T H E RO U T L E D G E H I S T O R Y O F

WE ST E R N E MPIRES

The Routledge History of Western Empires is an all new volume focussing on the history of
Western Empires in a comparative and thematic perspective. Comprising thirty-three
original chapters arranged in eight thematic sections, the book explores European overseas
expansion from the Age of Discovery to the Age of Decolonisation.
Studies by both well-known historians and new scholars offer fresh, accessible perspec-
tives on a multitude of themes ranging from colonialism in the Arctic to the scramble for
the Coral Sea, from attitudes to the environment in the East Indies to plans for colonial
settlement in Australasia. Chapters examine colonial attitudes towards poisonous animals
and the history of colonial medicine, evangelisation in Africa and Oceania, colonial
recreation in the tropics and the tragedy of the slave trade.
The Routledge History of Western Empires ranges over five centuries and crosses continents
and oceans highlighting transnational and cross-cultural links in the imperial world and
underscoring connections between colonial history and world history. Through lively and
engaging case studies, contributors not only weigh in on historiographical debates on
themes such as human rights, religion and empire, and the ‘taproots’ of imperialism, but
also illustrate the various approaches to the writing of colonial history. A vital contribution
to the field.

Robert Aldrich is Professor of European History at the University of Sydney. He is the

author of Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories
(2005), Gay Life Stories (2012) and editor of The Age of Empires (2007).

Kirsten McKenzie is Associate Professor in History at the University of Sydney. She is

the author of Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850 (2004) and A Swindler’s
Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty (2009).
 THE ROUTLEDGE
HISTORY OF WESTERN
EMPIRES

Edited by
Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie

I Routledge
I Taylor & Francis Group

L O N D O N A N D N E W YORK
First published 2014
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie for selection and editorial matter; individual
contributors for their chapters
The right of Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie to be identified as editors of this work; and the
individual contributors for their chapters has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or
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used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The Routledge history of Western empires / edited by Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie.
pages cm – (The Routledge histories)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Europe–Colonies–History. 2. Imperialism. I. Aldrich, Robert, 1954- II. McKenzie, Kirsten, 1970-
JV151.R68 2013
909’.09712–dc23
2013018672

ISBN: 978-0-415-63987-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-87949-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Baskerville
by Taylor and Francis books
 2
FLOATING FRANKS
The Portuguese and their empire as seen from early modern
Asia

Jorge Flores

The Estado da Índia

During his formal reception by the Samudri Raja on 30 May 1498—after being warned
the previous day by two prominent Muslim officials that the gift he had brought from
Portugal ‘was not a thing to offer to a king’—Vasco da Gama (1469–1524) was forced to
listen to the ruler of Calicut bitterly declare, in front of a large group of courtiers, that he
‘came from a very rich kingdom, and yet had brought him nothing’.1
From the very beginning of their expansion in the region, the Portuguese faced a high
degree of commercial and cultural sophistication in the Indian Ocean, though they were
not truly prepared to deal with such a reality. And yet King Manuel I (r. 1495–1521) took
little time in declaring himself ‘Lord of Navigation, Conquest, and Commerce of Ethiopia,
Arabia, Persia, and India’, a singular royal title adopted as early as 1499 that betrays his
imperial project to transform the Indian Ocean from a (then) vague geographical concept
to a political and economic space ruled from Lisbon. Six years later, in 1505, the Estado
da Índia (State of India) was born as a peculiar kind of political and administrative entity.
It was ruled by a governor or viceroy residing in the capital city of Goa after 1510, and
was constituted by a long corridor of cities and fortresses stretching from Kilwa, in East
Africa, to Macau, in the South China Sea. Besides Goa, located at the heart of the West
Coast of Peninsular India, the main vertebrae of this spinal cord were Hormuz, in the
Persian Gulf, and Malacca, in Insular South-east Asia. Controlling the Straits of Malacca,
the latter was conquered by the Portuguese in 1511 and lost in 1641 to a Dutch–Johor
alliance, while the kingdom of Hormuz saw the establishment of a Portuguese protectorate
in 1515, though it came to an end with the conquest of the city by an Anglo–Safavid entente
in 1622.2
The Estado was a floating domain, anchored in the control (or in the desire to control)
the main Indian Ocean axes of circulation and trading routes. ‘More than its spatial dis-
continuity’, writes the Portuguese historian Luís Filipe Thomaz, ‘it is the heterogeneity of
its institutions as well as the imprecision of its limits, both geographical and juridical, that
make it exceptional’.3 The Portuguese Empire in Asia held little territory and remained
maritime in essence. It was a loose network rather than a cohesive space—a political body
‘written on water’.4 The Estado da Índia represents a unique model of empire, not

33
 JORGE FLORES

necessarily more medieval and less ‘modern’ than the Vereenigde Oostindische Compag-
nie (VOC) or the East India Company (EIC). The cleavage between ‘redistributive’ and
‘productive’ European enterprises in early modern Asia is a somewhat simplistic way of
categorising these undertakings. Alternatively, one should insist on continuity over rupture,
for the differences between the various European actors at stake were certainly not as
pronounced as Niels Steensgard has argued.5
While the creation of a ‘Portuguese Indian Ocean’ was facilitated by military and naval
superiority, Portugal’s success was very much dependent on gaining knowledge of the
region. As such, Dom Manuel, who liked to style himself ‘King of the Sea’, was frequently
forced to play the apprentice, devoting considerable time to studying the economic and
political geography of maritime Asia. He soon understood that the world east of Cape
Comorin, from the Bay of Bengal to the South China Sea, was hardly controllable from
Goa. It did not take long before the king’s subjects freely circulated in the region, ‘weaving’
together a myriad of small coastal settlements known as povoações and bandéis. Such a string
of informal colonies represents a ‘shadow’ or ‘improvised’ empire, the reverse side of Goa.6
This alternative empire was composed of adventurers and renegades, and marked by trade
and military skills, mixed marriages and blurred ethnic boundaries, cross-cultural dressing
and food. The Portuguese ‘tribe’, made up of different components, soon became a South-
east Asian recognisable ‘brand’.7
In many ways, the arrival of the Portuguese signified the entry of one more group in a
long, complex cast of characters pursuing different interests in the region—sometimes as
competitors, in other instances as partners. Far from a simple ‘stage’ on which Portugal,
followed in time by other Western powers, would operate century after century without
getting its hands dirty, the Indian Ocean was a dynamically evolving entity, with the pre-
sence of Europeans not always leading to dramatic changes. The most interesting historical
cases are those in which the newly arrived Europeans and the indigenous societies were
transformed together, without the latter necessarily playing the active role or the former
being consigned to a passive one.
What impact did the Portuguese have on the Indian Ocean? Was it the mark of an
empire that dominated and transformed? Or was it rather about integration and founda-
tion? To this vexed question, the answer is probably: both.
The Estado da Índia was the manifestation of an expansionist project outlined and
developed by an early modern European state. It resorted to the political, military
and diplomatic instruments of legitimisation (war, negotiation, alliance), but also was con-
cerned with mechanisms of economic domination and social control. It was a sovereign
state that had marked the ‘discovered’ lands with stone pillars (padrões), and was always
keen on displaying the main elements of the Portuguese imperial iconology—the crucifix
and the armillary sphere, as well as the figure of Saint Thomas, the Apostle of the Indies.
In this context, the Portuguese, in certain regions and during defined periods, managed
greatly to influence circulation and trade within maritime Asia, deploying armadas and
granting safe-conducts (cartazes) to their allies while denying them to their enemies.8 The
empire established monopolies on commercial routes and commodities, blockaded ports
and built fortresses, demanded tribute (páreas) and instituted systems of vassalage modelled
on relevant European and Islamic precedents.
In other instances, the Estado da Índia proved to be a flexible and accommodating
entity, capable of practising a sort of ‘cultural relativism’ in early modern Asia. This
certainly was the right formula for dealing with an extremely diverse cultural and social

34
 FLOATING FRANKS

landscape, in which not everyone was necessarily acquainted with (nor eager to adopt) the
European political conventions and diplomatic vocabulary of the time. In such cases, Goa
behaved as a partner or a ‘fair’ economic and political rival, ready to learn and accept the
rules of the local game.
‘Portuguese Asia’ constituted another—European, Catholic—stratum of life in the
complex world of the Indian Ocean, contributing in turn to the urban, mercantile, social
and religious networks that characterised the region around 1500 and beyond. Portuguese
involvement led to the decline of some ports, but it also made others more prominent.
Some mercantile communities and commercial networks were negatively affected by
imperial policies, while others may have seen the Estado da Índia as an opportunity. The
Portuguese brought more powerful ships and cannon to the Indian Ocean arena, but they
quickly complemented these with local techniques and tools of war. They converted
thousands to Christianity through the missionary structures of the Padroado, though they
also learned the advantages of multi-ethnic cities and frontier societies. In an Indian Ocean
traditionally keen on the integration rather than expulsion of ‘foreigners’, the Portuguese
contributed to the region’s mix of merchants, political magnates, pilgrims, travellers,
pirates and other groups constantly on the move.
The reactions the Portuguese inspired among Asians, with understandable variations
from the Red Sea to China, reflected the region’s difficult balancing act between impact
and integration. The Portuguese, then, appeared simultaneously strange and familiar.

Asian images of the Portuguese

The dawn of the sixteenth century marked the beginning of a long and multifaceted
process of Asian observation of the Portuguese. From South Arabia to Japan many eyes
were on the new arrivals, the only Europeans to systematically travel in maritime Asia for
about a century. Some of the native observers expressed their feelings about the Frangues9
in writing, while others focussed on visually representing the foreigners. Everyone was
struck by the newcomers’ physical appearance and clothing, the exotic objects they
brought, as well as the ships they sailed.10
While certain Asian representations of the Portuguese are specific to particular cultures
and societies, ‘hard’ tropes concerning the ‘Franks’ became recurring themes for discussion
throughout the continent. Religion probably constitutes the strongest of these themes. The
medieval Christian–Islamic tension found a fertile breeding ground in an Indian Ocean
with a notable Islamic presence in the early modern period. The religious demonising of
the ‘infidel’ Portuguese pirates that runs through the Hadrami chronicles from South
Arabia is also the touchstone in Zain al-Din’s Tufhat al-Mujahidin (Gift to the Holy
Warriors)—a text conveying the perspective of the Muslim communities of Kerala (South
India) in the late sixteenth century—as well as in the words of Lutfi Bey, the Ottoman
ambassador to the South-east Asian sultanate of Aceh in 1563–1565.11 Along the same
lines, the ‘untrustworthy’ Portuguese were held responsible for the drowning of the Sultan
of Gujarat (Bahadur Shah, r. 1526–1537) in 1537, a dramatic moment depicted in an
early seventeenth-century Mughal miniature.12
The pictorial representation of the Mughal attack on Hughli (Bengal) in 1632 with the
resulting expulsion of the Portuguese from the port follows a similar line. Illustrated by the
best artists in the service of Emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658), the Padshahnama, housed
in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, includes two miniatures of this event with

35
 JORGE FLORES

extremely rich iconology. The one representing the capture of Hughli appears to be
inspired by European iconographic sources, as the depictions of both ships and landscape
demonstrate. The streets and the port are teeming with Portuguese who, surrounded by
sea and land, try both to flee and to defend themselves. The most marked distinctive
features of the foreigners are their physiognomy, their clothes and in particular the hats,
two of which are drawn floating calmly on the river. The prominence given to a twin-
towered church is perhaps intended to transmit and reinforce the religious nature of the
attack. Capturing the moment of flight, the anonymous painter of this miniature shows the
Portuguese loading their vessels with a number of wooden boxes. The second miniature, in
which the emperor receives the prisoners at his court in Agra, makes clear that, despite
their exotic attire and the gifts they are bearing, the Portuguese are far from centre stage.
The anonymous painter has intentionally relegated them to the bottom left corner, away
from the emperor and outside the most prestigious area of the square. Moreover, the
foreigners are being watched over by men wielding clubs, not the kind of characters and
gestures associated with the depiction of courtly scenes in Mughal India.13
Nevertheless, some significant nuances show up throughout Muslim lands. Even in the
case of Mughal India, it is possible to identify an ambivalent yet pragmatic attitude to the
Portuguese. Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) often parleyed with the Jesuit missionaries in
his court and was extremely interested in Christian doctrine. But for external consumption,
when addressing someone like the Uzbek Sultan, he was particularly vocal regarding his
intention to eliminate the numerous ‘Farangi infidels’ who were harassing and oppressing
traders and pilgrims to holy places.14 Further east, in the Malay world, the traditional
vocabulary of the Islamic jihad could be somewhat secondary when it came to reflecting on
the Portuguese Catholics. The popular epic Hikayat Hang Tuah does not make religion the
point of contention between Malays and Portuguese, for it is clear that ‘a religious
polarisation between Islam and its enemies became established in Southeast Asia only after
1550’.15
Furthermore, anti-Christian rhetoric was by no means exclusive to the Islamic world. It
can be traced in other religions and other societies through Sinhala war poems in Ceylon,
Burmese chronicles, Chinese memorials and Japanese texts proclaiming the need to
‘destroy Deus’. The dismantling of non-Christian temples and the spread of Catholic
churches, the en masse conversions and the felt danger of religious ‘contamination’ from
the populations, all played a part in this radicalisation of Asian opinions concerning the
Portuguese. And the Jesuit missionaries, the obvious face of Christianity in Asia, were often
the main targets. Their enemies in the Mughal royal palace did not refrain from calling
them ‘black devils’, even though court painters such as Narsingh, Manohar or Kesu Das
were affable in their representation of them, clothing the priests in dark cassocks, Bible in
hand.16 For Japan, the demonised image of the priests (bateren) expressed in the Kirishitan
Monogatari (1639), which describes and visually depicts the arrival of Father Organtino,
springs immediately to mind: ‘From this ship for the first time emerged an unnamable
creature, somewhat similar in shape to a human being, but looking rather more like a
long-nosed goblin or the giant demon Mikoshi Nyudo. Upon close interrogation it was
discovered that this was a being called Bateren’.17
The pro-Portuguese writings penned by Asian converts to Catholicism, however, afford
us a different picture. For Sri Lanka, various texts in Sinhala and Tamil written from this
perspective are available, while in late seventeenth-century Burma, a history of Portugal
and its empire (Puteguê Yazawin), most probably authored by a Barnabite priest of Burmese

36
 FLOATING FRANKS

ancestry called Inácio de Brito (1760–1832), stands out.18 The warm reception given to the
Portuguese in South India by the local Syrian Christian hierarchy precedes these ‘hybrid’
texts in time and adopts the typical arguments of those who pushed for an alliance between
Christian sects in the European Middle Ages. This is how, in 1504, four bishops from
Kerala narrated to the Catholicos of the East, Mar Simeon, the first Portuguese voyages to
India:

May you also know, Fathers, that from the Occident powerful ships have been
sent to these countries of India by the King of the Christians, who are our
brethren the Franks … By this way thus explored the said King (whom may God
preserve in safety!) sent six huge ships, with which they crossed the sea in half a
year and came to the town of Calicut, people extremely well versed in nautical
science … The number of the said Franks is estimated as about 400 men. And the
fear and dread of them fell on all infidels and Ismaelites of these countries. The
country of these Franks is called Portkal, one of the countries of the Franks, and
their king is called Emmanuel. We beseech Emmanuel, that He may conserve
Him!19

Another prevailing image of the Portuguese, which spread fast throughout Asia, was their
seafaring nature. The ships in which they roamed the Asian seas are frequently depicted,
from Ottoman miniatures, Persian carpets and Mughal paintings to Thai temple murals
and Japanese screens. The omnipresence of the Franks at sea is associated with the idea of
extreme mobility and ceaseless movement. This is how they are presented in the Japanese
chronicle Teppo Ki, or in the Sinhala chronicle Rajavaliya. It is worth noting the portrait of
the first Portuguese landing in Colombo conveyed by the latter text:

There is in our port of Colombo a race of people very white in colour and of
great beauty; they wear jackets and hats of iron and pace up and down without
resting for a moment. Seeing them eating bread and grapes and drinking arrack,
they reported that these people devour stones and drink blood … The sound of
their cannon is louder than thunder at the end of the world. Their cannon balls
fly many leagues and shatter forts of stone and iron.20

Hence it is not unusual for the Portuguese to be seen in Asia as ‘frogmen’ who are more at
ease at sea than on land. This is exactly how the Koreans classified them in the late six-
teenth century, when describing the Portuguese soldiers incorporated in the Chinese
armies that fought the Japanese invasion of the country. In the annals of the Choson
dynasty for 1592–1599, the Portuguese are ‘Demons from the Sea’ (Haegui), ‘bearded, curly
haired’ beings who ‘spent days at the bottom of the sea feeding themselves on fish’.
Contemporary Chinese perceptions were not far from this view. Cristóvão Vieira, one of
the captives from Tomé Pires’ embassy to Beijing in 1517–1521, notes from Canton
(Guangzhou) in 1534 that the Chinese compared the Portuguese to fish ‘who die as soon as
they are taken out of the water or the sea’.21 As late as 1666, the governor of Guangdong/
Guangxi still wrote in a memorial to be presented in the Forbidden City ‘that the Portu-
guese had no lands and, even if they did, they would not know how to cultivate them’.22
Fish or frogmen, the Portuguese are invariably described as skilled warriors. The
admiration evoked by their vessels coupled with the surprise their firearms caused

37
 JORGE FLORES

were further heightened by the exotic nature of their armour and helmets. Cannon and
muskets became the trademark of Portuguese warriors in most contemporary South Asian
texts. Parasikas mercenaries populate South Indian texts, and the Marathi chronicles often
repeat the expression ‘warriors like the Portuguese’.23 Stone and wood carvings depicting
them are often found in Hindu and Buddhist temples, such as Srirangam, in Tiruchirapaly
(Tamilnadu, South India) or Embekke, in Kandy (Sri Lanka). Portuguese and Eurasian
mercenaries and sailors are recurrently represented in early modern Burmese and Siamese
temple murals,24 while the Malay chronicles, as well as texts and images from China and
Japan, reveal a great fascination with the military technology displayed by the Franks. In
the Malay accounts dealing with the Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1511, it is the
military apparatus of the foreigners that mostly impresses the besieged.25
As symbols of power, Portuguese cannon often were absorbed by local societies, soon
acquiring a supernatural dimension. The Si Jagur cannon, taken from Malacca to Batavia
after the Dutch conquest of the former city in 1641, became the object that sterile women
from VOC Batavia were eager to touch hoping to get pregnant.26 The figure of the Por-
tuguese (often Eurasian) artilheiro (gunner), fundidor (cannon-maker) or mercenary in the
service of a given Asian ruler populates both Portuguese documents and indigenous texts.
The case of João da Cruz, a mestizo from Macau who became highly influential in mid-
seventeenth-century Indochina due to his cannon-foundry, is exemplary.27
Deft in the water and expert at handling firearms, the Portuguese were quick to enter
into the history and imagination of certain societies in maritime Asia. This happened
particularly in the microcosms of the most important river deltas where bands of ‘sea
gypsies’—rather difficult to characterise and identify given their diversity—abounded. So
we find the Portuguese mixed with Turks and Muslims from Malabar, cruising the Indus
Delta and resisting the Mughal conquest of Sind in the late sixteenth century.28 We also
come across them roaming the Ganges Delta, under the name of harmad, evidently a
corruption of armada, or fleet. Somewhere between 1594 and 1624, a Bengali landlord
called Mukundaram Chakravati wrote a poem that repeatedly mentions the Portuguese
pirates in the region, while many local temples show terracotta paintings depicting
Portuguese ships and sailors.29
These Portuguese people lived as pirates among pirates, taking advantage of the com-
mercial strength of ports like Chittagong and controlling the intricate river channels that
led to them. Just as in Sind, they engaged in ‘guerrilla’ opposition to the imperial authority
in Bengal throughout the seventeenth century. The Farangian-i-harmads are seen as a local
tribe and texts like the Bhararistan-i Ghaybi, penned by the Persian Mirza Nathan, provide a
clear picture of an interesting process of ‘Bengalisation’ of the Portuguese.30 Curiously
enough, the impression that the folangji left along the Chinese littoral before the ‘invention’
of Macau in the mid-sixteenth century is not substantially different. One may recall the
forceful imperial reaction in 1549 to the unrest caused by groups of ‘bandits’ along
the Fujian coast. Several dozen ‘white barbarians’ and ‘black barbarians’ were among
those held responsible.31
Despite being invariably identified as Franks and hence from the West, the geographic
origins of the Portuguese often remain ambiguous in Asian texts and the idea of a
‘European Other’, conceived as the absolute opposite, is not always in keeping with the
reality. Some Chinese were convinced that the Portuguese came from a country near
Malacca, while others believed them to be members of a Buddhist sect. In Malacca,
according to the Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), the Portuguese were taken for ‘white

38
 FLOATING FRANKS

Bengalis’, while the city of Goa was considered the capital of Portugal. Further east,
the Japanese thought them to be Indians (Tenjiku jin, ‘men of India’) before they started
calling them barbarians (or savages) from the South (Nanban jin). The same applies to the
Burmese texts where the Portuguese are presented as ‘white Indians’ (Kalapyu) or ‘feringgi
Indians’ (Kala-bayin-gyi). These constitute fragments of an unfolding phenomenon of
‘Asianising’ the intruders which clearly illustrates a tendency to absorb what is different
and to categorise what is strange within the human landscape and the civilisational
grammar of maritime Asia.
In turn, Europe was little more than a vague notion. The Kiristan Monogatari refers gen-
erally to ‘South Barbary’, while the Chinese speak of Portugal (Pulidujia) for the first time
in 1565, but knew very little of its whereabouts by that time. Tamil Christian literature is
seduced by an idyllic Spain (or Iberia), a picture predominantly shaped by the certainly
enthusiastic descriptions of Western missionaries.32 Concurrently, the Mughal painters
usually included classical Western landscapes in their miniatures. But these are mainly
copies of European engravings and in all probability such views were primarily intended to
emphasise the vastness of the emperor’s authority. As noted by Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
Asian societies in an early moment conceived ‘Europeans without Europe’; when later,
through travel and direct observation, Europe enters the picture, the tone is not always
enthusiastic.33 In a letter sent by his parents in China to a young Chinese who lived in
Portugal in the late eighteenth century, the image of the distant European country is a
dark one: ‘From the letter arrived from Portugal, we can see how bad things are in that
place. It will be best for you to return home and make your living here’.34
Paradoxically, the supposed Asian origin of the Portuguese did not render them any less
strange in the eyes of many native observers. First and foremost, they were physically dif-
ferent: the colour of their skin and hair, their eyes and noses. Hence the undeniable sur-
prise with which they were received in the different port-cities. They were often seen as
exotic beings bringing exotic animals, like the turkey acquired in Goa by an ambassador of
Jahangir (r. 1605–1628)—a strange animal that the Mughal sovereign described in his
memoirs and asked Mansur to paint.35 The same holds true of the lion sent as a gift to the
Chinese emperor Kangxi (r. 1662–1722) in 1678, which is known to have caused a great
sensation in the Forbidden City.36
The status of the foreigner is reaffirmed at every step by the use of a specific set of
markers. Of all these, clothing is the one that best ties in with physiognomy as a sign of
difference: most of the Asian societies thought the Portuguese were well dressed, and people
were generally fascinated by their bell-shaped trousers, their lace-trimmed collars, the capes
and especially their hats. In Asia, the Portuguese—like the other Europeans who followed
them—were the ‘hat-wearers’, and hats truly dominate the Asian iconography of the Franks.
Some Asian sovereigns violated codes and transgressed identities by wearing Western
clothing in public, perhaps in this way expressing the universality of their authority. The
Chinese emperor Yongzheng (r. 1723–1735) was painted wearing European clothing and
it is well known that Akbar and Jahangir often dressed in Portuguese style. On receiving a
gift of a number of hats from the viceroy of Goa, Jahangir threw ‘his cap aside, put one of
them on his head and kept it on for several hours ordering a mirror to be brought so that
he could see himself’.37 Toyotomi Hideyoshi (r. 1585–1598) did likewise in Japan, and it
was not unusual for his subjects to wear nanban clothes, propagating the illusion of him
being a Western monarch governing a Western court. The nanban clothes and related
markers were also used for a long time as a sign of national difference, as many Japanese

39
 JORGE FLORES

screens represented other foreigners (Chinese, Koreans) in exactly the same way as they
represented the Portuguese.38
There were many other distinguishing features besides dress. In South Asia, the Portu-
guese were noted for not piercing their ears and not chewing betel. But they were
also known for walking their dogs and always being accompanied by black slaves. Wine-
drinking was perhaps one of the most striking features of the Franks. Most Asian observers
associated the Portuguese with wine, and sometimes painted them with glass in hand.39 On
the one hand, the habit of drinking alcohol was often linked with decadence and immor-
ality, an impression that is gathered both from the Burmese chronicles and the Malay
accounts. However, on the other, it was wine that the Portuguese offered Akbar in late
1572 when they were brought for the first time to the Mughal emperor. A good choice, if
we are to believe the words of Muhammad Arif Qandhari, who poetically describes the
magical effects of wine on Akbar’s state of mind as well as on those who accompanied him
on that occasion:

By chance it so happened that the messengers of the Firangan who were settled in
the port of Daman on the coast of the Arabian Sea came and brought some card
loaded with Portuguese wine with them. Its scent turned the lions of skies dead-
drunk, and even the innocent denizens of earth thought of enjoying its effect …
The fact was that the collection of provisions of enjoyment induced the emperor
to drink and for this purpose he adorned the throne in the Diwan-i-Khas. The
wine served shone in the cups like the light in the eyes of noble man. The hiding
screen was removed away from the face and the swab of forgetfulness had been
taken away from ears, and the senses had been plundered from the head. His
[Akbar’s] face was shining like the sun by the effect of wine, as fire rising from the
earth … The emperor enjoyed the assembly till the end. Let us hope that the
emperor’s mind would not be dim by the dust of intoxication.40

There was, then, an ambivalent reaction to the Portuguese and their ways in early modern
Asia. Curiosity and the desire to emulate alternated, or became frequently intertwined,
with disgust and the wish to underscore differences. In the Malay chronicles, the Portu-
guese are uncouth people, without manners, unfit to attend the most refined of social and
political circles. Even their characterisation as ‘white Bengalis’ is far from flattering; the
picture of a certain ‘Don Jamilu’ in a Malay account describing the arrival of a group of
Portuguese to Ambon in 1512 demonstrates this precisely. Jamilu is depicted as a proud,
inebriated and non-religious man.41
At the Mughal court, the chronicler Abu’l Fazl describes Akbar’s approach to the Por-
tuguese as the expression of the imperial desire to civilise a savage race,42 while the
observations about the Portuguese made from Goa by an imperial envoy in 1579–1580
called Tahir Muhammad would certainly have shocked the elite in the capital of the
Estado da Índia who hosted him at the time. The ambassador, who authored a work
entitled Rauzat al-Tahirin (The Garden of the Immaculate), reports some interesting news
about the battle of al-Qsar al-Kibir (Morocco) in 1578, the death of the Portuguese King
Sebastian (r. 1557–1578) and the early steps of the Iberian Union (1580–1640). At some
point he states that the ‘Franks wear very fine clothes but they are often very slovenly and
pimply. They don’t like to use water. They bathe very rarely. Amongst them, washing after
relieving oneself is considered improper. They are very good at using firearms, and they

40
 FLOATING FRANKS

are particularly brave on ships and in the water. But in contrast to this, they are not so
brave on land’.43 In East Asia, the topic of the barbaric, uncivilised people who had no
manners was repeated and there was even a certain demonisation of the Portuguese. In
China, just as in Japan, there were people who doubted that they were human and it was
not unusual for the stigma of cannibalism to overshadow their image.44
The complexity of the Asian impressions of the Portuguese is revealed in a last and
somewhat unexpected phenomenon. In Sri Lanka, as in Southeast Asia, there were often
cases of Portuguese and other Europeans who, despite being considered strangers and
enemies, were recognised for their magical power, thereby acquiring the status of local
divinities and objects of worship. Constantino de Sá de Noronha, the Portuguese captain-
general of Ceylon who was killed at the battle of Randenivala in 1630 fighting the Kand-
yan army, is one such case. He was soon transformed from hated enemy to local deity,
worshipped by the Sinhalese in the ‘pagode of Constantino de Saa’—‘those of Candea
[Kandy] respecting the valour which they beheld that morning in the Captain-General,
gave him a place among their gods, and today they honour him under the name of Cussal
nete deiyo, which in the Chingala language means “Luckless God”, a name of great wit’.
Noronha thus became a bandara deity with a tangible regional impact. Another con-
temporary Portuguese text states that the Sinhalese worshipped Noronha after his death as
‘God of War’ and it is known that other ‘pagodes have been built to other Captains of His
Majesty’ in the island.45 Concurrently there is evidence of Dutchmen being depicted in
mythical terms in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka: the salagamas (cinnamon-peelers), for
example, regarded the Dutch ‘cinnamon captain’ as a ‘god’ and his clerk as a ‘tiger’.46
It may be appropriate to draw a parallel between the cult of Noronha and other Eur-
opeans in Sri Lanka, and a similar phenomenon that occurred roughly in the same period in
lower Burma: the public worship of two sons of the Portuguese entrepreneur Filipe de Brito
e Nicote and his wife, the Arakanese princess Sawthanda. In the stupa of the ‘One Hundred
Thousand Emeralds’ (Mye Thein Tan) built around 1628, an inscription states that when
Syriam was conquered by King Anauk-hpe-tlun (r. 1606–1628), two of Nicote’s children
managed to escape, seeking refuge in Arakan. However, the two princes did not succeed
and died when crossing lower Burma, in the very same location of that temple. Soon after,
they became nats (the local equivalent of the Sinhala cult of the bandaras), deities whose
worship was reserved for people of royal blood who met premature or violent deaths.47
This intriguing indigenisation process of the Franks resulted from the need to ‘domes-
ticate’ and integrate the power of the enemy, placing it in the realm of what was familiar
and controllable. Hence it was not unusual for the authority of a foreigner to be considered
divine, even though he was just a barbarian. Moreover, the indigenisation and divinisation
of Europeans in Asia was not exclusive to Buddhist states. In the Moluccas, as well as in
other islands of the Indonesian archipelago, the Portuguese were often seen as persons
endowed with magical power, while in Java it did not take long until the governors-general
of Dutch Batavia were ‘Javanised’ and incorporated into court historiography and mythol-
ogy. In Serat Sakondar, Jan Pieterzoon Coen (the founder of Batavia in 1619) becomes Mur
Djangkung, son of a princess of Padjadjaran.48 Like their European predecessors in the
region, the Dutch had to go through a process of identity change, which turned them into
Malays in the eyes of the Malays themselves. Batavia is often presented as a state and its
leader as a ‘father’ or ‘grandfather’, a source of (native) authority and respect.
From a broader perspective, one might also draw a parallel between the cases of Asian
divinisation of Europeans and similar phenomena occurring in other early modern cultures

41
 JORGE FLORES

and societies. Even if highly controversial among modern-day scholars, the proposed
identification of Hernán Cortés with Quetzalcoatl and of Captain Cook with the Hawaiian
god Lono resembles that of Constantino de Sá de Noronha with a Sinhala deity.49
Reflecting on the ‘stranger-effect’ in disparate early modern societies, Felipe Fernández-
Armesto has argued that in those cases it was not uncommon to ‘allow the divine horizon a
role in sanctifying strangers’ authority’.50

Conclusion
When dealing with the history of the Portuguese or any other European empire in Asia
from the dawn of the sixteenth century onwards, the impact of the newcomer turns out to
be a nodal issue. We can begin to loosen this knot by inverting the mirror and focussing on
the ways in which Asian peoples, from the seafaring communities of the Hadhramaut
Coast to the Chinese literati in the Forbidden City, looked at the Portuguese. The purpose
of this chapter was to explore the complexities of such perceptions, in the broader frame-
work of a global early modern ethnography fuelled by the considerable movement of
people in and around distinct cultural worlds in the period.
Various examples illustrate the most important markers of difference concerning the
Franks—religion, body and dress code, wine-drinking, dogs and black slaves, seafaring
nature and unmatched expertise with firearms. Yet at the same time, there was an intri-
guing indigenous search for similarities, often based on the ‘Asiatisation’ of the newcomers
and/or the desire to emulate them. There certainly was an impact—economic, political,
religious, social and visual. However, such phenomena are not measurable in a linear
fashion. On returning to Lisbon in the summer of 1499, Vasco da Gama was questioned
by Francisco de Portugal, count of Vimioso, who wanted to hear ‘what goods are available
there to bring here, and what things they would like to exchange’. Finding out that
Western gold and silver would be needed to obtain Eastern spices, the count made the
following, deliciously sarcastic observation: ‘In the end, they are the ones who discovered
us’.51 The web of Asian perceptions of the Portuguese underscores the sharpness of the
count of Vimioso’s observation about the Portuguese ‘discovery’ of the Indian Ocean. We
cannot say with certainty who discovered whom.

Notes
1 Anonymous (Álvaro Velho), Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497–1499, E.G. Ravenstein
(trans. and ed.) (New Delhi and Madras, 1995), pp. 60–62. The gift consisted of ‘twelve pieces of
lambel, four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral, a case containing six wash-hand basins, a
case of sugar, two casks of oil, and two of honey’.
2 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History
(2nd edn) (Chichester, 2012).
3 Luís Filipe Thomaz, ‘Estrutura política e administrativa do Estado da Índia no século XVI’, in De
Ceuta a Timor (Lisbon, 1994), p. 208.
4 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Written on Water: Designs and Dynamics in the Portuguese Estado
da Índia’, in Susan E. Alcock et al. (eds), Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge,
2001), pp. 42–69. Also see Anthony Disney, ‘Contrasting Models of “Empire”: The Estado da Índia
in South Asia and East Asia in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, in Francis A. Dutra
and João Camilo dos Santos (eds), The Portuguese and the Pacific (Santa Barbara, 1995), pp. 26–37.
5 Niels Steensgaard, Carracks, Caravans, and Companies: The Structural Crisis in the European–Asian Trade in
the Early Seventeenth Century (Copenhagen, 1973).

42
 FLOATING FRANKS

6 George Winius, ‘The “Shadow Empire” of Goa in the Bay of Bengal’, Itinerario, Vol. 2 (July
1983), pp. 83–101; George Bryan Souza, The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China
and the South China Sea, 1630–1754 (Cambridge, 1986); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Improvising Empire.
Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal, 1500–1700 (New Delhi, 1990).
7 Leonard Y. Andaya, ‘The Portuguese Tribe in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Dutra and Santos (eds), The Portuguese and the Pacific,
pp. 129–148; Stefan Halikowski Smith, ‘ “No Obvious Home”: The Flight of the Portuguese
“Tribe” from Makassar to Ayutthaya and Cambodia during the 1660s’, International Journal of
Asian Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2010), pp. 1–28.
8 Luís Filipe Thomaz, ‘Portuguese Control over the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. A
Comparative Study’, in Om Prakash and Denys Lombard (eds), Commerce and Culture in the Bay of
Bengal, 1500–1800 (New Delhi, 1999), pp. 115–162.
9 Frangue is the Portuguese form of Faranji (‘Frank’), an Arabic word designating the Western
Christians. It sometimes applied only to Catholics, but in other instances all Europeans were
subsumed within the label. Faranji—word and concept—passed on to a number of Asian lan-
guages, namely Malay (peringgi) and Chinese (folangji). See Luís Filipe Thomaz, ‘Frangues’, in Luís
de Albuquerque (ed.), Dicionário de história dos descobrimentos portugueses, Vol. I (Lisbon, 1994), p. 435.
10 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘On the Hat-Wearers, Their Toilet Practices and Other Curious
Usages’, in Kumkum Chatterjee and Clement Hawes (eds), Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early
Modern Encounters (Lewisburg, 2008), pp. 45–82.
11 R.B. Serjeant, História dos Portugueses no Malabar por Zinadim. Manuscripto árabe do século XVI, David
Lopes (trans. and ed.) (Lisbon, 1898); The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast: Hadrami Chronicles.
With Yemeni and European Accounts of Dutch Pirates off Mocha in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1963);
Giancarlo Casale, ‘His Majesty’s Servant Lutfi: The Career of a Previously Unknown Sixteenth-
century Ottoman Envoy to Sumatra based on an Account of his from the Topkapı Palace
Archives’, Turcica, Vol. 37 (2005), pp. 43–81.
12 Painted by La’l, c. 1603–1604; London, British Library, Or. 12988, fol. 66a.
13 King of the World. The Padshahnama: An Imperial Mughal Manuscript from the Royal Library, Windsor
Castle, Milo Cleveland Beach and Ebba Koch (eds), Wheeler Thackston (trans.) (London, 1997),
nos. 19–20, pp. 56–59, 179–180. Possible comparison with the Jarunnama, an anonymous seven-
teenth-century Safavid account of the taking of Hormuz by Imam Quli Khan in 1622 (with ten
miniatures); London, British Library, Add. 7801, fol. 43a.
14 Letter from Akbar to ‘Abdu’llah Khan Uzbeg, 1586, in Mukatabat-i-’Allami (Insha’i Abu’l Fazl). Letters
of the Emperor Akbar in English Translation, Mansura Haidar (ed.) (New Delhi, 1998), pp. 42–51, 44).
15 Anthony Reid, ‘Early Southeast Asian Categorizations of Europeans’, in Stuart Schwartz (ed.),
Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other
Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 268–294, 283.
16 Manohar, c. 1590; Paris, Musée National des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, 3619, Gc.
17 George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA,
1988), p. 321.
18 Putegê Yazawin. Crónica setecentista birmane sobre o expansionismo português na Ásia, Maria Ana Marques
Guedes (trans. and ed.) (Lisbon, forthcoming).
19 Georg Schurhammer, ‘Three Letters of Mar Jacob’, in Orientalia (Rome, 1963), pp. 334–337.
20 In Chandra R. de Silva (ed.), Portuguese Encounters with Sri Lanka and the Maldives: Translated Texts from the
Age of the Discoveries (Farnham, 2009), pp. 19–20. For different possible interpretations of this descrip-
tion, see Michael Roberts, ‘A Tale of Resistance: The Story of the Arrival of the Portuguese in Sri
Lanka’, Ethnos, Vol. 54, Nos. 1–2 (1989), pp 69–82; C.R. de Silva, ‘Beyond the Cape: The Portuguese
Encounter with the Peoples of South Asia’, in Schwartz (ed.), Implicit Understandings, pp. 295–322.
21 Cartas dos cativos de Cantão (1524?), Rui Manuel Loureiro (ed.) (Macau, 1992), p. 19.
22 Lisbon, Biblioteca da Ajuda, Jesuítas na Ásia, 49-V-15, fol. 306.
23 Panduronga S.S. Pissurlencar, ‘Os Portugueses nas literaturas indianas dos séculos XVI, XVII e
XVIII’, Boletim da Sociedade Geografia de Lisboa, series 73, 7–9 (July–September 1955), pp. 367–383;
Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court
and State in Nayaka Period Tamil Nadu (New Delhi, 1992), esp. chap. 6.
24 Stefan Halikowski Smith, Creolization and Diaspora in the Portuguese Indies: The Social World of Ayutthaya,
1640–1720 (Leiden, 2011), chap. 9, pp. 235–276.

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 JORGE FLORES

25 Luís Filipe Thomaz, ‘Os Frangues na terra de Malaca’, in Luís Filipe Barreto and Francisco
Contente Domingues (eds), A Abertura do Mundo. Estudos de história dos descobrimentos europeus em
homenagem a Luís de Albuquerque, Vol. I (Lisbon, 1987), pp. 209–217; Reid, ‘Early Southeast Asian
Categorizations of Europeans’.
26 Denys Lombard, Le carrefour javanais. Essai d’histoire globale (Paris, 1990), Vol. III, p. 80, ill. 75;
Charles R. Boxer, ‘Asian Potentates and European Artillery in the 16th–18th Centuries:
A Footnote to Gibson-Hill’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 28 (1965),
pp. 156–172.
27 Pierre Yves-Manguin, Les Portugais sur les côtes du Viet-nam et du Campa. Étude sur les routes maritimes et
les relations commerciales d’après les sources portugaises (XVe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles) (Paris, 1972),
pp. 204–209. See also Halikowski Smith, Creolization and Diaspora, chap. 9, for other continental
South-east Asian cases.
28 Khwaja ‘Abdur Baqi Nihavandi, Ma’asir-i-Rahimi (1616), English summary in H.M. Elliot and
John Dowson, The History of India as told by its own Historians: The Muhammad Period, Vol. VI (rpt,
New Delhi, 1996), pp. 237–243; Abu’l Fazl, The Akbar Nama, Henry Beveridge (trans.), Vol. III
(rpt, New Delhi, 1993), pp. 919, 972.
29 Aniruddha Ray, ‘Middle Bengali Literature: A Source of the Study of Bengal in the Age of
Akbar’, in Hirfan Habib (ed.), Akbar and his India (New Delhi, 1998), pp. 225–242, 234–239.
30 Mirza Nathan, Baharistan-i Ghaybi: A History of the Mughal Wars in Assam, Cooch Behar, Bengal, Bihar
and Orissa during the Reigns of Jahangir and Shahjahan, M.I. Borah (trans. and ed.), 2 vols (Gauhati
[Assam], 1936).
31 Ng Chin-keong, ‘Trade, Sea Prohibition and the “Fo-lang-chi”, 1513–1550’, in Dutra and Santos
(eds), The Portuguese and the Pacific, pp. 381–424.
32 S. Pathmanathan, ‘The Portuguese in Northeast Sri Lanka (1543–1658): An Assessment of
Impressions Recorded in Tamil Chronicles and Poems’, in Jorge Flores (ed.), Re-exploring the Links:
History and Constructed Histories between Portugal and Sri Lanka (Wiesbaden, 2007), pp. 29–47.
33 Subrahmanyam, ‘On the Hat-Wearers’
34 Sinica Lusitana. Fontes chinesas em bibliotecas e arquivos portugueses, Roderich Ptak et al. (eds and trans.),
Vol. I (Lisbon, 2000), p. 161.
35 The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India, Wheeler Thackston (trans. and ed.)
(Washington, DC, 1999), pp. 133–134; Mansur, c. 1612, London, Victoria & Albert Museum,
IM 135-1921.
36 John E. Wills, Jr., Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K’ang-hsi, 1666–1687
(Cambridge, MA, 1994), pp. 130–138, 243–245. A contemporary Chinese drawing of the lion is
housed in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Chinois 5444.
37 Lisbon, Biblioteca da Ajuda, Jesuítas na Ásia, 49-V-18, fol. 336. Many similar examples concern-
ing Akbar. Also see, for later cases, Ashan Jan Qaisar, The Indian Response to the European Technology
and Culture, 1498–1707 (New Delhi, 1998), pp. 124–125.
38 Ronald Toby, ‘The “Indianess” of Iberia and Changing Japanese Iconographies of Other’, in
Schwartz (ed.), Implicit Understandings, pp. 323–351.
39 C.1600, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 14.661.
40 Muhammad Arif Qandhari, Tarikh-i-Akbari, Tasneem Ahmad (ed. and trans.) (Delhi, 1993), p. 199.
41 Reid, ‘Early Southeast Asian Categorizations of Europeans’, p. 277.
42 Abu’l Fazl, The Akbar Nama, Vol. III, pp. 37.
43 Subrahmanyam, ‘On the Hat-Wearers’, pp. 63–65.
44 Fok Kai Cheong, ‘Early Ming Images of the Portuguese’, in Roderich Ptak (ed.), Portuguese Asia:
Aspects in History and Economic History (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries) (Stuttgart, 1987), pp. 143–155;
Stefania Stafutti, ‘Portogallo e Portoghesi nelle fonte cinesi del XVI e del XVII secolo’, Cina, Vol.
19 (1989), pp. 29–51, 40–41; Fok Kai Cheong, ‘The Ming Debate on How to Accommodate the
Portuguese and the Emergence of the Macao Formula. The Portuguese Settlement and Early
Chinese Reactions’, Revista de Cultura, series 2, 13–14 (January–June 1991), pp. 328–344.
45 Jorge Flores and Maria Augusta Lima Cruz, ‘A “Tale of Two Cities”, a “Veteran Soldier”, or the
Struggle for Endangered Nobilities: The Two Jornadas de Uva (1633, 1635) Revisited’, in Flores
(ed.), Re-exploring the Links, pp. 95–124.
46 Jurrien van Goor, Jan Kompagnie as a Schoolmaster. Dutch Education in Ceylon, 1690–1796 (Groningen,
1978), p. 30.

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 FLOATING FRANKS

47 Maria Ana Marques Guedes, ‘A história birmano-portuguesa para além das relações oficiais.
Assimilação e aculturação nos séculos XVII–XVIII’, PhD dissertation, New University of Lisbon,
1999, pp. 396–403.
48 Merle C. Ricklefs, Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi 1749–1792: A History of the Division of Java
(London, 1974), pp. 362–414, 400–401, 410–413.
49 For a reassessment, criticising the thesis of deification of the Spaniards by the Aztecs, see Camilla
Townsend, ‘Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico’, The American
Historical Review, Vol. 108, No. 3 (June 2003), pp. 659–687. As to Lono, see Gananath Obeyese-
kere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, 1992). Contrasting
opinion, accepting Captain Cook as the god Lono, by Marshall Sahlins, How Natives ‘Think’: About
Captain Cook, For Example (Chicago, 1995).
50 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ‘The Stranger-Effect in Early Modern Asia’, in Leonard Blussé and
F. Fernández-Armesto (eds), Shifting Communities and Identity Formation in Early Modern Asia (Leiden,
2003), pp. 181–202, 189.
51 Anonymous, Ditos portugueses dignos de memória. História íntima do século XVI, José Hermano Saraiva
(ed.) (Mem-Martins, 1997), p. 113.

Further reading
Bethencourt, Francisco and Diogo Ramada Curto (eds), Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800
(Cambridge, 2007).
Boxer, C.R., The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (2nd edn) (Manchester, 1991).
Chatterjee, Kumkum and Clement Hawes (eds), Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern
Encounters (Lewisburg, 2008).
Disney, A.R., A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, from Beginnings to 1807, Vol. II: The Portuguese
Empire (Cambridge, 2009).
Elison, George, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (2nd edn) (Cambridge,
MA, 1988).
Halikowski Smith, Stefan, Creolization and Diaspora in the Portuguese Indies: The Social World of Ayutthaya,
1640–1720 (Leiden, 2011).
Jackson, Anne and Amin Jaffer (eds), Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500–1800 (London,
2004).
Levenson, Jay (ed.), Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th & 17th Centuries, Vol. III:
Essays (Washington, DC, 2007).
McPherson, Kenneth, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (Oxford, 1998).
Newitt, Malyn, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668 (London, 2005).
Pearson, M.N., The World of the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800: Studies in Economic, Social and Cultural History
(Aldershot, 2005).
Russellwood, A.J.R., The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808: A World on the Move (Baltimore, 1998).
Schwartz, Stuart (ed.), Implicit Understandings. Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between
Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, 1994).
Silva, Chandra R. de (ed.), Portuguese Encounters with Sri Lanka and the Maldives: Translated Texts from the
Age of Discoveries (Farnham, 2009).
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (2nd
edn) (Chichester, 2012).

45