When Vasco da Gama nudged cautiously around the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in India in 1498, he ‘opened up’ the East for European commerce. Not long afterwards, in 1513, the first Portuguese traders arrived in the Pearl River estuary at the entrance to Canton (Guangzhou). It was the beginning of Western dominance in Asia. For the next 500 years, white European Christians—and, later, Americans—engaged in a process of economic pillage and profit extraction in Asia, supported by guns and violence. They assumed a right to exploit and oppress because, they contended, Asians were an inferior race.

Desirable products like spices, silks, porcelain, and tea were shipped to the West in vast quantities. The Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, and American merchants who flocked to Asia were intent on making as much money as they could in the shortest possible time. Fortunes were made in the City of London, on the Amsterdam stock exchange, and among the illustrious east coast families of Boston and Massachusetts. Invariably, white Western Christianity was assumed to be superior. An early viceroy of Portuguese India, Afonso de Albuquerque, announced on his arrival on the subcontinent that he came “in search of Christians and spices”. When he captured Goa, he did not spare the life of a single Muslim. He reported to his king that “we filled the mosques with them and then set them on fire… It was a very great deed, Sire, well fought and well accomplished.” It was the same mentality that motivated the failed Christian Crusades to the Holy Land, the Spanish Reconquista and, in modern times, the American/Israeli crusade against Islam.

• Tags: China, Issue 43, Michael Pembroke