Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750

Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization

by Stephen Frederic Dale

This is a study of the activities and economic significance of the Indian merchant communities that traded in Iran, Central Asia and Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their role within the hegemonic trade diaspora of the period. The author has made use of Russian material, hitherto largely ignored, to highlight the importance of these mercantile communities, and to challenge the conventional view of world economic history in the early modern era. The book not only demonstrates the vitality of Indian mercantile capitalism at the time, but also offers a unique insight into the social characteristics of an expatriate community in the Volga-Caspian port of Astrakhan.

180 pages, Paperback

First published May 19, 1994

About the author

An Islamic historian who specializes in and teaches courses on the history of the eastern Islamic world, specifically India, Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia, Stephen Frederic Dale is Emeritus Professor at the Ohio State University. He took his undergraduate degree from Carleton College and both of his graduate degrees from the University of California at Berkeley.

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dale focuses on an Indian (from Multan, primarily) trade diaspora in Astrakhan during this period, its lineage with similar communities in Uzbeki Turan and Safavid Iran, and its economic reach well into Moscow and European Russia to bring to the historiographical foreground an Indian global economic system. Contemporaneous with Europe and basically behaving exactly the same as Genoan and Venetian "great merchants", the Multani Indians operated within a vast regional trade network. The only thing standing in their way was Russian mercantile interests who resented their awesomeness. Global comparative history is the shit, yo.

[Jindřich Zapletal · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent exposition of the Multan-Isfahan-Astrakhan trade line during the Safavid period, with some remarks on the Multan-Samarkand direction too. The author makes extensive use of Russian primary and secondary sources.

There are several similar books on Indian and Armenian trade networks in this geopolitical area and epoch (Markovits, Aslanian), all very informative and erudite, they deserve to be read together. They are a key puzzle piece to the understanding of the impressive early modern, pre-colonial Indian prosperity. A good geographic background regarding Iran and Khorasan (less so Russia) is a prerequisite.