The Indian Ocean (22 page)

The ports further down India's west coast were less important, in part because the interior was less productive. The next major group of port cities were in Malabar, now the Indian state of Kerala. The dominant port here was Calicut, ruled by a powerful and independent ruler, the Samudri raja or Zamorin, and a market not only for a host of 'foreign' goods but also a great collection and distribution centre for the pepper which was harvested in abundance in the interior. Several other port polities were important at different times in this region. One of them was Cranganore, some 15 miles landwards from the seashore and located on several rivers. A vast array of merchants there dealt in spices.
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None of these Malabar ports were centres for manufacturing, yet neither were they merely exchange centres. In these cases location (they made obvious stopping places for trade from west to east and back again) joined with an interior where much pepper was found to ensure that for many centuries there would be major ports in this region.

This also applies quite exactly to Sri Lanka, and its major port of Colombo, for its location paralleled that of the Malabar ports, while the island was the only place where true, fine, cinnamon was produced. Moving around to the Bay of Bengal, toward the end of our period the major ports included, on the Coromandel coast, Pulicat, which drew on production, especially textiles, from the great Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar, but was little affected politically by it. In Bengal the most important port was Chittagong, which similarly was little controlled from the political centre of Gaur. The last major port of which we need to take account was Melaka, located along the coast from modern Singapore, which rose to prominence in the fifteenth century both as a great trade centre, maybe the greatest of all in the second half of this century, and also as a dissemination centre for Islam. In this great mart were found products from all over the Indian Ocean and far beyond: Chinese silks and porcelains, Indonesian spices, textiles from India, and a host of European products also. Melaka functioned as a pure exchange centre. Local products, let alone local manufactures, were of very slight account. It was the great hinge in Indian Ocean trade at this time, connecting up what could be called the 'larger' Indian Ocean, which would include the South China Sea on one side, and the Mediterranean on the other.

We now move on to consider the merchants who made these ports what they were. A merchant is a person who exchanges one good for another, or buys a good for money with the intention of selling it on to someone else. It would be tedious and pointless merely to list a confusing array of merchants in each port city. Rather, I will concentrate on the main communities, and attempt to describe the role of merchant communities in general rather than in specific terms. Some merchants were permanently located in a particular market place, though the goods they dealt with could come from far away. Others travelled widely, chaffering their way all around the shores of the Indian Ocean.

In our discussion of merchants we can use, with care, evidence from the very early Europeans at the start of the sixteenth century. These men were concerned to understand how things worked in the Indian Ocean the better to participate, or even control, and so they left valuable accounts of what they found around 1500. Certainly they were impressed with the merchants they met in Gujarat. As a merchant from Florence commented in western India in 1510,

We believe ourselves to be the most astute men that one can encounter, and the people here surpass us in everything. And there are Muslim merchants worth 400,000 to 500,000 ducats. And they can do better calculations by memory than we can do with the pen. And they mock us, and it seems to me that they are superior to us in countless things, save with sword in hand, which they cannot resist.
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A famous early Portuguese observer, Tomé Pires, at about the same time said that

They are men who understand merchandise; they are so properly steeped in the sound and harmony of it, that the Gujaratees say that any offence connected with merchandise is pardonable. Those of our people who want to be clerks or factors ought to go [to Gujarat] and learn, because the business of trade is a science in itself which does not hinder any other noble exercise, but helps a great deal.
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We are often told that the trade of the Indian Ocean in our period was increasingly handled by Muslims: the ocean was a 'Muslim lake'. And to be sure there is much truth in this. Nor is this a matter for wonder, for Islam had spread from the heartland of the Red Sea all around the Indian Ocean over water. One would predict then that coastal people were most likely to be converted first, and indeed this was the case. However, there was an important change during our period, for while earlier it was Muslim Arabs from the Red Sea and Egypt who dominated Indian Ocean trade and its markets except perhaps for Calicut, later it was local converts from such coastal areas as Gujarat and Bengal, and Middle Eastern Muslims who often had migrated to the Indian Ocean area, who had the cream of the trade, especially that going past India to the Bay of Bengal and beyond.

A brief tour around the markets which we have just listed will make this clearer. On the East African coast the coastal trade was done by local people, the Swahili, who had been converted to Islam in the twelfth century. These men also acted as brokers, connecting the interior with overseas markets. They seem to have been in a particularly, and atypically, advantageous situation. Over most of the Indian Ocean and its interior use values were relatively constant, so that a preciosity would be valued much the same wherever one was. However, this was not the case in the African interior. Gold and ivory were produced there, but these items had little value in their originating societies; cloth and glass beads did. The situation was reversed in the overseas areas of India and the Middle East. This happy situation gave the Swahili brokers who made the connection between these two different use value areas a great advantage, and they profited from it, as the wealth of Kilwa at its height in the fourteenth century makes clear.
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Much of the overseas long-distance trade was handled by Muslims from the Hadhramaut and Yemen, and they were important people in the Swahili port cities; indeed many of the rulers were descended from, or married to, merchants from further north. However, there was also a sizeable Hindu presence, men from Gujarat who came in with the seasons and, unlike the Muslims, did not settle.

Hindus were also to be found, this time often settled, in the great market of Aden, and indeed further into the Red Sea, but obviously this area was dominated by Muslims, in this case Arabs. Yet earlier in our period Jewish Karimi merchants played a major role in the Egyptian Mamluk state and the Mediterranean in general. Around 1100, as Goitein has shown, they were major participants in Indian Ocean trade. So also in the Gulf, where in the tenth century in the briefly important port of Sohar there was a large Jewish community. However, the main traders here were Ibadi Muslims from Oman, who ventured to ports all around the Arabian Sea.
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At its height Siraf had some fabulously wealthy merchants. In the early twelfth century Abul Qasim Ramisht, who traded as far as China, was very wealthy. The silver plate his family ate out of reputedly weighed about one ton.
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Later in our period in the Gulf, Hurmuz was one of the great cosmopolitan cities with a great variety of traders: some Europeans and Hindus, Muslims from various areas, but the majority of them local, that is Persians. In Gujarat the interior trade, and the domestic markets, were largely controlled by Hindus and Jains, and they also engaged in oceanic trade to an extent. However, more important were a bewildering variety of Muslims: local people, Persians, still some Arabs, others from Bengal. Both here and in Calicut it seems that the long-distance trade was handled mostly by 'foreign' Muslims, who were able to draw on far-flung family connections, while local converts were more likely to engage in coastal and inland trade. Around the corner, on the Coromandel coast, we find a larger role for Hindu traders, especially
klings
, who were south Indian Hindus more correctly called Marakkayars. Some members of the community had converted to Islam, and were known as chulias.
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Bengal, however, had an important Persian merchant community. Melaka, as the greatest market, had the greatest variety of merchants: all sorts of Muslims, and Hindus from both Coromandel and Gujarat, plus local people from the Malay world, most of them now Muslim, and of course Chinese traders.

What was the position of these merchant communities in these great markets? Ibn Battuta again will provide an entrée to the topic. He left several detailed accounts which show the typical situation. In 1330 he arrived at Mogadishu:

It is the custom of the people of this town that, when a vessel reaches the anchorage, the sumbuqs, which are small boats, come out to it. In each sumbuq there are a number of young men of the town, each one of whom brings a covered platter containing food and presents it to one of the merchants on the ship, saying 'This is my guest,' and each of the others does the same. The merchant, on disembarking, goes only to the house of his host among the young men, except those who have made frequent journeys to the town and have gained some acquaintance with its inhabitants; these lodge where they please. When he takes up residence with his host, the latter sells his goods for him and buys for him; and if anyone buys anything from him at too low a price or sells to him in the absence of his host, that sale is held invalid by them. This practice is a profitable one for them.
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A little later he arrived in Zafari, that is Khafar or Dofar, in southwest Oman:

The population of Zafari are engaged in trading, and have no livelihood except from this. It is their custom that when a vessel arrives from India or elsewhere, the sultan's slaves go down to the shore, and come out to the ship in a sumbuq, carrying with them a complete set of robes for the owner of the vessel or his agent, and also for the rubban, who is the captain, and for the kirai who is the ship's writer. Three horses are brought for them, on which they mount [and proceed] with drums and trumpets playing before them from the seashore to the sultan's residence, where they make their salutations to the vizier and amir jandar. Hospitality is supplied to all who are in the vessel for three nights, and when the three nights are up they eat in the sultan's residence. These people do this in order to gain the goodwill of the shipowners....
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And finally some years later in the Maldives:

It is a custom of theirs when a vessel arrives at their island that kanadir, that is to say small boats, go out to meet them, loaded with people from the island carrying betel and karanbah, that is green coconuts. Each man of them gives these to anyone whom he chooses on board the vessel, and that person becomes his guest and carries his goods to his host's house as though he were one of his relatives. Any of the visitors who wishes to marry may do so, but when it is time to leave he divorces the woman, because their women never leave the country.
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Ibn Battuta's experiences were the norm. In Quilon in the twelfth century a European visitor, Benjamin of Tudela, said that when foreign merchants arrived three secretaries of the king came on board, wrote down their names, and reported them to the king. The king then gave them security for their property, which he claimed could even be left in open fields without guard.
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Marco Polo wrote generally, and perhaps over-flatteringly, that Indian merchants

are the best merchants in the world, and the most truthful, for they would not tell a lie for anything on earth. If a foreign merchant does not know the ways of the country he applies to them and entrusts his goods to them, they will take charge of these, and sell them in the most loyal manner, seeking zealously the profit of the foreigner and asking no commission except what he pleases to bestow.
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We also have an account demonstrating practice in the great Gujarati port of Cambay in the sixteenth century. While this is beyond the period of this chapter, Cambay was little affected by the policies of the Portuguese. The Frenchman Vincent Le Blanc was in Cambay in the mid 1570s. He wrote:

Trade is very faithfully carried on there [in Cambay] for the Factors and Retailers are persons of quality, and good reputation; and are as careful in venting and preserving other persons wares, as if they were their own proper goods; they are also obliged to furnish the Merchants with dwelling houses, and warehouses, diet, and oftentimes with divers sorts of commodities: the houses are large and pleasant, where you are provided with women of all ages for your use, you buy them at certain rates, and sell them again when you have made use of them, if you like them not you may choose the wholsomest and the most agreeable to your humour: all things necessary to livelihood may be made your own at cheap rates, and you live there with much liberty, without great inconveniences; if you discharge the customs rates upon merchandizes, nothing more is exacted, and all strangers live with the same freedom and liberty as the Natives do, making open profession of their own Religions.
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It could be that the allocation of a local to act as agent led to some fleecing of the ignorant arriviste. Tomé Pires described how in Melaka, before the Portuguese conquest, when a ship came in the captain or leading merchant negotiated a price with a group of ten or twenty local merchants, and they then divided the goods up among themselves. This did mean that sales were quick, an important consideration given the monsoon system.
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So also in Calicut, again at the end of our period. When the foreign Muslim traders, the pardesi, arrived, 'As soon as any of these Merchants reached the city, the King assigned him a
Nayre
, to protect and serve him, and a
Chatim
clerk to keep his accounts and look after his affairs, and a broker to arrange for him to obtain such goods as he had need of, for which three persons they
paid good salaries every month.'
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This account is confirmed by Ma Huan, from Zheng He's fleet, and his account seems to show a very considerable degree of state control or facilitation: the two seem to merge in rather. He wrote that in Calicut pepper was held in a state storeroom, and sold at a fixed price, but one had to have an official's permission. When a ship arrived an official and the people on board negotiated fixed prices for the goods it carried, and also for what the people on ship wanted to buy from the locals. These prices had to be observed, with no deviation. 'Foreign ships from every place come there; and the king of the country also sends a chief and a writer and others to watch the sales; thereupon they collect the duty and pay it in to the authorities.'
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