11. Why was a Giraffe the Perfect Gift for the Chinese Emperor?
The Indian Ocean Trade and European Imperialism
On the east coast of Tanzania, south of Dar es Salaam, lies the tiny island of Kilwa Kisiwani. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries the port city of Kilwa was the centre of trade for the entire Swahili coast, integrated in a trading network that stretched as far as Arabia, India and even China. The inhabitants of this beautiful city were ethnically mixed – including Persians, Arabs and Bantu-speaking Africans – and, over time, they developed a distinctive East African culture and language – Swahili, which literally means ‘coast dwellers’. This cultural influence stretched all along the East African coast, from Inhambane and Sofala in the south (modern-day Mozambique) to Mombasa and Malindi (Kenya) and Mogadishu (Somalia) in the north.
The trade network along the East African coast had ancient roots. Some Chinese records suggest trade connections between Africans and Chinese as far back as the Han dynasty in China (206 BCE–220 CE). But much of our evidence come from archaeologists who have excavated and analysed glass beads along the East African coast.1 What their studies reveal is an intricate pattern of trade in places like Zanzibar dating back to between the eighth and tenth centuries. Two different types of networks seem to have existed. The first was trade with southern Africa (beads were found as far as Tsodilo Hills in modern-day Botswana), which seems to have been limited to the Persian Gulf, whereas in the second network, the East African cities of Zanzibar and Kilwa had direct connections with South Asia (India and Sri Lanka,) and perhaps even China.
We do know that a Chinese ship visited the Swahili coast in 1417. When Zhu Di became emperor in 1402, he announced that a new capital would be built in China, in Beijing. He appointed his favourite commander, Zheng He, to lead massive expeditions to all the known parts of the world, including Africa, and conduct tributary missions. On his fifth voyage Commander Zheng He arrived on the African coast to collect as many exotic goods as possible, including a giraffe. Why was he looking for a giraffe specifically?
A few years earlier the Chinese emperor had received a giraffe as a gift from the sultan of Bengal, who, in turn, had received it as a gift from an emissary of Malindi – in what looks like a medieval version of regifting! The giraffe caused a stir in China because it was thought to be similar to a mythical creature in Chinese folklore, a qilin, whose appearance was said to presage the imminent arrival of a great ruler. The arrival of a giraffe in China thus gave Emperor Zhu Di and his project of a new capital – with the Forbidden City at its centre – spiritual legitimacy.
The Chinese expansion and their trade voyages would not last long. China would turn inward, abandoning its foreign trade and refocusing its efforts on keeping the Mongols out of the new capital, Beijing, which was close to the Mongol border. These efforts would include building the Great Wall of China. While China was fighting the Mongols, a new oceanic power would soon arrive in the Indian Ocean, adding to the Chinese empire’s need for defence: Western Europeans in search of spices.
By the end of the fifteenth century European monarchs began to send expeditions west and south in search of new routes to the East Indies. Spices were in high demand across Western Europe because of its importance in food preparation and medicine. Silk was in high demand too and was often used in church ceremonies and decorations. These commodities traditionally followed an arduous overland trade route to Europe from the spice islands in present-day eastern Indonesia, where nutmeg, mace and cloves were exclusively found, or from China, where silk was produced. The Venetians had long held a monopoly in the Mediterranean silk and spice trade with the Byzantine Empire in the Middle East, with both the Venetians and the Byzantines imposing hefty trade tariffs and making these goods prohibitively expensive. This gave an incentive for competing Western European powers to find alternative routes.
Knowledge of a possible route around Africa reached the Portuguese, probably from the Chinese, who must have known about the southern tip of Africa. The prospect of sailing around Africa directly to the source of the spice trade was incredibly appealing and the reason that, by the early fifteenth century, the Age of European Discovery began with several exploratory voyages along the African coast. The young Prince Henry the Navigator could see the profit-making opportunities for Portugal, and generously supported these ventures. Although the Portuguese made many discoveries during his lifetime, including the Atlantic islands of Madeira and Azores, it was only after the death of Henry in 1460 that Portuguese navigators started making significant progress in their search for a sea route to the spice-producing regions in the East. In 1488 the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Storms, sailing as far as the Fish River before his crew forced him to turn back to Portugal. Ten years later, on 20 May 1498, Vasco da Gama finally reached Calicut in India, after stopping in Mozambique, Mombasa and Malindi on the East African coast. He returned to Lisbon on 10 July 1499, more than two years after departing. While the trip had come at a high cost – two ships were lost and more than half the crew had died – it showed that the spice trade around Africa could be a success. In the next century the Portuguese would continue their voyages into the Indian Ocean, establishing trading ports as far as Goa (in modern-day India), Malacca (Malaysia), Macau (China) and Nagasaki (Japan). Because of its convenient location on the east coast of Africa, Mozambique would later become a Portuguese colony.
The Portuguese voyages were quickly followed by those undertaken by other Western European countries. In the late sixteenth century the Dutch were at war with Spain. Because Portugal and Spain were allies, the Portuguese trade ships became an appropriate target for the Dutch navy – and, of course, the lucrative profits were attractive to Dutch merchants. But it was only with the establishment of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1602 that Dutch shipping traffic around the southern tip of Africa really took off. The VOC was a chartered company with a formal monopoly from the Dutch government over the lucrative Asia trade. The Dutch trade, and later that of the British and French, would ultimately supplant most of the Indian Ocean trade networks of the Portuguese.
The arrival of the VOC in the Indian Ocean also had repercussions for the the living standards of the local populations. Three economic historians collected more than 70,000 wages in Western India to investigate how Indians were affected by the presence of European merchant companies.2 Despite initial improvements, real wages seems to have declined on average: ‘The decline in volume of Portuguese maritime trade, quite visible since the first half of the seventeenth century … and the consequent decline in labor demand may explain why wages were not able to keep up with the cost of living.’3
More maritime competition also reduced the incredibly high profits enjoyed by those first voyages. Economic historian Jan de Vries explains why: ‘[The] European companies conducting trade with Asia via the Cape route faced a long-term deterioration of their profitability as trading operations. Their gross margins were under long-term pressure while transaction costs as a whole were stubbornly resistant to reduction.’4 These companies had two options. They could either increase profitability by reducing transaction costs or they could extract political rents. For most of the seventeenth century they followed the former strategy. They did this by expanding their intra-Asian trade and improving the efficiency of their ships. But once this trade was blocked (for example, when Japan barred trade or when war made trade voyages too expensive), the companies resorted to political rent extraction. By using their superior military power, they could gain direct control over Asian territories and force their new subjects to pay tolls and taxes. Although these types of income had never accounted for more than a small percentage of the VOC’s Asian revenue in the seventeenth century, it reached 44 per cent by the 1760s.
But conquering territory was a fatal strategy. Despite the VOC’s increased revenue from tolls and taxes, the costs of protecting and administering the territories were always greater. Although the British East India Company did slightly better from these revenue streams – notably because of the capture, in 1757 at the Battle of Plassey, of the lucrative Indian market and the Chinese opium trade – it would also come under frequent financial strain, and the company was dissolved by the mid-nineteenth century.5
What is clear is that, as de Vries notes, these trading companies ‘were transformed into colonial rulers and/or replaced by their national states. What began as an age of globalisation – soft and limited, but real – ended as an age of colonialism, something completely different.’6 The reason for this was the economic and political institutions of the time. Because they were national monopolies, the trading companies could count on the financial and military support of their national governments. Whereas a free market would have encouraged innovation, rent seeking was the preferred choice for these monopolistic merchant companies.
This change in strategy not only reduced the profits of the European shareholders , it had devastating consequences for the millions of people in the newly conquered African and Asian territories. The European companies became colonial rulers. The Portuguese acquired Mozambique and Angola, the Dutch Indonesia and the English India. In many places, European traders displaced the local traders and rulers. In Western India, for example, newly transcribed wage series from 1500 to 1650 show a general decline in living standards already after the arrival of Vasco da Gama.
The decline happened on the East African Swahili coast too. By the nineteenth century, after several invasions and occupation by the French, Kilwa Kisiwani was abandoned. There is little that remains today of this once majestic trade city. The story of Kilwa provides an early lesson in how monopoly companies can shape government policies to the detriment of ordinary consumers.
E. Pollard and O. C. Kinyera, The Swahili coast and the Indian Ocean trade patterns in the 7th–10th centuries CE, Journal of Southern African Studies, 43 (5), 2017, 927–947.↩︎
Carvalhal, Helder, Jan Lucassen, and Pim De Zwart. "After da Gama: real wages in Western India, c. 1500–c. 1650." European Review of Economic History (2023).↩︎
Ibid., p. 20.↩︎
J. de Vries, The limits of globalization in the early modern world, Economic History Review, 63 (3), 2010, 710–33, at 726.↩︎
S. Hejeebu, The colonial transition and the decline of the East India Company, c.1746–1784, in A New Economic History of Colonial India, edited by Latika Chaudhary, Bishnupriya Gupta, Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy (London: Routledge, 2015), 33–51.↩︎
De Vries, The limits of globalization in the early modern world, 731.↩︎