West. As the Portuguese traveler Tomé Pires put it in
1515: “The trade and commerce between the different
nations for a thousand leagues on every hand must come to
Melaka … Whoever is lord of Melaka has his hands at the
throat of Venice.”
With Melaka in their hands, the Portuguese
systematically tried to gain a monopoly of the valuable
spice trade. They failed.
The opponents they faced were not negligible. Between
the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was a great
deal of economic development in Southeast Asia based on
trade in spices. City-states such as Aceh, Banten, Melaka,
Makassar, Pegu, and Brunei expanded rapidly, producing
and exporting spices along with other products such as
hardwoods.
These states had absolutist forms of government similar
to those in Europe in the same period. The development of