现代化早期的南亚与印度洋地区

Preliminary draft. Not to be quoted without the author’s written permission South Asia and the Early Modern Indian Ocean World OM PRAKASH Delhi School of Economics University of Delhi Delhi – 110007, INDIA e-mail; prakash.dse@gmail.com Paper written for the conference on “Economic Change Around the Indian Ocean in the Very Long Run”, Venice, 22-24 July 2008. South Asia and the Early Modern Indian Ocean World OM PRAKASH I The standard of economic performance in pre-colonial India is generally believed to have been reasonably high. This was true of both northern (or Mughal) India as well as of southern India. In the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the Mughal empire imposed a new level of peace, order and stability throughout most of the subcontinent. This was a period of moderate but steady population growth, urbanization, monetization and rising productivity. It is true that the economy was essentially agrarian with the agricultural sector accounting for an overwhelming bulk of the total output as well as of total gainful employment. Indian peasants in the seventeenth century grew a large number of food and industrial crops efficiently and well. The Mughal revenue system was biased in favour of producers of higher value cash crops like indigo, cotton, sugar-cane, tree-crops or opium. State incentives together with rising market demand stimulated cash crops grown for the market. It is, however, useful to remember that what set the Indian subcontinent apart from its neighbours in the Indian Ocean littoral during these centuries were its sophisticated and well-developed industrial and trade sectors, a process undoubtedly and significantly assisted by the dynamic and market-oriented agricultural sector. Indeed, India played a central role in the structure of the Indian Ocean trade at this time. In part, this indeed was a function of the midway location of the subcontinent between west Asia on the one hand and southeast and east Asia on the other. But even more important was the subcontinent’s capacity to put on the market a wide range of tradable goods at highly competitive prices. These included agricultural goods, both food items such as rice, sugar and oil as well as raw materials such as cotton and indigo. While the bulk of the trade in these goods was coastal, the high-seas trade component was by no means insignificant. The real strength of the subcontinent, however, lay in the provision of large quantities of manufactured goods, the most important amongst which was textiles of various kinds. While these included high value varieties such as the legendary Dhaka muslins and the Gujarat silk embroideries, the really important component for the Indian Ocean markets was the coarse cotton varieties manufactured primarily on the Coromandel coast and in Gujarat. There was a large scale demand for these varieties both in the eastern markets of Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand and Burma as well as in the markets of the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and East Africa. While it is impossible to determine precisely what proportion of total domestic demand for mass consumption textiles in these societies was met by imports from India, the available evidence would seem to point in the direction of this not being altogether insignificant. India’s capacity to manufacture these textiles in large quantities and to put them on the market at highly competitive terms made it in some sense the ‘industrial’ hub of the region surrounded by west Asia on one side and southeast Asia on the other. This circumstance also determined to a large extent the nature of India’s demand for imports from the rest of the Indian Ocean littoral. This demand consisted essentially either of consumption goods which were not produced domestically for soil, climatic or other reasons, or of minerals and metals of various kinds whose domestic supply was either nil or substantially below the total demand. In the first category were items such as fine spices like cloves, nutmeg and mace from Indonesia, and horses and rosewater from west Asia. The second category included rubies and other precious stones from Burma, as well as metals – both precious and non-precious. By far the most important non-precious metal imported was tin from Malaya. Precious metals, mainly silver, were imported overwhelmingly from west Asia. It was for this reason that, from the sixteenth century onward, the port of Mocha was repeatedly referred to as the ‘treasure-chest’ of the Mughal empire. The important point to emphasize is that by virtue of her relatively more advanced structure of manufacturing production and her capacity to provide large quantities of a basic manufactured consumption good such as inexpensive cotton textiles at highly competitive terms, India significantly enhanced the basis of trade in the Asian continent. She not only provided the textiles and, on a more modest scale, the foodgrains and the provisions in great demand in the neighbouring societies but also provided an important outlet for their specialized agricultural, mineral and other products. Trade satisfied different kinds of consumption needs for India as compared with her numerous trading partners in the Indian Ocean region. This by itself provided an excellent basis for a significant and growing level of trade. It is really in this sense that the critically important role of India in the structure of early modern Indian Ocean trade needs to be assessed. At the root of India’s ‘industrial’ capability was the availability in the subcontinent of a sophisticated infrastructure of institutions and services which rendered the system of production and exchange highly efficient, dynamic and fully market responsive. The principal constituent elements of this infrastructure were things such as a high degree of labour mobility and the existence of a labour market, merchant groups capable of collective defence and good organization, development of accountancy skills, highly developed and price- responsive marketing systems and a sophisticated monetary and credit structure. A highly developed exchange and trading network – both internal and external – served as a vital link between the agrarian and the non-agrarian sectors of the economy. Land revenue had traditionally accounted for an overwhelming proportion of state finance in Mughal India and adjustments in the procedures for assessing and collecting this revenue were a routine feature in all administrations. But under Akbar (r.1556-1605), these adjustments were rather extensive and, among other things, involved a continuing shift away from the collection of land revenue in kind to that in cash. Both at a qualitative as well as at a quantitative level, this innovation served to promote in an important way the growth of a money economy. Quite clearly, the land revenue assessees would have been marketing a certain proportion of their gross output in any case. But under the new dispensation of compulsorily having to generate a rather large cash flow to meet the revenue demand which could be up to 40 percent of gross output, the volume of monetized transactions entered into by this group would have gone up significantly. This would have necessitated a continuously rising supply of money and perhaps an increase in its velocity of circulation. The Mughal Indian coinage consisted of the gold muhr, the silver rupee, and the copper dam or paisa. Given the almost total absence of domestic production of precious metals, the supply of gold and silver available for coinage depended almost exclusively on the volume of their import into the country. This was also true of copper, though to a smaller extent. A continuing import of these metals, overwhelmingly from the Middle East in the pre-European trade phase and, thereafter, increasingly also from Europe and Japan, had thus assumed the role of almost a precondition to the successful functioning of the monetary system and the exchange networks. It was essentially on the basis of the continuing inflow of the khalisa revenue – the share of the imperial government in the total land revenue – in cash that the elite in the heartland of the empire around Agra/Delhi could afford to constitute an important market for the industrial and other products of the outlying regions of the empire. By the same token, these regions, such as Gujarat and Bengal, would have found it impossible to generate the revenue to be sent to Agra/Delhi without the heartland providing a substantial and continuing demand for their products enabling them to buy back, as it were, the cash flowing to the north as ‘tribute’. A highly developed credit organization also contributed to the efficient working of the system. Merchants could raise short-term loans at remarkably low rates of interest. The institution of the respondentia loans was also quite widespread. Funds could be transferred from one place to another relatively inexpensively by using the hundi which could also double as an instrument for raising short-term credit. The sarrafs who ran the credit and the banking structure were also indispensable to the working of the currency and the monetary system. The Mughal coinage system, with its uniform imperial standards of weights and measures, was imposed throughout the empire over dozens of local monetary systems. Centrally appointed functionaries of the imperial mints accepted bullion or coin from local sarrafs or other private individuals. The system of free minting ensured that the Mughal coins retained their high degree of fineness without any known debasement for nearly two centuries. The rise of an early modern world economy following the great discoveries of the closing years of the fifteenth century brought about a significant increase in the scale and the intensity of both the intercontinental trade between Europe and the Indian Ocean as well as of trade within the Ocean. In both these branches of trade, India played a crucial role throughout the early modern period. It was indeed a critically important coincidence that the discovery of the all-water route between Europe and the Indian Ocean via the Cape of Good Hope and of the New World took place almost simultaneously. For without the enormous quantities of American silver reaching Europe through the sixteenth century, the enhanced trading opportunities between Europe and Asia opened up by the Cape route would essentially have been frustrated. Euro-Asian trade had traditionally been one involving the exchange of luxury and other goods basically against European silver. This ‘bullion for goods’ pattern of trade was essentially an outcome of the inability of Europe to supply goods that could be sold in Asia in reasonably large quantities at competitive terms. Another factor working in the same direction was that at this time the bimetallic ratio between gold and silver was very different between Europe and Asia making silver much more valuable in the latter continent rendering it a preferred medium of payment in exchange for Asian luxury goods. Ever since the fourteenth century or so, the output of precious metals in Europe had by and large been stagnant raising fears of deflationary tendencies cropping up. This, coupled with bullionist inhibitions regarding the export of precious metals, would almost certainly have created a situation where the non-availability of significant additional quantities of precious metals for export to the East would by and large have rendered the opportunities opened up by the availability of the Cape route quite redundant. While the expansion in the volume and value of Euro-Asian trade in the course of the sixteenth century was certainly important, it was only with the establishment of the English and the Dutch East India Companies at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the scale of Euro-Asian trade really picked up at a truly significant rate. The growing diversification of the commodity composition of the exports from Asia in the course of the seventeenth century further aided the English and the Dutch penetration of the Indian Ocean in search of new commodities for the European markets. Another significant development leading to the same outcome was the growing involvement of the European corporate enterprises in the Indian Ocean trade for the large additional profits that such participation promised. This practice had been started quite early in the sixteenth century by the Portuguese Estado da India. Mainly with the help of Tamil Keling merchants settled at Malacca, the Estado had managed to make its way into a complex intra-Asian trading network of goods and routes with Malacca as the centre-point. Following the growing withdrawl of the Estado from this trade in the second half of the sixteenth century, the initiative was taken over by private Portuguese traders operating under the so-called concession system. The quantum jump in the volume and value of European corporate participation in the Indian Ocean trade, however, came about only in the seventeenth century when the Dutch East India Company made a large scale participation in the Indian Ocean trade an integral part of its overall trading strategy. This paper seeks to situate South Asia in the Early Modern Indian Ocean World by highlighting the subcontinent’s role in the structure of trade in the Indian Ocean-South China Sea complex. This will be done through a detailed analysis of the trade in two key commodities – Indian textiles and Japanese precious metals, mainly silver until 1668 and gold thereafter. The ‘bullion for goods’ model discussed above in relation to the Euro-Asian trade was also valid in a limited way in some of the branches of the Indian ocean – South China Sea trade. Thus the Indian textiles exported to Burma were paid for largely in silver – in part produced in Pegu and in part imported overland from Unnan in China. Much more important in this respect were the Indian (mainly Bengal) silk- and fine cotton textiles together with raw silk exported to Japan in the seventeenth century through the agency of the Dutch East India Company and paid for almost exclusively in Japanese silver and gold. Indeed, through the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth century, Japan became an extremely important supplier of precious metals to the rest of Asia rivalling the New World in terms of the quantities made available. II One could legitimately argue that Indian textiles structured long distance commercial relationships across the Indian Ocean in the early modern period. If the Indian Ocean was a relational space shaped by trade, Indian textiles represented the very nature of both. The complexity and the high degree of penetration of Indian textiles in the markets of most countries on the Indian Ocean littoral can be fully understood by considering the artifact-based research carried out in recent years by Ruth Barnes at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Indian textiles have traditionally figured prominently both in the trade with west Asia and the Mediterranean via the Arabian Sea as well as with mainland and island southeast Asia via the Bay of Bengal. The fifth century A.D. cotton fragments discovered at Berenike, a harbour site on the Egyptian side of the Red Sea, are the earliest patterned textiles of Indian origin so far recovered from an archeological context.1 At least from the sixteenth century onward, large quantities of Indian textiles are known to have reached Persia, Baghdad and Basra where they changed hands again and reached Constantinople via Syria. These textiles were also traded in large quantities in places such as Mecca and Yemen. Textiles were also carried by Indian merchants, mainly Gujaratis, in fairly large quantities to East Africa where they also served as currency. In that role, these textiles secured the provisioning of other valuable commodities such as ivory, slaves and gum. Perhaps the largest Indian Ocean market for Indian textiles in the early modern period was that of southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. Textiles with designs similar to those at the Ashmolean Collection from Egypt have also been reported from Indonesia. While many of these bear the Dutch East India Company stamps, a number of pieces acquired from Sulawesi have been carbon-dated to the 14th – 15th century.2 Textiles have reigned as a dominant aesthetic in Indonesia for centuries and have played an important role in various ceremonies in the islands. Foreign textiles, mainly of Indian origin, were quickly assimilated to fit local sensibilities and subsequently were encoded with indigenous meaning. There is evidence that clothes produced in Indonesia were affected by Indian influence. This influence was manifested in terms of designs, motifs, materials and techniques of production.3 There is extensive evidence from the sixteenth century onward testifying to the central role played by Indian textiles in the economic life of southeast Asia. These textiles served as the principal medium of exchange for the most coveted product – both within the Indian Ocean as well as internationally – of the region namely exotic spices including pepper, cloves, nutmeg and mace. Among other Indian merchants, Gujarati merchants from the port of Cambay carried large quantities of Indian textiles to Malacca, the leading international port of the Indian Ocean – South China Sea complex from the fifteenth century onward where these textiles were exchanged against Indonesian spices and other goods carried there from China and the Malay archipelago. That is what made the Portugeuse traveller Tome Pires remark early in the sixteenth century that “Malacca could not live without Cambay, nor Cambay without Malacca”.4 The export of Indian textiles to southeast Asia received a further fillip from the early years of the seventeenth century onward when the Dutch East India Company embarked upon a large-scale participation in the Indian Ocean trade as an integral part of its overall trading strategy. As in the case of the other European trading companies, the initial principal aim of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was the procurement of pepper and other spices in Indonesia. By the early 1620s, the VOC had managed to acquire effective monopsony rights in cloves, nutmeg and mace in the Spice Islands. But it soon discovered that traditionally Indian textiles had been used in the region as the principal medium of exchange and no large-scale procurement of spices was feasible unless the Company could lay its hands on a large amount of relatively cheap Indian cotton textiles. The Company could have obtained these textiles at Acheh and other places in the Indonesian archipelago, but its acute business instinct drove it to their source, the Coromandel coast, where four factories were established between 1606 and 1610 covering both the northern and the southern stretches of the coast. This was the starting point of the Company’s involvement in the Indian Ocean trade which eventually assumed proportions as large as its Euro-Asian trade. The special privileges obtained from the petty rulers in the archipelago enabled the Company to earn considerably more than the usual rate of profit on Indian textiles. In fact, in a number of treaties the Company concluded in the archipelago, one of the clauses specified the rate of exchange between the particular commodity in which it had been granted monopsonistic privileges and important varieties of Indian textiles that it proposed to import.5 Another index of the crucial role of Indian textiles is the unquestioned domination of these textiles in the mix of goods the Indonesian and Malay traders carried out of Bata