The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [118]
The main difference between these two companies was in their attitude to trade within Asia, that is a history of the ocean. The Dutch East India Company engaged massively in the 'country' trade, and did very well indeed from it. The great Dutch governor J.P. Coen well described the complexity of the trade which the Dutch East India Company hoped to enter:
Piece goods from Gujarat we can barter for pepper and gold on the coast of Sumatra, rials [silver currency] and cottons from the [Coromandel] coast for pepper in Bantam, sandalwood, pepper and rials we can barter for Chinese goods and Chinese gold; we can extract silver from Japan with Chinese goods, piece goods from the Coromandel coast in exchange for spices, other goods and rials, rials from Arabia for spices and various other trifles – one thing leads to the other.61
Private trade by its employees was actively discouraged, another sign of the rigidity which seems to characterise their total presence. The company opened up some new and long-distance routes, and were able to compete successfully with Asian traders. One of their main successes was a result of their being the only Europeans allowed to trade in Japan from the 1640s: their profits here were immense. In another niche they had an unusual success. The Maldives produced the best, because smallest, cowry shells, which we have noted being very widely used as an alternative currency (see pages 84–5). The VOC was able to centralise this trade on Sri Lanka. In 1763 fourteen ships came from the Maldives carrying 80,000 kgs of these shells, a total of 85,740,000 shells.62
Meanwhile, the English company concentrated on the trade to Europe, and allowed its own servants, called factors, to engage in local trade on their own behalf. Private English trade in the Indian Ocean had expanded greatly by the end of the seventeenth century, and even more during the eighteenth, especially once the swing to the east and China became apparent in the last quarter of the century. Many EIC ships, carrying both company and private goods, spent their lives chaffering around the littoral of the Indian Ocean, engaging in what was in many respects a peddling trade.
Despite this large and often successful engagement in the country trade, the Europeans still had to send out large quantities of bullion to the Indian Ocean area; few European products found a market in the area. As Furber noted, 'if silver had not been available to the Europeans in sufficient quantities, the East India trade could not have been carried on.'63 This in turn reinforces our view of a world beginning to be integrated, for the bullion came from south America, and much of it flowed on to the Indian Ocean, either via the Mediterranean and the Middle East and so to our ocean, or around the Cape in European ships. On average two-thirds of VOC exports from Europe were in bullion; in the seventeenth century Peruvian silver, in the eighteenth Brazilian gold. Between 1660 and 1720 Dutch imports into Bengal, one of their major trading areas, were only 12.5 per cent goods, the rest being bullion. So also with the EIC. Over the period 1660–1720 only 20.6 per cent of English imports to all of Asia were made