Escaping from the Littoral Reality
The Portuguese were the major maritime superpower of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their exploration of Southern and Eastern Asia opened up entirely new realities for Western Europe and the trade routes they established became massive sources of wealth for the Western world. Because of their maritime focus on trade routes and port cities for strategic purposes, the Portuguese view of Asia was biased primarily toward the shorelines. This littoral reality theory is encompassed very well by Ataide and Teixeira’s 1630 map. The empty space inside of the shores was filled with the names of ports, left blank, or filled with insignificant aesthetics like rolling hills or trees.
This littoral reality is seen in individual maps of the cities of Goa and Mumbai, but it is also seen most clearly in another Portuguese map of Asia from 1550. In this map, though less detailed than our map from Ataide and Teixeira, we see again particular attention paid to shore lines. In India we see no trace of the Ganges or the Himalayas. In the empty spaces of this map, rather than being filled with names and paintings, flags and crests were painted to fill up the map. Granted, this map is eighty years older than Ataide and Teixeira’s and so has less spatial data to include than the younger map, but regardless the concept of a littoral reality still holds here.
Though they were the dominant maritime power early on, the Portuguese ultimately lost control of many of their colonies and lost much of their influence in Asia to the British (1). Mumbai stands as a good example, as it was originally ruled by the Portuguese before being given to the British as part of a dowry (1). When the average person thinks of Mumbai or Bombay, they generally think of the British influences on the city before they consider the Portuguese influences.
Looking at the matter completely detached from the troubles of colonialism, the reason that the British were able to really leave an indelible mark on the city of Mumbai and on the subcontinent of India in general is because they escaped from the littoral reality of the Portuguese and explored the vast and powerful interiors of the nations that they arrived in. Though the coasts were obviously most economically valuable for use as ports and for trade, the British transported their influence and culture inward and learned more about the countries that they colonized. By escaping from the Portuguese littoral reality and focusing on the huge empty spaces that we saw in Ataide and Teixeira’s map, the British were able to much more effectively colonize and maintain control over India and Southeast Asia.