The Restricted Factory

The Restricted Factory is what the Portuguese Crown holds in Malacca in place of the conquest it attempted, and failed to complete, in 1511. Its charter -- negotiated in the settlement that ended the Strait Stand -- permits a single trading compound, a resident factor and a small staff, and a strictly capped volume of trade, reviewed annually by the Tribute Hall (see: The Strait Stand, The Factory Restriction Rules).

The Factory is administratively separate from Portuguese holdings elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, reporting to Goa but operating under local terms Goa did not choose and has never been entirely comfortable with. Successive factors have petitioned, formally and informally, for expanded terms -- a larger quota, a seat on the Merchants' Compact, permission to build in stone, permission to send missionaries beyond the compound walls -- and successive Directorate-Sultanate hearings have granted almost none of it.

The Factory survives, in the judgment of most Malaccan officials, for a simple reason: a contained Portuguese presence that can be watched, taxed, and periodically humbled in negotiation is more useful to everyone else in the port than an excluded Portuguese presence that has nothing to lose by returning with more ships. Whether that calculation still holds as Portuguese power elsewhere in the ocean continues to grow is precisely the question behind the Tariff Dispute of 1519, and precisely the question this world does not yet have an answer to.

What is happening to Portuguese ambitions and resources back in Europe and along the rest of their Indian Ocean route, in a timeline where Malacca never fully fell, is something the Factory's own reports touch on only in fragments -- rumors of trouble, contradictory dispatches, nothing anyone in Malacca can currently confirm.

Diverges from: Historically, the Portuguese conquered and governed Malacca outright from 1511 to 1641; no restricted, subordinate factory arrangement of this kind existed.