Abstract
Ever since Ashin Das Gupta’s book on the decline of Surat, published in 1979, the question of Surat’s decline and Bombay’s rise to prominence as the commercial hub of the western Indian Ocean has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention.1 Das Gupta argued that Surat, the chief port of the Mughal Empire and northern India’s gateway to the Afro-Eurasian maritime world, declined in the early eighteenth century because of the disintegration of the Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman empires and lost its position to Bombay, the headquarters of the English East India Company (EIC) in western India. What precipitated the decline was, according to some scholars, the flight from Surat of merchants and their capital.2 Because a number of merchants fleeing Surat ended up in Bombay, the relevant literature never fails to emphasise an inverse relationship between the two ports. As Das Gupta wrote, ’surat did not decline because Bombay grew, Bombay grew because Surat declined.’3 Das Gupta’s ‘decline of Surat’ paradigm became a fad with many scholars, so much so that they find it hard to accept any view that contradicts or challenges it.4 The aim of this chapter is to move beyond the decline-growth binary between a Mughal port city (Surat) and a colonial port city (Bombay), and to explore the continued dynamism of Surat and Bombay and their respective roles and positions in the rapidly reconfiguring port complex of Gujarat during the region’s transition to a colonial economy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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Notes
Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, 1700–1750 (Wiesbaden: Fransz Steiner, 1979).
For example, Eckhard Kulke wrote that after the Portuguese had relinquished Bombay to the British in 1661, Surat lost its leading role within a few decades to Bombay, which was free of the pressure of the Moguls and of the danger of Maratha invasions and was therefore developed by the British to be their main port on India’s west coast. Eckhard Kulke, The Parsees in India: A Minority as Agent of Social Change (Munchen: Weltforum Verlag, 1974), 33;
Ruby Maloni, Surat: The Mughal Port City (Bombay: Himalayan Publishing House, 2003), 165.
Ghulam A. Nadri, Eighteenth-Century Gujarat: The Dynamics of Its Political Economy, 1750–1800 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2009). Some reviewers of this book have taken issue with my conclusions that Surat’s Indian Ocean maritime trade revived and flourished in the second half of the eighteenth century. Sushil Chaudhury, ‘The Economy of Vibrant Gujarat’, Statesman, 10 October 2010; Edward Simpson’s review of Eighteenth-Century Gujarat, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 55 (2012): 827–31.
See, Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Das Gupta, Indian Merchants, 139–40; Shireen Moosvi, ‘The Gujarat Ports and Their Hinterlands: The Economic Relationship’, in Ports and Their Hinterlands in India, 1700–1950, ed. Indu Banga (Delhi: Manohar, 1992), 129.
Holden Furber, Bombay Presidency in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1965), 6; Kulke, The Parsees in India, 33.
Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Table 5.1; Nadri, Eighteenth-Century Gujarat, 120, 222.
Ibid., 281; Ashin Das Gupta, ‘India and the Indian Ocean in the Eighteenth Century’, in India and the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800, ed. M. N. Pearson and Ashin Das Gupta (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1987), 141.
Ashin Das Gupta, The World of Indian Ocean Merchant: Collected Essays of Ashin Das Gupta, compiled by Uma Das Gupta (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘Banias and the British: The Role of Indigenous Credit in the Process of Imperial Expansion in Western India in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies 21, 3 (1987): 482–84.
Michelguglielmo Torri, ‘In the Deep Blue Sea: Surat and Its Merchant Class During the Dyarchic Era (1759–1800)’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 19, 3–4 (1982): 267–99;
Michelguglielmo Torri, ‘Trapped inside the Colonial Order: The Hindu Bankers of Surat and Their Business World during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies 25, 2 (1991): 367–401.
Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘Capital and Crowd in a Declining Asian Port City: The Anglo-Bania Order and the Surat Riots of 1795’, Modern Asian Studies 19, 2 (1985): 205–37.
My study of Surat’s maritime trade, with a limited focus on the ship-owning merchants of Surat in the early decades of the eighteenth century, had earlier left me with the same impression as Das Gupta. Ghulam A. Nadri, ‘Merchants in Late Mughal Gujarat: Evidence from Two Major Persian Sources’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress (Bangalore session, 1998), 382–90.
For a detailed discussion of the aspects of what is termed the English monopoly over Surat’s freight trade, see Ghulam A. Nadri, ’sailing in Hazardous Waters: Maritime Merchants of Gujarat in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, in The Trading World of the Indian Ocean1500–1800, ed. Om Prakash (New Delhi: Pearson, 2012), 260–62.
VOC 2967, Ship** list, Surat, 1759, 195–200; VOC 3026, Ship** list, Surat, 1761, 126–32; VOC 3122, Ship** list, 1763–1764, ff. 3299r–3305r; Ghulam A. Nadri, ‘Commercial World of Mancherji Khurshedji and the Dutch East India Company: A Study of Mutual Relationships’, Modern Asian Studies 41, 2 (2007): 329–30.
, Proceedings, Surat, 12 May 1791, 123; Ghulam A. Nadri, ‘The Maritime Merchants of Surat: A Long-term Perspective’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50, 2–3 (2007): 245.
In the eighteenth century, Surat lost access to parts of the hinterlands, but large-scale commodity production and imports of sugar and other commodities helped Surat to regain access to much of the north and northwest Indian hinterlands and West Asian forelands in the second half of the eighteenth century. Ghulam A. Nadri, ‘The Dynamics of Port-Hinterland Relationships in Eighteenth-Century Gujarat’, in Hinterlands and Commodities: Place, Space, Time and the Political Economic Development of Asia over the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Tsukasa Mizushima, George B. Souza and Dennis Flynn (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015), 83–101.
Rajat Kanta Ray quoted in Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 13.
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Nadri, G.A. (2015). Revisiting the ‘Decline of Surat’: Maritime Trade and the Port Complex of Gujarat in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. In: Bosma, U., Webster, A. (eds) Commodities, Ports and Asian Maritime Trade Since 1750. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463920_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463920_5
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