Two earlier examples again point to a rather benevolent situation, where merchants were able to counter attempts to fleece them from land powers, and port controllers. A Jewish merchant who left Oman poor, but made a great fortune, came back thirty years later in 912 to Sohar with a huge cargo of Chinese merchandise. Envious people persuaded the Caliph in Baghdad to confiscate his goods, but the governor of Oman was worried about this as he knew that he would lose trade in his port if word of this got out. He summoned all the heads of the merchant communities, and told them what had happened. They closed down the markets, and sent a petition to the Caliph, and the governor was able to avoid having the Jewish merchant arrested. Buzurg recounts a very similar tale, one perhaps based on this actual event. He tells how a rich Jewish merchant in Oman was unjustly arrested by the rulers. This was seen as prejudicial to all merchants and foreigners, and once word of his arrest got around no ships would come to Oman. The markets all closed and foreign merchants got ready to leave. Upset, the locals pointed out that 'We shall be deprived of our living when ships no longer come here, because Oman is a town where men get everything from the sea.'
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In sum, there is very little evidence of the use of force in the Indian Ocean before 1498. The bottom line is competition. None of these port cities could afford to be too abusive, for then merchants would go elsewhere. The crucial point is that these Asian port cities prospered not by compulsion, but by providing facilities for trade freely undertaken by a vast array of merchants. What the rulers provided was really opportunities, fair treatment, an infrastructure within which trade could take place. They ensured low and relatively equitable customs duties, and a certain law and order, but did little else. Officials concerned with trade were instructed to encourage and welcome visitors. In short, visiting merchants wanted a level playing field. If they did not get this, they could retaliate by going elsewhere.
What was the basis of these merchant communities? The main distinction between various
natios
(a word deriving from the Mediterranean, which can be used to refer to Indian Ocean merchant communities) was not power or wealth, and certainly, in this pre-modern and pre-national age, it was not nationality: these people did not carry passports, and knew little or nothing of frontiers between sovereign states. The senior historian Philip Curtin some time ago wrote a book about 'trade diasporas', which he thought characterised much premodern trade. The notion is that various traders spread out from some place of origin, like say Jews, or
Armenians.
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However, his stress on their being dispersed, and on the importance of kin and connections, seems to be to a degree invalid; all merchants at this time operated through these sorts of connections, regardless of whether they were an Armenian trading in Tibet or a Gujarati Jain trading in Cambay. Indeed, the whole concept of a diaspora seems problematic, for many of the groups he classifies in this way did retain strong ties with some base or home area; this certainly applied to India's Hindu and Muslim overseas traders, and even to Armenians, who had no country but did have centres, notably New Julfa in Isfahan.
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If these merchant communities were not all trade diasporas, on what criteria were they based? Obviously not all merchants were itinerant. Rather, various merchant groups had agents, often kin, located in the major trading centres. There were at least two reasons for this. First, someone based in an echelle for some time would learn the local languages and customs, and provide good information for his visiting kin folk. Some port controllers, as we saw, provided mediators for visitors, but in many cases merchants preferred to use their own locally based men. Second, the monsoon pattern necessitated a local permanent contact. A merchant who arrived and was dependent on leaving on the next monsoon would be at a massive disadvantage, as the locals would merely put up their prices and he would have no bargaining power as he would have to leave at a set time in order to catch the monsoon to get home. But someone there permanently could buy when the market was low, and sell when it was high, throughout the year.
Merchant networks could be very extensive indeed, stretching all around Eurasia. From the early fifteenth century the Venetians, who dominated the trade in spices in the Mediterranean, had networks of correspondents and associated merchants' firms going from Venice to Aleppo, Baghdad, Basra, Hurmuz, Diu and Tabriz, and probably to Mashad and Samarkand as well. The aim, successfully realised, was to get information on planned movements of goods. The Armenians had similar networks, spreading from Amsterdam to Moscow and from Istanbul to Cochin and Abyssinia.
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Some of these were kin based networks, in which family ties and a common religion intersected. Armenians practised a particular form of Christianity. Jews had their own faith. Larger trading groups were internally divided: Hindus most obviously by caste, as were Jains. But the best information we have on these religious divisions relates, fortuitously, to the major dispersed trading communities in the Indian Ocean, that is Muslims. As we commented extensively earlier in this chapter, merchants and religious specialists worked hand-in-hand in our period, indeed could be the same person, in that a trader could well adhere to a particular Sufi (Muslim devotional) order, and a religious specialist would trade on his own behalf. In the fifteenth century we know of a group who came from a town in Iran called Kazarun, whose community solidarity was based on locality as well as common religious practice. These merchants were all adherents of a Muslim saint of this town, and his successors sold 'spiritual insurance', in that the merchants would get a blessing and in return, once back from a successful voyage, they would pay a sum of money. This particular network had people in Cambay, Calicut, Quilon, and Guangzhou in China.
Yet we must not let a communal flavour come in to our discussion. There is clear evidence that in Gujarat Hindus and Muslims interacted economically, with for example Muslim traders being happy to use Hindu brokers to secure their goods. Similarly, Jews traded with Armenians, and so on. Indeed it could be, reverting to our discussion of littoral society (see pages 37–41), that all those who travelled and traded by sea had a certain commonality which gave them some identity with those who also did this, as compared with those of their own religion who did not. A Muslim sea trader may have felt more at home with a Jewish sea trader than with a Muslim peasant, or for that matter a mullah, located far inland. The physical aspect of the sea, and the port – the ship, the prostitutes and taverns, the role of the monsoon, haggling over customs – made up an experience which differentiated sea travellers from all others.
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These merchant groupings acted relatively autonomously within the port polities. In Melaka at the time of the Portuguese conquest in 1511 four merchant communities were important, each of them living autonomous lives with their own headmen, called shahbandars, and governing themselves with little or no reference to the ruler, the sultan. The most important of these four groups were the Gujaratis. Many were resident, but some 1,000 merchants from Gujarat visited each year. The other main groups were other merchants from the west, that is from India and especially Klings from Coromandel, Malays from Indonesia and as far east as the Spice Islands and the Philippines, and the East Asians, mostly from South China but also from Japan and Okinawa. They lived in ethnically based quarters, here called kampongs, and each group was represented before the 'state' by a shahbandar. The sultan participated vigorously in trade, but apparently gave himself no particular advantage from his position as ruler.
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Similarly, in the great Gujarati ports different merchant communities had recognised leaders, though their power here, being located not in an independent port city but in a city which was part of a major landed state, must have been less. In Calicut there was a clear distinction, and considerable autonomy, for Gujarati Hindu merchants, foreign Muslims from various places of origin (the most important being those from the Red Sea and Cairo, known as
pardesi
), and local Muslims, known as Mapillahs. 'They sail everywhere with goods of many kinds and have in the town itself a Moorish Governor of their own who rules and punishes them without interference from the King, save that the Governor gives an account of certain matters to the King.'
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Most political elites used intermediaries to handle their trade, rather than engage themselves in haggling and bargaining. In Gujarat Muslim governors and rulers often used Hindu and Jain intermediaries to handle their private trade. In southeast Asia port city rulers traded vigorously, and indeed sometimes may have taken advantage of their power position. Increasingly, however, they used a quasi official called the saudagar raja, typically a south Indian Muslim or chulia who was the local ruler's official business agent. These people acted as brokers or mediators between the economy and the court.
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The point to note here is that it is one thing for a ruler or a noble to trade, whether directly or through an intermediary, but it is quite
another matter to pursue mercantalist policies by which the state as a state aims to control and direct trade.
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It is true however that this varied from port to port. The situation in the Malay world appears to be rather different. Here there were no vast territorial empires, but rather a host of smaller polities. All of these were more or less dependent on maritime trade. This area was much more maritime, more imbricated in the ocean, than were the other areas we have discussed. It is revealing to note that, unlike most other parts of the ocean, especially China and India, all great southeast Asian cities were either ports or were on navigable rivers. For the latter, we can instance Pegu, Ava, Phonpenh, Ayutthaya, and for the former Pasai, Melaka, Aceh, Palembang, Patani, Brunei, Manila, Makassar, Banten, Demak, Grisek/Surabaya.
This seems to have meant that the rulers of these port polities played a much larger role in sea trade than was the case elsewhere, for trade was more central both for them and for the usually rather limited inland areas behind them. In this insular world the inland was closely connected to the coast, and trade patterns in the ocean affected even basically inland states like Burma and Thailand, let alone the smaller coastal states in Indonesia such as Aceh, Perak, Kedah, and Johore.
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What examples do we have of state intervention? They are actually few and far between in southeast Asia. An extreme example was Srivijaya, a Sumatran thalassocracy, which controlled the Straits of Melaka from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries. More generally, Arun Das Gupta gives a picture of heavy state involvement: ports were dominated by sultans, coastal trade was under their control, and so was spice production, which was done by slaves.
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It may be that coercion increased once the Portuguese, with their attempts at monopoly, arrived. The ruler of Aceh began to control pepper production, and even wiped out cultivation in some areas in order to deny pepper to the Europeans.
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The best summing up for the southeast Asian case may be that there certainly was more intervention in trade from states than was the case in the rest of the Indian Ocean, and this was fundamentally a consequence of the geography of the area. Yet this is a relative matter. Obviously no Indian Ocean state or port polity got near the sort of economic control which any modern state routinely exercises.
I will end this long account of ports, products and merchants with a handful of more personal and individual accounts of actual travellers. Many of these men are petty traders or, in F.C. Lane's felicitous phrase, the sea proletariat. They travelled mostly short distances – up and down the coasts, or on the inland waterways, the backwaters of the Kerala near interior or in the marsh area of the Tigris-Euphrates delta. They visited many strange places well outside the interest of the established great merchants. The fictitious but still arguably prototypical Sindbad the Sailor visited one place, probably the remote Andaman Islands, and found that the inhabitants rode their horses bareback. He got a saddle made, and they were all delighted and gave him many presents.
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Yet again we must not categorise too strictly. Pedlars sometimes could be so lucky as to acquire a valuable item, and there is no reason to assume merchant princes found it beneath their dignity to trade in necessities. Sindbad seems to be a
typical Indian Ocean trader. He purportedly lived in Baghdad during the golden reign of Harun al Rashid, when the city was at its most splendid. On his first voyage, 'From Basrah we sailed, day after day, night after night, over the sea, visiting island after island and land after land, selling and bartering our goods at each.' So also on the second, when they went 'visiting from island to island and ocean to ocean for many weeks, making ourselves known to the notables and chief merchants at each port of call, and both selling and exchanging our goods to great advantage.' And again on his fifth voyage, when after his celebrated escape from the Old Man of the Sea he traded in coconuts, and with them bought pepper and cinnamon, and made so much from them that he was able to hire divers once he got to the sea of pearls. He made 'an immense fortune'. Then he bought aloe wood, and went back home to Basra.
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Ghosh's brilliant study of an 'antique land' describes other people who travelled huge distances. In Aden in the 1120s there were at least two Jewish merchants who 'bear witness to a pattern of movement so fluent and far-ranging that they make the journeys of later medieval travellers, such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, seem unremarkable in comparison.' One was the prominent Jew Abu Sa'id Halfon of Fustat, that is Cairo, who now lived in Aden. He travelled between Egypt, India, East Africa, Syria, Morocco and Spain. The other was Abu Zikri Sijilmasi, from Morocco, who travelled to Egypt, Aden, southern Europe, and India.
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