Casa da Índia, Lisbon

node · earth · Lisbon

The Portuguese crown's trading house, which did not merely regulate the India trade but was its owner. Where the Castilian Casa de Contratación administered and taxed a trade carried on by licensed private merchants, the Casa da Índia ran the carreira as a royal monopoly in the most valuable commodities — pepper above all — buying in Asia and selling in Europe on the king's account, with the Antwerp factory as the northern outlet. The two models are the clearest institutional contrast of the period and they produced different failure modes: the Portuguese system was chronically short of capital and dependent on foreign bankers, while the Castilian one leaked bullion through contraband it could not police. The Casa's records were largely destroyed in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which is why Portuguese trade volumes of the sixteenth century are reconstructed indirectly and remain contested.