One decisive factor in the fall of Srivijaya was the conversion of the majority of Sumatran and Javanese to Islam, introduced by the very Indian Ocean traders who had long provided Srivijaya’s wealth.
China and the Indian Ocean trade routes
Meanwhile, the Tang (618 - 907) and Song (960 - 1279) Dynasties in China also emphasized trade and industry, developing strong trade ties along the land-based Silk Roads, and encouraging maritime trade. The Song rulers even created a powerful imperial navy to control piracy on the eastern end of the route.
For centuries, the authorities in China had allowed some foreign merchants to come to trade. After all, everyone wanted Chinese goods, and foreigners were more than willing to take the time and trouble of visiting coastal China to procure fine silks, porcelain, and other items. In 1405, however, the Yongle Emperor of China's new Ming Dynasty sent out the first of seven expeditions to visit all of the empire's major trading partners around the Indian Ocean. The Ming treasure ships under Admiral Zheng He traveled all the way to East Africa, bring back emissaries and trade goods from across the region.
Between the Arabs and the Chinese, several major empires blossomed based largely on maritime trade. The Chola Empire in southern India dazzled travelers with its wealth and luxury; Chinese visitors record parades of elephants covered with gold cloth and jewels marching through the city streets.
An ancient network of trade across the Indian Ocean
The long held presumption in European historical accounts was that the Indian Ocean network had developed primarily to supply the Roman Empire’s demand for exotic goods. However, new evidence shows that the network predates the Romans by millennia.
The Indian Ocean system developed out of the gradual integration of earlier regional networks. By 3000 B.C., travelers in small canoes and rafts moved between towns and trading ports along coastlines from Arabia to the Indian subcontinent. By 2000 B.C., millet and sorghum — grains imported from the East African coast — were part of the cuisine of the Harappan civilization, which stretched across today’s Pakistan and northern India. Archaeological evidence and genetic studies suggest that the first major settlement of Madagascar came not from Africa — a short hop across the Mozambique Channel — but from Indonesia, 4,000 miles away.
The Indian Ocean trade routes connected Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and East Africa. From at least the third century BCE, long-distance sea trade moved across a web of routes linking all of those areas as well as East Asia (particularly China). Long before Europeans "discovered" the Indian Ocean, traders from Arabia, Gujarat, and other coastal areas used triangle-sailed dhows to harness the seasonal monsoon winds. Domestication of the camel helped bring coastal trade goods - silk, porcelain, spices, slaves, incense, and ivory - to inland empires, as well.
Nevertheless, the trade across the Indian Ocean carrying goods to the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean was significant. The other major empires in the period of Roman Imperial power and also involved in the Indian Ocean trade included the Mauryan Empire in India, the Han Dynasty in China, and the Achaemenid Empire in Persia. Thus, silk from China graced Roman aristocrats, Roman coins mingled in Indian treasuries, and Persian jewels show up in Mauryan settings.
In the first millennium BC the Arabs, Phoenicians, and Indians were engaged in sea and land trade in luxury goods such as spices, gold, precious stones, leather of rare animals, ebony and pearls. The sea trade was in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The sea route in the Red Sea was from Bab-el-Mandeb to Berenike and from there by land to the Nile and then by boats to Alexandria. The land trade was in deserts of Western Arabia using camels. The Indonesians were trading in spices (mainly cinnamon and cassia) with East Africa using Catamaran boats and sailing with the help of the Westerlies in the Indian Ocean.
In the second half of the first millennium BC the Arab tribes of South and West Arabia took control over the land trade of spices from South Arabia to the Mediterranean Sea. The tribes were the M'ain, Qataban, Hadhramaut, Saba and Himyarite. In the north the Nabateans took control of the trade route that crossed the Negev from Petra to Gaza. The trade made the Arab tribes very rich. The South Arabia region was called Eudaemon Arabia (the elated Arabia) by the Greeks and was on the agenda of conquests of Alexander of Macedonia before he died. The Indians and the Arabs had control over the sea trade with India. In the late second century BC, the Greeks from Egypt learned from the Indians how to sail directly from Aden to the West coast of India using the monsoon winds (Hippalus) and took control over the sea trade.
Rome played a part in the spice trade during the 5th century, but this role, unlike the Arabian one, did not last through the Middle Ages. The rise of Islam brought a significant change to the trade as Radhanite Jewish and Arab merchants particularly from Egypt eventually took over conveying goods via the Levant to Europe.
While the lure of the luxuries produced in China has always attracted a "global" interest, it was the Spice trade that brought great riches to the Abbasid Caliphate, and even inspired famous legends such as that of Sinbad the Sailor. These early sailors and merchants would often set sail from the port city of Basra and eventually after many voyages they would return to sell their goods including spices in Baghdad.
The fame of many spices such as nutmeg and cinnamon are attributed to these early Spice merchants.
The Banda Islands, also known as "the Spice Islands"
Arab traders – mainly descendants of sailors from Yemen and Oman – dominated maritime routes throughout the Indian Ocean, tapping source regions in the Far East – linking to the secret "spice islands" (Maluku Islands and Banda Islands).
The islands of Molucca also find mention in several records: a Javanese chronicle (1365) mentions the Moluccas and Maloko; and navigational works of the 14th and 15th centuries contain the first unequivocal Arab reference to Moluccas. Sulaima al-Mahr writes:
"East of Timor [where sandalwood is found] are the islands of Bandam and they are the islands where nutmeg and mace are found. The islands of cloves are called Maluku ....."Moluccan products were then shipped to trading emporiums in India, passing through ports like Kozhikode, and through Sri Lanka. from there they were shipped westward across the ports of Arabia to the Near East, to Ormus in the Persian Gulf and Jeddah in the Red Sea and sometimes shipped to East Africa, where they would be used for many purposes, including burial rites. The Abbasids used Alexandria, Damietta, Aden and Siraf as entry ports to India and China. Merchants arriving from India in the port city of Aden paid tribute in form of musk, camphor, ambergris and sandalwood to Ibn Ziyad, the sultan of Yemen.
Indian spice exports find mention in the works of Ibn Khurdadhbeh (850), al-Ghafiqi (1150), Ishak bin Imaran (907) and Al Kalkashandi (14th century). Chinese traveler Xuanzang mentions the town of Puri where "merchants depart for distant countries."
From there, overland routes led to the Mediterranean coasts. From the 8th until the 15th century, the Republic of Venice and neighbouring maritime republics held the monopoly of European trade with the Middle East. The silk and spice trade, involving spices, incense, herbs, drugs and opium, made these Mediterranean city-states phenomenally rich. Spices were among the most expensive and in-demand products of the Middle Ages, and used predominantly in the practice of medicine as well as in cooking.
Venetian merchants distributed these goods throughout Europe until the rise of the Ottoman Empire, which eventually led to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, barring Europeans from important combined land-sea routes.
The discovery of a new sea route to the Spice Islands
Consider nutmeg
"It's no exaggeration to say that the hunt for nutmeg helped build the modern commercial world. In 1453, the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople (modern Istanbul), embargoing trade across the sole sliver of land through which a few merchants had evaded the Arab-Venetian spice monopoly and forcing Europeans to find new eastern trade routes. Columbus sailed the blue Atlantic looking for a passage to India; and Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, his men charging on to the shores of Kerala crying, "For Christ and spices!" The Portuguese military genius Afonso de Albuquerque annexed the Indonesian Molucca islands, of which the Bandas form part, in 1511. The fortresses he built there established and then consolidated a Portuguese monopoly over the world's nutmeg that lasted almost a whole cushy century."
The Cantino planisphere or Cantino world map is the earliest surviving map showing Portuguese geographic discoveries in the east and west.
It is named after Alberto Cantino, an agent for the Duke of Ferrara, who successfully smuggled it from Portugal to Italy in 1502. The map is particularly notable for portraying a fragmentary record of the Brazilian coast, which the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral explored in 1500, and for depicting the African coast of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans with a remarkable accuracy and detail. It was valuable at the beginning of the sixteenth century because it showed detailed and up-to-date strategic information in a time when geographic knowledge of the world was growing at a fast pace. It contains unique historical information about the maritime exploration and the evolution of nautical cartography. The Cantino planisphere is the earliest extant nautical chart where places (in Africa and parts of Brazil and India) are depicted according to their astronomically observed latitudes.
Whose world? Dividing the world between the Portuguese and Spanish
Also clearly visible on the western half of the map is a line of "longitude" that divides the world between the Portuguese and the Spanish. In Brazil, east of this line, the dominant everyday language is Portuguese. The rest of the South American continent speaks South American Spanish.
This line was agreed in the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed at Tordesillas on June 7, 1494, and authenticated at Setúbal, Portugal, and divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between the Portuguese Empire and the Crown of Castile, along a meridian 370 leagues (1,184 nautical miles) west of the Cape Verde islands, off the west coast of Africa. This line of demarcation was about halfway between the Cape Verde islands (already Portuguese) and the islands entered by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage (claimed for Castile and León), named in the treaty as Cipangu and Antilia (Cuba and Hispaniola).
The lands to the east would belong to Portugal and the lands to the west to Castile. The treaty was signed by Spain, 2 July 1494, and by Portugal, 5 September 1494. The other side of the world was divided a few decades later by the Treaty of Zaragoza, signed on 22 April 1529, which specified the antimeridian to the line of demarcation specified in the Treaty of Tordesillas, in order to settle the so-called "Moluccas issue", which had arisen because both kingdoms claimed the Moluccas islands for themselves, asserting that it was within their area of influence established by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.
The conflict began in 1520, when expeditions of both kingdoms reached the Pacific Ocean, because no agreed meridian of longitude had been established in the orient.
In 1511, Malacca, then the centre of Asian trade, was conquered for Portugal by Afonso de Albuquerque, and it was from Malacca that the search to find the secret location of the so-called "spice islands" was instigated. The Banda Islands in the Moluccas, then the single world source of nutmeg and cloves, had always been the main purpose behind all the Portuguese expeditions in the Indian Ocean. Albuquerque sent António de Abreu in search of the Moluccas, and particularly, the Banda islands.
The expedition arrived in early 1512, passing en route through the Lesser Sunda Islands, before becoming the first Europeans to arrive at this small group of islands. Later, after a separation forced by a shipwreck, Abreu's vice-captain Francisco Serrão, sailed to the north and, but his ship sank off Ternate, where, luckily, he obtained a license to build a Portuguese fortress/factory: the Forte de São João Baptista de Ternate.
Letters describing the "Spice Islands", from Serrão to Ferdinand Magellan, who were friends and possibly cousins, helped Magellan persuade the Spanish crown to finance the first circumnavigation of the earth.
On 6 November 1521, the Moluccas, "the cradle of all spices", were reached from the east by Magellan's fleet, sailing then under Juan Sebastián Elcano, at the service of the Spanish Crown. Before Magellan and Serrão could meet in the Moluccas, Serrão died on the island of Ternate, almost at the same time Magellan was killed in the battle of Mactan in the Philippines.
After the Magellan-Elcano expedition (1519–1522), Charles V sent a second expedition, led by García Jofre de Loaísa, to colonise the islands, based on the assertion that they were in the Castilian zone, under the Treaty of Tordesillas. After some difficulties, the expedition reached the Moluccas, docking at Tidore, where the Spanish established a fort. There was inevitable conflict with the Portuguese, who were already established in Ternate. Nearly a decade of skirmishes between the Spanish and Portuguese over the possession of the islands ensued.
In 1524, both kingdoms organised the "Junta de Badajoz-Elvas" to resolve the dispute. Each crown appointed three astronomers and cartographers, three pilots and three mathematicians, who formed a committee to establish the exact location of the antimeridian of Tordesillas, and the intention was to divide the whole world into two equal hemispheres.
The Treaty of Zaragoza laid down that the eastern border between the two domain zones was 297.5 leagues (1,763 kilometres, 952 nautical miles), or 17° east, of the Maluku Islands. The treaty included a safeguard clause which stated that the deal would be undone if at any time the emperor wished to revoke it, with the Portuguese being reimbursed the money they had to pay, and each nation "will have the right and the action as that is now." That never happened however, because the emperor desperately needed the Portuguese money to finance the War of the League of Cognac against his arch-rival Francis I of France.
The treaty did not clarify or modify the line of demarcation established by the Treaty of Tordesillas, nor did it validate Spain's claim to equal hemispheres (180° each), so the two lines divided the Earth into unequal portions. Portugal's portion was roughly 191° of the Earth's circumference, whereas Spain's portion was roughly 169°. There was a ±4° margin of uncertainty as to the exact size of both portions, due to the variation of opinion about the precise location of the Tordesillas line.
Under the treaty, Portugal gained control of all lands and seas west of the line, including all of Asia and its neighbouring islands so far "discovered", leaving Spain with most of the Pacific Ocean. Although the Philippines was not mentioned in the treaty, Spain implicitly relinquished any claim to it because it was well west of the line. Nevertheless, by 1542, King Charles V had decided to colonise the Philippines, assuming that Portugal would not protest too vigorously because the archipelago had no spices. Although he failed in his attempt, King Philip II succeeded in 1565, establishing the initial Spanish trading post at Manila. As his father had expected, there was little opposition from the Portuguese.
Manila - 'the world's first global city'
Frankopan writes:
In 1571, the foundation of Manila by the Spanish changed the rhythm of global trade; for a start it followed a programme of colonisation whose character was markedly less destructive for the local population than had been the case after the first Atlantic crossings. Originally established as a base from which to acquire spices, the settlement quickly became a major metropolis and an important connection point between Asia and the Americas. Goods now began to move across the Pacific without passing through Europe first, as did the silver to pay for them. Manila became an emporium where a rich array of goods could be bought.
Manila was, in the words of one modern commentator, 'the world's first global city'.The amount of silver heading from the Americas through the Philippines and on into the rest of Asia was staggering: at least as much passed this way as it did through Europe in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, causing alarm in some quarters in Spain as remittances from the New World began to fall.
(pages 239-240)
Known as kraak porcelain (probably after the Dutch word ‘carrack’, meaning a Portuguese galleon that traded with the East Indies), it was the first type of Chinese export ware to reach Europe in bulk, initially via Portuguese traders and subsequently via the Dutch East India Company (voc). Impervious to water, unlike other luxury imports such as textiles or spices, kraak was used as ballast cargo, and has been discovered in great quantities in shipwrecks. Kraak porcelain features prominently in seventeenth century Dutch still-life paintings of exotica, and was often fitted with fashionable silver-gilt mounts, as here, to protect its edges and increase its preciousness.
The silver road was strung round the world like a belt. The precious metal ended up in one place in particular: China. It did so for two reasons. First, China's size and sophistication made it a major producer of luxury goods, including the ceramics and porcelain that were so desirable in Europe that a huge counterfeit market quickly grew up. The Chinese, wrote Matteo Ricci while visiting Nanjing, 'are greatly given to forging antique things, with great artifice and ingenuity', and generating large profits thanks to their skill.
China was able to supply the export market in volume and to step up production accordingly.The second reason why so much money flowed into China was an imbalance in the relationship between precious metals. In China, silver's value hovered around an approximate ratio to gold of 6:1, significantly higher than in India, Persia or the Ottoman Empire; its value was almost double its pricing in Europe in the early sixteenth century. In practice, this meant that European money bought more in Chinese markets and from Chinese traders than it did elsewhere - which in turn provided a powerful incentive to buy Chinese. The opportunities for currency trading and taking advantage of these imbalances in what modern bankers call arbitrage were grasped immediately by new arrivals to the Far East - especially those who recognised that the unequal value of gold in China and Japan produced easy profits.
(pages 240-241)
Update
In the chapter 'Cheap Money' in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things - A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel (see Guardian Review), they look at this particular history of exchange:
"Once again we can see cheapness at work. Cheap lives turned into cheap workers dependent on cheap care and cheap food in home communities, requiring cheap fuel to collect and process cheap nature to produce cheap money - and quite a lot of it. Potosi was the single most important silver source in the New World, and New World silver constituted 74 percent of the world's sixteenth century silver production. Silver does not make trade, but global trade can be traced from the mines of Potosi. Unless it forms parts of circuits of exchange, silver is just shiny dirt. It's the fusion of commodity production and exchange that turns it into capital. That's why some commentators have suggested that the birth year of global trade was 1571, when the city of Manila was founded. Silver from the New world didn't stay in Europe but was propelled along the spice routes and later across the Pacific. Japanese silver flowed to China from 1540 to 1620 as part of a complex network of exchange and arbitrage. Without the connection of exchange of silver for Asian commodities, money couldn't flow from the New World into East Asia. Because the Portuguese and then the Dutch controlled maritime silver flows through Europe to Asia, the Spanish short-circuited them, annually sending as much silver (fifty tons) across the Pacific and through Manila as they did across the Atlantic through Seville. Similar volumes of silver found their way to the Baltic. In eastern Europe, silver combined with credit, quasi-feudal landlords, and enserfed labor to deliver cheap timber, food, and vital raw materials to the Dutch Republic. To remember this is to insist that, although Europe features in it, capitalism's story isn't a Eurocentric one. The rise of capitalism integrated life and power from Potosi to Manila, from Goa to Amsterdam."
(pages 84-85)
Potosí lies at the foot of the Cerro de Potosí—sometimes referred to as the Cerro Rico ("rich mountain") — a mountain popularly conceived of as being "made of" silver ore that dominates the city. The Cerro Rico is the reason for Potosí's historical importance, since it was the major supply of silver for Spain during the period of the New World Spanish Empire.
A China crisis?Picking up again from Peter Frankopan's book The Silk Roads - A New History of the World, and the chapter 'The Road of Silver' sets out the way globalisation was no less problematic five centuries ago than it is today:
"Maps like the Seldon Map, recently rediscovered in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, likewise demostrate the increasing Chinese interest in trade and travel in this period, offering an extensive overview of South-East Asia, complete with shipping routes. however, these are something of an exception: in this period, as before, Chinese maps typically retained a cloistered view of the world, with visual representations bounded to the north by the Great Wall and to the east by the sea. This was symptomatic of China's readiness to play a passive role at a time when the world was opening up; but it also reflected European naval superiority in East Asia where Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese vessels targeted each other - but also regularly seized Chinese junks and their cargoes too.China was not keen to take part in running battles between aggressive rivals, let alone to be made to suffer as a result; in the circumstances, the inclination to become increasingly introspective, but at the same time reap the benefit of traders coming to them, seemed entirely logical."
"Much of the silver that flooded into China was spent in a series of major reforms, not the least of which were the monetisation of the economy, the encouragement of free labour markets and a deliberate programme to stimulate foreign trade. Ironically, China's love of silver and the premium it placed on this particular precious metal became its Achilles heel. With such great quantities of silver reaching China, above all through Manila, it was inevitable that its value would start to fall, which over time caused price inflation. The net result was that the value of silver and above all its value in relation to gold, was forced into line with other regions and continents. Unlike India, where the impact of the opening up of the world produced new wonders of the world, in China it was to lead to a serious economic and political crisis in the seventeenth century. Globalisation was no less problematic five centuries ago than it is today."
(pages 241-242)
A Dutch monopoly, but not for long?
Consider Nutmeg (continued)
The Netherlanders enforced their nutmeg monopoly with paranoid brutality, banning the export of the trees, drenching every nutmeg in lime before shipping to render it infertile, and imposing the death penalty on anyone suspected of stealing, growing or selling nutmegs elsewhere. When some Bandanese failed to appreciate the VOC's God-given right to control the nutmeg trade – it's possible the islanders hadn't understood the "contract" to which they'd "agreed" – the then head of the Company, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, ordered the systematic quartering and beheading of every Bandanese male over the age of 15. The population of the Banda islands was around 15,000 when the VOC arrived. 15 years later, it was 600.
With this militarised vision of ruthless capitalism, the VOC became the richest corporation in the world. By 1669 it was paying its shareholders an annual dividend of 40% while sustaining 50,000 employees, 10,000 soldiers and around 200 ships, many armed. The Dutch perpetuated their nutmeg monopoly by obdurate force and pathological secrecy, never revealing to traders the islands' location. Then, in 1769, the impeccably named Pierre Poivre, a kind of roving French horticulturalist somewhere between the Scarlet Pimpernel and Alan Titchmarsh, swooped on to the archipelago under the noses of the Dutch and smuggled out nutmegs and nutmeg trees. The French planted the seeds on their colony Mauritius, and the Dutch monopoly was broken.
Finally, the British occupied the islands from 1796 to 1802, and were then able to grow nutmeg in Penang and Singapore and thereafter in their other possessions.
The Caribbean island of Grenada, a longstanding British colony, eventually became the world's second leading nutmeg exporter.
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