The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [116]
There were also problems in Europe. We have noted that European consumption of spices was more or less static throughout the seventeenth century, or possibly even declined a little. The problem was that the huge increase, at least a doubling, in European consumption of spices in the sixteenth century meant that as they became cheaper and more available they were no longer a symbol of wealth and luxury. Their prestige declined and relatively they were less used. New luxuries and stimulants competed with or even replaced spices: coffee, chocolate, cocoa, alcohol and tobacco. New vegetables (asparagus, spinach, artichokes, tomatoes, pimentos, melons) varied the European diet, so spices were less needed to ginger things up. It seems that meat consumption in Europe declined, and also simpler cooking styles were more in vogue. In short, ironically, the VOC monopoly turned out to be a Trojan horse; they controlled products whose value was falling, and ignored humbler but ultimately more productive goods.
This Dutch impact on the spice trade was atypical. Recent work tends to emphasise that in most areas for most of the time we must still stress continuity, at least up to the mid eighteenth century, when the British began to acquire land in eastern India. From this time the whole equation changed and the Indian Ocean area was increasingly dominated by Europeans, and especially the English. Asian markets were undercut by port cities located in colonial areas; Asian merchants were displaced by Europeans backed up by armed force and by a state which ruled all of India and other areas around the Indian Ocean.
We can see some signs of these changes in the 150 years between the arrival of the northern Europeans and the mid eighteenth century. These apply more to the location of the major markets than to changes in merchant communities. Broadly speaking, over this period we see the rise of new port cities, major markets, which were ruled by Europeans. Often some coercion was employed to attract or force Asian traders to use these new markets. In Indonesia the best examples are Jakarta, the capital of the Dutch East India Company from the 1620s, and Melaka, conquered from the Portuguese in 1641. In India the most obvious examples are the three great port cities, each of them created more or less from scratch by the English East India Company: Chennai in the 1640s, Mumbai in the 1660s, and Kolkata in the 1690s. The rise of these new ports, and the increasing volume of European trade around the Cape of Good Hope, left many traditional ports in the Arabian Sea bereft. Most of the Swahili ports sunk into stagnation. Aden and Hurmuz continued to decline. On the west coast of India the once great Surat was replaced by Mumbai by the 1730s, though here it is worth remembering that it took Mumbai seventy years as a British port before it could outrank Surat; the traditional port cities did not give up easily!
Merchant communities often demonstrated considerable flexibility. They were prepared to move to new markets. Late in our period many Surat merchants moved to Mumbai; Coromandel merchants to Chennai; and merchants from many parts of India to Kolkata. Gujarati merchants also moved in to Zanzibar, and played a major role in its economy, being for example responsible for collecting customs. As another example of a change, the Parsi community in Surat had been of only minor importance in the trade of the town until late in the seventeenth century. They then acquired a larger role as agents of the increasingly dominant English. Members of this merchant community also moved to Mumbai and became major figures in the trade of this port in the eighteenth century. There were however dislocations, and new groups rose under the expanding influence of the Europeans. The Dutch attempt to monopolise the trade in fine spices from the Malukus was more or less achieved by the middle of the seventeenth century, and the traditional