Merchants, Companies and Trade
Europe and Asia in the Early Modern Era

A comparative study looking at the development of trade between Europe and Asia with contributions from leading scholars.

Sushil Chaudhury (Edited by), Michel Morineau (Edited by)

9780521563673, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 June 1999

344 pages, 2 maps 15 tables
23.6 x 16 x 2.6 cm, 0.63 kg

"...it is nonetheless a service to the field to have these contributions by important scholars available for incorporation into the stream of discussion." The International History Review

Written by well-known scholars, this book raises pertinent questions and takes up alternate perspectives on the growth and development of international trade between Europe and Asia, especially India, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Through a comparative and comprehensive study of merchant communities, markets and commodities the individual authors argue, contrary to conventional views, that Asian merchants were in no way inferior to Europeans in terms of their commercial operations and business acumen. The book emphasizes the continuing and growing importance of India's overland trade, even in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, traces the little-known world of Armenian merchants, the hitherto obscure, but voluminous, Indian trade with the Ottoman Empire, and by unearthing new evidence, demonstrates that the export activity of Asian merchants through the overland route from Bengal was higher, in fact, than the combined total of European exports.

List of contributors
Preface
Introduction Sushil Chaudhury and Michel Morineau
Part I. Asia, Especially India, Around 1500: 1. Of what world-system was pre-1500 'India' a part? Ravi Arvind Palat and Immanuel Wallerstein
2. Trade in the Indian Ocean at the dawn of the sixteenth century Geneviève Bouchon
Part II. Routes, Markets and Merchants: 3. The route through Quandahar: the significance of the overland trade from India to the West in the seventeenth century Niels Steensgaard
4. The Armenian merchant network: overall autonomy and local integration Michel Aghassian and Kéram Kévonian
5. Commercial relations between India and the Ottoman Empire (late fifteenth to late eighteenth centuries): a few notes and hypotheses Gilles Veinstein
6. Eastern and Western merchants from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries Michel Morineau
7. The other 'species' world: specification of commodities and moneys, and the knowledge-base of commerce, 1500–1900 Frank Perlin
Part III. European Presence in Asia: 8. The Portuguese and the Dutch in Asian maritime trade: a comparative analysis Om Prakash
9. Competition or collaboration? Relations between the Dutch East India Company and Indian merchants around 1680 Femme S. Gaastra
10. The French India Company and its trade in the eighteenth century Philippe Haudrère
11. Sweden and India in the eighteenth century: Sweden's difficulty in gaining access to a crowded market C. Koninckx
12. The ambitions of the Austrian Empire with reference to East India during the last quarter of the eighteenth century Helma Houtman-de Smedt
Part IV. Implications of Trade: Asia and Europe: 13. The Indian challenge: seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Michel Morineau
14. The changing pattern of British trade in Indian textiles, 1701–1757 Dietmar Rothermund
15. French traders and India at the end of the eighteenth century Paul Butel
16. The Asian merchants and companies in Bengal's export trade, circa mid-eighteenth century Sushil Chaudhury
Index.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ]