Portuguese India was tiny—a handful of trading posts and enclaves, centered on the colony of Goa. The Estado da Índia faced the Mughal Empire and the Deccan Sultanates, large Muslim and Persian-based societies that ruled the subcontinent. How did Portuguese India survive? Well, by spying.
Imperialism
In the early 19th century, Reverend Andrew Fuller, a leading evangelical, dismissed the possibility of any anti-colonial unity in India, claiming that “Hindoos resemble an immense number of particles of sand, which are incapable of forming a solid mass. There is no bond of union among them, nor any principle capable of effecting it.” Yet, over the next century, Fuller’s glib remark would be upended by the very forces he had underestimated. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a rising wave of Hindu nationalism had begun to consolidate those so-called “particles of sand” into a powerful, collective identity.
In our book Painter and Patron, about the Códice Casanatense, an album of annotated Luso-Indian watercolors produced in Goa ca 1540, my co-author Juan José Morales and I noted that the both the paintings and annotations indicated both considerable and rather granular knowledge of the people and places all over Asia, Persia, Arabia and East Africa, as well as familiarity with descriptions in Portuguese sources as yet not formally published at the time. How this happened, we could only guess; Jorge Flores’s Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World, although it deals with a period from a few decades to a century and a half later, helps explain what was going on.
In Indonesia, the colonial past has a conspicuously low profile in public consciousness and political debate, but the national revolution—”Revolusi” in Bahasa Indonesia—that threw off colonial rule once and for all nonetheless remains the single most defining moment in the country’s history. Countless murals, quirky dioramas, annual Independence Day celebrations, place names, monuments, official and unofficial histories celebrate this struggle. Meanwhile, interest in decolonization has grown exponentially, but Indonesia has figured much less in international discussions than cases such as Algeria or India.
Baseball’s introduction to the Philippines. The slot machine trade between Manila and Shanghai. A musical based extremely loosely on the life of the sultan of Sulu.
Podcast with Roger Crowley, author of “Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World”
The spice islands: specks of land in the Indonesian archipelago that were the exclusive home of cloves, commodities once worth their weight in gold. The Portuguese got there first, persuading the Spanish to fund expeditions trying to go the other direction, sailing westward across the Atlantic.
The title (and cover) of Andrew Hillier’s new book The Alcock Album: Scenes of China Consular Life 1843-1853 might lead one to think that it is primarily a collection of drawings and paintings; but while the volume is indeed profusely-illustrated, it is rather more a biography of Henrietta Alcock, the wife of Rutherford Alcock, one of the first British consuls in the treaty ports of Xiamen, Fuzhou and Shanghai in the years immediately after the First Opium War. Both were, as it turns out, proficient at both sketching and watercolors.
Although it is the Silk Road that captures most of the contemporary attention and discussion, it was in fact spices, not silk, that drove Western Europeans to seek routes to Asia. “Lightweight and durable, spices” writes Roger Crowley in his new history (appropriately entitled Spice), “were the first truly global commodity … they could be worth more than their weight in gold.”

How did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? And how did these contribute to the making of Goan identity?
Podcast with Diego Javier Luis, author of “The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History”
There’s a popular folk hero in Puebla, Mexico—Catarina de San Juan, who Mexicans hailed as a devoted religious figure after her death in 1688. She’s credited with creating the china poblana dress, a connection of dubious historical veracity made several centuries after her death. But Catarina is one of Mexico’s most famous “chinos”—despite the fact that she was likely from India, not China. In fact, any Asian that disembarked in Mexico, whether from China, Japan, the Philippines, India, or even further away, was called “chino”. It was not a particularly beneficial classification: “chinos”, under Spanish law, could be enslaved; “indios”, or indigenous populations, could not.
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