The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [91]
Similarly,
If a wealthy businessman is captured during raids on enemy territory or during sea expeditions, then he should pay a suitable ransom. Detain him until this is paid; when that is done treat him honourably and return him to his own land. It is not right to subject businessfolk to the severities reserved for the soldiers and employees of an enemy.7
It has often been argued that the decline of great empires led to economic problems, including a decline in sea trade. The late Ashin Das Gupta was an influential proponent of this thesis. He claimed that the decline, in the eighteenth century, of all three of the great Islamic empires – the Ottoman, the Safavid and the Mughal – affected Indian Ocean trade deleteriously. At the least these states had provided a certain stability and law and order, and had defended their borders against raids from outside. Locally powerful figures in all of them were to an extent controlled, and where possible their revenue raising activities (often more or less plunder) were curtailed in favour of the central state levying a more routine tribute or tax. This sort of predicability was obviously good for merchants. As the countrysides were monetised merchants had a larger role, buying the crop for money which the cultivator used to pay land revenue, and then on-selling the produce at a regional market. Merchants need information and communications, and large empires do too. Imperial networks of communication served not only to keep a ruler informed of events in distant places, they also made it possible for merchants to learn of distant markets, and to transmit funds via letters of credit. All this, we are told, was ended as these empires collapsed into anarchy.8
To demonstrate this conclusively would require much more quantitative research than has been done so far. But some things make one dubious of this blanket claim. For a start, sea trade as such was not affected by these declines, though certainly some port cities and some production areas were. The whole notion of Islamic decline in the eighteenth century has become a controversial one. Older European historiography wrote of decline, collapse and confusion, to justify conquest by the West. However, Ottoman decline in the eighteenth century is no longer universally accepted. So also in India, where the successor states of the Mughals were themselves perfectly viable. Even the Marathas, once stigmatised as lawless plunderers, have now been shown to be much more organised and benevolent than was once thought. In short, the whole notion of decline has been called into question.
In any case, to the extent that these vast empires were under stress, there were some compensations for trade and the economy. Most obviously, when the Mughal state began to release vast hordes of bullion accumulated over a century and a half, in order to fight its enemies, some parts of the economy obviously benefited from this increase in liquidity. In some areas it is clear that traders simply tried to avoid unsettled areas and avaricious land holders: routes changed, but trade continued. For many traders the political situation was only one element which determined their success, and the areas to which they traded. More important in their prosperity or collapse were such eternal verities as whether or not their goods met local demand, and arrived at a time when the market was not glutted.
If, then, the notion that the decline of landed states caused a decline in sea trade is not proven, we need to look instead at the activities of the Europeans, and assess whether it was competition from them which led to problems for indigenous Indian Ocean traders. This is the central concern of much of this chapter and the next: for now we can quickly say that this was indeed the case, but beginning only