3 - The route through Quandahar: the significance of the overland trade from India to the West in the seventeenth century

Summary

In recent years there has been a renewed interest among historians in the early modern trade from India towards the West. Frank Perlin has even observed that recent findings in monetary history, documenting the continued importance of the flow of precious metals through the Near and Middle East to India in the seventeenth century, implied ‘important revisions to the now conventional position represented by Steensgaard’. By this Perlin presumably means that I should have taken the point of view that the success of the Companies not only brought to an end the direct caravan trade between Asia and Europe through the Levant, but also the export trade from India to the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and along the caravan routes. As far as I remember, I never discussed this particular problem, but concerning the trade to Persia I wrote in 1973: ‘The expansion of the Company trade in the first decades of the seventeenth century undoubtedly reduced the transit trade through the Persian Gulf, but it did not stop it. Neither was the fall of Hormuz able to stop the transit trade to the densely populated Safavid and Ottoman Empires. It was with this smaller, though far from negligible, transit trade that the Persian trade acquired its greatest significance after the fall of Hormuz.’