Scattered as it was over thousands of miles of African and Asian coastline, the Portuguese empire in the East had a peculiar shape when compared to the Spanish one in the New World. As one author of the early seventeenth century put it, ‘the king our lord does not have more than twenty leagues of land in all Asia, from Macao to the Cape of Good Hope’. Portugal was a small country with a population of one and a half million people, and it is no surprise that the Portuguese presence in Asia - a ‘network’ rather than an ‘empire’, as some authors claim - had to rely heavily on diplomacy. The wholesale ‘conquest’ (conquista) of the East was perceived as a theoretical right of the Portuguese crown, but in practice most relations with Eastern polities rested on a complex set of negotiated links of ‘friendship’ (amizade) or indirect submission (uassalagem).

During a parliamentary debate in April 1874, the Dutch conservative politician Nierstrasz made this provocative statement on the war in Aceh. He was supported by the former conservative Minister of Foreign Affairs, Van Zuylen van Nijevelt, who dismissed the negotiations held with Aceh on the basis of a strict ultimatum condescendingly as ‘negotiations à la Bismarck’, and unworthy of a Dutch statesman. Nierstrasz maintained the Dutch were pursuing a ‘utilitarian’ policy in Aceh which they would abominate seeing implemented on themselves in Europe. The Aceh War was a disgrace to a Christian nation. Furthermore, the moral issue put forward by the Dutch authorities: that the state of Aceh was guilty of piracy and slavery, was no more than a pretext.

Western expansion in Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth century resulted in two different groups of Asian countries: those which fell victim to European colonialism and those which managed to maintain the basis of their sovereign rights. This contribution will concentrate on the second group, including not only the countries of the so-called Far East but those of the Middle Eastern Ottoman Empire as well. The link between these two otherwise separate worlds is the concept of consular jurisdiction. It originated in the Islamic world and was transplanted by the West to China, Japan and Siam in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth, it became the touchstone in the relations of the Asian countries with the West in their struggle for equality.

Even after the passing of the ‘Free Trade’ acts in Europe and America between 1765 and 1803, colonisation still meant trade for European mercantile and maritime powers which were beginning to think of themselves as liberal in the politico-economic sense. As before, the only suitable way of obtaining profits appeared to be economic exploitation, albeit within a politico-institutional structure. This ideal had inspired the inflexible system that had dominated the relations of both Spain and Portugal with their respective transatlantic colonies. Likewise, ever since their first incursions into the New World, northern Europeans had encouraged the creation of commercial companies dedicated to monopolising any of the goods that colonies might possibly have to offer. Dutch, English and French merchants developed farreaching private and state programmes designed to direct trade and colonisation and to encourage the populating of the new lands. During the seventeenth century, some of these companies achieved considerable success. They were able to settle, with or without permission from the Spanish monarchy, in territories formally under Spanish control, such as Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, coastal Venezuela or Guiana, regarded as areas eminently suited to business projects.