The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

The Era of Chinese Predominance, 1000–1500 51

lives of many thousands of people in southeast Asia and adjacent

islands. All who cultivated and prepared these commodities for ship­

ment, along with sailors, merchants and everyone connected with the

collection, assortment, and transport of spices came to depend for

their everyday livelihood on precarious linkages with consumers

thousands of miles away. The same was true for the producers of

hundreds of other commodities entering long-distance trade nets,

from rarities like rhinoceros horn to items of mass production and

consumption like cotton and sugar.^55

Such specialization and interdependence duplicated what had hap­

pened earlier in China, with the difference that trade in the south
China Sea and Indian Ocean crossed political boundaries. As a result,
merchants faced greater uncertainty on the one hand and enjoyed
greater freedom on the other. Malaya and other key places along the
trade routes—Ceylon and southern India, together with ports on the
African coast and in southern Arabia as well—were governed by rulers
whose income came to depend in very large part upon dues levied on
shipping. But once a ship put out to sea, local rulers lost control,
whereas ship captains were free within fairly wide limits to seek out
the cheapest place to come ashore and do business. If a ruler became
too greedy, resentful captains could find another port of call. Under
these circumstances, patterns of trade could alter rapidly in response
to changes in political regimes, and new entrepots could rise to im­
portance very quickly.
This happened at Malacca, for example. That emporium, built in a
dismal swamp, almost inaccessible by land, had no importance before
the turn of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries. It started as a piratical
headquarters, where goods seized at sea could be re-sorted and dis­
patched to advantageous destinations. Then, in the first years of the
fifteenth century it became a port of more general resort for peaceable
shipping, and within a few decades dominated the trade of the region
round about—becoming the principal entrepot for the spices pro­
duced in the “Spice Islands” lying further east. Malacca rose, of
course, at the expense of other, alternate ports. Safe harborage and
moderate dues attracted trade; so did compulsion exercised by armed
vessels policing the Malaccan straits between Sumatra and the main­
land. Force therefore mattered in Malacca’s rise, along with the pro­
tection from piracy such force could bring. Naval force had to be sus­
tained by taxation levied on goods passing through the port. A delicate

55. Archibald Lewis, “Maritime Skills in the Indian Ocean, 1368–1500,” JESHO 16
    (1973): 254–58, compiled a long list of goods traded.