The “Shadow Empire” of Goa in the Bay of Bengal

Abstract

When it came to innovating ad hoc imperial structures in what the late John H. Parry called ‘The Age of Reconnaissance’, no European power could hold a candle to Portugal. It had one arrangement for the Atlantic islands, a modification of this pattern for Brazil; then it had another scheme for the African west coast and a different one for the Estado da India Oriental (which included the African east coast). Finally, as is known well enough, its relations with Macao and the Portuguese stations in Japan were again unique. Thus it was not particularly surprising to me when I discovered recently that besides all these, there was still another variant which nobody appears to have realized, one which fell somewhere between semi-rule and no rule at all. This was in the Bay of Bengal, and I only became aware of its special nature three years ago when I read of runaway soldados from Goa escaping to that region in the Reformação da Milicia e Governo da India of Francisco Rodrigues da Sil-veira. Later I visited Mylapore and became interested in the Indian east coast. Slowly, I began piecing the remarkable story together of how the entire bay area must be classified as a separate Portuguese colonial genus.