A Splendid Exchange by William J. Bernstein

A Splendid Exchange by William J. Bernstein

Author:William J. Bernstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2008-08-14T16:00:00+00:00


Paradoxically, the real beneficiary of the Anglo-Persian seizure of Hormuz was the VOC.31 The nominal victors at Hormuz, the Persians and the English, derived little benefit from their newly won command of the Gulf, the former because they had no merchant fleet, and the latter because they no longer had Moluccan spices to ship to the caravans at Persian Gulf ports. The Dutch had almost totally frozen the English out of the spice trade, and not until the end of the seventeenth century would the EIC be able to exploit other commodities and once again challenge the VOC.

The Dutch followed this stroke of good luck by taking Sri Lanka from the Portuguese in a long and bloody campaign lasting from 1638 until 1658 and added the hugely profitable cinnamon monopoly to their portfolio. Finally, they completely sealed off the last leakages from the Spice Islands by bringing the Buginese port of Makassar, an important spice market for Asian traders, under VOC domination in 1669 and by taking Bantam, the main English base in Indonesia, in 1682.

With the fall of Hormuz and the virtual elimination of Portuguese power from the Indian Ocean, the only route open to Asian competitors was through the Red Sea. After 1630, the Turks lost control of its entrance at Bab el Mandeb to a local Yemenite imam, who reopened trade to all comers, including the Europeans, through the port of Mocha, near Aden. Although the Red Sea was theoretically open, Holland’s competitors had no spices to ship through it. The Acehnese, who had so successfully defied the Portuguese cartaz system in the sixteenth century, had disappeared from the western Indian Ocean. The exact reasons for their decline are not clear, but it seems likely that merchants from Aceh could not buy spices because of the increasing VOC presence on Sumatra.

Dutch maritime technology had improved to the point where the route around the Cape of Good Hope at last became decisively cheaper and faster than “Sinbad’s Way” and the Red Sea route. So complete was the VOC’s control of the Spice Islands, so efficient was Dutch shipping, and so well financed and well managed were Company accounts, that by the early seventeenth century it was intentionally glutting the Mediterranean with pepper and fine spices from the west via Gibraltar. While this decreased profits, the low prices rendered the overland spice routes uneconomical and thus doomed the age-old Venetian trade via the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.32 A century and a half later, Venice, its major source of revenue gone, would be easy pickings for Napoleon’s army.



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