Coffee Mocha

The second half of the eighteenth century, witnessed a boom in the trade in coffee in Mocha and Muscat. The Kachchhis traders of Mandvi and Surat based traders were central to this trade. The shifts and circumstances of the eighteenth century disturbed the control and Surat was forced to lose the premier position in coffee supply. The considerable coffee trade was diverted to Muscat in the eighteenth century. Concurrently, the Sultans were running into political expansion and risked considerable resources. Kachchhi merchants in Muscat were stressed to contribute. This necessitated the fortune making enterprise through the lucrative commodity trading. The opportunity to import Mocha coffee and re-export them to destinations in the neighbourhood of Oman was, thus, the outcome. This chapter takes us to the understanding that how the circulation of a single commodity empowered the transregional trade routes not only with the significant volume of trade but also facilitated the flow of specie and profit through various channels.

Gujarat in the History of the Indian Ocean

This chapter takes a stock taking exercise of the history writing on Gujarat and Indian maritime history over the last five decades. It identifies the major shifts and emphases that mark the nature of historical knowledge. What these hold for the discipline of history in general and how these inflect the case study of Gujarat in particular are examined. The intention of such a stock taking exercise is also to consider the importance of recovering and reading new and local archives and of incorporating new methods into standard historical work. The author also explores the most significant shifts that have emerged in the recent historiography of the Indian Ocean and of maritime Gujarat: study of law and piracy and Muslim seafaring and sailing practices in the western Indian Ocean.

Forty Years On

Almost forty years ago, the author published an article on Gujarat and East Africa from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Although several other scholars had written serious historical works either about or including Indian traders in eastern Africa in the modern period, at the time it was a pioneering piece for historians of East Africa. While the author has written and continues to write about the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean world and, more recently, the islands of this vast oceanic space now referred to as Indian Ocean Africa, he has not again written anything specifically about Gujarat and the Indian Ocean, nor about Gujarati traders in East Africa. This chapter attempts to review the last forty years of scholarship written in English on Gujarat and the Indian Ocean with a focus on transregional trade and traders. What is hoped from this overview is a sense of how current debates have developed over these decades and where further research is called for.

Ratansi Purshottam, the Gujaratis of Muscat, and the Global Connectivity of Indian Ocean Transregional Markets

This chapter provides a case study of the career of Seth Ratansi Purshotam to demonstrate the role of Gujarati Banyans of Muscat, Oman in linking that port’s transregional commercial network of India, the Persian Gulf, and East Africa to the global market. Ratansi, a native of Mandvi, Kachhch, began his career as a clerk in his uncle’s shop in 1857, opened his own shop in 1867, and by the 1880s until his death in 1904 was one of the leading importers/exporters and money lenders of Muscat and a principal financier of the government of Oman as the customs farmer. During that period Ratansi joined with other Banyan, Khoja, and Arab merchants to expand and strengthen direct contacts with European and American commercial outlets for the export of Omani products, especially dates, and the import of Western manufactured consumer goods, most notably arms and ammunition.

Filling Hearts with Joy

It is generally recognized that cotton textiles made in the Indian subcontinent dominated global markets until outcompeted by Britain’s industrially manufactures in the early 1800s. However, scholars have now nuanced this meta-narrative by era, Indian sub-region, artisan class, and textile type. Building on studies by Chhaya Goswami and Jeremy Prestholdt, this chapter explores the shifting fates of handcrafted ‘Indian cloth’ imports in the years 1800–1900 in eastern Africa. Employing an object-centred approach, it scrutinizes the category of ‘cloth’ as much as the modifiers of ‘British’, ‘Indian’, ‘Gujarati’, or ‘Kutchi’. It shows that of seven basic cloth types, handcrafted goods from western India held a significant share of many. It supports Haynes’ (2012) work that Indian textile artisans did not merely survive in the age of industrialization; they actively innovated. Colour was often key, highlighting the importance of India’s dyers and printers, often overlooked in favour of spinners and weavers.

Merchants and Marts

India’s flourishing trade and production economy in the late medieval times has been well studied, particularly from the point of view of the variety of goods that were exported across the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. In this context, the ports, particularly those of Gujarat and the Coromandel Coast, have received considerable attention. This chapter seeks to examine the nature of Gujarat’s connections to the hinterland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Surat, it is well known, was the port of the Mughal Empire; but what about ports like Cambay, or other towns like Ahmedabad or Baroda? What were their connections to the interior? Are there indications of merchants shifting from, for example, Cambay to Surat, as the former port declined in importance? The chapter, thus, focuses on the accessibility, contact, or reach of Gujarati merchants to different places in India.

Gujarat and Long-Distance Trade in the Indian Ocean Region before the Sixteenth Century

Northwestern India, and particularly Gujarat, played a crucial role in the history of the ancient world by building connections with various Indian Ocean regions. These included the Persian Gulf, southern Arabia, the Red Sea, and the Horn of Africa on one side, and southern India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia on the other. Gujarat benefited from its agricultural potential and acted as a hub for various areas. This explains both its own success and the constant efforts by regional powers to control it. This chapter attempts to demonstrate the ways in which Gujarat proved able to assert its power and gradually become a major actor in exchanges in and around the Indian Ocean: exchanges that have connections to religious networks and places.

Migration and Creation of New Societies

The general outline of Indian migration to East Africa is broadly understood, and there have been a number of detailed family histories of prominent people of Indian origin, which sometimes tend to freeze the image of Indians as a homogeneous and separate entity. The author decided to compile a history of his family which had lived in Zanzibar for five generations. He wanted to understand, within the context of much wider migrations and settlements across the Indian Ocean by all sorts of peoples, why and how they migrated, how they became not a ‘diaspora’ but an indigenized and part of a constantly evolving multicultural society, a perspective that is often lacking in the existing literature on the Indians overseas.

Gujarati Merchant Diaspora in South East Asia (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)

Gujarat was concentric to the early modern Indian Ocean world. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the fine tuning of long distance trading systems. In South East Asia, the Indo-Portuguese trade network flourished in the sixteenth century, followed by the English and the Dutch in the seventeenth. Equilibrium was established between European and Asian traders, both indispensable to the other. Profitable trade in pepper and spices in the eastern archipelago was based on cotton textiles from Gujarat. In the sixteenth century, Cambay stretched out two arms—towards Aden and Malacca. Commercial connections included ports like Acheh, Kedah, Tenasserim, Pegu, Pase, and Pidie. In the seventeenth century, Surat’s mercantile marine facilitated the consolidation of Gujarati trade. This chapter shows how Gujarati merchant diaspora was intrinsic to the intricate patterns of trade practices and traditions of the Indian Ocean.

Adjusting Output to Demand

Contemporary sources reveal that volume of trade between India and Europe multiplied in the seventeenth century with the energetic participation of the Dutch and the English Companies. They were quite organized regarding schedule of shipping, negotiating the prices, engaging the artisans and brokers, maintaining good relations with the authorities, and so on. Very early, they realized that investment in textiles would be of great benefit for them. In view of tremendous competition, weavers were engaged through brokers and were provided with musters to prepare pieces according to certain specifications. Pieces were to be printed and given a fine finish. There were always complains about the behaviour of these groups. Interestingly, most of the complaints registered against any of the groups of artisans were about weavers, washers, and painters. In turn, they too protested frequently against their exploitation. Here an attempt is made to understand the equation between the artisans, service providers, brokers, and merchants.