The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [73]
The great ports of Gujarat were certainly important centres of exchange, but they were located on the maritime fringe of important production centres for such products as indigo, saltpetre, and especially a vast variety of cotton cloths. Indeed, some of the manufacturing process was done in these very port cities. In our period the greatest port was Cambay, at the head of the Gulf of Cambay. This, like many other ports within and around the gulf, was not an independent city state: rather it was part of the important Muslim sultanate of Gujarat. Here were huge volumes of trade, skilful merchants, and a very well articulated network of production and exchange and credit. For such ports, that is those with productive interiors, connections with the land were obviously crucial, as compared with say Aden and Hurmuz, which being dependent on the exchange of products from all over the Indian Ocean, but not from their interiors, were less concerned about what happened directly inland from them.
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.104 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