The Struggle over Hormuz

It’s a new series! For the next few weeks, we’re going to be looking at the history of chokepoints — those accidents of geography that have exerted a disproportionate influence on the course of global history and economics. It will not surprise you that the back-and-forth-and-back-again over the Strait of Hormuz gave me the idea for this series, so we’ll start there!

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For more than 1,000 years, the Indian Ocean had been at the center of the world’s most lucrative trade network. A vast basin linking Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and China, it was a decentralized zone of exchange. The rim of the basin was studded with port cities where local rulers grew rich from customs revenue paid by cosmopolitan traders. This description of an Indian city gives a sense of the density of the trade network:

Cambay chiefly stretches out two arms, with her right arm she reaches out towards Aden and with the other towards Malacca, as the most important places to sail to... They sail many ships to all parts, to Aden, Ormuz, the kingdom of the Deccan, Goa, Bhatkal, all over Malabar, Ceylon, Bengal, Pegu, Siam, Pedir, Pase and Malacca, where they take quantities of merchandise, bringing other kinds back, thus making Cambay rich and important.

Trade in the Indian Ocean was not always peaceful, but it was generally stable. Most of its participants understood that more trade meant more money, and that no one owned the ocean.

Then Afonso de Albuquerque showed up.

The inscription around Albuquerque’s head in the image above gives us a sense of how he approached the Indian Ocean:

Twice he seized the city of Goa and Malacca and Hormuz, and he also built the Fortress of Calicut, went to Persia and the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.

Albuquerque, who followed the first Portuguese expeditions to the Indian Ocean in the early 1500s, was the primary architect of a new system there: one in which the Portuguese would dominate shipping lanes by building a network of fortified nodes around the basin. He systematically conquered trade ports and strategic passages. To trade in the Indian Ocean, ships would have to purchase a cartaz, a pass, from the Portuguese. The system was enforced by violence: ships without a cartaz would be sunk by Portuguese armadas patrolling the ocean. Albuquerque wrote to his king that “This use of terror will bring great things to your obedience without the need to conquer them.”

No one transformed the Indian Ocean more completely than Albuquerque, who made it his life’s goal to control both the sources of valuable trade goods and the key chokepoints through which they moved. In the east, he targeted the Strait of Malacca, which we’ll talk about in a future post. In the west, he saw only one logical target: the Strait of Hormuz.

Thirty-five million years ago, the Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates began to collide with one another; the violence pushed the Zagros Mountains of Iran toward the sky and sank a depression that became the Persian Gulf. A passage, only 30 miles wide, threaded through the upthrust rock on either side, connecting the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world.

As we can see in this 17th-century French map, the strait is bounded on the north by Persia and on the south by the Arabian Peninsula. Several islands can exert influence over the strait, including the island of Hormuz (often spelled Ormuz or Ormus, as you can see here):

Before Albuquerque showed up, Hormuz Island and some of the lands around it were under the control of a Kingdom of Hormuz, which became widely known for its wealth and importance to trade. It was one of those local kingdoms that controlled one node in the larger Indian Ocean trade network before the Portuguese showed up. Some of the world’s most valuable commodities flowed through the strait: warhorses bound for India, pearls from the Persian Gulf, spices from southeast Asia, ivory from Africa. Arab traders liked to say that “If all the world were a golden ring, Ormus would be the jewel in it.”

The Chinese treasure fleet of Zheng He stopped there in the early 1400s, and Hormuz appeared in Chinese maps and travel narratives, which praised the area for its sophistication:

Hormuz was well known to Europeans before the age of exploration, too. Marco Polo went there; he mostly noted how hot it was:

The 1502 Cantino world map, one of the earliest to be based on Portuguese voyages, highlights the significance of the Persian Gulf:

When the Portuguese arrived in Hormuz, they were not as complimentary as the Chinese had been. Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier, sent east by the King of Portugal, said that Hormuz hosted “all the most corrupted forms of every religion in the East… foreigners, soldiers and merchants threw off all restraint in the indulgence of their passions.” Whatever he may have felt about the people of Hormuz, Albuquerque recognized its strategic importance and determined to take it.

Albuquerque first tried to intimidate Hormuz into submission in 1507, sailing into the island’s harbor with cannons firing after having conquered Oman. He offered the city the chance to submit to Portuguese rule without bloodshed. Hormuz’s effective ruler, a vizier named Cogeatar, stalled while he prepared for battle. A fierce fight ensued, which the Portuguese won with their superior firepower despite being outnumbered.

Albuquerque began to build a Portuguese fort on Hormuz. Soon, Persian emissaries arrived to demand the tribute that they had normally received from the old rulers of Hormuz. The brash Albuquerque sent them a shipment of cannonballs and bullets, saying that this was the currency that Portugal traded in.

The Portuguese sailors, who were being forced to build a fort in the blistering heat, soon turned on their commander. Some defected to Cogeatar and told him just how few men Albuquerque commanded. The mutiny forced the Portuguese to abandon their half-built fort. Albuquerque set out to conquer Malacca and Goa, but vowed not to cut his beard until he had returned to conquer the Strait of Hormuz.

He didn’t have to wait long. Political intrigue destabilized Hormuz — Cogeatar was murdered, and a new 18-year-old ruler gained a shaky grasp on power. Albuquerque, after conquering other ports in the Indian Ocean, returned with a larger force in 1515 and forced the Kingdom of Hormuz to become a vassal of the Portuguese king.

Control of the Strait of Hormuz was incredibly lucrative for Portugal, which collected tributes from nearby kingdoms and charged customs taxes. Hormuz, a key outpost of Portuguese power, became known for its prosperity. Here, it’s featured as one of the key Portuguese colonial possessions alongside Calicut and Cannanore in India and the slave-trading fortress Elmina:

Wealthy Portuguese people moved in, living in homes that could be flooded for cooling:

And Portuguese artists depicted the local inhabitants:

The Portuguese Navy used Hormuz as a base from which to fend off attacks by Ottoman ships:

Portuguese profits from control of Hormuz attracted interest from other colonial powers, while the Safavid rulers of Persia resented the fact that their geographic asset was under the control of a distant colonial empire. So Shah Abbas, the ruler of Persia, approached the British in 1622: what if they worked together to oust the Portuguese from Hormuz, and then shared the spoils? The Persians would do the heavy fighting with naval support from the British. The fact that they were simply supporting a Persian action gave the British (through the East India Company) a way to take Hormuz without ever declaring war against Portugal.

The operation was a success, commemorated by Persian artists a few generations later. Here the Portuguese peek out of their fort at the besieging Persian forces:

And here the two sides’ ships open fire at one another:

The Portuguese didn’t leave the Strait of Hormuz after they lost; they simply relocated their forces to Muscat, a port city and fortress at the eastern end of the strait:

After taking control of the island of Hormuz, Shah Abbas lost interest in it; he wanted a spot on the strait that he could control outright. He founded a new city, Gameroon (now named Bandar Abbas, after him) on the mainland:

Meanwhile, Shah Abbas, aware that the British could not force compliance, mostly didn’t send them their share of the customs proceeds.

In this period, many powers tried to exert control over the strait. The British and Dutch East India Companies both established factories in Gameroon. The French eventually showed up and competed with them for influence, too. As Persian power declined, colonial competition heated up.

Even as Hormuz Island faded in significance, it was still seen in Europe as an exotic place, worthy of lovely paintings:

And even appeared as the exotic backdrop of a popular opera by Salieri:

In the early 1800s, after they had won the Napoleonic Wars, and with an invitation from their Omani allies, the British decided to take control of the Strait of Hormuz once and for all. They declared (with some justification) that the Persian Gulf was riddled with piracy and that only the British Navy could secure trade there. So they moved in and took control of the “pirate strongholds:”

Over time, through the power of their navy and their arrangements with various regional powers, the British turned the Persian Gulf into what some people called a “British Lake.” Affairs were managed by a Political Agent for the Lower Persian Gulf, whose offices were on Qishm Island, just west of Hormuz Island in the strait.

The geological peculiarities of Hormuz made it a place of contestation for five centuries, as people from all over the world obsessed over maintaining access to — or dominating — the strait. Sometimes the contestation came through violence, sometimes through intimidation. You’ll notice that every voice I’ve quoted here, and almost every image, came from far away. The local population found themselves in a place that offered opportunities for great wealth but also attracted unwanted interest from abroad.

We’ve seen over the last few months how the Strait of Hormuz remains central to the global economy, and how conflict there can affect conditions all over the world. These days, it’s oil, gas, and petrochemicals that flow through the strait rather than pearls and spices. But the conflict rhymes with what happened in 1507 and 1622 and 1810, because whoever controls this narrow passage still exerts a powerful influence on the rest of the world.

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