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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association
Over three centuries, from the early seventeenth until well into the twentieth, English and later British people saw themselves as united with the Portuguese in a common enterprise in Asia, but also sought to distance themselves from the Portuguese and to assert what they saw as a superiority over them. The British, as AbdoolKarim Vakil has authoritatively demonstrated, sought to appropriate the Portuguese, but they also rejected their example. (1) The common enterprise on which British people believed that they were embarked with the Portuguese was the exercise of dominion in Asia. Different phases of British India are reflected in different British interpretations of the role of the Portuguese in Asia. Only when their own empire in India was manifestly weakening did it cease to exercise a dominating influence on how the British wrote about the history of the Portuguese.
Denis Hay's Europe--the Emergence of an Idea long ago described how medieval Europe defined its sense of its own collective identity and of its difference from what it saw as a collective Asia. (2) Europeans increasingly came to pride themselves that not only were they preserving the Christian truth that had been submerged in Asia with the rise of Islam, but that they were also the guardians of ancient learning that had also perished there and were indeed improving on it in certain respects. From the sixteenth century until well into the twentieth century, progress in the art of navigation was recognized as a pre-eminent improvement brought about exclusively by Europeans and one that symbolized the difference between an enlightened Europe and a backward Asia or other parts of the world. As Samuel Purchas put it at the beginning of his compilation of travel accounts that he called his Pilgrimes of 1625:
And our Age which God hath blessed beyond many former, produced as Twinnes Navigation and Learning, which had beene buried together in the same grave with the Roman Greatness, and now are as it were raysed again from the dead. Hence it is that barbarous Empires have never grown to such glory, though of more giant-like stature, and larger Land- extension, because Learning had not fitted them for the Sea attempts, nor Wisdome furnished them with Navigation. Thus the Persian, the Mogoll, the Abassine, the Chinois, the Tartarian, the Turke, are called Great. [...] But as God gives huge strength and vast bodies to beasts, yet makes Man by art and reason secure from them, if not wholly their Masters; so as to the good of Christendome, hath he denied Learning to those Barbarians, and skill or care of remote Navigations [...] [T]he Portugals before, the English since hath put a bridle into the mouth of the Ottoman Horse, and shewed how easie it is to intercept his maritime incomes. (3)
Purchas claimed Prince Henry, evidently not formally anglicized as 'the Navigator' in English until R. H. Major's book of 1868, (4) as 'the true foundation of the greatness, not of Portugall alone, but of the whole Christian world, in Marine Affaires and especially of these Heroick endevours of the English (whose flesh and blood he was)' through his mother. (5) Purchas also acclaimed the first wave of Portuguese conquests as demonstrating Europe's power in Asia:
What reputation of courage, what increase of state did the Portugals hereby attaine in Africa and Asia? cooping up the Natives within their shoars, possessing themselves of divers petty Kingdomes, enriching themselves with the richest Trade of the World. (6)
Admiration for the early Portuguese, especially for Vasco da Gama and Albuquerque, as the first standard bearers of Europe in Asia was to be repeated by British writers until far into the twentieth century. In 1898 British societies concerned with Asia and with exploration joined with the Portuguese in commemorating Vasco da Gama after the four hundred years. For the British he was 'the man who gave India to Europe...
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