2 - Indian Merchants and the Trade in the Indian Ocean c. 1500–1750

Summary

A fact of life with which the student of India's medieval economy has learned to live is the absence of statistics. The history of foreign trade therefore becomes a discussion of the structure of commerce and the role of the merchant in it. And from what we gather by way of qualitative statements, it would seem beyond doubt that the Indian merchant investing in the trade of the Indian Ocean was the most important figure in the country's overseas trade during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was in the eighteenth century that Indian shipping and the Indian Ocean trade declined in importance to make way for European carriers and trade with Europe.

At the turn of the fifteenth century, India's mercantile marine, largely in the hands of Gujarati Muslim merchants, appears to have been deployed principally in the middle Indian Ocean, dominating the sea-lanes between Cambay and Malacca. To the west, Indian ships called regularly at the ports of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, but the carrying trade in the Arabian Sea was largely in the hands of Arab shipowners. In the east, Chinese vessels excluded all others between southern China and Malaya, while Malay and Javanese craft were prominent in Indonesian waters. The loosely-joined structure which supported India's overseas trade would seem already to have assumed the form it was to retain for the ensuing 300 years. Moreover, the important distinction between coastal India's shipping interests, which were by and large Muslim, and the shore-based merchants feeding the shipping lines, among whom Hindus predominated, endured throughout the period.