Bullion for Goods (European and Indian Merchants in the Indian Ocean Trade 1500- 1800)

The spectacular rise in world trade following the great discoveries of the closing years of the fifteenth century had important implications for each of the major segments of the newly emerging early modern international economy. As far as Asia was concerned, the commercial operations of the European corporate enterprises as well as private traders in the Indian Ocean region between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries had far reaching consequences for the economies and the polities of the countries of the region. Asian merchants engaged in the Indian Ocean trade interacted with the European intruders into the Ocean in a variety of ways.

The twenty-one essays included in this volume are firmly embedded in original archival sources. They deal mainly with issues arising out of the Europeans' commercial presence in the Indian Ocean region and the interaction they had with their Asian counterparts. The volume discusses how over a span of three centuries, the Indian economy was integrated into the world economy as a result of these interactions. The macroeconomic implications of the European encounter for the Indian economy are analysed in detail. Another important area explored at some length is the monetary history of the subcontinent in the early modern period.

This collection of essays will be of interest to the historians of India and of the Indian Ocean. It will also have a great deal of appeal for the historians of early modern Asia as well as Europe.

Those interested in what is being increasingly described as world history will also find the volume useful.

Om Prakash is Professor of Economic History at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. His publications include The Dutch Factories in India 1617-1623 (Delhi, 1984); The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal 1630-1720 (Princeton, 1985); Precious Metals and Commerce, The Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean Trade (Variorum, 1994); European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India, Vol. 11.5 in the New Cambridge History of India series (Cambridge, 1998); and Euro-Asian Encounter in the Early Modern Period (Kuala Lumpur, 2003). He has also edited European Commercial Expansion in Early Modern Asia (Variorum, 1997); and co-edited with Denys Lombard Commerce and Culture in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1800 (Delhi, 1999); and with Jos Gommans Circumambulations in South Asian History, Essays in Honour of Dirk H.A. Kolff (Leiden, 2003)

THE SPECTACULAR rise in world trade following the great discoveries of the closing years of the fifteenth century had important implications for each of the major segments of the newly emerg-311 ing early modern international economy. As far as Asia was concerned, the commercial operations of the European corporate enterprises as well as private traders in the Indian Ocean region between the sixteenth 326 and the eighteenth centuries had far reaching consequences for the economies and the polities of the countries of the region. Asian 337 merchants engaged in the Indian Ocean trade interacted with the European 'intruders' into the Ocean in a variety of ways.

The twenty-one essays included in this collection were written largely around issues arising out of the Europeans' commercial presence in ban the Indian Ocean region and the interaction they had with their Asian Cant 380 counterparts. These essays were written over a period of nearly four decades. The earliest was published in 1964 and the most recent in 398 2002. They have been arranged in the volume not chronologically but thematically. The introduction to the volume serves to introduce 417 the essays and to put them in a broader context. On rereading the essays, I find that there is a certain amount of overlap across essays dealing with similar themes but in varying depth and emphasis. I have decided to leave the essays as they were written and ask for the reader's indulgence in this behalf. The only updating I have done is in the matter of the referencing of the archival source material used and mentioned in the notes to the essays. In 2002, the principal repository of the Dutch East India Company archives in The Hague, familiar to generations of scholars as the Algemeen Rijksarchief (A.R.A.), was rechristened National Archief (N.A.). Many years earlier, the volumes containing the bulk of the Dutch East India Company correspondence preserved at this archives had been redesignated from the earlier Koloniaal Archief or K.A. volumes as Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or V.O.C. volumes and assigned new numbers. Both these changes have been incorporated in the notes to the essays. As far as the archives of the English East India Company is concerned, the only important change over the last forty years and duly incorporated in the notes to the essays is that they are now part of the 'Oriental and India Office Collection (OIOC)' housed at the new building of the British Library in London.

IN ADDITION TO major developments in the domain of enlightenment, religion, and culture, the transition from the late medieval to the early modern world was marked by equally epoch-making changes in the field of economics. Probably the most wide-ranging of these was the rise of an early modern world economy facilitated by the two great maritime discoveries of the last decade of the fifteenth century-the discovery of the Americas and of the all-water route linking Europe and Asia via the Cape of Good Hope. An important element in the rise of this economy was the integration of the Indian Ocean into the larger framework of world trade on a scale unimaginable before. Not only were the three principal segments of the early modern world economy-the New World, Europe, and Asia-now drawn into the vortex of world trade but there emerged also an organic and interactive relationship across the three segments whereby the growth of trade in one direction became critically dependent on the growth of trade in the other. The critical link was provided by the silver of South American origin, the growing availability of which to Europe became a precondition for the growth of the Euro-Asian trade. This was the earliest, if somewhat limited, incarnation of globalization.

The history of commercial traffic in the Indian Ocean goes back to at least the early centuries of the Christian era. Networks of trade covering different segments of the Ocean have a history of remark-able resilience without being resistant to innovation. In other words, without disrupting the rhythm of the overall flow, variables such as the share in total trade of different communities of merchants engaged in a given network, the goods carried, and the relative volume of trade carried on at the ports called at, were fully reflective of evolving situations. Over the centuries, India has played a key role in the successful functioning of these trading networks. In part, this indeed was a function of the midway location of the subcontinent between West Asia on the one hand and South-East and East Asia on the other. But perhaps even more important was the subcontinent's capacity to put on the market a wide range of tradeable goods at highly competitive prices. These included agricultural goods, both food items such as rice, sugar, and oil as well as raw materials such as cotton and indigo. While the bulk of the trade in these goods was coastal, the high-seas trade component was by no means insignificant. The real strength of-the subcontinent, however, lay in the provision of large quantities of manufactured goods, the most important amongst which was textiles of various kinds. While these included high value varieties such as the legendary Dhaka muslins and the Gujarat silk embroideries, the really important component for the Asian market was the coarse cotton varieties manufactured prima-rily on the Coromandel coast and in Gujarat. There was a large scale demand for these varieties both in the eastern markets of Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand, and Burma as well as in the markets of the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and East Africa. While it is impossible to determine precisely what proportion of total domestic demand for mass consumption textiles in these societies was met by imports from India, the available evidence would seem to point in the direction of this not being altogether insignificant. India's capacity to manufacture these textiles in large quantities and to put them on the market at highly competitive terms made it in some sense the 'industrial' hub of the region surrounded by West Asia on one side and South-East Asia on the other.