India Traders of the Middle Ages


Book Description

The annotated and translated letters of 11th-12th century traders of the Jewish Indian Ocean, found in the Cairo Geniza, provide fascinating information on commerce between the Far East, Yemen and the Mediterranean, medieval material, social, and spiritual civilization among Jews and Arabs, and Judeo-Arabic.




The Indian Traders


Book Description

Study of these intermediaries between two civilizations, based on interviews, letters and other first-hand accounts.




The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947


Book Description

Claude Markovits tells the story of two groups of Hindu merchants from the towns of Shikarpur and Hyderabad in the province of Sind. Basing his account on previously neglected archival sources, the author charts the development of these communities, from the pre-colonial period through colonial conquest and up to independence, describing how they came to control trading networks throughout the world. While the book focuses on the trade of goods, money and information from Sind to the widely dispersed locations of Kobe, Panama, Bukhara and Cairo, it also throws light on the nature of trading diasporas from South Asia in their interaction with the global economy. This is a sophisticated and accessible book, written by one of the most distinguished economic historians in the field. It will appeal to scholars of South Asia, as well as to colonial historians and to students of religion.




The Indian Slave Trade


Book Description

This prize-winning book is the first ever to focus on the traffic in Indian slaves in the American South. For decades the Indian slave trade linked southern lives and created a whirlwind of violence and profit-making. Alan Gallay documents in vivid detail the operation of the slave trade, the processes by which Europeans and Native Americans became participants in it, and the profound consequences it had for the South and its peoples.




Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750


Book Description

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.




Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade


Book Description

Positioned at the crossroads of the maritime routes linking the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, the Yemeni port of Aden grew to be one of the medieval world's greatest commercial hubs. Approaching Aden's history between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries through the prism of overseas trade and commercial culture, Roxani Eleni Margariti examines the ways in which physical space and urban institutions developed to serve and harness the commercial potential presented by the city's strategic location. Utilizing historical and archaeological methods, Margariti draws together a rich variety of sources far beyond the normative and relatively accessible legal rulings issued by Islamic courts of the time. She explores environmental, material, and textual data, including merchants' testimonies from the medieval documentary repository known as the Cairo Geniza. Her analysis brings the port city to life, detailing its fortifications, water supply, harbor, customs house, marketplaces, and ship-building facilities. She also provides a broader picture of the history of the city and the ways merchants and administrators regulated and fostered trade. Margariti ultimately demonstrates how port cities, as nodes of exchange, communication, and interconnectedness, are crucial in Indian Ocean and Middle Eastern history as well as Islamic and Jewish history.




Born to Trade


Book Description

This pioneering work traces migration of Indian traders to Russia, Iran, West Asia and South-East Asia in medieval times. Four essays throw light on the activities of the Indian business community in Russia. Generally Indians came to Russia via Iran. There they took a boat, crossed the Caspian Sea and reached the Russian port of Astrakhan. Indian visitors included Hindus (including Jains), Muslims, Christians, Parsis among others. Hindus constituted the largest segment of the migrants. They became an object of local curiosity because of their rituals and social practices. They also became an object of jealousy. Indians did not enjoy political and administrative support as the European East India Companies did. Occasionally local rulers consulted them and sought their advice. Three essays deal with Indian traders in Iran in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One essay discusses trade between India and Iran in the fifteenth century. There are papers discussing activities of Indian traders in West Asia, Yemen and South East Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conclusion focuses on Indian merchants and the Indian Ocean in medieval times. The author concludes that Indian traders did not enjoy political and royal support, essential for success. He also affirms that crossing the seas did not lead to social boycott by their caste-men. This taboo came much later, probably with the advent of British rule in the nineteenth century.




The Indian Trade at the Asian Frontier


Book Description

This volume provides rich insights into workings of the Indian mind arguing that Indian merchants in the medieval and the early modern period were in no way inferior to other traders and Europeans in terms of their commercial operations and business acumen drawing on a wide range of sources. This book throws a new light on growth and development of Asian Trade on Sea and Land unearthing new evidence from Danish and Russian sources.




North America’s Indian Trade in European Commerce and Imagination, 1580-1850


Book Description

In North America's Indian Trade in European Commerce and Imagination, Colpitts offers new perspectives on Europe's contact with America by examining the ideas, debates and questions arising in the trading that linked newcomers with Native people. European capitalization of the Indian Trade, beginning in the 16th century, forced newcomers to confront the meaning and legitimacy of traditional gift economies and assess the vice and virtue of the commerce they pursued in the New World. Making use of French and English colonization texts, published narratives and state colonial papers, the author explores how European capital investments, credit, profits and commercial linkages elaborated and complicated understandings of North American people in the period of colonization.




The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century


Book Description

First Published in 1989. Well over a million slaves were exported from Indian Ocean and Red Sea ports in Eastern Africa during the nineteenth century, and millions more were shifted around the interior of the continent and along the coast of East Africa. And yet we still know remarkably little about this great movement of people, particularly from an economic point of view. This is a collection of twelve essays looking at the economics of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea Slave trades of the nineteenth century.