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Trade in Early India: Themes in Indian History

Edited by RANABIR CHAKRAVARTI
Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 2001

Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300–900

MICHAEL MCCORMACK
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2001

Reviewed by NIGEL HARRIS

It is a great pleasure to have the opportunity – as a complete outsider to both economic

history and to the history of India – to review these two important works. My credentials
for doing so must be no more the strength of my innocence – with the pious hope
that the weakness of innocence, the capacity to make gross errors, is not too blatant.
The review has thus claims neither to expertise nor authority.
Professor Chakravarti has collected here some of the most significant articles of the
past half century on trade in Indian history – Shereen Ratnagar (1994) and Maurizio
Tosi (1991) on Harappan trade; Romila Thapar (1976) on Dana and Dakshina as
exchanges; Ivo Fiser (1954) on Setthi in Buddhist Jatakas; B.N. Mukherjee (1996) on
pre-Gupta Vanya and Kalinga; Lionel Casson (1990) on maritime loans; D.D. Kosambi
(1959) on feudal trade charters; Chakravarti (1990) on northern Konkan (AD 900–1053);
Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya (1985) on early medieval Rajasthan; Jean Deloche (1983)
on ancient seaports; R. Champakalakshmi (n.d.) on South-Indian guilds; V.K. Jain
(1989) on merchant corporations; R.S. Sharma (1983) on usury in early medieval times;
John S. Deyell (1990) on the Gurjara-Pratiharas; and S.D. Goitein (1980) on trans-
Arabian Sea trade. The editor provides a masterly long overview of the field in the
introduction and a most useful annotated bibliography at the end. The book – nearly
five hundred pages – is excellent, consistently stimulating, judicious and throughout
most scholarly. The detail and the detective work are impressive.
Professor McCormack’s book is both narrower (in time period) and, given its great
length (1,101 pages), much denser. His is a grand attempt to put together from many
different sources a picture of the emergence of the European economy in what used
to be the Dark Ages. He uses a great diversity of sources most creatively – documents,
(including those from the Baghdad Caliphate), coin hoards, the provenance of holy
relics, etymology, early medieval monastic medical recipes, archaeological sites (the
location and residues of toll posts, industrial waste sites, sunken ship contents, as

Historical Materialism, volume 12:4 (455–462)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2004
Also available online – www.brill.nl
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456 • Nigel Harris

well as the remains and sources of cargo). It is, of course, difficult to identify what is
commercial trade in all these sources, but he is adept at rigorous inferences from
limited data. As he notes, those who wrote the records disdained trade and merchants
in favour of kings, officials and prelates, so trade is least documented. Nonetheless,
he has identified a wealth of evidence to contradict earlier notions that Europe in
these times had very little trade.
He begins with an attempt to assess what of the late Roman imperial economy
survived as the polity disintegrated, concentrating on the persistence or change in
routes of communication (of pilgrims, prelates, diplomats and rulers as well as traders)
from the beginning of the revival in the seventh century. He plots the creation of new
clusters of economic activity, urbanisation, in the Mediterranean, the Frankish and
Carolingian Empires, as well as the peripheral areas (Britain, Eastern Europe and the
far north). Out of this, he identifies – in response to the major expansion of the richer
and more advanced Islamic world (up to the tenth century) – the remarkable rise of
Venice and the north Italian cities, the revival of river trade and development of new
trade points. It is an impressive and fascinating compilation, a masterly summing up
of the point we have reached in the enquiry, a bench mark for further explorations.
What is the justification for putting together these two works? It is to consider the
essence of historical research, revisionism. The perception of the past is continually
changing and must do so as evidence accumulates and new sources become available.
Yet revisionism is, in principle, always a challenge for governments and the intelligentsia,
for settled ways of considering the past and thus our present. What makes history
important outside the ranks of historians is thus its impact on the present, how we
see ourselves and our times. Historians, whether they know it or not, are thus continually
undermining the present, subverting our comfortable assumptions that we know who
we are. It is not just more immediate questions – as with the work of Israel’s revisionist
historians,1 to the violent protests of the government, showing that the official account
of the foundation of the State in 1948, is remote from the ‘truth’ and this bears directly
upon the appalling conflicts in the Occupied Territories at the moment (no less, the
myth of the lands of the ancient Israelites is a powerful – if in principle absurd –
moral element in present Israeli claims). The revision of Irish history2 has less painful
relevance but is no less upsetting for the ruling order. A recent London satire on the
performance of British generals in 1914 produced strong protests from the Conservative
backbenches, and one need not mention an obscure mosque at Ayodhya in a similar
connection.
However, surely ancient or medieval history cannot have any such importance?
Yet, even here, the cultures within which we grow up do indeed equip us in certain
ways that can be challenged. Both Chakravarti and McCormack present arguments

1 Morris 1987, Silberstein 1999.

2 George and O’Day 1996.