| Vasco da Gama’s voyage around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 was an epoch-making event, putting an end to the Muslim monopoly of trade in the Indian Ocean and opening the way for the British and Dutch Empires in South Asia and the East Indies. The era of European imperialism began with merchant adventurers who established trading posts in the southern seas, which became the bases for further expansion. The Portuguese were the pioneers, taking Kilwa and sacking Mombasa in 1505 before establishing bases in Zanzibar and Pemba. In 1509 they defeated a combined Egyptian-Indian fleet to take Goa on the Malabar coast. In 1515 they conquered Malacca and in the same year Hormuz on the Persian Gulf. Portuguese hegemony was soon replaced by that of the Dutch, whom the Portuguese had tried to exclude from the lucrative pepper and spice trade. |
The forts guarding the entrance to the harbor of Muscat were originally built by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century on the site of earlier strongholds. After surviving Ottoman attacks, the Portuguese garrisons surrendered to the Omani Imam Sultan bin Saif in 1650. |
| The Dutch defeated the Portuguese at Amboyna in 1605, taking Banda in 1621, Ceylon (Sarandib, now Sri Lanka) in 1640, and Malacca in 1641. Batavia (now Jakarta), which would become the capital of the Dutch East Indies, was founded in 1619. |
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| Although the process was a gradual one, the Portuguese intervention introduced changes in the patterns of trade and in the political economies of the Muslim states in the region. By the end of the seventeenth century England and Holland, two small countries perched on the western periphery of Eurasia, had become (with France) the dominant forces in world trade. Cargoes of raw commodities — timber, grain, fish, and salt — replaced the traditional trade in luxury goods. The shift in cargoes heralded even more far-reaching changes, whereby the world would be divided between colonies producing raw materials and industrial and commercial centers producing high-value goods and services. Viewed from the perspective of the twenty-first century, Vasco da Gama’s voyage represents the beginnings of a process that culminates in “globalization.” |
As the British began to establish themselves in India, they imported their own architectural styles,
as shown in a watercolor of a house built at Chapra in 1796.
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| Two technological factors drove these changes: better sails and gunpowder. Their position on the eastern shore of the Atlantic had encouraged the Portuguese to develop powerful naval vessels capable of riding the Atlantic storms and sailing closer to the wind than the lateen-rigged Arab dhows. The Portuguese ships were larger and sturdier than their Arab and Persian counterparts, and thus able to hold more cargo and engage in longer runs. The new route around southern Africa to the Indies bypassed the West Asian trade routes, bringing goods from South Asia and the Indies — spices, cloths, and other valuable commodities — directly to Lisbon, enriching the merchants there but cutting out the intermediate beneficiaries of the trade between Europe and Asia (these had included the Venetians and Genoese who plied the waters of the eastern Mediterranean as well as the Muslim traders who carried goods by land). The gunpowder revolution — like the revolution in sailing techniques — was gradual, but reached equally far in its consequences. With the development of cannon, stone fortresses ceased to be impregnable, lending the military advantage to well-organized central powers that could afford to make the costly investment in artillery and firearms. As military technology advanced, a shift took place in the balance of power between the traditional warrior classes, for whom military prowess was vested in notions of tribal solidarity, honor, prestige, and courage (classic virtues of the nomadic conquerors), and economic powers with sophisticated administrative centers capable of keeping up with the latest military technology. Under European pressure the fragmented Muslim states that followed in the wake of Arab caliphate and the Mongol invasions were consolidated into larger units dominated by the three great “gunpowder empires”: Ottoman Eurasia, Shiite Iran, and Mughal India. |
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