The Portuguese and the Asian Seas, c. 1500 - c. 1640: remarks for a global review of the first European expansion in the East. Part II: The Portuguese Estado da Índia

Abstract

The Portuguese Estado da Índia was the government or vice-royalty that, with its human, economic, cultural and religious networks much closer to the Phenician thalassocracy than to the territorial models of both the Roman and the Spanish empires, framed the setting up of the first European player in the Asian Seas. In this second part of our article we will start by describing its settlements and working structures between c. 1500 and c. 1600. We will conclude with a synthesis of the adjustments imposed between c. 1600 and c. 1640 by the competition in that same area among the two Iberian powers, the English, the Dutch, and the main local merchant communities. The general features of the trading networks running in those waters, as the often new or fast changing pattern of many of its seaborne States will also be reviewed. Here, however, our main concern goes to the East and Southeast Asia as in that periphery the Dutch — the leading protagonists of the second European expansion — started defying the positions taken by their predecessors, a kind of disturbance already felt by the Portuguese Estado da Índia during the 1640’s