Chapter 12 The Colonial Period 443this venerable trade link between the Far East and the Mediterranean opened
and closed depending on the local political climate, but from 1240 to 1340 it
was again open, protected by Mongol outposts. During that “window of
opportunity” thousands of European merchants poured eastward, including
Marco Polo (see chapter 3).
Finally, there was the trade network of the eastern Mediterranean, where
merchants from Italian city-states, Byzantium, and North Africans were in a
lucrative transnational trade system.
Each of these networks was a “world system,” in the phrase made famous
by Immanuel Wallerstein (1976). This term contrasts with the term “empire.”
Both an empire and a world system are transnational bonds among polities of
various size and type, but an empire is a system of political domination
whereas a “world system” is an economic system. There may indeed be inequi-
ties in such systems—Wallerstein’s analysis of the capitalist world system is an
analysis of economic dominance—but they are not based on direct political
dominance. Of course, it can happen, and did, that a world system produces
empires, and that is the topic we turn to next. But the capitalist world system
was always larger than, and different from, the empires that thrived on it.European Empires in Asia
Portuguese Port Cities and Priests
The European period in Asia opens with the Portuguese. Prince Henry of
Portugal, “The Navigator,” in one of the earliest partnerships of science and
commerce, sponsored exploration by Vasco de Gama in search of a new route
to the Indian Ocean that avoided the unfriendly Turkish-controlled Red Sea.
Could you get there via the Cape of Good Hope? As it turned out, you could,
and soon Portuguese trading ships were going all the way to Southeast Asia.
When Vasco De Gama arrived home at the end of the fifteenth century with a
cargo of cinnamon mixed with clay for which he had paid double its market
value in Calicut, then sold it for 60 times the total cost of his two-year expedi-
tion, the European rush to Asia was on.
Four years before this fortuitous voyage, the Pope had sought to contain
Portuguese and Spanish rivalry by dividing the world between them in the
Treaty of Tordesilla (1494). Spain got the New World and Portugal got Asia.
This meant that during the sixteenth century, Portugal had no competition
from Spain except for Spain’s backdoor entry to the Philippines via the Pacific
late in the century.
The first viceroy of Portugal in the East was Dom Affonso d’Albuquerque
(1509–1515) whose vision of an Asian empire was fired by a loathing of Mus-
lims. This made the Islamic Mughal Empire in India, then in its prime, a par-
ticular challenge. Albuquerque’s strategy was to establish a series of fortresses
along the major coasts of the Indian Ocean. Unlike Arab and Indian trading
vessels, his ships were armed. His first conquest was at Goa on the Malabar