Organization
DissolvedThe Casa da Índia
Lisbon · 1503 – 1833
The house was abolished in 1833, long after the spice monopoly it had administered was already gone.
The Casa da Índia was the Portuguese crown's counting house for the trade around Africa. It sat in Lisbon, received the pepper and the cinnamon, sold them, and paid the crews. It was a royal office, not a private company, which is why its clerks were closer to customs officers than to merchants.
After Vasco da Gama's return in 1499, the crown decided the spice trade was too valuable to leave to whoever owned a ship. The Casa, organized in the first years of the sixteenth century, was the instrument. A voyage did not leave, and a cargo did not clear, without it.
A bureaucracy for an ocean
Pilots were examined. Charts were kept, sometimes as secrets. Factors in Goa and Cochin bought on the crown's account. In Lisbon, clerks weighed, taxed, and sold. The work created a shore career beside the sailor's: the man who never left the river and still lived off the Cape route. The crown's monopoly was leaky from the start. Private traders and smugglers did what the Casa was too slow to do.
A long afterlife
The Dutch and English companies took the profitable end of the trade in the seventeenth century. The Casa remained, administering a smaller empire, until it was abolished in 1833. By then it was a relic of a monopoly that had stopped being enforceable. The lesson for later firms is that a royal house can outlive the business it was built to run.
The work it organized
- Pilot examiner
- Factor
- Weighing clerk
- Chart keeper
On the timeline
Related
- The Casa de ContrataciónDissolved