5 - Merchant Communities and Cross-cultural Trade between Gujarat and the Gulf in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Summary

Introduction

This chapter explores the commercial and social dynamics of maritime trade between Gujarat in India and the Gulf in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Maritime trade between the ports of Gujarat, such as Cambay and Surat, and those on the Arabian and Persian coasts of the Gulf grew exponentially following the early sixteenth century. While the significance of this trade in the overall maritime economy of the Indian Ocean in general and that of Gujarat in particular is well recognised in the existing literature, the mechanics of this trade, merchant networks, commodities exchanged between the two regions, and many other interesting aspects have not been fully explored. This is primarily due to the lack of indigenous sources on merchants and trade and the scant references to Indian or Asian merchants and their trade in European records including those of the English and the Dutch East India Companies (EIC and VOC respectively). Most merchants mentioned in European sources were prominent shipowners and influential traders in Surat, many of whom were associated with the European companies. As shipowners were predominantly Muslims, it was generally assumed that the maritime trade was the domain of the local Gujarati and West Asian Muslim merchants. So pervasive was this assumption that, for some scholars, the Indian Ocean was an ‘Islamic lake’, and many understood the Portuguese encounter with Asians in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century as a clash between Portuguese and Muslim maritime trading interests.

The literature on Gujarat's maritime trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also reinforces the notion of a Muslim predominance, and some scholars have even equated the early eighteenth-century loss of Muslim shipping in Gujarat with the decline of Surat, the main trading port of the Mughal Empire in western India. A close look at the mechanics of trade, however, shows that the maritime trade in the western Indian Ocean was not a monopoly of the Muslims. It was more cosmopolitan. Merchants of diverse ethnic and regional origins, such as the Hindu and Jain Banias, Armenians, Jews, Kachhi Bhatias, Arabs, Turks, Persians and the local Gujarati Muslims, shared this trading domain.