Boom and Bust: The Port of Basra in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

From at least the early sixteenth century, Basra has been one of the principal port cities of the Persian Gulf. It was connected through overland trade with the main centers of the Ottoman Empire via Baghdad and Damascus, with Shiraz and Isfahan in Safavid Iran, and by way of maritime trade with commercial emporia throughout the western Indian Ocean basin, from Surat and Coromandel to Mukha. Besides being a sizeable urban center of some 50,000 inhabitants—the largest city on the Persian Gulf littoral in the seventeenth century—Basra was above all a commercial hub.1 The trade flow going through Basra included the region’s most significant export product, dates, as well as horses, most of which were shipped to India, and some other commodities such as nutgalls, buffalo skins, henna, pearls, camels, and madder dye (used in the textile industry in Gujarat).2 But the volume of exports was far outstripped by the import of such commodities as spices and bulk goods such as sugar and coffee and, more importantly, enormous amounts of Indian textiles in myriad varieties. To make up for its structural trade imbalance with India, the Ottoman Empire exported large amounts of bullion and specie to the subcontinent. Basra served as a major way station for this precious metal trade.