Building the first European enterprise in Early Modern Asia : the Portuguese Estado and the Carreira(s) system

Abstract

After Vasco da Gama reached Calicut, in India, in 1498, the Portuguese became the first European nation to regularly trade with Asia via the Cape of Good Hope and the only one to do so for the subsequent hundred years. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese built numerous trading factories along the Asian coastline and signed diverse agreements with local rulers. They also launched several intra-Asian trade voyages, developing a complex enterprise that relied both on Portuguese subjects and local Asian agents. When the northern European chartered companies entered the Asian trading arena in the early seventeenth century, they drew extensively upon the networks and structures that the Portuguese had built. However, the literature on the European East India companies downplays the role of the Portuguese in sixteenth-century Asia and overlooks the extensive scholarship on the Portuguese enterprise both in the sixteenth and in the following centuries. In an effort to facilitate the integration of this body of knowledge, this paper reviews the scholarly debates of the last three decades on the Portuguese in Asia and considers the formation of a Portuguese enterprise in the Indian Ocean. It is structured around three patterns of activity developed by the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean – the Carreira da Índia, the intra-Asian trade voyages and the shadow empire – and the territorial occupation created by each of these activities.