The Rice Trade in Eastern India 1650–1740

Abstract

The historical literature on Indian Ocean trade has now come to recognize the importance of food-grains as an ingredient of that trade. In the western part of the Ocean (the Arabian Sea), its eastern part (Bay of Bengal) and within the Southeast Asian mainland and islands, there is every evidence of a substantial movement of food-grains from surplus areas to deficit areas. Though the scale and frequency of this trade may not be relatively as important in the regional economy as Braudel has outlined for the Mediterranean (with the assistance, it must be admitted, of superior quantitative evidence), it was nevertheless one of the commodities that entered into the commercial processes of different regions of the Ocean. The evidence for the study of the grain trade is, as with all Asian trade in the early modern period, fragmentary and episodic. As intrinsic to the sector of trade embracing Asian merchant shippers and consumers, it shares the disadvantages of paucityof evidence of that whole sector. Again, as with Asian trade as a whole, the grain trade comes into view only when Europeans have entered into that trade and have left glimpses of it in their records.The Portuguese in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were heavily involved in it in western India and a recent study has marshalled evidence from Portuguese sources on the mechanics of that trade in a port on the Kanara coast.2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the entry into the Indian Ocean of the large Chartered Companies, evidence on the grain trade is substantially increased ,enabling us to see it in sharper focus in the broad canvas of Asian trade