Asia and the Americas: Commodities and Commerce, c
Asia and the Americas: Commodities and Commerce, c. 1750 - c. 1850
George Bryan Souza
What was the role of commodities and commerce between Asia and the Americas, c. 1750 – c. 1850 and how does this question relate to the Asia-Pacific in the making of America and writing Global History? Although commodities, the production, commercialization, and consumption of objects, were key historical components in all parts of the globe, it is argued that they were of fundamental importance in the internal and external economic, social, and cultural development of Asia and the Americas in particular and in the relationships and connections between the two regions. This paper is designed to provide a preliminary and, hopefully, provocative interpretation and answer to that question.
It is organized into two sections. In the first section, I will introduce and discuss a relatively new analytical methodology, commodity chain analysis, and use it to briefly examine a case of two commodities – cinnamon and cassia and their characteristics, which were generically shared by other commodities in Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere. In the second section, I will introduce and discuss the commerce or the exchanges of commodities between Asia and the Americas c. 1750 – c. 1850 from the Portuguese merchants’ perspective, during a period which experienced dramatic changes with the emergence of Anglo-American and Chinese commercial dominance. While acknowledging the existence of that domination, I will introduce some preliminary research results that describe the neglected activities of Portuguese merchants in Asia in general and their trade with the Americas in particular and identify where and with which commodities that they encountered some successes and argue for their inclusion in the present discourse on maritime commerce and exchanges in the development of Asia and the Americas.
1) Commodities
Commodities[1] are things or objects, which can be seen or touched but are not usually a living animal, plant or person. Thing(s) is a term that can be used to refer in an approximate way to an object or to a particular set of objects. Both, things or objects, can be objectified or treated as inanimate, with no feelings, opinions or rights of their own. A commodity, therefore, is a substance, material, or product (produced by an industrial process or, less commonly, something that is grown or obtained through farming) with particular physical characteristics from which things or objects have been or can be made. It is also a substance or product with a quality or value that can be traded, bought or sold.
A commodity chain or chains refers to the factors, processes, technology, logistics, distribution and commercialization networks, consumption patterns, and demand for one or more substances, materials, or products with particular physical characteristics which things or objects have been or can be made that are of a quality and value, which are traded, bought or sold by society.[2] While described as a chain, operationally it is more circular and screw-like in function as the commodity flows through place(s), space(s) and time(s).
A generic representation of a commodity chain, as a general proposition, is shown in Diagram 1. It begins with a commoditized object that is identified, defined, and situated by its particular physical characteristics and its subsequent use, value, and demands within society and inter-connects the production, commercialization, and consumption of a good. Temporally, it is a dynamic historical process that is subject to change, evolution, contraction, cessation, growth, and progression over time. Spatially, it is also an inclusive analytical tool, since it captures either a moment or large segments in time that encompasses all factors of production, commercialization, and consumption of a commodity over space. And it captures the actions of multiple agents and their agencies in this process. Since individual commodities and their chains share symbiotic production and marketing networks with other commodity chains, this analytical tool is even more dynamic, because it interfaces the relationships between one commodity chain and others, one example being the production of raw cotton or silk and multiple natural dyes with handicraft textile production and another example being the mining of copper and zinc for the minting of coin and metallurgical production of brass.
A production circuit is in general a finite geographically delimited area where a commoditized object is obligatorily produced. If the object is dependent upon elaboration or process of transformation, its production circuit is likewise where those modifications are performed. It is also an area that may contain the initial or primary market(s) in which the commodity is sold. The term circuit is employed to suggest regularity in production at geographically fixed location(s) or site(s).
A commercial circuit(s) is/are the area(s) in which the produced commodity is introduced into its final market, commercialized, and, generally, consumed. The term circuit is employed to suggest some geographically fixed or localizable site(s) of some regularity and volume in commercialization and consumption of the commodity. Depending upon the commodity and by focusing on the trajectory and acceptance of a commodity in individual and multiple commercial circuit(s), it is possible to capture and visualize the movements of commodities, for example in the case of Chinese sugar, within and from China to Japan and elsewhere and identify the catchments areas where Chinese sugar was consumed not only in their internal, regional but global markets.
The term currency circuit has been employed, primarily by economic historians specializing in the history of types and flows of monies and commodity monies.[3] The term circuit is employed to suggest 1) a finite but, more generally, a broad geographically delimited area, region, or state, where money or monies, as mediums of exchange, circulated for purposes of payments of goods, services, and obligations such as taxes or debts; or 2) a more explicit and much less broadly defined finite geographically delimited area, where one money, as a medium exchange, was preferred over all others by one group, normally producers of one commodity, and preferentially circulated for purposes of payment to those producers for their production of a specific commodity. For example, in the first case in Qing China, over the period under examination, two metals, un-minted silver and copper (actually brass) coin were in circulation and the accepted mediums of exchange for larger and smaller transaction purposes in payments for goods, services, and obligations such as taxes or debts.[4] In the second case in Qing China, still in the period under examination, tea producers in the Fujian highlands, for example, developed a preference from the very late eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century to receive payment for their tea production in a foreign minted silver coin, the Carolus peso or dollar, because of its reliability in touch and purity of silver content over the usual and here-to-fore commonly accepted un-minted silver and copper coin in circulation.[5] It is critically important to observe that in this second example both production and the currency circuits shared the same space.
Historians, and other social scientists, have employed and extensively discussed the term, hinterland, to describe the spatial and commercial relationships between production, commercialization, and consumption of commodities.[6] “Hinterland” comes from the German words for “behind” and “land” and is defined as: 1) a remote country region, which is distant from cities or their cultural influence; and 2) land adjacent to water, which lies next to coastline or a river. Some of the synonyms for the term are environs, surroundings, vicinity, and neighborhood and one antonym is heartland. Historians have followed the definitions of the term that is found above and generated additional concepts relating to the physical proximity of hinterlands through the use of the terms continuous and discontinuous. The focus on hinterlands in this paper generally follows the proponents of the port and colonial port paradigm[7] that is that they are primarily lands adjacent to water, which lies next to coastline or a river, without forgetting, however, that they may also be a remote country region, which is distant from cities or their cultural influence and their physical proximity to ports may be continuous or discontinuous. And the term may be employed in describing commodity production and commercial circuits, and the locations and patterns of consumption and demand for a commodity.
Wallerstein, in developing his views on the formation of a world system,[8] was one of the first scholars to focus on commodity chains and their role in linking peripheries or areas having a position of little or only minor involvement with other parts of the globe in the rise of capitalism and an emerging global economy, which he views as occurring only in one core or essential part of the world, Europe.[9] Other scholars such as Frank working, especially, on the history of economic development in Latin America contributed to the formulation of dependency theory, which strove to explain developmental paths that linked the colonial heritage of the organization and exploitation of primary commodities as a major contributing factor for the economic development in certain parts of the world to have lagged in comparison with others.[10] Recent work on Latin America by Topik and others has returned to the question of dependency and developed sound empirically driven examinations of individual commodity chains in that region that suggests that creoles and indigenous agents and their agencies in developing commodity production were not as dependent as earlier work has suggested and that peripheral relations with colonial or neo-colonial centers or cores are of greater historical complexity and fluidity.[11]
While all commodities may be historized and examined by employing individual commodity chain analysis, we only have the time and space to briefly highlight the case of two Asian commodities –cinnamon and cassias, identify their salient characteristics, and to integrate their commercialization via maritime trade into the emerging global economy over our period.
Cinnamon and cassia are the names of a spice from the bark of different varieties of the laurel family that were and are used as a fragrance and condiment providing fragrance in the preparation of food, sweets, and drink, especially chocolate, which was attributed medicinal properties initially and for an unspecified long period of time in the early modern period. “True” cinnamon, as shown in Illustration 1 (in the presentation), is from the bark of a specific variety of the laurel found only on Sri Lanka. Cassia or false cinnamon, as shown in Illustration 2 (in the presentation), is from the barks of different varieties of the laurel family found in different parts of Asia (for example, China, southwest India, Vietnam, and Mindanao in the Philippines). Cassias have similar properties as cinnamon but possess lesser fragrance and are coarser and darker in color.[12] Cinnamon and cassia were known and involved in Eurasian exchanges from ancient times.[13] It was not until the late eighteenth century forward that cassia began to be accepted as an alternative, substitute, or the equivalent of cinnamon in commerce and by global consumers.
Cinnamon and cassia barks were collected and stripped by laborers from the different varieties of trees of the laurel family that were found in the wild. The method of collection of cinnamon and cassia was fundamentally the same, although cassia does not appear to have been and, in all probability, was not peeled. The probable distinction in the different handling process of cinnamon and cassia is important. The difference is not in the collection and stripping of the bark from the tree. It is, in the case of cinnamon, the laborer’s peeling of the top or exterior layer of the bark, which reveals a second bark that is finer in appearance, touch, fragrance, and color.
More details are presently known about cinnamon’s production circuit on Sri Lanka than those of cassia in China, southwest India, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Cinnamon is not found on the entire island of Sri Lanka.[14] From the fourteenth century forwards, the collection and peeling of cinnamon was primarily and still is in the hands of one communal group, the Salagama or cinnamon peelers caste. Appearing in European reports and accounts under slightly different transliterated variations of the Portuguese term chaliá,[15] the Salagama[16] were the indigenous communal group or caste[17] responsible to local and foreign rulers for the collection and delivery of cinnamon within the Mahabadda or “Great Tax or Rent” system.[18] If the pear or ham shaped island is imagined and drawn mentally into quadrants, the lower southwest quadrant was and is where cinnamon and the laborers that collected and peeled it are found. Map 1 (in the presentation) locates the Salagama and non-Salagama cinnamon peeling caste villages and hamlets on Sri Lanka that produced cinnamon over the period, based on research that identified nearly all of the historical names for their villages, located them by their geographical coordinates, and generated this map through the use of Geospatial Information System (GIS) software.
Cinnamon was the object and commodity with a global demand that initially attracted the Portuguese to establish a presence in the maritime regions of Sri Lanka[19] and subsequently led the Dutch East India Company (the Company),[20] joined by the Sinhalese troops of the King of Kandy, to wrest the control and commercialization of cinnamon from the Portuguese by the 1650s. From that time until the English occupation of Sri Lanka in 1796, the Company’s monopoly of Sri Lankan cinnamon was one of the cornerstones of its commercial success.[21] During the early English colonial period, the English East India Company attempted and failed to maintain the pre-eminent commercial position of cinnamon, which by the 1830s had declined significantly in importance and value with the emergence of commercial and consumer acceptance of lower priced and inferior quality cassia as a alternative to it.
The assessment of the Mahabadda tax was on an annual basis; the collection and peeling of cinnamon was coordinated around the two times of the year that cinnamon could be cut and peeled: once after the great harvest and delivered around the New Year and the second after the lesser harvest and delivered around the Katti festival. At the appropriate time, the Salagama would form work gangs (called ranchus) and go out into the hinterland “and set up camps called wadiya to collect the cinnamon that grew wild.”[22] The logistics of its production and delivery was dependent upon the numbers of peelers that could be employed, the amount of cinnamon that an individual peeler could cut and peel and the physical proximity of cinnamon producing trees to an acceptable delivery or extraction point. After being cut and peeled, a cinnamon peeler divided a load of cinnamon into two and suspended it on a five foot pliant wooden pole or pingo, which was carried away from the point of collection on the shoulder of a porter over paths. Upon arrival of these pingo loads to the cinnamon peelers village or delivery or point of extraction, the loads of cinnamon were baled. During the Dutch period, the Company standardized the weight of a delivered bale of cinnamon at 80 ponden or 87.2 pounds. This was most probably done for ease in handling and the maximization of space, load, and weight in their shipping. Their bales of cinnamon were subsequently wrapped in leather hides if the cinnamon was destined for Europe or in gunny sacking material made from jute if the cinnamon was destined for intra-Asian or trans-Pacific markets.
How was cinnamon involved in diverse commercial circuits controlled by multiple agents and employed in geographically distant networks over this entire period? During the late Portuguese period, because of the union of the crowns of Spain and Portugal (the period of the Catholic Monarchy, from 1580-1640), there was an intensification of supply and re-distribution of Asian commodities, including cinnamon, in Europe via Lisbon to Spain at Seville and re-distributed from Seville to New World markets. Regardless and in spite of the Portuguese Crown’s attempt to monopolize the commodity, Portuguese private merchants or “country traders” also developed a competitive intra-regional and regional market for cinnamon by trading in the commodity with the Spanish in the Philippines. Since local consumption and demand for cinnamon was minimal, the Spanish purchased the deliveries of this spice from the Portuguese at Manila to supply burgeoning and developing markets for cinnamon, primarily, in the Americas and, secondarily, in Europe. Employed on the emergent and important trans-Pacific route, Sri Lankan cinnamon was transshipped in the Philippines and crossed the Pacific on board the Manila galleon to Mexico, where the commodity encountered other supplies of Sri Lankan cinnamon in America that had been shipped via the Cape of Good Hope route to Europe and re-exported from Spanish or other European ports to the New World. Sri Lankan cinnamon had completed its circumnavigation – it had truly become a global commodity.[23]
Temporally and spatially, it is suggested that over the long term, the Dutch East India’s occupation of the maritime region of Sri Lanka and its establishment of an effective monopoly over the production and commercialization of cinnamon generated some major realignments in the utility of the commodity for wealth creation and prosperity for the Company but few practical changes on the island and only temporarily disrupted global supply and demand patterns.
The Company continued the practice of supervision over the cinnamon peelers by entrusting one of their European employees with the position of Captain or Superintendent of the Mahabadda.[24] The Mahabadda or cinnamon tax assessment system, along with their supplementary efforts to obtain additional deliveries, were chronically insufficient, as during the Portuguese period, in delivering the quantities of cinnamon demanded by the Company. The Company innovated by adding environmental engineering to their strategy and tactics. It examined and drew plans to modify the environment and enlarge existing locations of cinnamon producing trees through a programmed deforestation of non-cinnamon producing trees in the early 1700s. Although these plans, apparently, were not executed upon, they were a precursor to the plantation system that was introduced in the 1760s and demonstrate the colonial administration’s thinking on how to increase labor productivity and to secure additional quantities of cinnamon.[25]
The total Company demand for cinnamon for Europe, intra-Asian and trans-Pacific markets was 6,000, 8,500, 8,000, and 10,000 bales in the mid-1650s, 1670s, 1730s and 1740s, and the 1750s.[26] Based on the Company’s records, the Salagama and other cinnamon peelers delivered some 685,887 bales, just less than 60 million pounds or around 30,000 tons of cinnamon to the Company from 1658 to 1760.[27] These records also confirm that over the same period the Company did not receive any deliveries of cinnamon in seven years (1664, 1668, 1675, 1690, 1692, 1693, and 1723). For most of the eighteenth century, similar Company records reveal that over two-thirds of the cinnamon produced on Sri Lanka was exported to Europe and initially commercialized by the Company at auctions in the Netherlands and almost all of the rest was exported to Batavia where it was sold to Portuguese, Spanish, and Armenian merchants who carried it to Manila, where it was sold and transshipped across the Pacific to the New World.[28] The sales of cinnamon at auctions in the Netherlands produced nearly 95 million guilders of revenue, which represented 8% of the total sales revenues from Asian commodities for the Company from 1642 to 1790.[29] Over most of the eighteenth century, from 1702 to c. 1796, the direct sales of cinnamon by the Company to Portuguese, Spanish, and Armenian merchants at Batavia produced an estimated 6.5 million guilders of revenue, which represented a significant percentage, 14% of the total sales revenues from maritime trade of Asian commodities at the Company’s headquarters and strategic comptoir on Java.[30]
Cinnamon’s global commercial odyssey, as we know, did not end in Europe in the Netherlands or in Asia at Batavia. It has been estimated that roughly, a half to two-thirds of the cinnamon sold in the Netherlands was purchased by diverse merchant networks that incorporated, re-sold, and re-distributed the commodity in Spain and the Spanish Empire where it was consumed. The records of the frota’s from Spain to the New World over the eighteenth century document that sizable quantities and values of cinnamon were re-exported by this route to the Americas and diverse Dutch, French, Sephardic Jewish and other European interloper merchant networks incorporated cinnamon in their commercial trading strategies vis-à-vis Spanish America. Cinnamon, after Asian (Chinese and Indian) silk and cotton textiles, was probably the second most important individual category and commodity to be transported and commercialized over the trans-Pacific route to the Americas over the eighteenth century.
Since commodities and their analysis are linked to broader contextual issues of wealth creation, economic development, and the rise of capitalism, a final observation may be advanced to conclude this section. It is argued that commodities in all parts of the globe in general and in Asia and the Americas in particular should share a methodological approach and lexicon, which has been absent, to elucidate and compare their shared historical characteristics and dissimilarities in their paths of development and exploitation. Heretofore, for multiple reasons, the histories of Asia, the Americas, and Africa, in general, have not connected these developments and it is advocated that the inclusion of the methodological and analytical approach that has been briefly introduced above will facilitate historians interested in relating the Asia-Pacific in the making of America and writing Global History in the early modern period.
2) Commerce
Commerce or exchanges between Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe are examined in this section, primarily, from two Portuguese perspectives: the Crown’s and private merchants - individuals, groups, and/or informal/formal associations and/or institutions dedicated to making a livelihood through ship owning, operating, chandelling, investing, financing, and trading in local, regional, intra-regional and/or global maritime commercial activities. It explores the maintenance, development, and expansion of Asia in general and in particular China’s maritime trading contacts within Asia and Africa, to Europe, and the Americas via Portuguese merchants and their shipping that was physically based and operated out of the Portuguese Empire’s metropolitan center: Lisbon, its peripheries in America: Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, and other peripheries in Asia that were in and outside of the Estado da India and Portuguese merchants and their shipping that was physically based in and operated out of the city of Macao. This section is organized and sub-divided chronologically: in the first half, from c. 1674 to c. 1770 and in the latter half, from c. 1770 to c. 1840.
c. 1674 to c. 1770
During this time frame, Portuguese commercial exchanges between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas were primarily under the control of mercantilist policies formulated by the Crown. The mainstay of this system was the carreira da India, [31] the regular employment of Crown owned and operated shipping, between Europe, Asia, and the Americas. There were no fewer than nine companies that were established by merchants in Portugal from 1692 to around 1774, usually under the aegis of the Crown but always under its license that traded with Asia, in general, and Macao, in particular, with temporary monopoly rights over the voyages and trade. These companies and their commercial efforts rarely included any direct ownership or participation by non-Lisbon based Portuguese merchants and trade between Portugal and Asia, generally, was the preserve of the Crown and merchants residing in Portugal. With variable results, all of these companies failed. [32] Local Portuguese communal and commercial interests in China, however, operated shipping that was active in intra-Asian exchanges over this time frame.
The elevated cost of the successful restoration of the Portuguese Crown from Spain in 1668 produced an acute fiscal and economic crisis both at home and overseas. To overcome that crisis, the Portuguese Crown had to seriously re-organize and re-structure its sources of revenue in order to cancel accumulated obligations and attend to current operating expenditures. One of the solutions was to establish a monopoly over the commercialization of Brazilian tobacco.[33] Tobacco originated in the New World and had been diffused around the world and in Asia by the Portuguese and Spanish throughout the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries.[34] Early Portuguese efforts to commercialize Brazilian tobacco Asia had been frustrated because of the rapid and pervasive acceptance and growth of indigenous tobacco production, commercialization, and consumption within Asia and earlier attempts to harness the revenue generating capacity of tobacco by monopolizing its sale late in period of the union of Portugal with the Crown of Spain had ended with contested results.[35]
The Crown established the Junta da Administração do Tabaco (the Tobacco Administrative Council) in Portugal and its Empire in mid-1674 to confront its fiscal crisis. Its formation has been seen as “among the most important manifestations of increasing state involvement in the [Portuguese] economy,” but the “real aim of the crown’s economic policy was the raising of capital from whatever source available.”[36] Whether it was intended to be a temporary or permanent solution to the Crown’s revenue requirements is not clear. In an attempt to garner support from growers for the policy in Brazil, the Crown exempted the commercialization of lower grade tobacco by private individuals in Brazil and for the burgeoning slave trade between the colony and Africa (the Mina Coast).[37] Within a very short time span, the tobacco monopoly became the single most effective source of revenue for the Crown. By 1681, it produced around one-sixth to one-seventh of the revenue collected annually by the Crown in Portugal. It was not eliminated until 1834.
It operated on four continents in South America, Europe, Africa and Asia and Brazilian tobacco and products were found globally. The Junta was a small but powerful administrative unit, which coordinated the entire monopoly, including the re-exportation of the highest grade of Brazilian leaf tobacco and snuff destined for the Estado da India in Crown operated shipping and the commercialization of Asian commodities that were regularly shipped to Lisbon and Brazil from India, which had been purchased using the proceeds and profits of the tobacco monopoly in Asia. To coordinate the monopoly in the Estado da India, the Junta appointed two administrators who were located at Goa.
Over the period from c.1674 to 1774, there were twenty administrators of the monopoly at Goa. [38] All of them were male and respected servants of the Crown with extensive from ten to fifteen years administrative, military (army and/or navy) and/or commercial experience prior to and at the time of their appointment. The appointment was socially and commercially desirable and it lasted for the rest of their life and career of the successful candidate, until this practice was reformed in 1757. Their early career paths generally parallel those of contemporary Crown administrators better known for their merchant prowess and involvement in commerce as private entrepreneurs in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, such as Antonio Coelho Guerreiro and Manuel de Sousa de Meneses.[39] There is irrefutable evidence that the administrators were privileged members of society as thirteen out of the twenty can be located and confirmed as being members of one of the most prestigious military orders of Portugal, the Order of Christ.[40] There was an implicit religious and an explicit color bar in place, since all of them were of Old Christian stock, most were reinois or European born Portuguese and a few were minor nobles.
The administrators were responsible for the functioning of the monopoly over the vast territory assigned to them. They coordinated the reception, and handling (including customs clearance and warehousing), of the tobacco and snuff that arrived from Portugal. They oversaw and participated in the triennial negotiations between the Crown and the Goa tax farmers of the commodity as well as the delivery and commercialization by the Goa tobacco contractor. Nearly all of the Brazilian tobacco and snuff was destined for the successful contractor, who was, usually, a prominent Hindu, merchant or association of merchants. This rendeiro commercialized tobacco in Goa, its environs, and more distant contractually non-excluded markets. There were minor but important variations in how the administrators organized the monopoly. The administrators in the Estado da India were also involved in the contracting or purchasing, reception, handling (including packing and customs clearance), and loading of commodities shipped from Asia to Portugal and Brazil. They contracted, purchased, and supervised the exportation of commodities on the Crown’s account from India, (pepper from the Malabar Coast, diamonds from Golconda, saltpeter from Bengal with the subsequent inclusion of textiles, primarily Gujarati colored cotton textiles). They also controlled the purchase, and supervision of the exportation of commodities on the Crown’s account from East Africa (cowries or shells from Mozambique), and China (initially tea and some fine silks) from the direct sales of tobacco in East Africa, the Provincia do Norte, China, the Indonesian Archipelago and the Coromandel Coast. They instructed the monopoly’s local representatives in East Africa to purchase gold, ivory, and cowries from the proceeds of those local tobacco sales. The gold, ivory, and cowries were remitted to Goa, where the administrators sold them and added the revenues or proceeds to the monopoly’s accounts. They also decided how they would use Crown shipping, primarily, to deliver the tobacco that would be sold in China. When Crown shipping was not available, they would pay for it to be freighted on private merchants’ ships.
Functioning as merchants acting on behalf of the Crown, the administrators were commercial agents, remunerated by commissions, which is a commonly known typology in the lexicon and characterization of merchants in Portugal and Brazil over this period. Neither the Crown nor others, however, specifically used the term comissários or commission agents to describe them. Its use would have been accurate. The merchant that these agents represented was the Crown. Their remuneration from commissions on the sale of tobacco was significant. From c.1677 to c. 1741, their commission was 8% on the tobacco sold in the rendeiro contract. Based on the available accounts for 48 years over the period from 1700 to 1760, the administrators received a total of 405,049 xerafines in commissions or an annual average of 8,440 xerafines for both or 4,220 xerafines per individual administrator.[41] This amount was an elevated and secure source of compensation for the individual administrator in an insecure environment. This amount for the Crown was an extremely high price to pay for the management of its interests. It was the elevated cost of this system that led to the Crown’s decision to eliminate these positions and to substitute them with salaried treasury officials in 1774.[42]
The quantities of tobacco and product that were re-exported from Portugal to the Estado da India were a relatively insignificant fraction of the Crown’s overall trade in Brazilian tobacco. From 1675 to 1715, the Junta annually re-exported on Crown shipping, via the carreira da India from Portugal, an average of 20,240 pounds or 220 barrels of different grades (Fino, Cidade, and Simoneta) of Brazilian tobacco and snuff to the Estado da India.[43] The revenues from the sale of Brazilian tobacco emerged as a significant source of revenue for the Crown that was disproportionately more important than the volume of tobacco that was involved and tobacco sales became the backbone of the fiscal stabilization of the Estado da India in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.[44] In addition to providing revenues used to purchase fungible and profitable commodities for the Crown’s return carreira da India shipping, the sale of tobacco in Asia also provided the Crown, as the administrators reported, with sufficient revenue (not less than 1,199,501 xerafines, which was roughly equivalent to the same number of Spanish pesos, Chinese taels and Dutch rijksdaalders)[45] to repay loans that had been made to the Crown by ecclesiastical institutions and to fund military and naval operations and public works.[46] From 1700 to 1760, the sale of Brazilian tobacco by the Crown to the Goa tobacco renda produced a total income of 6,288,840 xerafines for the Estado da India and generated an annual average income of 104,814 xerafines, over the same period, which was slightly over one-eight of the Estado da India’s total annual revenue. [47]
Our interest in this example is in the manner in which the administrators in India independently employed their commercial acumen in shaping the Crown’s commercial involvement in the Americas and the Atlantic World in the eighteenth century. While there is sufficient information and detail to comment on all of the commodities that were involved, two examples: cowries from Mozambique and cottons from India (Gujarat) at Bahia will be briefly examined, since they are particularly important and illustrative of the role that Afro-Asian commodities played in Portuguese commercial exchanges between Asia and the Americas or the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic World.
Possessing knowledge of the commercial utility of cowries from Mozambique in western India, it is not entirely clear how the administrators learned of the commercial opportunities for them in Brazil and in the Atlantic World. Although convincing documentary evidence has not been found, it is plausible that private merchants from Brazil with slave trading contacts with Mozambique may have identified and initiated the commercial utility of this commodity by using it as ballast for their shipping on the return voyage from Africa to Bahia. Despite the absence of clarity in how the commercial opportunity for an Afro-Asian commodity in the Americas was identified, the administrators and the Crown were sufficiently convinced for them to advocate and the Crown to claim via an alvará signed in Lisbon and dated 1 April 1722 and establish a Crown monopoly and agency over the commercialization of cowries by Crown officials in Brazil, Africa, and Asia.[48]
From 1725 forward, if not the year before, the administrators of the tobacco monopoly in Asia were loading cowries from Mozambique at Goa and Mozambique and exporting them, using their weight as ballast, on the return ships of the carreira da India for Brazil. When the Crown’s captains of the returning carreira da India shipping that called at Bahia could not sell all of the cowries that they had delivered before they had to sail with the return fleet for Portugal, the administrators with help from the Junta in Lisbon expanded the services of local Crown treasury officials to include and make them responsible for the administration, warehousing, and the sale of these cowries at Bahia. The revenues from the sales of shells were used to purchase Brazilian gold and remitted to the Junta on returning frota shipping, usually but not obligatorily from India, for the administrators in Asia’s account. The above description took a relatively short amount of time to implement. Although there would be fluctuations in the quantities, frequency of deliveries, and the turnover of cowry stocks at Bahia, this trade was still in place at the time of the elimination of the administrators in India.[49] At Bahia, the cowries were off-loaded, warehoused, and sold by Crown officials to private Portuguese/Brazilian merchants involved in the trade from Brazil with West Africa. The Portuguese/Brazilian merchants who purchased them used them as ballast for their shipping and incorporated them, since cowries were used in particular at Whydah as currency, along with the other items of exchange that this shipping carried, primarily, tobacco, brandy, and contraband gold from Brazil for the slave trade.
Cowries from Mozambique were not a “perfect” item of exchange at Bahia and the Mina Coast. First, they were slightly larger and coarser than cowries from the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, which were the preferred shells involved in this trade;[50] and, second, since they were sold by weight, merchants at Bahia complained occasionally of the amount of sand and, hence, additional weight that was found when they examined stocks of the shells at Bahia.[51] Local market resistance, as a result, developed for them as an item of trade. Since these cowries were the property of the Crown and local Crown treasury officials had to sell these stocks and defend their actions to authorities in Lisbon, they developed ways of coercing merchants via the threat or the actual withholding of sailing licenses, for example, if the stocks of the cowries were not purchased.[52] By the later half of the eighteenth century, after having an important interlude in the Atlantic World, buzios or cowries from Mozambique ceased to be a significant commodity exported from Africa to India and then to Brazil by the administrators. Although stocks had to be eliminated at Bahia and the Crown examined schemes to continue the trade in the Atlantic World, by the last third of the eighteenth century, buzios from Mozambique controlled by the administrators generally stayed within the Indian Ocean World’s commercial circuits.
From 1751 to 1764, the administrators of the tobacco monopoly in Asia identified that an important percentage of the proceeds from the sale of Brazilian tobacco in Portuguese Asia could be profitably employed in the purchase of Indian sourced cotton textiles, primarily from Gujarat and some from Bengal to be sold at Bahia to private merchants for their inclusion in the trade for slaves in Africa, for local internal market consumption in Brazil, especially but not exclusively for slaves and others in the mines and plantations, as well as a commercial component in the clandestine trade between Brazil and Spanish America at the Colonia de Sacramento and the Rio Plata regions.
Indian cotton textiles had been incorporated historically from nearly the beginning of Portuguese contact with Asia and private merchants at Bahia, Lisbon, and elsewhere had for years incorporated these textiles in their commercial strategies in the Atlantic World. From c.1677 to 1750, Indian cotton textiles are never mentioned nor are they registered in the administrator’s detailed accounts and cargo manifests of the Afro-Asian commodities that they purchased and loaded on Crown shipping in Asia for Brazil and Portugal. What is being commented upon is the documented Crown involvement initiated by the administrators of the tobacco monopoly in Asia in the trade in Indian cotton textiles in Brazil.
In 1751, the administrators were in a quandary as to how best employ their capital from tobacco sales because of a structural conjuncture in market conditions in relation to pepper. Prior to 1751, they had observed over a series of years an alarming trend in western India and in Europe: the quantity and quality of available pepper supplies was decreasing and their price was increasing because of competitive and disturbed war-time conditions in some of the western Indian markets. Their written comments also suggest that these higher pepper prices were affecting already low profit margins at Lisbon and threatening to make trading in pepper unprofitable. Apparently, employing their capital entirely in Bengal saltpeter or returning to purchasing Golconda diamonds was not possible or a contemplated but discarded alternative, the administrators in an initiative that was conceived by themselves and not initially discussed with Lisbon authorities turned to purchasing Gujarati sourced colored cotton textiles at Goa to be sold at Bahia to resolve this problem.
Initially, they made a series of errors common to merchants that lacked sufficient and accurate commercial intelligence about what or how to buy or the preferences and demand for textiles in consuming markets. They bought the wrong quantities, qualities (sizes and colors), and at prices that were uncompetitive at Bahia. They lost money and the Crown was not pleased. Being informed from Bahia and Lisbon of their misjudgments, they justified their commercial decision, requested and received commercial information that permitted them to remedy their errors. Crown officials at Bahia interviewed locally based private merchants that were experienced in dealing in Indian cotton textiles and forwarded that information on to the administrators in Goa.[53] Even after market conditions for pepper in western India improved sufficiently for the administrators to return to its inclusion, they continued to intermittingly include Bengal, Gujarat, and Coromandel Coast sourced Indian cotton textiles as part of the mixture of commodities in their commercial strategies for export to Brazil until the elimination of their office in 1774.[54]
c. 1770 to c. 1840
By the early 1770s changes in attitudes and strategies towards commerce emerged, the Crown discarded the monopoly of trade model in favor of licensing multiple, individual, and ship owning merchants in Portugal from different parts of the Empire, including from Macao, to sail and trade between Europe and Asia. Those private merchants were organized as individuals, in partnerships, limited companies, while the Crown maintained a diminished number of sailings of ships belonging to the Portuguese Royal Navy. The shipping belonging to private merchants focused on commercially desirable destinations and markets in Asia and they were NOT restricted to calling at ports in the Estado da India. The maritime trade between Portugal and Asia was no longer the preserve of the Crown and/or the Portuguese merchant interests in Lisbon as a consequence of the Crown’s relatively newly found pragmatic attitude towards maritime trade that sought to benefit from the revenue producing potential for the Crown from this liberalization of mercantilist doctrines and policies.
It is argued that the categorization of this trade as being part of the earlier “carreira da India” system is not useful or appropriate, since the Portuguese merchants shipping began to act more like other European East Indiamen as they commercially responded to the “freeing of trade”. Some of the commercial practices and policies implemented by the Crown that stimulated this trade, benefited all of the merchants that were involved, and produced significant revenues for the Crown from custom’s duties collected on imports from Asia at Lisbon included: 1) the adjustment as commercial conditions dictated, upwards or downwards, of tariffs; 2) the facility of financing the payment of tariffs, initially, from cash terms to six months and, subsequently and successively, from six to twelve, from twelve to eighteen, and, finally, from eighteen to twenty-four months; 3) transshipments of cargoes were regularly authorized; 4) “draw-back” or the temporary re-exportation of a semi-finished good for the item to be finished in another market and, subsequently, re-introduced in Portugal was introduced and permitted, for example, for solid white, semi-finished, cotton textiles from Coromandel that were imported from India to Lisbon, re-exported, temporarily, to the Netherlands or England, where they were dyed and patterned, returned to Lisbon for the payment of duty and sale and consumption in Portugal or other parts of Europe, Africa, and/or America; and 5) when faced by merchants failures or insolvencies, the Portuguese Crown installed liquidators to work out and pay the outstanding debts.[55]
Table 1. Portuguese Shipping at Lisbon from Asia, 1772-1834
[pic]
Sources: Senado da Câmara of Lisbon, O Livro do Marco: Imposto da anchoargem and AHU, Maços de Macao passports and “visita de ouro” reports.
Some 10,836 Portuguese and foreign ships are recorded as arriving at Lisbon from 1772 to 1834; only 413 or 4% of the total number of the ships arriving at Lisbon over this period were involved in the maritime commerce between Europe and Asia. All of these ships were Portuguese owned and included limited numbers of ships owned and investments made by non-Lisbon based Portuguese merchants, which included Portuguese merchants from Brazil and China.[56] Although the majority of Macao’s and China’s commercial exchanges are found in the numbers of ships and their cargo manifests registered as having arrived in Lisbon from Macao, since cargoes from China were purchased in other parts of Asia and some of the Portuguese ships arriving from India were Macao owned and/or included cargo manifests of goods from China, the unit of analysis, for our purposes, has to include all of the Portuguese trade from Asia registered at Lisbon. Table 1 graphically depicts the total numbers and the distribution of Portuguese ships arriving annually at Lisbon from Asia from 1772-1834.
The commerce and prosperity of merchants at Macao was based upon the Chinese sub-regional market of Guangdong at Canton. The city of Macao was not outwardly prosperous in the eighteenth century but its merchant fleet was active and contributed to China’s maritime economy.
The categories of commodities that were in supply and demand in China were agricultural, textiles and natural dyes for textile production, metals and others. A detailed report on the Chinese goods from Canton that were available at Macao was prepared by a commercially astute Portuguese Crown official in 1771. At that time, there were twenty-one items exported from China at Macao. The composition of the principal export commodities was sugar, tea, tobacco, raw and colored silk and silk piecegoods, zinc, alum and worked copper items. According to the report, there were thirty-three items imported into China via Macao. The composition of the principal imported commodities that flowed into the Macao market for sale at Canton was pepper, raw cotton, opium, rice, and salt, tin, lead, silver, and sappanwood and included the “exotic” China market demand for shark’s fin, bird’s nest and ivory. [57]
For the eighty year period, from 1764-1843, the records for Macao’s total customs duties revenues and value of imports establish that the registered revenue was slightly over 4.5 million taels or 56,250 taels/year and permit those annual revenue flows to be graphically depicted as shown in Table 2. Furthermore, since we have the rates charged/category (a flat rate/chest for opium; 5% for coarse and fine goods, and 2% or less for silver) and volumes of the imported goods, it is possible to conservatively estimate that the total value of goods imported by Portuguese/Macanese merchants into Macao and China over the same period, which was from 45 to 65 million taels.
Over the long eighteenth century, the number of ships in the Portuguese/Macaense merchant fleet at Macao is estimated at between six to eight ships in 1684. By the late 1710s, the number of ships expanded to thirteen or fifteen ships. Although ships were lost, sold and disincorporated, for the remainder of the eighteenth century, the number of Portuguese vessels that were owned and operated at Macao remained at or around fifteen. It is only in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and into the first quarter of the nineteenth century that the numbers of ships of the Portuguese/Macaense fleet increased to around twenty-five. There were multiple ship types (denominated in the records
Table 2. Macao’s Customs Duties Revenues, 1764-1843.
[pic] Source: AHU, Maços de Macao, “Municipal Financial Balances” and other reports.
as ships, sloops, barks, brigs, corvettes, and pallas) with diverse sizes (draught and cargo capacities), number of sails, placement, and sailing characteristics that these merchants owned and employed. While there are difficulties in estimating the size of individual ships and the total fleet cargo carrying capacity, a preliminary estimate suggests that the total fleet cargo carrying capacity fluctuated from well under 3,750 tons at the beginning and over 7,500 to less than 10,000 tons toward the end of our period. While there were still risks and losses because of shipwreck, piracy, and war and those losses did adversely impact individual and collective merchant fortunes, in comparison with the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there were lower rates of losses for all Portuguese ships in general and for the Portuguese/Macaense fleet in particular.
The movements and destinations of the Portuguese/Macaense merchant fleet from 1784 to 1834 were documented by the issuance of passports by the municipal council (Senado da Câmara) of Macao to all of the shipping that departed that city. The passports were overwhelmingly issued to: 1) Portuguese/Macaense merchants (casados and moradores); 2) Portuguese merchants, usually from Portugal and/or the Estado da India, temporarily, residing in Macao; 3) a few ships owned by the municipal council; 4) a few ships owned by Armenian merchants residing in Macao; and 5) jointly owned Luso-Spanish shipping that operated out of both Manila and Macao. Eighteen passports, on the average, were issued annually.
While there is neither time nor space in this essay to discuss and examine these passports in detail, there are a number of pertinent observations about them that can be advanced. First, Portuguese/Macaense merchants explored and exploited commercial opportunities that were located in an ever widening and distant geographical arc from Macao, which emerged via: a) regional state systems such as the Tayson in central Vietnam, for example, and others requesting assistance; b) the Portuguese becoming commercially competitive in the intra-Asian trade from India in opium and raw cotton; c) the position of neutrality in some European conflicts adopted by the Portuguese Crown; and d) the “freeing of trade” implemented by the Crown to obtain increased revenues from maritime trade from Asia in Portugal and accelerated, from 1808 to 1821, during the Napoleonic wars and invasion of Portugal, which provoked the Court’s transfer to Rio de Janeiro and its operation out of Brazil. Second, the Portuguese/Macaense merchant fleet at Macao, apparently, became more efficient, increasing frequencies and making faster transit to their regular and additional annual major intra-Asian colonial and port cities ports of call.
Table 3. Portuguese/Macaense Shipping Passports, 1784-1834
[pic]
Sources: AHM, Leal Senado, “Passports”.
By the late eighteenth century the list of those ports for which passports were issued was under a general rubric called “from the Cape of Good Hope to inside”. They inculded passports for Chinese ports to the north of Macao, Manila and minor ports in the Philippines and the Indonesian Archipelago that encircled the Sulu Zone, all of the major and most of the minor ports of mainland Southeast Asia, the Indonesian Archipelago, and the Malay Peninsula, including Bencoolen, Malacca, Penang, and Singapore; all of the major and most of the minor ports in the Bay of Bengal (Burma), India, Sri Lanka, and the French islands in the Indian Ocean to the island of Mozambique in East Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. A small number of passports were issued for the west coast of America and different islands in the Pacific Ocean, specifically, Palau in Micronesia. And, finally, there were passports regularly issued for Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon, as well as others sporadically issued for ports in northern Europe, the northeast coast of the United States of America, British settlements in the Caribbean, and in Africa for Luanda in Angola.
Because of similar types of reports concerning the collection of customs duties, it is also possible to comment upon the composition and volumes of goods imported into Macao and China by Portuguese/Macaense merchants, in detail but not in extenso, over the sub-period from 1784-1828. The results are revelatory. The revelation is not so much in the emergence or, in general, in the increased commercial importance of opium in trade with China but in the size and vitality of the Portuguese/Macaense merchants involvement in this commerce and the dependence upon this commerce that Macao and Portuguese/Macaense merchants developed. The Portuguese/Macaense merchant involvement in Indian opium sourced from Bengal and Malwa for the China market at Macao was 800 chests annually in 1771. They were procuring Malwa and/or Bengal opium on the Malabar coast from 166 to 233 taels per chest and Bengal opium from 100 to 133 taels per chest; this opium was selling in China from 260 to 750 taels per chest.[58] In comparison with other goods and commodities that they were selling in China in greater volume, such as pepper and raw cotton, Portuguese/Macaense merchants were obtaining their largest gross profit margins by far on their Bengal and Malwa opium transactions.
Table 4. Opium Imports by Portuguese/Macaense merchants
at Macao, 1784-1828
[pic]
Source: AHU, Maços de Macao, Cx. 60, no. 6 (27/i/1830).
Over a forty-five period, from 1784 to 1828, Portuguese authorities at Macao quantified the Portuguese/Macaense merchant involvement in the Indian opium trade, as shown in Table 4, as being a total of 98,847 chests for the sub-period or an of average 2,196 chests/year to China.[59] From 1784-1803, they paid a 7.2 tael, flat rate/chest, import duty to the Crown/municipal council custom house at Macao that conceptually remained a flat rate/chest but was increased to 16 taels/chest from 1804-1828 forwards. Since the Crown also permitted the transshipment of goods at Macao that did not have to pay import duty, including opium, it is estimated that the Portuguese/Macaense merchants transshipped around 5-10,000 chests of additional quantities of opium for their commercial activities in the Malay and other ports in the South China Sea, which was equivalent to 5-10% of the amount of opium that they imported over the same sub-period into Macao and China. Customs revenues on imported non-opium goods and commodities versus opium were from 1784 to 1828 almost clearly divided into two equal halves (51:49%). Simply put, opium had become the lynchpin of the Portuguese/Macaense merchant fortunes and the basis for Macao’s commercial success and re-newed prosperity at the end of the long eighteenth century.
3) Conclusions
This paper has argued that commodities in all parts of the globe in general and in Asia and the Americas in particular should share a methodological approach and lexicon to elucidate and compare their shared historical characteristics and dissimilarities in their paths of development and exploitation. It briefly introduced a methodological and analytical approach constructed around commodity chains that will facilitate historians interested in relating the Asia-Pacific in the making of America and writing Global History in the early modern period.
It introduced and discussed some preliminary research results and thoughts from the Portuguese merchants’ perspective on the commerce or the exchanges of commodities between Asia and the Americas c. 1750 – c. 1850. While acknowledging the dominant Anglo-American and Chinese involvement, my paper has focused on the non-winner perspective or the activities of Portuguese merchants in Asia in general and their trade with the Americas in particular. By introducing and analyzing their activities and modest successes, it is suggested that global political and economic conditions over this period offered the Portuguese Crown and private merchants initially some dynamic opportunities, although they proved to be un-sustainable. Since the existence of those activities and successes are generally unknown, this preliminary paper has concentrated in identifying and documenting them to the detriment of interpreting how and why they emerged and why they were not sustained and developed. This is an on-going project and I will be willing during our workshop discussions to formulate and discuss some hypotheses on the political economy of Portugal and its empire, merchant capital, and the insufficiency of institutional structures vis-à-vis maritime commerce in comparison with the competing commercial forces that the Portuguese encountered to explain why they failed.
Nevertheless, in this paper, we have learned that out of political economic necessity, the Portuguese Crown harnessed a New World commodity, Brazilian tobacco, and fashioned a monopoly that provided revenues for its metropolitan and imperial requirements. By making buyers and consumers in Europe, Africa, America, and Asia pay for the pleasure they derived from smoking tobacco and taking snuff, the Crown reduced debt and generated income that it might not have found elsewhere. In metropolitan Portugal, the tobacco monopoly produced around one-sixth to one-seventh of the revenue collected annually by the Crown. In Portuguese Asia, the tobacco monopoly produced over one-eight of all of the Estado da India’s total annual revenue. For the Estado da India and China, although the quantities of tobacco and snuff were small, the revenue that was generated was disproportionately significant and important to imperial fortunes and the maintenance of the Portuguese Empire. By exporting and commercializing Brazilian tobacco, the Portuguese Crown diminished the necessity of remitting silver to Asia. By selling and using the proceeds of those sales of tobacco to purchase Afro-Asian commodities that circulated within Asia, Africa and America, the monopoly multiplied its economic impact and importance. Areas of the globe were interconnected in a way and at a level of activity that might not have been present before these contacts. Direct sailings from Portugal to China and China to Portugal were instituted at this time to increase Portuguese trade with China. Although these sailings were not initiated to deliver tobacco and snuff, the monopoly did take advantage of this change in colonial and commercial policy. Despite the shipments of Brazilian tobacco and snuff being extremely small, the use and consumption of snuff in China became increasingly fashionable. In Brazil and in the Atlantic World, the interconnections that this monopoly fostered in Asia provided a competitive commodity mix of items in demand and that were highly fungible in Africa that contribute towards an explanation for the relative commercial advantage and the longevity of the Portuguese participation in the South Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century.
Similarly, Portuguese merchants throughout the empire were able to identify and exploit commercial opportunities from the “freeing of trade” policies that emerged after the earthquake and fire in Lisbon (1755) and the implementation by the Marquis of Pombal of a series of fiscal and economic reforms aimed at strengthening Portugal and its empire, which were continued by the Crown after he left office in 1777. While tensions between previously favored and newly emergent commercial groups flared and Pombal’s reforms ultimately enhanced state autocracy and furthered colonial economic exploitation, individual and certain merchant groups, especially in Asia and the Americas were able to vigorously capitalize on these opportunities, which only grew when the Crown was forced to move the court to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. Ultimately, externally in the face of stronger commercial competitors and superior political and economic adversaries in Asia, with the emergence of an independent Brazil in the Americas, and internal metropolitan political conflict and contestation that crippled the governance of a dramatically re-dimensioned Portuguese state and empire, the opportunities for the Portuguese merchant capitalists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century evaporated.
Select Bibliography
Manuscripts
Instituto do Arquivo Nacional, Torre do Tombo (IAN/TT) in Lisbon, Portugal:
Arquivos Particulares, Casa Fronteira e Alorna collection:
245: Saltpeter report: “Salitre vindo da India por conta do Cabedal de S. Mag.de no descurso de vinte annos que tiverao pricipio o anno de 1690 thé o de 1710”, Lisbon, 18/viii/1711;
Casa das Rainhas collection:
Livros 142;
Maços: 658, 659, 662, 676, 725, 732, 733, and 734;
Chancelaria da Ordem de Cristo;
Habilitações do Ordem de Cristo;
Conselho da Fazenda collections:
Consultas: Livros 349-351;
Repartição India e Ordens, Decretos:
Maços 1-10/Caixas 890-899; for the petitions from private merchants dealing with Asia in general and China (Macau) in particular to the Crown (the Royal Treasury) and its decisions and policies concerning customs and commercial treatment from 1732 to 1799;
Junta da Administração do Tabaco:
seven collections (Consultas, Decretos, Avisos, Cartas do Brasil e Índia, Papéis Findos, Vária, and Cartas e informes), especially,
Cartas do Brasil e Índia (Letters from Brazil and India) collection, 31 maços or boxes of loose documents;
Junta da Real Fazenda do Estado da Índia:
Cartas: Mf. 2206, 2209, 2233, and 2361;
Registo de alvarás e cartas régias: Mf. 1887;
Junta do Comércio, Consultas, Decretos, Avizos:
Maços 310-311;
Caixas 619-621: “Listas das Entradas e Sahidas do Navios do Porto de Lisboa.”
Senado da Câmara of Lisbon
O Livro do Marco: Imposto da anchoargem, sixty volume collection, for the numbers, names, dates of arrival and cargo manifests of nearly all the arriving Portuguese shipping including those from Asia in general and Macau in particular at Lisbon from 1772-1834;
Arquivo Historico Ultramarino (AHU) in Lisbon, Portugal
Maços de Macao collection, including the passports and “visita de ouro” reports in the sixty-two boxes of loose leafed bundles of documents dealing with Macao;
Arquivo Historico de Macao (AHM) in Macau, China
Leal Senado, “Passports”
Arquivos de Macau, 1st to 4th series, published 1929-1995
General State Archives (ARA), the Hague, the Netherlands
VOC collection
4583, 4586-4597, “Samenvatten Staten” or Authorized Accounting Summaries of the VOC, 1642-1790.
Hope collection
69, numbers 10, 12, and 18.
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Souza, G. B., “Portuguese Colonial Administrators and Inter-Asian Maritime Trade: Manuel de Sousa de Meneses and the Fateh Moula Affair,” Portuguese Studies Review, 12:2, 2004-2005, pp. 25-62
Souza, G. B., The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea, c.1630-1754, Cambridge, 1986
Souza, G. B., “Hinterlands, Commodity Chains, and Circuits in Early Modern Asian History: the Case of Sugar in Qing China and Tokugawa Japan”, unpublished XV World Economic History presentation, scheduled publication by Brill.
Steensgaard, N., Carracks, Caravans and Companies: The Structural Crisis in the European-Asian Trade in the Early 17th Century, Odense, 1973
Strathern, A., Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka: Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land, Cambridge, 2007
Topik, Steven, et. al., eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000, Durham, NC, 2006
Vale, A.M. Martins do, Os Portugueses em Macau (1750-1800), Lisbon, 1997
van Goens, junior, (Pieters, tr.), Ryclof van Goens, junior, …, 1910
van Gollenesse, (Arasaratnam, tr.), Memoir of …, 1974
van Imhoff, (Pieters, tr.), Gustaaf Willem Baron van Imhoff, …, 1915
Verger, Pierre, Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le golfe de Bénin et Bahia de todos os Santos du dix-septième au dix-neuvième siècle, Paris, 1968
Wagenaar, L., Galle, VOC-vestiging in Ceylon: Beschrijving van een koloniale samelleving aan de vooravond van de Singales opstand tegen he Nederlandse gezag, 1760, Amsterdam, 1994
Wallerstein, I., The Modern World-System, 3 vols., New York, 1974-1989
Winius, G. D., The Fatal History of Portuguese Ceylon: Transition to Dutch Rule, Cambridge, MA, 1971
Dissertations
Bauss, Rudolph William, “Rio de Janeiro: The Rise of Late Colonial Brazil’s Dominant Emporium, 1777-1808,” PhD. Tulane University, 1977
Donovan, William M., “Commercial Enterprise and Luso-Brazilian Society during the Brazilian Gold Rush: The Mercantile House of Francisco Pinheiro and the Lisbon to Brazil Trade, 1695-1750,” PhD. Johns Hopkins University, 1991
Dores Costa, Fernando, unpublished thesis
Flory, Rae Jean Dell, “Bahian Society in the mid-Colonial period: the Sugar Planters, Tobacco Growers, Merchants, and Artisans of Salvador and the Recôncavo, 1680-1725,” PhD. University of Texas at Austin, 1978
Gamburd, Geraldine DeNering, “The Seven Grandparents: Locality and lineality in Sinhalese kinship and caste,” PhD. Colombia University, 1972.
Kanapathypillai, V., “Dutch Rule in Maritime Ceylon, 1766-1796,” PhD. University of London, 1969
Kotelawele, D. Ariyapala, “The Dutch in Ceylon, 1743-1766,” PhD. University of London, 1968
Nardi, Jean-Baptiste, “Le Tabac Bresilien et ses Fonctions dans l”Ancien Systeme Colonial Portugais (1570-1830), PhD. Aix en Provence, 1990
Norton, Marcia, “New World of Goods: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Spanish Empire, 1492-1700,” PhD. University of California at Berkeley, 2000
Pedreira, Jorge, unpublished thesis
Smith, David Grant, “The Mercantile Class of Portugal and Brazil in the Seventeenth Century: A Socio-Economic Study of the Merchants of Lisbon and Bahia, 1620-1690”, PhD. University of Texas at Austin, 1975
Wimmer, Linda, “African Producers, European Merchants, Indigenous Consumers: Brazilian Tobacco in the Canadian Fur Trade, 1550-1821,” PhD. University of Minnesota, 1996.
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[1] See Appadurai, “Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in Appadurai, ed., Social Life of Things, pp. 3-63.
[2] Souza, “Hinterlands, Commodity Chains, and Circuits in Early Modern Asian History”.
[3] See, for example, Kuroda, “Another Monetary Economy”, in Latham, and Kawakatsu, Asia Pacific Dynamism, pp. 187-198; and “Concurrent but non-integrable currency circuits,” pp. 7-15.
[4] See Glahn, Fountain of Fortune.
[5] See Kuroda, “Another Monetary Economy”, pp. 187-198.
[6] See, for example, Pomeranz, Making of a Hinterland.
[7] For examples of the port and colonial port paradigm and hinterland relationships with maritime trade, see Broeze, ed., Brides of the Sea; Broeze, ed., Gateways of Asia; Basu, ed., Rise and Growth of the Colonial Port Cities in Asia; Banga, Ports and their Hinterlands; Mukheyee and Subramanian, eds., Politics and Trade in the Indian Ocean World; and Chaudhury and Morineau, eds., Merchants, Companies and Trade.
[8] It is characterized as a set of mechanisms which redistributes resources from the periphery to the core. In his terminology, the core is the developed, industrialized part of the world, and the periphery is the "underdeveloped", typically raw materials-exporting, poor part of the world; the market being the means by which the core exploits the periphery.
[9] See Hopkins and Wallerstein, “Commodity Chains in the World-Economy Prior to 1800,” pp. 157-170; and Wallerstein, Modern World-System.
[10] Defined as “a body of social science theories predicated on the notion that resources flow from a ‘periphery’ of poor and underdeveloped states to a ‘core’ of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. It is a central contention of dependency theory that poor states are impoverished and rich ones enriched by the way poor states are integrated into the ‘world system’;” see, for example, Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America; and Frank, ReOrient.
[11] See Topik, et. al., eds., From Silver to Cocaine.
[12] See Ortiz, Encyclopedia of Herbs, Spices, and Flavorings, pp. 76-77.
[13] See Parry, Story of Spices, 1953, especially chapter 3.
[14] For a detailed discussion of Sri Lankan cinnamon production and commercial circuits, see Souza, “Commerce and Communal Relations” and "Global Commodities and Commerce in the Early Modern World”.
[15] See Dalgado, Glossário Luso-Asiático, I, 253.
[16] For a detailed modern anthropological study of the Salagama, see Gamburd, “Seven Grandparents”.
[17] For the issue of caste, see Ryan, Caste in Modern Ceylon; Rogers, “Caste as a social category and identity in colonial Lanka”, pp. 51-77; and Roberts, Caste Conflict and Elite Formation.
[18] For a general overview, see Codrington, Ancient Land Tenure and Revenue in Ceylon. For a specific discussion during the Portuguese period, see Pieris, Ceylon Littoral 1593.
[19] For fundamental overviews and discussions of both the Portuguese and Dutch periods, see Silva, ed., History of Sri Lanka, Volume II. For detailed monographs and treatment of different facets and time frames of the Portuguese period, see Abeyasinghe, Portuguese Rule in Ceylon; Abeyasinghe, “Portuguese Rule in the Kingdom of Kotte”, pp. 1-14; Flores, Os Portugueses e o Mar de Ceilão; Silva, The Portuguese in Ceylon 1617-1638; and Strathern, Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka.
[20] For detailed monographs and treatment of different facets and time frames of the Dutch period, see Goonewardena, The Foundation of Dutch Power in Ceylon, 1638-1658; Arasaratnam, Dutch Power in Ceylon, 1658-1687; and Winius, The Fatal History of Portuguese Ceylon; Kanapathypillai, “Dutch Rule in Maritime Ceylon, 1766-1796”; Kanapathypillai, “Helen or Costly Bride: The V.O.C. and the Cinnamon Trade of Sri Lanka 1766-1796”, pp. 133-145; Kotelawele, “The Dutch in Ceylon, 1743-1766”; Wagenaar, Galle, VOC-vestiging in Ceylon; Schrikker, Dutch and British Colonial Intervention in Sri Lanka, 1780-1815; and Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant.
[21] See Glamann, Dutch-Asiatic Trade 1620-1740.
[22] See Roberts, Caste Conflict, p. 90.
[23] For further discussion, see Souza, "Global Commodities and Commerce in the Early Modern World”.
[24] For the instructions and regulations that guided the Captain of the Cinnamon Peelers, which were issued in 1661, 1707, and 1739, see Hovy, ed., Ceylonees plakkaatboek, I, pp.78-90, 322-328, and II, pp. 460-464.
[25] See Hovy, Ceylonees plakkaatboek, I, pp. 363-366 and 378-379.
[26] See Arasaratnam, “Sri Lanka’s Trade, Internal and External in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” in Silva, ed., History of Sri Lanka, Volume II, pp. 399-416; van Goens, junior, (Pieters, tr.), Ryclof van Goens, junior, pp. 8-9; van Imhoff, (Pieters, tr.), Gustaaf Willem Baron van Imhoff, pp. 48-50; and van Gollenesse, (Arasaratnam, tr.), Memoir, pp. 74-75.
[27] See ARA, Hope collection, 69, number 10.
[28] See ARA, Hope collection, 69, number 12; over this period, these records indicate that the Company exported a total of 461,701 bales of cinnamon; 72% (329,955) were exported to Europe; 27% (125,804) were shipped to Batavia and sold; and only 1% (5,942) were sold in intra-Asian markets (Coromandel, Surat, Persia, Cochin, Bengal, and the Cape of Good Hope).
[29] See ARA, VOC 4583, 4586-4597, “Samenvatten Staten” or Authorized Accounting Summaries of the VOC, 1642-1790. Three guilders or florins were equal to one rijksdalder, which was roughly equal to one xerafin; peso, and tael.
[30] See Souza, “Opium and the Company”, pp. 128-131, for the Batavia comptoir accounts and sales of cinnamon records from 1702 to c. 1796.
[31] The carreira da India is the term used for Portuguese shipping using the Cape of Good Hope route to Asia from the late fifteenth century onwards. For the role of Bahia in Brazil in supporting these efforts, see Amaral Lapa, Bahia e a Carreira da India; and Magelhães Godinho, “The Portuguese and the ‘Carreira da India’, 1497-1810,” in Bruijn and Gaastra, eds., Ships, Sailors and Spices, pp. 1-47.
[32] For archival references and secondary literature on the activities of the Portuguese companies that traded with Asia, especially with China and sailed directly from Lisbon to China and China to Lisbon (Companhia do Comercio de Lisboa; Companhia da Cidade de Macau; Companhia da Fabrica Real da Seda; Felix von Oldenburg Companhia; and the Companhia Geral do Grão Pará e Maranhão), see Souza, Survival of Empire, pp. 179-180.
[33] For the history of the French tobacco monopoly, see Price, France and the Chesapeake; tobacco in Spain and in the Spanish Empire and Bourbon efforts in the New World in Mexico and Venezuela and in Asia in the Philippines, see Norton, “New World of Goods”; Deans-Smith, Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers; Farías, Historia de un Monopolio; and Jesús, Tobacco Monopoly in the Philippines.
[34] For an excellent introduction to tobacco, see Goodman, Tobacco in History. For a general overview on the introduction of tobacco in Asia, see Laufer, Tobacco and it’s Use in Asia; for Southeast Asia, in particular, see Höllman, Tabak in Südostasien. For India, see Gokhale, “Tobacco in Seventeenth-Century India”, pp. 484-492.
[35] For background on the role of tobacco, including the Crown monopoly of Brazilian tobacco, in Portugal, see Hanson, Economy and Society; Hanson, “Monopoly and Contraband”, pp. 149-151; and Santos, Os Tabacos. For discussions of production of tobacco in Brazil, see Barickman, Bahian Counterpoin; Nardi, “Le Tabac Bresilien”; Nardi, Fumo no Brasil Colonial; Nardi, Fumo Brasiliero no Periodo Colonial; and Nardi, Sistema Colonial e Trafico Negreiro. For discussions of the trade in Brazilian tobacco by the Portuguese and others, see Lugar, “Portuguese Tobacco Trade,” in Alden and Dean, eds., Essays, pp. 26-70. For the use of Brazilian tobacco in North America, see Wimmer, “African Producers, European Merchants, Indigenous Consumers”.
[36] See Hanson, Economy and Society, p. 160.
[37] See Verger, Flux et reflux.
[38] See Cartas do Brasil e Índia, Maços 96 to 103, annual letter reports.
[39] For a discussion of the activities and account books of both of these Crown administrators, see Souza, “Portuguese Colonial Administrators and Inter-Asian Maritime Trade”, pp. 25-62; and Miller, “Capitalism and Slaving”, pp. 1-56.
[40] See Dutra, “Membership in the Order of Christ”, pp. 3-25.
[41] For the annual accounts that permitted this reconstruction, see Cartas do Brasil e Índia, Maços 96 to 103, annual letter reports with accounts.
[42] For correspondence citing cost as one of the reasons and the alvará from Lisbon and a published copy abolishing the positions of the superintendent and administrators in the Crown’s Tobacco monopoly and the system that substituted them, see the Junta da Real Fazenda do Estado da Índia, Registro de Alvarás e Cartas Régias, Livro 9 (Mf 1887), Lisbon, 15/i/1774 and Goa, 17/x/1774.
[43] See IAN/TT, Cartas do Brasil e Índia, Maço 98, “Balanço dos Barris do tabaco fino e de simonete que se Remeteo por Conta e Risco da Fazenda de Sua Magesdade que Deos Guarda começando no anno de 1675 athe 1715.” This report indicates that tobacco was not delivered in two years, 1692 and 1708.
[44] See Pearson, “Indigenous Dominance in a Colonial Economy”, pp. 61-73, especially p. 63 for a description of the rendas at Goa. For other descriptions of the Brazilian tobacco in India, see Barendse, Arabian Seas, p. 311; Datta, “Portugal’s Experiment with Brazilian Tobacco”, p. 104. For the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, see Pinto, Trade and Finance in Portuguese India, pp. 193-201; and Pinto, "At the Dusk of the Second Empire", pp. 41-69.
[45] The xerafin was a silver coin worth 300 Portuguese reis. It had a strong exchange rate to the Spanish peso, Dutch rijksdaalder, and Chinese tael. One xerafin was equal to 1.07 pesos, 1.29 rijksdaalders and/or 1.33 taels.
[46] For the 1708 report that documents the partial use of the monopoly’s revenue for: 1) military and naval aid for the relief of Mozambique, in 1678 and 1681; 2) extraordinary expenses by the Estado da India in 1684 and 1684; 3) the Mormugão public works project from 1696 on an ongoing basis; 4) donations to the Estado da India from 1689 on an ongoing basis; and 5) beginning in 1689, the repayment schedule over 3 to 8 years of the loans to the Estado da India provided by the church silver of the island of Goa and Salcete, see Cartas do Brasil e Índia, Maço 100-A, “1708 Petição e mais papeis que fizerão para a Junta Geral de Comercio de Mozambique.”
[47] For the annual income generated from the Goa tobacco renda and the annual accounts from 1700 to 1760, see Cartas do Brasil e Índia, Maço 98, renda report for 1700 to 1724 and Cartas do Brasil e Índia, Maços 97 to 105, annual accounts. For details of the Estado da India’s income and expenditures around 1684 to 1687, which permits the calculation of this percentage estimate, see: Hanson, Economy and Society, p. 212.
[48] For two copies of this alvará, which established the monopoly over cowries and the confiscation of existing private merchants stocks at Bahia, see Cartas do Brasil e Índia, Maço 99, Caixa 88; and Maço 100-A, Caixa 90, alvará, Lisbon, 1/iv/1722.
[49] This description of the trade in cowries from Mozambique is based upon the explicit paragraphs, accounts, and correspondence on the subject found in Cartas do Brasil e Índia, Maços 96 to 103, annual letter reports with accounts.
[50] For the standard work on cowries, see Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money of the Slave Trade.
[51] For the 1766 report on cowry stocks by the Desembargador Manoel António da Cunha de Sotto Maior, the Provedor-mor in Brazil, one of the Crown officials that was responsible for overseeing this trade, and the remedy he ordered that merchants wishing to obtain licenses to trade to the Mina Coast would have to purchase some cowries until all of it was sold, see Cartas do Brasil e Índia, Maço 106, Caixa 104, Bahia, 18/iii/1766.
[52] For a report on how the remedy ordered in 1766 to eliminate stocks was working, see Cartas do Brasil e Índia, Maço 108-B, Caixa 114, Bahia, 29/xi/1770.
[53] For the 1751 report by the Provedor-mor in Brazil to the Junta in Lisbon on the difficulties encountered in selling the recently arrived Indian cotton textiles, the results of his interview with experienced but un-named Bahian merchants and the importance of this commercial intelligence, which was shared with the administrators in Goa, see Cartas do Brasil e Índia, Maço 103, Caixa 96, Bahia, 30/ix/1751. For a list of private merchants (António Pires Monsão, Luis de Silva Pinto, Manoel João Vianna, Felix Manoel Dias, Manoel de Oliveira Freire, Luis Coelho Ferreira, Bernardo da Silva Costa, and João Luis de Deus) who dealt and some of whom were buyers of Indian cotton textiles from the Crown at Bahia in 1759, see Cartas do Brasil e Índia, Maços 104, Caixa 97, Bahia, 2/viii/1759.
[54] This description of colored Indian cotton textile trade is based upon the explicit paragraphs, accounts, and correspondence on the subject in Cartas do Brasil e Índia, Maços 96 to 103, annual letter reports with accounts.
[55] For the petitions from private merchants dealing with Asia in general and China (Macau) in particular to the Crown (the Royal Treasury) and its decisions and policies concerning customs and commercial treatment from 1732 to 1799, see IAN/TT, Conselho da Fazenda, Repartição India e Ordens, Decretos, Maços 1-10/Caixas 890-899.
[56] For the numbers, names, dates of arrival and cargo manifests of nearly all the arriving Portuguese shipping including those from Asia in general and Macau in particular at Lisbon from 1772-1834, see the sixty volume collection entitled: O Livro do Marco: Imposto da anchoargem, in the Senado da Câmara of Lisbon and the passports and “visita de ouro” reports in the sixty-five boxes of loose leafed bundles of documents dealing with Macao in the AHU, Maços de Macao collection.
[57] See AHU, Maços de Macao, Cx. 6, no. 28, (10/xi/1771); and Vale, Portugueses em Macau, appendix 20.
[58] See AHU, Maços de Macao, Cx. 6, no. 28 (10/xi/1771) and Vale, Portugueses em Macau, appendix 20.
[59] See AHU, Maços de Macao, Cx. 60, no. 6 (27/i/1830).
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