The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [128]
Much local trade in Malabar, especially that in pepper, was disrupted by the Europeans, first the Portuguese and from the 1660s the Dutch. The Coromandel coast was less affected. In the mid seventeenth century the ports of the sultanate of Golconda, especially Masulipatnam, traded extensively around the Bay of Bengal. A dominant figure at this time was the Persian grandee cum trader Mir Jumla, who in the 1640s had his own ships (though carrying cargoes belonging to many people) travelling all over the ocean: to Bengal, Surat, Arakan, Ayuthya, Aceh, Melaka, Johore, Bantam, Makassar, Ceylon, Bandar Abbas, Mocha and the Maldives. While traders from Coromandel ports traded all around the Bay of Bengal, to Burma and Arakan and Pegu for example, one of their best routes had been to exchange local cloths for spices. As the Dutch monopoly became relatively effective this trade declined, but Coromandel merchants were able to disperse, just like the Gujaratis, and trade in places less closely controlled by the VOC. An example is Banten, where south Indian merchants had a very large, even dominating, role.
Traders from north of the Malay world, that is China, also had a role in this region. We pointed out in the previous chapter that an extensive Chinese trade even to the western ocean had ended by the middle of the fifteenth century. However, the Chinese continued to come as far as Melaka, and indeed some still traded there even after the Portuguese conquest in 1511. In the seventeenth century there was a large Chinese settler, and trader, population in Jakarta (Batavia) and its umland. However, China's main trade at this time was with Japan, from whence were brought vast quantities of silver. In the middle of the century the Japanese expelled all European traders, allowing only the Dutch a very restricted presence. Chinese traders from Fukien were not affected by this, and they did well, much better than the Dutch, in the overseas trade of Japan. It could be that the dynastic change in China in the middle of the seventeenth century affected foreign trade as a whole for a time, but if it did this was only temporary.
Who were the main merchants at this time? There was a huge range, from the smallest pedlar to magnates who controlled vast amounts of capital. At one end are the humble folk, local to the area, who traded short distances up and down the coast, say from one Indonesian island to another, or from Bengal to Masulipatnam, or Mombasa to Mogadishu; indeed even these would be considered major voyages for some of these men. Other humble men were able to travel much further, taking their bundle of goods on board a ship owned by some other bigger person: maybe a large merchant, or a political leader, or a European. People could travel for years, making a little profit here, a loss there.
Above such atomised people, about whom admittedly we know very little, we can see a category who are part of a much more articulated merchant world. The Armenians are an excellent example. Ethnicity, kinship and religion were vital in trading matters. The much quoted account of the Armenian merchant Hovhannes has provided us with a typical case. He was by no means a pedlar, but rather was an agent of larger Armenian merchants in the Armenian suburb of New Julfa in Isfahan, in Iran, and later Agra, in India. However, his importance for us is that he operated as a member of a very dispersed community. His journal describes his travels over the period 1682 to 1693. During this time he visited and traded in Bandar Abbas and Surat, and then in Agra, where he spent most of a year. From there he went to Tibet, then back to India, to Patna, and then Bengal. Everywhere he went he had contact with, and assistance from, other members of the far-flung
Armenian merchant community. Indeed he may well have had written advice