Category Archives: economics

by | 4 September 2025 · 12:02 am

Venezuela’s “Dutch Disease”

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 118-119, 126-128:

The early theorists of Dutch disease studied how real economies, including those with robust consumer markets, reacted to a commodity boom. These writers did not consider what might happen to a small, barely functioning country, which did not even have a modern state in place when the first oil gusher blew out. The existing capital in Venezuela was negligible, which means that other, less measurable, factors came into play.

Arturo Uslar Pietri was the first person to pick up on the cultural strands of Dutch disease well before American academics started modeling the phenomenon. He was a descendant of landowners and had seen first-hand the death of the cocoa and coffee industry upon oil’s arrival. More importantly, he could see what oil was doing to the country as far back as the 1930s and 1940s. In a feat of uncanny prediction, he also foresaw the tragedy of the 2010s.

His brief analysis of the new economy was offered in a now-famous op-ed piece, “Sowing Oil,” published in 1936. For him, conditions were such that the newfound riches “could make Venezuela into an unproductive and lazy country, a giant oil parasite, swimming in a temporary and corrupting abundance, and driven toward an inevitable and imminent catastrophe.”

The main issue, he feared, was that either oil would run out, or that something synthetic would replace it, as had happened to other commodities familiar to South Americans, such as rubber or indigo. His thesis mirrors what the early theorists of Dutch disease would later acknowledge. What the academics ignored but Uslar could sense all around him were the broader, less tangible ways in which oil would permeate and dull Venezuelan society.

Uslar wrote his op-ed to counter the increasingly influential views of Rómulo Betancourt, who thought that oil was, and should be, everything. Alluding to Betancourt, he writes in “Sowing Oil” that having the state focus exclusively on the rent from oil was the “suicidal dream of naive men.” He believed the oil money should be used to develop a vigorous national industry, including modern agriculture.

…

While a lot has been written about how governments wasted oil revenues for decades, Dutch disease was very much a part of the private sector as well. Mid-sized and large companies that, in retrospect, had a real chance of global success, were never able to do anything about those prospects.

The shoe industry born in the Catia neighborhood of Caracas is a perfect example. The know-how of Sicilian and Neapolitan families that had emigrated from the old country to continue their shoe trade in Venezuela could never become globally competitive with a strong bolivar. Their companies were very prosperous for decades because the Ministries of Education and Defense would buy millions of shoes and boots. But the future was bleak without a consumer market big enough for the factories to reach substantial scale. The overvalued bolivar never let them export successfully, and cheap Chinese manufacturing eventually hit them hard. Later, they would be crushed by globally integrated and truly competitive retailers such as Zara.

The degree to which the out of context desarrollista policies failed the country is made evident by comparing two key Venezuelan companies and their Mexican counterparts. As early as 1979, well before NAFTA, Mexico’s Grupo Modelo managed to reinvent their weak and cheap working-class beer Corona into a “cool and light” alternative for American “Yuppie” consumers. The venture’s success turned Modelo into one of Latin America’s most valuable companies while Venezuela’s brewery Polar, awash in 1970s overvalued bolivars, did not take export markets seriously. Decade after decade Polar’s businesses expanded domestically, remaining tied to the price of oil and the swings of Venezuelan politics. Another Mexican company, Cemex, exploded out of humble beginnings to become the biggest cement company in the world. While its take-off did not happen until the 1980s, everything started with a financial consolidation, a series of acquisitions, and a listing in the local stock exchange in 1976. Right around that time, Cementos de Venezuela was happy to feed the building boom driven by the strong bolivar, a prelude to its eventual bankruptcy.

Rather than getting ready to expand through exports, the simplistic theory of import substitution allowed the Venezuelan private sector to use overvalued bolivar revenues to obtain dollar-denominated loans. Foreign banks at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s were ready to lend dollars against future bolivars. On top of every other challenge, the borrowing proved catastrophic.

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by | 2 September 2025 · 11:32 pm

Venezuela’s Oil Blessing and Curse

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 82-85:

It was dawn in the tiny fishing village of Cabimas when the earth started to shake on December 14, 1922. A roaring explosion followed the tremor, and a furious rainstorm of thick oil fell over the straw-roof shacks and dirt roads. The black rain went on for days.

The Barroso II oil field’s spectacular blowout spewed one million barrels of oil in a little over a week. It was then the world’s biggest known oil field, tapped just in time to feed a global economy fast converting from coal to fuel oil. The black rainstorm signaled a new era for one of South America’s poorest countries. Exploration and production would spread throughout the sparsely populated country as American roughnecks turned “béisbol” into a national pastime and pound cake into a local delight, “ponqué.” Everything from the most trivial to the most consequential would be transformed, starting with the economy.

Ever since Barroso II, three numbers have dominated many conversations seeking to explain the country’s destiny: barrels produced per day, their price in the global market, divided by the country’s population.

During the heyday of 1974, oil production reached 3.4 million barrels per day, the global price of crude oil stood at US$48 in 2019 dollars, and the country had thirteen million people. By 2019, the price of crude stood at US$50, production had bottomed out at 877,000 barrels per day, and the population had reached 28 million. By this somewhat arbitrary measure, the per capita production value in 1974 was US$4,582 for every Venezuelan. By 2019, it was US$572.

For many, this simple math tells their country’s story, a kabbala of its miseries and triumphs. The Chavista leadership of the late 2010s prayed the accelerating emigration would tilt the simple formula, or at least its trendline, in their favor. If enough people left the country, there would be fewer mouths to feed and able bodies to revolt, even on declining oil revenue. No one imagined, much less understood, the extent to which millions and millions of Venezuelans walking away from their country would answer the wildest wishes of those in power.

And yet, the long history of social and geographical conflict means that even a positive balance between oil production, international prices, and population cannot always guarantee peace.

The revolt leading to the coup d’état against General Pérez Jiménez in 1958, and Commander Chávez’s attempted coup in 1992, both took place when the global price of oil, and production capabilities, had not suffered significant downward pressures. Chavez’s coup came weeks after the end of 1991 when the economy had clocked the world’s fastest growth at 9.73%.

The dynamics behind the 1958 coup are illuminating. Three decades after Barroso II, the country was experiencing massive urban migration of the rural poor to the cities and unprecedented European and South American immigration. A new professional middle class and rising prosperity in many regional capitals had contributed much complexity to the country’s politics. General Pérez Jiménez never understood that the way he was brokering the oil wealth was out of step with a fast-changing Venezuela. The emerging actors demanded a new accommodation. By January 1958, a broad coalition overthrew the last general to rule the country in the 20th century.

Eleven months later, Acción Democrática’s Rómulo Betancourt set out to build a novel liberal state designed to broaden the oil treasure’s distribution. The new democracy would ensure the old rural poor, in the countryside or the big cities, received a much higher share of the bounty. The far from perfect but more independent unions, courtrooms, congressional chambers, political parties, and professional and trade associations allowed for a deeper and broader distribution of resources across constituencies throughout the country. Betancourt was determined to erase old ethnic and racial fractures but also paid attention to the growing expectations of more assertive regions, a nascent immigrant commercial class, and new industrial and financial interests. A more sophisticated accommodation to manage the oil bounty made sense for a country that had become too complex for the iron hand of a highland general and the machinations and prejudices of his conservative cronies.

While the construction of Betancourt’s gigantic new state would be very visible, a key component underpinning the country’s society since the 1930s would remain unmentioned: the currency’s value.

The bolivar’s high value relative to the dollar had been a political and cultural demand of economic elites and the nascent middle class as far back as the late 1920s. As oil revenues increased in the aftermath of President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1934 dollar devaluation, the bolivar emerged as one of the strongest currencies in the world. The country’s unique history and the realities of an oil economy developed on the back of a poor and virtually empty geography had turned the overvalued currency into a true religion. The generals and their conservative allies, and later Betancourt along with his socialist and liberal supporters, both built societies on the foundation of a strong bolivar. Their very different answers to the social, ethnic, and racial fractures that had torn the country apart for four hundred years had a shared, if silent, premise in the long-running currency consensus.

However, as often happens to societies whose good (and bad) fortunes depend on a single commodity, oil and its ability to prop up the currency became a fixed reference in the nation’s identity and a conveniently forgotten factor in its destiny. The connections tying modern universities, great theater, sophisticated newspapers, vibrant public debate, and transformational strides in nutrition, health, and education to the price of oil and the overvalued bolivar were always fuzzy.

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by | 1 September 2025 · 12:58 am

Early Rise of Hugo Chávez

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 53-55:

The slow collapse of the Adeco project started in the early 1980s, as oil prices fell and did not rise again, except for the Gulf War hiccup in 1990, until 2004. In 1998, when Chávez won his first election with 56% of the votes, the price of oil had just dropped in real dollars to its lowest levels since 1972. Venezuela’s population was then twelve million people, as opposed to the twenty-three million inhabitants of 1998.

If the country’s oil prospects had helped Betancourt dream of erasing, and then burying, any sense of racial and ethnic identity from the country at the beginning of the 20th century, 1998 presented a different landscape. The return of ethnic difference in the nation’s consciousness was already in the air.

As explained, Chávez broadened his base toward the end of the electoral campaign and eventually won the 1998 election with support from lighter-skinned middle-class voters. He campaigned hard for those votes by tapping into the desire for a powerful military figure at a time of uncertainty. He said the country and the state were broke only because someone, an “evil group,” had stolen all the wealth. By then his speeches lacked any mention of redistribution, and merely mentioned theft. If he stopped “them” from stealing, there would be plenty of money for all. But this was campaign rhetoric. It was clear to anyone who looked at the numbers that Chávez would not be able to do anything once in power.

Oil prices had hit rock bottom, and there was only so much revenue to go around. There were not even enough resources to satisfy Chávez’s core base in the favelas, much less reconstruct the state that had glued the country together for so many decades. Chávez’s short-term economic options were almost non-existent, but it is also clear he did not even have a plan.

What Chávez had was a prescient understanding of power: he realized the color-blind society built over the prior fifty years was broken and ready to die. Despite his one-nation pitch in the final months of the campaign, Chávez was aware that his powerbase could only be nourished by deepening, not bridging, the ethnic gap. He intuitively understood 19th-century Venezuelan politics, specifically the 100-plus years during which rulers had to grab and retain power in a country with vast swaths of extreme poverty, a weak state at best, and very little money.

The young Chávez vividly understood everything the young Uslar Pietri had described in his novel Las Lanzas Coloradas, which most of the country had forgotten. His encyclopedic knowledge of the songs, legends, heroes, and language of bygone times became a political currency of incalculable value. His humble origins in the rural Plains and his self-proclaimed Zambo identity (the original caste designating those of mixed African and Amerindian descent) made him a different kind of politician. The memory of his great-great-grandfather Maisanta, a renegade warlord whose guerrilla actions had killed former President Crespo in 1898, helped him understand the new politics that were to come.

He saw the power vacuum in front of him, as had been the case for ambitious would-be-rulers throughout the 1800s. Back in that century, a sudden drop in coffee prices, a shift in population, or a palace revolt in faraway Caracas, were always seen as golden opportunities for men of war to march with a few peons and take over the trophy capital while advocating the grievances of Pardo peasants.

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by | 30 August 2025 · 1:37 am

Betancourt’s Vision of Venezuela

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 43-44:

Rómulo Betancourt was the architect of a Venezuela in which race and ethnicity were eradicated from the public discourse. An early 20th-century pro-democracy leader, he laid down the basis for the country’s race-neutral ideology as Venezuela’s president first in 1945, and then again in 1959. Adecos, as Betancourt’s followers were called, would go on to become the political reference point in the life of the country, until Chávez and the new demographic wave destroyed their social project. Their vision’s successes and failures are virtual keys to understanding contemporary Venezuela.

By 1940 the thirty-three-year-old Betancourt was already a promising political leader, but one in the very middle of a unique moment in history. Behind him lay a poor, provincial country with a vast countryside still recovering from the deep social fractures Laureano Vallenilla had described in 1919. Ahead of him was a nation with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to start over again. He imagined that properly distributed, oil money would create a brand-new country to be filled, like a vast empty canvas, with great ideas and institutions. The young Betancourt knew he could shape an entirely new political imaginary. He was convinced he could solve the underlying issues of the country’s ethnic fracture.

His political program for change was clear: the state would charge a 50% tax on all profits obtained by American and British oil companies to underwrite a welfare state that would wipe out poverty, and level all Venezuelans. An enormous investment in education would transform people into informed citizens, and an influx of migrants would bring their legacies to form a new society made up of equals.

His political party, Acción Democrática, would organize workers, peasants, students, professionals, and industrialists around the unifying idea of a new Venezuela that left behind castes, ethnicities, and places of birth. The party’s manifesto called the organization “multi-class” and was purposely silent on matters of race, ethnicity, castes, or regional origin. Oil would fuel the country’s development and well-being, and act as a social glue linking everything together.

…

Betancourt had to embody that majority to sell this project. He emphasized his mother’s African descent. His hometown was on the western edge of the Afro-Caribbean Barlovento coast. His accent lacked the upper-class singsong of Creoles, and he would occasionally refer to himself as a “mulatto from Guatire.” His Spanish was laced with provincial colloquialisms.

But most importantly, Betancourt’s public persona embraced the mannerisms, language, and humor of ethnic Pardos. Ethnicity is an ambiguous combination of perceptions, far from the clearer lines that can define race. By embracing and claiming to be a Pardo, Betancourt became the perfect spokesperson for a project that someone with a Creole accent, a more formal manner, or wearing starched shirts with cufflinks could never sell.

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by | 25 August 2025 · 3:00 pm

Portugal’s Means & Ends in 1505

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 137-140:

Dom Francisco de Almeida, was only the king’s second choice. Tristão da Cunha had been his initial nomination, but the experienced seaman had suddenly been struck down by blindness, probably the result of a vitamin deficiency. Though he later recovered, the incident was taken as a sign from God. Almeida was to be the first member of the high nobility to lead an India expedition. He was about fifty-five years old, with wide military, diplomatic, and nautical experience, but he also possessed the personal qualities that Manuel hoped for in a man to whom he might entrust high affairs of state. Almeida was incorruptible, unmoved by the lure of riches, benevolent, a widower without home ties, pious, and mature in his judgments. For many, the attraction of India was the prospect of personal gain; Almeida was untarnished by the appetites of the Sodrés. He valued titles above bales of spices, and he knew how to fight.

Almeida was not just to be the captain-major. He was also granted the elevated title of viceroy, nominally with executive power to act in the king’s place. What this meant in practice was spelled out a week later in the regimento, the instructions given to him by the king. They ran to 101 closely written pages, containing 143 different items divided into chapters and subchapters that revealed both the microscopic level of detail at which the king wished to direct his appointee and the breathtaking scale of his ambition.

After sailing around the Cape, Almeida was ordered to get control of the Swahili coast. His targets were to be the ports of Sofala, key to the gold trade, and Kilwa. The recommended method was to arrive in the guise of friendship, then attack the towns by surprise, imprison all the Muslim merchants, and seize their riches. Forts were to be constructed and control then exercised over the sources of gold, necessary for trading on the Malabar Coast in exchange for spices. It was to be a mission of war, disguised as peace. Then, wasting no time, he was to proceed directly across the Indian Ocean and build four more forts: at the stopover island, Anjediva, as a support and provisioning hub, and in the friendly cities of Cannanore, Quilon, and Cochin.

Moving north, another fort was to be built at or near the mouth of the Red Sea and close to the kingdom of Prester John, to choke off the sultan’s spice trade and ensure that “all India should be stripped of the illusion of being able to trade with anyone but ourselves.” Two ships were to be on permanent patrol along the African coast as far as the Horn of Africa. The regimento then turned its attention to the intractable Calicut problem. One way or another, the new samudri, as hostile as his predecessor, was to be dealt with. Almeida was to establish peace if the samudri agreed to expel all the Muslims; if not, “wage war and total destruction on him, by all the means you best can by land and sea so that everything possible is destroyed.”

No strategic point was to be overlooked. After locking up the Red Sea, a fleet was to be sent to other Islamic city-states and kingdoms: Chaul and Cambay, and Ormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Almeida was to demand annual tribute to the king of Portugal; to order these states to break off all commercial relations with the Arab merchants of Cairo and the Red Sea; to capture all Muslim shipping along the way. To pay for all this, he was to ensure the full loading and prompt sailing of the annual spice fleets.

…

Manuel’s ambition did not end there. After seeing to the spice ships, the viceroy was ordered to open up new frontiers by “discovering” Ceylon, China, Malacca, and “whatever other parts have still not been known.” Pillars were to be planted on this new soil as markers of possession. It was an exhaustive list.

Though the instructions also claimed to allow Almeida a certain freedom of action in the case of unseen eventualities, in practice they imposed a rigid agenda. Manuel never had seen and never would see the world whose conquest he was demanding, but the regimento revealed an astonishing grasp of the choke points of the Indian Ocean and an authoritative geostrategic vision for controlling them and constructing his own empire. This knowledge had been acquired at breathtaking speed. Within seven years of bursting into the new world, the Portuguese understood, with a fair degree of accuracy, how the twenty-eight million square miles of the Indian Ocean worked, its major ports, its winds, the rhythm of its monsoons, its navigational possibilities and communication corridors—and they were already eyeing farther horizons. The methodology of knowledge acquisition had been developed over the years of slogging round the coast of Africa, during which the Portuguese had become expert observers and collectors of geographical and cultural information. They garnered this with great efficiency, scooping up local informants and pilots, employing interpreters, learning languages, observing with dispassionate scientific interest, drawing the best maps they could. Astronomers were sent on voyages; the collection of latitudes became a state enterprise. Men such as Duarte Pacheco Pereira, substituting firsthand observation for the received wisdom of the ancients, operated within the parameters of Renaissance inquiry. Information about the new world was fed back into a central hub, the India House in Lisbon, where everything was stored under the crown’s direct control to inform the next cycle of voyages. This system of feedback and adaptation was rapid and effective.

Manuel had drawn on a small coterie of advisers to construct the regimento for Almeida. Influential among them was Gaspar, the Polish Jew posing as a Venetian whom Vasco da Gama had kidnapped on his first voyage. He is woven into the first decade of Portuguese exploration, invaluable as an expert and an interpreter, an elusive figure, changing his identity and name to suit the patron of the moment and the needs of the situation. First Gaspar da Gama, to Manuel probably Gaspar da India, on the forthcoming voyage he would call himself Gaspar de Almeida “out of love for the viceroy.” He had a propensity to tell his new employers what they wanted to hear, but he was well informed. He seems to have had a good knowledge of the Indian Ocean and to have traveled widely. It was he who suggested the first overture to Cochin, and he had probably made voyages to Ceylon, Malacca, and Sumatra. He also understood the strategic importance of the Red Sea. It was this information that seeped into Manuel’s grand plan of 1505.

Gaspar had advocated that the Portuguese should go straight for the Muslim jugular—attack Aden, close the Red Sea, and suffocate Mamluk trade first; then the samudri would be compelled to become a Portuguese client—rather than laboriously constructing forts on the Malabar Coast that would cost money and lives. The wisdom of the forts strategy would become a hotly debated issue in the years ahead. Manuel had absorbed the plan but not the sequence: he preferred first to establish secure bases on Indian soil as a platform for snuffing out Muslim trade.

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by | 24 August 2025 · 3:02 am

First Portuguese Toeholds in India

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 119-120:

GAMA SET SAIL FOR Lisbon in February 1503, leaving behind two fragile toeholds on the Indian coast—the trading posts at Cannanore and Cochin—and a furious and humiliated samudri in Calicut, additionally enraged with the sultan of Cochin for defying his attempts to uproot the Portuguese pirates. It was clear that there could be no peaceful negotiations with these intruders, whose visitations were assuming an ominous regularity. With the dying of each monsoon, their ships returned, sometimes in small squadrons, sometimes in major shows of force. They announced themselves with displays of flags and volleys of cannon fire. They came with intemperate demands for spices and for the expulsion of the deep-rooted Muslim community; they flouted the taboos of Hindu culture and backed up their threats with traumatic acts of violence beyond the acceptable rules of war.

The Portuguese now started trying to introduce a toll system for shipping along the shores of the Malabar Coast; they issued safe-conduct passes, called cartazes, that ensured protection for the vessels of friendly powers. This was effectively a tax on commerce. In time it would require merchant shipping to trade in Portuguese-controlled ports and, additionally, pay substantial import and export duties. The cartazes, stamped with the image of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, marked a radical shift in the Indian Ocean. With the coming of the Europeans, the sea was no longer a free-trade zone. The cartaz system introduced the alien concept of territorial waters, a politicized space controlled by armed force and the Portuguese ambition to dominate the sea.

The full implications of these threats to Indian Ocean trade were now echoing across the wider world. In December 1502, the worried Venetians established a Calicut committee with the express purpose of soliciting action from the sultan in Cairo; this was to be undertaken by their ambassador, Benedetto Sanuto, “to find rapid and secret remedies.” The utmost discretion was essential. The potential scandal of aiding Muslims against their Christian brethren made Venetian overtures extremely delicate, but Sanuto’s mission was clear: to highlight to the sultan the threat posed by a Portuguese blockade of his spice route, to urge him to put pressure on the samudri to expel the intruders, and, to the obvious advantage of the Venetians themselves, to lower tariffs on spices traded through Egypt to compete with the Portuguese.

In Cairo itself, the sultan, Al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghawri, had other things to concern himself with—outbreaks of sedition, threats to the pilgrim routes to Mecca and Medina from Bedouin tribesmen, an empty treasury—but the sudden appearance of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean was as disconcerting as it was inexplicable. “The audacity of the Franks knows no limit,” reported the chronicler Ibn Iyas of their growing incursions.

They say that the Franks have succeeded in effecting a breach in the dyke constructed by Alexander [the Great]…this breach has been made in a mountain that separates the China Sea [the Indian Ocean] from the Mediterranean. The Franks have been striving to enlarge this cutting to allow their ships to pass into the Red Sea. Such is the origin of this piracy.

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by | 23 August 2025 · 11:30 am

Cabral’s Armada to India in 1500

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 85-87:

JUST SIX MONTHS AFTER Gama’s return, a vastly larger fleet was ready to depart from the shores of Belém: thirteen ships, twelve hundred men, and a capital investment by Florentine and Genoese bankers, now eager to participate in the opportunities of the Indies. Manuel could be irresolute, easily swayed, and perverse, but the year 1500 resounded with messianic portents, the eyes of Europe were turning toward Lisbon, and this new armada, led by the fidalgo Pedro Álvares Cabral as captain-major, was a swift follow-up aimed at winning material advantages and the crusading admiration of the Catholic world. Cabral’s expedition marked the shift from reconnaissance to commerce and then conquest. In the first five years of the sixteenth century, Manuel would dispatch a volley of overlapping fleets of increasing size, eighty-one ships in all, to ensure success in a life-and-death struggle for a permanent position in the Indian Ocean. It was a supreme national effort that called on all the available resources of manpower, shipbuilding, material provision, and strategic vision to exploit a window of opportunity before Spain could react. In the process, the Portuguese took both Europe and the peoples of the Indies by complete surprise.

Cabral was able to apply all the knowledge gained from Gama’s voyage. The timing of departure was no longer decided by the auspicious calculations of court astrologers but by the rhythm of the monsoon. The route was to follow the looping westward sweep undertaken by the ships in 1497, and to draw on the experience of pilots and captains such as Pêro Escobar, Nicholas Coelho, who had accompanied Gama, and Bartolomeu Dias himself. Cabral’s fleet carried back Malayalam-speaking Indians who had been taught Portuguese, with the aim of cutting out the Arabic-speaking middlemen. The Jewish convert Gaspar da Gama was aboard, knowledgeable about the intricate politics of the Malabar Coast, and another converted Jew, Master John, Dom Manuel’s physician, sailed as astronomer to the fleet, with the duty of studying the stars of the Southern Hemisphere for the purposes of future navigation. After the hideous embarrassment of the gifts offered at Calicut, Cabral carried choice items to entrance the samudri. It appears that the Portuguese persisted in believing that the samudri was a Christian king, albeit of an unorthodox kind, and in accord with the remit of the pope, a delegation of Franciscan friars accompanied the expedition to correct his errors, so that “the Indians…might more completely have instruction in our faith and might be indoctrinated and taught in matters pertaining to it, as befits the service of God and the salvation of their souls.”

Equally important was the commercial mission. The personnel, secretarial resources, and goods to establish a trading post in Calicut accompanied the expedition. With the cautionary example of the failures of the previous voyage, calculated attempts were made to load wares that might be attractive to the Malabar Indians. These included coral, copper, vermilion pigment, mercury, fine and coarse cloth, velvets, satins, and damasks in a whole range of colors, and gold coins. A highly experienced factor, Ayres Corrêa, who spoke Arabic, headed up this commercial initiative, supported by a team of clerks and secretaries to keep records and accounts. These literate subordinates—such as Pêro Vaz de Caminha, who wrote the first account of Brazil—provided some of the most riveting, and sometimes heartbreaking, narratives of the deeds of the Portuguese in the years ahead.

Cabral himself was no seaman, rather a diplomat with a carefully framed set of instructions, some of which had been drawn up by Gama to smooth the troubled waters in the wake of his expedition to Calicut and to establish peaceful and lucrative relations with the “Christian” samudri. Vastly better informed than his predecessor, Cabral could consult this multi-page document, which contained branching options in the case of a whole range of eventualities. It also directed him to take peremptory and high-handed action against perceived enemies that was likely to lead to trouble.

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by | 22 August 2025 · 1:01 am

Indian Ocean Trade Before 1400

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 51-53:

The Indian Ocean, thirty times the size of the Mediterranean, is shaped like an enormous M, with India as its central V. It is flanked on its western edge by the arid shores of the Arabian Peninsula and the long Swahili coast of East Africa; on its east, the barrier islands of Java and Sumatra and the blunt end of Western Australia separate it from the Pacific; to the south run the cold and violent waters of the Antarctic. The timing and trade routes of everything that moved across its surface in the age of sail were dictated by the metronomic rhythm of the monsoon winds, one of the great meteorological dramas of the planet, by whose seasonal fluctuations and reversals, like the operation of a series of intermeshing cogs, goods could be moved across great stretches of the globe. The traditional ship that plied the waters of the western Indian Ocean was the dhow—that is, any of a large family of long, thin vessels with triangular lateen sails of various sizes and regional designs, ranging from coastal craft of between five and fifteen tons up to oceangoing ships of several hundred tons that could overtop Gama’s carracks. Historically, these were sewn vessels, held together by coir ropes, made from coconut fiber without the use of nails.

Unlike Columbus, the Portuguese had not burst into silent seas. For thousands of years, the Indian Ocean had been the crossroads of the world’s trade, shifting goods across a vast space from Canton to Cairo, Burma to Baghdad, through a complex interlocking of trading systems, maritime styles, cultures and religions, and a series of hubs: Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula, larger than Venice, for goods from China and the farther spice islands; Calicut, on the west coast of India, for pepper; Ormuz, gateway to the Persian Gulf and Baghdad; Aden, at the entrance to the Red Sea and the routes to Cairo, the nerve center of the Islamic world. Scores of other small city-states dotted its shores. It dispatched gold, black slaves, and mangrove poles from Africa, incense and dates from Arabia, bullion from Europe, horses from Persia, opium from Egypt, porcelain from China, war elephants from Ceylon, rice from Bengal, sulfur from Sumatra, nutmeg from the Moluccas, diamonds from the Deccan Plateau, cotton cloth from Gujarat. No one had a monopoly in this terrain—it was too extensive and complex, and the great continental powers of Asia left the sea to the merchants. There was small-scale piracy but there were no protectionist war fleets, and little notion of territorial waters prevailed; the star fleets of the Ming dynasty, the one maritime superpower, had advanced and withdrawn. It constituted a vast and comparatively peaceful free-trade zone: over half the world’s wealth passed through its waters in a commercial commonwealth that was fragmented between many players. “God,” it was said, “had given the sea in common.”

This was the world of Sindbad. Its key merchant groups, distributed thinly around its shores, from the palm-fringed beaches of East Africa to the spice islands of the East Indies, were largely Muslims. Islam had been spread, not at the point of a sword, but by missionaries and merchants from the deck of a dhow. This was a polyethnic world, in which trade depended on social and cultural interaction, long-range migration, and a measure of mutual accommodation among Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, local Christians and Jews; it was richer, more deeply layered and complex than the Portuguese could initially grasp. Their mindset was defined by the assumption of monopoly trading rights, as developed on the west coasts of Africa and by holy war in Morocco. The existence of Hinduism appears to have been occluded, and their default position when checked was aggression: hostage taking and the lighted taper ever ready at the touchhole of a bombard. They broke into this sea with their fast-firing, ship-mounted cannons, a player from outside the rules. The vessels they would encounter in the Indian Ocean lacked any comparable defenses.

It became immediately apparent as Gama’s ships approached the town of Mozambique that this was different from the Africa of their previous experience. The houses, thatched with straw, were well built; they could glimpse minarets and wooden mosques. The people, evidently Muslim merchants richly dressed in caftans fringed with silk and embroidered with gold, were urban Arabic speakers with whom their translators could communicate. The welcome was unusually friendly. “They came immediately on board with as much confidence as if they were long acquainted and entered into familiar conversation.” For the first time the Portuguese heard news of the world they had come to find. Through the interpreters they learned of the trade of the “white Muslims”—merchants from the Arabian Peninsula; there were four of their vessels in the harbor, bringing “gold, silver, cloves, pepper, ginger and silver rings…pearls, jewels and rubies.” “Further on, where we were going,” the anonymous writer added with a justifiable note of incredulity, “they abounded, and…precious stones, pearls and spices were so plentiful that there was no need to purchase them as they could be collected in baskets.” This heady vision of wealth was encouraging enough; but they also learned of a large presence of Christians along the coast and that “Prester John resided not far from this place; that he held many cities along the coast, and that the inhabitants of those cities were great merchants and owned big ships.” Whatever might have been lost in translation, “we cried with joy and prayed God to grant us health, so that we might behold what we so much desired.”

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by | 18 August 2025 · 12:12 am

Emigrating from Liverpool by Sea

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 229-232:

The modern Catholic cathedral in Liverpool is known irreverently but affectionately as Paddy’s Wigwam, in deference to its shape and to the antecedents of the masses who worship within the diocese today. The six years of the Famine sailings saw a million Irish emigrants arrive in Liverpool’s port. The majority had just completed the short trip across the usually turbulent Irish Sea – the first stage of their journey to America or Canada. Nearly a quarter of them would have nothing more to do with that cruel sea and those inhuman ships. Some travelled to England and Scotland but many an Irishman and his family remained in Liverpool. For some the city symbolised the end of all their travels and a section of the city came to be known as Little Ireland.

For nearly two centuries, from c. 1700–1900, Liverpool’s port enabled Britain to dominate rival maritime nations. Liverpool sent out ships to explore the world but also ships full of human cargo, first slaves, and then emigrants. Known as the slavers’ port in the 18th century, Liverpool rapidly became an emigrants’ port in the 19th century, though Liverpool’s ship owners continued to trade in slaves until slavery was abolished by Britain in 1807. During that final year, 185 ships transported as many as 50,000 slaves. Soon the commercial rule of ‘slaves-out and sugar-back’ gave way to ‘emigrants-out and timber-back’. On ships bound for New York or Boston during the Famine, it cost 6 cs to insure US $4 worth of baggage but only 4 cs to insure your life. But the Irish were only part of the emigration story. During the 19th century, a total of nine million emigrants spilled out of Europe, sailing from Liverpool to America. Liverpool enjoyed unique commercial and geographical assets. Sited strategically close to the Irish Sea, the city lay only 3 miles up the River Mersey. Liverpool was also one of the first posts to forge a rail-link with Hull, 100 miles away. Hull, in turn, enjoyed busy trade with the ports of Hamburg and Bremen, Gothenburg and Danzig, from where a remarkable ethnic mix of people journeyed, sometimes fleeing their homelands for various reasons. The crossing from Europe to Hull over the North Sea, was as short as that over the Irish Sea, and the rail fare was only a few shillings. Of course, at this particular time the mainland Europeans formed only a minor part of the emigrant population in Britain.

It was logical for the Irish to aim for Liverpool as their launching pad into the New World, not merely because it was the nearest port of convenience, but also because it was a familiar site and source of summer work. Thousands of Irish farmhands regularly crossed to Liverpool, seeking work at the back end of summer on England’s farms. Too few opportunities existed at home at harvest time and the wages in England were better. Additionally, many more ships were available in Liverpool, with its big, fast vessels and speedy American packet ships. The fast packets grabbed a good half of the emigrant trade towards the end of the Famine years, averaging 40 days westward and 23 days eastward. Liverpool was also one of the world’s busiest shipping ports, with over 36 miles of quays and a massive ship tonnage registered as three times the overall tonnage owned in America at that period. Into this teeming city sailed the Irish families from their rural communities. Already overawed by the Irish cities of Dublin, Belfast or Cork, the rural emigrants had to survive the streetwise con-men and racketeers of Liverpool, and later of New York or Boston. At various levels the Liverpool fraternity was engaged in the business of exporting people and, as human cargo was regarded as a commodity, every trader sought to extract his ounce of flesh from that commodity. Yet help was at hand, if only the emigrants knew where to look and who to ask. Various publications offered guidance, and government circulars advised on how to find lodgings, how to seek a passage and buy a ticket, where to exchange money, what to avoid at the docks, on the ships and on arrival.

The priority for the emigrant in Liverpool was to obtain a ticket for a ship sailing within a few days. Space on most of the Atlantic ships was often sold in one block by the owners to the passenger brokers and competition was so intense that fares varied from day to day, sometimes changing by the hour. A berth in steerage ranged between £3 10s to £5 (US $17.50 to $25). The port authority licensed 21 brokers who each provided a bond plus two sureties totalling £200 (US $1,000). The brokers paid a small commission to dock-runners for each emigrant delivered to their office. Given half a chance, a runner would lead his unsuspecting victims from the brokers to a lodging house, and then on to a chandler for provisions and suitable clothing, earning further commission, if he could persuade his prey to part with his last few pennies. Before the day of departure, each emigrant had to appear before a medical officer who was paid by the ship owner or charterer £1 (US $5) for every hundred passengers he inspected. After a very rudimentary examination, he would stamp each ticket as proof of inspection. Passengers were entitled to board the ship 24 hours before departure. Once settled, if lucky to have among them a fiddler or a piper and while spirits were high, the passengers might enjoy a song and dance. Once out on the ocean, the sloping decks and strong south-westerly winds would soon restrict their activities. Occasionally, there were scenes at the quayside if passengers arrived late, after the gangway had been raised, the mooring lines cast off and the ship had sailed away. The late arrivals would be rushed to the dock-gate and as their ship passed close by, their luggage and boxes would be flung aboard, followed by the passengers themselves, hopefully landing on the deck. If they or their luggage missed the ship and splashed into the water, there was usually a man in a rowing boat positioned for a rescue, and a reward.

Steam tugs usually towed a sailing ship into position down-river. As tugs were not always available during these early days of steam, outgoing ships were sometimes steered by a practised pilot with a single-sail cutter in attendance. The pilot’s local knowledge of navigational hazards, tides, currents and winds and his regular practice in handling a ship were invaluable. During the short voyage down-river, the ship’s crew searched for stowaways. All legitimate passengers were mustered on deck during the search, while dubious bundles were poked with long, sharp sticks and suspect barrels were turned upside-down. Many a barrel or trunk concealed a body or two. Once discovered, the guilty stowaways were transferred to the tug and returned to shore where they would be tried before a magistrate. A lucky few survived the search and made their appearance two or three days later when the crew would be grateful as the successful stowaways worked their passage by doing the most unpleasant jobs on board.

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by | 10 August 2025 · 6:13 am

Voyage of the Perseverence, 1846

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 17-18, 34-35:

As Ireland’s capital city, Dublin was by far the biggest and busiest of all the ports around the Irish coast, and the passengers for one of the first voyages of the Famine period, directly to New York, boarded here on St Patrick’s Day in 1846. The sweet smell from the hatches of the Perseverance still hung in the air, for Demerara, the old Dutch colony in the West Indies, was her last port of call and sugar, rum and molasses had recently been unloaded.

…

The abundant Canadian forests had more than enough wood to equip the expanding fleets on either side of the ocean and timber was only a fraction of the price compared with Europe. So Martin and Sons despatched their senior captain, William Scott, to Saint John in New Brunswick, to build, buy and commission new ships to sail under their flag, to be registered in the port of Dublin.

A native of the Shetland Isles in the north of Scotland, Captain William Scott was a veteran of the Atlantic crossing. At around the time when most men would be thinking of retiring, he gave up his desk job and his home in Saint John and returned to his adopted city. When he took the Perseverance out of Dublin that day, he was an astonishing 74 years old.

For the first time Captain Scott’s barque of 597 tons was carrying passengers, the vanguard of a million Famine emigrants. He would cut short the farewells, scorning the quayside tears, anxious to get this strange cargo down below while he prepared his ship to catch the late afternoon tide the following day, on Wednesday, March 18th. The crew had cleared the holds, and ship’s carpenter James Gray had fitted out bunks four tiers high and 6 feet square. The fare in steerage was £3 (around US $15). In the cramped conditions for 210 passengers, pots and pans to cook their meagre rations were a priority, as were a tradesman’s tools to earn a living in America. The mate Shadrack Stone checked the passengers and their belongings as they stepped on board. Perhaps there was also room for a couple of fiddles, maybe a squeezebox or a set of Irish pipes.

…

In reasonable weather groups of 20 or 30 passengers at a time would be allowed on deck to breathe fresh air for a change, wash their clothing and clean themselves, and to cook whatever rations were still intact and fit to eat. In bad weather they would be forced to remain below, in complete darkness if the seas were really rough, the heaving waves bringing all kinds of discomfort as well as the inevitable seasickness for poor travellers. Most of the time they stayed on their bunks: despite the lack of space, it was usually more comfortable there than on deck.

…

The hearths were nothing more than rudimentary boxes lined with bricks, a crude form of barbecue. When the weather was rough, no fires would be allowed, but there would often be a period of calm at the end of the day, as dusk was settling on the ocean, when a few passengers would be allowed on deck to cook for their families and friends below. Then it would be the turn of the youngest apprentice seaman on board, Jack in the Shrouds as he was known, to clamber up the rigging carrying a jug of water to douse the flames. Many a protest was raised, but no argument was heeded.

The water ration was supposed to be 6 pints per person per day, to drink, wash and cook. If the journey lasted beyond the estimated period, passengers and crew alike went thirsty and dirty, and those on board could soon gauge if they were going to be on the sea for longer than expected when the daily water allocation was reduced. Head money covered the dues which might be payable by the captain at the port before any passengers were allowed to disembark.

During the six years of the Famine Emigration the Passengers’ Acts, which covered the provision of food, were changed, and different versions of these Acts were imposed by American and British governments. A glaring example of the contrast between the legislation of the two countries was in the number of passengers allowed on board. America decreed only two people be allowed for every 5 tons of the vessel’s registered tonnage, while in Britain, the allowance was three for every 5 tons. Thus, British ships could carry half as many passengers, again 300 instead of 200, as American ships of similar size. Not surprisingly, American ships were considered to be faster, safer, more comfortable, more modern, and sailed by more competent crews.

Rigid enforcement of the Acts was impossible. There were regularly too many passengers aboard too many ships and too few Customs and Immigration officers. These were hard times, desperate times: with so many ships carrying emigrants for only one voyage, the politicians in Washington and London could easily be ignored, and many a captain was guilty of failing to care properly for the people in his ship. Changes in the Passengers’ Acts were aimed at making ocean travel safer, for the protection of the passengers, but their effect was to drive up the fares, bringing despair to the impoverished people in Ireland.

In the first year of the Famine sailings the ships were supposed to provide each passenger, each week, with a total of 7lbs of bread, biscuit, flour, rice, oatmeal or potatoes. One pound of food a day was nothing more than an insurance against starvation: the passengers themselves were supposed to be responsible for anything else they required. Three years later, in 1849, the Acts were amended, decreeing that twice a week tea, sugar and molasses were to be given out. Ship owners were also directed to provide more space on board for each passenger. The new Act laid down a minimum of 12 square feet, so now the bunks were 6 feet long and 2 feet wide where previously they had been only 20 inches wide.

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