The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [74]
In our discussion of merchants we can use, with care, evidence from the very early Europeans at the start of the sixteenth century. These men were concerned to understand how things worked in the Indian Ocean the better to participate, or even control, and so they left valuable accounts of what they found around 1500. Certainly they were impressed with the merchants they met in Gujarat. As a merchant from Florence commented in western India in 1510,
We believe ourselves to be the most astute men that one can encounter, and the people here surpass us in everything. And there are Muslim merchants worth 400,000 to 500,000 ducats. And they can do better calculations by memory than we can do with the pen. And they mock us, and it seems to me that they are superior to us in countless things, save with sword in hand, which they cannot resist.105
A famous early Portuguese observer, Tomé Pires, at about the same time said that
They are men who understand merchandise; they are so properly steeped in the sound and harmony of it, that the Gujaratees say that any offence connected with merchandise is pardonable. Those of our people who want to be clerks or factors ought to go [to Gujarat] and learn, because the business of trade is a science in itself which does not hinder any other noble exercise, but helps a great deal.106
We are often told that the trade of the Indian Ocean in our period was increasingly handled by Muslims: the ocean was a 'Muslim lake'. And to be sure there is much truth in this. Nor is this a matter for wonder, for Islam had spread from the heartland of the Red Sea all around the Indian Ocean over water. One would predict then that coastal people were most likely to be converted first, and indeed this was the case. However, there was an important change during our period, for while earlier it was Muslim Arabs from the Red Sea and Egypt who dominated Indian Ocean trade and its markets except perhaps for Calicut, later it was local converts from such coastal areas as Gujarat and Bengal, and Middle Eastern Muslims who often had migrated to the Indian Ocean area, who had the cream of the trade, especially that going past India to the Bay of Bengal and beyond.
A brief tour around the markets which we have just listed will make this clearer. On the East African coast the coastal trade was done by local people, the Swahili, who had been converted to Islam in the twelfth century. These men also acted as brokers, connecting the interior with overseas markets. They seem to have been in a particularly, and atypically, advantageous situation. Over most of the Indian Ocean and its interior use values were relatively constant, so that a preciosity would be valued much the same wherever one was. However, this was not the case in the African interior. Gold and ivory were produced there, but these items had little value in their originating societies; cloth and glass beads did. The situation was reversed in the overseas areas of India and the Middle East. This happy situation gave the Swahili brokers who made the connection between these two different use value areas a great advantage, and they profited from it, as the wealth of Kilwa at its height in the fourteenth century makes clear.107 Much of the overseas long-distance trade was handled by Muslims from the Hadhramaut and Yemen, and they were important people in the Swahili port cities; indeed many of the rulers were descended from, or married to, merchants from further north. However, there was also a sizeable Hindu presence, men from Gujarat who came in with the seasons and, unlike the Muslims, did not settle.
Hindus were also to be found, this time often settled, in the great market of Aden, and indeed further into the Red Sea, but obviously this area was dominated by Muslims, in this case Arabs. Yet earlier in our period Jewish Karimi merchants played a major role in the Egyptian Mamluk state and the Mediterranean in general. Around 1100, as