Estado da India (Portuguese India)

The first European seaborne empire in Asia, run as a chain of fortified ports rather than as territory. Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498, and within fifteen years Afonso de Albuquerque had taken Goa, Malacca and Hormuz - a strategy of seizing the chokepoints of the Indian Ocean rather than conquering hinterlands, on the theory that whoever held the straits held the trade. The Estado da India was the resulting administration, governed from Goa by a viceroy, and it enforced a licensing system requiring Asian ships to buy passes, which was novel and resented. Portugal's numbers were always tiny, so the empire depended on local alliances, mixed marriages that were official policy, and conversion; the Goa Inquisition, running from 1560 to 1812, was among the most severe anywhere. Dutch and English competition took most of the ports in the seventeenth century. Goa, Daman and Diu remained Portuguese until India annexed them by force in 1961, four centuries after their capture. Macau was held until 1999. Goan churches are a World Heritage site. Goa was the capital from 1510. The Estado at its height ran from East Africa to Macau and Nagasaki. Portuguese loanwords entered Japanese, Malay, Bengali and Swahili through it. The carreira da India voyage took six months each way and lost ships regularly. Its records in Lisbon and Goa are among the earliest European archives on Asia. Portuguese remained a trade lingua franca in Asian ports long after Portuguese power faded, and creoles derived from it survive.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history