Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750 (review)

From about 1620 to 1720, a colony of Hindu merchants settled under Muscovite rule at Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga played a crucial role in the Muscovite state's commercial and political expansion on its inland frontiers. They maintained their ceremonial life and cremated their dead. As late as 1824 an English traveler noted the general religious toleration and the number of Hindu temples there. In Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750, Stephen Frederik Dale presents his brief, fact-packed account of the rise and fall of this community as a corrective to the tendency to ascribe all commercial dynamism in the early modern world to "European expansion" by sea. If this is not quite flogging a dead horse, it's certainly whipping one that is on its last legs and has more scars than he would suggest. Nonetheless, Dale is right to call his investigations important contributions to the ongoing "de-Eurocentering" of discussions of world history.

The Astrakhan Indian colony was an offshoot of the larger and longer settled colonies of Indian merchants in Iran. Dale gives a de-tailed account of the latter, making especially good use of Jean or John Chardin's account of his travels in the 1670s. Both Hindus and Muslims from India traded in Iran; Dale suggests that the Hindus took advantage of Muslim prohibitions of usury to dominate money-lending, expand their businesses in Iran, and move on to Astrakhan. Surely it also is relevant that in Surat, the Indian port most closely connected with the trade to Iran, brokerage and money-changing were dominated by Hindus.

In the 1600s, as Muscovy slowly emerged from its "time of troubles," the Hindus were welcomed to Astrakhan in very roughly the same ways and for the same reasons as Dutch and English merchants were welcomed in Russia's far northern ports. Like those merchants, the Hindus also went on trading expeditions to Moscow, and by the late seventeenth century they were settled there. Dale makes very inter-esting use of Russian archival materials published by Russian scholars and quoted extensively in their writings. A census or two give full listings of every member of the Indian community, and because Indian names frequently include a place-of-origin element, we get a good picture of the origins of the sojourners.

Dale draws on an impressive range of sources and studies in Indian history to show that these clues fit nicely with what is known of trading communities and routes linking what is now India and Pakistan to Afghanistan and Iran. Nothing seems to have been found so far that would allow construction of even an approximation of a statistical series that would give a sense of the changing volumes of the Indians' trade and allow us to compare it with that of the Armenians and, on some routes, the Europeans. Scattered evidence on the size of the fortunes accumulated by some of the Indian merchants suggests that they were considerably larger than those of all but a very few Russian merchants of the time. Dale attributes the Indians' success to their access to Indian capital and export goods, especially cloth. The expansion of these merchants' trade is seen as the last phase of expansion of an "Indian world system," propelled by demand for Indian cloth and the financial resources and expertise of Indian merchants, which produced colonies of Indian merchants as far away as Aleppo. No mention is made of the expansion of Indian traders into East Africa at about the same time. A bit of background on the earlier Indian mercantile diasporas, especially that in the Malay Peninsula and island Southeast Asia, would have been welcome.

There are some odd gaps in attention to the contributions of other scholars. Little use is made...