PÊRO VAZ DE SIQUEIRA, MERCADOR E ARMADOR NOS MARES DO SUL DA CHINAPêro Vaz de Siqueira : 南中國海的商人和船主
This case study analyzes Pêro Vaz de Siqueira, merchant and shipowner, as an example of European agency in the South China Sea, situated within the Macau–China–Japan–Southeast Asia axis. The central hypothesis is that Siqueira's career demonstrates how, under the Iberian Union, Portuguese merchants...
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| Published in: | Review of Culture |
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| Format: | Articles |
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Instituto Cultural de Macau
July 2004
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| Online Access: | https://www.icm.gov.mo/rc/viewer/pdfViewerParts/40011/3845 |
| Summary: | This case study analyzes Pêro Vaz de Siqueira, merchant and shipowner, as an example of European agency in the South China Sea, situated within the Macau–China–Japan–Southeast Asia axis. The central hypothesis is that Siqueira's career demonstrates how, under the Iberian Union, Portuguese merchants mobilized entrepôt networks, navigation, and credit to maintain the flow of goods between Japan, China, and the markets of Southeast Asia, even in the face of shifting power dynamics and Dutch competition. Drawing on Portuguese archival sources and specialized literature, the article reconstructs trajectories, routes, and commodity flows (silver, silk, gold, sandalwood, spices), as well as the risks (storms, persecutions) that marked the voyages. In particular, the text emphasizes the role of Macau as the gateway for merchants to Japan and China, the commercial intermediation that intensified after the prohibition of direct contact with the Japanese, and the circumvention of Padroado policy. The closure of trade with Japan in 1639 and the rise of the Dutch are presented as critical junctures that forced the reconfiguration of routes (Makassar–Flores–Solor–Timor) and the maintenance of mercantile dynamism. It is concluded that figures such as Siqueira embody the complex alliance between maritime economy and missionary action in the Portuguese macro-Asian space up to the seventeenth century. |
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| ISSN: | 1682-1106 |