L19_cw_Rdg- The Portuguese Impact on Southeast Asia

The penetration of the Portuguese and the Spanish overseas did not determine the
character of the sixteenth century in southeast Asia. The Dutch seafarers did not arrive in a
Portuguese Asia, neither a Portuguese India nor a Portuguese Indonesia, but in regions in
which the position of the Portuguese was militantly held in check or repulsed. Portuguese power
was typically medieval in character, a fact which helps to explain its limited effectiveness. There
was not much unity to the scattered territory of port settlements spread out over thousands of
miles, despite the centralized royal shipping from Goa to Europe. There was no hierarchy of
officials with a distinction between civil and military administration, but a conglomeration of
nobles and condottieri each with his own retinue of henchmen bound to him by a vassal’s loyalty
or a lust gain; often the officials in authority provided their own equipment and carried out
exploitation for their own benefit by means of offices bestowed on them, frequently on a short
term basis. Portuguese power sought its strength, then, not in taking over Oriental trade
reestablishing a territorial authority, but in acquiring tribute and booty.
The Portuguese colonial regime, then, did not introduce a single new economic element
into the commerce of southern Asia. The forms of political and economic domination-
monopolies, financial exploitation, “fiscalization” of the government- all of them originated in the
caliphates and Byzantium, and were transferred to Portugal, and perhaps carried on there, by
Jews and Italians. The political power of the Portuguese, based on their military superiority, now
made possible the large scale application of those forms in Asia. That military superiority was
the only thing the Portuguese carried overseas to Asia as a new and European element.
Though the Portuguese period was the first of the European colonial periods which from then on
were to decide the fate of Asia, this fact serves to separate it from the following, second period,
that of Dutch and English oversees voyages and colonial settlement, and to link it in spirit and
forms to previous periods, those of purely Asian trade. The Portuguese regime only introduced
a non-intensive drain on the existing structure of shipping and trade. The next period would in its
time organize a new system of foreign trade and foreign shipping, it would call into life trenchant
colonial relationships, and it would create new economic forms in Europe- not perhaps as a
direct result but rather as a parallel development bolstered by the system. Not Lisbon and
Seville, but Amsterdam, Middleburg, Enkhuizen and London were among the heralds of a new
era.

From: John Basin, The Emergence of Modern Southeast. Asia 1541-I 9572
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, Inc., 1967, pp. 20-22.

Questions:
According to the author...
1. How were Portuguese commercial ventures described?
2. Who would succeed the Portuguese as commercial colonizers?
3. How ‘impactful’ were the Portuguese on the Asian societies they interacted with?