Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, 1994 - Business & Economics - 162 pages
In this remarkable 1994 work of comparative economic history, Stephen Dale studies the activities and economic significance of the Indian mercantile communities which traded in Iran, Central Asia and Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author uses Russian sources, hitherto largely ignored, to show that these merchants represented part of the hegemonic trade diaspora of the Indian world economy, thus challenging the conventional interpretation of world economic history that European merchants overwhelmed their Asian counterparts in the early modern era. The book not only demonstrates the vitality of Indian mercantile capitalism, but also offers a unique insight into the social characteristics of an Indian expatriate trading community in the Volga-Caspian port of Astrakhan.
 

Contents

An Indian world economy
1
The Eurasian context
7
India Iran and Turan in 1600
14
The economies
15
Commerce and the state
30
IntraAsian trade
42
The Indian diaspora in Iran and Turan
45
Trade routes
46
The New Trade Regulations
95
Merchants and the state
98
The Indian diaspora in the Volga basin
101
Patterns of Indian commerce
108
The Indian firm in Astrakhan
112
Companies and capital
121
Peddlers merchants and moneylenders
126
Imperial collapse mercantilism and the Mughul diaspora
128

Multan and the Multanis
55
Mediatory trade
64
The Multanis of Isfahan
66
Technology transfers
75
IndoRussian commerce in the early modern era
78
The Indian guesthouse in Astrakhan
86
Borzois and gyrfalcons
90
Multanis and Multan
129
Indian entrepreneurs and Eurasian trade
133
Appendix
139
Bibliography
142
Index
158
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