Western imperialism in Asia
Western imperialism in Asia begins with a spice. In the 15th century, with the Ottoman Turks holding the Silk Road, Western European rulers wanted their own way east. The hunger for porcelain, silk, spices, and tea sent sea captains around the bottom of Africa toward the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. What followed stretched across six centuries. It formally ended only in 1999, with the independence of Portuguese Macau. Along the way the West introduced early modern warfare into a region Europeans first called the East Indies, and later the Far East. It also exported its own ideas of the nation and the multinational state. The question this documentary chases is not simply who arrived first. It is how trading posts became colonies, how merchants became rulers, and how the people of Asia answered. Why did the Portuguese monopoly crumble. How did a business concern come to control the destinies of millions. And what made the whole structure finally fall apart.
In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa under the sponsorship of Portugal's John II. From there he saw the coast swing northeast, at the point named the Cape of Good Hope. His crew forced him to turn back. By 1497, Vasco da Gama completed the first open voyage from Europe to India. This broke the monopoly that Arabs and Italians had held over trade between Asia and Europe. European exploration of Asia was not new. The Romans had knowledge of lands as distant as China, and trade with India through Roman Egyptian Red Sea ports mattered in the first centuries of the Common Era. In the 13th and 14th centuries Christian missionaries tried to penetrate China, the most famous traveler being Marco Polo. Those journeys left little permanent mark. The Yuan dynasty, receptive to Europeans, was overthrown, and the new Ming rulers rejected religious proselytism. In 1520, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator serving the Crown of Castile, found a sea route into the Pacific Ocean. The age of cheaper, easier access to South and East Asian goods had opened.
In 1509, the Portuguese under Francisco de Almeida won the battle of Diu against a joint Mamluk and Arab fleet sent to expel them from the Arabian Sea. The victory let Portugal pursue control of the Indian Ocean. Afonso de Albuquerque, viceroy from 1509 to 1515, understood that commercial supremacy could be wrested from the Arabs only by force. His method was forts at strategic sites that dominated trade routes. In 1510 he conquered Goa, which Portugal held until 1961. Europeans here traded from forts as foreign merchants rather than settlers, a sharp contrast to the heavy settlement that followed Christopher Columbus into the West Indies. Malacca controlled the narrow strait through which most Far Eastern trade moved. Captured in 1511, it became the springboard east. In 1512 Albuquerque ordered Antonio de Abreu and Francisco Serrao to the Moluccas, the Spice Islands. By 1513 to 1516 Portuguese ships reached Canton on the southern coasts of China. In 1515 Albuquerque secured Muscat and Ormuz at the gates of the Persian Gulf, and in 1521 the Portuguese annexed Bahrain. The empire even reached Japan, where Portuguese visitors introduced Christianity and firearms. Yet the same years brought defeats. In 1521 Ming China beat the Portuguese at the Battle of Tunmen, and again at the Battle of Xicaowan, where the local navy captured a fleet of caravels. Only in 1557 did China lease Macau to the Portuguese as a place to dry their goods, a foothold they kept until 1999.
In 1594, the Portuguese under Pedro Lopes de Sousa launched a full-scale invasion of the kingdom of Kandy in the Campaign of Danture. Their entire army was wiped out by Kandyan guerrilla warfare. Constantino de Sa, celebrated in a 17th century Sinhalese epic for his humanism, led the last operation and died at the Battle of Randeniwela rather than abandon his troops. Conquest met fierce answers across Asia. The arrival of the Portuguese and Spanish turned Southeast Asia into an arena of conflict between Muslims and Christians. The Spanish word for savages, cafres, came from the Arabic Kafir, meaning infidel. After insults from the Spanish at Manila in 1578, the Brunei Sultan called Castilians kafir, men who have no souls condemned by fire when they die, because they eat pork. Muslims from Champa, Java, Borneo, Luzon, Pahang, Demak, and Aceh echoed the rhetoric of holy war. Governor Sande led a 1578 Spanish attack on Brunei's capital at Kota Batu. There were fifty thousand inhabitants before the 1597 attack. The Spanish were expelled in 1579, but the war cut the Philippines off from Brunei's influence, and Spain began colonizing Mindanao. In 1564 Miguel Lopez de Legazpi began the gradual conquest of the Philippines. After Andres de Urdaneta discovered the return voyage in 1565, Chinese goods flowed from the Philippines to Mexico and on to Spain. The Moro Muslims fought the Spanish for over three centuries in the Spanish-Moro conflict.
In 1602, rival Dutch companies united into a cartel and formed the Dutch East India Company. The government granted it the right to trade and colonize from the Cape of Good Hope eastward to the Strait of Magellan. The Netherlands revolt against Spanish rule had opened the door, and when the two Iberian crowns joined in 1581 the Dutch felt free to attack Portuguese territory. In 1605 armed Dutch merchants captured the Portuguese fort at Amboyna in the Moluccas, the company's first secure base. The Dutch drove the Portuguese from Malacca in 1641 and Ceylon in 1658, completing a near monopoly over the world spice trade. Headquarters sat at Batavia, today Jakarta, on Java. Outposts spread to Persia, Bengal, Siam, and Taiwan from 1624 to 1662. In 1652 Jan van Riebeeck established a restocking post at the Cape of Good Hope, which grew into the Cape Colony and the city of Kaapstad, Cape Town. By 1669 the company was the richest private firm in history, with a private army of thousands and stockholders accustomed to high dividends. The Dutch did not win everywhere. Ming China drove them from the Pescadores in 1624 and beat their fleet at the 1633 Battle of Liaoluo Bay. In 1662 Zheng Chenggong, known as Koxinga, expelled them from Taiwan after the siege of Fort Zeelandia. The Vietnamese Nguyen lords defeated them in 1643, and the Cambodians in 1644. The company was dissolved in 1799, and its lands became the Dutch East Indies, consolidated through the Padri War, the Java War, and the Aceh War of 1873 to 1904.
In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I incorporated the English East India Company with a monopoly of trade from the Cape of Good Hope to the Strait of Magellan. In 1639 it acquired Madras, soon surpassing Portuguese Goa as the chief European trading center on the subcontinent. French defeat under Robert Clive in the Seven Years' War, from 1756 to 1763, ended the French stake in India. The Mughal Empire was the company's true opening. The reign of Aurangzeb marked the height of Mughal power, and by 1690 its territory reached nearly the entire subcontinent. Fifty years after his death the empire had crumbled. At the 1757 Battle of Plassey, Clive defeated Siraj ud-Daulah, the ruler of Bengal, beginning a period of informal British rule. The British Parliament, disturbed that a business concern interested in profit controlled the destinies of millions, passed acts in 1773 and 1784 to take control of company policy. The company then fought the Anglo-Mysore wars against Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, who died at the Siege of Seringapatam in 1799. Three Anglo-Maratha Wars followed, and after the surrender of Peshwa Bajirao II in 1818 the company controlled most of the subcontinent. James Dalhousie, governor-general from 1847 to 1856, annexed the Punjab in 1849, seized states by the doctrine of lapse, and banned Hindu practices such as sati. The breaking point came in 1857. Sepoys, told their cartridges were greased with pig and cow fat, refused them. In one camp 85 out of 90 men refused, and the British jailed them. On the 10th of May 1857, sepoys marched to Delhi and captured it. The revolt was crushed, the Mughal dynasty finally collapsed, and in 1858, after 258 years, the company relinquished its role. Lord Canning became the first viceroy of India.
In 1839, China found itself fighting the First Opium War with Britain. European traders, confined to Guangzhou and Macau, had chafed at high customs duties and at attempts to curb the opium trade that imperial government had forbidden by 1800. Defeat brought the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, first of the unequal treaties. Hong Kong Island was ceded, and ports including Shanghai and Guangzhou opened. The Second Opium War followed in 1856, ending in the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin, which opened the interior and let Christians spread their faith. These treaties carried lasting bitterness through extraterritoriality, customs control, and foreign warships in Chinese waters. The historian Edward L. Dreyer argued China's humiliations were rooted in weakness at sea, not on land, where it defeated French forces in the Sino-French War of 1884 to 1885. China also modernized, buying 260,260 modern rifles from Europe and arming soldiers with Krupp artillery and Mauser rifles. Defeat by Japan in 1894 and 1895 opened a scramble. By the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895 China recognized Japanese rule of Korea and ceded Taiwan. Germany took rights in Shandong in 1897, Russia took Dairen and Port Arthur, and much of China split into spheres of influence. In 1899 Secretary of State John Hay proposed equal trading privileges, giving rise to the Open Door policy. In June 1900 the Boxers attacked foreigners around Beijing. The Eight-Nation Alliance was first turned back at the Battle of Langfang, then reached the capital, where British and French forces burned the Old Summer Palace. Japan's own story turned on the 8th of July 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry sailed black-hulled warships into Edo harbor. His show of force led to the Convention of Kanagawa on the 31st of March 1854. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 followed, and Japan's defeat of Russia's navy in 1905 gave it southern Sakhalin and a free hand in Korea, which it annexed in 1910.
In 1947, the United Kingdom, devastated by war and an economic crisis at home, granted British India independence as two nations, India and Pakistan. The wartime Japanese occupations of British, French, and Dutch territory had shattered the image of European pre-eminence. Burma and Ceylon followed in 1948. In the Middle East, Britain granted Jordan independence in 1946 and ended its mandate of Palestine in 1948, when the independent nation of Israel was born. Indonesian nationalists demanded complete independence from the Netherlands. After a brutal conflict, United Nations mediation brought independence in 1949 to a new nation of roughly 3,000 islands and over 100 million people, spanning some 300 distinct ethnic groups. Dutch New Guinea stayed under Dutch administration until 1962. France had built an empire in Indochina nearly 50 percent larger than the mother country, ruling Cochinchina directly from Hanoi and governing Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia, and Laos through residents. In the United States, the Spanish-American War of 1898 had handed it the Philippines and Guam. Filipinos had declared independence from Spain on the 12th of June 1898, and when fighting with the Americans broke out in 1899, it took nearly fifteen years to subdue. Congress guaranteed Philippine independence by 1945. Portugal, the first power in, was nearly the last out. Goa was invaded by India in 1961, Portuguese Timor was abandoned in 1975, and Macau returned to China in 1999, the final close of European political control that had begun with a search for the route around the Cape.
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Common questions
What was Western imperialism in Asia?
Western imperialism in Asia was the influence and colonial domination of Asian territories by Western powers, peaking from the 16th century and substantially reduced by 20th century decolonization. It originated in the 15th century search for trade routes to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia after Ottoman control of the Silk Road. It formally ended with the independence of Portuguese Macau in 1999.
When did Western imperialism in Asia begin and end?
Western imperialism in Asia originated in the 15th century search for sea routes east and peaked from the 16th century colonial period. It spanned roughly six centuries and formally ended with the independence of Portuguese Macau in 1999.
Which European power first dominated trade in the Indian Ocean?
Portugal first dominated Indian Ocean trade after winning the battle of Diu in 1509 against a joint Mamluk and Arab fleet. Afonso de Albuquerque conquered Goa in 1510 and captured Malacca in 1511, building a maritime empire to monopolize the spice trade.
How did the British East India Company take control of India?
The British East India Company gained control of India through victories such as Robert Clive's defeat of Siraj ud-Daulah at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, followed by the Anglo-Mysore and Anglo-Maratha wars. After the 1857 Indian Rebellion, the company relinquished its role in 1858 after 258 years, and Lord Canning became the first viceroy of India.
Why did China sign the unequal treaties?
China signed the unequal treaties after military defeats by Western powers, beginning with the First Opium War with Britain in 1839. The 1842 Treaty of Nanking ceded Hong Kong Island and opened ports, and the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin opened the interior and allowed Christian missionary work.
How did Japan respond to Western pressure in the 19th century?
Japan responded to Western pressure after Commodore Matthew Perry sailed warships into Edo harbor on the 8th of July 1853, leading to the Convention of Kanagawa on the 31st of March 1854. The realization of technological weakness led to the Meiji Restoration of 1868, after which Japan industrialized and became an imperial power, defeating Russia's navy in 1905.
How did Western imperialism in Asia finally end?
Western imperialism in Asia ended through decolonization after World War II, when wartime Japanese occupations shattered European pre-eminence. Britain granted India and Pakistan independence in 1947, the Netherlands ceded Indonesia in 1949, and the final European political control closed with the return of Portuguese Macau to China in 1999.
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