916
- Pub. Date:
- 04/30/2007
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0521608910
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521608916
- Pub. Date:
- 04/30/2007
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400-1800 / Edition 1
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521608916 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2007 |
| Edition description: | 1ST |
| Pages: | 558 |
| Sales rank: | 710,300 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.26(d) |
About the Author
Diogo Ramada Curto is Vasco da Gama Professor, European University Institute, Florence. He is the author of O Discurso Politico em Portugal, and the editor of The Jesuits as Cultural Intermediaries, La Cartografia Europea tra Primo Rinascimento e fine dell'Illuminismo (with Angelo Cattaneo), O Tempo de Vasco da Gama and A Memória da Nação (with Francisco Bethencourt). He has been a Lecturer, Reader, and Professor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and a Visiting Professor at Yale and Brown Universities.
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Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-84644-8 - Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800 - Edited by Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto
Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto
Translated by Neil Safier
The conquest of Ceuta in 1415 was the founding moment of the global Portuguese diaspora. Over the course of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese launched a number of reconnaissance missions throughout the Central and South Atlantic, which led to the discovery of Porto Santo and the Madeira Islands, the Azores, the Cape Verde archipelago, São Tomé and the Príncipe Islands, and the further exploration of the west coast of Africa. The colonization of these Atlantic islands, begun during the 1420s, preceded the establishment of trading posts ( feitorias) and forts in Morocco, Senegambia, and the Gulf of Guinea. In 1487, seventy years of extensive Portuguese experience with Atlantic currents and wind patterns culminated in Bartolomeu Dias’s successful crossing into the Indian Ocean. The way was thus opened for Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India (1497–1499), which established the maritime connection between Europe and Asia.
During the sixteenth century, Portuguese expansion continued unabated. In the century’s first decades, Portuguese ships surveyedthe entire east coast of Africa, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf; Hormuz succumbed to their assaults in 1507 and 1515; Goa was conquered in 1510; and Malacca came under Portuguese control in 1511. In the years that followed, the Portuguese reconnoitered Southeast Asia, established a presence on the Molucca Islands, arrived at the mouth of the Pearl River, and sent an ambassador to the emperor of China. From 1520 to 1550, they expanded their presence in Gujarat and along India’s west coast with the creation of the “Northern Province.” During this period, they also established a presence in Ethiopia and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and made first contact with the Japanese. Earlier, in the South Atlantic, a voyage to India in the year 1500 under the command of Pedro Álvarez Cabral made landfall on the coast of the territory that would eventually come to be called Brazil.
By the 1520s, the Portuguese had also extended their presence well into northern Africa. Under the command of sharifs from the south, however, Muslims later reconquered Santa Cruz do Cabo de Gué (Agadir) and forced the Portuguese to abandon most of the fortresses that had been built or conquered there (Safi and Azamor in 1541–1542, Alcácer Ceguer and Arzila in 1549–1550). This process ended with the military defeat at Alcazarquibir in 1578, signaling a radical reduction of Portuguese activities in the region.
It was not until the nineteenth century that the Portuguese were able to establish a significant territorial dominion in Senegambia. Up to that point, Portuguese influence in that region and in the Gulf of Guinea had consisted of a network of factories and fortresses engaged in gold and slave trafficking. By the first decades of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese presence, which had been largely negotiated with African powers in the region, began to suffer stiff competition from the English, French, and Dutch, who broke down the Portuguese trading monopoly among West Africa, Europe, and America.
The king of Kongo’s conversion by Portuguese missionaries early in the sixteenth century led to an extended period of influence in Central Africa, which in turn made possible more frequent slave traffic to the American continent. The founding of the city of Luanda in 1576 required a transfer of Portuguese regional power to the southwest, thereby increasing the instability of the kingdom of Kongo and its bordering kingdoms. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a tense but stable situation prevailed in the Kwanza River region and along the coastal zone of Benguela between the Portuguese and the N’gola and Jága peoples. This equilibrium was achieved through a strategy that oscillated between military action and treaty negotiation. The king of Kongo’s army, aided by Christian clergy and Portuguese, was decimated by troops from Luanda during the decisive battle at Ambuila in 1665. This episode exemplified the failure of missionary projects in Africa during the ancienrégime. For the first time, too, political rationale appeared to have overcome religious commitments: Brazilian troops were called in, tipping the military balance and dramatically altering the course of the war in Africa. But Portuguese dominion did not follow immediately on the heels of the kingdom’s decline: It was only following the Berlin Conference and the wide diffusion of quinine for the relief of malaria in the last decades of the nineteenth century that the Portuguese were able to occupy large portions of the African interior.
In Mozambique, Portuguese efforts to occupy the interior through military means in the 1570s were thwarted by the spread of disease and the ability of local inhabitants to defend their territory. Nevertheless, the Portuguese were able to establish a network of fortresses that provided support for their various initiatives. The strategy here was to insinuate themselves within the chiefdoms of the Monomotapa confederation, a political structure that was, however, soon to go into decline in the early years of the seventeenth century. From this region, the invaders were able to maintain a hierarchical, if long-distance, relationship with the Estado da Índia. The Portuguese domination of the Zambezi River valley over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries created one of the few successful European territorial bases on the entire continent, even if genuine territorial occupation of the interior would once again be achieved only in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. The distinctive situation in Mozambique owed much to the miscegenation between the Portuguese and the local chiefdoms, as well as to the preferential trading relationship the area enjoyed in the western Indian Ocean’s burgeoning interregional economy.
In Asia, the Estado da Índia was based on a system of key ports through which the Estado sought to control intercontinental, and to some degree interregional, commerce. From the east coast of Africa to Macao, and stretching as far as Nagasaki and Amboina, the Portuguese empire functioned as an interconnected network of port cities that took on diverse institutional and diplomatic features determined by particular economic, political, and cultural interests. In only two cases was there an effort to occupy the Asian interior: the first, along the coastal strip surrounding Daman, Bassein, and Chaul, where the Northern Province was created in the mid-sixteenth century; and the second in Ceylon, where the series of fortresses that the Portuguese established along the coastline allowed for the occupation of a significant portion of the Ceylonese interior in the early seventeenth century.
Although reinforced by missionary work, the basic explanation for the longevity of the Portuguese presence in Asia is to be found in territorial conquest, political control of local populations, and commercial advantages. Nevertheless, there are well-documented cases of extraordinary missionary success outside the boundaries of the empire, especially in southern India (the Pescaria Coast) and Japan, even though the latter was compromised by local political reaction. Meanwhile, the Portuguese were also expanding well beyond the formal frontiers of the empire by establishing mercantile communities in such places as the Bay of Bengal and Southeast Asia. They acquired a surprising level of autonomy by offering their services as mercenaries to various Asian kingdoms, including Pegu and Cambodia, and even came to establish their own fortresses, such as Syriam, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. On occasion, they received explicit support from the Estado da Índia itself. These largely autonomous groups of individuals represent the paradox of Portuguese miscegenation: They spread the traits of Portuguese identity by integrating themselves into native communities.
Although Portuguese power reached its zenith in the Indian Ocean during the first decades of the seventeenth century, competition from the Dutch and the English inevitably reduced its influence in Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Malabar Coast, and the Bay of Bengal. At the same time, and especially in the 1630s, local potentates, who occasionally teamed up with other European powers, managed to expel the Portuguese from Bengal, Ceylon, Ethiopia, and Japan, in spite of the continuing circulation of Portuguese merchant communities. This confrontation was intensified even further in the eighteenth century, with the definitive occupation of Mombasa by the Omanese empire and the conquest of the Northern Province by the Maratha Confederation. The Portuguese reacted to the latter by conquering the region around Goa in the 1740s, 1750s, and 1760s. These developments confirmed the need to concentrate forces around the capital of the Estado da Índia and prefigured the increasingly peripheral place of the Portuguese empire in Asia as compared with other European powers.
The Brazilian case was the sole example of sustained territorial occupation of a colony by the Portuguese during the long period extending from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The need to supply the growing sugar economy with the manpower of African slaves linked Brazil to West Africa and structured the entire South Atlantic system. In the sixteenth century, Portuguese settlement of South America progressed slowly, despite crown encouragement through royal privileges for overseas travel and the establishment in the 1530s of “donatory” captaincies, which were huge concessions of land by the king, who delegated with the land various government powers. Three principal factors were responsible for the definition of a first imperial project in South America: the need to counter French projects of colonization; Portuguese attempts to repeat what the Spanish had achieved with the discovery of the Potosí mines; and an interest in finding new sources of income to compensate for the first crisis in India. In 1549, the establishment of a general government (governo geral ) in Bahia and the arrival of the first Jesuit missionaries provided a fresh impulse for the colony’s development. Over time, the power of the donatory captains was reduced, and it was finally eliminated in the eighteenth century by the Marquis of Pombal. At the same time, Indian slavery, justified since the sixteenth century by the idea of defensive war, was limited in practice because of the protection offered the Indians by the Jesuits.
The Society of Jesus came to control a large portion of the indigenous workforce by establishing village settlements (aldeias), following a policy that had the support of both the crown and the governors. As a result of this policy, the colonists, hungry for cheap labor, and the Jesuit missionaries, protective of the Indians, frequently found themselves locked in serious conflict. This was especially the case in the poorer regions of Maranhão and Pará, which lacked the financial resources to acquire African slaves, as well as in São Paulo, where Portuguese miscegenation with indigenous populations led early on to a policy of making slaving raids into the interior. Although Jesuit policies certainly contributed to the increased importation of African slaves, the more operative basis for this choice was the resistance of Indians to slave labor and their vulnerability to European diseases. Whatever the case may be, the status of African slaves was never really questioned by the Society of Jesus, as the writings of Padre António Vieira clearly demonstrate. One thing, however, is certain: From the moment that a structure was established to collect and transport African slaves, there was a tendency to exploit this market whenever there was a need for human labor. Over the course of the eighteenth century, this pattern was repeated not only in Brazil but in the Spanish, Dutch, and British American colonies as well.
The stability of the Portuguese system in the South Atlantic was shaken between 1624 and 1654 by the arrival of the Dutch. They first conquered Bahia, which was retaken the very next year by an armada composed of troops from throughout Philip IV’s empire. In 1630, they occupied Pernambuco, and in the years that followed they moved into other northern captaincies as well. The incorporation of the two sides of the South Atlantic in the sugar (and tobacco) economy explains the Dutch conquest of São Jorge da Mina (1637), Arguim (1638), and São Tomé and Angola (1641). These moves spurred the first large-scale Portuguese attempt to reconquer the territory the Dutch had captured.
The successful Portuguese expedition to retake Angola and São Tomé in 1648 was led by Salvador Correia de Sá, then governor of Rio de Janeiro, and carried out by troops from Brazil. The interruption of the slave supply signaled the beginning of the decline of Dutch America, further accelerated by the military successes of Brazilians in the region. The expulsion of the Dutch from Brazil in 1654 made it possible for the Portuguese to consolidate their power in the South Atlantic, demonstrating both the deep roots of Portuguese emigration and the Portuguese capacity to recruit troops from among the Indians and African slaves. The success of the campaign against the Dutch in Brazil also transformed military strategies in Angola, with the nomination of Brazilian governors and the transfer of troops from Portuguese America to Africa. This episode demonstrated the relational logic of the Portuguese empire: The losses suffered in Asia were balanced by the victory over the Dutch in the South Atlantic during the same period. This was the first war of the seventeenth century that had been waged between two European powers on different continents, and its results defined the future of both the Portuguese and Dutch empires for decades to come.
In the following decades, the sugar and tobacco economies, in addition to the fishing industry, stimulated Portuguese expansion along the Brazilian coastline and attracted a large number of immigrants from Portugal. With the exception of the expeditions of the paulistas (residents of São Paulo), however, the Brazilian interior remained largely unexplored by Europeans until the very end of the seventeenth century. The discovery of gold in the region of Minas Gerais in the 1690s completely transformed this situation, causing a massive migration from Portugal and from other regions within Brazil. The conflict over mining rights between the paulistas and those from the metropole (who were allied with groups from other regions in Brazil) led to civil war, ultimately requiring intervention by the government of the southern captaincies. The successful suppression of the paulistas’ pretensions of exclusivity in the extraction of precious metals encouraged further migration and an expansion of gold and gem mining to other regions, especially in Goiás and Mato Grosso. The expansion of gold and diamond extraction also meant a dramatic leap forward for the Brazilian economy, bringing with it a series of consequences, including the expansion of cattle breeding, the regular use of the immense river system, and the creation of a vast network of roads.
The new economic, demographic, and urban situation also explains the shift in power from the northeast to the south of Brazil, symbolized most concretely by the transfer of the capital of the Estado do Brasil from Salvador da Bahia to Rio de Janeiro in 1763. Encouraged by the Pombaline policy of territorial conquest, the Portuguese were throughout the century able to penetrate deeply into the north using the fluvial networks of the Amazon River and its tributaries. Meanwhile, in the south, the difficulty in defining the borders between Spanish and Portuguese America – the object of two successive treaties in 1750 and 1777 – brought to light the problematic status of indigenous aldeias, which had so far been controlled by the Jesuits outside of crown jurisdiction. Ultimately, this situation led in 1759 to the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from Portugal and the rest of the empire. Thus, the greatest moment of global Portuguese expansion occurred in the eighteenth century, with the territorial occupation of the interior of South America. The present-day borders of Brazil by and large owe their contours to this westward expansion. In this context, Pombal’s administrative and military reforms provided a more consistent frame in which Portuguese dominion could increase. Despite the poor communication between regions and the appropriation of municipal structures by local notables, the crown managed to establish a certain degree of centralized power over the region.
In Brazil, individuals increasingly assumed a colonial, as opposed to a metropolitan, identity over the course of this complex process of migration and miscegenation, circulation of people and possessions, transfer of investments, and adaptation to diverse locales. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the development of a solid urban network across the country also created a new class of elites, including intellectuals, who established academies and were responsible for the diffusion of new philosophical ideas that often challenged the encrusted interests of a slave-based society. Despite a lack of alliances between captaincies, the emergence of a sense of local autonomy promoted through fiscal and political protests left deep traces of antimetropolitan sentiment throughout Portuguese America, as was apparent in the so-called Inconfidência Mineira conspiracy of 1789. Paradoxically, the transfer of the royal court to Brazil in response to the Napoleonic invasion of 1807 breathed new life into this sentiment. The establishment of central authority in Rio de Janeiro, legitimized by the presence of the king himself, led Brazilians to focus more on themselves than on the metropole. The relocation of the crown also brought with it the assimilation of social and behavioral models imported from Lisbon. Meanwhile, the authorization of manufacturing in Brazil and the opening of the ports in 1808 reinvigorated the spirit of autonomy and liberty of the Estado do Brasil, which in turn allowed the consolidation of elite groups that shared its commercial and financial interests. The independence declared by prince Dom Pedro in 1822 received strong and immediate support from these colonial elites.
Contemporary with the Inconfidência Mineira, the 1787 Pintos conspiracy (Conjura dos Pintos) in India showed that local Christian and Hindu elites, active in local politics since the sixteenth century, felt a similar desire for autonomy. These groups, with their long tradition of financial independence, included members of the secular and, after the second half of the eighteenth century, the religious clergy, not to mention large contingents in the armed forces. These elites were pushing for the opening to indigenous soldiers of the artillery corps, a specialized branch of the armed forces reserved for Europeans, an issue that had in large part inspired the conspiracy in the first place. The violent repression of this conspiracy by the Estado da Índia did not deter other revolts over the course of the nineteenth century, nor did it prevent the consolidation of an autonomous spirit that manifested itself most explicitly in the twentieth century before Goa’s integration into the Indian Union. The doubly peripheral situation of this elite, in confrontation with both the Portuguese and Indian worlds, goes a long way toward explaining its failure to impose an autonomous solution until the Indian Union decided on military intervention in 1961. A more complex situation is that of Macao, where a community composed of descendants of Sino-Portuguese miscegenation maintained both a strong tradition of autonomy (perhaps the most deeply rooted of the entire empire) as well as surprising political allegiance to Portugal. This attitude can only be explained by Macao’s anomalous position as a colony subjected to the daily influences of Chinese power yet situated at the margins of the greater Chinese world.
Portuguese expansion cannot and should not be seen as a cumulative process: It was marked by continuities and discontinuities and by breaches and transformations in the patterns of its activities from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans, from India to the South Atlantic, and from Brazil to Africa. It is possible to speak of successive Portuguese empires, the result of political adaptations to reversals of fortune and to the transfer of people and capital from one region to the other. Studying this process should not therefore be limited only to territories that were controlled by powers authorized or delegated by the crown. There was always a permanent flow of merchants, seamen, and artisans who lived beyond the boundaries of empire and who, in some cases, even ended up serving regimes other than the Portuguese.
The reduced demographic capacities of the metropole – roughly a million people at the beginning of the fifteenth century and nearly three million at the end of the eighteenth – did not prevent constant emigration of the Portuguese, estimated at between one and two thousand people per year for most of the fifteenth century, between two and five thousand per year during the sixteenth, between three and six thousand per year during the seventeenth, and between eight and ten thousand during the eighteenth. These emigrants headed primarily to the Atlantic Islands and to Brazil. The Portuguese presence in Asia always suffered from a demographic scarcity, although this was largely compensated for by a policy of miscegenation with local societies that was put into effect by Afonso de Albuquerque in Goa in 1510. This distinctive characteristic of the Portuguese empire, reproduced in large scale in Brazil and to a much lesser extent in Africa, created colonial societies stratified by complicated “racial” criteria, as was also the case in the Spanish empire. Another specific characteristic of the Iberian empires, as distinguished from the Dutch and British empires, was that religious conversion served as a relatively important factor in the integration of local groups. It should be noted, however, that the use of force mobilized by missionaries to convert these populations (or to maintain them inside Christianity) proved to have a deeply contradictory effect in the long run. The use of local manpower, as mariners, pilots, artisans, soldiers, and clerics, was a characteristic the Portuguese empire shared with other European empires and was especially common in Asia.
Any process of expansion is violent by nature, and its consequences in this regard cannot be ignored. The conveyance of enslaved laborers from Africa, initiated by the Portuguese for the development of Brazil, soon involved the Spanish, English, French, and Dutch colonies in America. This forced relocation of an estimated twelve million individuals resulted in a staggering number of deaths both during the journey and in the first years of their captivity. The imposition of Portuguese dominion in key ports (and surrounding hinterlands) of Africa and Asia meant the destruction of families, communities, and ethnic groups, as well as the unraveling of political and cultural systems. For these reasons, we see our aim in publishing this book as anything but celebratory in nature. Our intention in writing history is to move beyond an ideological appropriation of the past and to deconstruct consciously the successive myths that have been created by various historiographies. The need to rewrite the history of Portuguese expansion stems from our refusal to accept particular ideological or nationalistic perspectives; our objective is to disrupt those encrusted layers of retrograde historiography that are still common today. From our point of view, the debate over historiographical ideas should begin with an acknowledgment of our principal intellectual legacies – examples of which might include studies by Vitorino Magalhães Godinho of the ideal-type of the merchant-knight – and continue through an evaluation both of the new history of European expansion (Spanish, English, Dutch, or French) and the new historiography produced in the former colonial regions. Even today, many of these new studies are carried out within strictly nationalistic frameworks with little effort toward a comparative analysis.
The goal of this collection is to arrive at an understanding of the history of Portuguese expansion during the early modern period from a global perspective. Our approach, conceived by a group of experts in the field, departs in five significant ways from traditional historiography. In the first place, we refuse to treat Portuguese expansion in a compartmentalized fashion, subdivided into continents, regions, and subregions. Without completely disrespecting the specificities associated with local and regional forms of interaction, we find that the academic practice of writing history based upon geographic regions is artificial and undermines a global approach to the process by which successive Portuguese empires were brought into existence. From our point of view, it is impossible to understand what took place in the Estado da Índia if one ignores what was happening in Africa, Brazil, or mainland Portugal itself at the same time. Thus, the development of colonial Brazil needs to be seen as more than an enlargement and definition of territorial boundaries; rather, it should be understood in the context of a bipolar system in the South Atlantic, of which the slave trade was one of the principal and defining features. The job of the historian must be to reconstitute the relationships between regions through a study of the circulation of peoples, goods, and cultural configurations.
Second, we are reluctant to accept an approach that confines itself to periods of short or medium duration, whether this periodization conforms to regnal years or to the local and regional realities being studied. The division of history into arbitrarily defined, isolated chronological slices has come to be practiced today under the pretext of refusing a teleological view of the past. Although appearing to be salutary on the surface, this self-restraint ultimately defeats itself, as it results in a historicism that is unconscious of its own place within that same history. From our perspective, historical inquiry begins as a complex process of confronting an array of possibilities in constant flux. It is impossible to disregard the periods that preceded or followed the objects of one’s analyses. Although we acknowledge the importance of local realities and small-scale interconnections, it is not feasible to analyze such a long-lasting process of expansion in piecemeal fashion. Only a global approach grounded in long-term appraisals is capable of defining analytically the models of domination the Portuguese adopted in different social and cultural contexts. Only through this kind of approach is it possible to understand the multiple forms of interaction between the Portuguese and the local and regional power brokers with whom they came into contact, interactions that generated new political relationships, new economic activities, and new financial partnerships.
Third, we cannot accept an approach that confines itself solely to the formal framework of the Portuguese empire without taking into account the circulation of the Portuguese beyond the borders of their political dominion or a model that downplays local political, economic, and cultural conditions. In this collection, we have attempted also to move beyond an anti-Eurocentric rhetoric that features an overly exoticized view of the Portuguese empire. Instead, our approach emphasizes the real ways in which the empire depended for its survival on merchants and local financiers (as in the case of Asia) or on a slave labor force from Africa (as in the case of Brazil). Moreover, we believe the Portuguese empire can only come into clear focus when it is studied in close relation with those Asian, African, and Amerindian networks with which the Portuguese interacted and not just within the context of the actions of other European powers.
Fourth, we reject a historiography that does not question some of the implicit assumptions about European expansion in general and about the Portuguese empire in particular. We are referring here to a mode of historical thinking that attempts to analyze sources with erudition but ultimately falls short of engaging with the ideological uses to which the colonial and imperial past has recently been put. Our attempt to reach this self-reflective critical position does not correspond to any particular argument or authority held up by particular schools or groups of historians. In principle, the same critical methodology should be used to interpret primary sources, especially those that reflect highly complex forms of knowledge, such as systematic compendia of information on geography, astronomy, languages, forms of political organization, markets, precious metals, currency, and distribution networks. Furthermore, this self-criticism allows us to detect different patterns of reciprocal cultural impact as experienced either by the peoples affected by the Portuguese expansion or by the Portuguese themselves, including economic, social, linguistic, architectural, musical, and artistic exchanges.
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