Of Lmarat and Tijarat: Asian Merchants and State Power in The Western Indian Ocean, 1400 To 1750

Of lmarat and Tijarat: Asian
Merchants and State Power in the

Western Indian Ocean, 1400 to 1750
SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
Delhi School of Economics, Delhi
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Societies, Paris
"Tijarat [trade] is better than imdrat [government] by several degrees. In imarat one
becomes subordinate, and in tijarat one can lead the life of a ruler. The riches that
accumulate through imarat are a misfortune, and the money one gets through tijarat is a
lawful livelihood."
—Anand Ram 'Mukhlis'1
How best might one address the relationship between trade and state building
in early modern South Asia? The question is hardly a new one. To some, like
Anand Ram 'Mukhlis' (d. 1751), a Khatri from northern India who, though
not Muslim, had been educated in Persian letters and accounting (siydqat),
trade was more honourable and safer than statecraft or government. The for-
tunes of the nobility were fluctuating ones, and the means by which they had
been accumulated were of a questionable legitimacy. Doubts of this sort did
not of course prevent his Khatri brethren from entering into government ser-
vice during the later Mughal period, and several of them can be counted among
the acydn (notables) of the reign of the Mughal, Muhammad Shah (1719-48)
(Alam 1986:169-75). They maintained a tradition begun in the reign of Ak-
bar with the famous Raja Todar Mai (d. 1589), also a Khatri from the Punjab.
Further south in India, in the Maratha territories, eighteenth-century writers
on statecraft, like Ramachandra Pant, provide a complementary perspective
and make it clear that the merchant had a significant role to play from the
state's point of view (Puntambekar 1929:31). These eighteenth-century writ-
ings can be viewed as the culmination of a long process of not merely reflec-
tion on, but practice in dealing with, the adjunct and at times overlapping
spheres of statecraft and trade in South Asia. On the other hand, some modern
writers who addressed this issue have sought to argue that a particular solution
unique to India had long been evolved to deal with the relationship between
This essay has benefitted from discussions with Muzaffar Alam, Keram Kevonian, and Avrom
Udovitch, and the comments of the journal's referees. An earlier version was presented at a
conference on the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires, held at Istanbul in June 1992.
1
Anand Ram 'Mukhlis3, Badaie Waqa'i' (c. 1740), cited in Azhar 'Ali (1946:22).
0010-4175/95/4599-4233 $7.50 + .10 © 1995 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History
750
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

ASIAN MERCHANTS AND STATE POWER 75I
ruler and merchant. This solution involved separating functions by caste, the
very nature of which seems to argue for the segmentation of activities, distin-
guishing state-building kshatriyas as being apparently distinct from trading
vaishyas (Jones 1981:192-201). At the same time, the continental dimensions
of South Asia suggested a certain inwardness, a suspicion of the exterior, and
thus a natural preference among even Sultanates for an agrarian-based fisc in
place of a commerce-based one (Pearson 1976; Pearson 1991; Wills 1993).
Placing South Asia in the larger context of the western Indian Ocean region
helps us shift the basis of what has thus far usually been a somewhat rarefied
discussion. It is evident to any historian of the flow of trade that this region
was located in a larger continuum in the early modern period, in which at least
some men and certain skills were extremely mobile and, thus, ideologies
themselves were not evolved in a closed societal greenhouse. If Anand Ram
'Mukhlis' and his contemporary in south India, Jaswant Rai 'Munshi', learnt
to write verse and prose in Persian, they could not have been unaware of the
intellectual traditions of the rest of the Persian-speaking world. Again, the
Mecca-based family of al-Nahrawali, whose scion, Qutb al-Din Muhammad,
produced two well-known sixteenth-century chronicles of the Hijaz and Ye-
men, must have carried more baggage to Arabia than merely their last name,
which points clearly enough to roots in Gujarat (Wustenfeld 1857). The same
was clearly the case with the seventeenth-century Gujarati Sufi, Nur al-Din
Raneri, who emerged as a powerful and charismatic figure in the Sumatran
Sultanate of Aceh, or Husain Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Basra, who in
1669-70 came over to the Mughals and was titled Islam Khan 'Rumi' (Lom-
bard 1967:19-20, 162-3; Farooqi 1989:61-64).
At the same time, the implicit comparative exercise must of necessity be a
still larger one. The classic portrayal of the differentia specified that set apart
the economic trends in early modern Asia from those in Europe makes an
argument for dividing Asia itself into two loose civilisational entities, east and
west of India. In each of these, certain institutions and values were identified
(whether by Karl Marx and Max Weber themselves or, following in their
footsteps, by historical sociologists from Barrington Moore to Immanuel Wal-
lerstein) that inhibited the development of these societies along the lines of
western Europe and that thus accounted for the "Rise of the West" (Goldstone
1993). Over the years, a central feature of this argument has been the por-
trayal of the relationship between state power and mercantile activity in Asia
as one opposed to that of Europe. In the areas bordering on the western Indian
Ocean, an argument has repeatedly been made that because states either
preyed on or neglected trade, they failed to harness its transformative poten-
tial, unlike their western European counterparts.
Specialists may be aware that one after another of this argument's empirical
props have been gradually weakened. To those who had argued that the unique
institution of the trade-oriented city-state set Europe apart, a number of

752 SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
THE WESTERN INDIAN OCEAN

1400-1750
° 500 1000 1500 KILOMETRES
MAP 1.

ASIAN MERCHANTS AND STATE POWER 753
counter-examples have been presented over the years. To those who had
argued that ideological barriers restrained states bordering on the western
Indian Ocean from seeking alliances with traders, textual evidence has been
produced to show that a rather complex attitude existed in that area as much as
in western Europe and derived in part even from doctrinal Islamic traditions
(Subrahmanyam 1992; also much earlier, Udovitch 1970). To those who had
presented the teleological argument that early modern Asian traders were
petty pedlars unable to compete with the mighty chartered trading companies
and their sophisticated organisation, the response from economic historians of
Asia has been sceptical. Such formulations have been shown to be based on a
rather skewed sample of materials for understanding the institutions that un-
derpinned Asian trade in the epoch (such as insurance, partnership, bills of
exchange, and bottomry). It turns out, moreover, that the companies could
rarely compete with Asian traders in any market, save when they could use
violence without fear of retaliation (Habib 1990; Subrahmanyam 1990; Perlin
1993:284-5). Yet these have usually remained isolated critiques, effective
only to point out this or that weakness, while leaving the larger formulation
intact (Tracy 1990, 1991). The present essay thus sets out to draw on these
accumulating, but largely dispersed, materials to provide a larger comparativ-
ist formulation.
DIASPORA AND STATE MERCANTILISM

Two concepts clearly dominate recent discussion on traders and states in the
western Indian Ocean between the fifteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries.
The first is the idea of diaspora communities (Curtin 1984; Lombard and
Aubin 1988). The second, the idea of state mercantilism (Bayly 1989), is used
not with the narrow connotation that confines it to European nation-states of
the early modem period but in a broader and more commonsensical way.
Comparative historians have raised objections to these usages, first, because they
are "descriptive rather than analytical" and, second, because they are not authen-
tic native usages but, rather, "Western terminologies" (Wink 1993:110). Neither
of these objections appears fundamental. If the latter is taken seriously, it leads to
the unfortunate conclusion that Asian histories can only be written in Asian
languages; and the former perhaps fails to appreciate that these terms have a
rather clear analytical meaning, even though they may pose a problem of preci-
sion when used as descriptive categories.
Indeed, it is of considerable analytical interest that the two ideas of mercan-
tilism and diaspora are somewhat in conflict. While the idea of the diaspora is
based on the notion of the mercantile communities' autonomy and the exis-
tence of a sort of equilibrium based on mutual indifference between them and
those who wield state power, the idea of state mercantilism rests on the no-
tion that states can be active participants in trade themselves. If states did,
indeed, take such an interest in trade, they could scarcely have been indif-

ferent to the identity and interests of other participants in the world of mercan-
tile operations. Could mercantilist states coexist then with diaspora commu-
nities?
Before we enter into this question, we should remind ourselves that the
world of trade in the Indian Ocean region changed considerably during the
centuries with which we are concerned. The increased presence of the Eu-
ropeans is one, but only one, aspect of this change (Wills 1993). For a variety
of other reasons having to do with the shifting demographic balance within
Asia, with the spread of new crops and the rise of new markets, the horizons
of the Asian trader were also transformed in the years between 1400 and
1750. Whereas during the years 800 to 1300, the main axis of long-distance
commercial flows in Asia appears to have been in the east-west direction
(both on the caravan routes through Central Asia, and on sea), the years after
1300 saw the rise of commerce largely in the north-south direction. Indian
trade with Southeast Asia and East Africa grew, as did Chinese trade with
insular Southeast Asia. This increase was largely based on the exchange of
tropical products, such as spices and woods, and minerals, against manufac-
tures like Chinese porcelains and silks and Indian cotton textiles. At the same
time, the rise of a set of port-centred states, which we shall describe below,
led to the growth of a substantial trade in food grains and other items of bulk
consumption. This trade, in relatively low-value and high-volume goods, may
have existed earlier as well, but it would seem that the late fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries witnessed a substantial expansion.
It has often been stated that the commercial expansion of the early centuries
of the second millenium was part of a phase of Arab dominance of Indian
Ocean trade; it is also asserted, more recently, that the years after about 750 AD
witnessed the formation of an Islamic world-economy in the Indian Ocean
(Wink 1990, 1988; Chaudhuri 1985; contrast Lombard 1965). Two obvious
questions arise in this context. First, was the commercial nexus in question
indeed a world-economy? And second, how "Islamic" was it in content? The
answer to the first question appears, even on brief reflection, to be clearly
negative: Proponents have been unable to show that the structure of trade in
the region either corresponded to a hierarchy of markets with a single central
clearinghouse or to a single core with peripheries with which it traded on
terms of unequal exchange (Abu-Lughod 1989). Without these elementary
propositions in place, the term world-economy appears inappropriate.
The second issue—that of Islam's role in this commercial nexus—is a
more delicate one and has been taken to the logical limit of its development in
Andre Wink's recent Al-Hind (Wink 1990:vol. 1). This work tends to treat
both Islam and Muslims in a largely monolithic and undifferentiated fashion
and is strikingly reticent both on questions of ideology and on the social and
economic competition and conflict between different groups operating in the
Indian Ocean at this time. Indeed, readers of Wink's work may be left with

the impression that Islam alone ensured that the expansion of trade was
always the case in the Islamic world-economy, that no peaks and troughs or
reversals of conjuncture need be identified. The absence of quantitative evi-
dence is taken here as argument enough for expansion. Islam—with its tripar-
tite formula of Mamluk institutions, Sasanid kingship, and de-thesaurised
gold—motivates trade, and once trade grows, everything else follows in its
train. Besides, the further an economy was from the centre of Islam, the less
its sophistication, and the less its potential for growth, as in the case of
Indonesia. In this view then, the economy (and thus the society and polity) of
South Asia acquires a logic of change through contact with Islam, first
through trade and then through conquest.
It seems clear enough that the history of Indian Ocean trade in the centuries
after 750 AD is far too complex to fit the set of straitjackets that have been
imposed on it in the literature surveyed above. Change (which must not
always be glossed as growth, pure and simple) was polycentric in its motiva-
tion. There was no single epicentre that generated a pulse to which the entire
system responded, even in the western Indian Ocean. The model of the
Islamic world-economy is simply unable, for example, to comprehend the
trade of other groups than the Islamic ones, save as minor actors operating
essentially within the monopolistic framework of this Islamic world-economy
(Wink 1993:106-7). But, as we shall see below, this is surely less than
accurate, for two reasons. First, other non-Muslim Asian merchant groups
participated in this trade on a large scale as well and often wholly or largely on
their own terms. These included Gujarati vaniyas, Tamil and Telugu Chettis,
Syrian Christians from south-western India, Chinese from Fukien and neigh-
bouring provinces, and others besides the Jews studied by S. D. Goitein and
treated as paradigmatic of the "incorporated other" by more recent writers.
Second, to exercise a monopoly, even the Muslims must have acted en bloc,
something that is simply undemonstrable. The very strong connotation of a
term like monopoly suggests a certain caution in its usage before creating the
image of a monolith where none existed.
It remains true that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the expan-
sion of a variety of forms of Islam on the shores of the Indian Ocean and
that Muslim mercantile communities comprised a growing presence,
whether in East Africa, India, or Southeast Asia (Pouwels 1987; Hourani
1951). But this is not the same process as that envisaged by the construct of
the Islamic world-economy, for we should bear in mind that this Islam was
as often heterodox as orthodox, as we see from the disdain expressed by the
Arab navigator, Ahmad ibn Majid, for Malay Muslims in the fifteenth cen-
tury:
These are bad people, who do not know any rule; the Infidel marries the Muslim, and
the Muslim the Infidel woman; and when you call them infidels', are you really sure
that they are Infidels? And the Muslims of whom you speak, are they really Muslims?

They drink wine in public, and do not pray when they set out on a voyage (cited in
Thomaz 1988:42).
No doubt to some later European observers (and notably to some sixteenth-

century Portuguese), the entire process appeared to be one of spreading the
"law of Muhammad"; but it seems more than a little problematic to equate
Mappilas and Maraikkayars to Bohras and Khojas and to assume that all of
these were bound up tightly in one social and economic system. What seems
more reasonable as an assertion is that the expansion of Islam, and to a lesser
extent Theravada Buddhism—religions that laid particular stress on individu-
al salvation—may indirectly have had an influence on the social perception of
the role of trade and profits. The Christianity that the Portuguese brought to
Asia therefore competed with other religions freshly on the ascendant which
were being spread not merely by conquest but by acculturation and trading
contacts. This second aspect of long-term change in maritime Asia must also
be borne in mind if we are to view in proper perspective the mercantile shifts
in the three and a half centuries under our consideration. It will not do,
however, to speak of the European monolith confronting an earlier, equally
monolithic, structure; for this does scant justice to the history of the periods
both before and after 1500.
THE RISE OF CITY-STATES BASED IN PORTS

A brief tour d'horizon may be in order here. In the course of the fifteenth
century, a set of city-states based in ports grew up and came to dominate the
maritime world from Melaka in the east to Aden in the west. Their rise was
associated with what has recently been called an age of commerce; in the
context of Southeast Asia, this process was one that the limited records at our
disposal from the fifteenth century only dimly allow us to comprehend (Reid
1988). Nevertheless, these sources, which include Chinese travelogues, Per-
sian chronicles and memoirs, as well as European accounts from Italian and
other merchants, do permit us to delineate a network of interlinked ports and
trader communities. Portuguese records then provide us with more detailed
information after 1500 (Mills 1970; Aubin 1973; Godinho 1963-65).
Perhaps the most conspicuous port-city and state created in the fifteenth
century, Melaka, was one that, properly speaking, lies outside the geographi-
cal ambit of our discussion. Nevertheless, Melaka's structure was at the same
time similar enough to the general pattern, and original enough in some re-
spects, to attract our attention (Thomaz 1988, 1990). Founded in about 1400,
Melaka had by the middle of the fifteenth century become the metropolis-
capital of a state whose shadow reached to the other extremity of the Indone-
sian archipelago. The population of the city, between 100,000 and 200,000,
was large by Asian standards of the time and certainly dominates any other
centre in the Southeast Asian region. As a consequence, Melaka remained a

sort of model for the Southeast Asian Sultanate of the early modern period,
even as its legal code (Undang-undang Melaka) continued to be imitated and
drawn upon as a basis for commercial transactions.
Although the greater part of the population of Melaka was made up of
Malays of the labouring class (including a substantial slave sector), there was
also a sizeable number of communities of resident foreign merchants. There is
little doubt that these merchants were accorded a high status in Melaka's
society, as we see from the Hikayat Hang Tuah, a Malay prose epic celebrat-
ing Melaka's Sultans (Thomaz 1988:34; Overbeck 1986). What we know of
the Melaka Sultanate's revenue base confirms that foreign trade was indeed
the lifeblood of the kingdom. A complex system of taxes differentiated ships
coming from the lands west of Melaka from those coming from the east. The
former paid customs-duties, while the latter were liable to taxation under the
complex system of beli-belian, in which goods were sold to the Melaka
Sultanate below market price, and other goods were purchased above market
price. In both cases, the explicit and implicit rates of customs duties were,
however, much lower than in contemporary Burma, Bengal, and elsewhere
(though not lower than in, say, Calicut). Despite this fact, customs collections
and related surcharges accounted for something like 90 percent of the Sultan-
ate's revenues, swamping by far the tributes paid by the provincial governors
and vassal kings of the Sultan. Besides this, Melaka's Sultans also partici-
pated directly in commerce, owning ships and plying routes between Melaka
and the Indian coast of the Bay of Bengal. The presence of these ships,
manned at times by the slaves of the Sultan, gives the state in Melaka a
markedly mercantile character.
A characteristic feature of Melaka is the town's well-defined ethnic quarters
(kampongs), inhabited by the leading trading communities. Most numerous
among these were the Gujaratis, who dominated Melaka politically as well
until the late fifteenth century. Next in importance were the Kelings from
Coromandel, whose fortunes were on the ascendant in the early years of the
sixteenth century. The Chinese from Fukien, the Javanese, the Luzonese, and
the merchants of Bengal also had an important role to play. Political organisa-
tion tended to mirror the spatial division. Each of the major communities was
represented by a syahbandar (or chief consul), and the major communities
also vied to control the important ministerial posts.
We are aware that in about 1500 Melaka was one of the key nodes in Asian
maritime trade, linked to China and eastern Indonesia but also to India and the
regions of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. In the latter two areas, political
power sought expression in the form of relatively small and compact trading
states not dissimilar to Melaka, of which the two clearest examples are Yemen
at the mouth of the Red Sea and Hurmuz in the Persian Gulf. Both also
controlled key nodes in Indian Ocean trade—the ports of Aden and Jarun,
respectively.

Aden emerged into importance as a centre in the late ninth or early tenth
century, several centuries before the rise of Melaka (Goitein 1954; Serjeant
1988). It was one of three ports, the others being Zafar and al-Shihr, where
ships from India and Southeast Asia customarily made first landfall on the
Arabian coast. Under the rule of the Ayyubid dynasty, the port duties Cushur)
at Aden were first codified in the twelfth century by Khalaf al-Nahawandi.
These rulers also instituted a system of galleys to patrol the coast and the
mouth of the Red Sea in order to protect merchant shipping from pirates. This
coastal fleet (al-casdkir al-bahriya) survived in some form into the early
sixteenth century and was used to defend Aden from attacks by the rulers of
Shihr and other neighbours on at least two occasions between the 1450s and
1490s (Schuman 1960:12-14, 69). The consolidation of Aden's fortunes is
usually dated to Ayyubids in the twelfth century, but the structure of trade and
state in the area, somewhat obscure in the period, becomes clearer during the
rule of the Rasulid dynasty that succeeded. Of particular importance as evi-
dence is a text of 1411-12, the Mulakhkhas al-fitan, which sets out at some
detail the administration of the port, the nature of the communities resident
there, the extent of revenues, and so on (Cahen and Serjeant 1957). This work
indicates that Aden's port duties provided the major source of revenue for the
Rasulid Sultans at Tacizz.
It is natural enough, then, that from the early thirteenth century, the Rasulid
Sultans should have taken great interest in developing the port, building a repu-
tation of such dimensions that in 1374-75, the qdzi of Calicut brought a letter
to the ruler al-Malik al-Ashraf, requesting that the paradesi (Iranian and Rumi)
Muslims of this Malabar port be permitted to read the khutba in the name of
the Rasulids. The regulations of the port speak of a certain degree of bureau-
cratic orderliness: All vessels entering Aden were to carry a manifest in the care
of the ship's scrivener (karrdni); all goods were to be examined in detail; body
searches of passengers were to be conducted; and so on. Many of these prac-
tices, described in Aden's case by Ibn al-Mujawir in his Tdrikh al-Mustabsir,
were found in later centuries in ports like Mughal Surat (Serjeant 1974).
Evidence also exists of conflict between the Rasulid Sultans and merchants,
especially the substantial magnates (acydn al-tujjdr) of Aden, and in particular
the so-called Karimi merchants. These conflicts arose largely because the
Sultans, like their counterparts at Melaka, were themselves engaged in com-
merce and also because—as was to occur later in the Sultanates of Aceh and
Banten and unlike what usually obtained in Melaka—they at times acted as
monopsonists or monopolists (Lombard 1967:101-26; Guillot 1992). The
royal trading establishment (al-Matjar al-Sultdni) was probably founded in the
mid-fourteenth century in imitation of the Fatimid practice at Cairo. Engaged
in trading madder, pepper, aromatics and so on, the headship of the establish-
ment appears to have been a hereditary post. It is likely that the Sultan also
owned ships, though there is no evidence of trade over long-distance routes.

For the most part, the Matjar's trade seems to have been limited to the Arabian
peninsula, the Red Sea littoral, and Egypt. This would also explain why the
merchants who were most often in conflict with the Sultan were the Karimis,
rather than, say, the Gujarati vaniyas. Evidence of the latter's quarter at Aden
(the so-called hafat al-bdniyan) can be encountered as early as the late four-
teenth century.
Fifteenth-century Aden bears more than a passing resemblance to Melaka,
although some differences also existed between the two. It also resembles its
nearer neighbour, Hurmuz (or rather Jarun) in the Persian Gulf in more ways
than one. Jarun, unlike either Aden or Melaka, was an island, with two port
sites on it, one for small vessels, the other for large ones. Founded around
1300, the island city was virtually impregnable from land and succeeded
quickly in superseding the centre of Qays that had earlier dominated Persian
Gulf trade for two centuries (Aubin 1969; Aubin 1973). There has been some
debate concerning whether the fall of Baghdad meant that maritime trade had
ceased between the Persian Gulf and India between the eleventh and the
fourteenth centuries. The earlier consensus that this was the case has been cast
in some doubt over the past few decades, and Aubin has argued that there was
in fact no real hiatus or interruption in this commerce (Aubin 1963, supersed-
ing the essay in 1959). Nevertheless, the rise of Jarun did imply a quickening
of the trading pulse, already visible by Marco Polo's time. The town became
the centre of a kingdom, the kingdom of Hurmuz, that Sunni rulers of Arab
extraction ruled, but it was still closely linked by way of trade and political
relations to the Iranian world. Hurmuz, like Melaka and Aden, was organised
in terms of quarters, in which different communities resided, including the
Gujarati vaniyas, Iranian merchants, and also a substantial community of
Jewish traders in the fifteenth century. More than the rulers of Melaka, the
Shahs of Hurmuz appear to have run a state that was both tributary and based
on trade. They controlled a number of islands in the Persian Gulf, of which
the most important—Qishm—was also the major supplier of agricultural
products to feed Jarun. Other islands, such as Kharg, which guarded the
entrance to the Shatt-al-Arab waterway at the interior of the Gulf, had a more
clearly strategic function. Besides these islands, Hurmuz's rulers also col-
lected revenues from their dominions on the mainland, both on the Iranian and
the Arabian sides, with the latter being more significant from the viewpoint of
yielding revenue.
Over half of the total revenues of the kingdom came from trade and cus-
toms, in particular the trade to India. Fifteenth-century observers, as well as
early Portuguese writers, suggest that as in Melaka, customs rates in Hurmuz
were quite low. Nimdihi, writing in about 1500, suggests that all goods
arriving in the kingdom by sea paid 10 percent of their value and that all goods
from Khorasan paid 5 percent. The Portuguese writers suggest a far more
complex system, in which some Indian goods like raw cotton, rice, and butter

76O SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
TABLE 1
Revenues of Hurmuz and Melaka, c. 1500
Hurmuz Melaka
Head Amount Head Amount
(in ashrafis) (in cruzados)
Customs-duties 100,000 Customs 30,000

Minor levies 41,300 Beli-belian 50,000
Arabian land tax 28,200 Weighing duty 11,000
Persian land tax 16,700 Land taxes 3,820
Pearl fishery 6,000 TOTAL 94,820
Other 5,800
TOTAL 198,000
SOURCE: Aubin 1973:233-7; Thomaz 1988:33.
paid no more than 5 percent, Indian textiles 10 percent, and textiles exported
to Hurmuz via Melaka as much as 16.5 percent. It is interesting to note that
the bulk of customs duties was collected on imports rather than exports;
neither of the major exports in the eastward direction, namely horses (ex-
ported at the rate of two thousand a year in the early sixteenth century) and
bullion (the major component in Hurmuz's trade to India) seem to have been
taxed. The total revenues of Hurmuz's rulers in the early sixteenth century
appear to have amounted to just under 200,000 ashrafis. We may compare
them to those of Melaka in the same period in Table 1.
Jean Aubin's detailed investigations nevertheless point to an internal politi-
cal structure somewhat different from that in either Melaka or Aden. Hur-
muz's rulers owned no ships and did not participate directly in trade; thus, the
sort of conflict that emerges between the Rasulids and the Karimi traders at
Aden is absent here. Further, unlike Aden or Melaka, a series of powerful
vazir families—the Baghdadi, the Iji, and the Fali—played a major role in
Hurmuz. In their early dealings with Hurmuz, the Portuguese had to contend
with Khwaja cAta, who had risen to power in about 1475 and who virtually ran
the kingdom over the heads of two successive Shahs (Aubin 1971a:104-5).
Thus, despite the apparent similarities, Hurmuz provides us with a distinct
case from Melaka and Aden at one level, being somewhat closer perhaps
to the situation in the south-western Indian kingdom of Calicut, where the
Samudri Raja (or Zamorin) derived a great part of his revenues from taxing
trade but still did not run a full-fledged mercantilist state. In Calicut, as in
certain other small kingdoms with access to the seaboard, like Kotte in west-
ern Sri Lanka, the rulers left trade in the hands of specific communities—
whether indigenised Muslims, like the Mappilas of Malabar, or foreigners

iparadesis) from as far as Baghdad and Shiraz (Bouchon 1973). Closer to

Melaka and Aden in this respect was the East African Sultanate of Kilwa,
ruled over from the late thirteenth century by a family of Yemeni sharifs, the
Mahdali (Pouwels 1987; but see also Ferrand 1928). In the case of Kilwa, or
its northern neighbours and rivals, Mombasa and Malindi (which emerged
into prominence in the fourteenth century), we are not aware of any data on
the fiscal foundations of the state, though the links between the prosperity of
these states and the Indian Ocean commercial triangle of Gujarat, Red Sea,
and East Africa are often asserted (as is the importance of Kilwa in the control
of the gold trade).
On the other hand, whatever the distinctions between them, Aden, Hurmuz
and Melaka still appear to conform to a certain category of state that depended
very largely, in fiscal terms, on trade. It is commonly held that there was a
great divide between such states and other Asian states that were essentially
agriculturally based. Two intertwined strands in the arguments need to be
separated here. There is, first, the issue of the lack of trading opportunities for
certain states. States that occupied poorly monetised regions or that had little
control over either maritime or overland routes could, even with the best of
intentions, never really have been trade oriented. Then, there is the second
question of idological barriers to participation in trade, even in the presence of
opportunities. On this, it is argued that certain political cultures were instinc-
tively hostile to the very idea of trade, while others would embrace it readily.
These two issues are naturally related, but we should not assume that one
flows directly out of the other nor that ideology would necessarily accomodate
itself to changing opportunities. Indeed, the coexistence of divergent ideolog-
ical streams on the question of trade, even within the same political culture,
can clearly be seen by juxtaposing early medieval Arabic texts that take quite
contrary views on the subject within the same intellectual tradition (Serjeant
1988:61).
An instructive test case from the fifteenth century is located on the very
fringes of our region: here, I refer to the Mamluk state of Egypt. To under-
stand what underlay the manner in which the Mamluks approached trade in
the fifteenth century, we should recall that the idea of seapower as an instru-
ment of statecraft was by no means alien to these rulers of Egypt, whose
kingdom was vulnerable to attack both from the Mediterranean and the Red
seas. During the period of the Circassian Mamluks (1382-1517), the use of
maritime power was required at various points to defend the kingdom's eco-
nomic interests, and the Sultans never showed signs of wavering from protect-
ing their interests. Barsbay (r. 1422-38) in the 1420s built coastal defences as
well as a fleet, to defend his kingdom's northern shores from the depredations
of Christian pirates and privateers, and it is also in this sultan's reign that
Mamluk policies towards the Red Sea trade underwent significant change. A
deliberate policy was adopted to develop the trade of Jiddah to the detriment

of Aden, since the former port was far more closely linked to Cairo on fiscal
matters than the latter. In Barsbay's period, a contemporary source reports
that Jiddah alone yielded a revenue of 200,000 dinars on average to the trea-
sury each year (Darrag 1961:222).
The commercial policy of earlier Sultans, articulated for example by the
contemporary writer, al-Qalqashandi (who in his chronicle, Subh al-cfsha,
speaks of the need to receive merchants kindly "and treat them justly, for the
profits accruing from them . . . are very great"), was reversed to an extent in
Barsbay's time. A series of commodity monopolies was created, first on local
products like sugar and later even on imported goods such as pepper (Fischel
1958). In the 1430s, the Sultan forbade the sale of pepper to Europeans by
anyone save his own official apparatus, a policy that later rulers like Khush-
qadam (r. 1461-67) and Qa'it Bay (r. 1468-95) periodically revived. In the
early sixteenth century, faced with the Portuguese threat to trade in the Red
Sea, the Sultan Qansawh al-Ghawri once more saw a close link between
mercantile profit and the well-being of the Mamluk state and responded
strongly, although without great military success. He sent out a fleet into the
Indian Ocean in 1506 and 1507 and filed a complaint with the Papacy against
the Portuguese (Aubin 1989). Yet the Sultan's policies even at this juncture
seem to have been two-edged, as we see from the contemporary writings of
Ibn Iyas al-Hanafi al-Misri. This prolific, if somewhat obtuse, writer accu-
rately sums up the feelings of the Cairo-based bourgeoisie of his epoch when
he declares, on Qansawh al-Ghawri's death in 1516, that "each day of his
reign weighed upon the populace like a thousand years," thus confirming the
equally negative judgment passed somewhat earlier by the Frenchman, Jean
Thenaud (Wiet 1960:84; Schefer 1884). The following passage from Ibn
Iyas's BadcPF al-Zuhur fi WaqffF al-Duhur clarifies:
[In this reign] Husain, the governor of Jiddah, imposed a tax on the traders from India,
but at ten times the rate, and these traders too left the port of Jiddah, so that the
situation headed for ruin: thus, muslins, rice and hides became rare, and the port was
abandoned. The same was done in the ports of Alexandria and Damiette; the European
traders ceased to frequent them on account of the multiplicity of arbitrary taxes and
thus the merchandise imported from Europe disappeared (Wiet 1955:87).
Curiously, then, rather than blaming the Portuguese for damaging Egypt's
commercial economy—surely the simplest option for a writer in the early
sixteenth century—Ibn Iyas blames the Sultan's desire to exploit traders. The
picture that emerges, we might add, is not of a ruler who was indifferent to
maritime commerce, since the Husain referred to above is none other than the
celebrated Amir Husain Mushrif al-Kurdi, who fought the Portuguese with
such mixed success between 1506 and 1517 off the Indian west coast and in the
Red Sea (Bacque-Grammont and Kroell 1988). But a positive interest in trade
did not prevent the Sultan from preying on merchants, be they Indians, Eu-
ropeans or even—as Thenaud reports—Jews based in Cairo (Schefer 1884:48).

Lest the case of the Mamluks seem to us to be wholly unique, we should

equally recall that the southern Indian kingdom of Vijayanagara, while far
from being a port-state, was nevertheless already interested in maritime trade
in the fifteenth century. We see this for example from the account of Kamal al-
Din cAbd al-Razzaq Samarqandi (1413-1482), who between 1441 and 1444
acted as the ambassador-at-large of the Timurid ruler, Shah Rukh, in the
Persian Gulf and India (Thackston 1989:299-321). cAbd al-Razzaq's travels
took him to Hurmuz, where he embarked for Calicut in a horse-trading vessel
in 1442. While in Calicut, he was invited by the Vijayanagara ruler, Deva
Ray a II, to his court and eventually spent several months there. The account
of the ambassador from Samarqand is important for several reasons. First,
while it is apparent from his account that the control of the ports of the west
coast by Vijayanagara was somewhat tenuous (save perhaps for Mangalore),
there nevertheless was a considerable west Asian trading community at Vi-
jayanagara. Several references, mostly uncomplimentary, are made to the
Hurmuzis, and on his departure the ambassador set out accompanied by two
Khorasani merchants, Khwaja Mascud and Khwaja Muhammad. Second, the
ambassador stressed the key role that imported commodities, coinage metals,
and war-animals played in motivating Deva Raya's external policies. In the
case of horses, the Vijayanagara rulers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
seem to have followed a semi-monopsonistic policy, which was further
strengthened from about 1480 when the key port of Bhatkal fell under their
control. Trade between Bhatkal and Hurmuz, shared by the Hurmuzis, Map-
pilas, Navayats and Saraswats, was particularly flourishing in the late fif-
teenth and early sixteenth centuries. In turn, the overland route between
Bhatkal and the city of Vijayanagara was jealously guarded by Vijayanagara
rulers like Krishnadevaraya (r. 1509-29).
THE LINCHPIN OF WESTERN INDIAN OCEAN TRADE: GUJARAT

While our discussion so far has taken us from Melaka at the eastern end to
Aden at the western end of the geographical space that we are considering, it
has largely ignored the area that can rightly speaking be termed the linchpin of
western Indian Ocean trade, namely Gujarat. It may be partially true that the
trade between Malabar and Kanara (ports such as Calicut, Cannanur and
Bhatkal) and the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf could be conducted autono-
mously of Gujarat (Bouchon 1988). Precious metals and horses from the
northwest could be exchanged for pepper, spices, sugar, and rice from the
southeastern fringe of this maritime area. It is also true that the Portuguese,
when they first appeared on the western Indian Ocean scene, concentrated on
the one hand on the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and East Africa and on the other
hand on Malabar and Kanara, ignoring Gujarat to a large extent. Albuquerque
did make some efforts in that direction, opening negotiations at both Div and
Surat; but, as late as 1510, he instructed an envoy to Shah Isma'il to offer him

Gujarat as an enticement, if he were only to cooperate with the Portuguese in

their other West Asian ventures (Aubin 1971:18-19). From the point of view
of the Portuguese in Europe, who wanted to procure pepper for themselves
while decimating the trading economy of the Mamluks on the other, Gujarat
may have seemed a diversion but was not in actuality, as Tome Pires took
some pains to point out in his Suma Oriental. And if Gujarat was important,
its traders—the Gujaratis—were crucial to the epoch's Indian Ocean trade
(Pearson 1976).
The Gujarati mercantile network at the close of the fifteenth century has
justly been called a forgotten thalassocracy. Whether in the ports of Burma
(Martaban and Dagon) or in Melaka or even in Bengal, the early Portuguese
found the Gujarati presence a significant and, at times, difficult one (Bouchon
and Thomaz 1988; Bouchon 1992). Closer at hand, on the Malabar coast and
in the Maldives, in the Konkan ports of Chaul and Dabhol, in the Persian
Gulf, Red Sea and East Africa, they had to be reckoned with in greater force.
One sees this for example in the accounts of Pires and Duarte Barbosa and a
briefer but quite typical report left in 1518 for the Venetians by Francisco de
Albuquerque, a Cairo-based Jewish merchant who had served the Portuguese
for some years in the Indian Ocean. His Referir mentions Div, Khambayat (or
Cambay, singled out for attention), as well as Bharuch, Surat, Somnath and
other centres. A particular mention is made of the baniyas, who are zente vil,
ma gran mercadanti e boni contadori (a low people but great merchants and
good account keepers) (Aubin 1974:191).
The term baniya today refers to a set of Hindu and Jain merchant commu-
nities residing throughout a great part of northern and western India. How-
ever, some debate has developed in recent times over the accuracy with which
this term was used by early modern observers. Some historians have claimed
that the term was extended to include practically any merchant group in
western India, and particularly those who performed the function of inter-
mediaries. This may have been the case in the late eighteenth century, when
the English in particular used the term to speak of such dependent comprador
merchants. But earlier, in the sixteenth century, for instance, the Portuguese
used it with greater accuracy; and an excellent collection of mid-sixteenth
century sketches by an anonymous Portuguese artist presents us near-
ethnographic details of the baniyas at work and play (Matos 1985).
The importance of these baniyas, in the ports of Gujarat, on the Konkan,
and even in Goa, Calicut, and Melaka, is undeniable. As late as the eighteenth
century, Dutch and English reports on the ports of the Red Sea detail the
baniyas' celebration of festivals there; in the early seventeenth century, the
Fleming, Jacques de Coutre, found himself in the company of two rich baniya
merchants on a visit to the governor of Shiraz (Coutre 1991:207). Hurmuz,
both before and after its takeover by the Portuguese, had a substantial baniya
settlement, and the port of Thatta on the Indus was very largely dominated by

these merchants and by the Sindhi Bhatias. But this does not imply that all
merchants in Gujarat were baniyas. To the Bolognese merchant, Ludovico di
Varthema, writing in the early sixteenth century for example, Div was so
dominated by West Asian merchants that he termed it bandar-i rumi (Pearson
1988:467). The epoch's governor of the port, himself a great trader, was
Malik Ayaz, a manumitted slave of the Sultan of Gujarat, and may have been
of either Slav, Turkish, or Persian origin. In Surat, renowned as a centre of
baniya trade, the richest merchant in the early sixteenth century was Malik
Gopi (or Gopinath), a Brahmin and not a baniya, described by Tome Pires as
"richer than all the men of the Orient." Gopinath also traded extensively in
other ports like Khambayat, operated a trading fleet of thirty vessels, pa-
tronised poets, and was accused by Sikandar ibn Muhammad, the author of
the near-contemporary chronicle, Mirdt-i Sikandari, of tyrannising the local
Muslim population by using his access to the state machinery (Aubin 1971:9—
11). Besides being a great trader, Malik Gopi was a major actor in that era's
politics of the Gujarat Sultanate.
Two other merchant groups operating out of Gujarat merit some attention.
The first were the Parsis, of whom a rare earlier mention is in the thirteenth-
century Persian account of Sadid al-Din Muhammad cAwfi, who accuses the
Zoroastrian merchants of Khambayat of having incited the local residents
against the Muslim merchants of the port, killing eighty of them and destroy-
ing a mosque and its minaret (Siddiqui 1992:24-26). But it is only from the
late seventeenth century that one encounters the great Parsi merchant figures
of the early modern period, such as the renowned Seth Rustamji Manakji and
his family. These merchants, operating first out of Surat and then later from
Bombay, successfully rode the coattails of the English East India Company to
enjoy a place of major prominence by the late eighteenth century. The second
group, far more visible in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are the
Ismacilis, usually divided into two groups, the Khojas and the Bohras. The
Ismacili Bohras in turn can be divided into two, the Sulaimanis and the
Da'udis, with the latter being largely Shici migrants from Yemen who settled
in Gujarat in the first half of the sixteenth century and suffered persecution in
the late seventeenth century at the hands of Aurangzeb. But there also existed
a third group of Bohras, the so-called Sunni Bohras. They were concentrated
at Rander but also had some important representatives at Surat. It would
appear that the great merchant of late seventeenth-century Surat, Mulla cAb-
dul Ghafur, for example, originated from the Sunni Bohra community of
Patan (Das Gupta 1979:78n).
The crucial role of Gujarat in western Indian Ocean trade was emphasised
during the course of the sixteenth century. Traders based in Gujarat were able,
silently, and at times also overtly, to evade official Portuguese attempts to
curtail trade between Southeast Asia and the Red Sea (Pearson 1976; Boxer
1969). The growth of an anti-Portuguese network based at the north Sumatran

TABLE 2
Indian Shipping Arrivals at the Red Sea, 1611-1628
Port/Region 1611 1612 1616 1621 1628
Surat _ 3 1 _ 1
Gogha - - 1 - -
Div 1 3 5 3 2
Dabhol 2 2 2 2 1
Chaul - 1 2 4 1
Malabar ports 3 3 5 1 10
Masulipatnam - - 1 - 1
Sind - 4 14 ? ?
SOURCE: Steensgaard 1973:90; Melink-Roelofsz 1962.
Sultanate of Aceh has been attributed in large measure to the trade of Gujarati
merchants therein, and this participation was particularly conspicuous after
about 1560 in the trade to Aden and Jiddah. A Portuguese author from the
mid-1580s tells us, for example, that the annual trade of Aceh comprised five
to six ships from Pegu, two or three ships from Coromandel, and between six
and nine ships from ports dominated by Gujaratis, that is, Dabhol, Surat, and
Jiddah (Alves 1989). Traders and shipowners based in Gujarat itself and in
Konkan ports like Dabhol managed to continue trading by paying dues at
Portuguese-controlled ports, such as Div and Hurmuz, or by using political
and diplomatic leverage to force the Portuguese to license their trade (Das
Gupta 1985). Treaties in the 1570s between the Portuguese Estado da India
and the Mughal ruler, Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar, as well as the Sultans of
Bijapur, permitted ships based at Surat and Dabhol to sail to the Red Sea,
ostensibly for the hajj but also to keep alive the lucrative trade between the
Indian west coast and Ottoman domains (Pearson 1976, 1981). In the early
seventeenth century, as Ashin Das Gupta has argued, trade between Gujarat
and Konkan ports and the Red Sea and Persian Gulf probably expanded still
further but turned away from the Southeast Asian ports in those years (Das
Gupta 1985). Table 2 summarises some fragmentary data on shipping from
India at the Red Sea in the early years of the seventeenth century.
The fall of Hurmuz in 1622 and the rise of Bandar cAbbas under Safavid
patronage can only have acted as a further incentive to merchants based on the
Indian west coast to increase their westward trade. At the same time, the
dominance of Surat over other rival ports in the area became more and more
pronounced, as Dabhol and Chaul declined in importance and as Div too
became a shadow of its former self. By the last quarter of the seventeenth
century, the distribution of ships arriving at Surat was as indicated in Table 3.

TABLE 3
Asian Ships Arriving at Surat, 1681-94
Origin 1681-82 1683-84 1684-85 1686-87 1692 1693 1694

Red Sea 12 1 6 13 10 14 8
Persian Gulf 11 13 12 10 9 7 15
Arabian coast 12 16 3 7 9 10 14
Other 19 27 4 5 49 80 43
TOTAL 54 63 25 35 77 111 80
SOURCE: Gupta 1991:388-9.
It is possible, on the basis of Ashin Das Gupta's research, to reconstruct a

fairly accurate profile of the merchant community in Surat in the late seven-
teenth century. Besides the baniyas, the Parsis, and the Bohras, he points to
the importance of other resident communities of foreign merchants, in partic-
ular what he terms the Persian merchants, interestingly also designated by the
term tujjar-i Mughliya. The most important of these in the late seventeenth
century was Mirza Muhammad Taqi, who returned however to Iran in 1705.
Mirza Taqi, like most others of his community, seems to have concentrated on
the trade to the Persian Gulf ports. Then there is the group defined as Arab
merchants, which included such men as Shaikh Hamid (a major shipowner, as
well as a Sufi), and cAli bin Sultan, who appears to have come to Surat from
Kung (Das Gupta 1979:75). Finally, there was a small but relatively well-
organised set of Turkish merchants who used the title £elebi and who included
in the late seventeenth century the major shipowner-trader, Muhammad Saleh
£elebi (and his son Haji Ahmad Celebi); Osman Celebi; Ibrahim Celebi; and a
few others. Muhammad Saleh himself may have been a native of Baghdad,
although some documents indicate that his family may have been from Mosul.
The (Jelebis, like the Bohras, were fundamentally interested in the trade
between Surat and the Red Sea; they left the trade to the Persian Gulf to the
Mughal merchants, a few Armenians, and a number of Khatri and other
traders (Das Gupta 1979:82-84).
MERCHANT RESISTANCE AND STATE BUILDING

While the baniyas originated largely from western and northern India, their
trade oriented them towards settling in urban nodes which were often far
distant from their land of origin. At least on the face of it, they appear then to
correspond quite well with the idea of diaspora and indeed have been used by
Philip Curtin to illustrate that notion in the context of Indian Ocean trade
(Curtin 1984). One finds them after all, from Melaka to the Red Sea, and in
the seventeenth century, even in the small (ostensibly Portuguese) settlements

of the Zambezi valley in East Africa. Nowhere do they show a particular

hunger for political power, nor do they seem to wish to shape the policies of
continental states in a way that might be advantageous either to trade in
general or to their community in particular. On the other hand, not all traders,
even those based in Gujarat, shared the same mentality. We have examined if
only briefly the cases of Malik Ayaz and Malik Gopi, and the seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries provide us other examples from the Bohra commu-
nity, such as cAbdul Ghafur's grandson Muhammad cAli, who built a small
fortified centre for himself, attempted to set up his own wharf and customs
house, and interfered actively in local politics (Das Gupta 1979; Subrahman-
yam 1988).
The will to political power here was expressed by seeking a slice of the
action within a larger political structure—the Sultanate of Gujarat for cAyaz
and Gopi, the declining Mughal state for Muhammad cAli. Elsewhere,
mercantile-minded elements had tried other means, even seeking to shape the
very structure of the state to their own ends. An important and relatively little-
known form of a type of merchant republic can be found on the Kanara coast,
south of Goa, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The members of the
dominant trading community here were Saraswats, a caste of open status,
which at times claimed Brahminhood but more usually was identified with
mercantile activity (the Portuguese usually term them chatins, from chetti)
(Subrahmanyam 1990:260-5). In the middle years of the fifteenth century,
with the exception of a small stretch of coast near Mangalore, most of the
region was free of Vijayanagara control. It was thus under various minor
rulers, under whose chieftaincies the ports held out an independent character.
In the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta found Honawar, for example, under the
rule of a certain Sultan Jamal al-Din Muhammad ibn Hasan; further south, in
Barkur, he encountered a Hindu ruler with a fleet of thirty warships engaged
in raids on merchant ships. The Moroccan traveller also visited Basrur, the
great centre of Saraswat trade but found little there to interest him (Husain
1976:180-5). Two centuries later, the Portuguese paid far greater attention to
the town.
By the time the Portuguese made their first visits to Basrur, the surrounding
area had fallen under Vijayanagara control. But the town, which was walled
and had a small fort on the sea, maintained a form of autonomy and was
controlled by a council of Saraswat merchants. The Portuguese state negoti-
ated a tribute of rice through this council in the 1540s from Basrur, which was
located in an extremely fertile rice-producing and exporting area. Later, in
1569, the Portuguese Estado took control of the small fort in the town and
strengthened it in order to place its own garrison there. For a period of over
eight decades, lower Basrur remained under Portuguese control, while the
upper town continued to be dominated by the Saraswats, who both actively
and passively resisted the domination by the Estado da India. Portuguese

observers from the late sixteenth century were convinced that the merchant
council orchestrated the resistance, and some, like the chronicler Diogo do
Couto, were even partly sympathetic to the plight of the Basrur merchants.
Couto argued that since antiquity Basrur had been a sort of merchant republic
and portrayed it in an idealised picture as being ruled democratically by
"Senators" (Subrahmanyam 1990: 261). Not only this, he stressed that even
Vijayanagara control over Basrur had been quite limited, a portrayal con-
firmed by another anonymous Portuguese account from about 1580.
We have dwelt at some length on the case of Basrur here, for it is relatively
little-known and brings out the existence of surprising forms of mercantile
political autonomy in the western Indian Ocean in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. Nevertheless, the Basrur merchants' situation was quite different
from that of another semi-autonomous mercantile community located some-
what further to the south, the Mappilas of Malabar. The Mappila settlement
concentrated largely on two nodes, one to the north near Cannanur and anoth-
er further south in the vicinity of Ponnani. By the late fifteenth century,
Mappilas were extensively involved in the trade to Melaka and the Coro-
mandel coast of eastern India; however, their strongest zone of operation was
an area defined by the west coast of Sri Lanka (the ports of the kingdom of
Kotte), Malabar, the Maldives and the Laccadives (Bouchon 1988). Thus,
they do not correspond all that well to the notion of a diaspora community,
being somewhat localised in their activities.
Mappila militancy in the sixteenth and seventeenth century is a fact to
which numerous European accounts testify. Termed "piracy" by the Por-
tuguese, it was glorified by being called jihad (holy war) by the late sixteenth-
century chronicler, Zain al-Din Macabari (Lopes 1899; Bouchon 1973; Pear-
son 1981). However, in the early sixteenth century, the Mappilas were able to
cooperate with the Portuguese in trade, as there was no major contradiction
perceived between Portuguese raids on shipping to the Red Sea (which was
largely controlled by Middle Eastern merchants) and the Mappilas' interests.
Later, from the 1520s, difficulties surfaced when the Portuguese challenged
the Mappilas in a number of their own core areas of activity, such as the
Maldives, the west coast of Sri Lanka, and the straits between southern India
and northern Sri Lanka. Forced out of these regions by a series of military
defeats in the late 1530s, the Mappilas increasingly concentrated now on the
west coast of India and on trade to east Africa and the Red Sea. Much before
the so-called Acehnese revival of trade to the Red Sea (which can at best be
dated as far back as the 1560s), Mappila traders (and to a lesser extent
Saraswats from Kanara) had successfully challenged Portuguese squadrons
patrolling the western Indian Ocean. The Hadrami chronicles from the epoch,
such as the Tdrikh al-Shihri, take note of several naval engagements there
among vessels based at Calicut, Cannanur, and Bhatkal, and the Portuguese
(Serjeant 1963:55, 62-63, 68, 71).

This struggle eventually caused a good deal of military and maritime power
to be concentrated in the hands of Mappila leaders such as the Kunjali Marik-
kars of Ponnani or the Ali Rajas of Cannanur, tempting them to make a bid for
independent status on the land as well. The latter were successful in setting up
a type of independent chieftaincy by the late sixteenth century, but the ambi-
tions of the Kunjali Marikkars were thwarted when the Portuguese negotiated
an alliance with the Samudri Rajas of Calicut. Nevertheless, when they visited
the ports of the Red Sea in the early seventeenth century, the first English and
Dutch squadrons were struck by the considerable Mappila presence there, and
later in the same century themselves competed for trade with the Mappilas
along the Indian west coast.
These developments can, of course, be treated as purely reactive phenome-
na that developed in response to the European presence in the Indian Ocean in
these years. I would argue, however, that it is not particularly fruitful to push
the paradigm of European expansion and Asian reaction beyond a certain limit
(Subrahmanyam 1993; Wills 1993). Instances of armed trading, of the strate-
gic use of blockades, and of corsair and pirate activity were all known in the
years before 1500. The use of maritime force in areas like the South China
Sea, the borders of Burma and Bengal, the Kanara coast, and elsewhere, was
not an European innovation, even though in the years after 1500 these phe-
nomena grew more powerful and force was used in increasingly sophisticated
forms. At the western fringes of the Indian Ocean, we have seen that the
Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt had a partly Mediterranean legacy of using force
and that the same was true of the Ottomans. This must be borne in mind in
order to understand the context of the last major western Asian thalassocracy
that we shall discuss—that of the Omanis.
Like the Mappilas, it is clear that, at some level, Omani maritime power
was shaped in the crucible of combat with Europeans in the Indian Ocean.
The Omanis had always been a minor thorn in the flesh of the Estado da India,
even in the days when Hurmuz was still a Portuguese possession, during
which time minor centres subsidiary to Hurmuz were frequently under threat
from the forces of the Imams of Oman. But when the Ya'rubi line of Imams,
founded by Nasir ibn Murshid (r. 1624-1649), came to power, the threat
began to grow. Imam Nasir succeeded in unifying much of Oman between
1624 and 1632, leaving the Portuguese with limited territories at Masqat, Sur,
and Quryat (Bathurst 1972). These centres, and especially Masqat, emerged
in the late 1620s and 1630s as important nodes for Portuguese trade to Basra,
Sind, and Gujarat, as well as to Chaul and Goa. Towards the end of his reign,
Imam Nasir thus moved against Masqat besieging it from August 1648, al-
though he died before he was successful. His successor, Sultan ibn Saif al-
Ya'rubi (r. 1649-79), completed that task in January 1650. But this was
merely a portent of things to come because the Omanis built up a formidable
navy and emerged in the latter half of the seventeenth century as a powerful

ASIAN MERCHANTS AND STATE POWER 77I
maritime-oriented state, with ambitions ranging from the Indian west coast to
the east coast of Africa.
It is difficult to comprehend Omani ambitions if one seeks to pose their
maritime expansion purely in the narrow context of politics in the sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century Red Sea and Persian Gulf regions. Within this ambit,
it is evident that no very precise precedent existed for what the Ya'rubis set out
to do, which was to build a trade-oriented state focussed on the household of
the Sultan while refining the concept of the jihad and aggressively pursuing a
policy of overseas proselytisation. The Ottomans did pursue some form of
naval activity in the area even after the fall of Basra to them in 1546; however,
as the Basra customs regulations and related documentation show, Ottoman
ambitions in the post-1550 period were strictly limited in the Indian Ocean
(Mantran 1967; Ozbaran 1972). Besides, the centrality of maritime trade to
the Omanis is far more evident than with the Ottomans. In opting for such a
strategy, then, the Omanis may have departed from state-building traditions in
their immediate vicinity but not wholly from those, say, of the Acehnese or
the Mappilas in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Omani
scheme seems to have been to build a thalassocracy extending down to Kilwa
while reducing the ports of the Indian west coast to a tributary status. In
pursuing this ambition, the Omani ruler, Saif bin Sultan (r. 1692-1711),
operated a fleet of twenty-four large ships, twenty-eight smaller ones, and had
some 1,700 household slaves in an enterprise that is also strikingly mercantil-
ist in character.
In Saif bin Sultan's reign, far more systematic operations were attempted
than ever before. Between 1696 and 1698, the Omanis laid siege to the
Portuguese Fort Jesus at Mombasa and eventually took it, together with most
of the key ports of the coast. The Ya3rubi Sultans took care to maintain small
garrisons at Mombasa, Pemba, Zanzibar, and Kilwa in the early decades of
the eighteenth century; and it was only for a brief period in 1726 to 1727 that
the Portuguese were able to re-capture Mombasa by taking advantage of
internal troubles in Oman. However, the Omanis soon recouped their loss and
appointed a strong governor (liwdli) there, Muhammad bin cUsman Mazrui.
He in turn soon broke off from Oman to found his own independent centre and
dynasty, which continued to hold power in Mombasa to 1837 (Bathurst 1972;
Pouwels 1987).
Thus, the eventual consequences of Omani maritime expansion were at
times rather different from what obtained either with the Mappilas or the
Acehnese. There was a clear attempt to build up and sustain a network of
maritime settlements, using but also modifying in a drastic way the notion of
the port-city as it had obtained already before 1500. The Omanis quickly
spawned imitators. From the mid-seventeenth century, on the west coast of
India, a maritime force of Sidis, descended from slaves and mariners of
Abyssinian origin, came into prominence (Das Gupta 1979). Based largely in

forts like Janjira and Danda but also to a lesser extent in other centres, the
Sidis—though mentioned intermittently already in the sixteenth century—
emerged by the early eighteenth century as maritime allies of the Mughals,
the unofficial (and at times official) protectors of the merchant marine of ports
such as Surat and were also used against the Angrias, the chiefs of Kolaba,
who were used by the Marathas as their own maritime arm.
THE THREE EMPIRES AND TRADE

It may appear that we have so far in this essay deliberately, and even perverse-
ly, steered clear in good measure of the core of any discussion of imdrat and
tijdrat in the western Indian Ocean in these years: namely, how the three Great
Empires of the epoch—the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals—dealt
with the issue. Nicolas de Nicolay, a French traveller to the Ottoman empire in
the mid-sixteenth century, found only three major groups of merchants worthy
of mention: the Jews, the Armenians, and the Ragusans. Of the first of these,
he declares that "the quantity of Jews who live in all the towns of Turkey and
Greece, principally at Constantinople, is so large that it is a marvelous thing
and almost unbelievable" and then adds that "one may say with reason that
today they have in their hands all the greatest traffic of merchandise and of
money changing that is done in all the Levant." The Armenians and Rag-
usans, while portrayed as less rich, are nevertheless seen as holding second
and third place (De Nicolay 1989:233-41). Significantly, he makes no men-
tion of the Rumi merchants, who had made Div their second home and could
be found in the early sixteenth century from Bengal and Burma, to Dabhol
and Chaul (to say nothing of Venice). But in the Ottoman domains them-
selves, they had apparently yielded pride of place to the diaspora communities
(Inalcik 1969; Mantran 1989:220-3, 253-7).
The thrust of most modern literature on the Ottomans is directed at the
trade in the eastern Mediterranean and focuses on the growing ascendancy
of European traders and their agents, to the detriment of "the indigenous
and predominantly Muslim merchant classes" over this period (Islamoglu-
Inan 1987:11). In this context, there have been detailed studies, for exam-
ple, of the Venetian presence in the Ottoman domains, but no corresponding
study appears to exist concerning eastward trade (Faroqhi 1987). Whether
the situation in respect of the eastward trade can be related in some way to
the nature of the Ottoman state and its penchant (which one often finds
mentioned) to interfere in, and regulate, the market is an interesting prob-
lem. If state functionaries were themselves involved as sleeping partners in
trade and if the Sultan's official merchants (khassa tdjjiri) can at times be
found in western Europe in the sixteenth century, what of the western Indian
Ocean? Equally curious is the fact that a great deal of the tax farms given
out in the Ottoman empire in the seventeenth century were taken up by
merchants belonging to the religious minorities, Jews and Christians. Evi-

dently, these groups were both willing and able to invest in the state, even if
they were unable to use this investment to lever themselves into positions of
great power and prestige.
One community that has attracted a fair amount of scholarly attention is that
of the Armenians, who have seen by some historians (and notably Niels
Steensgaard) as the epoch's quintessential pedlars of Asian trade (Steensgaard
1973); and the key individual merchant, in the years from 1682 to 1692, is the
Armenian, Hovhannes Joughayetsi (John of Julfa), a man whom Philip Curtin
would easily identify as a typical diaspora merchant. By speaking of the
uncertain politico-economic environment and of the high-risk world inhabited
by these merchants in their "non-transparent markets," Steensgaard has also
brought into relief the need to understand social insurance and support net-
works in early modern Asian trade. Intervention by the state can be thought in
this context to constitute a two-edged weapon. If the state sought periodically
to engross trade, it constituted another source of uncertainty in an already
uncertain world. The tradition in scholarship on Indian Ocean trade which
stresses the arbitrariness of the rules of the game and the absence of legal
recourse for merchant groups vis-a-vis the state would thus seize on state
mercantilism as another reason for the marginal position of the trader in South
Asian society. This position has also been taken, albeit in a nuanced fashion,
by K. N. Chaudhuri in some of his recent writings (Chaudhuri 1985:209-12).
The implicit assumption appears to be that the state was itself a closed entity
and not accessible to mercantile interests. I contend, on the contrary, that
mercantilist states usually had to ally themselves with at least one mercantile
group in society, since state trading through a well-defined bureaucracy was
usually out of the question (Subrahmanyam 1992).
The clearest example of this is, of course, Iran under the rule of Shah
c
Abbas I (1587-1629), an example discussed often enough not to require
detailed rehearsal here. Let us content ourselves by noting the principal ele-
ments in the strategy followed by the Safavid monarch: The combined use of
the carrot and the stick to foment an alliance with the eastern Armenian
community, settled by him in fair numbers at New Julfa in Isfahan; the
centralisation of the silk trade to force traders from outside his domains to deal
largely with the state and its selected intermediaries; the attempt to build up a
trading outlet independent of the Ottomans and Portuguese, either by explor-
ing the northern route (through Russia), or—as was eventually done—by
breaking free of the stifling embrace of the Portuguese at Hurmuz. The logic
of this strategy led to the creation of Bandar cAbbas as the port with over-
weening importance from the 1620s. And once into the latter half of the
seventeenth century, the Armenians emerged as an independent force, able to
negotiate trade privileges as much on the northern land route via Russia
(through a treaty at Moscow with the Czar Alexis Mikhailovich in 1667), as
with the English East India Company for trade to Europe on the Cape route

(through the London treaty of 1688) (Khatchikian 1988; Ferrier 1970; Aghas-
sian and Kevonian forthcoming).
Thus, ironically enough dismissed as precarious itinerant pedlars by many
historians, the records of the Armenians suggest a highly complex and sophis-
ticated network in operation. At New Julfa, the core in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries of a network extending from Amsterdam to Manila, the
community was organised in some twenty quarters, each under a khoja. A
council of notables existed over and above this, under a chief of the princes
(ichkhanapet or, in Persian, kaldntar) who dealt with administrative matters
and taxes and mediated with the Safavid Shahs and later rulers. This council
was the collective body that sent envoys to sign treaties at London and Mos-
cow and oversaw the creation in the late seventeenth century of a school for
merchants at New Julfa. Here, merchants were trained in bookkeeping and
mercantile practice and participated in producing handbooks of terminology,
duties, and practices to help itinerants find their way in strange lands—
handbooks that were equally produced by Armenians in late seventeenth-
century Amsterdam (Kevonian 1975; Aghassian and Kevonian 1988). Behind
the itinerant merchant like Hovhannes lay a complex system of pooling capi-
tal. Drawing upon these resources, he had to maintain a daily diary (roz-
ndma), to justify his expenses and to determine the profits to be shared at the
end of the voyage (Khatchikian 1966).
The Armenian example has been all things to all historians. Some have
seen in it a typical example of pedlars, others of diaspora; still others have
spoken of the "little republic" of New Julfa or even of the "trading company
of the Armenians of Julfa." The first set of writers wish to define the Arme-
nian experience as a mirror image of that of northwestern Europe, while the
latter seek evident parallels whether with Italy or with Holland and England.
Neither procedure accounts for the peculiar historical trajectory of the east-
ern Armenian traders in relation to state power: from a relatively autono-
mous existence, to engagement with the Ottomans and Safavids, to an in-
creasing maritime presence through dealings with the Dutch and English,
and even in the mid-eighteenth century to the brief exercise of military-
fiscal functions in states like Bengal under the Nawabs. Then, in the nine-
teenth century, the Armenian community shifts its centre of activities from
New Julfa to Astrakhan, inaugurating a new phase with a reduced orienta-
tion towards Asia (Pogosjan 1967). Thus, their trajectory is one that trans-
forms them, in part, in the image of the Iranian entrepreneurs of the epoch
or, indeed, in that of the Khatris, who for their part spread out between
Baku and the Caspian Sea littoral and Bengal in the early eighteenth century
(Alam 1994). In sum, then, under the carapace of the Islamic Empires of
the early modern epoch, merchant groups could not only expand geograph-
ically but gradually redefine their place and engage in new ways with politi-
cal power.

TRADE AND VIOLENCE IN THE WESTERN INDIAN OCEAN

The logic of the formulation in this essay appears to leave its author swim-
ming upstream against a heavy current of received wisdom, which is unable to
rid itself of the legacy of the Oriental Despot preying on the unhappy mer-
chant. The East India Companies in their correspondence have done much to
shore up such a portrayal of the Mughals, Ottomans, and Safavids, and have
not spared even the rulers of smaller states, such as Thailand or Arakan. The
story is a familiar one: Merchants have no security and are subject to arbitrary
punishments; the state is apt to impose whimsical monopolies and regulations;
there is no legal recourse. Such a portrayal surely misses the point. In South
Asia, as in Iran, or the Ottoman domains, states needed trade and traders,
even as commercial activity needed to come to terms with political power.
The solutions that were sought to structure this symbiotic relationship were—
increasingly in the early modern period—not those of separation but of en-
gagement. Rather than the rather idealised situation (which South Asianists
fondly imagine to be "English"), wherein political authority looked down
from on high at the world of trade, states engaged with traders either as
powerful mediating individuals (magnates or, as I have termed them else-
where, "portfolio capitalists") or in the form that they best understood from an
earlier period, namely as communities. This in turn gave traders access to
political power, which they embraced with a greater or lesser degree of
eagerness. By so doing, they opened themselves up to risk from rivals within
both the commercial and the political spheres, as well as that of losing coher-
ence as a collectivity. Where this latter factor was a major concern, as with the
Armenians, traders soon disengaged from the direct exercise of political pow-
er over others. However, in a situation wherein trade (in particular maritime
trade) was growing increasingly militarised, it is unclear what other option
than political engagement was available to merchant groups. The examples of
the Khatris, the Armenians, the Iranians, the Mappilas, and (farther afield
from our concern here) the Maraikkayar Muslims of Southern India, all dem-
onstrate this in varying degrees.
What emerges from the above discussion is the identification of a crucial
point: The greatest imperative in early modern Asian trade was to find a
proper combination of force and commercial skill. And yet, the Weberian
legacy ensures that comparative historians still work with the comforting
notions of dysfunctional or other-worldly values, poor mercantile skills, inap-
propriate mentalities, predatory state attitudes, and arbitrary legal frameworks
to distinguish East from West. Macro-historians still rummage all too often in
their explanatory sacks for the sources of the European Miracle, even as the
author of a book with that title has decided that long-term change is better
analysed through the notion of Growth Recurring (Jones 1981, 1988)! To
conclude, the solutions adopted by states and mercantile communities in the

early modern western Indian Ocean to the difficult problems posed by a

changing trading environment were several and complex: Only by examining
them on their own terms (rather than through the prism of a false problematic)
can we come to grips with how the domains of imarat and tijarat were
manipulated by different actors. Amongst these, we hardly need to remind
ourselves, the English East India Company, Tipu Sultan of Mysore, and
Martanda Varma of Travancore, each launched a quest for power in the latter
half of the eighteenth century.
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Of Lmarat and Tijarat: Asian Merchants and State Power in The Western Indian Ocean, 1400 To 1750

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Of Lmarat and Tijarat: Asian Merchants and State Power in The Western Indian Ocean, 1400 To 1750

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Of lmarat and Tijarat: Asian

Merchants and State Power in the

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

THE WESTERN INDIAN OCEAN

° 500 1000 1500 KILOMETRES

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DIASPORA AND STATE MERCANTILISM

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

No doubt to some later European observers (and notably to some sixteenth-

THE RISE OF CITY-STATES BASED IN PORTS

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

(in ashrafis) (in cruzados)

Customs-duties 100,000 Customs 30,000

SOURCE: Aubin 1973:233-7; Thomaz 1988:33.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

iparadesis) from as far as Baghdad and Shiraz (Bouchon 1973). Closer to

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Lest the case of the Mamluks seem to us to be wholly unique, we should

THE LINCHPIN OF WESTERN INDIAN OCEAN TRADE: GUJARAT

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Gujarat as an enticement, if he were only to cooperate with the Portuguese in

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Port/Region 1611 1612 1616 1621 1628

SOURCE: Steensgaard 1973:90; Melink-Roelofsz 1962.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Origin 1681-82 1683-84 1684-85 1686-87 1692 1693 1694

SOURCE: Gupta 1991:388-9.

It is possible, on the basis of Ashin Das Gupta's research, to reconstruct a

MERCHANT RESISTANCE AND STATE BUILDING

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

of the Zambezi valley in East Africa. Nowhere do they show a particular

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

THE THREE EMPIRES AND TRADE

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

TRADE AND VIOLENCE IN THE WESTERN INDIAN OCEAN

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early modern western Indian Ocean to the difficult problems posed by a

Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World-System, AD.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Themes in the History of Oman to 1728," in D. Hopwood, ed., The Arabian

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Thomaz, Luis Filipe F. R. 1988. "Malaka et ses communautes marchandes au tournant

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500019940 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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