Category Archives: military

by Joel | 13 September 2025 · 7:20 am

Afonso de Albuquerque vs. Ormuz

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle p. 173:

That Albuquerque possessed an intemperate streak was becoming increasingly apparent, not just to the hapless Omanis but also to his own captains. It was usual for the captain-major to consult with his ship commanders and, often, to be subject to a vote of the whole group. Albuquerque, intelligent, impatient, and possessed of an unshakable belief in his own abilities, had no such tact or cooperative spirit. The captains had been nominally informed at the start of the Omani expedition, but as the weeks wore on the relationship became strained. By mid-September they were inside the mouth of the Persian Gulf, increasingly distant from the key task to which they had been assigned: blocking the mouth of the Red Sea. The drive up the Arabian coast had one clear destination in Albuquerque’s mind: the island city of Ormuz, a small nugget of parched rock anchored offshore that was the axis of all Gulf traffic between Persia and the Indian Ocean. It was an immensely wealthy trading place—the great Arab traveler Ibn Battuta had found it “a fine large city with magnificent bazaars” and tall handsome houses. When the Chinese star fleet had called, they’d declared “the people of the country…very rich….There are no poor families.” It controlled the famed pearl fisheries of the Persian Gulf and dispatched large numbers of Arabian horses to meet an insatiable demand among the warring empires of continental India. “If the world were a ring, then Ormuz would be the jewel in it,” ran the Persian proverb. Albuquerque was well aware of the city’s reputation and strategic worth.

Aggressive action against Ormuz seems to have formed no part of his instructions from King Manuel to “establish treaties.” The harbor was thronged with merchant ships when Albuquerque arrived, but he proceeded in customary style. He refused all gifts from the king’s messengers; his reply was simple: become vassals of the Portuguese crown or see your city destroyed. The chief vizier, Hwaga Ata, concluded that Albuquerque, with just six ships, was a seriously deluded man, but on the morning of September 27, 1507, in a hubbub of noise, Portuguese bronze cannons again outgunned a far larger Muslim fleet. The vizier quickly sued for peace, accepted Manuel as his lord, and agreed to payment of a hefty annual tribute.

Albuquerque saw the hand of the Christian God at work in the victory.

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Filed under Arabia, economics, Iran, migration, military, nationalism, Portugal, religion, war

by Joel | 7 September 2025 · 1:02 am

Korean POWs in Hawaiʻi, 1940s

From Most Prisoners In Hawaiʻi’s WWII Internment Camp Were Korean, by Kirsten Downey (Honolulu: Civil Beat, 5 September 2025). While hundreds of Japanese-Americans were the first held at Honouliuli, many more Koreans followed:

The Honouliuli internment camp in central O’ahu is best known in Hawaiʻi as the place some 400 Japanese Americans were detained during World War II.

But new research is bringing to light the fact that Koreans were the largest single population group there.

In fact, there were seven times as many Koreans held there as Japanese Americans. Of the 4,000 people held, about 2,700 were Korean, captured elsewhere and brought to Hawaiʻi, and about 400 were Japanese Americans who had been living and working in Hawaiʻi when the war broke out.

The Koreans were prisoners of war who fell into American hands as U.S. forces made their way across Oceania fighting Japanese imperial forces, who had seized lands all across the Pacific, including in China, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and French Indochina (now Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), Guam, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Most of the Koreans were in fact doubly prisoners: The Japanese, who had invaded and conquered Korea in the early 1900s, had conscripted many of them against their will. Dragooned by the Japanese, they then ended up American prisoners when the Japanese garrisons fell.

The little-known fact that Koreans made up the lion’s share of residents at the internment camp is becoming the focus of new academic scrutiny and discussion.

Korean Prisoners Identified

Last year, researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi’s Center for Oral History began a new collaboration with the National Park Service to collect accounts from the Korean or Korean American descendants of people who were detained at the camp or who worked there to incorporate this new information into current understanding and historical interpretation.

This work builds on the scholarship of Duk Hee Lee Murabayashi, president of the Korean Immigration Research Institute in Hawaiʻi, and Professor Yong-ho Ch’oe, who taught Korean history at the University of Hawaiʻi and was the author of a book about Korean immigration to Hawaiʻi called “From the Land of Hibiscus: Koreans in Hawai‘i, 1903–1950.” Ch’oe died last year.

Murabayashi has identified the 2,700 Koreans held at Honouliuli, providing their names and home locations, which is helping people identify their deceased relatives.

…

‘A Complete Shock’

The fact that so many Koreans were present in the camp during World War II has come as a surprise even to the Korean community.

“Until a few months ago, I certainly did not know about Koreans who, during World War II, ended up as prisoners of war right here in Hawaiʻi at Honouliuli Internment Camp,” said David Suh, president of the United Korean Association of Hawaiʻi, at a recent talk hosted by the park.

“It came to me as a complete shock,” said Edward Shultz, former director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi and the immediate past president of the Korean American Foundation.

…

As the war progressed and American forces began advancing on Japanese-controlled strongholds, they took a number of Koreans into custody as prisoners of war, bringing them to the internment camp at Honouliuli. According to the National Park Service, hundreds arrived after each battle in the Pacific, including from Guam, Peleliu, Tinian and Palau, sometimes intermingled with Japanese prisoners.

Following the 1944 battle in Saipan, the NPS reported, about 350 Koreans arrived, all noncombatants, many with bullet and slash wounds. The bullet wounds came from the American troops, but the Koreans also appeared to have been victims of sword attacks by Japanese, suggesting they suffered systematic abuse.

Relations between the Koreans and the Japanese Americans at the camp became at times so strained that they had to be kept separate from each other, said Professor Alan Rosenfeld, the associate vice president of academic programs and policy at the University of Hawaiʻi, who has spent years studying Honouliuli.

“There are archival incidents of Koreans and Japanese fighting,” said Mary Kunmi Yu Danico, director of the University of Hawaiʻi’s Center for Oral History, who is leading the project to gather oral histories of the descendants of people who lived or worked at the camp.

…

Word began to seep out in Hawaiʻi that Koreans were there, probably because the American military hired some local Korean Americans to serve as translators and guards at the camp.

The first published report that Koreans were living at Honouliuli came in the pages of the Methodist Church bulletin in 1944, according to Murayabushi [Murabayashi!]. Church leaders had apparently been told that many Korean men in their 20s and 30s were being held there, and that they were bored and lonely. The first notice about their existence came when the church asked if anyone had spare musical instruments they would be willing to donate so the men could entertain themselves.

Later, church leaders began organizing an outreach to them, delivering Christmas gifts and arranging to loan them books.

That means there may be people living in Hawaiʻi today who recall those years and those interactions. Murayabushi [Murabayashi!], Danico and Ogura are asking people to come forward to share those memories.

For an earlier blogpost about Korean POWs in WW2, see Koreans, Taiwanese, and Okinawans Among Japanese POWs. See also Origins of Korean POWs in Hawaii, excerpted from an article by the late Yong-ho Ch’oe, mentioned above. Prof. Ch’oe was a fine scholar and a kind gentleman.

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Filed under Hawai'i, Japan, Korea, labor, language, migration, military, nationalism, U.S., war

by Joel | 6 September 2025 · 1:31 am

Bolívar Recalibrates National Identity

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 203-205:

By 1819 Bolívar delivered the justly famous Angostura speech to the second Venezuelan Congress. What he said then laid out a plan based on Boves’ insight into colonial society. For years, the Angostura text has been read as an example of a centralizing Bolívar advocating for a strong state that accommodates patrician institutions like a hereditary House of Lords. The most radical aspect of the speech is seldom mentioned.

Going well beyond what he had written in the Cartagena Manifesto, Bolívar seeks to explain the fragmentation and hatred within the colonial territories. Many decades before Vallenilla Lanz and Uslar Pietri had articulated the fracture at the country’s heart, he already speaks of a society on the verge of falling apart: “The diversity of origin requires an infinitely firm grip, an infinitely delicate tact to manage this heterogenous society whose complicated artifice can be dislocated, divided, and dissolved with the slightest altercation.”

The key phrase is “diversity of origin,” which acknowledged at the very beginning of the 1800s that Venezuela was, at its core, a multi-ethnic and multi-racial society. The explanation goes into considerable detail,

“We must be aware that our people are not Europeans, or North Americans: they’re a composite of Africa and the Americas rather than a product of Europe; even Spain itself is no longer European due to its African blood, its institutions and its character. It is impossible to properly decide to which human family we belong. The largest part of the indigenous population has been annihilated, the European has mixed with those of the Americas and those of Africa, and they have mixed with Indians and with Europeans …”

No one had ever described the facts and uncertainties of ethnic and racial differences in this way. Boves’ de facto solution had been to promote the extermination of all whites. Creole society’s program sought to reenact the colonial caste system. Many ignored the issue and pretended it was not relevant. As the years went by and a battery of constitutions dismantled the caste system’s nominal rules, and later, slavery, most of the country’s intellectual establishment chose to ignore the subject.

The speech’s enduring passage defines the conundrum faced by countries in the Caribbean basin: “our parents, different in origin and blood, are foreigners, and all have visibly different skin: the dissimilarity brings a challenge of the highest order.” In the context of his time, and that of many decades after him, Bolívar proposes a radical solution: “The blood of our fellow citizens is different. Let’s mix it in order to unify it …”

The speech promotes a mixed-race country with a historical dimension and a spiritual path. Boves’ men had lived their day-to-day in a new kind of army: multi-ethnic, horizontal, and devoid of rankings based on skin color or national origin. This had been a revolutionary social experiment. Bolívar wanted a society based on that model and included his ethnic group in the mix.

While the concept of nation proposed at Angostura had nothing to do with the Creole ideals of the older Cartagena Manifesto, Bolívar continued to advocate for a powerful ruler and a centralizing seat of power.

The speech summarizes the late Bolívar’s prescription for the country: fuse all nations and races and ethnicities into a new brown Venezuelan identity and superimpose a powerful central state to combat factionalism and special interests.

Although this was never clearly stated, one hundred years later Rómulo Betancourt founded his political project upon those ideas. Acción Democrática would create a vast and centralized welfare state unimaginable to Bolívar in its scope, reach, and sheer power. And the party and its leaders would work tirelessly to create one nation around the idea of Juan Bimba, a racially mixed John Doe that stood for the average (and ideal) Venezuelan.

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Filed under Africa, democracy, migration, military, nationalism, Spain, Venezuela, war

by Joel | 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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Filed under economics, education, energy, industry, Mexico, military, philosophy, Venezuela

by Joel | 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 Joel | 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 Joel | 31 August 2025 · 1:14 am

Two Novels of Venezuela

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 46-47:

Two novels describe the crux between the past and the imaginary future proposed by Betancourt: Las Lanzas Coloradas (The Red Spears) by Arturo Uslar Pietri, and Doña Barbara, by Rómulo Gallegos. The novels were published in 1931 and 1929, respectively, and both seek nothing less than to explain the country and its prospects. Naturally, both stage their dramas in the countryside.

Uslar Pietri’s Las Lanzas Coloradas tells the story of a slave plantation owned by the descendants of the original Spanish founders at the time of the Wars of Independence. Doña Barbara takes place at a cattle ranch worked by free peons rather than slaves. Gallegos’ Doña Barbara is the story of a college graduate who returns to modernize his father’s land only to find himself opposed by a vicious, uneducated woman with near-magical powers. Barbara, standing in for the country’s dark past, will stop at nothing to derail the civilizing ideals of the protagonist, whose name is Santo, Spanish for Saint. The widely popular soap opera plot in Gallego’s novel ends, predictably, with the triumph of noble civilization over barbarism.

Uslar Pietri’s novel, on the other hand, ends with the Creole family’s plantation burned and reduced to ashes, the last female descendant of the founder graphically raped and murdered by the Pardo foreman, and the white male heir half-crazed and wandering through the countryside. …

The young Uslar Pietri was the last writer of a generation obsessed with the country’s ethnic divides, the savagery of the 19th-century wars, and what some have called the pessimistic view of Venezuelan history. Las Lanzas Coloradas is packed with impressionistic descriptions of the brutality of life for enslaved workers at the plantation, the psychological effects of human submission, and the fury mixed-race Pardos felt toward their Creole masters. Uslar Pietri’s novel also offers an alternative and radical view of the independence wars’ early years.

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Filed under democracy, labor, literature, military, nationalism, religion, slavery, Venezuela

by Joel | 28 August 2025 · 12:25 am

Venezuela’s Civil War of Independence

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 21-23:

Venezuelan children of the Concorde generation were taught a particular story of Venezuelan independence. It all started, according to the narrative, in a sleepy colonial outpost known as the Royal Captaincy General of Venezuela that was peacefully plodding along at the end of the 1700s. By 1808 Napoleon had invaded Spain, imprisoned the King, and imposed a puppet government over the empire in the Americas. Venezuelan Creoles, using the Cabildo de Caracas, seized the opportunity in 1810 to break away from a now-illegitimate monarchy, proclaimed sovereignty, wrote brilliant declarations, and led the first independence armies.

Yet, the Creole independent forces were, to their surprise, systematically defeated between 1810 and 1817. They seized Caracas twice, and declared and established independent Republics both times, only to be crushed. Their most famous representative and eventual leader, Simón Bolívar, commanded the country’s most important garrison during the first uprising, only to end up in exile in Cartagena. Years later he led the failed Second Republic before fleeing again.

What the elementary school stories never mention is that with the Spanish King imprisoned, and nearly every Spanish soldier on the planet fighting the French on Iberian soil, the so-called “royal” soldiers defeating the First and the Second Republics were mostly locals. The conflict was never one between newly self-conscious Venezuelans and royal Spaniards, but rather one between castes. The war of the First Republic was one of Pardos against Creole-led armies. Those of mixed-race felt no allegiance to the King, had no interest in the monarchy, and did not feel Spanish in any way. They flew the King’s standards, but they were fighting against Creole rule.

…

Pardos, free Africans, mutinous slaves, and many others of indigenous descent, destroyed Creole-led pro-independence governments twice in four long years. They battled Creole-led armies that sought to preserve the caste system and slavery in a newly independent republic. As the third chapter of this book chronicles in detail, the social and military dynamics had changed by 1816. Still, the first half of the independence wars remains critical to understanding what happened by the 1820s.

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by Joel | 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 Joel | 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.