©  1999  Katherine Moseley

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R.J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas 1640-1700 (Leiden: Research School CNWS, Leiden University, 1998). vi + 465 pp. 60 Dutch guilders
    Reviewed by Katherine Moseley

"To the merchants and mariners of the seventeenth century the wide waters of the Indian Ocean appeared of vast, superhuman dimensions. An interminable time was spent crossing it...." So opens Barendse’s Arabian Seas—a splendid account, resembling, in its complexity, color, and scale, the region it describes. Indeed, it takes us, like fellow-travelers, to the ports, ships, and mercantile communities of that great maritime arc, bounded by the East African shoreline, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, and India’s western coast.

Based on over a decade of archival research in the Netherlands, India, and Portugal, Barendse’s book blends social and economic history, economic geography, and institutional analysis. While synthesizing perhaps thousands of primary documents, it retains the feel of an account -- descriptive, discursive, with little in the way of generalization, aggregate data, or quantitative trends. The underlying strategy, however, seems like Braudel’s: to take the reader to the scene, letting him sort through the evidence himself for clues to interests and motives, underlying structures, and long-term shifts. There are shortcomings: countless typographic errors, quaint wordings, rudimentary tables, the lack of an overall bibliography, and vagueness on certain points. All these pale, however, in face of the utterly convincing realism of this work—its seductive combination of historical sweep, sharp insights, and rich detail.

Barendse’s focus is on the last half of the seventeenth century—a period of Dutch hegemony, English ascent, and Portuguese decline—and the problematic of "European expansion" in many ways frames the book. This is far from a conventional imperial or economic history, however: it is resolutely centered on the regional economy, with minimal attention to wars, states, boundaries, or even to trade with the metropoles. A chapter is devoted to each of the three great chartered companies of the Indies, but the emphasis throughout is on contradictions and ambiguities—the impossibility of effective monopolies or central control; the ubiquity of corruption, smuggling, and "private trade"; the immense and inescapable role of indigenous traders, shippers, and financiers.

The Moghul, Safavid, and Ottoman empires, along with other local principalities, also remain in the background, leaving the political demarcations of the region somewhat unclear. As in Europe, Barendse notes, "the cornucopia of American bullion was emptied by the state on payments for a salaried bureaucracy and army" (111), while the sale of offices and tax farming were milked for further revenues. Despite their actual dependence on trade, however, the Asian states—with the exception of the Omanis—tended to treat commerce with some disdain (preferring, as Barendse puts it, "the stirrup to the ship")(p. 434).

Europeans -- barred entirely from most of the Ottoman Red Sea -- were generally confined to coastal enclaves; Barendse provides fascinating detail on these, especially the stratified, more or less creolized Portuguese settlements of the western Indian ports, and their subaltern strata of mestizos, converts, and lascarin troops. Other diasporas of Portuguese settlers, lancados, and mercenaries stretched up the Zambezi and Euphrates, and into the political centers of the interior. More generally, the ports and sea lanes teemed with a multicultural assortment of renegades, freebooters, "sea proletarians" (a term from Frederick Lane), and African (ex-)slaves.

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Barendse’s focus then, is not only regional but maritime, and especially on the coastwise, inter-Asian, or "country trade." The major flow was between India (producer of pepper, cloth, and diamonds, inter alia), and the Middle East (still the major conduit for bullion, along with cotton, silk, and coffee). To both regions came smaller flows of African slaves, ivory, and gold. Barendse provides especially rich material on not only the operations of the Companies, but on local-level structures and transactions—ports and bazaars, Indian and Muscati merchant and banking networks, European privateers, ships’ crews, the seasonality of trade—in such places as Basra, Mocha, Goa, and Surat.

It is the character and dynamic of this commercial system that is Barendse’s overarching concern. In the long run, he seems to argue, the more humdrum, localized trade in bulk goods was as important as, and intertwined with, the long distance trade. Though the latter was crucial for capital accumulation and state revenues, "[t]he entire trade of the Indian Ocean would barely have filled one modern freighter" (p. 173). Even the old silk route, he argues, was less "a highway from Europe to the celestial kingdom" than "a succession of small local circuits of trade" (p. 134). Markets for high-value exports were limited and fragmented, beset by inadequate information and erratic fluctuations, high insecurity and protection rents (or by customs duties, which might be even worse). To minimize risks, small-scale "peddling" and dispersed "portfolio investments" tended to prevail.

Barendse is accordingly quite cautious on the question of a seventeenth-century "world-economy." The Arabian seas, he says, did make up a regional maritime system (p. 60), but less an (integrated, hierarchical) "world-economy" than a simple "network of trade" (p. 435). And thus the transformative impact of the European chartered companies— their mercantilist character, their superior centralization, capitalization, and power; their ability to achieve economies of scale and lower costs; and their role in forging wider linkages on a truly global scale. One might add—a Wallersteinian point that Barendse does not quite make explicitly—the fact that there was not one chartered company but several, always competing, never able to regulate, stabilize, and thus limit global commerce as they might have wished.

By the end of the century, Berendse suggests, "the integration of the Arabian Seas within the ‘modern world system’" was well underway (p. 439). Spatially, eastern and western Asia became more closely connected, as did both not only to Europe, but to the wider Atlantic world. A marvelous chapter, entitled "Private Deals," tells of the smugglers and buccaneers who, in defiance of mercantilist restrictions, pioneered the American routes, carrying East African slaves and other booty to the Bermudas and New York. "By 1700 global connections tied both ‘Indies’ together," Barendse notes (p. 407). Similarly, tea and other Chinese goods began to appear in significant quantities, in exchange for opium, textiles, and bullion earned in the Indian trade.

Larger and more unified markets, in turn, narrowed the gap between staples and hitherto luxury goods. By the end of the century, bulk-manufactured cloth, and primary products like indigo, coffee, and rice entered massively into world-wide trade; so did labour, "not only slaves but indentured labour and mercenaries as well" (p. 5). Market integration also spelled greater cost/price competition and a "global process of product substitution" (p. 216). Indigo from the Caribbean and Guatemala displaced the Indian product, first in Italy, then in the Levant; pepper from the East Indies, shipped round the Cape, struck a blow to Western Indian exports and the traditional Levant trade. Competing supplies of New World sugar, cotton, then coffee were to follow close behind.

This ongoing reorganization of world trade was led by Europeans, Barendse argues, above all by the English, whose multiple advantages are explored in some detail. These included their early entry into the tea and coffee trades, the close connections they engineered between Bombay, China, and Madras, and their experience in producing textiles for the Middle East. But "paramount to the rise of the British Empire in Asia," Barendse argues (pp. 378-9), was their thriving "country trade," soon surpassing the Portuguese, then the Indians themselves. In the process, Bengal and Arabia prospered, but to the detriment of the Malabar Coast and the Levant.

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Bullion had long drained eastward to India’s "bottomless sink" (reflecting Portugal’s early deficits with the region, for example). With the decline of the transit trade in pepper, the Persian and Ottoman balance of payments turned negative as well. By the turn of the century, silver began to drain eastward from India itself: "One could obtain bullion for the China-trade," Barendse notes, "with the sale of European commodities at Surat and Bombay..." (p. 405). These shifts seem to have been part of a more general decline affecting the Arabian Seas, ca. 1660-1690, to which Barendse alludes at several points. There were other possible culprits, however—inflation and heavy taxes, plague and climate change; the possible connection to a wider "seventeenth-century crisis" is mentioned as well.

Here, as on other major points, Barendse sticks to the evidential clutter, the uncertainties, of the middle ground. His book stands somewhere between Steensgaard and Pearson, emphasizing both the revolutionary role of European commerce and the immense importance of the preexisting inter-Asian trade. Similarly, it treads a path between Wallerstein and Frank, seeing the area as not "external" but still only partly integrated to a still-emerging world-economy—a world-economy in which India, as well as Europe or China, had a major place. This world system, however, was also assuming distinctive capitalist, systemic features, and under increasing European control.

A revised edition, to be brought out in the United States by M.E.Sharpe, promises to tell us more of the African side of the Arabian Seas. For now, useful (but uncited) companion volumes might be Risso’s Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean (Westview 1995), and Joseph Harris, The African Presence in Asia (Northwestern 1971). Photos and other art work would also be precious complements to a new edition, but are perhaps too much to hope for. Such basic amenities as an index and bibliography, however, not to speak of proofreading, should be de rigueur, along with better maps, perhaps some even showing political boundaries, trade routes, or commodity flows. This volume is a great achievement, and surely deserves the best.

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