The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [119]
Most rulers at this time, whether English kings or Mughal emperors, were bullionists who believed, with prevailing economic thought, that a rich state was one which had huge stocks of precious metals. Despite this, the influence of both of the companies in domestic politics, and their contribution to home revenues, was so great that they were allowed to export huge amounts of bullion. It must be stressed how fortuitous this all was. The consequences of the discovery of the Americas, and then of huge silver deposits there, generated the bullion without which Europeans could hardly have entered Indian Ocean trade. The ramifications of this are clearly enormous.
There was also a fluctuating, and ultimately unsuccessful, French effort in the ocean. The French seem never to have quite got it right. Several companies, usually undercapitalised, and often created de novo by the state as compared with the Dutch and English examples where the state recognised merchant pressure, had difficulty in competing with their European rivals. Often the French arrived too late, to find a trade, or a port city, already dominated by someone else. They did however attempt to plant colonies in Madagascar in the 1640s, and on the Ile de Bourbon (Réunion) in 1670. In 1710 they moved from there to Mauritius, now renamed the Ile de France. This island had been sighted by the Portuguese. In 1598 the Dutch named it and claimed it, but even in 1617 it was still uninhabited. Later the island was meant to serve as a way station between their other important territory, the Cape Colony, established in the 1640s, and Indonesia. They even tried to colonise it, but their settlements there failed, and they withdrew in 1710, having taken all the ebony and made the dodo extinct. Both these islands were captured by the British in 1810 during the Napoleonic Wars. The British at this time also acquired Rodrigues, which the French had settled in 1750, and the Seychelles, colonised in 1770.
The French were one of the European groups engaged in the slave trade in the Indian Ocean. This trade had a long history, and we have noted extensive trade from East Africa to the Middle East over many centuries. In the seventeenth century there was little demand for slaves in India, but there was a lot in southeast Asia, where various forms of bondage, right through to slavery, were common. This was especially so in Aceh, where expanding pepper plantations and tin mines needed slaves, as also did agriculture to feed a growing population. The Dutch entered this trade with some enthusiasm, doing especially well in buying people when there was famine in India. In famine years in Coromandel the Dutch shipped a thousand or so each year to Indonesia. The Dutch also took labour from Madagascar to work in their Cape colony, and even took some to the Americas.65 Later in the century the EIC took some hundreds of slaves from Africa, and especially from Madagascar, to Benkulen in Sumatra.
The French participated in this trade in the western part of the ocean. Indeed, the trade only became important when the French developed plantation agriculture, especially sugar, in the Mascarenhas islands. Again Madagascar was the first place to supply slaves, but later the East African coast was also exploited.
Europeans in the Indian Ocean were making important advances as the eighteenth century progressed. Even by 1750 the VOC and EIC were handling nearly 40 per cent of Bengal's silk exports, and this was a major export from the area.66 In global terms, Steensgaard worked out figures which show how important the Europeans were becoming. He claims that the total Indian overseas trade around 1600 was about 60,000 tons. The VOC alone by the 1620s had 10,000 tons, and around 1700 had 30,000 tons. By the middle of the eighteenth century European demand for Indian Ocean products was probably bigger than the total internal trade in the ocean, though this takes no account of inland markets.67
Our schema concerning the degree of influence of port cities claims