Conquerors
How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire
Roger Crowley (Faber & Faber, 432pp, £20, Oldie price £16.50)
ACCLAIMED FOR his earlier books about the Ottoman and Venetian empires, Crowley now turns his attention to the Portuguese and their short-lived imperial domination of the Indian Ocean. ‘Though its supremacy lasted little more than a century,’ Crowley concludes, ‘Portugal’s achievement was to create a prototype for new and flexible forms of empire, based on mobile sea power, and the paradigm for European expansion. Where it led, the Dutch and the English followed.’
This was not simply an empire based on trade in spices; it was also an empire inspired by ruthless crusading zeal. ‘The Portuguese came to the Indian coast with their visors lowered,’ writes Crowley. ‘Hardened by decades of holy war in north Africa, their default strategies were suspicion, aggressive hostage-taking, the half-drawn sword and a simple binary choice between Christian and Muslim.’
When the explorer Vasco da Gama captured a dhow carrying a party of wealthy Calicut merchants and their families, he refused their offer of wealth in exchange for their freedom and instead sank their vessel. ‘The Portuguese were not after short-term plunder, the incident made loud and clear, but total domination,’ wrote Ben Wilson in the
Times. ‘Their methods went beyond mere piracy; this was unrestrained terrorism.’ Wilson praised the book for its ‘pulsating narrative’, while Domi- nic Sandbrook, writing in the Sunday
Times, agreed that it was a ‘magnificently rip-roaring history’.
Reviewing it for Abu Dhabi newspaper the National, Matthew Price called it ‘something of an old-fashioned page-turning history . . . Crowley’s pages burst with action; he is a fine writer of kinetic set pieces. If the succession of blood, guts and battles gets a bit repetitive, he opens the reader’s eyes to a now lost chapter in the Western encounter with the lands of the East.’