The inventors of imperialism

JOE GILL traces the ideology and method of contemporary imperialism back to the greed, hubris and violence of the late 15th century Portuguese

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WHAT is often called The Age of Discovery, when Spanish and Portuguese explorers reached the southern coast of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific, is something of a misnomer. When Vasco de Gama reached the coast of east Africa in March 1498, he “discovered” pre-existing trade routes across the Indian Ocean that had been established by Yemeni Arab merchants hundreds of years before.

But the Portuguese were not only interested in “discovery” — their real goal was to find gold, slaves, spices, and to establish imperial supremacy across vast swathes of the world, done in the name of God and the king. They went armed and ready for violence, and that is what they brought.

In the 15th century, Portuguese monarchs were waging a religious crusade against the Muslim emirates of Morocco, while at the same time sending out slave-raiding parties to west Africa (Guinea) and settling the Atlantic islands, including Madeira and the Azores.

During the 16th century, the Portuguese built 50-plus ports to control trade across the Indian Ocean, enforced by a royal armada of warships patrolling the west coast of India, eastern Africa, the Red Sea and the Gulf. They were the upstart imposters in an Asian commercial sea trade in which the big players were Gujaratis, Chinese, Javanese and Japanese. As one writer put it, “they crawled like lice on the hide of the [Asian] continent,” where Mogul India, China and Safavid Iran called the shots.

But gradually they built a global trade system between the plundered wealth of the new colonies, using the black bodies of Africans, in exchange for the silk and spices of Asia. A new world order was born.

Portugal was the pioneer of settler colonialism and the slave plantation economy in the 15th century, a model it developed in the Atlantic islands and then reproduced as its conquests spread to Africa and Brazil in the 1500s.

Malyn Newitt’s Navigations: The Portuguese Discoveries and the Renaissance is an ambitious and challenging work of history that spans almost two centuries. It links together the dynastic history of Portugal, the evolution of its own version of the wider Renaissance, and the famous journeys of the Portuguese explorers from the late 15th century.

Newitt is generous in his quotation and acknowledgement of other historians of this heavily explored terrain, although at times I found myself wondering exactly who the book was written for. The very breadth of the work seems to detract from a focused narrative drive that any popular history requires.

A section on the women who shaped the history of Portugal at a time of rampant patriarchy, when aristocratic women were primarily seen as the future mothers of kings, sits awkwardly between elite dynastic history and a tentative feminist revisionism.

There are fascinating details revealing how Portugal was a society in which slaves of Brazilian and Moorish origin formed part of the royal households, but where African kingdoms were, at least initially, seen as potential Christian allies against Islam. 

As the 15th century ended and the Atlantic slavery economy expanded, Portuguese attitudes shifted to perceive Africans as lesser humans — invariably and inaccurately described as cannibals — and racism became entrenched.

The author should be commended for going to significant lengths to challenge the conventional story of the Portuguese discoveries, revealing the profit-seeking motives, the religious fanaticism, and the extreme violence deployed by the explorers in the name of king and the imperial state.

Navigations is at its best when we are brought close to the key figures who led these expeditions, most of whom were members of the minor nobility — driven, ruthless individuals who wished to make their mark on the world and achieve fame and fortune.

The goal of the two rival Iberian powers, Lisbon and Madrid, was to find a shorter route west to Asia, to avoid the dangerous route around southern Africa. America was in this way discovered by accident, and its existence as a vast continent separate from Asia was not fully comprehended until years after Columbus’s first voyages.

The most illustrious and infamous of the Portuguese explorers were Vasco de Gama and Ferdinand Magellan, whose voyages over several years were the first to cross the Indian Ocean, and to circumnavigate the world, each in formidable armadas heavily laden with artillery and troops. They left a trail of blood and terror. De Gama, on his third voyage to India, in one of many atrocities, set fire to a Muslim pilgrim vessel with 400 men, women and children on board, fuelling the fires for four days until all were burnt to death.

The author compares Magellan to Odysseus, a mad captain pushing his men ever onwards toward catastrophe, which he finally meets dressed in full armour trying to reach shore in the Philippines, where all his violence and cruelty toward peaceful natives and his own crew finally catch up with him, speared to death and his body never recovered.

If we think of Donald Trump as a monstrous imperialist surrounded by evangelical fanatics, his primitive racist ideology can trace its lineage to the greed and hubris of the Portuguese empire-builders.

As Newitt says, these voyages, along with the conquests of Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro in Mexico and Peru, when stripped of myth and legend, can be seen as “a savage assault by well-armed pirates on peoples they aspired to dominate and ruthlessly exploit — all in the name of Christianity.” Plus ca change.

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