Capital and Empire in Africa (Dispatch from Lisbon)

The Padrão dos Descobrimentos and the Jardim Botânico Tropical in Belém, Lisbon (2022)

The spirit of inquiry of the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has imparted a distinct geographical flavour to the records of Portuguese activity in Africa in that era. Indeed, whatever short-comings those records possess must be attributed to the Portuguese preoccupation with the gathering of geographical data, to the exclusion of much else. As the Portuguese moved south along the west coast of Africa, their main concern was the preparation of navigational aids, necessitating a close attention to detail. Frequent soundings were made off the coast and in the rivers, and wind and weather conditions scrupulously noted. In 1634, the Conselho da Fazenda approved the payment of a pension to Miguel Albernas, who had been in their service as a cartographer on the Upper Guinea Coast.” The result of his work, like the work of so many others relating to Asia and Africa, must have been known only to the Portuguese authorities, since it was the policy to keep such information out of the hands of rivals.

Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Portuguese roteiros, or charts, in spite of their limited objectives, are extremely useful introductions to the geography and the history of the Upper Guinea Coast. More substantial information followed later as European commercial activities intensified and forced them to look more closely at the land from which they hoped to reap a profit. Sierra Leone was particularly favoured, since inquiries were conducted with a view to Portuguese colonization in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, English and French colonization projects generated similar interest. On the basis of such evidence, and with some recourse to more recent and more scientific studies, one can construct a tolerably accurate geography of the region between the Gambia and Cape Mount, which is the region described by the term ‘Upper Guinea Coast’ in this study... 

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Together with the Senegambia, the Upper Guinea Coast was being exploited for slaves in the 1460s, even before the southern sections of the West African coast had been charted by the Portuguese. Four hundred years later, the Atlantic slave trade was still being prosecuted in the area. Over this span of centuries, the Upper Guinea Coast was involved in all the phases of the slave trade. It supplied Europe, the mines of Central and South America, and the plantations of the Caribbean and North America. In the late eighteenth century, it was Sierra Leone that was chosen as the site for the first settlement of freed slaves in West Africa; yet in spite of this memorial to freedom, and in spite of the British Navy, the slavers were still present in the neighbouring estuaries and rias until the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus, though the Upper Guinea Coast was not as notorious and unfortunate as Angola and the Bight, it is in many ways a classic region for the study of the Atlantic slave trade.

Fifty years after these shores had been seen by the Portuguese, the latter were shipping abroad, ‘when the trade of the country was well ordered’, more than 3,500 Africans every year. Captives taken were mainly destined for the nearby Cape Verde islands and the Iberian peninsula, with Madeira and the Canary Islands providing secondary markets. Sometimes captives from this section of the coast were procured by passing ships and became galley slaves—as, for example, in 1504, when the East Indies fleet of Alfonso de Albuquerque obtained seventy Negroes at Santiago.” This may also have applied to ships bound for the Americas. The Cape Verde islands were situated on the route of the sailing vessels proceeding from Portugal to Brazil, and it is not unlikely that small numbers of Africans from Upper Guinea were carried as slaves to Brazil at an early date.

It was the Spanish market which held out the greatest prospects. After the famous pleas of Las Casas, Charles V granted to a courtier the right to furnish 4,000 slaves to the Antilles, and the deal was eventually carried through by Genoese merchants, who made their purchases in Lisbon. A great portion of these slaves were obtained through Cape Verde enterprise. In 1512 a royal edict had declared that all Guinea slaves should go directly to Lisbon. The Cape Verdeans protested that in that event no ships from Madeira, the Azores, the Canaries, or Spain would visit the Cape Verde islands,” and they may have broken this strict provision. In any event, many of the slaves on the Lisbon market would have been acquired on the Upper Guinea Coast and in the Senegambia. Indirectly, therefore, Upper Guinea was in touch with the market in the Spanish Indies since the second decade of the sixteenth century. By the second half of that century, the Spanish Indies had become the principal destination of captives from this area...

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In 1755 the captain-major of Cacheu reported aggrievedly that an English ship from Barbados had gone straight up to Zeguichor on the river Casamance without a pilot—something which no Portuguese captain had ever done. This was truly symbolic, because it was in the sphere of navigation that Portugal had led the world in the fifteenth century. But the financial infrastructure of European mercantilism and nascent industrial capitalism was never developed within the Iberian peninsula, so that the profits of Iberian expansion ultimately flowed to banking, commercial, and manufacturing centres outside of Portugal and Spain. With pretensions to a monopoly of world trade completely shattered by the seventeenth century, Portugal became a depressed area of the Western European economy.

Of course capitalism, even in the days of chauvinist mercantilism, was already an international phenomenon; and all Western European states displayed a great degree of interdependence in buying, selling, and transporting goods intended for Africa. However, Portugal’s relationship was one of dependency rather than equality. Joao Barreto stresses Portugal’s weakness as an apologia for that country’s responsibility in the Atlantic slave trade. His argument is that Portugal’s moral blameworthiness should be proportionate to the small profits they reaped. He says:

It is curious to note that the economy of Portugal was the one which profited least from the slave trade. In the first place, the national mercantile fleet was very limited; the majority of the ships which, since the sixteenth century, were used to carry slaves from the African coast being foreign, and no gain accrued to Portugal. . . . In the second place, Portugal did not produce the articles which the slavers made use of in their transactions with the peoples of Africa: cotton cloths, trumpery, beads, mirrors, iron, etc. 

Moral sophistry aside, he is substantially correct. 

Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1-2; 95-96; 242-243. A revision of his doctoral dissertation completed in 1966 at SOAS based upon work in the Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and British Archives, Rodney’s first book is a great work of historical research and writing. Reflecting on his reliance on European sources from his post in Dar es Salam, Rodney wrote that “stumbling over such barriers is an occupational hazard for those who seek to reconstruct the history not only of Africa’s peoples but also of all the voiceless millions who worked and died.” “My debt,” he wrote in the preface to his book, “is greatest to the irredentist masses of the British Caribbean, who provided inspiration and finances (via the University of the West Indies).” He ended his preface with a philosophy of history: “I have sought to ensure that the integrity of the evidence was respected at all times, for this has always been demanded from those who practise the writing of history. Beyond that, the interpreter is himself nothing but a spokesman for historical forces.” 

Capital and Empire in Asia (Dispatch from Lisbon)

The Padrão dos Descobrimentos and the Jardim Botânico Tropical in Belém, Lisbon (2022)

 

Though [Pedro Alvarez] Cabral had sailed away, the Portuguese had not abandoned the Indian Ocean. On the contrary, Dom Manoel assumed for himself the title of ‘The Lord of the Navigation, Conquest and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India’ and fitted out an even stronger expedition with orders to enforce his claim to the supremacy of the Indian seas. It was Vasco da Gama himself who was appointed captain-major of this fleet. The fleet consisted of fifteen ships of which six were larger and more powerfully equipped than those which had previously arrived in the Indian sea. San Jeronymo was the flagship. The other five were lateen rigged caravels fitted with heavy artillery and the expedition carried 800 trained soldiers. Since it was realized that there might be serious opposition a reinforcement of five vessels under Estavo da Gama was sent five months later. 

The most impressive fact about this first and most decisive period of Portuguese endeavour is the remarkable manner in which the fleets in the East were kept reinforced by the Portuguese home government. Armada followed armada in unending succession under trained captains, and the Portuguese chiefs in the Indian waters knew that men and ships were on the way bringing succor to them. Even in the most difficult circumstances they could therefore hold out with the firm conviction that help was not far away. In this work, the Portuguese Government had the financial backing of the great merchant princes of Antwerp who, realizing the revolutionary change in trade that the Portuguese discoveries involved, had hastened to annex the benefits. The Weslers, for example, had invested in the Portuguese voyages of 1505, and the Lisbon Government had found it necessary as early as 1503 to open a depot for spices in Antwerp. To this system of continuous reinforcements, worked out by Dom Manoel with the assistance of Antwerp capital, must be attributed the success that attended the navies of Portugal on the Eastern seas. 

Da Gama and his associates, even before they reached the coast of India, began to enforce the claim of his sovereign to be ‘the Lord of Navigation’. Without any kind of warning he intercepted and destroyed any vessel he came across on his voyage. The following incident quoted in Lendas da India is typical of the policy of terrorism and piracy that he introduced into Indian waters. The Portuguese armada ran across some unarmed vessels returning from Mecca. Vasco da Gama captured them and in the words of Lendas, ‘after making the ships empty of goods, prohibited anyone from taking out of it any Moor and then ordered them to set fire to it’. The explanation for capturing the vessel is perhaps to be found in Barroes’ remark: ‘It is true that there does exist a common right to all to navigate the seas and in Europe we recognize the rights which others hold against us; but the right does not extend beyond Europe and therefore the Portuguese as Lords of the Sea are justified in confiscating the goods of all those who navigate the seas without their permission.’ 

Strange and comprehensive claim, yet basically one which every European nation, in its turn, held firmly almost to the end of Western supremacy in Asia. It is true that no other nation put it forward so crudely or tried to enforce it so barbarously as the Portuguese in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, but the principle that the doctrines of international law did not apply outside Europe, that what would be barbarism in London or Paris is civilized conduct in Peking (e.g. the burning of the Summer Palace) and that European nations had no moral obligations in dealing with Asian peoples (as for example when Britain insisted on the opium trade against the laws of China, though opium smoking was prohibited by law in England itself) was part of the accepted creed of Europe’s relations with Asia. So late as 1870 the President of the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce declared: ‘China can in no sense be considered a country entitled to all the same rights and privileges as civilized nations which arc bound by international law. Till the end of European domination the fact that rights existed for Asians against Europeans was conceded only with considerable mental reservation. In countries under direct British occupation, like India, Burma and Ceylon, there were equal rights established by law, but that as against Europeans the law was not enforced very rigorously was known and recognized. In China, under extra-territorial jurisdiction, Europeans were protected against the operation of Chinese laws. In fact, except in Japan this doctrine of different rights persisted to the very end and was a prime cause of Europe’s ultimate failure in Asia. 

K.M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch of Asian History 1498–1945 (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1953), 41-43. Panikkar (1895–1963) was a prominent historian and diplomat in late colonial and post-colonial India. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the author of a number of scholarly histories of the Portuguese Empire and its personalities, has contested Panikkar’s characterizations of da Gama and described Panikkar variously as an “idealogue” and “Indian nationalist,” which he was. Asia and Western Dominance was completed in 1951, just as Panikkar was finishing his tenure as Indian ambassador to China and moving to Cairo to become Indian ambassador to Egypt, however the idea for the book was conceived much earlier. “In 1925,” he recounts, “when I went to Portugal I visited the port of Belem from which Vasco da Gama set out on his fateful voyage to India and marveled at the momentous changes unleashed on the world by that trivial event. It was then that the idea of writing a full scale history of European domination over the Asian continent had occurred to me.” As an idealogue and nationalist, Panikkar oversaw the organization and elaboration of a series of cultural and intellectual projects related to the writing and publication of Indian and Asian history (more on those efforts, at length, in the future).