Mughal India was a self-contained world. It produced nearly everything it needed.

What
is needed, however, was little. There was thus no great scope in Mughal India for inter-
regional trade or for imports from other countries. Local trade was, however, well
organized, Town markets were regulate by government officials, who checked prices,
weights and measures, Metropolitan cites like Agra, Delhi and Lahore held thriving
markets selling products from all over India and abroad. “You cannot desire any thing but
you shall find it in this city”, says Jourdain about Agra(1). “Every great town or cities of
India hath markets twice a day: In the cool season presently after the sunne is risen, and a
little before setting”, says Terry. Peddlers abounded in towns. In Surat, Ovington saw”.
The most vivid acount of an Indian bazaar in Mughal times is given in the chronicle of
Akbar’s envoy Asad Beg, who found in Bijapur “a bazaar of great extent”, as much as
27.5 meters wide and nearly 6.5 kilometers long. “Before each shop was a beautiful green
tree, and the whole bazaar was extremely clean and pure”, writes Asad. “It was filled
with rare goods, such as are not seen or heard of in any other town. There were shops of
cloth-sellers, jewelers, armors, vintners, bakers, fishmongers, and cooks.
“In the Jewellers’ shops were jewels of all sorts, wrought into a variety of articles, such
as daggers, knives, mirrors, necklaces, and also into the form of birds. All studded with
valuable jewels, and arranged upon shelves.
These oases of wealth were mostly seats of political power, but a few commercial cities
were also coming into prominence at this time, such as Goa, Calicut, Madras,
Machilipathnam (Masulipatam), Hugli, and of course Surat, which was by far the richest
and most prominent port city in the Mughal Empire. Port cities like Surat were dominated
by Indian merchant princes, who were held in high esteem in international trading circles.
The most prominent Surat merchant in the mid 17th century was Virji Vohra, who was
reputed to be the richest merchant in the world in his time, and could deploy as much as
eight million rupees in trade. He had branch offices or agencies at Ahmadabad, Agra,
Burhanpur, Golconda and Malabar, and he dominated and controlled the markets in
which he operated. Often the syndicate which he led bought up entire cargoes of ships
valued up to a million rupees. He also lent money on interest – the English often
borrowed from him, a couple of hundred thousand rupees at a time – on a security other
than the creditworthiness of the borrower and the assurance of strict adherence to the
agreed terms.
Haji Said Beg and Haji Qasim were the other Croesuses of Surt. Shantidas Jawhari, a
Jain jeweler and banker of Ahmadabad, was yet another prominent merchant of Gujrat.
He had considerable influence at the imperial court, sufficient to discomfit even imperial
princes, as Aurangzeb once learned to his sorrow – when Aurangzeb, as the governor of
Gujrat, seized the temple Shantidas had built and converted it into a mosque, Shantidas
petitioned Shah Jahan and got the temple restored to him. Aurangzeb himself, on his
accession, took care to conciliate Shantidas. Likewise, Surat merchant Rustam Manak
successfully petitioned Aurangzeb to secure for Parsees exemption from jizya. Similar
prominence was enjoyed by Mir Jumla of Golconda, Malay Chetti and Kasi Viranna of
Coromandel, and several others like them.
Thus when Murad set out on the war of succession, he borrowed ten million rupees from
the merchants of Surat by issuing a bond guaranteeing repayment. When Murad lost the
war of succession and was executed by Aurangzeb, the creditors petitioned Aurangzeb to
redeem the bond – though, when the emperor conceded the claim.

1
Later, when Aurangzeb in acute financial stringency at the end of his life, sought an
interest free loan from the bankers at the imperial camp, they refused, on the ground that
it would set a bad precedent, and that the governors too, if they came to hear of it, would
ask for interest-free loans.
Sometimes, though rarely, amirs were involved in trade the most distinguished of them
being Mir Jumla, who had begun his career as a trader. Mir Jumla owned ten ships and a
large fleet of carts to transport his goods; he also had the weavers of an extensive tract of
land working exclusively for him, and had once, having fallen out with the Dutch,
proposed a partnership with the English to monopolize east coast trade. Muqarab Khan,
the governor of Surat under Jahangir, was also a prominent and successful trader. “It is
the principal trade of the nobles of India to place their money on values in speculations”,
says Tavernier. Amirs seldom handled trade directly, to avoid the stigma of being
branded Baniyas, but acted through merchant agents, who operated under their
protection.
Trade, including international trade, was also a bobby of the royal ladies; connections
enabled them to acquire valuable monopolies. Sometimes the emperor himself created
monopolies. Thus in 1633 Shah Jahan made indigo a royal monopoly, requiring its sale
throughout the empire to be channeled through a particular merchant, who was given a
loan from the treasury to finance the trade and was required to share the profit with the
emperor. In 1655 Shah Jahan set up a monopoly in saltpeter, and in 1640-41 he and his
Vizier Asaf Khan commandeered the entire textile industry in Ahmadabad for exporting
cloth to the Middle East. Salt was a royal monopoly under the Mughals.

It is difficult to estimate the size of urban population that the diffusion of agrarian surplus
would have generated. An estimation of up to 15 percent of the total population living in
town, giving an absolute urban population of , say , about 20 million for the whole

1-The Journal of John Jourdain..1608-1617