International Trade in Bengal Silk and The Comparative Role of Asians and Europeans, circa. 1700–1757

Abstract

It is almost common knowledge by now, thanks to the penetrating research by several scholars in the field, that Bengal silk was an important commodity in international trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the general assumption so far has been that it was the Europeans rather than the Asians who played the major role in the export of raw silk from Bengal.As a corollary to thi and taking into consideration the dominant position of the European Companies in Bengal textile trade, historians have maintained even in recent studies that around the mid-eighteenth century, European trade was the most important factor in Bengal's commercial economy. 1 There is no denying the fact that the Companies were the most dominant factor in Bengal's seaborne trade but that does not necessarily imply that they were far ahead of Asians in Bengal's export trade as a whole. For the above does not take into account Bengal's export trade by overland routes which had always been extremely significant. It is generally assumed that with the fall of the great empires–Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman–and the consequent decline of ports like Surat, the overland trade was doomed. The reason for this sort of assumption, it seems, was mainly the lack of data regarding India's overland trade compared to the abundance of quantitative material in the Company archives on European exports from Bengal. It is also possible that the fascination of the sea and preoccupation with the European market, as also the nature of the surviving evidence, have obscured the significance of the traditional and continuing trade through the overland route from India. Moreland thought that India's overland trade in the seventeenth century was of small importance and that the important development took place at sea.2