Theme II

Trade and Markets

Trade and Markets
TRADE AND MARKETS
This Block discusses the history of trade and traders in the colonial period. Unit 3
focuses on merchants and markets in the first century of British rule. To explore the
specific nature of shifts that occurred in this period, the chapter begins with an account
of developments in the seventeenth century. From the extensive research on the
subject, we now know that traders in pre-colonial India did not operate only in the
margins of society, working with small amounts of capital, dealing in a limited range
of goods, buying and selling within the small confines of local society. A hierarchy of
trading links connected the port-towns to the hinterland, the villages to the qasba and
the larger urban centres. Hundis enabled complex transfers of commodities and capital
across vast distances. This vibrant network was sustained by trading communities
who, in fact, wielded considerable political power in different regions. All this changed
in significant ways in the eighteenth century. The weakening of the central power,
the growth of regional formations, and the outbreak of peasant rebellions disrupted
the flow of intra-regional trade. The expansion of British private trade and shipping
displaced local traders and undermined the indigenous shipping industry. This Unit
discusses these changes in detail, shows the pattern of early colonial trade, and the
dissimilar histories of different trading regions. Eastern and western India, Bengal
and Surat tell us contrasting stories of colonisation.

Unit 4 takes us into the subsequent phase of colonial history (1857-1947), a period
that witnessed dramatic changes in the pattern of trade. There was a general boom
in the volume of trade and India became integrated to a wider network of multilateral
exchange between Great Britain, United States of America and Japan. While the
Exchange Banks and international exporters consolidated their hold over the commerce
of the country, at another level we see the operation of a vast network of traders that
forged the links between different regions and connected the villages to the
international markets. This chapter focusses not only on the flows of international
trade but also on the traders who operated in the bazaars, and the peddlers who
extended the market into the countryside. It analyses the long-term trends in trade,
as well as the shorter-term fluctuations. It discusses the changing composition of the
trade over the period along with the shifting fortunes of different community of traders
– Chettiars, Marwaris, Shikarpuris. It helps us understand what colonialism meant
for trade and traders.

Bombay Harbour, 1731

Image Courtesy
Author: Samuel Scott (1702-1772); painting circa 1732-1733
Source: [Link] [Link]
bom/[Link]; [Link] https://
58 [Link]/wiki/File:Ships_in_Bombay_Harbour,_1731.jpg
 Merchants and
UNIT 3 MERCHANTS AND MARKETS: Markets: 1757-1857
1757-1857*
Structure
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The Background: An Overview of India’s Trading Economy in the Seventeenth
and Early Eighteenth Centuries
3.2.1 Rurban Trade
3.2.2 Monetisation
3.2.3 Urban Centres, Market Places and Production
3.2.4 Merchant Shipping
3.2.5 Banias and Sarrafs
3.3 The Eighteenth Century Crisis and the Prelude to Colonialism
3.3.1 The Crisis
3.3.2 Rise of European Private Trade
3.3.3 Decline of Indian Ports
3.4 Early Colonialism and India’s Foreign Trade, 1757-1800: Two Case Studies
3.4.1 Decline of Surat
3.4.2 The Case of Bengal
3.5 The Final Years of Transition: 1780-1800
3.6 The Flowering of the Colonial Economy: 1800-1857
3.6.1 Private European Merchants
3.6.2 Pattern of Early Colonial Trade
3.6.3 Post-1813 Colonial Trade
3.7 Deindustrialization: The Debate
3.8 Summary
3.9 Glossary
3.10 Exercises
3.11 Suggested Readings

3.1 INTRODUCTION
The period between the British subjugation of Bengal in 1757 and the transfer of
power in 1947 saw a dramatic transformation of the Indian economy. From being at
the centre of the Indian Ocean trading system as the principal provider of textiles,
finished goods and a variety of spices, India slipped to the rank of one of the poorest
country in the world. Paradoxically, this transformation was accompanied by the
extension of market economy and the rise of a modern economy based on machinery
and wage labour. The complexity of India’s economic experience in the two centuries
under review is generally and legitimately understood to have been embedded in the
structure of political and economic relations described as ‘colonialism’ coming in the
aftermath of the British subjugation of the subcontinent in course of the eighteenth
century. The present Unit intends to plot the story of India’s economic transformation
in two phases – between 1757 and 1857 when the colonial regime was cobbled together
largely under the initiative of the English East India Company and the century following
the assumption of India’s sovereignty by the British Crown. The second phase, the
theme of the next Unit, saw the greater integration of India into the world system of
trade and exchange and the beginning of modern industrialization in the subcontinent.
We will, in this Unit focus on the non-agrarian sector of India’s economy – on the
dynamics of indigenous merchant society and market networks as these came directly
under the impact of the new structures of economic relations that the ascendancy of
the English East India Company introduced.

*Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian, Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata 59

Trade and Markets
3.2 THE BACKGROUND: AN OVERVIEW OF INDIA’S
TRADING ECONOMY IN THE SEVENTEENTH
AND EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
Historical scholarship in the last three decades has substantially enhanced our understanding
of the Indian trading economy in the early modern period. The range of India’s commercial
networks and the vitality of the Indian trading community is a fairly well established fact.
No longer is Indian trade seen as being socially marginal or irrelevant or the Indian trader
as some kind of insignificant peddler of the Van Leur (see Unit 22 of MHI 105 for
details) variety. The overseas trade of the subcontinent was of impressive proportions
dealing with both the exotic and the ordinary and solidly grounded on a lively internal
market structure, which was supported by a network of integrated commercial institutions
as well as by links to the political and administrative establishments. India’s overseas
trade was characterized primarily by the export of textiles and a range of manufactured
products and spices and the import of bullion. The centrality of merchants and markets in
the working of India’s economy leaves little room for doubt or ambiguity about the nature,
scale or indeed, levels of development of the Indian economy in comparison with the
economies of Western Europe. The Indian trader was not simply a peddler engaged in
small, countless retail transactions in fragmented and volatile markets subject to chronic
fluctuations. The location of the subcontinent in the trading system of the Indian Ocean
combined with the advantages of India’s manufacturing potential that enabled her to place
at the world market textiles at competitive prices, facilitated the development of a complex
trading structure that was impressive in volume and value.
3.2.1 Rurban Trade
The seventeenth century constituted the golden years of India’s maritime trade. This was
largely the outcome of the stabilization of Mughal power in the subcontinent and the
consolidation of the Islamicate in West Asia. Both these sets of political developments
were instrumental in integrating the trading system of the Indian Ocean giving it a pan
Indian Ocean dimension and thereby producing an intricate network of commercial
exchanges and movement of peoples and produce. As the chief supplier of textiles, India
commanded a special place in the network exporting a huge range of goods and importing
in return a substantial volume of bullion. These bullion imports fed directly into the Mughal
mints that turned it over into the regnal coin, which was the principal instrument for both
revenue payments as well as commercial transactions. The export trade was integrally
connected with the subcontinent’s internal trade through the twin mechanisms of bullion
inflows and cash revenue payments. As the Mughal state required the cultivators to pay
land revenue in cash and not in kind and furthermore in the regnal coin, the pressure to
market agricultural production stimulated internal trade and absorbed the imports of specie
that entered the stream of exchange. A complex hierarchy of markets emerged to channel
the movements of a whole range of goods. Studies on this have suggested that for Northern
India, there were three principal types of markets. At the lowest level, rural produce was
exchanged in makeshift markets – periodic, temporary structures in large villages while
the commodities traded in were mostly necessities of life. Directly above these centres,
were regional markets catering to trade again mainly in essentials but the volume of
transactions was larger and the markets were fixed rurban centres called qasbas. Above
the qasbas, were large urban centres that directed the trade in high value goods including
a vast range of textiles for both elite consumption within the country as well as for overseas
markets in the Indian Ocean. Here it may be worthwhile to remember that the staple of
the Indian Ocean commerce was medium and coarse quality cloth that was extensively
used by the populations of west and south east Asia. Over and above this hierarchy of
markets was the long distance trade in grain transported in carts and by peripatetic
communities such as the Banjaras. The volume of this trade is not easy to quantify but
available clues would suggest that it was large. The Banjaras who organized the transport
of foodstuffs by land on pack oxen had in their large camps or tandas anything between
60 12000 and 20000 bullocks capable of carrying 1600 to 2700 tons of grain. Movements of
grain responded to the needs of marching armies during a campaign and it would seem Merchants and
that in the first half of the eighteenth century, when there was a marked increase in Markets: 1757-1857
political decentralization, the grain trade actually expanded – a case of a war economy
powering the trade in necessities.
3.2.2 Monetisation
The impulse for internal trade and the consolidation of markets (at various levels) was
largely the pressure exerted by the re-distributive mechanisms of the Mughal State in the
form of a huge revenue assessment and extraction. The emphasis on cash revenue
collections and the stimulus for cash crop production, according to Irfan Habib led to
increasing monetization of the economy, to stratification in rural society and over time to
large-scale peasant immiseration as the poorer of them contracted debts to pay the revenue
demand. The idea of the self sufficient and isolated village is no longer seen as tenable for
the available evidence indicates quite clearly that exchange of goods was to be found at
every level. Notwithstanding the dominance of subsistence production and the one way
flow of goods from village to urban centre, the coexistence of deficit areas with those of
surplus ones and the policy of the State to collect cash revenues generated pressures to
sell and thereby stimulate trade and exchange. Over and above this level of exchange,
there was the steady development of intra-regional trade that testified to the growing
integration of the Indian economy. The profusion of craft production, of textile manufacture
inevitably drew upon a wide range of raw materials that were not always locally available.
A case in point is the Gujarat-Bengal connection, where raw silk imports from Bengal
sustained the silk industry of Ahmedabad.
3.2.3 Urban Centres, Market Places and Production
India’s export trade threw its own hierarchy of urban centres and market places. The
centrality of textiles in the export trade meant that India’s chief port cities were located
around an arc of manufacturing and supply centres. The chief ports of seventeenth century
maritime India were Surat on the west coast, Hugli and Masulipatam on the east and
southeastern seaboards respectively. The export trade as mentioned earlier centred around
textiles that commanded flourishing markets through the century in west Asia. The trade
of the North European trading companies constituted but one segment in this trade for the
bulk of the textile production was absorbed by markets in the Persian Gulf and Southeast
Asia. Besides textiles, indigo, saltpeter, sugar and spices were important export items
(see Unit 22 of MHI 105), the movement of which was adequately supported by the
existing infrastructure of roads, communication networks and banking and insurance
facilities. Thus an exporting merchant based in Surat could draw on the produce of a wide
hinterland extending as far as Lahore and Burhanpur and Dacca. An interlocking system
of supply merchants and markets connected the port towns with the manufacturing interior
giving rise to a hierarchy of market centres and intermediary merchants who functioned
as brokers for the shipper and the export merchant.
While the great towns and port cities functioned as international concourse of merchants
engaged in long distance trade, the manufacturing towns in the interior served as market
centres where buyers through their agents negotiated with sellers. Export merchants
located in port cities contacted general brokers who in turn worked through commodity
brokers specialising in the supply of specific items. They in turn worked through under
contractors or sub brokers who were directly in touch with manufacturers or artisans.
Their access to the producers was contingent upon the existing system of cash advances
for production. Here, it is important to remember that for the greater part of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, weavers and artisans were price workers and were technically
free to turn over their produce to the open market. The actual business of industrial
production or of manufacture was organized in some cases by state or nobility sponsored
factories or karkhanas. For the rest, the manufacture was very much an individual activity
and in the case of textile production, arguably the most important line of manufacture, the
weaver and his loom constituted the basic unit of production (see Unit 19 of MHI-105).
Admittedly, weaving as an economic activity was a caste based occupation with specific
groups deploying their traditional skills in claiming a monopoly control over production of 61
Trade and Markets specified items. This was especially true of textiles – specific caste groups undertook the
business of manufacturing specialized cloth like red silk goods and resisted any attempts
by other groups to encroach on their preserve. The weaver was an independent artisan
who owned his loom but was dependent on the intermediary merchant for cash advances
to buy yarn and other raw materials (commonly known as putting out system). These
cash advances became critical in a situation where the poverty of the weaver and his
restricted access to markets forced the artisan to commit his produce to the creditor.
A number of important monographs on the weaving industry in the pre-colonial and early
colonial period have tended to stress the similarities between the putting out system in
Europe and the Indian method of textile production that relied on the system of commercial
advances. The system was different, for in the Indian case, the advances were almost
always in cash and never in raw materials. The weavers needed working capital to buy
raw materials and to support themselves during the season of manufacture. As the
Committee appointed by the English Company to enquire into the failure of the Surat
investment in 1794 commented, it was only through the under contractors that the weavers
found regular subsistence ‘by acknowledging submission to a people who pay them regularly
for their work as it comes from the looms besides occasionally assisting their exigencies
and supplying them in sickness’. K.N. Chaudhuri argues that implicit in the system of
advances was the idea of a contractual obligation on both sides. Just as the merchant was
assured of receiving his supplies on time with a reasonable degree of certainty, the weaver
regarded the advance as a deposit on orders. Once the money was delivered to the
weavers it created at once a short-term supply monopoly. This meant that if the buyer for
some reason did not accept the product they would have to forfeit the deposit. Of course
merchants took precautions to minimize this risk but during conditions of rising demand
and a responsive market, weavers could often exploit the situation to their advantage. In
fact it was precisely on this issue that the English East India Company faced a running
battle with the artisans and the intermediary brokers for the rejection of items supplied on
grounds of even technical deficiency (mostly measurement) resulted in the weavers selling
the rejected goods to other buyers at attractive prices.
3.2.4 Merchant Shipping
The diversity of markets and the overlapping levels of trade found reflection in the Indian
entrepreneurial structure that accommodated large wholesale merchants with access to
substantial capital assets and warehousing facilities and small retailers who combined
peddling with pilgrimage. The hierarchy in India’s commercial society was the product of
both sociological and functional impulses. Ashin Dasgupta spoke of the dichotomy between
the Muslim shippers located on the coast and the Hindu financiers and brokers whose
business was largely shore based. Neither of these categories were fixed – the taboo on
sea travel for instance did not apply with the same force in the Coromandel, where Hindu
merchants invested in shipping and performed physically voyages to southeast Asia. In
Surat, Masulipatam and Hugly, the principal ports of maritime India in the seventeenth
century, the most affluent group was the ship-owning merchants who operated the business
of export and freight. Examples of this category were the Chellabys and Ghafurs in Surat
who owned ships, traded on their own account besides letting out cargo space for the
region’s freight trade. A ship owning merchant generally earned his profits in three ways.
He could hire out a ship to more than a single merchant by taking on a cargo of goods on
commenda: the ship owner guaranteed to pay the shippers the value of the goods (principal)
and the agreed ratio of the profits unless the goods were not sold for some reason.
Alternatively, the ship owner could become a merchant in his own right by borrowing
money on bottomry: the ship itself in this case becoming the security for the loan and
whatever money was paid after paying the loan and the interest constituted the
ship-owner’s earnings. Finally the ship-owner could borrow at respondentia – the
ship-owner agreed to sell the goods on board as in commenda, returning the value of the
loan including the interest but only if the goods arrived safely at their destination. Of
course in a single voyage all three procedures could be used as indeed, they were in
seventeenth century Surat, where ship-owners reserved a part of the cargo space for
62 their own use. In fact, a large proportion of the profits came from the proceeds of the
freight business, which they monopolised. They let out their ships to pick up the season’s Merchants and
freight for which there was sizeable demand from among the multitude of the city’s small Markets: 1757-1857
traders – Patani Bohras, Parsis and even Hindu/Bania groups. The latter constituted an
important segment in the trading hierarchy – persistent in their commercial pursuits; they
could not be driven out of business by rich merchants no matter how influential.
3.2.5 Banias and Sarrafs
The shore based Hindu and Jain merchants, often described collectively as Bania who
traded on their own account, and performed a variety of inter-dependent commercial
functions, occupied the second level in the trading system. These related to the business
of brokerage, retail and supply and banking. In the Coromandel, the Chettys – the local
commercial caste, combined banking and brokerage with sea trade while in Bengal the
supply and banking sectors was shared between local commercial groups and resident
merchant groups from Western and Northern India. In addition, there were the Armenians
– the most important diasporic group and described by [Link] (1983) as ‘highly
skilled arbitrage dealers who developed geographically mobile forms of commerce with
an ability to measure risks of overland trade’. The banking sector was particularly well
articulated in course of the seventeenth century and was in the hands of Hindu groups
called sarrafs, who financed the production of trade and the marketing of imports. The
principal rationale behind the organization of indigenous banking in Mughal India was the
overriding need to convert imports of bullion into regnal coins, the only admissible currency
for all transactions. Sarrafs or moneychangers operated the business of assaying or
converting all coins – foreign, old into the coin of the realm and worked in tandem with the
Mughal mints whose capacity was stretched particularly during the peak trading season.
The mints too were under the control of the sarrafs who farmed the minting rights (for
details see Unit 23 of MHI-105).
Sarrafs also operated the hundi, which perhaps constituted the most important and
distinguishing feature of the Indian banking system. Simply put, a hundi was a bill of
exchange promising payment after a specified period ‘usually two months or less’ at a
particular place and allowing a discount which included interest, insurance charges and
cost of transmission. Hundis became in course of the seventeenth century the principal
instrument of remittance and the standard form of payment in all commercial transactions.
In long distance trade, this form of payment not only met the requirements of an expanding
demand for credit, but reduced the risks involved in the physical transfer of money across
uncertain frontiers. The sarrafs issued and discounted hundis that enjoyed by the end of
the seventeenth century extensive circulation not only within the subcontinent but also
beyond in the trading ports of the Indian Ocean.
The working of the hundis was as follows. Bankers took the responsibility of transferring
funds from one centre to another and would charge for the service an amount, which
depended on a number of variables. For instance this would take into account the volume
of traffic between the two points in question, the exchange rate between the two points
and the sarrafs own charges. Broadly speaking hundis were issued and discounted in
two ways. The first was to draw money from a sarraf against a promise to pay him in
another town where the hundi would be presented before the banker’s agent. The
alternative was to pay cash down to the banker with a promise from the latter that the
money would be recovered in the selected destination on presentation of the hundi. In the
former case, the sarraf ’s charges were higher since the risk devolved on him was
correspondingly higher and because there was a time element involved. The person who
drew the money had use of it for a period of time while the hundi matured. Between the
mid-seventeenth and the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the use of hundis grew
more complex and pervasive as networks proliferated and became more enmeshed. Major
transfers became possible across distant regions and attracted the comment of eighteenth
century observers like Muhammad Ali Khan, the author of the Mirat-i Ahmadi. “Instead
of collecting cash”, wrote Ali, “the possessor of the hundi could give it to one of his own
debtors and so free himself from that obligation. Not only this, similarly he may transfer it
to another, until it reaches a person against whom the drawee of the hundi has claims and
63
Trade and Markets who, therefore surrendering to the latter relieves himself of the debt” Thus, in other
words, hundi had become a form of money which was exchanged against cash at a
certain rate. This practice later known as anth grew rapidly in the eighteenth century and
we shall have occasion to talk about this at a later stage.
The social base of the merchant groups was by and large confined to specific Hindu
castes that may for the sake of convenience be described as Bania. This was an
occupational-cum caste category that included commercial castes, both Hindu and
Jain and occasionally Brahmins like the Nagars who in Gujarat had taken to the
commercial calling. There were other castes like the Khatris in the Punjab and U.P.,
the Chettis in the Coromandel all of whom lay claims to some sort of Vaisya status in
the caste order. The Muslim merchants, Bohras, who dominated the shipping and
export business, were in Gujarat for the most part although there were important
Turkish groups as well. In the Coromandel, there were the Chulias or Marakkaiyars,
an endogamous body of Tamil speaking Muslim merchants who dominated the trade
of the southern Coromandel. Caste and community differences would not appear to
have impeded the working of the trading system – the entire structure was predicated
on a measure of cooperation. Informal associations, linkages with the ruling power
structure and personal friendships were important as mediating influences that on
occasion could even deflect the market.
To conclude, one may on the basis of existing work suggest that the non-agrarian sector
of the Indian economy had evolved through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into a
dynamic and integrated system responding to market forces and capable of generating a
degree of capital accumulation. Irfan Habib in his classic essay on the ‘Potentialities of
Capitalist Development in Mughal India’, argued that from the point of view of merchant
capital, the economy had reached a fairly advanced stage. However, he added the caveat
that the credit and banking system, which was arguably the most impressive component
of the economy, catered primarily to commerce. There was no provision or indeed
predilection for any form of proto-industrial investment or experiment or technology. The
take off thus was not a foreseeable possibility. Equally significant were the constraints
that accompanied the workings of the Mughal revenue system that was intrinsically
exploitative and by its very nature bound to break down under the weight of its internal
contradictions. Practically no rural market existed for urban crafts and thus when an
agrarian crisis developed, it was bound to extend to the entire economy. Capital had failed
to develop an independent basis for itself – its fortunes lay with the Mughal ruling class
and the system they represented. Thus when the crisis came during the eighteenth century,
merchant capital floundered and faced the most serious challenge ever. The high profit
margins that the merchants had been used to created a sort of complacency and restricted
the possibility of technological innovations. The outcome was disastrous when the twin
pillars of political order and a sustainable demand market collapsed in the aftermath of
Mughal decline and the growing ascendancy of the English East India Company.

3.3 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CRISIS AND THE

PRELUDE TO COLONIALISM
The crisis of the eighteenth century has been in recent years one of the most debated issues
in Indian history. Was the century a period of unmitigated decline leading inevitably to the
British conquest of Hindustan? Was it a century of large-scale decentralization, when the
region came into its own to produce distinct cultural and social formations? Was
decentralization coterminous with decline or was that very much the product of a particular
reading that was only as valid as an alternative understanding of the same phenomenon?
These are questions that have cropped up in course of the debates between nationalists,
Marxists and later revisionists and we will have occasion to refer to these when we set out
to identify some of the more important developments that characterized the reorganization
of markets and merchants networks in course of the eighteenth century. For the moment
we shall focus on the actual components in the crisis – in other word locate the changes in
64 the existing political and commercial systems following the decline and collapse of the Mughal
Empire in the first half of the century. The regional manifestation of the political crisis was Merchants and
not uniform – Bengal prospered in the first half of the century and grew stronger while Markets: 1757-1857
Gujarat underwent a serious crisis in terms of political authority and economic stability. And
yet given the degree of integration in the Indian Economy, it was only natural that the crisis
affected all the regions in one way or the other especially in the sectors of trade and exchange.

3.3.1 The Crisis

What constituted the eighteenth century crisis? Simply expressed, this amounted to the
slackening hold of the central authority in Delhi over its provincial governors, the failure of
the provincial authorities to extract revenue from local agrarian society and control local
magnate influence or quell agrarian revolts, the virtual collapse of communications and
networks that hampered the easy movement of goods and credit, the contraction of demand
on the part of the Mughal ruling class for manufactured goods and items of trade and the
total collapse of all governance. This coincided with the disintegration of Muslim power in
west Asia and the steady expansion of European private trade in the Indian Ocean at a
time when profits from overseas trade were already under pressure. The result was a
series of cataclysmic blows to the overseas trading sector and to the local merchants who
faced a two-pronged crisis from about the second decades of the eighteenth century.
There were regional variations to this story but none that could offset the consequences
of the convergence of Mughal decline and European commercial penetration.
The vulnerability of the Mughal political edifice was apparent even as early as the closing
years of the seventeenth century. With the death of Aurangazeb in 1707, the emergence
of factional politics in the imperial court, widespread rural disturbances in the regions and
the eruption of Maratha raids in Hindustan created an unprecedented situation of insecurity.
In Gujarat itself, the premier maritime suba (province) of the Mughal Empire, the crisis
assumed a complex aspect. The increasing isolation of the region from the hinterland, a
direct consequence of Maratha raids compounded with the fissures within the region’s
political system to produce an extremely volatile situation for local merchants. The
contraction of the hinterland deprived Gujarati traders of the markets of Northern and
Central India, where their import items were usually marketed. Of greater consequence
was the collapse of the administration within the region after 1720 when the incursions of
the Marathas and their occupation of the Athavisi in 1723. The Athavisis was a
conglomerate of twenty-eight villages from where Surat had traditionally drawn her
revenues. Imperial dictates after 1720 lost their teeth as every Mughal official began to
covet the lucrative posts within the administration. In Surat the posts coveted were those
of the Mutasaddi (incharge of the port) and the Qiladar (incharge of the fort) and the
Admiralty of the Imperial Fleet. With a collapsing revenue structure, the administration
took recourse to a policy of mercantile taxation precisely at a time when profits from
trade were flagging, The merchants responded to the crisis by agitating against the city
administration but only with limited success.

3.3.2 Rise of European Private Trade

The consequences of these developments on Surat’s trade can be easily imagined. The
loss of markets in Hindustan together with conditions of instability in West Asia undermined
the foundations of Surat’s prosperity. As early as 1707, when Gujarati shipping was at its
height, the increased volume of Gujarat’s exports had glutted markets in the western
Indian Ocean so much so that voyages had proved unprofitable. In the following decades,
the situation deteriorated even further with the expansion of British private trade. Asian
shipping gave way to British private trade as local freighters preferred to invest their
cargo on European bottoms in the hope of better protection against the increasing problem
of piracy on the high seas. The traditional trading order, which had so far revolved around
Surat’s preeminence and the leading role of her merchant shippers cracked up in the
wake of political insecurity and European competition. Merchant protest proved ineffective
for it neither arrested the decline of the city’s trade nor the decay in the administrative
system. It was, however, instrumental in introducing the English East India Company as a
potential protector and political aspirant and in facilitating a new alignment between sections 65
Trade and Markets of the city’s commercial population and the English East India Company. This in turn
became the prelude to early colonial control in the region.

3.3.3 Decline of Indian Ports

The effects of the political crisis were apparent so far as the region’s trade and markets
were concerned. The value of Surat’s export trade dipped from 16 million rupees in 1700
to 6 million in 1740s and never recovered in the decades to follow. The crisis of the export
market had its inevitable repercussions on the internal trading and finance structure that
had sustained it in the past. The hundi network was seriously undermined as merchants
and European factors found it increasingly difficult to avail of credit. Interest rates escalated
and Surat suffered from a wave of bankruptcies. The contraction of bullion imports affected
currency – by the 1760s the problem of debased currency became serious. The Muslim
shippers were among the most adversely affected as the competition of European private
traders and their increasing political influence in the city cut into their ventures. Bereft of
any protection from the state, they failed to put up an effective resistance against the
aggression of the English traders who steadily encroached upon the freight trade turning
it over into a virtual monopoly by the 1750s.
The decline of Surat was paralleled by the decay of Hugli on the east coast. The old port
city made way for the rising English centre of Calcutta and British shipping. The
ramifications of the Mughal crisis were markedly different in the Bengal suba. Here, a
succession of competent governors had built up an efficient administration by securing
the cooperation of the local elite groups – magnates and bankers who played a vital role
in the machinery of revenue management and collection. The benefits of internal security
and growth did not, however, insulate the province from the larger effects of the eighteenth
century crisis or from the aggressive expansion of English private trade. The decline of
west Asian markets did not leave the Asian merchants in Bengal entirely unaffected.
Further, the Surat-Bengal trade in raw silk and cotton entered a period of rapid decline
especially after 1765 – a development that adversely affected the credit networks. The
increasing menace of piracy in the high seas aggravated the situation as more and more
merchants preferred to tie their cargo with English country shipping. In Bengal as
elsewhere, English private trade edged Asian competition altogether in the sector of export
trade and freight. The first half of the eighteenth century also saw a corresponding expansion
of European commerce in Bengal bringing in its wake, increasing imports of silver,
employment opportunities for supply merchants and weavers with the result that the
commercial and banking sector continued to grow and represent a dynamic component in
the Bengal economy. However, the displacement of Asian merchants shipping, the rise of
Calcutta and the English private traders and the articulation of their aspirations, the fall
out of the commercial crisis of Hindustan on Bengal’s inter-regional and coastal trade did
not bode well as future developments indicated.
Both the intensity and spread of Maratha raids in the Mughal territories and the revolts of
peasant castes like the Jats and Sikhs against Mughal authority in the heartland and the
Punjab resulted in a serious agrarian and commercial crisis. Agricultural production suffered
while the connecting linkages between agriculture and trade were severely disrupted.
The complex grid of markets and communication networks that had supported India’s
internal and export trade collapsed leading to shortages of production, currency deficit
and urban decay. The European Companies in Western India, for instance, commented
extensively on the shortage of yarn and other raw materials that weavers faced as a
result of the Maratha raids and the abandonment of looms by artisan groups and the
existence of famine like conditions. The large scale incidence of Sikh revolts in the Punjab,
the Afghan and Rajput uprisings in the Awadh region played havoc with the inter-regional
traffic in the 1720s resulting in a severe shortage of cash in the Punjab and the
Delhi- Agra region.
The phenomenal expansion of English private trade in the Indian Ocean had far reaching
effects. Not only did it adversely affect the operations of Indian traders, it fostered a
growing tendency among Company officials and private traders to intervene in the regional
66 political set up and manipulate the prevailing disaffection to their advantage. Even before
the articulation of such political ambitions became a tangible factor that threatened to alter Merchants and
the existing equations of power, the influence of the English East India Company had become Markets: 1757-1857
a critical determinant in the realignment of India’s overseas trading system. The Company’s
monopoly control over the freight trade meant that the Muslim shippers were displaced and
that their hopes of readjusting to the crisis were slim. At the same time, the growing strength
of the Company encouraged local merchants whose interests were not immediately
threatened by the Company’s activities to contemplate a closer partnership with the Company
as a counterpoise to the decaying Mughal administration and to the threats of the Maratha
contenders. Collaboration of a sort was thus built into the emerging structure of colonial
dominance and served to inflect the process of realignment in India’s trading sector.

3.4 EARLY COLONIALISM AND INDIA’S FOREIGN

TRADE, 1757-1800: TWO CASE STUDIES
The expansion of British private trade in the second and third decades of the eighteenth
century emboldened the Company servants to manipulate the existing political set up to
their advantage. Without entering into the debate whether the English take over in Bengal
was by design or accident, it is important to stress the fact that the Company authorities
from about the 1740s strenuously attempted to extend their privileges and were prepared
to resist the local administration in the face of any encroachment – real or perceived. In
Bengal, these ‘privileges’ assumed the form of extending the provisions of the Mughal
farman (royal decree) of 1717 for carrying on duty free trade, to fortifying their trading
settlement in Calcutta and even extending protection against fugitives escaping Mughal
law. In western India, the focus of Company politics was control over the Imperial
Admiralty that would facilitate and formalise the Company’s efforts to dominate the shipping
in the Indian Ocean and to give Company servants in Bombay and Surat a decided edge
over the region’s freight trade to the Gulfs of Persia and Arabia. The strategies adopted
by the Company towards their political project lay in forging connections with important
local groups, potential collaborators against the ruling administration. Assuming the role of
protectors and patrons of client groups against the arbitrary Mughal administration, the
Company represented their interests with threats of force and succeeded by the late
1750s in building a viable support base for their ventures. The strategies produced the
desired results – backed by merchants, magnates and other disaffected groups, the
Company assumed effective power in Bengal and Surat in 1757 and 1759 respectively.
These victories enabled the Company to become a major player in regional politics and
use the benefits of political office to pursue their commercial interests. The take over had
important implications and as the Company enforced measures to dominate the carrying
trade and to achieve a monopsonistic control over the purchase of export items, the
economy suffered from certain distortions.
The effects of Mughal decline and of the expansion of the English East India Company in
the trade of the Indian Ocean did not spare any particular merchant group even if some
fared worse than others. But did this mean that the trading economy went completely
under even before the historic date of 1757 that inaugurated a new era in the commercial
growth of the English Company? For it is important to remember that it was not before
the end of the eighteenth century, that the nature of India’s overseas trade changed
substantially and she became a supplier of primary goods oriented entirely to the needs of
the metropolitan economy. This Section proposes to examine the nature and functioning
of the India’s trading economy in the critical half century of transition, to analyse the
status and strategies of India’s merchant groups as they struggled to come to terms with
altered reality embodied in the emergence of the English East India Company as the
dominant player in the economy. We shall concentrate on two regions – Bengal and
Western India, two rather atypical and contrasting cases – one, where the effects of
Mughal decline were particularly acute in the first half of the eighteenth century but one
that survived better the early colonial onslaught, whereas the other which escaped the
tyranny of Mughal decline but which was the first to go under in the face of early colonial
penetration.
67
Trade and Markets 3.4.1 Decline of Surat
For purposes of convenience, the study will be divided into two time periods – one between
1757-1780, when the traditional structure and orientation of India’s overseas trade sustained
an irreversible and major dislocation subsequent to the establishment of the English East
India Company’s monopolistic control over shipping in the Indian Ocean and the other
between 1780 and 1818, when Indian merchants attempted to adapt to the changing
conditions. Also by 1818, the colonial economy had been put in place and the decisive
shifts in the structure, orientation and compositions of India’s trade had been registered.
For Surat, the figures of decline are pretty dramatic. Ashin Dasgupta (1979) spoke of a
severe slump in the value of trade from 16 million rupees in the last years of the seventeenth
century to 3 million in 1740 – a trend that continued right through the century. The expansion
of English private trade in the western Indian Ocean in the 40s and 50s of the 18th century,
documented by Holden Furber (1965) was an additional factor that aggravated the
commercial crisis of the Indian merchants. The assertion of English private trade became
in effect a major determinant of the Castle revolution of 1759, when the Company
assumed charge of the Imperial Admiralty, Surat castle and shared power with the ruling
Nawab. The transformation of the Company’s political status enabled the authorities to
consolidate their commercial ventures even if the markets in west Asia remained sluggish.
Beginning around the 1720s, the private trade of the Company was dominated by the
presence of senior servants at Bombay and Surat. Both the Governor of Bombay and the
Chief of Surat exploited their office to further their private deals. Furber gives us a detailed
account of Robert Cowan (Governor of Bombay) who was extensively engaged in private
shipping and freighting and was eventually dismissed from Company service in 1734.
Henry Lowther, Chief of Surat and William Wake, Governor of Bombay were important
players who made use of their position and entered into partnerships with local notables to
prosecute a vigorous trade. What is important in the story of Bombay’s private trade is
the growing resolve of the English merchants to wrest political control for commercial
ends. Their confidence derived largely from the growing success of the Bombay Marine
– the Company’s naval force – in eliminating rival claims over maritime jurisdiction, thereby
claiming control over navigation and shipping. Indian trade and shipping had to accept
English colours and the protection of the Marine if they were to traffic at all. The visible
expansion of English shipping was not as yet at this stage accompanied by a fundamental
alteration in the orientation of Maritime India’s trading structure. European trade remained
oriented to traditional markets and dealt with traditional commodities. The change was
thus, at least in the first phase restricted to the growing European preponderance in the
carrying agency and the resultant displacement of traditional Muslim mercantile groups.
The Castle Revolution of 1759 largely sponsored by Surat’s Hindu merchant groups and by the
English servants in their capacity as interested private traders introduced important change
since the political set up. The Company assumed the position of Qiladar and with it enjoyed
considerable powers of mediation in the city’s administration. This enhanced their commercial
advantages. Michelguglielmo Torri (1982) has argued that the Revolution enabled the private
traders to formalize the monopoly control over the city’s freight trade. Of the officials engaged
in the Gulf trade, the most prominent were W.A. Price, Chief of Surat (1759-62, 1767-69.
1771-74), and Thomas Hodges, Chief of Surat (1762-67) and Governor of Bombay (1767-71).
The first stage in the enforcement of the monopoly was taken in 1759-60, when it was announced
that only those Surat ships hired by the English Chief and chartered by him to the city freighters
who wished to send goods to the Gulfs would be allowed to proceed. What this in effect meant
was that the ships of the English Chief and those of his favorites had exclusive rights to
proceed first. At a meeting called the Noorbundy, the English Chief conferred with the shipper
freighters about the rates of freight prevailing that season and also the commission due to the
English Chief and then given permission to pick up the season’s freight. Others were not
technically prohibited from making independent voyages but the Chief had sufficient power to
render these difficult if not impossible. We come across a number of conflicts with senior
Surat merchants like Mulna Fakirodin in the Mayor’s Court.
The workings of the monopoly did not always go as anticipated. As Torri has shown, the
68 interests of the Surat Chief were occasionally at variance with the English representatives
in Basra who complained to the Court of Directors. Also the Muslim merchants through Merchants and
their contacts with the Turkish authorities had occasion to forward their complaints to Markets: 1757-1857
London with the result that regulations to free the trade were introduced in 1769. These
regulations prohibited all discrimination and ordered that all merchants, ‘whether Muslim,
Hindu or Parsi or English’ were free to put up their ships for freight for the Gulfs of Persia
and the Red Sea. On paper, these regulations threw open the freight trade, as merchants
no longer had to cope with the excesses of the Surat Chief or Bombay Governor. However,
these were late in coming and did not immediately restore the situation. However, Torri
argues that the Muslim merchants of the city did succeed in regrouping and recovered
important ground by the closing decades of the century.
While there is some evidence of the partial revival of Muslim shipping and the initiative of
the Muskat Arabs in the trade of the western seas in the last decades of the century, it is
difficult to argue for a Muslim recovery so to speak. There is little doubt that the Gulf
trade continued for the greater part of the century to operate at very low levels and that
the older 16 million mark was never repeated. The displacement of the Muslim
ship-owning category was irreversible and the group was never able to recover its former
position of advantage. The undermining of the English monopoly in the 1770’s did not
redress the situation for trade itself by this time was on the wane. The collapse of Gulf
markets following conditions of political insecurity in west Asia and the diversion of
European commercial interests in China boded fundamental changes for India’s trading
structure.
The community of non-Muslim merchants – the Banias and the Parsis fared better under
the conditions of transition. For one, their interests did not immediately clash with those of
the English private traders. Their investment in shipping and the freight trade was only
marginal with the result that they were quite prepared to switch to English carriage.
Further, their services as brokers and bankers made them indispensable for the conduct
of English trade. In Western India, the connection was particularly significant. Here, a
combination of circumstances resulted in the formation of a critical partnership between
the English Company and the Bania community, the latter emerging as key financiers of
the Company’s trade and politics. The relative success of the Banias was made possible
by their access to capital and credit instruments that became vital for the survival of the
Company in western India. This is not to suggest that the community did not face the
pressures of declining demand, of capital shortage or the contraction of Surat’s Gulf
trade. What seems to have happened was that following the stabilization of Indian politics
around the 1780s when there was a partial reintegration of trading networks in Hindustan
and Central India, the Bania merchants were able to adapt to the changing situation and
consolidate their business as supply merchants and financiers. Thus, as Lakshmi
Subramanian has argued, whereas the emergence of the Anglo-Bania order had occurred
in a period of languishing trade and political crisis immediately preceding the Castle
Revolution, its consolidation was carried out in conditions of resurgence and revival of
trade. That brings us to the second phase in the period of transition, when following the
stabilization of English power in Eastern India and the consolidation of indigenous regimes
like those of Mysore, Hyderabad and the Maratha power in the Deccan and Central
India, there was a partial integration of trading channels and credit flows in the hinterland.

3.4.2 The Case of Bengal

Developments in Bengal’s trading economy in the years immediately following Plassey
(1757) tended to affect more adversely the local merchants and their trading networks.
As far as Bengal’s overseas trade was concerned, the rise of the Calcutta fleet had by
the 1740s displaced the local Asian shipping operating from Hugli. The more important
long-term change was the shift to the east – the so-called commercial revolution in the
Indian Ocean that Furber (1976) later elaborated. From about the 1760s the focus of
English shipping and trade in the Indian Ocean moved from the declining west Asian
markets to the ports in Southeast Asia and China. This was the harbinger of the new
colonial economy that went beyond the traditional Asian networks to create a new set of
global linkages adhering to the imperatives of the metropolitan economy. 69
Trade and Markets The results of the British take over on Bengal’s internal economy were even more brutal.
The assertion of political power by the Company was an effective weapon in the removal
of limits on private trade. The Company servants could and did make use of the political
change to claim the right of exemption from custom duties, local dues and to challenge the
workings of established state monopolies. The 1757 grant following Plassey that confirmed
the British trading privileges in Bengal, the guarantees that goods bearing the Company’s
dastak (seal) would pass without paying customs resulted in an unprecedented expansion
of British private trade. Not only did this affect the custom receipts of the Bengal Nawabs,
it posed grave threats in terms of law and order forcing the Bengal Nawabs to confront
the Company. The confrontations were in vain as the English traders eroded the traditional
preserve of local merchants, and aggressively trafficked in opium and saltpetre. The
increasing investment in Bihar’s opium was in itself the product of the burgeoning China
trade, the dynamics of which reflected all too clearly the emergence of a colonial economy
and a new trading dispensation. Indigenous supply merchants were squeezed out of business
as the Company exercised monopoly control over the saltpetre and opium business. Even
earlier, the textile trade had come under greater supervision with the result that the status
of the artisan and merchant changed. From being independent price workers, they became
Company weavers forced to commit their produce to the Company appointed gumashtas
(agents). The decay of manufacturing towns like Dacca and the collapse of the indigenous
merchants – Seths and Basaks – testified to the changes that had set in in Bengal’s
trading economy. The subordination of the economy to the requirements of the English
Company’s global commerce worked itself out in the closing decades of the eighteenth
century, which witnessed the configurations of the colonial economy.
In conclusion, one may suggest that in the period of transition between 1757 and 1780, the
Indian economy was subject to a variety of pressures, which threatened to alter the basis
and orientation of the traditional structures of trade and merchant networks. Admittedly, the
orientation of India’s trade remained with traditional Asian markets and on the bi-lateral
exchange of goods for specie. K.N. Chaudhuri (1983) in fact made this point when he
argued that Indian trade for half a century after 1757 continued to operate along traditional
channels and its composition was based on the exchange of fine textiles, foodstuffs and
other materials for precious metals and manufactured products. However, the activities of
the Company in controlling the freight and shipping in western India or in controlling the
supply of export goods in Bengal were not without consequence. In Bengal, the elimination
of the rival European trading Companies and the local Asian merchants resulted in a
long-term decline of Bengal’s European commerce. After 1765, with the Company’s
acquisition of the Diwani that gave them the right to the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and
Orissa (Odisha), there was a growing tendency to deploy Indian revenues in trade. This
affected the imports of bullion into the economy resulting in serious deficits of coin. The
ruthless expansion of private traders in the internal trade of Bengal undermined the moral
economy and left merchants and bankers permanently crippled. The impact of Company
controls on weavers, in order to monopolise their produce severely affected the artisans as
they were compelled to submit to the Company’s coercion. In western India, the situation
was somewhat different. The Company was just one player among many and did not enjoy
the benefits of a secure revenue base. Consequently it was critically dependent on local
financial support. The continuing importance of the Gulf demand for Western India’s textiles
meant that the weavers and merchants could not be forced to produce exclusively for the
Company. It was only at the very last years of the century that the Company could contemplate
extension of coercive measures in western India and that too very tentatively.
Regional variations in economic performance were closely linked to the timing and nature
of British political penetration. These have added fuel to the more recent debates about
the nature of the early colonial impact on the trading economy of eighteenth century
India. We shall have occasion to refer to these once we plot the developments that followed
in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, when slowly but inexorably the colonial
economy was assembled. From about the late 70s and 80s of the century, India’s overseas
trade changed direction although it was not before 1800, that the outlines of the new
70 economy became perceptible.
 Merchants and
3.5 THE FINAL YEARS OF TRANSITION: 1780-1800 Markets: 1757-1857
The post-1780 situation saw the growing influence of the Calcutta and Bombay trading
ports and their impact upon the adjacent hinterland economies. In part these consequences
signified the end of an older trading order and the slow and sometimes almost ad hoc
assembling of the colonial economy. The initiative lay very much with the English East India
Company and its servants who in their private capacity used the newly acquired political
authority to eliminate all competition and explore new possibilities of trade that linked India
to the larger trading world. However, for most of the period, the imperatives of early colonial
trade constituted an important but not exclusive determinant in the realignment of merchant,
market and credit structures in the subcontinent. The imperatives of Company trade, constituted
a very important but not an exclusive determinant of the country’s trading economy. The
realignment of merchant and market networks in the last decades of the eighteenth century
were as much in response to the emerging colonial factor as they were to indigenous stimuli
that came in the wake of the new balance of power that the presence of the Maratha
Confederacy and other regional polities like those of Hyderabad, Mysore and even the
Punjab represented. C.A. Bayly (1983) in this connection, has argued that the early colonial
economy in India had indigenous origins in the sense that the external or colonial demand
factor converged with the internal one to produce a situation that generated a variety of
opportunities for commercial groups and stimulated a measure of urban growth evident in
the rise of towns like Nagpur, Mirzapore and Benaras.
The political context for the trading economy of India in the closing decades of the century
was determined largely by the expanding presence of the English East India Company
and by the stabilization of Maratha power in central and western India. The rise of the
cross-country trade routes provides us an example of the reintegration of commercial and
credit connections that followed in the wake of tribute payments that tied up the areas of
the Maratha Confederacy with its centre in Poona. The annual movement of tribute
payments from Baroda, Ahmedabad, Nagpur and Gwalior to Poona working simultaneously
with renewed pilgrimage traffic under Maratha patronage stimulated commercial
exchanges that in turn fed into the expanding trade of the Calcutta and Bombay commercial
poles. For example, Bombay’s trade with Poona was so impressive even before 1770 that
Charles Malet, the English Resident in Poona had occasion to remark that ‘a state of
hostility with this empire little affects the commercial intercourse which must be attributed
to its being in the interests of the farmers of the customs and landholders not to impede
the intercourse and as to the latter, it must certainly ever be our interest to promote it’.
However, by the 1790s, Bombay’s trade with Gujarat – the cotton bowl of the region –
became perceptibly more significant in view of Bombay’s growing trade in raw cotton
with China. This coincided with the emergence of a further line of dependency tying the
eastern Maratha domain to the Calcutta commercial pole (? port). Increasing Bengal
demand for raw cotton from the Maratha cotton bearing tracts in Central India like
Amrawati and Nagpur through Mirzapur stimulated the growth of middle sized towns
engaged in the supply of cotton. This was a genuine case of transition – drawing from
both local stimuli as well as from the pressures of a changing external situation.
The rise and growth of Mirzapur and of Benaras as a financial centre supporting the
cotton trade best illustrates the dynamics of a trading economy in transition. The context
for the emergence of Mirzapore was provided by the rise of cross-country trades supported
by the transactions of the Maratha Confederacy and the operations of the English East
India Company. The latter’s financial operations resulted largely from the dispatch of the
Bengal surplus into the deficit presidencies of Madras and Bombay funneled through the
existing credit network of Indian financiers and dovetailed into the inter-regional commercial
network. To begin with, both these factors were significant in the reactivation of the
cotton traffic between northern, central and eastern India. By 1776, Mirzapore had emerged
as the great cotton mart of the Benaras district and Benaras the great financial capital of
the region. Enjoying the benefits of political security under the Rajas, Benaras became a
key conduit for the cotton trade and a major centre of hundis that financed both the
tribute transfer operations of the Awadh Nawabs and the English Company as well as the 71
Trade and Markets cotton trade of the local merchants. The steady growth in Maratha demand for silk and
luxury fabrics as well as coarse textiles for the armed forces began to exert a strong
pressure on the region’s balance of trade situation and it became clear that the region was
on the verge of a massive take off. Thus Bayly argues that the internal demand factor
represented by the Maratha requirements had already gone a long way in making
Mirzapore’s commercial reputation and its accessibility to the English Company. Thus
when the time came, it proved easy to expand the cotton trade for the purpose of
re-export, first to Bengal and then to China. In other words, indigenous developments had
created a situation of expansion and adaptation in Mirzapore and Benaras both of which,
thereafter could adjust to the emerging colonial situation.
The colonial factor worked thus. From the late 18th century, Bengal was not in a position
to meet the demands at Dacca and Murshidabad for medium and high quality cloth. This
coincided with an unexpected development in 1784, when it was decided to bring cotton
overland from central India and Bundelkhand to be transported by river to Bengal. This
spurred the growth of towns like Kalpi, Farrukhabad and Mirzapore and Agra that were
already beginning to play a nodal role in the inter-regional commerce of textiles and cotton.
The year 1784 was a turning point for the reduction of duties on tea in Britain created a
strong demand for the commodity. But tea could be bought only in exchange for raw
cotton, which created a huge demand for the product. The subsequent rise in the price of
Gujarat’s cotton made it profitable to import Mirzapore cotton. In fact the connection
became so close that between 1790 and 1820, the price of cotton at Mirzapore depended
entirely on the relative prices in China, the anticipated demand there and the quantity
likely to be produced in Gujarat.
The gradual reorientation of the Indian economy to the pressures of Company trade was
not without benefit to Indian commercial groups. While the displacement of India’s traditional
trade had undoubtedly undermined Indian shippers and exporters forcing them to play a
subordinate if not nonexistent role in the changing set up, the realignment of markets and
merchant networks in the half century of transition enabled the regrouping and deployment
of merchant capital in the proto colonial trade of the late eighteenth century. Bania
merchants collaborated with the European private merchants in the expanding trade of
cotton in Gujarat. Naupatti bankers were active in Mirzapore’s cotton traffic. The
community of bankers consolidated their links with the Company emerging as key
collaborators of the new regime. In western India, their presence was especially important
as they handled the huge flow of credit transfers that proved vital for the survival of the
Company establishment in Bombay.

3.6 THE FLOWERING OF THE COLONIAL

ECONOMY: 1800-1857
The Indian trading economy in the first colonial century was distinguished principally by a
massive fall in the share of indigenous traders in foreign trade, a complete cross over to
raw material exports in place of finished goods and a shift to new markets in the Indian
Ocean, like China and Southeast Asia. Together, these changes helped integrate the Indian
economy to the larger world system with its nerve centre in Western Europe – equally,
these changes destroyed the structures of traditional business and trade dispossessing
certain groups while enabling others to find new opportunities in the changing scenario.
The Company-British private trader combine established a clear domination over the
growing sector of India’s export trade, which even by the closing decades of the previous
century had shifted to markets in the eastern Indian Ocean. The change in direction was
fed by a change in commodity composition – textiles, the traditional export staple giving
way to raw cotton, opium and indigo, all of which facilitated purchases of Chinese tea and
speeded up the integration of the Indian economy into the global system.

3.6.1 Private European Merchants

The assembling of the colonial economy was a near logical sequel to the political expansion
72 of the English East India Company and the spectacular expansion of English private trade
that among other things intensified the problem of remittance. This in turn inflected the Merchants and
course of overseas trade making inevitable an artificial link up of trade transfers between Markets: 1757-1857
India, Great Britain and China and thereby setting in motion a new trading pattern and
structure. The principal carriers of the new and burgeoning trade were private European
merchants, who enjoyed a special license from the Company to carry on the country
trade, which the Company could not handle. As agents for investment and the remittance
of private savings of civilian and military officials of the English Company, they played a
key role before extending their ventures to finance the import and export of the country
trade. They organized themselves into Agency Houses – sometime around the 1780s –
and by the end of the century, became the most important trading group in terms of both
numbers and the volume of traffic they dominated. Their number increased from 15 in
1790 to 27 in 1828, 61 in 1835 and finally to 93 in 1846. Between 1783 and 1813, when the
Charter Act partially ended the East India Company’s India monopoly, the Agency Houses
were very closely connected with the Company officials who were also their constituents.
Their shipment of country goods to Europe were confined to the privilege trade, i.e.,
space hired out in the holds of the Company’s East India men. Most of their energies
were directed to the China trade where they shipped opium and cotton, key staples in
financing the tea investment of the Company and also the principal channels of remittance.
The Company encouraged private traders – both Indians and Europeans – to engage in
the trade and hand over proceeds of their sales to its representatives in Canton (China).
The English East India Company granted licenses to select private traders to carry on
business, which the Company could not handle, creating in the process a kind of
sub- monopoly. The latter repaid the merchants in bills of exchange drawn on their treasuries
in India or on the Court of Directors in London. A close bond was thus formed between
the Company and the Agency Houses. Historians have seen the Agency Houses as the
main instrument through which western capitalism and business institutions were introduced
into the subcontinent in response to the requirements of the world market. Thus political
subjugation and the imperatives of remitting profits to England created a situation where
the produce of Indian villages serviced European trade – a development that was hardly
natural or born out of the spontaneous pressures of market and competition.

3.6.2 Pattern of Early Colonial Trade

The configurations of early colonial trade were determined largely by changes in the
development of trade relations between India, China and England. Here tea played an important
role. The popularity of tea in England generated a huge demand for this exotic product of
China. Britain had hardly anything to offer in exchange for tea and with the mounting pressure
against bullion exports. The financing of tea imports required an imaginative rerouting of
Indian produce that enjoyed a demand in the Chinese market. Cotton and opium provided
the key to Britain’s problems of trade balance. At the same time, the triangular trade
arrangements seemed to solve the problems of remittance. Integrating the movement of
funds between Britain, China and India through bills of exchange drawn on London or on
the Company treasuries in India, the Company and the private traders were assured of
regular channels of capital and remittance facilities. Thus private merchants shipped cotton
and Opium to China, deposited the proceeds of their traffic into the Company’s treasury at
Canton and received bills of exchange drawn either on London or India. The Company on
its part had access to treasure that it could deploy to purchase consignments of tea. It was
this complex interlocking of financial and commercial interests that shaped India’s trading
economy and exposed Indian merchants and producers to an altogether new set of
circumstances over which they had very little control. The items that entered this new trade
were chiefly raw cotton and opium followed by indigo and sugar.
A quantitative analysis of India’s foreign trade reflects a very high rate of growth. According
to [Link]’s estimates, exports expanded from Rs. 68 million in 1814-15 to Rs.183
million in 1853-54. The expansion in imports was even more impressive from Rs.11.9
million to Rs.124 million in the same period. Bombay by virtue of its locational proximity to
the cotton bowl of India enjoyed an edge in the raw cotton traffic. By 1805, the aggregate
amount of cotton exported from Bombay, amounted to 80,000 bales of cotton. The principal
73
Trade and Markets agency houses handling this traffic were Forbes & Co., Fawcett & Co., Alexander
Adamson & Co. and Tate & Co. Their investments principally lay in shipping cotton
consignments to China and Britain and reinvesting their dividends either in tea or in bills of
exchange. The trade in raw cotton did not turn out to be of long standing and was soon
superceded by the opium traffic that dominated the China trade for more than half a
century.
The two outlets for Indian opium were Calcutta and Bombay, with their proximity to
opium producing areas in Bihar and Malwa respectively. Barring small amounts shipped
to Malaysia and Indonesia, these exports were destined for China. The agency houses
dominated the trade in Bengal where it was managed as a state monopoly. The government
gave out loans to the cultivators, brought the product to Calcutta and there auctioned it
each month generally well above the cost price to private merchants who shipped it to
China. In Bombay, the situation was different for the Company here made no attempt to
monopolise its production or trade. The fragile basis of the Company’s authority in western
India, the relative strength and independence of local traders and the web of interests that
connected the merchant/banker with the princely states of western and central India and
the Portuguese private traders stationed in coastal enclaves like Daman and Diu to oversee
a clandestine traffic in the produce combined to work in favour of the local merchants,
exporters and suppliers.

3.6.3 Post-1813 Colonial Trade

The expansion of India’s foreign trade in the decades after the Charter Act of 1813
coincided with the second phase in the development of the agency houses. A large number
of new houses came into existence. These were formed largely by adventurers from
Britain. Faced with competition, these houses tended to explore other fields for investment
– and came up eventually with indigo. A temporary demand for the dye combined with the
problem of Bengal’s balance of payments made indigo an attractive proposition. What
followed was thus an overextension of trade and indigo production, which in the long run
created more problems for the houses. The most serious problem was one of wildly
fluctuating markets – an inevitable fall out of the remittance factor. This hiked up prices in
Calcutta independent of its prices in London and the result was a glut on the London
market. This combined with the contraction of fluid capital in Bengal aggravated the
situation. The transfer of the Company’s debt and a slump in prices in 1825 proved to be
the final straw. Bullion imports fell off while a number of agency houses sold their assets
and left. Between 1830 and 1833, the entire edifice crumbled wiping out a generation of
agency houses. A new crop came up after the 1830s to inaugurate a very different phase
of Indo-European business.
So far, we have focussed on the changes in the commodity composition of India’s exports.
A very major transformation occurred in the field of her imports as well. The period of the
Charter Acts corresponded with the most productive phase of the Industrial revolution in
Britain. The phenomenal expansion of the British cotton industry combined with the high
price elasticity of demand for British textiles in India and the new rate of customs levied
in Calcutta in 1815 to produce a flood of imports of cotton piece goods, twist and yarn
from Britain into India.
What was the impact of these developments on Indian merchants and their commercial
networks? The disappearance of handlooms from India’s exports and the subordinate
position that she subscribed to in the new system of trade and balance of payments were
obvious and crippling liabilities that early nationalists and economic observers commented
upon. To what extent did the new economy dispossess indigenous enterprise; promote
de-industrialization and block avenues of capitalist growth and accumulation for Indian
merchants? We shall attempt to address these questions by looking at the way in which
the new economy functioned and the location of Indian merchants in the dynamics of the
new system and its workings. One thing needs to be constantly stressed and that is the
differential advantage enjoyed by British traders in the new system as a direct consequence
of British political control. Also the very nature of the trade given that it was largely
74
induced by extra market considerations of balancing payments and remittance servicing Merchants and
subjected it to violent fluctuations of both the British economy as well as the policy Markets: 1757-1857
operations of the Company’s government in India. This is, however, not to suggest that
Indian merchants failed to play the game to their advantage or that regional variations did
not exist. In fact, the timing of British colonial control proved to be decisive in determining
the trajectory of Indian enterprise. In Western India, for example, where colonial control
was late in coming and where it was hamstrung by local factors and had, therefore, to
accommodate parallel structures of local authority, the nature and direction of Indian
trading enterprise was remarkably different.
Indian Merchants
The merchant world of India went through a complex process of redeployment in the first
half of the colonial century. Those of whom who survived the crisis of the eighteenth
century fitted into the new colonial system largely in the capacity of dependent partners
of British firms in the expanding country trade of India. In Western India, the partnership
proved to be vital and sustained – it was in the cotton and later opium trade that the
conjunction between British private traders and Indian merchants produced its most striking
results. Parsis and Bania merchants emerged as the most important players of Bombay
and Western India’s colonial traffic. Asiya Siddiqi’s (1995) work on Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy
demonstrates the close connection between Parsi enterprise and British agency houses.
His income derived from a variety of sources: the profit of trade on his own account, the
income from hiring freight on his ships, interest on loans to shippers, dividends on shares
in marine insurance companies and commission on the sale of his own bills. His prodigious
talent and wealth did not, however, insulate him from the inherently unequal trading structure
under which he operated. Backed by a worldwide field of operations, British merchants
were able to buy and sell bills of exchange at rates that Indians could hardly afford. So
much so that they had often to import British textiles and metals as a means of remittance.
Thus while European remitters eagerly sought American bills, Jamsetjee found them
undesirable and difficult to sell in Bombay. The problems of payments and remittance
arrangements affected other ventures – for instance we find Jamsetjee unable to operate
his country shipping in the face of competition for private European shipping. The victory
of English shipping, argues Asiya Siddiqi, was not simply a technological one. “Just as
their links with the dominant international networks, of commerce and banking, centreed
in Britain, enabled the Liverpool trading houses to sell bills of exchange at rates which
Indian merchants could not afford so also were English ships able to offer freight far
cheaper than what Indian ships could do.” Given these conditions, the success of Jamsetjee
must be seen as a testimony to his agility and acumen that enabled him to build a substantial
fortune.
Below the Europeans and the Parsis who dominated the first tier of Bombay’s export
trade was the supply merchants and financiers whose links with commodity production
proved vital. Recent works by Amar Farooqui (1995) have emphasized the significance
of the trade in Malwa opium as a source of capital accumulation. Malwa opium became
the instrument, with which against heavy odds, indigenous groups in western and central
India carved out a niche for themselves within the overall colonial structure. This, Farooqui
argues, was reflected in the far greater participation of indigenous enterprise in the
development of capitalism at Bombay compared to that of Calcutta. The Malwa trade
was a huge smuggling operation, in which the main participants were the Marwari soucars,
Gujarati and Parsi merchants of Bombay and Ahmedabad and the European agency houses.
The wholesale trade in opium was dominated by the soucars – mostly Gujarati and Marwari
who made advances to cultivators (in collusion with the princely states of Rajputana and
Central India), and collected the produce. They had large warehouses where they stocked
the produce. They engaged in large scale speculation and gambling in stocks. Farooqui
describes the two favourite forms of speculation and trading in futures. These were jullub
and cowri sutta. The former practice was an anticipation of price at certain dates
‘accompanied by unreal entries and transfers’. Cowri sutta was a similar form of gambling
wherein, ‘one soucar or bania giving another, before the harvest a Cowree, as a pledge,
75
Trade and Markets that he will pay him a specific price, at a certain date, for a specific quantity of grain.’
They serviced both petty traders as well as the agents of large opium dealers, based in
Gujarat, Bombay and Rajasthan. The latter represented the second important layer in the
traffic. The merchants of Ahmedabad and Bombay – both Parsis and Gujaratis worked
through agents who contacted the wholesalers for procurement of the commodity and
arranged for the transport of the drug by caravan to various ports on the west coast
including the Portuguese centres of Daman and Diu and Goa before its final shipment to
the Chinese market. By the 1820s, the networks of Bombay, Gujarat and Rajasthan opium
merchants encompassed the major opium marts of Malwa, where their agents bought
opium directly from the opium wholesalers.
Ujjain was the principal centre for the export trade in opium. The really important dealers
were Lakshmichand Panjray, Jadonjee Chabeelchand, Bhaidas Gokuldas, Appa Gangadhar.
Connections with the Marathas – Holkar and Sindhia – enabled them to establish a syndicate
of sorts. Among the Ahmedabad traders, we hear of Khushal Nihal Chand, Karamchand
Dhongarshee, Dayaram Dulobha not to speak of indigenous Parsi firms of Bombay who
affected their purchases through the medium of Malwa traders. Clearly, then the workings
of the opium trade in western and Central India enabled indigenous commercial groups to
develop a viable commercial base and a significant source of capital accumulation that
strengthened opportunities for future enterprise.
Bengali Banyans
The same could not be said for merchant enterprise in Bengal. Not that a regrouping of
commercial interests under the colonial dispensation, did not occur. The emergence of the
Bengali banyans as dependent partners of the European private traders and later agency
houses was an important development and as P.J. Marshall (1974) pointed out, ‘Europeans
traded on the capital of their banyans or Indian agents; or to be more exact the banyans
traded on their masters’ names and authority’. Men like Ramdulal Dey, Nabakishan,
Madan Dutta, Duttaram Ghosh invested money in trade and amassed fortunes, a sizeable
portion of which was invested in land. The world of business in Bengal was primarily
determined by the imperatives and workings of colonial trade, which meant that any
fluctuations in the trade were bound to adversely affect their operations. Unlike as in
western India, where, an important segment of commercial activity remained outside the
domain of official/European control, business enterprise in Bengal was inextricably tied to
European colonial enterprise with the result that the Indian constituents necessarily operated
from a position of disadvantage.
The ubiquity of the Bengal Banyans has to be located in the context of the consignment
trade that developed after the opening of the India trade. In the absence of a proper
consignment system, private traders urgently required the services of the banyan who
would ‘in return for customary commissions and perquisites, etc. to take charge of safety
and security of goods and with all due care and diligence to keep all such goods, wares
and merchandise of the firm. Goods were from time to time deposited with or entrusted to
them to redeliver when they shall be required or disposed of in the like order or condition
as deposited or entrusted, reasonable wear and tear expected’. It was through the Banyan,
that all purchases and sales were affected. He had to assume responsibility for quality
and timely transactions. His knowledge of the market was expected to mediate trade
effectively. In fact, banyans like Ramdulal Dey satisfied all these conditions and yet failed
to make that critical cross over to large-scale trade. The expansion of private trade and
the advent of the American clippers constituted for the banyans in the first decade of the
nineteenth century the gateway to profit and wealth – a point that the career of Ramdulal
Dey exemplifies.
The Banyans, representing the indigenous component of the trading economy of Bengal
were located firmly in the colonial trading structure that had firmly been put in place by
the first half of the nineteenth century. By the 1820s indigo emerged as the most significant
export item for remittance with the result that there was an over investment in the
commodity leading eventually to the first major commercial crisis in Bengal in 1829-33.
76 Exports of indigo for instance expanded from 40,000 maunds in 1800 to 120,000 maunds
in 1815 and to 118,111 in 1826-30. The banyans had a considerable portion of their capital Merchants and
tied up in the agency houses with the result that when the crash came following over Markets: 1757-1857
speculation, shortage of bullion and government indifference, the entire edifice of
Indo-European business crashed. It did not, however, result in the eclipse of Banyan
activity. They surfaced again, this time as key partners of the new agency houses that
depended on them for working capital. By the 1840s the banyans had become agency
house partners in name and fact.
The Agency houses in the 1840s were of two categories: export based and import based.
The exporting houses were principally involved in the production and export of country
products such as indigo, sugar and silk. As the funnel for capital for indigo planters and
other European producers, they were the debtor houses. They depended for their working
capital on Banians, government advances and funds supplied by the importing houses.
The importing houses were formed by British manufacturers to serve as agents for the
sale and distribution of yarn and textiles sent on consignment from Britain. They
accumulated capital from sale of their goods and remitted the proceeds to England through
bills hypothecated to indigo and other exports. Indians were intimately involved in both
sectors – Marwari bankers based in Burrabazar provided capital for importing houses,
advanced money to dealers in cloth and became the key middlemen for distribution of
cloth upcountry. They also speculated in opium, many of them lost out after the opium
war. Banyans associated with export houses enjoyed a brief period of glory, a rare, almost
meteoric even if short-lived success. The most notable among Bengali businessmen in
this decade were Dwarkanath Tagore, Motilal Seal and Rustamji Cowasji, who figured as
dominant partners in British enterprises such as the Union Bank, and in a number of
insurance and coal companies. The coming of age of Bengali business did not solve the
basic problems of capital sourcing – clearly the most important constraint faced by business
groups in Bengal. Almost all the assets of the bank for instance were committed to financing
the production of a single export item, namely indigo with the result that when indigo
prices slumped owing to conditions of depression in England, there was a universal fall out
of European managing agencies and their Indian constituents. Thus, while on paper, loans
to indigo concerns were dropping, in fact the bank continued to increase its support to
indigo cultivation. And in annual reports directors disguised their loans under euphemistic
headings. This was a dangerous trend given the fact that indigo prices were dropping
steadily after 1840. The more they declined, the more capital had to be borrowed to keep
them in operation, the more capital borrowed, the more indigo had to be contracted for –
thus flooding the market and keeping marginal concerns in operation. The Union Bank
colluded in this charade until 1847 it became no longer possible to stem the rot. The bank
went into liquidity even as the agency houses collapsed.
The collapse of the Union bank has been seen as a watershed, marking the end of Bengali
business enterprise in large-scale business. Thereafter capital tended to remain tied to
land, with Bengalis preferring to invest in zamindaris. Historians attempting to explain
this tendency in terms of the appeal land held for Bengalis as both as source of safe
investment and as a way of life, the stranglehold Europeans had on large scale trade and
industry especially in the high noon of imperialism and speculative mentality born out of
the get rich approach of European principals who contributed thereby to the culture of
cliques and cabals. After 1848, commerce and industry were dominated by British capital
and their Marwari associates who enjoyed familial traditions of support and credit and
were willing to make long-term investment commitments.

3.7 DEINDUSTRIALIZATION: THE DEBATE

No essay on the trading economy of India in the period of transition and early colonialism
can be complete without referring to the debates on de-industrialization. This debate in a
sense encapsulates the larger question of the impact of colonialism on India’s trading
economy, whose workings we have already outlined. That the subcontinent’s trading profile
underwent major changes, in terms of commodity composition, direction and business
organization can be taken as given. That India lost her primacy as a supplier of textiles in
77
the world market, that her merchant groups suffered displacement in the principal sectors
Trade and Markets of shipping and export and that the imperatives of colonial trade and remittance shaped
the configurations of India’s economy are facts that need no further elaboration The
implications too are clear enough and it was, therefore, not without reason that the nineteenth
century came to be regarded as the era of stagnation and stasis for the Indian economy
The debate came into the public domain as early as the late nineteenth century, when
nationalist critiques of British rule stressed the destruction of India’s handicrafts and the
disruption of the traditional socio-economic order under the shattering influence of market
forces represented by western capital and mediated by the colonial state. The stagnation
of industrial enterprise, the enfeeblement of agriculture and the decline of traditional crafts
embodied the inherently exploitative nature of British rule in the nineteenth century.
Subsequent historical scholarship on the nature of India’s pre-colonial economy took into
account the colonial factor in their reassessment of India’s pre-colonial economy, arguing
that it accommodated definite capitalist elements and that the intervention of European
control thwarted the logical progression of the Indian economy. Morris D Morris (1968)
attacked this position in the late 1960s when he argued that the capacities of the
pre-colonial Indian economy were not as significant as they were made out to be, and that
the British did ‘not take over a society that was ripe for an industrial revolution and then
frustrate that development’. Further he argued that British imports of cotton did not wipe
out the handicrafts industry and that imports of yarn actually strengthened the competitive
position of the indigenous handloom sector despite the fall in cloth prices. The demand for
cloth was elastic and the fall in price led to a movement down the demand curve. The
amount of capital consumed arose and the vast expansion of British cloth skimmed off the
expanding demand. The handloom weavers were thus no fewer in number than they
were at the beginning of the colonial period. Morris’ bald even if bold proposition, backed
by little or no empirical data was refuted by Toru Matsui (Morris, 1969). Others argued
that even if the competitive position of the handloom industry was strengthened by cheap
yarn imports, it could not counteract the decline in the traditional spinning industry. Again
from the long term point of view, the fall in the price of cloth per piece was greater than
the fall in the price of yarn required for one piece of cloth and therefore the remuneration
for weaving one piece of cloth was less and adversely affected the productivity for labour
of traditional handicrafts. However, Toru Matsui concedes that foreign cloth could not
penetrate as effectively as desired and that there was a potential realm available for
Indian handloom weavers. The debate was further advanced by Bipan Chandra (1968)
who demonstrated the lack of correspondence between yarn imports and piece good
imports. The ratio of yarn imports to piece good imports was in fact very low. The artisan
survived only because Lancashire failed to reach the Indian market and because British
rule was not efficient enough to create the perfect market. Tapan Raychaudhuri (1968)
also questioned the assumptions of Morris regarding the increase in per capita income as
a sound indicator of economic change and of the beneficial aspects of British rule.
Subsequently, A.K. Bagchi (1978) in an authoritative essay on deindustrialization in Bengal
and Bihar established, based on a complex reading of Buchanan Hamilton’s report and
later census data, the real incidence of de-industrialization and a relative decline in the
strength of the population attached to industry. While it is true that quantitative evidence
for the strength of the artisan community and its displacement in the nineteenth century is
slender and that we have virtually no data on incomes, it would not be far fetched to
suggest that the changes in the structure and workings of India’s foreign trade affected
segments of the merchant and artisan classes. Even if there was a degree of adjustment
and the expansion in the trade of new commodities balanced the decline of older ones, the
benefits of structural adjustment were limited and did not cover the costs of social and
economic displacement. If some merchants did well, it was because of the porous nature
of British rule that left some gaps for Indian merchants to carve a space for themselves.

3.8 SUMMARY
Recent scholarship has recognized the vitality of the Indian trading economy in the early
modern period. The Indian merchant was in no sense a peddler, enagaged only in multiple
78 retail transactions. There were wholesale merchants with impressive capital stocks
operating within complex networks of commercial exchange. India’s overseas trade brought Merchants and
in a huge inflow of bullion accelerating the levels of monetization and urban development Markets: 1757-1857
in India. However, the weakening of the political centre in the early eighteenth century
affected the fortunes of ports like Surat and Bengal. The latter decades of the eighteenth
century saw the growth of British private trade and a re-alignment of trade routes. Indian
commerce could not remain impervious to the political changes, but the impact of the
eighteenth century crisis was not uniform in all quarters. While the decline of Surat was
irreversible, Bengal survived until the mid-century when the British conquest inaguarated
a new phase in the region’s trading experience. Indian merchants now regrouped
themeselves as brokers and banyans to the European private trader.

3.9 GLOSSARY
Agency Houses Agency Houses were the establishments of
private English merchants. They were
financed by the East-India Company’s
servants.
Banjaras Transporters of grain and other bulky goods.
During the medieval period they were the
important link between the rural-urban trade.
Bottomry A speculative investment; money was lent out
for a particular voyage. The lenders were to
bear all the risks of voyage. The rate of interest
depended upon the risk involved in a particular
voyage.
Castle Revolution of 1759 In 1759, the English East India Company,
backed by a section of the merchants in Surat
city, occupied the Surat castle and assumed
joint control of the city.
Commenda A practice in which merchants combine their
resources for mutual benefit.
Respondentia A from of marine insurance and speculation
Tanda A banjara camp

3.10 EXERCISES
1) Discuss the pattern of growth of India’s trading economy in the seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries.
2) What role did the Banias and sarrafs play in the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries trade?
3) Analyse the working of the hundis within the pre-colonial economy.
4) Discuss the impact of European intervention on Indian merchants and trade during
the eighteenth century.
5) To what extent did the eighteenth century ‘crisis’ influence trade and markets?
6) Discuss the condition of Indian merchants during the first half of the nineteenth century.
7) Analyse the role of Bengali Banyans in the nineteenth century Indian trade.

3.11 SUGGESTED READINGS

Bagchi, A.K. (1978), ‘Deindustrialization in India in the Nineteenth Century: Some
Theoretical Implications’, Journal of Development Studies, XXII, pp. 135-64.
Bagchi, Amiya Kumar (1976), ‘De-industrialization in Gangetic Bihar, 1809-1901,’ in Essays
in Honour of S.C. Sarkar, New Delhi. 79
Trade and Markets Bayly, C.A. (1983, 1998), Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in
the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Chandra, Bipan (1968), ‘Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History’,
Indian Economic and Social History Review (IESHR), Vol. V, No.1.
Chaudhuri, K.N. (1983), The Trading World of Asia and the English East India
Company, Cambridge.
Chaudhuri, K.N. (1985), Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic
History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Das Gupta, Ashin (1979,1994), Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat
c.1700-1750, New Delhi, Manohar.
Das Gupta, Ashin (2001), The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant: 1500-1800,
collected essays of Ashin Das Gupta, Compiled by Uma Das Gupta, New Delhi, Oxford
University Press.
Farooqui, Amar (1995), ‘Opium Enterprise and Colonial Intervention in Malwa and Western
India: 1800-1824’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, [Link], No. 4.
Furber, Holden (1965), Bombay Presidency in the Mid-Eighteenth Century, New York.
Kumar, Dharma [ed.] (1983), The Cambridge Economic History of India, c.1757-c.1970,
Vol. II, Cambridge.
Marshall, P.J. (1974, 1976), East India Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth
Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Marshall, P.J. (1987), ‘Private Trade in the Indian Ocean before 1800’, in Ashin Das
Gupta and M. N. Pearson, India and the Indian Ocean: 1500-1800, Oxford University
Press, Calcutta, pp. 276-300.
Matsui, Toru (1987), British Rule and Indian History: A North Indian District in the
First Half of the 19th Century, Tokyo.
Morris, Morris D. (1968), ‘Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian
Economic History, IESHR, Vol. V, No.1.
Morris, Morris D., Toru Matsui, Bipan Chandra and Tapan Raychaudhuri (1969), Indian
Economy in the Nineteenth Century: A Symposium, Indian Economic and Social History
Association, New Delhi.
Raychaudhuri, Tapan (1968), ‘A Re-interpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic
History?’ IESHR, Vol. V, No.1.
Siddiqi, Asiya (1995), ‘The Business World of Jamesetjee Jejeebhoy’, in Asiya Siddiqi
(ed), Trade and Finance in Colonial India, Oxford in India Readings, Oxford University
Press, New Delhi.
Subramanian, Lakshmi (1996), Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion: Bombay,
Surat and the West Coast, Oxford University Press.
Torri, Michelguglielmo (1982), ‘In the Deep Blue Sea: Surat and its Merchant Class during
the Dyarchic Era 1759-1800’, IESHR, XIX Nos. 3&4.

80
 Colonialism and Trade :
UNIT 4 COLONIALISM AND TRADE: 1857-1947
1857-1947*
Structure
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Foreign Trade: Trends and Commodity Composition
4.3 Internal Trading Networks
4.4 Merchants: Europeans and Indians and the Racial Division of Economic Space
4.5 Three Trading Communities: Chettiars, Marwaris, Shikarpuris
4.6 Merchants’ Organizations and Business Structures
4.7 Summary
4.8 Exercises
4.9 Suggested Readings

4.1 INTRODUCTION
The history of India’s economic development between 1857 and 1947 is demonstrated
by a well-known paradox. As Amiya Bagchi so pithily puts it, India in 1900 while
remaining the brightest jewel of the British Empire was one of the poorest countries
in the world. The reasons for this paradox have engaged economic historians working
on this period. Why did India grow so slowly if at all in the colonial period? What role
did colonial rule play in the arrested growth and stagnation of India’s economy? What
were the structural changes in the organization and orientation of India’s trade? How
did these affect merchant activity and the industrial experience of colonial India?
How did merchants and markets respond to the changes brought about by the colonial
subordination of India’s trading economy and its integration with the larger international
economy? These are some of the questions that this Unit will address as it attempts a
broad overview of the nature, trajectory and ramifications of India’s trade and
development. The focus will be squarely on the non-agrarian sector, on trade and
markets, the changes that were recorded therein and their effects on the population.
The Unit will also review some of the more recent debates on Indian merchant capital
and its workings under the colonial dispensation.
The period 1857-1947 saw the consolidation and workings of formally established
colonial rule in India. It was a period when the British Crown exercised direct control
over a little over 60 per cent of land area in India maintained close control over the
affairs of the Indian princely states. These years also saw the integration of India’s
economy to the imperatives of the world economy in which Britain held a dominant
position. This directly fostered an extension of the market economy in India, which
was increasingly integrated with the global economy, the nucleus of which lay in
metropolitan Britain. India became a central pillar of the international trade economy,
and accommodated in the process a large inflow of foreign capital. By 1914, three
quarters of total investment in business and industry in India came from overseas.
The imperatives of the international economy generated major infra-structural changes
within India, where the British rulers introduced a uniform system of weights and
measures, currency and communications. How instrumental were these changes in
generating economic growth? Or did these benefit the colonial regime only? How did
colonial interests affect Indian interests? What was the impact of the drain of wealth
that underpinned the colonial regime, where the government supervised a transfer of
wealth from India to Britain in the form of profits of foreign business and government
charges? These questions are germane to any discussion of India’s performance under
colonial rule and have long formed the subject matter of intense debate among
nationalist, Marxist and revisionist historians who argue for an objective assessment
of the colonial regime.

*Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian, Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata 81

Trade and Markets
4.2 FOREIGN TRADE: TRENDS AND COMMODITY
COMPOSITION
In terms of sheer volume, India’s foreign trade registered a significant increase from the
late nineteenth century. Access to statistical evidence makes it easy to calculate the
exponential rate of growth in overseas trade for the entire period from 1834 to 1940.
According to K.N. Chaudhuri, the average annual rate of growth for this period, was
3.23% for exports and 3.68 for imports (See Table 1). In spite of variations between
individual decades, the period 1850 to 1914 was marked by certain homogeneity, a feature,
which was lost after the First World War. The reasons for the expansion in exports lay in
the expansion of multilateral trade between Great Britain, the United States of America
and Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in which India, by virtue of its
location as a colony and as a major supplier of primary agricultural and processed goods
played a crucial role. Equally important factors were a reduction in the length of sea
routes and the consequent fall in transport costs, railway construction in India and elsewhere,
all of which combined to raise the levels of world trade to a new and unprecedented level.
India could hardly escape the consequences of global flows driven largely if not exclusively
by Britain. Changes in these flows produced vacillations and fluctuations in the movement
of India’s exports and imports.
Table 1: Compound rates of growth (annual) in India’s foreign trade 1834-35 to 1940-41
(in per cent)

Date Export Import

1834-35 – 1940-41 3.23 3.68
1834-35 – 1865-66 5.61 6.01
1866-67 – 1890-91 3.27 3.69
1891-92 – 1915-16 3.84 4.15
1914-15 – 1940-41 –2.72 –2.33
1834-35 – 1850-51 3.61 5.61
1851-52 – 1860-61 6.31 10.10
1861-62 – 1870-71 1.37* 5.43
1871-72 – 1880-81 2.37 4.50
1881-82 – 1890-91 2.52 4.43
1891-92 – 1900-01 [no trend]* 1.23
1901-02 – 1910-11 4.80 5.43
1911-12 – 1920-21 3.00 6.49
1921-22 – 1930-31 – 1.20* – 2.30*
1931-32 – 1940-41 4.00 3.10
* indicates that the statistical tests are not significant owing to wide random fluctuations.
Source: Chaudhuri, K.N., ‘Foreign Trade and Balance of Payments (1757-1947)’, in Kumar,
Dharma (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India 1757-1970, Vol. II, New Delhi, 1982,
Tables 10.6, p. 832.
The period 1834 and 1866 constituted years of highest growth for both exports and
imports particularly during the decade following 1850. The main impulse for expansion
came from the outbreak of the Crimean War and the beginnings of large-scale
railway construction in India. Following the Crimean War, the rupture of trade
relations with Russia, which was a principal supplier of oilseeds, flax and hemp
gave a fillip to the demand for substitute products from India, while the transfer of
a large part of the railway capital raised in England inflated the imports. This trend
of increasing exports continued into the following decades of the 60s. This time, the
American Civil War and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 became the
determining factors. The American Civil War created violent fluctuations in the
export trade; India’s exports doubled in value between 1860 and 1865 only to fall in
1866 (See Table 1A). Most of the fluctuations were the result of the shortage of
raw cotton from American sources to British textile mills forcing the latter to rely
on Indian exports causing cotton prices in India to rise steeply and a spectacular
82 growth in demand for cotton.
Table 1A: Total value of India’s foreign trade (excluding treasure), 1834-1915 Colonialism and Trade :
(in thousands of rupees) 1857-1947

Year Imports Exports Index imports Index exports

1834 42,611 79,934 100.0 100.0
1835 47,818 111,064 112.2 138.9
1836 55,369 132,401 129.9 165.6
1837 50,324 112,427 118.1 140.6
1838 52,406 117,747 122.9 147.3
1839 58,312 108,627 136.8 135.8
1840 84,159 134,555 197.5 168.3
1841 77,885 138,252 182.7 172.9
1842 76,036 135,518 178.4 169.5
1843 88,177 172,534 206.9 215.8
1844 107,540 165,902 252.3 207.5
1845 90,874 170,286 218.2 213.0
1846 88,966 153,554 208.7 192.1
1847 85,976 133,123 201.7 166.5
1848 83,448 160,885 195.8 201.2
1849 102,998 173,122 241.7 216.5
1850 115,587 181,641 271.2 227.2
1851 122,404 198,792 287.2 248.6
1852 100,708 204,646 236.3 256.01
1853 111,226 192,951 261.02 241.3
1854 127,426 189,272 299.04 236.7
1855 139,434 230,392 327.2 288.2
1856 141,945 253,384 333.1 316.9
1857 152,776 274,560 358.5 343.4
1858 217,285 298,628 509.9 373.5
1859 242,651 279,602 569.4 349.7
1860 234,937 329,706 551.3 412.4
1861 223,204 363,170 523.8 454.3
1862 226,323 478,596 531.1 598.7
1863 271,455 656,254 637.05 820.9
1864 281,509 680,270 660.6 851.03
1865 295,992 654,911 694.6 819.3
1866 316,786 456,654 743.4 571.2
1867 357,057 508,740 837.9 636.4
1868 359,901 530,621 844.6 663.8
1879 329,275 524,713 772.7 656.4
1870 344,691 553,361 808.9 692.2
1871 320,918 632,092 753.1 790.7
1872 318,746 552,507 748.03 691.2
1873 338,198 549,960 793.6 688.01
1874 362,221 563,592 850.0 705.07
1875 388,916 580,914 912.7 726.7
1876 374,406 610,138 878.6 763.3
1877 414,641 652,223 973.08 815.9
1878 378,005 609,375 887.1 762.3
1879 411,660 672,123 966.08 840.08
1880 531,167 745,806 1,246.5 933.02
1881 491,133 819,684 1,152.5 1,025.4
1882 520,957 834,851 1,222.5 1,044.4
1883 552,793 881,760 1,297.3 1,103.1
1884 557,030 832,552 1,307.2 1,041.5
1885 556,558 838,812 1,306.1 1,049.3
1886 617,773 884,701 1,449.7 1,106.7
1887 650,046 905,436 1,525.5 1,132.7
1888 694,404 970,495 1,629.6 1,214.1
1889 691,974 1,034,603 1,623.9 1,294.3
1890 719,753 1,002,273 1,689.1 1,253.8
1891 694,323 1,081,735 1,629.4 1,353.2
1892 662,652 1,065,954 1,555.1 1,333.5
1893 770,214 1,065,033 1,807.5 1,332.3
1894 735,289 1,089,137 1,725.5 1,362.5
1895 729,367 1,143,347 1,711.6 1,430.3
1896 761,173 1,039,840 1,786.3 1,300.8
1897 736,470 976,327 1,728.3 1,221.4
1898 721, 015 1,127,997 1,692.08 1,411.1
1899 753,044 1,090,833 1,767.2 1,364.6
1900 808,945 1,077,185 1,898.4 1,347.5
1901 887,805 1,248,952 2,083.5 1,562.4
1902 858,191 1,293,966 2,014.01 1,618.7
1903 925,922 1,535,171 2,172.9 1,920.5
1904 1,044,127 1,577,220 2,450.3 1,973.1
1905 1,121,137 1,618,356 2,631.09 2,024.6
1906 1,172,421 1,766,739 2,751.4 2,210.2
1907 1,366,475 1,774,854 3,206.8 2,220.3
1908 1,287,868 1,531,431 3,022.3 1,915.8
1909 1,225,512 1,879,681 2,868.3 2,351.5
1910 1,337,067 2,099,616 3,137.8 2,626.6
1911 1,440,554 2,279,898 3,380.7 2,852.2
1912 1,666,296 2,462,183 3,910.4 3,080.2
1913 1,913,079 2,490,074 4,489.6 3,115.1
1914 1,449,307 1,821,780 3,401.2 2,279.08
1915 1,381,693 1,994,803 3,242.5 2,495.5
Source: Statistical Abstracts for British India, Cf. Chaudhuri, K.N., ‘Foreign Trade and Balance of
Payments (1757-1947)’, in Kumar, Dharma (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India 1757-
83
1970, Vol. II, New Delhi, 1982, Tables 10.7A, B, C, pp. 833, 834, 837.
Trade and Markets There was a perceptible slowing down in the decades between 1870 and 1900. Two
sets of factors were responsible for this trough. One was a series of famines and
agricultural pressure in India and the other a prolonged depreciation in the gold
price of silver, which caused the exchange value of the Indian Rupee to decline
continuously until 1893. The devaluation in the Indian Rupee achieved what D.
Rothermund has called the ‘miracle of stable export prices’ which stimulated and
sustained India’s foreign trade. Around 1900, the situation showed signs of
improvement and a strong upward trend continued right through to 1911.
The two World Wars proved to be critical for India’s export trade and its industrial
experience. The First World War affected India’s import trade more than the exports
traffic. The cessation of trade with hostile countries and the dislocation of markets
in Britain, France and Belgium caused an immediate decline in both imports and
exports The revival of exports from 1916 took place in the context of increasing
government war time demand for jute bags, hides and skins for the manufacture of
army boots and greatly benefited Indian exporters. Imports on the other hand lagged
in their rate of recovery although after 1919, there was a veritable upsurge in imports
as well.
The boom in trade came to an end in 1920 and it was not until 1924 that the import
trade began to revive once again. The world depression affected India’s trade and
by 1932, there was a serious decline in both exports and imports. The adverse
terms of trade and the sheer absolute size of the decrease in foreign trade produced
serious deflationary effects on the economy. The general recovery, which began in
1935, was checked by the two-year recession starting in the US in 1937. With the
outbreak of the Second World War, there was a perceptible increase in the value of
both exports and imports. The two World Wars and the depression of 1929 were
among the most important single external events that influenced the structure of
India’s foreign trade and business.
If fluctuations characterized the course of India’s overseas trade in the second half
of the nineteenth century, the changes in its commodity composition were no less
marked. As far as exports were concerned, major shifts took place in the composition
of trade. India became an exporter of agricultural produce and an importer of
manufactured products. The complete elimination of Indian handloom textiles from
international markets, a development that began in the first decades of the century,
was among the most visible change in the period under review. India was left to
largely export primary commodities, which she exchanged for the advanced industrial
products of the west and in the event became a classic case of a colonized economy.
Not that this eliminated all possibilities for economic gain and activity for indigenous
merchants. In fact, as we shall see, the distribution of British goods was affected
through indigenous mechanisms of marketing and retail controlled by a number of
enterprising business communities.
The principal exports in the second half of the nineteenth century were food grains,
jute, oilseeds, tea, hides, skins and cotton. Of these both cotton and jute which
became the basis for industrialization were linked with war time contingencies that
catapulted Indian exports into the world market. For instance, the story of cotton
exports was linked with the disruption of American cotton supplies during the Civil
War, and when Indian cotton emerged as an invaluable substitute. In terms of value
share in India’s total exports in the 60s, raw cotton accounted for 52.2%. The boom
was an important starting point of a long-term change in the direction of the cotton
trade in India. Even after American cotton exports resumed, India was able to keep
up its own exports largely due to the growth of the textile industry in Europe. Added
to this was the emergence of Japan who by 1913-14 had emerged as a major
customer for Indian cotton using 45 per cent of the total exports. (See Table 2)

84
Table 2: Exports from India: commodity composition, percentage share of Colonialism and Trade :
selected items in total export value, 1850-1 to 1935-6 1857-1947

Year Raw Cotton Indigo Food Raw Mfd. JuteHides & Opium SeedsSugar Tea
cotton goods grains Jute good skins

1850-1 19.1 3.7 10.9 4.1 1.1 0.9 1.8 30.1 1.9 10.0 0.2

1860-1 22.3 2.4 5.7 10.2 1.2 1.1 2.0 30.9 5.4 3.1 0.5

1870-1 35.2 2.5 5.8 8.1 4.7 0.6 3.7 19.5 6.4 - 2.1

1880-1 17.8 4.2 4.8 17.1 5.2 1.5 5.0 18.2 8.6 - 4.2

1890-1 16.5 9.5 3.1 19.5 7.6 2.5 4.7 9.2 9.3 - 5.5

1900-1 9.4 6.4 2.0 13.1 10.1 7.3 10.7 8.8 8.3 - 9.0

1910-11 17.2 6.0 0.2 18.4 7.4 8.1 6.2 6.1 12.0 - 5.9

1920-1 17.4 7.6 - 10.7 6.8 22.1 3.5 - 7.0 - 5.1

1930-1 21.0 1.6 - 13.5 5.8 14.5 5.3 - 8.1 - 10.7

1935-6 21.0 1.3 - - 8.5 14.5 - - - - 12.3

Imports: Percentage share of selected Items in total value, 1850 to

1933-4

Year Cotton twist Cotton piece Metals Machinery Railway Mineral

and yarn (%) goods(%) (%) (%) Materials(%)oils (%)
1850-1 9.0 31.5 16.8 - - -
1860-1 7.4 39.6 10.6 - 8.1 -
1870-1 10.1 47.0 8.1 - 4.4 -
1880-1 7.4 45.5 7.5 - 2.2 -
1890-1 5.2 37.9 8.4 3.0 4.5 3.3
1900-1 3.1 33.8 8.6 2.9 4.8 4.3
1910-11 2.3 31.2 11.2 3.7 4.6 2.5
1920-1 4.0 26.4 12.1 6.7 4.2 2.5
1930-1 1.9 13.5 9.7 8.7 - 6.4
1933-4 2.2 13.1 8.2 11.1 - 5.1
Source:Statistical Abstracts for British India, Cf. Chaudhuri, K.N., ‘Foreign
Trade and Balance of Payments (1757-1947)’, in Kumar, Dharma (ed.),
The Cambridge Economic History of India 1757-1970, Vol. II, New Delhi,
1982, Tables 10.11, 10.18, pp. 844, 858.
Closely following on the tracks of cotton was India’s export trade in food grains.
During the fifty years preceding 1914, India possessed a very large export trade in
food-grains, which accounted for 10 to 20 per cent of total export value. Indian wheat
commanded an important market in Britain. After 1922, the wheat trade entered a
phase of decline partly due to the increased demand for wheat in India itself and
partly because of competition from other wheat growing countries.

85
Trade and Markets Exports from India: 1850-1 Exports from India: 1890-1
(in per cent) (in per cent)
Raw cotton Raw cotton
18 19.1 12.6 16.5
Cotton goods 0.2 Cotton goods
Indigo 5.5 Indigo
Food grains Food grains
Raw Jute
3.7 9.5
10 9.3 Raw Jute
Mfd. Jute good
Mfd. Jute good
Hides & skins 3.1
1.9 10.9 Hides & skins
Opium
Seeds
4.1 9.2 Opium
Sugar 1.1 Seeds
4.7 19.5
Tea 0.9 Tea
30.1 2.5 7.6
Others 1.8 Others

Exports from India: 1910-11

(in per cent)
12.5 17.2

5.9
6

0.2
12

6.1 18.4

6.2
8.1 7.4

Raw cotton Cotton goods Indigo Food grains

Raw Jute Mfd. Jute good Hides & skins Opium
Seeds Tea Others

Imports from India: 1850-1 Imports from India: 1890-1

(in per cent) (in per cent) Cotton twist
9 5.2 & yarn
Cotton tw ist
Cotton piece
and yarn 42.7
goods
Metals
Cotton piece 37.7
goods Machinery
31.5
Metals Railway
Materials
Mineral oils
Others
3.3 37.9 Others
16.8 4.5
3 8.4

Imports from India: 1910-11

(in per cent)
2.3

31.2

44.5

11.2
2.5 4.6 3.7

Cotton tw ist and yarn Cotton piece goods Metals

Machinery Railw ay Materials Mineral oils
86 Others
Accompanying the increased level of trade in food-grains, was a growing demand for Colonialism and Trade :
container bags. This generated a demand for jute as an export item, which in turn and 1857-1947
over time led to the establishment of India’s second major manufacturing industry in this
period. The principal catalyst for the initial expansion of jute was the Crimean War that
disrupted supplies of Russian hemp and flax. In the 1880s, according to [Link],
India took a lead in the export of finished bags eliciting the resentment of Dundee (in
Scotland) mill-owners who in the early years of the twentieth century complained of
Indian competition in the American and Australian markets. Between 1900 and 1914, the
industry in Bengal was unusually prosperous and both exports and profits in these years
were exceptionally high (See Table 2A).
Table 2A: Invoice amount of investments from Bengal, from season
1766 to 1780

Piece goods Silk Saltpetre Drugs Total

In Season
1766 £329,498 £91,602 £14,123 £2,288 £437,511
1767 415,774 132,596 12,345 4,746 565,461
1768 500,797 137,299 16,071 4,171 658,338
1769 576,281 142,328 17,733 5,944 742,286
1770 451,152 160,337 16,606 5,570 633,665
1771 571,542 170,457 21,452 5,007 768,458
1772 697,778 136,270 24,275 7,555 865,878
1773 508,622 94,431 22,306 7,213 632,572
1774 466,944 160,016 14,262 7,645 648,867
1775 659,255 239,514 23,968 10,100 932,837
1776 446,277 318,406 16,736 7,104 788,523
1777 614,539 434,268 23,971 9,455 1,082,233
1778 595,079 633,836 23,252 14,057 1,266,224
1779 563,675 481,862 26,146 10,770 1,082,453
1780 639,938 554,237 34,911 25,872 1,254,958

Total £8,037,151 £3,887,459 £308,157 £127,497 £12,360,264

Source: Ninth Report of Select Committee, 1783, Appendix 6. Cf. Chaudhuri, K.N., ‘Foreign
Trade and Balance of Payments (1757-1947)’, in Kumar, Dharma (ed.), The Cambridge Economic
History of India 1757-1970, Vol. II, New Delhi, 1982, Tables 10.2C, pp. 819,
Of the three remaining exports, seeds, hides and skins, and tea, the first was next
only to cotton and jute in total exports and before 1914, India was the world’s largest
supplier of rapeseeds and groundnuts. Unlike tea, the trade in hides and skins and oil
seeds was not new. It was tea that was a classic example of import substitution from
a non-colonial to a colonial era. The industry owed its existence entirely to British
capital and enterprise. The real expansion for tea as a significant item of export came
in the 1880s.
The structure of India’s imports remained stable throughout the period. Miscellaneous
items made up India’s imports. A variety of Asian products such as coffee, Chinese
tea and sugar and spices from Southeast Asia constituted one category. The second
group consisted of European luxury goods and finally there was an entirely new class
of articles of mass consumption, namely textiles, metal goods, paper and glassware.
Cotton textiles accounted for the bulk of the imports, which fell off only towards the
end of the First World War. With the maturing of Indian industry and the emergence
of Japan as one of the most efficient producers of cheap cloth, the monopoly of
Britain in the Indian market was definitely broken.
87
Trade and Markets India’s exports far exceeded that of imports and yet India remained in trading deficit with
Great Britain. This was a consequence of the nature of the imperial connection that tied
India to Britain and that imposed on the colony the burden of Home Charges that included
the administrative and defense expenses incurred by Britain. As Rupee prices fell continually,
the payment of the tribute to Britain generated an increasing quantum of unrequited exports
of primary produce from India and the effects of railways and integration into the world
market remained partial and limited.

4.3 INTERNAL TRADING NETWORKS

If overseas trade represented the visible face of the colonial economy and its functioning
and enabled an integration of the subcontinent with the larger global economy, it was the
internal trading network that provided the critical scaffolding for India’s export trade and
for the subsequent development of Indian industrial enterprise. Until the emergence of
the modern industrial sector in the aftermath of the First World War, indigenous merchant
communities remained largely confined to what Rajat Ray has called the world of the
bazaar, which was distinct from the world of modern business and industry but which
remained closely inter-related. The bazaar was aligned to internal trade, especially to the
marketing of agricultural produce, the financing of inland trade in commodities, the facilitation
of movements of artisan production and peasant crops. Operating the bazaar were bankers
or shroffs and commission agents or arhats. The former used bills of exchange or hundis
to finance and market the trade in agricultural produce as well as the marketing of imported
goods. The size of their operations was impressive and enabled them to accumulate capital
and forge long distance connections in the inland market, and which proved critical when
they made the transition to industry.
Even historically, India’s inland trade had strong links with maritime trade. The opening of
the country through the railway network made the links even stronger. The development
of the railways under colonial rule both expanded and diverted the movement of goods in
the interior. For instance, the Great Indian Peninsular Railway diverted cotton traffic that
had in the eighteenth century moved along the Ganges river to Bengal was diverted from
Nagpur in central India to Bombay. In the process old routes dried up. Boat and steamer
traffic down the Ganges and Jamuna dwindled as the East Indian Railway ran up the
Gangetic valley to Agra. The inland trade of India came to flow through the railway
network that was essentially oriented to the export trade controlled by imperial interests,
and which enabled the two leading foreign firms – Ralli Brothers and Volkart Brothers to
set up buying organizations far into the interior of the country. Even though admittedly, the
railway network was intended to facilitate the operations of European export interests,
the establishment of a far reaching network of distribution channels stood Indian merchants
and middlemen in good stead as they worked in the capacity of brokers and upcountry
dealers. However, this is not to deny the evident hegemony of the foreign firms who had
the pick of the business or that indigenous firms tended to operate in areas in which
foreign firms found either more risky or not sufficiently lucrative in terms of profit margins.
In addition to the trade in agricultural products that followed the railway network and
serviced the export economy, there was the caravan trade to central Asia. We have a
compelling description of this trade operated largely by peddlers from Neeladri
Bhattacharya’s work (2003). This trade brought into India from Bukhara and Samarkand,
Persian carpets, currants, dyes, saffron, goat and camel hair, sheep skins and dyes from
Kabul and furs, horses, manna, wool and bullion from Bukhara. The return trade was in
English cotton piece goods, silks, chintzes, spices, drugs, medicines and Kashmir shawls.
There were shifts in this traffic as well in the period under review; for instance, the fine
horses of Bukhara no longer commanded the same prices in the later nineteenth century.
Imports of silks also shrank, while those of dried fruit, fur and skins went up. Among
exports, cotton manufactures and tea gained ground together accounting for 60 per cent
of the total value of exports to Afghanistan and Iran in the 1940s. By the second decade
of the twentieth century, over Rs.3 to Rs. 4 lakhs worth of charas (medium of payment)
was annually coming into Punjab through Ladakh, constituting 55 to 65 per cent of the
88
value of imports; raw silk, borax, wool, horses and ponies accounted for the rest. Among Colonialism and Trade :
exports again, tea and cotton goods became important, the former accounting for 25 to 30 1857-1947
per cent and the latter 55 to 65 per cent of the total value.
No account of India’s trade in the period under review will be complete without reference
to the movement and migration of Indian merchant capital into the world of the Indian
Ocean. As we know, between 1750 and 1850, the merchant world of India had gone
through a complex process of regrouping and had undergone major reverses especially in
the sector of foreign trade. During the first colonial century, there was undoubtedly a
massive fall in the share of India’s foreign trade controlled by its indigenous traders.
However, the latter had whenever possible responded to opportunities, functioning as
collaborators with British private merchants. This collaboration proved particularly significant
in the case of the opium trade, which became one of the most important sources of capital
accumulation for many Indian mercantile groups – the Malwa soucars being a case in
point and so vividly described by both Claude Markowitz and Amar Farooqi.
Rajat Ray has in an important essay (1995) argued that even in the era of ‘high imperialism’,
i.e. the 1858-1914 period, Indian merchants continued to play a role in international trade,
which was not purely residual. While the trade between India and Europe was monopolized
by British business, the trade of India with the rest of Asia and Africa remained with the
Indians. Trade with Southeast Asia increased considerably in the second half of the
nineteenth century – so did the trade in the western Indian Ocean. It is to this sector of
Asian trading enterprise that we shall now turn our attention.

4.4 MERCHANTS: EUROPEANS AND INDIANS AND

THE RACIAL DIVISION OF ECONOMIC SPACE
The configurations of the Indian trading economy in the high noon of Imperialism were
determined by the communication and transport revolution that accompanied colonial rule
in the nineteenth century. Dramatic changes in shipping and transportation embodied by
the railways and steam shipping fundamentally altered the organization and finance of
Asian trade and gave Western capital mastery around the 1870s. The great liners swept
the high seas displacing the sail ships and enforced a monopoly by the formation of rings
among themselves, (also called Conferences) from about 1875. This was accompanied
by telegraphic communications that provided the basic conditions for forward trading on a
large scale. The large European firms extended their grip over the commerce of the east,
selling cargo several months ahead, did their import and export business on the principle
of simultaneous operations. What this meant was that as soon as a firm purchased produce
in India, for a price fixed in rupees, it simultaneously sold its bill to an exchange bank, fixed
the exchange in pounds, and engaged the freight with the shipping line. Three operations
were necessary to fix the sterling price of produce ahead of delivery – the price of
rupees, the rate of exchange and the rate of freight – all fixed simultaneously for a small
margin. Under these altered circumstances, the Asian merchant consigning goods on a
ship for whatever these might fetch at a port of call were over. Only large firms with a
base in the metropolitan country, that is Britain, could operate in such complex conditions.
Conferences were in essence monopoly rings to exclude all competitors by such means
as rate wars and deferred rebates. Supported by government contracts for carrying mail,
the P&O Company and the British Indian Steam Navigation Company grew into giants
and dominated the coastal and overseas shipping of India. Formed in 1875, the P&O
Company formed the first ring called the Calcutta Conference, with a few other steam
ship lines of London, Glasgow and Liverpool to prevent all comers from entering their
preserve. The system was extended to China in 1879.
Working in tandem with the shipping conferences were European Managing Agencies
and Exchange banks that in their new incarnation completely distanced themselves from
Indian collaboration. Early exchange banking had been located in India with strong Indian
partnership; now they shifted their headquarters to London beyond the reach of Indians.
Indian directors were shut out. The banks monopolized the financing of India’s export
trade that was concentrated in the hands of the shipping Conferences, the managing 89
Trade and Markets agencies and the exchange banks. The managing agencies closely financed and supported
by the banks were engaged in extensive imports of manufactured goods and in exporting
raw cotton, jute, gunnies, hessian, cotton yarns, grains and seeds, tea and a variety of
country produce from India.
The increasing racialisation of the economic space whereby Europeans dominated the
uppermost tier of the trading structure meant that Indians were necessarily pushed into a
corner. How did they respond and what were the options available before them? Prevented
from competing with the Europeans, they turned inwards and concentrated on inland
trade that fed and serviced crucially the export import lines. Trading communities like the
Marwaris and Gujaratis emerged as principal distributors of British imports and as the
major players in the marketing of agricultural goods in the subcontinent. Taking advantage
of the spreading railway and telegraph network, Marwari and Gujarati trading communities
stepped in to finance and market the trade in agricultural products and import items. This
provided the context both for the emergence of what Rajat Ray has called the Bazaar
economy that was segregated from the consolidated enclaves of European banks and
corporations.
The most important class of merchants in the inland trade of India were the Marwari
shroffs or bankers and commission agents (arhatiyas) who controlled the flows of money
and produce in the mandis or market towns of the interior. The arhatiyas were distinct
from ordinary brokers in that he guaranteed the bills or hundis through which trade
transactions were made between buyer and seller. The arhatiya, functioning as a link
between the buyer and seller, gave a contract of guarantee, undertaking that delivery
should be taken on due date or given at the price at which the order was accepted failing
which he would be liable to pay the difference. The arhatiyas controlled the expanding
grain trade and financed the smaller merchants or beparis who brought the grain to the
market towns. The arhatiyas maintained grain stores and speculated on the difference of
grain prices between distant market towns. The larger commission agency houses were
bankers, acting for merchants from other areas and allowed them to draw credit for their
business transactions. The system of interlocking commission agencies formed a network
through which long distance trade and credit developed in the interior of the country into
a dense web in course of the nineteenth century.
The prominence of the Marwari merchants in the mid-nineteenth and twentieth century
dated from the first decades of the nineteenth century, when they developed for the first
time the futures trade in opium. The fluctuations in opium prices together with the unstable
exchange between India and China made the opium market particularly favourable for
high speculation. Regular Marwari opium futures trading in Bombay started in the 1840s
while in Calcutta it developed from the 1860s. Huge fortunes were made in opium
speculations with the result that the community was well placed to enter the money market
and subsequently develop speculation in the stock market.
The banking business and the merchants associated with it underwent a major
transformation in course of the nineteenth century. It may be recalled that until the
establishment of the official British system of treasuries and a uniform silver coinage, the
hundis of Indian bankers had functioned as critical instruments in the remittance of funds
during times of peace and war. After 1860, the situation changed and the hundi became
a pure trade bill, a means by which bankers financed and facilitated the rapidly increasing
flow of inland trade along the railways.
The emergence of the bazaar in the context of expanding internal trade as a distinct but
inter-related sector of the colonial economy demonstrated the vitality of Indian business,
that was able to carve for itself an important niche in the transformed trading economy of
colonial India. The bazaar was not, in any sense a marginal or inferiorised strata in the
business world of India – like the European banking sector, it dealt with financial instruments
and mobile credit and financed the arhatiyas or commission agents and functioned as a
parallel interlocking system of trade, exchange and credit.
The link between the bazaar and the European exchange banks, was however tenuous.
90 There was no unified money market in India and different rates prevailed in each of its
three segments. The money employed in native banking and commerce, the money Colonialism and Trade :
employed in European commerce, and banking and the metallic currency issued by the 1857-1947
Government of India and partly kept in reserve in treasuries. Whereas the money circulating
in the first two sections consisted of paper, the money in use among the people was in
metal. The usurious rates at which the common people obtained loans had no relation
whatever to the rates of mobile money at the command of banks and the bazaar.
The two most important Marwari banking firms in the nineteenth century were Tarachand
Ghanshyamdas and Bansilal Abirchand, both of whom began with opium and cotton
speculation. In the 1920s, the banking house of Bansilal Abirchand with their headquarters
at Nagpur commanded a huge network of more than thirty branches spread over the
Bombay Presidency, central India, Bengal and Madras Presidencies and the princely
states of Rajputana, Hyderabad and Mysore. The Poddars of Ramgarh who owned the
firm of Tarachand Ghanshyamdas, had at their command an even wider network in India
to help distribution of Burma Oil.
The accumulation of capital and skill and commercial intelligence enabled indigenous
merchants to discover new avenues of commercial gain and discover new possibilities for
export business that was at one level, outside the strict confines of the colonial economy
and at another was part of the integrative operations of the capitalist world.
Contrary to the generally held assumption that Indian capital was unable to penetrate the
capitalist world economy dominated by the Western powers, recent scholarship has
established the importance of Indian capital movements and migrations in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. While admittedly the international trade of Asia in the later
nineteenth century was monopolized by European and American banks and shipping
corporations, Asian shipping and capital was able to find a new sphere of activity in
inter-Asian trade. As the volume of exchanges along the coast of Asia and Africa increased
steadily with the concentration of cash crops in areas of natural advantage and with
increasing imports of food into these areas, Indian capital found profitable outlets in financing
the trade in food grains and textiles to Africa and Asia. Furthermore, like the Chinese, the
Indians who had a long tradition of experience and expertise in handling money and
brokerage, were able to take full advantage of the internationalization of the economy.
Thus it was no coincidence that trading communities like Chetties of South India should
have moved into Burma from where the export of rice created a new trade in money.
Similarly the business in money arising from the export oriented clove plantations in and
around Zanzibar was monopolized by enterprising Gujarati merchant communities.

4.5 THREE MERCHANT COMMUNITIES:

CHETTIARS, MARWARIS, SHIKARPURIS
The Nattukottai Chettiars were among the most important and impressive participants in
the pan-Asian bazaar economy that functioned in tandem with the colonial economy
controlled by European capital and enterprise. To this community goes the distinction of
having opened ‘Lower Burma’ to commercial agriculture. Emerging as intermediaries
between the native cultivators who had neither access to capital nor expertise in handling
credit and the colonial economy, they became indispensable to British banks.
Historically the community was known to have engaged in extensive money lending to the
Sivaganga and Ramnad zaminaris on hundis and mortgages and in marketing and financing
the grains collected as rent in these two estates. As early as the 1830s they were attracted
to Ceylon and the Straits settlements and subsequently after the British annexation of
1852 to Lower Burma. There they quickly built up their liquid reserves and concentrated
their capital on overseas credit operations in four zones, namely, Burma, the Federated
Malay States, French Cochin-China and Ceylon.
The overseas expansion of Chettiar finance and banking started with Ceylon, where their
initial business involved supply of rice and piece-goods from India, pawn-broking and
shop-keeping. These activities subsequently led to banking and trade in money which
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Trade and Markets accompanied the development of European plantations. Until the 1840s, European planters
were dependent on Chettiars for their exchange operations. The planters who obtained
sterling bills on London for shipments of coffee, converted the bills into silver rupees, the
current coin of Ceylon, through the agency of the Chetty bankers. The Chetty bankers
shipped silver rupee coins on native vessels for which they paid a shipping charge of two
rupees per bag of rupees brought from India. With the entry of the Oriental Bank in 1847,
the Chetty bankers lost this branch of commerce and reoriented their ventures by stepping
in as intermediaries between European exchange banks and native Ceylonese borrowers.
The exchange banks made large advances to the Chettiars for short term periods at two
or three per cent above the bank rate and the Chetty bankers in turn made advances to
local Ceylonese at a margin of three per cent.
In Southeast Asia, the Chettiars operated initially as traders selling lungi cloth dyed on the
Coromandel coast to the Malays. With the annexation of Lower Burma by the British, the
Chettiars moved in as moneylenders and as financiers of the rice trade. By the beginning
of the twentieth century, the Chetty network was widespread in Burma, its headquarters
located in Mogul Street in Rangoon and connected closely with four principal upcountry
markets – Mandalay, Bassein, Henzada and Moulmein, which acted as the principal
channels for the movement of funds to the Chetty banking establishments distributing
loans for the rice crop in the interior.
The banking business of the Chettiars sustained a huge expansion in the twentieth century
and on the eve of the Great Depression, their business had increased five times over –
with 1650 firms operating a working capital of 750 million rupees. It was in the same
period that Chetty capital moved to new and profitable areas of investment. As Singapore
became important, the Chettiars turned from peddling in Coromandel cloth to large-scale
financing of opium imports from India which in turn led to banking. This was undertaken
in close collaboration with the European exchange banks – the Chetti opium importers
formed an important channel through which the paper notes of the exchange banks
circulated in the straits.
The movement of Chetty capital and enterprise was not an isolated phenomenon. Like
the Chetties, Gujarati merchant communities spearheaded an impressive movement of
capital into the western Indian Ocean. Bhatias, Khojas and Cutchi Memons came into
prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century, when they established themselves
in all the major ports of the Arabian Peninsula. Originally grain sellers, these communities
began migrating into Bombay in the latter decades of the eighteenth century and went on
to form merchant colonies in Muscat, Aden and Zanzibar. The substantial trade that
developed between India and east Africa and centreed primarily on Zanzibar was largely
a preserve of various groups of Gujarati merchants. Trade with the Middle East, particularly
with the Persian Gulf remained also an important area of activity for many Indian traders
from Kutch and Kathiawar, Sind, Gujarat proper and Bombay.
The movement of Gujarati capital and enterprise while driven by the imperatives of the
colonial economy was clearly able to carve for itself an important domain of autonomy in
the trade of the Indian Ocean. Their chief function was to distribute Manchester cloth in
Arabia and Africa. Later in the period, the Japanese relied on their network as well and
eventually the Bombay mills used the same agency to push their products in the Red Sea
zone.
The regular steamship service between Bombay and the Persian Gulf made Bombay the
principal market from which the Arab countries and Iran purchased goods. The vitality of
Gujarati merchant enterprise in Bombay had been consolidated through the nineteenth
century, with the result that they were able to step in as critical intermediaries in the trade.
With their strong position in Bombay, built up through family connections, they built up an
extensive network for the distribution of goods in the Western Indian Ocean. The marketing
network that they built up fell into three zones: the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the
coastal stretch of Africa from Zanzibar to Mozambique. In the Persian Gulf, their main
centre was Muscat, where a settled Indian community conducted an active trade with
92 India in rice, grains, spices and coffee. As early as 1840, Muscat boasted of a strong
Indian community (some 2000 Indian merchants). In the succeeding decades, this settlement Colonialism and Trade :
became more entrenched. Indents for Manchester goods were sent by the Muscat Gujaratis 1857-1947
to their Bombay agents who placed the orders with the shipping firms in Bombay. The
Bombay agents made payments against the bill of lading and then drew hundis on their
Muscat correspondents at 21 days at a commission of 2 per cent. Bahrein and Kuwait
were two subsidiary centres of Gujarati trade in the Persian Gulf. Shells and pearls were
the principal items that entered this trade.
On the Red Sea, Aden dominated the trading network. Its imports of piece goods and
yarns were sizeable and its trade stretched beyond the British settlement. Three or four
large Indian firms in Aden, with branches in Bombay and Djibouti controlled the entire
import of yarn and piece goods and distributed it on the other side of the Red Sea.
In East Africa, the Gujarati trade zone centreing around Zanzibar extended to Mozambique
in the south and to Kampala in the north. Resident Gujaratis imported a variety of Indian
goods – rice, piece goods, wheat and flour from India and exported cotton, cloths and
ivory to India. The typical Gujarati firm in Zanzibar had a branch in Bombay that undertook
the business of importing piece goods from a local piece-goods merchant on cash against
documents, and of shipping the goods to the Zanzibar office on credit. Thereafter, the
Zanzibar office would, instead of making cash payment to Bombay, utilize the proceeds of
sale for purchase of cloves for the Bombay market. The Zanzibar Indian firms also dealt
in Manchester goods and Japanese goods. In Zanzibar, the Gujaratis importing and
wholesale firms passed on the imported goods to Indian retailers who formed a network
in the country. Credit for 90-120 days was readily extended to this secondary network –
a nexus so dominated by Gujarati capital that the foreign firms made no attempt in Zanzibar
to obtain direct access to the markets. The importance of Zanzibar declined in course of
the twentieth century making way for Kampala to emerge as the principal centre of the
Gujarati network.
A third merchant diaspora studied recently by Claude Markovits was constituted by the
Shikarpuri merchants and Sindworkis who operated very different networks. Shikarpur
was the centre of a financial network which developed in the second half of the eighteenth
century following the rise of the Durrani empire (in Afghanistan, 1747-c.1823-6). The
decline of Durrani power did not entirely deflect Shikarpuri enterprise for taking advantage
of the capital that the merchants had accumulated, they were able to take advantage of a
new surge in Indo-Central Asian trade from the 1840s to build a far-flung network based
on the financing of the caravan trade and on the close links with the Uzbek Khanates of
Central Asia. This was a network that functioned quite independently of the British
connection and was able to maintain it until the Russian revolution. The case of the
Sindworkies was quite different. Hyderabad in Sind was home to a community of bankers
and merchants who had close links with the Amirs of Sind and who were overthrown by
the British in 1843. Undeterred, the Sindworkis exploited the growing commercial
connections between Sind and Bombay to embark upon a new venture, namely that of
selling local craft productions to a European clientele, first in Bombay, then in Egypt and
then worldwide. These two networks, a study in contrast had many features in common in
that they both used ‘traditional’ forms of business organization and of accounting techniques.
At the same they, at least the Sindworkies, operated in conditions of a global economy.

4.6 MERCHANTS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND BUSINESS

STRUCTURES
How does one explain the relative success of merchants in colonial India? Historians
have suggested that the success of merchant communities like the Chetties, the Gujaratis
and the Sindhis were largely to do with the community structure, their accounting system,
partnership arrangement, agencies and communal mechanisms of bazaar rate
determination. In the case of the Chetties, whose business organization and practices
have been studied by David Rudner. Their community structure provided a firm foundation
to the commercial organization of the Nagarathars. The Nattukottai Chetties called
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Trade and Markets themselves Nagarathars because the community was divided into nine nagarms
(townships) with a temple at the head of every such unit. Each temple levied a tax on
every married couple assigned to it. Among the member thus apportioned, the nagaram
settled disputes out of court by arbitration.
Their system of accountancy was the double entry system of bookkeeping in which Chetty
boys were trained from year 8. Sons of rich parents were apprenticed to learn business in
firms that did not belong to their parents. Chettiar firms generally were partnerships between
relatives through marriage. The same Chettiar male could be partner in several firms,
which gave rise to a system of interlocking partnerships across the four zones.
A characteristic feature of Chetty enterprise was the system of agencies and inter-bank
system of accounting. An agent entered into the banker’s service on a three-year contract
and before setting out for his overseas destination received an advance in salary that
amounted to Rs.300 for Burma in contrast to Rs.100 for Madras. On his return, he got a
net ten per cent share in the net profits if he was considered industrious during his agency.
Auditing of accounts was done triennially while control of the agent was maintained by
examination of weekly or monthly dispatches of the book extracts and issue of instructions
by correspondence. Six months before the expiry of the agency, the new agent was sent
to learn the business and familiarize himself with local business conditions. The agent then
returned home, settled accounts and resumed his engagement either with his earlier
employer or with another banker, or start business on his own. Under such a complex and
interlocking system, Chattiars were found to act in multiple capacities, either as partners
in banking on their account or agents of their caste men.
The Chetty banks adopted among themselves the inter-bank system of accounting. This
involved crediting and debiting interest with each other at the end of the year after exchanging
a memorandum of interest calculations accepted by both parties before adjustment was
made in the books. Chetty inter-bank rates varied every month according to seasonal demand.
Overseas Chetties fixed the current rate every month at an assembly in a special building
where each banker secretly indicated his figures to a chairman who announced the average
and arrived at the rate in accordance with the demand and supply for capital among the
Chetties and the bank rate then prevailing. The community also made use of weekly meetings
to fix the thavanai rate or the interest on deposits from outsiders.
Among Gujarati businessmen as well as the Sind merchant networks, the business
organization remained strongly centreed round community ties. Markowitz mentions the
workings of the shah-gumastha system in connection with the Shikarpuri merchants.
Distinguishing it from the Chetty system where Markovits argues the agents were not
partners in the same sense as the Shikarpuri gomasthas (agents). The system originated
before the eighteenth century but by the 1840s it was firmly in place in Shikarpur. It
allowed a small groups of bankers located in Shikarpur to control financial and commercial
transactions over an extensive area. The sarraf or the banker was the merchant capitalist
or shah who advanced the funds to his agents or gumasthas, who were remunerated in
the form of a share in the profits of the financial and commercial operations they undertook
for him. Once in Central Asia, the gumasthas started their own business and became
shahs in their own right. The basic function of the system was to ensure a regular supply
of capital for long distance financial and commercial ventures. The hundi was the cementing
mechanism in the network – within the Shikarpur circuit hundis were honoured on sight.
In Hyderabad on the other hand, among the Sindworkies, there developed a kind of dual
system that combined features of the shah-gumastha system with that of European
commercial partnerships. These were associations of several shahs or capitalist partners
with several gomasthas. The firms had head offices and branches and demonstrated
exceptional longevity.

4.7 SUMMARY
What is one to make of the story of Indian trade in the global economy of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century? Obviously it cannot be detached from the reality of colonial
94 subordination and the imperatives that the colonial connection engendered. Without
discounting the dynamism and resilience of Indian merchant capital and initiative in working Colonialism and Trade :
the regional and global economy of the period, it must be kept in mind that the workings of 1857-1947
colonialism undermined the full potentialities of trade and its prospects for industrialization.
Historians have debated at length the impact of colonialism on the Indian economy. Despite
the significant additions made to our understanding of the subject, there is little doubt that
the workings of the colonial economy were instrumental in restricting the basis of the
Indian economy and slowing its take off. Tapan Raychaudhury, for instance, drew attention
to the fact that the so called integration into the world economy by means of railways was
largely if not exclusively oriented to foreign exports that favoured British capital and led to
the growth of enclaves with very little linkage effect. By developing in enclaves, foreign
activity created for itself a separate leaving a subordinate one to the traditional businessman.
More recently, Rajat Ray who argues that it is too simplistic to posit a simple opposition
between a modern European dominated world economy and an Asian bazaar economy
has contested this dualist characterization of the Indian economy. In his view there emerged
within the world capitalist economy, a specific sub-formation, namely the bazaar which
was clearly subordinated to the former but which nevertheless adapted itself successfully
to the world economy dominated by Europe. A third view is that of Markovits who accuses
Ray of remaining dualist. For him, what is more important is to identify the specificities of
the local situation that enabled some Asian merchant networks to adapt successfully and
not see them as a form of global sub-formation within the international economy. Each
network found its place within the global order through a complex process of negotiation
that involved conflict as much as collaboration.
The linkages between trade and early industrialization were important. The proceeds
from opium and cotton speculation in Western India formed the capital base of both
Gujarati bankers as well as Parsis who founded the first textile mills in Western India.
One of the characteristics of trader-industrialists, especially the bazaar industrialists was
the combination of bazaar transactions while expanding into the modern sector. Bazaar
industrialization, according to Rajat Ray, remained strictly limited for it catered to the
domestic market primarily and here the poverty of the masses was a major constraint.
The one way free trade policy which India was forced to adopt retarded the industrial
development of India. The base of the industrial sector remained narrow and this meant
that enormous technical and infra-structural constraints had to be overcome before
industrialization could take off.

4.8 EXCERCISES
1) Analyse the changing pattern of India’s trade during the second half of the 19th
century.
2) What role did the Indian merchants play in India’s trading economy during the late
19th century?
3) Analyse the impact of railways on Indian markets and merchants.
4) What accounts for the dynamism of the ‘bazaar economy’ in the colonial period?
5) Analyse Chettiar participation in the ‘pan-Asian bazaar economy’ during the second
half of the 19th century.
6) Discuss the operation of the Gujarati merchants in the Oceanic trade during the
second half of the 19th century.

4.9 SUGGESTED READINGS

Bagchi, Amiya Kumar (1972), Private Investment in India 1900-1939, Cambridge.
Bagchi, Amiya Kumar (1976), “Reflections on Patterns of Regional Growth in India During
the Period of British Rule”, Bengal Past and Present, 95, no. 1, pp. 247-89.
Bhattacharya, Neelaladri (2003), ‘Predicaments of Mobility: Peddlers and Itinerants in
Nineteenth Century Northwestern India’, in Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass 95
Trade and Markets and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), Society and Circulation Mobile People and Itinerant
Cultures in South Asia 1750-1950, Permanent Black, Delhi.
Chaudhuri, K. N. and Clive J. Dewey (1979) (eds.), Economy and Society: Essays in
Indian Economic and Social History, Delhi.
Chaudhuri, K. N. (1971), Economic Development of India Under the East India
Company, 1814-1858: a selection of contemporary writings in Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Chaudhuri, K.N. (1982), ‘Foreign Trade and Balance of Payments (1757-1947)’, in Kumar,
Dharma (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India 1757-1970, Vol. II, New
Delhi.
Markovits, Claude (2002), The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947: Trader
of Sind from Bukhara to Patna, Cambridge University Press.
Ray, Rajat Kant (1988), ‘The Bazaar: Changing Structural Characteristic of the Indigenous
Sector of the Indian Economy Before and After the Great Depression’, IESHR, Vol.
XXV, No. 3.
Ray, Rajat Kanta (ed.) (1992), Entrepreneurship and Industry in India 1800-1947.
Oxford in India Readings, Delhi.
Ray, Rajat Kanta (1995), ‘Asian Capital in the Age of European Domination: the Rise of
the Bazaar 1800-1914’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol.29, No.3, pp. 449-554.
Ray, Rajat Kant (1995), ‘Agrarian Bengal, 1850-1947: Issues and Problems.’ Studies in
History, 11(NS), no.1, pp. 119-42.
Rothermund, Dietmar (1981), Asian Trade and European Expansion in the Age of
Merchantilism, New Delhi.
Rothermund, Dietmar (1988), An Economic History of India from Pre-Colonial Times
to 1991, Routledge.
Roy, Tirthankar (2000), The Economic History of India 1857-1947, Oxford India
paperbacks, Delhi.
Rudner, David West (1995), Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India: The Nattukottai
Chettiars, Reprint. First published by the University of California Press in 1994.
Siddiqui, Asiya (1995), “The Business World of Jamesetjee Jejeebhoy”, in Asiya Siddiqui
( ed), Trade and Finance in Colonial India, Oxford in India Readings, Oxford
University Press, New Delhi.

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