Chapter 12 The Colonial Period 441guages and ideas (chapter 2). The process went on throughout the decades and
centuries of British, French, and Dutch colonial administration. As they put
institutions into place, codified law, established schools and hospitals, and sup-
ported some classes and undermined others, they were informed by their own
knowledge base, so that all those institutions, so thoroughly embedded into the
colonized nations by the end, bear the marks of Orientalist knowledge. Even the
heirs of the modern, postcolonial nations of Asia today are shaped by Oriental-
ist knowledge. That includes the leadership that led independence movements
and were recipients of “handovers” stretching from 1947 (India) to 1997 (Hong
Kong) as well as the classes created, then educated, under colonialism. Their
cities and governments are modern hybrids left by the imperial world order.
In this chapter we attempt to present a realistic overview of European
empire in Asia that is conscious of the critique mounted by Said and the post-
colonial scholarship that has attempted to correct the picture presented in an
earlier era, while acknowledging that this is an ongoing and unfinished effort.Trade in the Precolonial Period
It could not have been predicted, in the fourteenth century, that among the
several international trade networks then existing, the one up in the far north-
western corner of the Eurasian landmass would come to dominate almost the
entire world. It was far from the richest one at the time. In the fourteenth cen-
tury, there were several major trade networks.
China during Ming dynasty was the central power of a far-flung trade-trib-
ute system. The Chinese had developed excellent ocean-going junks, some as
long as 180 feet, benefiting from the Chinese invention of the magnetic com-
pass (carried by Arab traders to the West), the sextant that could chart courses
at sea by fixing on the Big Dipper, watertight compartments, dry docks, paddle
wheel ships, and weather forecasting. During the period from 1405 to 1480,
China became a maritime power that might have come to dominate the Pacific
and Indian oceans as Europeans later did. In 1405 a Muslim eunuch from Yun-
nan named Zheng He commanded a fleet of over 300 ships and 20,000 men,
which sailed as far as India, Hormuz, and the east coast of Africa. This armada
set out not to conquer but to trade. They were especially concerned with the
strategic city of Malacca (Malaka) on the strait between Malaysia and Suma-
tra, which controlled the waters connecting the Indian and Pacific oceans. But
by 1480, bureaucrats at the capital began to worry about the costs of these mar-
itime excursions and perhaps worry about the growing wealth and power of
merchants in the eastern coastal cities. They turned down new requests for
funds, burned records of Zheng He’s accomplishments, and turned inward,
leaving the seas to others.
The Strait of Malacca, which was of such interest to China during its brief
period as a maritime power, was a second maritime trade center from a very
early period. Whoever controlled the strait and nearby islands and peninsula