In 1457, the Council of Cardinals met in Holland where they sanctioned, as a righteous and progressive idea, the enslavement of black Africans for the purpose of their conversion to Christianity and to be exploited in the labour market as chattel property. This devilish scheme speedily gained the sanctimonious blessing of the Pope and became a standard policy of the Roman Catholic Church, and later of the Protestant churches. [3].
Two rival powers actively took up the bidding of the Vatican and they were:
North Africa - What was it like before Slavery and Colonisation?
Arab Muslims first arrived in Africa in 641/2 AD, when they displaced the tyrannical rule of the Byzantium Empire in Egypt and North Africa. Under Islamic rule, Egypt was regarded as major source of wealth for Muslims as they replaced the competitive taxation of Greeks and Romans with a fairer tax system. With the emergence of new and stable systems of Islamic law and order in the Near East and North Africa, the arteries of economic growth regained their health. In the Mediterranean, as in all the seas surrounding Arabia, trade recovered and was steadily enlarged. Responding to their new opportunities, as well as to the challenge of their new unity and faith in themselves, Muslim merchants pushed their ships and enterprise far across the seas. They established themselves little trading settlements along the coasts of India, Ceylon, Malaya, down the eastern coast of Africa, and in the ports of southern China. They multiplied the old Phoenician links between southern Spain, soon to be the seat of material prosperity and soaring intellectual achievements under a succession of Muslim dynasties. They re-opened large channels of inter-continental communications. Old markets were expanded and new ones founded, helping to shape the course of political change. Large regions of Africa benefited particularly from this recovery and expansion, creating long-enduring networks of commerce, that penetrated far into the continent [24].
In West Africa, salt and food dominated trade in the Sahara desert (sahr means desert in Arabic [23]). The trade also included gold, ivory, ostrich feathers, tortoise shells and furs from sub-Sahara. When the Arabs arrived in Africa, trade increased because of the camel. Camels were crucial because they were able to travel up to 100 km or more a day, that is twice the distance of pack-oxen or horses. Camels could also withstand both daytime heat and night-time cold. Berbers engaged in long-distance trade. Arab traders bought west African gold from Ancient Ghana - the land of Gold and financed Berber caravans. In this way Islam spread very quickly and transactions became easier. The expansion of Muslim trans-desert trade after about 750 AD provided a new and major spur to West African state-formation and urbanism.
By 1067 the Andulasian chronicler al-Bakri, writing in the then brilliant Andulasian city of Cordoba in southern Spain, but drawing on firsthand information from trans-Saharan travellers and traders, described Ghana as a large and powerful state. Writing at the court of the Norman king Roger II of Sicily, al-Idrisi described how the rulers of Ghana would often feed thousands at a time, spreading banquets more lavish than any man had ever seen before.
However, it was Mali in West Africa that was brought to attention of Muslim world by the ruler of Mali, Mansa Musa (d.1337), brother of Abu Bukhari (famous for sending thousands of trading ships to the Americas in the 1300s), with his famous pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324-5, arriving in Cairo with a huge caravan that included 100 camel-loads of gold. Musa showed his generosity by giving away quantities of gold in Egypt, depressing Egypt's currency. This created the European mythology of West Africa as a place of immeasurable wealth where even slaves wore gold [7]. Completing the Catalan World Atlas of Africa in 1375, the Majorcan cartographer Cresques (Jew ?) showed the king of Mali seated on a throne, holding an orb (huge gold nugget [7]) and sceptre, in the centre of West Africa while the traders of all North Africa march sturdily towards his markets. West African gold became a staple export to Europe with at least two-thirds of the world's supply of gold coming from West Africa. Monarchs as far away as England struck their coins in the precious metal of West Africa [Pg. 76-77, 24].
Mansa Musa encouraged the development of learning and expansion of Islam. In the early years of his reign, Musa sent Sudanese scholars to the Moroccan university of Fes. By the end of his reign, Sudanese scholars were setting up their own centres of learning and Quranic learning, particularly in Timbuktu, later to become an important centre for Muslim traders and scholars, Sudanese as well as Berber.
Less than twenty years after Musa's death the globe-trotting Berber, Ibn Battuta still restlessly wandering after nearly thirty years of eager observation up and down the Muslim world visited Mali. He wrote: 'the Negroes possess some admirable qualities. They are seldom unjust, and have a greater abhorrence of injustice than any other people...There is complete security in their country. Neither traveller nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence'. From E.W.Bovill, 'The Golden Trade of the Moors'.
Timbuktu, the capital of Mali reached the height of its wealth and fame in the 16th century. Writing for an Italian audience early in the sixteenth century, Leo Africanus described Timbuktu, as a city of learning and letters where the king, besides disposing of an army of three thousand cavalry and 'countless infantry', supported from his treasury 'many magistrates, learned doctors and men of religion. 'Here in Timbuktu', he noted, 'there is a big market for manuscript books from the Berber countries, and more profit is made from the sale of books than from any other merchandise' [Pg. 73, 24]. The reputation of their schools of theology and law spread far into Muslim Asia. This central age of Mali was afterwards remembered as a golden age of prosperity and peace [Pg. 76-77, 24].
________________________________________________________________________________________
By the late Dark Ages, with western Europe in crisis, the Black interior kingdoms of the western and central Sudan flourished. A number of African kings, among them Mansa Musa and Sonni Ali, enjoyed renown throughout Islam and Christendom for their wealth, brilliance and the artistic achievements of their subjects. Their capitals were large walled cities with many mosques and at least two, Timbuktu and Jenne, had universities that attracted scholars and poets from far and wide. Their power derived from a mixture of military force and diplomatic alliances with local leaders; their judges dispensed justice; their bureaucracies administered taxation and controlled trade, the life-blood of these states [pg. 134, 17].
The aim of the Portuguese
was to make their tiny European state into a vast African-Indian empire.
Portugal's eventual presence in West and Central Africa aimed at nothing
less than building an empire across Africa from West to East - from the
Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean - a vast swath across the continent
that would also serve directly as the imperial highway connection with
the projected Indian empire. The African-Indian empire was Portugal's grand
design. The court of Lisbon had planned well. For such a mini-state as
Portugal an ambition bigger than the continent of Europe, and then daring
enough to operate the plan - this must compel a degree of organisation,
admiration and uninhibited unagressivness that enabled very small groups
of men to go forth to conquer and dominate. The Vatican used had two men
of vision to inspire the all-out efforts to realise the dream: Joao I and
his son, Henrique, the Navigator. [Pg.261-263, 40].
Portugal hoped by gaining direct access to the gold producing regions of West Africa, would provide it with a major source of national wealth. Once access to west Africa had been achieved, the wealth could finance further exploration round the southern tip of Africa and so towards India. Ultimately, by reaching India via a southern route, the Portuguese would bypass the Muslim-controlled trading routes of western Asia. On the orders of the Vatican, the Portuguese sailed along the coast of West Africa seizing a number of ports along the coast. The early Portuguese were not traders or private adventurers, but admirals with a royal commission to conquer territory and promote the spread of Christianity. [Pg. 404, 25].
In 1434, Gil Eanes dared to sail beyond the sea where the Atlantic Ocean was supposed to end and ships plunge into the void and in 1488 the Portuguese arrived at the mouth of the great Congo River in West Africa [Pg.261, 40]. Portuguese sailing ships first reached the west African coast in 1470s. They built a fort there called Elmina (the mine) to protect their trading post from rival European shipping. By the treaty of Alcacovas, Spain had recognised Portugal's rights to explore the African coast, and the Pope granted indulgences to those who sailed to take part in the building of the La Mina. It's full name, Sao Jorge Da Mina, St George of the Mine, embodies the religious and commercial nature of 15th century Europeans [12].
In 1497, Vasco Da Gama set sail from Lisbon in Portugal. The Portuguese who sailed with Da Gama were men of the Catholic renaissance and their successors were under the influence of the Counter-Reformation. Culture and religion for them were inextricably mixed and it was impossible to say where Catholic stopped and Renaissance Portuguese began [15]. Unlike previous Portuguese expeditions, Da Gama continued sailing further down the West coast of Africa and round the southern tip of Africa, north along the East African coast. With the help of an Arab pilot borrowed from Malindi in modern Kenya, Da Gama entered the Indian Ocean [pg.81 24].
Basically the Portuguese hoped that by entering the Indian Ocean from the south they could bypass the Muslims who dominated north Africa and the eastern Mediterranean world of western Asia. The Portuguese wanted to seize from Muslim control the fabulously wealthy trade in spices, perfumes, silks and other luxuries of India and China, carry them to western Europe in ships and sell them at a considerable profit. Afterall the Portuguese were also aware that Egyptian merchants grew rich on the trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean where the Egyptians minted their own gold coins and the Fatimid dinar became a basic unit of international currency in the Swahili cities of the east African coast.
Eleven months after setting sail, Da Gama arrived at the Indian city of Calicut on 20th May, 1498. From the first, Da Gama encountered hostility from the 'Moors', Arabs and Africans, but he seemed to have found favour with the zamorin or Hindu raja of Malabar [25]. Da Gama told the first Indians he met on the Malabar coast that he had come to seek 'Christians and spices'. The Christians he had in mind were a legendary people to be rescued from Muslim encirclement and who would help him in his Crusade. They were probably the subjects of the mysterious Prester John and were in reality the Abyssinians whom Da Gama never met. The Christians they did find were the 'Syrians' of Travancore, probably resident since 4 AD and unknown to Europe.
Da Gama returned home with a message from the Hindu raja saying :'Vasco Da Gama, a nobleman of your household, has visited my kingdom and has given me great pleasure. In my kingdom there is an abundance of cinnamon, cloves, ginger, pepper, and precious stones. What I seek from thy (your) country is gold, silver, coral and scarlet'.
A second expedition, consisting of thirteen ships and twelve hundred soldiers, under the command of Pedro Alvares Cabral, was despatched in 1500. The sum of his instructions was to begin with preaching, and, if that failed, to proceed to the sharp determination of the sword. On reaching Calicat (after being blown to the coast of Brazil first !), Cabral established factories in face of active hostility from the natives. In 1502 the king of Portugal obtained from Pope Alexander VI (an intensely fat and ugly man who flaunted his mistress and had three illegitimate children; one of his daughters had two husbands whilst still in her teens), a bull constituting him 'lord of navigation, conquest, and trade of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India'. In that year Vasco Da Gama sailed again to the East, with a fleet numbering twenty vessels [Pg. 404, 25]. Thus began the Crusade, Christianisation, conquest, and 'commerce' of East Africa and India.
East Africa - What was it like before Slavery and Colonisation?
Islam had given a sense of unity, at least against their non-muslim rivals if seldom among themselves, to all those Muslim trading interests and enterprises which had spread along the coastal countries of the Indian ocean. Many of these countries meanwhile began to flourish in a new way, forming among themselves a wide community of commerce and production. At the same time, the Arab sailors whose exploits were vividly embodied in 'The Thousand and One Nights', Sinbad, etc took their new faith far down the East African coast trading with Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania. They converted some of the coastal people, or at any rate some of the coastal rulers. They established themselves in settlements that were wealthier, stronger, more ambitious than before, intermarrying with local women as predecessors had done. Islamic in their faith, strongly conscious of their membership in the Muslim world, the peoples of these ports and city states were nonetheless African, being of various origins in the north and mainly Swahili in the centre and south. They drew these ports and settlements into the community of the Indian ocean trade, and thereby laid the foundations of an Islamic civilisation. By the tenth century there were markets of importance as far south as Mozambique, building their wealth and power on trade with ivory and gold producers of the interior [7].
They traded with all the peripheral countries of the Indian ocean, exporting metals, ivory, tortoiseshell, a few slaves, and buying cottons and luxury goods from as far afield as China. The discovery of 240 Chinese coins in east Africa ranging from the T'ang emperors (618-906) to much later times of the Sung period (960-1279) reveal the existence of this trade. In addition pottery and porcelain has been discovered on east African shores, indicating imports from China and Iranian Gulf States. Mosques and pillar tombs are decorated with such porcelain too [24].
Metalwork was widespread with smelted iron of East Africa acquiring international reputation in India. Collecting reports of Africa in 12th century, al-Idrisi was informed that the best steel came from India, but that India had its best iron form south-east Africa. This East African iron, he wrote, was supplied to all the lands of India ...[and] at a good price [because it is] most superior in quality and most malleable [pg. 72, 24].
Many Swahili cities on the east coast of Africa, such as Kilwa, Mogadishu, Mafia, Mombassa and Zanzibar had grown rich from trading with both India and China. By the 13th century, Kilwa and Zanzibar and probably Mogadishu on the Somali coast, had acquired mints of their own, their kings struck copper coins in fair quantity, usefully inscribing their names. Archaeologists working in the locality of Zanzibar recovered a horde of some three thousand silver coins of local minting.
These findings indicate that the burgeoning economy of the East African seaboard moved into a local coin-minting stage soon after 1050. Long after he had travelled through east African Kilwa in 1331, the Moroccan scholar Ibn Batuta could still remember it as 'one of the most beautiful and best constructed towns in the world, and he had by that time, had seen the cities of India, China and his own Moorish countries. Ibn Batuta was not exaggerating the comparative comfort of the fourteenth century Kilwa. [pg.72-73, 24]
What happened to Africa when the Europeans arrived?
In West Africa, the Portuguese missionaries began their work on kings and notables. There was nothing new in this approach. The Africans were so anxious for the new education and its vehicle, Christianity, that the priests found their tasks easy. First of all, to become a Christian one had to be baptised and given a 'Christian' name. Christian names were western names, and they all took the form used in the conquering country. The first Kongolese king to become a Christian was Nzinga Kuwu in 1492, taking the Portuguese name of Joao I. Hundreds of other Africans followed his example - princes, chiefs, ministers and some of the masses. Overbearing Jesuit fathers were installed as councillors to the king, one functioning as a prime minister. This move at once destroyed the traditional council that controlled chiefs and kings, and with such councils no European power could operate. With this Portuguese wedge between the king and the people, the African king started to make important decisions without reference to his own local African councillors. The African kings then became absolute monarchs insofar as their own people were concerned, in the hands of Europeans. [Pg.264, 40].
The arrival of Vasco Da Gama in 1498 marked the beginning of European encroachment in this lucrative system of oceanic trade between East Africa and India. Sailing up from the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, Da Gama and his crews were astonished and relieved at Quilimane in southern Mozambique to find that they had swum once more into a zone of trade and frequent ocean voyaging. They had news of ships still bigger than theirs, and pressed on up the coast.
When the Portuguese saw the wealth of these Swahili cities and the extent of their trade, they were determined to seize control of it, if necessary by force. The tactic they adopted was to sail with heavily-armed ships into the harbours of the more important towns. They then demanded that the ruler of the town become a Portuguese subject and pay a heavy annual tribute to the king of Portugal. If these demands were not met, the town was attacked, all its possessions were seized and any Muslims who resisted were killed. The whole process was justified in the name of a holy Christian war against the Moors. (Moor was the name used by European Christians at this time to refer specifically to the Muslims of North Africa. They also used it more generally to refer to all Muslims, whether African or Arab) [7].
Zanzibar was the first Swahili city to come under serious Portuguese attack. In 1503 a Portuguese sea captain, Ruy Lourenco Ravasco, blasted at the townspeople with his ship's cannon until the sultan of Zanzibar agreed to pay an annual tribute of 100 miticals. It set the pattern for things to come. During 1503 Ravasco and his companions sailed up and down the Swahili coast, seizing ships and ransoming them for payment in gold. This was followed in 1505 by a more determined and official Portuguese assault. Francisco d'Almedia, who went on to become a governor of the Indian island of Goa, was sent with a fleet of eleven heavily armed ships to seize control of the more important towns. The following is a Portuguese eye witness account of what happened:
"From our ships the fine houses, terraces, and minarets with the palms and trees in the orchards, made the city [Kilwa] look so beautiful that our men were eager to land and overcome the pride of this barbarian, who spent all that night in bringing into the island archers from the mainland...
After some hand to hand fighting the following day the sultan fled and the Portuguese took the town. Then the Vicar-General and some of the Franciscan fathers came ashore carrying two crosses in procession and singing the Te Deum. They went to the palace, and there the cross was put down and the Grand-Captain [d'Almeida] prayed. Then everyone started to plunder the town of all its merchandise and provisions.
After two weeks spent securing the town, building a fortress and appointing a new puppet sultan, the Portuguese fleet sailed up the coast to Mombassa. The Grand Captain met with other captains and decided to burn the town that evening and to enter it the following morning...Once the fire started it raged all night long, and many houses collapsed and a large quantity of goods were destroyed....
The Grand Captain ordered that the town should be sacked and that each man should carry off to his ship whatever he found, so that at the end there would be a division of the spoil, each man to receive a twentieth of what he found. The same rule was made for gold, silver and pearls. Then everyone started to plunder the town and to search the houses, forcing open the doors with axes and iron bars. A large quantity of rich silk and gold embroidered clothes was seized, and carpets also; one of these, which was without equal for beauty, was sent to the King of Portugal together with many other valuables." [Adapted from eyewitness accounts of Joao de Barros and Hans Mayr printed in GSP Freeman-Grenvill, "The East African Coast", Oxford, 1962, pages 86, 102, 108-110].
The sultan of Mombassa refused to pay tribute to the Portuguese and continued to maintain direct trading contacts with Arabia and the Persian Gulf. As a result of this defiance, Mombassa suffered two further Portuguese sackings in 1528 and 1589. After the third and final sacking of Mombassa the Portuguese realised that to dominate the trade of western Indian ocean they needed to control the northern cities as well. In order to do this they built a huge fortress at Mombassa which they called Fort Jesus. Completed in 1599, Fort Jesus became the main centre of Portuguese authority in eastern Africa for the next 100 years. Its massive threatening walls amply symbolised the violence with which Portuguese domination of the trade of the east African coast was maintained for much of the 16th and 17th century.
In 1526, a Muslim general called Ahmad Ibn Ibrahim also know as 'Gran the left handed' became leader and saw Christian Ethiopia as a constant threat to Muslim security in the region. On declaring Jihad, Ethiopia responded by appealing to Christian Emperor for assistance against the common enemy of Islam. The Ethiopian kings had been in touch with the Portuguese for a number of years and Portuguese ambassadors had been present since at least 1520. The Portuguese responded by landing a small but well-equipped force in the north of the country. The combination of Portuguese and Ethiopians managed to save the Christian kingdom by inflicting a sharp defeat upon the Muslim army in 1543. Ahmad himself was killed in the battle and his state collapsed [7].
Roman Catholic missionaries from Portugal followed the early Portuguese coastal penetration of tropical Africa to convert a number of African rulers so that they would become allies. But once African rulers realised the strong political motivation behind their presence, the missionaries initiative was doomed to failure. In one African state after another Portuguese missionaries were expelled or even killed. African rulers were interested in contact with Europeans, but they wanted new trading openings, technical assistance and firearms. They did not want new ideas that threatened to undermine the 'traditional' religious basis of their authority. With the growth of the slave trade the Portuguese soon gave up the pretence of treating converted Christians as fellow believers. Even Christian Ethiopia did not respond to converting to the Roman Catholic version of the faith and in mid-17th century, missionaries were expelled for political interference.
Leo Africanus mentions in his 'Geographical Historie of Africa' the existence of magnificent stately temples in various African countries, prior to European intervention. He laments the destruction of ancient African texts by invading Europeans, and in most cases Leo emphasises that those destroying Africa and its people are 'Christians', particularly the 'Portugals.' He also refers to the abundance of fertile soil and crops in the Niger delta '...no places can be devised to be more fruitful'. He boasts of temples, hospital inns to be found throughout the teeming cities of Africa. He mentions the abundance of precious metals - gold, silver and also iron. He talks also of the 'excellent leather' produced in his country, along with the most cunning goldsmiths, carpenters and such like artificers. [Pg. 277, 28]
Leo describes Morocco as a thriving noble city...accounted to be one of the greatest ...in the world. He talks of the colleges, bookstores and temples that match and even surpass many palaces of Italy. Leo describes the magnificent city of Rebat, built at the top of a hill as a fortress against 'Christian' invasion. He boasts of that city's colleges, palaces, temples, and a water-system conducted by pipes and canals, quite similar to those of the modern-day western world.
Leo boasts of the elaborate city of Fez: its colleges, its fifty stately and sumptuously built temples, made of marble and other excellent stones unknown to the Italians.
Leo boasts of roofs adorned with gold, rich carpets in residences, an intricate water and sewer system, also similar to that of the previously-mentioned city of Rebat and the modern Western world.
Still referring to Fez, he talks of a public assistance system for the destitute, of free colleges and hospitals and an elaborate legal system.
He talks of heated water baths, the corn mills, notaries, books shops, stationers, scriveners, children's shoe stores, fruit markets, dairy shops, restaurants and cafes, linen stores, meat stores, fish stores, liquid soap stores, fourteen leather shops, a hundred and fifty tailor shops, laundromats, silk merchants, haberdashers, lingerie shops, bedding stores, wool stores, carpet and embroidery stores, every trading place that one could expect to find in modern-day New York city - grocers, apothecaries, physicians.
He even talks of water-proof shoes that were manufactured for 'foul weather'. Leo goes on to state how the architecture of Fez surpassed those of Persia in beauty and adornment.
Leo describes Fez also as a thriving tourist centre, 'a Paradise' from April to September. He also talks of its strongly built house of detention and its sophisticated legal system, whereby criminal, civil and religious disputes were all handled separately.
Leo describes the pomp with which marriage and circumcision ceremonies were held and the solemnity of funeral services. [pg. 281, 28]
Fez fell to greedy clutches of the Christian European plunderers, the Portuguese in particular. Ancient cities over a hundred years old (of which Ansa was a classic example), were known to be laid to complete waste within one single day.
In 1510 Affonso de Albuquerque captured the island of Goa on the west coast of India from the Sultan of Bijapur and made it the capital of the Portuguese eastern empire. Its strong points besides Goa were Socotra off the Red Sea (he could not take Aden), Ormuz in the Persian Gulf, Diu in Gujrat, Malacca, the entrepot for the Far East and the spice trade in the East Indies, and Macao in China. The function of Goa was to supervise Malabar, to control the pilgrim traffic to Mecca as well as the general trade to Egypt, Iraq and Persia, and of Malacca to control the East Indian spices at their source [15].
However, the Portuguese irked some of the Mughal and preceding rulers because of the toll they took of the trade from the port of Surat and the pilgrim traffic. In seizing and retaining their strong points they acquired a reputation for cruelty and peridy because their practice on both these points was below the current Indian standard. They were deeply impregnated with the idea that no faith need be kept with an infidel. It was from this period that the word feringi (lit.farangi, frank) acquired the opprobrium of which echoes may still be heard today [15]. However, the Mughal Emperor, Jahangir admired their pictures and had them copied. Emperor Akbar listened with interest to Jesuit Father's discourses. The New Testament was translated into Persian [15].
However, during the whole of the 16th century the Portuguese disputed with the Muslims the supremacy of the Indian seas, and the antagonism between Christianity and Islam became gradually more intense [pg.405, 25]. In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator commanded the first expedition to sail around the world. In the Collins Encyclopaedia it is written that Magellan set sail to check the power of Muslim navy and fleet that was dominant. In 1560, the Portuguese being intolerant in religion, introduced the Inquisition with all its horrors. This was regarded as sub-standard from the Indian standpoint, advertising this trait in their rough handling of Syrian Christians of Malabar to secure their submission to the Catholic faith [15].
Socially the policy of Albuquerque in encouraging mixed marriages had important results. His object was to rear a population possessing Portuguese blood and imbued with Portuguese Catholic culture who would be committed by race and taste to the Portuguese settlements and so form a permanent self-perpetuating garrison. The result was the race long known as Luso-Indians and now as Goansese or Goans. They are mainly Indian in blood, Catholic in religion, and partially western in outlook. In recent times, they have spread all over India as traders and professionals, a less successful version of the Parsis [15]. (Of all the Asians in Britain, a majority of whom are Muslim, the first Asian MP had to be a Roman Catholic of Goanese descent, Keith Vaz).
Some Portuguese words have even crept into the Urdu language such as the names of items for furniture (mayze for desk, almaari for cupboard/wardrobe). Also vindaloo (curry) is part Portuguese and part Urdu: vian is Portuguese for meat and aloo is the Urdu for potato - thus we have meat and potato curry.
The Portuguese were soon followed by European rivals like the French, Dutch and British. Rivalry between the Dutch and English resulted in the Dutch East India Company "winning" Southeast Asia and Indonesia (known to Europeans as the East Indies); and the British East India Company having to settle for "second-best", that is India.
The first Englishman who actually visited India was Thomas Stephens in 1579. He became rector of Jesuits College in Goa. His letters to his father are said to have roused with great enthusiasm in England to trade directly with India. India had an active trade with the Middle East and Europe, the main articles of export being textiles, indigo, saltpetre and spices (Gujrat benefited from the indigo industry and Malabar from the spice trade). In return she received luxuries like wines and novelties and metals, specially bullion, which was in chronic short supply in northern Europe. This constituted the Indian silver drain which was the bugbear of English mercantilists.
At Battle of Plassey in 1757 British troops commanded by Robert Clive defeated the Bengal ruler a Mughal viceroy and put in British puppet. Robert Clive said there would be little or no difficulty in obtaining absolute possession of these rich kingdoms. At this point silver was no longer needed for trading with India.
Before British rule, there was no private property in land. The self-governing village community handed over each year to the ruler or his nominee a share of the years produce. East India Company put a stop to this and introduced a new revenue system superseding the right of the village community over land and creating two new forms of property on land - landlordism and individual peasant proprietorship. It was assumed that the State was the supreme landlord. Fixed tax payments were introduced based on land whereby payment had to be made to the government whether or not crop had been successful. As one British put it we have introduced new methods of assessing and cultivating land revenue which have converted a once flourishing population into a huge horde of paupers. Indeed the first effect was the reduction in agricultural incomes by 50% thereby undermining the agrarian economy and self-governing village.
In 1769 the Company prohibited Indians from trading in grain, salt, betel nuts and tobacco and discouraged handicraft. Company also prohibited the home work of the silk weavers and compelled them to work in its factories. Weavers who disobeyed were imprisoned, fined or flogged. Company's servants lined their own pockets by private trading and bribery and extortion. Goods were seized at a fraction of their price and resold to their owners at five times their price.
In 1770s one writer said of Bengal : one continued scene or oppression. Systematic plunder led to a famine in which 10 million people perished. Bengal was left naked, stripped of its surplus wealth and grain. Famine struck in 1770 and took the lives of an estimated one third of Bengal's peasantry. A Commons Select Committee report in 1783 said that natives of all ranks and orders had been reduced to a State of Depression and Misery.
In 1787 a former army officer wrote: In former times the Bengal countries were the granary of nations, and the repository of commerce, wealth and manufacture in the East...But such has been the restless energy of misgovernment, that within 20 years many parts of those countries have been reduced to desert. The fields are no longer cultivated, extensive tracks are already overgrown with thickets, the husbandman is plundered, the manufacturer (handicraftsman) oppressed, famine has been repeatedly endured and depopulation ensured.
As India became poor and hungry, Britain became richer. Colossal fortunes were made. Robert Clive arrived in India penniless - activities of Company investigated by House of Commons. The Hindi word loot was introduced into English language because of the plunder of India. Colossal fortunes helped fund Britain's Industrial Revolution e.g.:
All this altered under the British leading to the de-industrialisation of India - its forcible transformation from a country of combined agriculture and manufacture into an agricultural colony of British capitalism. British annihilated Indian textile industry because a competitor existed and it had to be destroyed.
Shipbuilding industry aroused the jealousy of British firms and its progress and development were restricted by legislation. India's metalwork, glass and paper industries were likewise throttled when British government in India was obliged to use only British-made paper.
The vacuum created
by the contrived ruin of the Indian handicraft industries, a process virtually
completed by 1880, was filled with British manufactured goods. Britain's
industrial revolution, with its explosive increase in productivity made
it essential for British capitalists to find new markets. India turned
from exporter of textile or importer. British goods had to have virtually
free entry while entry into Britain of India goods was met with prohibitive
tariffs. Direct trade between India and the rest of the world had to be
curtailed. Horace Hayman Wilson in 1845 in The History of British India
from 1805 to 1835 said the foreign manufacturer employed the arm of political
injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor with whom he
could not have contended on equal terms.
While there was prosperity for British cotton industry there was ruin for millions of Indian craftsmen and artisans. India's manufacturing towns were blighted e.g. Decca once known as the Manchester of India, and Murshidabad-Bengal's old capital which was once described in 1757 as extensive, populous and rich as London. Millions of spinners, and weavers were forced to seek a precarious living in the countryside, as were many tanners, smelters and smiths.
India was made subservient to the Empire and vast wealth was sucked out of the subcontinent. Economic exploitation was the root cause of the Indian people's poverty and hunger. Under Imperial rule the ordinary people of India grew steadily poorer. Economic historian Romesh Dutt said half of India's annual net revenues of £44m flowed out of India. The number of famines soared from seven in the first half of 19th Century to 24 in second half. According to official figures, 28,825,000 Indians starved to death between 1854 and 1901. The terrible famine of 1899-1900 which affected 474,000 square miles with a population almost 60 million was attributed to a process of bleeding the peasant, who were forced into the clutches of the money-lenders whom British regarded as their mainstay for the payment of revenue. The Bengal famine of 1943, which claimed 1.5million victims were accentuated by the authority's carelessness and utter lack of foresight.
Rich though its soil was, India's people were hungry and miserably poor. This grinding poverty struck all visitors - like a blow in the face as described by India League Delegation 1932. In their report Condition of India 1934 they had been appalled at the poverty of the Indian village. It is the home of stark want...the results of uneconomic agriculture, peasant indebtedness, excessive taxation and rack-renting, absence of social services and the general discontent impressed us everywhere..In the villages there were no health or sanitary services, there were no road, no drainage or lighting, and no proper water supply beyond the village well. Men, women and children work in the fields, farms and cowsheds...All alike work on meagre food and comfort and toil long hours for inadequate returns.
Jawarharlal Nehru wrote that those parts of India which had been longest under British rule were the poorest:Bengal once so rich and flourishing after 187 years of British rule is a miserable mass of poverty-stricken, starving and dying people.
India was sometimes called the 'milch cow of the Empire', and indeed at times it seemed to be so regarded by politicians and bureaucrats in London. Educated Indians were embittered when India was made to pay the entire cost of the India Office building in Whitehall. They were further outraged when in 1867 it was made to pay the full costs of entertaining two thousand five hundred guests at a lavish ball honouring the Sultan of Turkey.
In India, the hunger and poverty experienced by the majority of the population during the colonial period and immediately after independence were the logical consequences of two centuries of British occupation, during which the Indian cotton industry was destroyed, most peasants were put into serfdom (after the British modified the agrarian structures and the tax system to the benefit of the Zamindars - feudal landlords) and cash crops (indigo, tea, jute) gradually replaced traditional food crops. Britain's profits throughout the 19th century cannot be measured without taking into account the 28 million Indians who died of starvation between 1814 and 1901.
Angola, Luanda: founded in 1576 by Portuguese settlers. Made capital in 1627
Benin, Porto Novo: founded in 15th or 16th century by Portuguese slave-traders. Its name is Portuguese for 'new port'.
Cameroon, Yaounde: founded from Portuguese cameroes, meaning prawns, because Portuguese explorers found plentiful supplies along the coast.
Cape Verde, Praia: islands named Cabo Verde, meaning green cape, by the Portuguese.
Gambia, Banjul: according to tradition, the city's name arose when Portuguese settlers, who discovered the country in the 15th century, asked what the place was called. Thinking the question to be 'what are you doing ?', the natives replied 'Bangjulo', meaning 'making rope-mats'.
Guam, Agana: present name of islands derived from the original name San Juan (St John), which the inhabitants distorted to San Guam. Islands first sighted by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan on St John's Day 1521.
Guinea-Bissau, Bissau: country formerly Portuguese Guinea.
Macao, Macau City: Peninsula settled by the Portuguese in 1557.
Portugal, Lisbon (Lisboa): the original settlement on the site was colonised by Phoenicians and Carthaginians. The city's modern name is probably Phoenician; it may come from the word ippo, meaning 'fortress', or Alisubbo, meaning 'joyful bay' (Aschbuona during the Muslim rule).
Reunion, Saint-Denis: islands discovered by Magellan in 1513. Given its present name in 1793, during the French revolution, to celebrate the union of the revolutionaries from Marseilles with the National Guard on August 10, 1792.
St Helena, Jamestown: island discovered in 1502 by the Portuguese explorer Joao Da Nova. Named after St Helen (about 250-330) who reputedly discovered Christ's cross.
St Pierre and Miquelon, St Pierre: islands first named Eleven Thousand Virgins because discovered by the Portuguese explorer ...
United States of America, Washington: Portuguese sailor, Americo Vespucio. Capital named after George Washington (1732-99).
Uruguay, Montevideo: probably named by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1520. Settled in 1726 by Spanish. May mean 'I saw the mountain' (from Portuguese mont-vide-du).
Vatican City, Vatican City: has been the papal residence since 5th century AD. City named after Mons Vaticanus, the Roman hill on which it stands, and the hill's name may come from the Latin Vaticina, meaning a place of divination. It was the site of a pre-Christian shrine.
Financial Times Weekend November 16 / November 17 1996 Section 3, Weekend FT
There is a challenge to the Pacific Age, argues Richard Hall, who thinks the West ill-advised to ignore Islam's trading tradition.
Stirrings from the Indian Rim
[LARGE COLOUR PICTURE OF A SHIP WITH RED CROSS ON BOTH OF ITS MASTS - picture imposed on Ethiopia, Arabia, India and Madagascar]
When Pope Alexander VI divided up the known world between Ferdinand & Isabella of Spain and King Manuel of Portugal at the end of the 15th century, Manuel was thrilled at getting the better of the bargain. For him, it was the opulent Indian Ocean, with all its spices, jewels and gold. The Spaniards were making do with seemingly barbaric and barren lands found by Columbus while trying to reach what is now called the Pacific Rim.
King Manuel proudly declared himself Lord of the 'navigation and commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India' - the bountiful lands where fortunes were waiting to be made. Beyond them, past the Straits of Malacca, were shores and oceans which seemed far less promising. Fears still lingered that ships would fall off the end of the world if they ventured into waters fare beyond the Indian Rim.
That terra incognito, the Pacific region, is the engine of the world economy. Japan has blossomed, China is on the rise, Chile has overcome dictatorship and the West coast of the US is where present and future fantasy is made and marketed. In retrospect, Ferdinand and Isabella appear to have given the prime real estate.
But there are stirrings in the Indian Ocean that could challenge the Pacific Age. The idea is easy to mock the images evoked by a mention of the Indian Ocean is of languid paradise, a honeymoon destination, or a scene of tragedy in which the sheer size of casually figures makes for incomprehension. Regional co-operation seems an impossibility, its way blocked by religious dispute and ethnic divisions.
The stereotype absurdly underestimates the present economic strength and ignores the commercial past of the Indian Rim. Traditions of international trade were established in a region that now appears to have a permanent high risk investment rating.
But even a glance at the geography hints at the potential. At the rim's Northwest corner are Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, the world's richest countries in per capita terms, possessing more than 60% of the world's proven reserves. On the south-east flank of the Indian ocean are Malaysia and Singapore, economic success stories already, and beyond them, the emerging giant of Indonesia and minerals-rich western Australia with its brash capitalism.
The fulcrum of the entire region remains India, with a population projected to surpass that of China by early next century. Bombay (once sold by Charles 2nd to the East India Company for £10) now vies with Shanghai as the biggest and fastest-growing industrial city in the world.
...
Yet it is not just 20th century enterprise that reveals how the Indian ocean can be self-generating economic entity. History shows that ocean had always served as a natural link between the east and West extremities of the known world. European invaders, INSPIRED BY RELIGION and then by the certainty of their economic destiny, arrived to shatter these organic patterns of trade.
In the words of Professor Michel Mollat du Jourdin, a French historian, it was 'a zone of encounters and contacts...a centre for all types of exchanges...a privileged cross-roads of culture from earliest times'.
Two proofs of this passage of ideas and icons are an erotic ivory statuette of an Indian goddess dug out of the ruins of Pompeii, and the bronze representation of the Greek sea God Poseidon found in the remains of a 2,000 year-old trading post on the West Indian coast. These had been carried in opposite directions across the classical world by merchant-adventurers from the Mediterranean, making their way down the Red Sea to join in the already thriving 'monsoon trade' across the Indian ocean.
Arab, Persian and Indonesian navigators already knew to the week - almost to the day - which was the right moment to set sail for distant ports. The alternating monsoons blew at precisely regular times of the year (nowadays, environmentalists say gloomily, these winds have grown far less predictable).
The Indian ocean supplied Europe, during the heyday of the Roman empire, with spices, perfumes and jewels. It was also the source of Chinese silk, for which rich Romans would pay fabulous prices. According to Caius Julius Solinus, a 4th century historian, India had 3,000 great cities and 'was believed a long time to be the third part of the world.'
After the collapse of Rome, the global balance of wealth and civilisation shifted to the Indian Ocean region for 1,000 years. Scholars in Baghdad and other great cities ruled by the Muslim caliphs translated and studied the literature of Greece, Persia and India. When the English were still trying to fend off Viking raiders [793 AD], the earth's circumference was being calculated to an accuracy of within 70 miles by al-Biruni, a scientist in the Punjab.
Scholarship apart, the enclosed world of the Indian Ocean was one vast market economy. Everywhere the merchants were supreme, risking their lives for profit in creaking ships with the distinctive lateen sails, still to be seen on dhows today. They voyaged to China, or 3,000 miles down the East African coast to Mozambique, bartering for gold, ivory and slaves.
The coastal city of Sirfa, just inside the entrance to the Gulf, was the greatest port in the world, until an earthquake shattered it in AD 977. (Today there is only an Iranian fishing village on one corner of its vast site). Siraf was replaced by Hormuz, closer to the mouth of the Gulf, which Marco Polo visited during his overland journey to Cathay.
He approved of the local date wine, which 'loosened the bowels and made a thorough purge', but condemned the ships he saw in Hormuz harbour because the passengers were packed in alongside Arabian war-horses destined for the armies of the Indian rajahs. Moreover, the vessels were only held together with coir and Marco Polo decided it was highly dangerous to sail in these ships: 'And you can take my word for it that many of them sink, because the Indian Ocean is often very stormy.'
Marco Polo was right on both counts. The 'sewn boats' frequently did sink - although that never deterred the merchants - and the Indian Ocean can be quite unlike the azure millpond of the tourist brochure. The ocean seems small when set against the watery expanse of the Pacific - a mere 16m square miles compared with 90m - but there is violence in its moods.
Even so, the tropical ports were havens for the early European navigators after they had battled through the south Atlantic gales and rounded the Cape of Good Hope.
Next year marks the 500th anniversary of the landfall by Vasco da Gama and his three small Portuguese ships on India's Malabar coast (now Kerala). It will also be the 50th anniversary of the British departure.
Earlier in the 15th century, the Chinese had also come to Malabar, in vast armadas of junks commanded by admiral Zhengu He, the Grand Imperial Eunuch of the Ming Emperor. The Chinese, who sailed as far as the Red Sea, were not only making a show of force; they wanted to find new markets for surpluses from their state-run factories - the junks carried porcelain plates as ballast.
The Chinese came and went and are returning. Having virtually ignored the market for five centuries, mainland traders are returning, looking again to sell surpluses and establishing ever more complex commercial links in the region. No more the grand political gesture of a state-sponsored railway in east Africa, now the trade winds are blowing. They must buy oil and must sell electrical goods and clothes, polyester and cotton.
The Europeans took a different approach. At the beginning of the 16th century Vasco da Gama and his successors imposed their wills with cannon fire. At the time, Muslims could only think that the ensuing terror must simply be divine punishment for their sins. Author K.M. Panikkar took a more detached view earlier this century: 'The Portuguese of the 16th and 17th centuries had nothing to teach the people of India except improved methods of killing people and bigotry in religion. Surely these were not matters of such importance as to make it necessary for Indians to feel grateful towards Vasco da Gama or his successors.'
The Europeans brought with them a new conceit: the ocean would no longer be free. It now belonged to them, and only those ships carrying a permit could sail on it. All others would be sunk. Joao de Barros, the 16th century Portuguese historian, explained that Muslims were 'outside the law of Jesus Christ, which is the true law'.
The new hegemony was equally a blow to the Hindus, ever avid for Arab dinars and other gold currencies, which they melted down to adorn their temples. Revenues from the spice trade began to go into European pockets. By a curious irony it was foreign currency, of a baser sort, which literally defeated the Hindus in a great battle in 1565, south-east of Goa.
Muslim enemies caused havoc among the Hindu infantry by firing canons packed with bags of copper-coins into their ranks. Ramaraja, the 96-year old Hindu king vainly tried to rally his fleeing troops by showering them with gold and jewels. His head was cut off and his great capital Vijayanagara (City of Victory) was ravaged.
By the second half of the 17th century other white intruders were busily grabbing territory in every corner of the Indian ocean. The Dutch took the Cape, Ceylon and Indonesia, the British and French competed for India. Rivalry for spices, pepper, nutmeg and cinnamon - was bloody. The human cost of developing Bombay was to prove severe, but the port would be crucial in helping Britain assert control over all India.
By the middle of the next century the British had even conquered the monsoon winds. P&O steamships and rival lines sailed according to strict timetables from Suez to Bombay, and on to Calcutta and Hong Kong. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 gave direct access from the Mediterranean to the Indian ocean, and European supremacy seemed unchallengeable.
But the colonists, for the most part, have returned home. Ideology has waned, and the primacy of economic policy has made the rules of engagement with the rest of the Rim, and the world, clearer.
The greatest unifying factor in the Indian ocean is Islam, often seen from the outside as a reason for the region's incoherence. The Hajj draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Mecca every year, from as far afield as the Philippines, but mostly from within the Rim. India has 120m Muslims, as many as the entire population of Pakistan.
And yet the mercantile traditions of Islam are ignored when the future is mapped out in the western mind. History tells of thriving communities in which viability and confidence were ultimately crushed by European force. And the readiness to reach out to the other lands for experience and wisdom has been long established, as Al Masudi, a 10th century chronicler, made clear in The Meadows of Gold: 'He who stays at home besides his hearth, and is content with the information which he may acquire concerning his own region, cannot be on the same level as one who divides his lifespan between different lands and spends his days journeying in search of precious and original knowledge.'
'Empires of the Monsoon, a history of the Indian Ocean and its invaders', by Richard Hall, published by Harper Collins.
Eight months after the fall of the last Muslim stronghold in Europe, namely Granada, in 1492, Christopher Columbus a Genoese seafarer set sail westwards with the blessing of the Vatican, in the name of The Trinity to combat the religion of Mahomet and all idolatries and heresies to those lands of India to meet their rulers and to see the towns and lands and their distribution, and all other things, and to find out in what manner they might be converted to the Christian faith [see the prologue written by Columbus in his journal describing his first voyage, 12]. Quite amazing considering the Vatican were propagating the false belief that the world was flat and anyone who sailed too far would fall into hell. So much for historical baloney.
Five years later, John Cabot discovered Newfoundland in his ill-fated attempt to find India and Japan by sailing westwards. A year later in 1498, the Portuguese under the command of Vasco Da Gama (a freemason) discovered the eastern sea route to India by sailing along the immensely wealthy Africa coastline.