The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan

On one occasion Vasco da Gama himself captured a ship filled with hundreds of Muslims returning to India after going on pilgrimage to Mecca. Ignoring the desperately generous offers of those on board to pay a ransom, he ordered the ship to be set on fire in an act so grotesque that one observer avowed, ‘I will remember what happened every single day of my life.’ Women held up their jewellery to beg for mercy from the flames or from the water, while others held up their infants to try to protect them. Da Gama watched impassively, ‘cruelly and without any pity’ as every last passenger and crew member drowned before his eyes. 23

The result when matters were finally settled in 1748 was that Cap Breton in Canada and Madras in India changed hands between the French and the British. This was just one example of how competition between European powers had effects on the other side of the world. Towns in India were handed to the French by the Dutch at the end of the 1690s as a result of the settlement of the Nine Years’ War in Europe; islands in the Caribbean changed hands between Britain and France as part of peace settlements two decades later after further intense fighting in Europe; while huge swathes of North America were swapped between the British and French when disputes over the Spanish throne were settled. Marriages could also deliver vast territories, strategic bridgeheads or great cities – such as Bombay, handed over to England as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza when she married King Charles II in the 1660s. It was an act of generosity that, as the city’s Portuguese governor accurately predicted, spelt the end of Portugal’s power in India. 33

Three days later Gavrilo Princip, a young idealist who was not yet twenty, discharged two bullets from a pistol at a passing car on the streets of Sarajevo. The first did not hit its target, instead striking in the stomach and mortally wounding the Archduchess Sophie, who was sitting in the back of the car with her husband. The second did: it killed Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And with that, the world changed. 98

Rest assured, she told Jaʿfar alʿ-Askarī, soon to be appointed Prime Minister of the new country of Iraq, that ‘complete independence is what we [the British] ultimately wish to give’. ‘My lady,’ he replied, ‘complete independence is never given – always taken.’ 55 The