The Portuguese expansion in the Orient ... led to
prolonged contact
between diverse cultures… which resulted in generations
of mother-
tongue speakers of Luso-Asian languages which were spoken
in
negotiating oriental commerce. These languages outlasted
Portuguese
presence in Asia....
Portuguese became the language of colonization…
So asserts Shihan de Silva
Jayasuriya in her recently published study, The
Portuguese in the East: A Cultural History of a Maritime Trading Empire
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2017) [xiii]. This is an intriguing text, furthering the
work of earlier scholars such as Holden Furber and Kenneth David Jackson in early
modern Western expansion and Luso-Asian cultural transference, respectively. There are historiographical lapses in the
book, and these are critiqued in penetrating terms in a review by Zoltán
Biedermann, lecturer in Portuguese imperial history at University College
London.[1] Biedermann’s concerns reminded me of a review
in which the eminent Rhys Richards took me to task for apparently neglecting to
cite the work of important earlier scholars in my own True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). As Richards lamented,
My frustration with
this thoroughly researched book, and the plethora of
soul-searching recent articles that its bibliography
reveals, is the near
absence . . . of references
to older American writers like Holden Furber
and the superb survey of
the American fur trade, in French, by
Richards’s observation was
uncomfortable, but correct, of course. While
I had consulted some of Furber’s other work (but not Dermigny’s, as my passing
ability in the French language was not up to the task), I had not consulted all
of it, although I have since rectified this gap. And, I recalled Richards’s caveat in reading
some tweets from the recent meetings of the Society of Early American Historians--one
of my favorite groups, but this year featuring some curious comments. One, for instance, opined that it was “So, so
refreshing to have a plenary session with younger scholars who aren’t bound buy
older historiographic debates.” Another
called for senior scholars serving as session commenters to withhold their own
insights and just let young scholars hold forth.
Yet, an appreciation of both older and newer literature
is important for understanding the world as it was when Americans first
encountered it, not occasionally as subjects of a British king aboard East
India Company ships or, like John Ledyard, sailing with Captain Cook, but as
citizens, representatives of a new nation, and an experimental republic at
that. Conventional “China trade”
histories embrace a nationalistic narrative of courageous American men braving
the seas to further capitalist enterprise.
Both Furber and Dermigny, and now Jayasuriya, paint a more complicated portrait
of a world rife with dangers as well as opportunities, in flux, unstable, and protean.
As Jayasuriya relates this story, “waves of European
influence that washed over [Asia] were never completely obliterated by the
subsequent waves.” First came the Portuguese, who “turned the Indian Ocean into
a zone for cross cultural contact between East and West,” followed by the
Dutch, French, and English ventures and conquests.[3]
Jayasuriya’s particular interest is in Portuguese
influence on Asia, particularly in areas such as Goa and Sri Lanka (which
Americans knew as Ceylon).[4]
Cultural exchange here was rich and
fertile, carried by currents of miscegenation, missionary work, and commercial
policy. She observes: “The Portuguese
were continually interacting with ‘Others’, peoples of alien cultures, who
spoke many languages and who had different religious beliefs and practices. The
Portuguese enterprise functioned on interdependence and interactions with other
cultures.”[5] Furthermore, “A Luso-Asian lingua franca
served as the medium of communication between the Portuguese and Asians. In Sri
Lanka, it served as the bridging tongue between, not one, not two, but three
European powers in the indigenous people.”[6]
For me, the most intriguing aspect of Jayasuriya’s work lies
in her interpretation of the Portuguese Empire’s legacy of conquest through her
exploration of language, secular and religious literature, and religious and
popular music. In the process, Jayasuriya deciphers Portuguese ballads from
Ceylon, investigates the fusion of Christian religious and Indian folk music
known as Mondo, and explores the incorporation of Portuguese terms into more
than fifty languages and dialects.
Engaging The
Portuguese in the East alongside the rich studies of Furber, Dermigny, and
other scholars opens a deeper line of inquiry for me, as well. In my reading of travelogues, journals,
letters, and ships logs penned by American travelers into the Great South Sea,
I have not (yet) found evidence of their descriptions of Asia as a kind of
Portuguese lake. In this body of
writing, the American foray into India appears to have been different from that
of the Portuguese. Although both Americans
and Portuguese travelers largely clung to coastal enclaves, eschewing inland
forays as dangerous, inconvenient, and unnecessary for their commercial
purposes, the Portuguese engaged indigenous peoples directly through a variety
of media, including religion, literature, and music. Some American visitors and expatriates appear
to have formed relationships with a few individual merchants, and missionaries
worked with Indian converts, but, by-and-large, they avoided the kind of
wholesale cultural exchange in which the Portuguese engaged. In doing do, they followed British models of
contact. American travelers to India,
Sri Lanka, Malacca, and other sites do not appear to have utilized the
Portuguese language, adhering to the English written and spoken in British
enclaves such as Calcutta (Kolkata) and Bombay (Mumbai). So, then, if Portuguese was still a lingua franca throughout Asia into the
nineteenth century, a “bridging tongue” essential “in trading and empire
building,” it is curious that American texts do not mention it.[7]
Notes
[1]
Zoltán Biedermann, “Long Review of Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya,
The Portuguese in the East: A Cultural
History of a Maritime Trading Empire.” e-Journal of Portuguese History, 9,
no. 1 (2011).
[2]
Holden Furber, John Company at Work: A Study of European Expansion in India in the
Late Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948) and Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient,
1600–1800, Europe and the World in the Age of Expansion, II, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1976; and Louis Dermigny, La Chine et l’Occident: Le Commerce Canton au XVIIe Siecle, 1719 –1833,
3 vols. (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1964).
[3]
Jayasuriya,
The Portuguese in the East,
1, 7.
[4]
Jayasuriya sees this history of conquest and colonization as “a two way
exchange but in an asymmetrical relationship.”
Jayasuriya,
The Portuguese in the
East, xiv.
[5]
Jayasuriya, The
Portuguese in the East, 3.
[6]
Jayasuriya, The
Portuguese in the East, 6.
[7]
Jayasuriya,
The Portuguese in the East,
6.
