The Indian Ocean Read Online Free Page B

completely
mare incognita
to them. They also implicitly considered it to be
mare liberum
, that is, as Barros noted, a sea space which had not been claimed by any previous state or other body. The distinction between
mare clausum
and
mare liberum
was set out by Grotius in the early seventeenth century, acting as a supporter of Dutch pretensions at sea. However, the notion of
mare clausum
can be traced back to the mid fifteenth century. The key question in evaluating Portuguese claims is to decide whether control over the Indian Ocean had already been parcelled out among the existing maritime powers, or was it a free internationalhighway? Alexandrowicz finds that there was freedom of navigation on the high seas. Grotius ridiculed the Portuguese claim that they had now occupied the high seas, for many others had sailed over it before them. Yet Grotius seems here to be setting aside the Portuguese claim that while certainly people had travelled over the sea before 1498, no state had claimed either sovereignty or even suzerainty. Thus, he said, the Indian Ocean before Europeans entered was
res communis
, that is open to all. 17 This has a nice echo of the modern concern with the notion of the sea as the last of the Commons.
    If this be accepted, then it has to be argued that the Portuguese claim had, in their eyes, some validity; there was no preceding right of passage claimed so they could do it, and if necessary use force. There was a juridical vacuum which they could fill if they chose, which they did thanks to their own notions as set out above.
    The second area of controversy concerns the existence, or prevalence, of state violence in the Indian Ocean before the Portuguese arrival. We discussed this matter at some length in the previous chapter (see pages 97–9). To sum up, there certainly had been violence at sea before the Portuguese arrived. Piracy was very widespread indeed, and took a heavy toll on merchant shipping. We will say more about this presently. There even are a few instances of Asian states at this time or in the past using sea power, such as Srivijaya, and the Cola state. However, it does not seem that any of these powers had very effective navies. We should see their maritime efforts as being completely adjunct to their land ones: their navies were only auxiliaries to their armies. Similarly, the controllers of the various port cities, such as Calicut, Melaka, Cambay, Hurmuz, made no attempt to force ships to call to trade. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the Portuguese introduced state controlled violence into the Indian Ocean.
    Some Portuguese violence was not directly done by the state, but was tacitly accepted. Professor Thomaz wrote that,
    Whereas the chief aim of the system of control set up by the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean was attained only in parts, its by-products seem, on the contrary, to have developed beyond all expectation. We refer mainly to extortion, bribery, peculation and piracy. The Bay of Bengal, which lay virtually out of reach of the Portuguese authorities, was the ideal ground for such activities. 18
    He sees violence as implicit in the whole Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean, especially in the matter of privateering. These state-sanctioned fleets could plunder ships outside the Portuguese system, and the proceeds were divided up among the officers and crew of the successful ship according to set shares laid down by the state. I would extrapolate a little more from this important point than Thomaz is prepared to do. The Portuguese unilaterally dictated a closed Indian Ocean, and then the king, instead of having to pay his men to enforce this, instead let the victims pay by letting his soldiers plunder those who infringed. This sounds very precisely like the sort of protection racket one gets in many societies, where a criminal elementcollects protection from shop keepers in return for not breaking their windows. Analogous to this is the failure to capture