Western imperialism in Asia
The influence and imperialism of the West peaked in Asian territories from the colonial period beginning in the 16th century, and substantially reduced with 20th century decolonization. It originated in the 15th-century search for trade routes to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, in response to Ottoman control of the Silk Road. This led to the Age of Discovery, and introduction of early modern warfare into what Europeans first called the East Indies, and later the Far East. By the 16th century, the Age of Sail expanded European influence and development of the spice trade under colonialism. European-style colonial empires and imperialism operated in Asia throughout six centuries of colonialism, formally ending with the independence of Portuguese Macau in 1999. The empires introduced Western concepts of nation and the multinational state.
European political power, commerce, and culture in Asia gave rise to growing trade in commodities—a key development in the rise of the free market economy. In the 16th century, the Portuguese broke the monopoly of the Arabs and Italians in trade between Asia and Europe by its discovery of the sea route to India around the Cape of Good Hope. The ensuing rise of the rival Dutch East India Company gradually eclipsed Portuguese influence in Asia. Dutch forces first established independent bases in the East and between 1640-60 wrested Malacca, Ceylon, some southern Indian ports, and the lucrative Japan trade from the Portuguese. The English and French established settlements in India and trade with China and their acquisitions surpassed the Dutch. After the Seven Years' War in 1763, the British eliminated French influence in India and established the East India Company as the most important political force on the Indian subcontinent.
Before the 19th century Industrial Revolution, demand for oriental goods such as porcelain, silk, spices, and tea remained the driving force behind European imperialism. The European stake in Asia was confined largely to trading stations and outposts necessary to protect trade. Industrialization, however, dramatically increased European demand for Asian raw materials. The 1870s Long Depression provoked a scramble for new markets for Western European products and services in Africa, the Americas, Eastern Europe, and especially Asia. This coincided with an era known as "the New Imperialism", which saw a shift in focus from trade and indirect rule to colonial control of large overseas territories as political extensions of their mother countries. Between the 1870s and World War I in 1914, the UK, Netherlands and France—the established colonial powers in Asia—added to their empires in the Middle East, Indian Subcontinent, and Southeast Asia. The Empire of Japan following the Meiji Restoration; the German Empire after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871; Tsarist Russia; and the US following the Spanish–American War in 1898, emerged as new imperial powers in East Asia and the Pacific Ocean area.
In Asia, the World Wars were played out as struggles among imperial powers, with conflicts involving the European powers along with Russia and the rising American and Japanese. None of the colonial powers however, possessed the resources to withstand the strains of both wars and maintain their direct rule in Asia. Although nationalist movements throughout the colonial world led to the political independence of nearly all of Asia's remaining colonies, decolonization was intercepted by the Cold War. Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia remained embedded in a world economic, financial, and military system in which the great powers competed to extend their influence. However, the rapid post-war economic development and rise of the industrialized developed countries of Republic of China on Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Japan and the developing countries of India, China, along with the collapse of the Soviet Union, have greatly diminished European influence in Asia. The US remains influential with trade and military bases in Asia.
Early European exploration of Asia
European exploration of Asia started in ancient Roman times along the Silk Road. The Romans had knowledge of lands as distant as China. Trade with India through the Roman Egyptian Red Sea ports was significant in the first centuries of the Common Era.Medieval European exploration of Asia
In the 13th and 14th centuries, a number of Europeans, many of them Christian missionaries, had sought to penetrate into China. The most famous of these travelers was Marco Polo. But these journeys had little permanent effect on east–west trade because of a series of political developments in Asia in the last decades of the 14th century, which put an end to further European exploration of Asia. The Yuan dynasty in China, which had been receptive to European missionaries and merchants, was overthrown, and the new Ming rulers were found to be unreceptive of religious proselytism. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks consolidated control over the eastern Mediterranean, closing off key overland trade routes. Thus, until the 15th century, only minor trade and cultural exchanges between Europe and Asia continued at certain terminals controlled by Muslim traders.Oceanic voyages to Asia
Western European rulers determined to find new trade routes of their own. The Portuguese spearheaded the drive to find oceanic routes that would provide cheaper and easier access to South and East Asian goods. This chartering of oceanic routes between East and West began with the unprecedented voyages of Portuguese and Spanish sea captains. Their voyages were influenced by medieval European adventurers, who had journeyed overland to the Far East and contributed to geographical knowledge of parts of Asia upon their return.In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa under the sponsorship of Portugal's John II, from which point he noticed that the coast swung northeast. While Dias' crew forced him to turn back, by 1497, Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama made the first open voyage from Europe to India. In 1520, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator in the service of the Crown of Castile, found a sea route into the Pacific Ocean.
Portuguese and Spanish trade and colonization in Asia
Portuguese monopoly over trade in the Indian Ocean and Asia
In 1509, the Portuguese under Francisco de Almeida won the decisive battle of Diu against a joint Mamluk and Arab fleet sent to expel the Portuguese of the Arabian Sea. The victory enabled Portugal to implement its strategy of controlling the Indian Ocean.Early in the 16th century, Afonso de Albuquerque emerged as the Portuguese colonial viceroy most instrumental in consolidating Portugal's holdings in Africa and in Asia. He understood that Portugal could wrest commercial supremacy from the Arabs only by force, and therefore devised a plan to establish forts at strategic sites which would dominate the trade routes and also protect Portuguese interests on land. In 1510, he conquered Goa in India, which enabled him to gradually consolidate control of most of the commercial traffic between Europe and Asia, largely through trade; Europeans started to carry on trade from forts, acting as foreign merchants rather than as settlers. In contrast, early European expansion in the "West Indies", following the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus, involved heavy settlement in colonies that were treated as political extensions of the mother countries.
Lured by the potential of high profits from another expedition, the Portuguese established a permanent base in Cochin, south of the Indian trade port of Calicut in the early 16th century. In 1510, the Portuguese, led by Afonso de Albuquerque, seized Goa on the coast of India, which Portugal held until 1961, along with Diu and Daman. The Portuguese soon acquired a monopoly over trade in the Indian Ocean.
Portuguese viceroy Albuquerque resolved to consolidate Portuguese holdings in Africa and Asia, and secure control of trade with the East Indies and China. His first objective was Malacca, which controlled the narrow strait through which most Far Eastern trade moved. Captured in 1511, Malacca became the springboard for further eastward penetration, starting with the voyage of António de Abreu and Francisco Serrão in 1512, ordered by Albuquerque, to the Moluccas. Years later the first trading posts were established in the Moluccas, or "Spice Islands", which was the source for some of the world's most hotly demanded spices, and from there, in Makassar and some others, but smaller, in the Lesser Sunda Islands. By 1513–1516, the first Portuguese ships had reached Canton on the southern coasts of China.
File:Portuguese discoveries and explorationsV2en.png|thumb|upright=2.8|Portuguese expeditions 1415–1542: arrival places and dates; Portuguese spice trade routes in the Indian Ocean ; territories of the Portuguese empire under King John III rule
In 1513, after the failed attempt to conquer Aden, Albuquerque entered with an armada, for the first time for Europeans by the ocean via, on the Red Sea; and in 1515, Albuquerque consolidated the Portuguese hegemony in the Persian Gulf gates, already begun by him in 1507, with the domain of Muscat and Ormuz. Shortly after, other fortified bases and forts were annexed and built along the Gulf, and in 1521, through a military campaign, the Portuguese annexed Bahrain.
The Portuguese conquest of Malacca triggered the Malayan–Portuguese war. In 1521, Ming dynasty China defeated the Portuguese at the Battle of Tunmen and then defeated the Portuguese again at the Battle of Xicaowan. The Portuguese tried to establish trade with China by illegally smuggling with the pirates on the offshore islands off the coast of Zhejiang and Fujian, but they were driven away by the Ming navy in the 1530s-1540s.
In 1557, China decided to lease Macau to the Portuguese as a place where they could dry goods they transported on their ships, which they held until 1999. The Portuguese, based at Goa and Malacca, had now established a lucrative maritime empire in the Indian Ocean meant to monopolize the spice trade. The Portuguese also began a channel of trade with the Japanese, becoming the first recorded Westerners to have visited Japan. This contact introduced Christianity and firearms into Japan.
In 1505,, the Portuguese, through Lourenço de Almeida, the son of Francisco de Almeida, reached Ceylon. The Portuguese founded a fort at the city of Colombo in 1517 and gradually extended their control over the coastal areas and inland. In a series of military conflicts and political maneuvers, the Portuguese extended their control over the Sinhalese kingdoms, including Jaffna, Raigama, Sitawaka, and Kotte - However, the aim of unifying the entire island under Portuguese control faced the Kingdom of Kandy`s fierce resistance. The Portuguese, led by Pedro Lopes de Sousa, launched a full-scale military invasion of the kingdom of Kandy in the Campaign of Danture of 1594. The invasion was a disaster for the Portuguese, with their entire army wiped out by Kandyan guerrilla warfare. Constantino de Sá, romantically celebrated in the 17th century Sinhalese Epic led the last military operation that also ended in disaster. He died in the Battle of Randeniwela, refusing to abandon his troops in the face of total annihilation.
The energies of Castile, the other major colonial power of the 16th century, were largely concentrated on the Americas, not South and East Asia, but the Spanish did establish a footing in the Far East in the Philippines. After fighting with the Portuguese by the Spice Islands since 1522 and the agreement between the two powers in 1529, the Spanish, led by Miguel López de Legazpi, settled and conquered gradually the Philippines since 1564. After the discovery of the return voyage to the Americas by Andres de Urdaneta in 1565, cargoes of Chinese goods were transported from the Philippines to Mexico and from there to Spain. By this long route, Spain reaped some of the profits of Far Eastern commerce. Spanish officials converted the islands to Christianity and established some settlements, permanently establishing the Philippines as the area of East Asia most oriented toward the West in terms of culture and commerce. The Moro Muslims fought against the Spanish for over three centuries in the Spanish–Moro conflict.