Roger Crowley

It was kind of a trading commonwealth, and it was said the sea is held in common.

This is the Sea of Sindbad, with a tremendously rich cultural life going on, people being swept back and forth across from Africa to India and back again by the monsoon.

The Portuguese, their aim is to really control, rather ambitiously,

The Indian Ocean, 28 million square miles of ocean or something like that, they are the only people in the Indian Ocean who have cannons, and therefore they introduce a high level of violence.

They very quickly try to create monopoly trading to drive out the Islamic merchants, which leads to quite high levels of violence along the coast of India.

Their ambitions are huge.

They develop almost like a proto-model of the kind of small seafaring state maritime empire, which is they ring the Indian Ocean in forts, key strategic places on the coast of India, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, Aden, Zanzibar, along the Swahili coast.

There are never very many of them, never more than about 2,000 Portuguese sailors

in the Indian Ocean in the early period of the 16th century, but they worked out that you could more or less control trade if you controlled the hubs.

The guy who worked this out was a very bright nobleman called Alfonso de Albuquerque, who worked out that we don't need to have boots on the ground because there aren't very many of us, but if we build fortified encampments at critical nodal points, we can control the trade.

That was what they were hell-bent on doing.

and driving Islam out of the sea and making it effectively a Portuguese monopoly.

Malacca is one of those critical trading hubs in the whole network of Indian Ocean trade and spice trade.

It's the gateway to

the Malay archipelago, Sumatra, Java, the Philippines, where the most valuable spices came from, cloves and nutmeg.

And Malacca is one of those key trading points to which Islamic merchants came and merchants from further east came to buy and sell spices, and particularly these two very rare and highly prized spices, nutmeg and cloves.

Yes.

The islands of the Malay archipelago were kind of a laboratory of evolution.

And

The 19th century biologist Alfred Wallace more or less worked out the theory of evolution simultaneously with Darwin there.