Download PDF | Stephen Frederic Dale - Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750-Cambridge University Press (1994).
176 Pages
Preface
This work is a study of economies and trade routes, of merchants and their capital in Mughul India, Safavid Iran, Uzbek Turan and Muscovite Russia. It is, more particularly, a study of the characteristics and significance of the MughulIndian trade diaspora in Iran, Turan and Russia. The underlying purpose of the work is to use new evidence and employ a new perspective to amend radically the persistent Eurocentric bias that continues to characterize most research on Eurasian trade in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
A remarkable number of articles and books have been published on this commerce in the last two decades, and many have focused on India, but nearly all of them have been primarily concerned with aspects of European maritime expansion. Two prevalent assumptions of this historiography have been that Indian commerce with its neighboring territories was comparatively insignificant when measured against European trade, and that Indian merchants themselves, to the extent that they ever had been involved in this trade in the first place, were by the seventeenth century in full-scale retreat in the face of European competition.
As far as Mughul India's trade with Iran, Turan and Russia was concerned, these assumptions are incorrect. I began this study in order to correct this erroneous, one-sided view of Eurasian commerce by examining the role of large numbers of merchants from Mughul India who lived semi-permanently and conducted business in Iran, Turan and Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. I would not have attempted to do so had not an adolescent interest in understanding the angst of characters in nineteenth-century Russian novels at least left me with the ability to use more than eleven hundred pages of published Russian documents that illumine the business activities of a little-known settlement of Indian merchants in the Russian Caspian port of Astrakhan. These records provide a uniquely detailed insight into the commercial and financial activities of Indian merchants, not merely in Astrakhan itself, but in Iran as well.
They offer the only means that I know to discuss specific Indian business practices in the diaspora in the early modern era, and they contain at least one set of data for evaluating the economic significance of the larger emigre Mughul-Indian merchant population. Unfortunately, I was not able to convince the Soviet government that I should be able to visit Astrakhan itself, but my disappointment in not being able to use the district and city archives there was somewhat diminished by the discovery of several fine historical studies of Astrakhan city and region by Soviet scholars. In addition I have benefited from a wide variety of other Soviet studies of the socio-economic characteristics of merchants and urban societies. Anyone who studies commerce or mercantile life in the pre-modern era is quickly made aware of two inescapable realities. First, statistics are rarely available to document even long-term economic trends, and most conclusions about commercial life have to be tentatively apprehended from the braille of occasional coin finds, scattered records and anecdotal evidence. Basic customs and financial data are almost never available.
These are problems too for most aspects of the economic history of India, Iran, Turan and Russia between 1600 and 1750, the century and a half during which the Astrakhan Indian community first prospered and then decayed. However, an exceptional number of administrative manuals, histories and travelers' accounts are extant for this period of Mughul and Safavid history, and in Astrakhan itself a significant number of customs records have been preserved. Second, just as it has been practical to write only about a relatively brief time span out of centuries of commercial interaction between Indian and adjacent territories, so too I have been compelled artificially to limit my study of expatriate South Asian merchants to those who emigrated from Mughul India to Safavid Iran, Uzbek Turan and Muscovite Russia.
Yet Mughul India did not exist in a state of autarky within the South Asian subcontinent, and the diaspora of Mughul Indian merchants was not confined to these three states or regions. It extended throughout the Indian Ocean region, was highly visible in the Ottoman empire and penetrated into Chinese Turkistan. At the very least, though, this work will offer clues and analogies for understanding the significance of South Asian merchants throughout the wider diaspora and in so doing encourage the study of regional economic history of Asia in the early modern era. I have an enormous intellectual debt to a large number of accomplished scholars who have written studies of commerce or merchant classes in India, Iran, Turan and Russia in the early modern era. For India I have particularly benefited from the writings of Christopher Bayly, K. N. Chaudhuri, Irfan Habib and his justly influential Aligarh school, Muzaffar Alam, Tapan Raychaudhuri and John Richards.
I would also like specially to acknowledge the work of Surendra Gopal, the first non-Soviet scholar who recognized the potential scholarly importance of the Russian Astrakhan records. My understanding of Iranian history of the Safavid era has been especially influenced by the interpretations of Bert Fragner, Edmund Herzig, Mehdi Keyvani, Rudolph Matthee, R. Roemer and R. W. Ferrier. E. A. Davidovich, N. M. Lowick, R. D. McChesney and R. G. Mukminova have produced works that have been crucial to my understanding of the trade of South Asian merchants in the Uzbek states or appanages of Turan.
I began my tutorials on Russian merchants by reading the articles and books of Samuel H. Baron and Paul Bushkovitch, but learned most about the particular subject of South Asian merchants in Russia by immersing myself in the uniquely valuable document collections that were carefully edited by K. A. Antonova, N. M. Gold'berg and others. My debt to N. B. Golikova will be especially evident in the notes, for her use of unpublished Astrakhan customs records has allowed me to make some statistically verified conclusions that could only be inferred from the published records.
I have also benefited from the criticisms and suggestions of Thomas Allsen, Paul Bushkovitch, John Masson Smith Jr. and my colleague Alam Payind. I must also record my debt for the second time in my scholarly life to the exceptional scholarship of the late S. D. Goitein, whose work on the Cairo Geniza documents has incalculably enriched my understanding of pre-modern commerce in the Mediterranean and Islamic world. Finally, I would like to thank Professor Tosun Aricanli for inviting me to present a paper at the "Workshop on the Political Economies of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal States during the 17th and 18th Centuries," that was held in Istanbul, Turkey, 16-20 June, 1992.
The final revision of this manuscript was influenced by several of the participants at that conference, particularly Suraiya Faroqhi, Ashraf Ghani, Edmund Herzig and Rudolph Matthee. While this manuscript was begun well before that meeting it is, in a way, a testimony to the wisdom of studying the early modern Islamic world from a comparative perspective. Cindy Gray and Jon Fehrman helped with the design of the maps and Jon Fehrman prepared the final version of each map.
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