Portuguese in Southeast Asia
In the fifteenth century, Spain and Portugal, as both formal allies and trading rivals, began to circumnavigate the globe to seek out new lands to expand trading networks and to spread Catholicism. A papal edict of 1493 divided the "New World" (or non-European world) between Spain and Portugal. This edict had assumed that the world was flat, but the circumnavigation of the globe by Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480–1521) in 1521 led to the 1529 Treaty of Saragossa to divide Asia. The treaty gave the Spanish a free hand in the Philippines, while the Portuguese had sole rights to the islands that now form Indonesia.
Growth of Portuguese Control
Arab traders dominated the lucrative trade from the spice-producing islands of what is now Indonesia. Portugal, a small and somewhat poor nation, excelled at seafaring. The skilled Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama (c. 1460–1524) arrived on India's southwest coast, at Calicut (Calcutta), in 1498. Da Gama was followed by Afonso de Albuquerque (1453–1515), appointed viceroy of India in 1509, who established a number of imperial possessions for Portugal. The Portuguese established a series of strategic ports and small territories in western Africa, Arabia, and southern and eastern Asia to control the trading routes to the Spice Islands of what is now Indonesia. The aim of the Portuguese was to secure key ports rather than to conquer territory. By the sixteenth century the Portuguese sphere of influence included African, Arabian, and South Asian ports as well as North Sumatra, Melaka, Bantam (West Java), Manado (North Sulawesi, Indonesia), parts of Maluku, Ambon, and the island of Timor in maritime Southeast Asia, and Macao and Taiwan in East Asia. Trading posts were also set up, with permission from local potentates, in Ayutthaya (a kingdom in what is now Thailand), Cambodia, and Myanmar (Burma). A crucial event was the capture of Melaka, the strategic Malayan trading city that lies on the all-important Strait of Malacca, in 1511. Control of Melaka gave Lisbon a monopoly on the spice trade to Europe. When Albuquerque finally captured it, his troops slaughtered the local Muslim population, while the sultan fled to Johor, where he rallied his forces for a counterattack. Until the arrival of the Spanish in the Philippines in 1564, the Portuguese were without European rivals in the region.
Portugal used a series of "factories" (handling posts) to process the raw commodities and used naval power to dominate the trading routes, although they never gained complete hegemony. However, the spice was tremendously lucrative, with the value of the trade in the sixteenth century being worth several times the entire revenue collected in Portugal itself. The Portuguese discovered that there was little that Southeast Asians wished to buy from Europe, but there were commodities they wanted from elsewhere. Thus the trading network that linked the various parts of Africa, Arabia, and Asia enriched the Portuguese middlemen, who took the profits back to Portugal: ivory and gold from Africa, textiles from India, spice from Indonesia, and manufactured goods from China.
Limitations and Decline of Portuguese Control
The spread of Portuguese religion and culture was, on the whole, far less successful. The rough and often violent behavior of the Portuguese sojourners left a very poor impression on the peoples of Southeast Asia, vast numbers of whom had adopted the Islam of Arab and Indian traders. The peoples of the Malay Peninsula and the Spice Islands favored trading with their coreligionists in the Middle East. For the Portuguese forces, occupation of their Southeast Asian possessions was hazardous, with fifteen major assaults by sultans in Johor, Aceh, and Java between 1513 and 1616. The Portuguese had also adopted the regular tactic of piracy against Muslim vessels, in the name of Christianity, which helped to undermine any pretensions to legitimacy they might have had. Opposition to the Portuguese solidified the power of emerging sultanates of neighboring areas that, hitherto, had only nominal control over the people in whose name they governed. The Portuguese also began to suffer severe domestic problems, in part because of the tremendous loss of men in the colonies due to conflict, piracy, and disease. The Dutch, on their arrival in the region in the seventeenth century, were able to displace the Portuguese in their key strongholds, notably by conquering Melaka in 1641. The Portuguese withdrew gradually from almost all of their ports but were able to hold the eastern part of Timor, creating the separate territory of East Timor.
One Portuguese legacy was the adoption of new words into Bahasa (Malay), particularly for new technologies of the time, which are still in use to this day. There is a smattering of Portuguese surnames around Southeast Asia, particularly in Melaka, denoting the descendants of marriages between Portuguese sailors and local women, which were quite common in colonial times.
Further Reading
Dixon, Chris. (1991) South-East Asia in the World-Economy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Osborne, Milton. (1995) Southeast Asia: An Introductory History. St. Leonard's, Australia: Allen & Unwin.
Tarling, Nicholas. (1966) A Concise History of Southeast Asia. Singapore: Donald Moore Press.
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