Indian Merchants in the Indian Ocean Trade in the Early Modern Period: Some Issues

Professor Prakash is a renowned specialist in the early modern economic history of the Indian subcontinent, and the relationship between India and the Netherlands. He first visited The Netherlands in 1961 and has been  a regular visitor to Holland ever since. He has authored a large number of important studies, including The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1650-1717 (Princeton University Press 1985), which is based on archival material from the Nationaal Archief in The Hague. He also published European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-colonial India (1998), published under the New Cambridge History of India series (part II, v.5).

In the lecture, he will briefly analyse three categories of Indian merchants, namely (a) the maritime merchant engaged in coastal and high-seas trade,(b) the broker and the intermediary merchant providing goods to and buying goods from the maritime merchant, and (c) the  money merchant. The intermediary and the money merchants were almost exclusively Hindu with the Bania merchants dominating the two groups. The maritime merchant community, however, was more mixed, though there were significant regional variations in the relative weights of the two principal communities - the Hindus and the Muslims - in the mixture.

Many of the important maritime ship owning merchants also simultaneously engaged in activities other than trade, such as revenue farming in respect of land revenue and/or customs and transit duties. An important consideration behind such diversification of economic activity and asset holding was risk minimization.

The last part of the lecture will deal with the relationship between the Indian maritime merchants and the Europeans - both the corporate enterprises as well as private traders - who became an increasingly important element in the Indian Ocean trade between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries.