The Portuguese and the Straits of Melaka, 1575-1619: Power, Trade and Diplomacy

Preface

xi Preface As the age of imperialism and the painful process of decolonization fade into a more distant horizon, the study of European presence in Asia is experiencing something of a renaissance. Students and researchers are subjecting source materials to fresh scrutiny, shaping a fresh image of the colonial era and capturing experiences across different strata of society. Attention is now being paid to a spectrum of social processes such as acculturation, assimilation, social insertion, hybridity, marginalisation, cooperation, and globalisation. Over the past decades, attention has been placed on the early motives, means, mechanisms and epochs of European expansion together with the social, economic, technological, religious and political factors that enabled these processes. Many older exposés upheld the three “G’s” — God, gold and glory — and celebrated conquest as the triumph of a superior Europe over the other peoples around the globe. These admittedly oversimplistic paradigms of historical analysis, it would appear, have finally been fortunately relegated to the dustbin of discarded research methodologies. Arguably, in no historical subfield have the underlying paradigms of analysis shifted more than for the early modern period. It was the 15th and 16th century that witnessed the establishment of the first European colonial settlements. Stimulus for deeper research on the latter Middle Ages and the early modern world almost certainly stemmed from a relatively recent plethora of “quincentennial celebrations” — from the “discovery” of the Cape of Good Hope (1488–1988), the Portuguese circumnavigation of the African continent (1498–1998) and the Portuguese conquest of the Melaka Sultanate to the Portuguese (1511–2011) to the Spanish “discovery” of the Americas (1492–1992) and soon also of the Pacific xii Preface Ocean (1513–2013). At an official level, these commemorations of the European reconnaissance are now being matched, and to an extent also intentionally juxtaposed, by earlier Asian — specifically Chinese — feats of maritime navigation: the great voyages of the Chinese Admiral Zheng He of the early 15th century. It can hardly escape attention that Europe’s aggressive, military and expansionist programme is sharply contrasted by the (supposedly) peaceful, cultural and commercial intentions of Zheng He, that Imperial Eunuch of the Ming Dynasty whose voyages — rightly or wrongly — are celebrated in Asia as missions of “friendship” and “intercultural exchange”. Thanks to considerable research funds generously made available in recent times from both private and public sponsors, the topic of European presence in Asia from the late 1400s to the late 1700s is experiencing a revival. The now classic works of Boxer, Chaudhuri, Furber, Lach, MacGregor, Meilink-Roelofsz, Reid, Schrieke, Thomaz, or Van Leur — just to select a handful of examples — are now supplemented by a growing pool of historical studies that revisit known source materials, and sometimes also draw on rare prints or recently (re-) discovered manuscripts. With respect to 16th- and 17th-century Southeast Asia, Portuguese and Dutch sources certainly retain their pre-eminent position in scholarly circles. But recent studies are making more extensive use of documents, reports and cartographical materials written in European languages including Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese and Spanish. Under the editorship of Armando Cortesão, the Hakluyt Society in London published the Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires with English translation in two volumes. With the benefit of hindsight, this bi-lingual edition marked a major breakthrough for the study of early modern Southeast Asia generally speaking. It has proven especially important to historians of Asia examining the dynamics of regional and long-distance inter-Asian trade and it has proven to be an invaluable source for understanding of that important period of transition between the Melaka Sultanate and Portuguese colonial port settlement. In this context one invariably thinks of the landmark studies by Luís Filipe R. Thomaz, Professor of History at the Universidade Católica in Lisbon, who has so meticulously combed the histories, documents and chronicles of Portuguese expansion. From the information he has gleaned from this pool of sparsely studied materials, he has cogently reconstructed an image of early colonial Melaka that was embedded in a patchwork of interlocked and overlapping commercial networks and found itself surrounded by competing, sometimes expanding Preface xiii polities that sustained a fragile but ever-shifting balance of power in Malaya, the Indonesian Archipelago and naturally also further afield. There can be little doubt that Thomaz has left for himself an enduring place in the history writing of the Malay world, and arguably Southeast Asia at large...