Piracy, the Military Revolution, and the Transformation of Ottoman Ship-Building Technology in the Early Modern Indian Ocean

In the historiography of the early modern Indian Ocean, the importance of tall-sided sailing ships for the establishment of European hegemony at sea has long been considered axiomatic.  According to the most widely accepted view, Europeans (Portuguese in the 16^th century, followed by British, Dutch and French in the 17^th and 18^th) were able to force their way into the maritime economy of the region not because of lower costs or superior organization, but primarily because their tall-sided ships, mounted with firearms, were militarily superior to both the indigenous sail-powered merchant vessels of the Indian Ocean (dhows) and traditional oar-powered war-ships (galleys).  As such, the only non-Western powers considered capable of successfully competing against Europeans were those, such as Oman, who were willing to abandoned their own ship-building traditions and managed to directly emulate European technology (either by stealing it or copying it).

            This paper will seek to challenge this historiographical consensus, through a discussion of the ship-building techniques employed by Ottoman corsairs of the Arabian Sea and western Indian Ocean during the second half of the 16^th century.  Contrary to expectations, an examination of surviving Portuguese and Ottoman archival records from the period demonstrate that the Ottomans in fact introduced European-style sailing ships during their first decades of expansion in the Indian Ocean, but gradually abandoned them in favor of small, fast and lightly armed oar-powered galleys.  Moreover, these traditional galley-style vessels eventually proved so effective in encounters with the Portuguese that, by century’s end, the Portuguese themselves began to give up their own reliance on sailing ships in favour of oar-powered vessels similar to those used by the Ottomans.