The Indian Ocean

by Michael Pearson

  The Red Sea continued to be the major route connecting the southern part of Eurasia with the northern, that is the eastern Mediterranean. Some of this trade was that done by pilgrims as they chaffered their way to the Holy Cities, engaging in petty trade on the way in order to cover their costs and buy food. But apart from this there was a very major trade centred on the port of Mecca, Jiddah, which however had little or nothing to do with the pilgrimage traffic. Around 1580 some forty or fifty great ships called each year with spices and merchandise. A few years later Lobo wrote generally of Jiddah,

  which has been made so famous in these times in all of the East by the great number of ships that go there and the rich trade the merchants find there, and the superstitious custom of pilgrimages to Mecca made by those who follow the infamous Koran... since the ships which sailed to Juda made excellent business profits, because of the great wealth of the universal market of people and merchandise carried on in that city, they became so famous in India that when people wanted to indicate that something was very costly and valuable they would call it a ship from Mecca or Juda.12

  Throughout our period Gujarat was a major trade centre, based on its huge production of cotton cloth and other products, and its role as a gateway not only for the hajj but also for a host of imported products sent up country to the heartland of the Mughal empire. Early in the sixteenth century Tomé Pires wrote that Cambay stretched out two arms, one to the Red Sea and one to Melaka. Portuguese misrule made the Gujaratis move out of the latter, thus assisting in the decline of this once great port city. They traded instead all around the Bay of Bengal, and in the Malay world, especially in Aceh. The companies found them keen, often dominant, competitors in the region. By the seventeenth century Cambay had been replaced by Surat. This was an important change and one which had nothing to do with the European presence in the area. Through the seventeenth century and beyond Surat was one of the greatest ports in the world, with a variegated and skilful merchant community, vast capital resources, and connections all around the littoral of the ocean. Around 1700 the port was home to a fleet of over 100 vessels, mostly medium size ones of 200 or 300 tons, so that the total tonnage available was at least 20,000 dead weight tons. The total value of trade was at least Rs 16 million, and only about Rs 1.5 million of this was European-owned.13

  Much local trade in Malabar, especially that in pepper, was disrupted by the Europeans, first the Portuguese and from the 1660s the Dutch. The Coromandel coast was less affected. In the mid seventeenth century the ports of the sultanate of Golconda, especially Masulipatnam, traded extensively around the Bay of Bengal. A dominant figure at this time was the Persian grandee cum trader Mir Jumla, who in the 1640s had his own ships (though carrying cargoes belonging to many people) travelling all over the ocean: to Bengal, Surat, Arakan, Ayuthya, Aceh, Melaka, Johore, Bantam, Makassar, Ceylon, Bandar Abbas, Mocha and the Maldives. While traders from Coromandel ports traded all around the Bay of Bengal, to Burma and Arakan and Pegu for example, one of their best routes had been to exchange local cloths for spices. As the Dutch monopoly became relatively effective this trade declined, but Coromandel merchants were able to disperse, just like the Gujaratis, and trade in places less closely controlled by the VOC. An example is Banten, where south Indian merchants had a very large, even dominating, role.

  Traders from north of the Malay world, that is China, also had a role in this region. We pointed out in the previous chapter that an extensive Chinese trade even to the western ocean had ended by the middle of the fifteenth century. However, the Chinese continued to come as far as Melaka, and indeed some still traded there even after the Portuguese conquest in 1511. In the seventeenth century there was a large Chinese settler, and trader, population in Jakarta (Batavia) and its umland. However, China's main trade at this time was with Japan, from whence were brought vast quantities of silver. In the middle of the century the Japanese expelled all European traders, allowing only the Dutch a very restricted presence. Chinese traders from Fukien were not affected by this, and they did well, much better than the Dutch, in the overseas trade of Japan. It could be that the dynastic change in China in the middle of the seventeenth century affected foreign trade as a whole for a time, but if it did this was only temporary.

  Who were the main merchants at this time? There was a huge range, from the smallest pedlar to magnates who controlled vast amounts of capital. At one end are the humble folk, local to the area, who traded short distances up and down the coast, say from one Indonesian island to another, or from Bengal to Masulipatnam, or Mombasa to Mogadishu; indeed even these would be considered major voyages for some of these men. Other humble men were able to travel much further, taking their bundle of goods on board a ship owned by some other bigger person: maybe a large merchant, or a political leader, or a European. People could travel for years, making a little profit here, a loss there.

  Above such atomised people, about whom admittedly we know very little, we can see a category who are part of a much more articulated merchant world. The Armenians are an excellent example. Ethnicity, kinship and religion were vital in trading matters. The much quoted account of the Armenian merchant Hovhannes has provided us with a typical case. He was by no means a pedlar, but rather was an agent of larger Armenian merchants in the Armenian suburb of New Julfa in Isfahan, in Iran, and later Agra, in India. However, his importance for us is that he operated as a member of a very dispersed community. His journal describes his travels over the period 1682 to 1693. During this time he visited and traded in Bandar Abbas and Surat, and then in Agra, where he spent most of a year. From there he went to Tibet, then back to India, to Patna, and then Bengal. Everywhere he went he had contact with, and assistance from, other members of the far-flung

  Armenian merchant community. Indeed he may well have had written advice on where to trade, and what to trade in, for a seventeenth century Armenian merchant's manual gave instructions for all the places Hovhannes visited.14 Armenians were classic intermediaries in the commercial world. It seems that persecution had done them a favour. They were moved by Shah Abbas from Armenia late in the sixteenth century, and made to settle in New Julfa, near Isfahan. This move gave them much better access to routes and products. They spoke Persian, and so could operate all over the Muslim world, yet were Christian, an advantage when dealing with Europeans. Thanks to their network made up of the dispersed Armenian community they had excellent intelligence on prices and conditions in their centre of New Julfa. There were several very large, often kin based, merchant houses in New Julfa, and these sent out agents, maybe a hundred in all from each house, far and wide around the Indian Ocean and far inland too. By the end of the seventeenth century Armenians in London were major freighters of the ships of the EIC. They traded as far as Sweden, and were important merchants in Amsterdam.15 There are strong parallels here with the Jewish trade from Egypt which was so important in a previous period (see pages 103–4). Other major merchants belonged to larger and more settled communities. Such magnates have recently been described as 'portfolio capitalists', that is people who spread their investments into many areas, including banking and shipping as well as trade in a host of commodities. These merchant princes, many of them Muslim at this time, overlapped with rulers and nobles who also traded. None of these were humble men at all. The Europeans wrote in awe of the great Jain merchant Virji Vorah in Surat, reputedly the richest man in the world, and who could have bought and sold the northern European trading companies with ease. Virji Vorah, who died in 1665, was into everything. He was a banker, a ship owner, a trader in indigo, pepper and many other products. He engaged in both retail and wholesale trade, and lent money to the Mughal nobility. He also lent money to the Europeans, and used his power quite unscrupulously. He had a Coromandel counterpart, Kasi Veeranna. He operated all over the central Coromandel coast, and sent out ships to both mainland and island southeast Asia from Pulicat, Chennai, San Thome, Tranquebar and other places. He was a major supplier of local cotton cloths to
the European companies, and it is symptomatic of changes occurring at this time that from the 1670s he left a rather unsettled local environment and based himself in Chennai, from where he administered tax farms over an extensive area of coastal Coromandel.16

  Most of these wealthy men did not travel themselves, but rather had agents spread around the great port cities of the littoral, and also far inland. Virji Vorah had agents or connections in Calicut, Agra, Burhanpur, all over the interior of Gujarat, and at all the great emporia around the Indian Ocean littoral. Networks of other Gujarati traders, especially the Hindu merchant group known as banias, extended even beyond this, to the Philippines, and even to Russia. These agents would often be members of the same community as themselves, often indeed related to some degree to the central figure.

  Members of the chulia community on the Coromandel coast are roughly analogous to the banias of Gujarat. Bowrey wrote a very hostile, and revealing, account of them. We see yet again Indian Ocean merchants competing very well with Europeans in the late seventeenth century, for Bowrey was writing in the 1670s:

  The Chulyars are a People that range into all Kingdoms and Countreys in Asia, and are a Subtle and Roguish people of the Mahometan Sect, but not very great Observers of many of his laws. Theire Native land is Upon the Southernmost parts of the Choromandell Coast. . . . They by theire rangeinge much (before they content themselves with a place for theire abode), doe learne to write and Speake Severall of the Eastern languages, whereby they very much delude the people, and not a little cheat them. They are likewise a very great hinderrance to us, for, wherever these rascalls be, wee cannot Sell any goods to a Native of the Countrey, but they creep in alonge with them, and tell them in private what our goods cost upon the Coast, or in Suratt, or Bengala, or elsewhere, which doth many Christians a great Prejudice.17

  Stephen Dale's exemplary account of Hindu merchants trading far and wide in Central Asia, Russia and the Middle East is another example, to be put with the Armenians, of how we are beginning to see greatly increased links across the whole globe.18 It would be too grand to start writing of a 'world economy' yet, but certainly there were major new connections. The most important was not European passages around the Cape of Good Hope, but the bringing in of the Americas.

  Indeed, it must be seen as a happy coincidence that the Americas were discovered, and bullion obtained, at the same time as the Cape route was opened, for without American bullion Europeans would have lacked the funds with which to trade in Asia. And these bullion-fuelled Europeans in turn affected part of the Indian Ocean littoral: in the early eighteenth century the European demand for textiles from Bengal created an extra 100,000 jobs in the industry. This massive increase in the supply of bullion had some impact on the economies of the Indian Ocean. For example, it meant that ambitious rulers, especially in Mughal India, could now demand their taxation on the produce of the land, the land revenue, in cash rather than kind: hence the Indian countryside was monetised, and markets spread to many remote villages. There were even examples of inter-continental competition impacting deleteriously on Indian Ocean producers. In the seventeenth century indigo and sugar, both major cash crops in India and elsewhere, were undercut by cheaper similar products from the Americas. Later, cloves from Zanzibar were similarly undercut. Some merchant networks now spread even further than before: Portuguese trading in the Indian Ocean area had connections going all the way to the Americas, as did pirates.

  Bullion was the prime example of a product flowing around the world. Even before the Americas much European-origin bullion ended up in the Indian Ocean region. However, much larger amounts flowed in once South America came on line. To sketch this trade is important for two reasons. First, it is an example of a major change in trade and the economies of the Indian Ocean area, but not, as Barendse wants us to remember, one that was caused solely by Europeans. Second, it is the prime manifestation of what could be depicted as the beginnings of an integrated world, and this aspect we will turn to in the next chapter.

  Contrary to the received opinion, the majority of the flow of precious metals from Europe to the East for most of our period did not take place in European ships via the Cape, but rather in Asian, and some European, ships via the Levant. Other bullion was carried by the Spanish to Manila, and from there taken by Chinese traders to the great sink of China. However, we are only now beginning to take account of the vast production and exports of silver from Japan over the period 1560 to 1668, and even later, to China. Flynn summed up very tersely this whole matter when he wrote that 'Japan and Spain were major competitors in the world's first global market; China was the most important customer, followed by India.'19 Indeed, the role of Europeans has recently, and somewhat extravagantly, been described merely as that of 'intermediaries in the trade between the New World and China.'20 In short, contrary to a European-focused stress on the effects of American silver on Europe, three of the major aspects of world monetary flows in this early modern period have to do with Asia: the drain of much American bullion across the Pacific, or through Europe and so to Asia, often carried in Asian ships, and two major production areas apart from the Americas, that is gold from East Africa and silver from Japan.21

  New crops have been listed in many places. However, a flow of new varieties from one place to another was not an innovation in the sixteenth century. Some products and styles that are today spread all around the ocean originated in the distant past in one particular area. The best example is bananas, which came from Indonesia with the migrants to Madagascar, and subsequently were much modified and improved in Africa. The areca nut, a mild stimulant which originated in southeast Asia, again is ubiquitous around the ocean. Ibn Battuta was offered some in Mogadishu as a gesture of respect for his learning. Newitt and Middleton provide quite long lists of products, techniques and crops imported into, and indigenised in, East Africa: cotton, rice, bananas, coconuts, mangoes, outrigger canoes, looms, square houses and the use of coral cement in construction.22 Sub-Saharan Africa over many centuries received from further east, via Hurmuz, the Hadhramaut, northern Ethiopia and then the Sudan, bananas, taro, pigs, goats, sheep, cattle, chickens.

  Most plants which came from the Americas to Europe were transmitted by the Spanish, but Brazil sent to all of Africa, and to India and China, Indian corn, manioc, sweet potatoes, peanuts, cashews, pineapples, hot peppers, papaya, pumpkins and squashes. The Spanish made available such American species as tobacco, chillies, pineapples, sweet potatoes, corn, avocado and guavas.23

  Tobacco provides an excellent example of flows and adopting. In the early seventeenth century the rulers of both England and Mughal India fulminated against the disgusting habit of smoking the noxious weed. Within the Portuguese empire the main production area was Bahia, from whence it was exported either direct to Goa, or via Lisbon and so to the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese also sent it to Macau, and into Qing China. Indian peasants were cultivating it with some enthusiasm by the early seventeenth century, and indeed many crops were taken up in new locations as a market appeared.24 Coffee originated in Yemen, but once a demand for it appeared in Europe, around 1700, the VOC picked it up and established plantations in Java. Around 1715 Java produced less than 2,000 pounds, but twenty years later it was producing nearly 6 million.25

  The source of other products did not necessarily change, but the pattern and extent of distribution did. Tea from China is the best example. In 1701 for the first time the EIC imported over 100,000 lbs of this mild stimulant; this soon rose to over 1 million, and from 1747 was very seldom less than 3 million. Cowry shells, a humble and very important currency, provide another excellent example which we have mentioned before (see pages 84–5). The best examples of this gastropod come from the Maldives. These shells were very widely used indeed. They were especially prevalent in the Bay of Bengal, but they were also used in Timbuktu, Benin, and in the valleys of the Ganga and the Niger. Most African slaves were purchased with cowries. Other wide connections are legion. There was a 'sea
l rush' in the 1770s. Sealers from New England hunted seals in the southern ocean, sold the skins in Guangzhou, and took home tea or silk. In the early eighteenth century the famous and luxurious 'gold cloth' of Gujarat was purchased by the mikado of Japan, the king of Thailand, and the Zaidi imam of Yemen. One of the best markets for madeira wine was the European communities in India and Guangzhou. Pirates operated globally (see page 000). The 250 or more blue and white willow-pattern tiles in the Cochin synagogue came from China around 1760. And so on....

  Nor was it only people and products. Religious chains of authority spread, in the case of Christianity, all over the world, while Mecca was the sacred city for Muslims from all over the world. The vast seventeenth-century Baroque churches in Old Goa, especially the Sé Cathedral and the Basilica of Bom Jesu, are based on European models, albeit with some Indian input in decoration.

  As people moved, so also did disease. The massive mortality in the Americas was not matched anywhere in the Indian Ocean world, because the area had been for centuries part of a Eurasian, or Afrasian, disease pool. The only important example of a new disease reaching the Indian Ocean was a much more virulent version of syphilis. It is believed that someone on Columbus' second voyage was responsible for bringing the infection into Europe, where it spread with remarkable rapidity. There was a case reported from Guangzhou as early as 1502, and in 1505 the Italian Varthema in Calicut claimed that the ruler had 'the French disease ["Frangi"] and had it in the throat.'26 However, it was not new diseases which affected populations around the ocean so much as faster communications, and increased densities of people in certain places: examples are the hordes congregated for the hajj, and the increasing populations of the port cities, especially from late in our period. Greater population concentrations meant that the protection provided by the vast expanses of the ocean was overcome, and crowd disease, such as cholera, smallpox and plague increasingly flourished; they had of course been present for many centuries.