ABSTRACT
Between 1628 and 1633 Portuguese trade and communications with Asia via the Cape of Good Hope were entrusted to a “Company for the Trade of India and the Overseas Conquests”, a chartered joint-stock enterprise modelled on the better-known and more lasting English and Dutch East India Companies. For most of the sixteenth century the Goa–Lisbon trade had been conducted mainly as a state monopoly, the crown reserving to itself the exportation of silver and copper from Portugal to India, and importation of pepper and other major spices in the reverse direction. For perhaps two decades before the signing of the Linhares–Methwold truce it had been clear to informed Portuguese that there was little chance that their European trade rivals in Asia could be eliminated by force, a fact dramatically underlined by the fall of the Portuguese fortress at Ormuz to a combined Anglo-Persian expedition in 1621.
