Merchants and Ports in the Indian Ocean World Across Sea and Land

The Indian Ocean world has a rich history of socio-economic and cultural exchanges across time and space. This book and its companion, Connecting the Indian Ocean World explore these connections around the wider Indian Ocean world. The book looks at the extensive range of maritime networks that criss-crossed pre-modern Asia and the Indian Ocean region connecting ports, peoples and cultures. It explores the connected histories of these regions and the movement of merchants, commodities and money which created the multi-cultural and cosmopolitan port cities like Surat and Nagasaki. With contributions from Indian and Japanese scholars, the volume analyses travellers’ accounts and trade routes between Japan and India, offering insights into how maritime movement shaped culture, politics and the social life of people in the most populated and productive regions of the world in the early modern period. Rich in archival material, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of Indian Ocean history, maritime history, economic and commercial history, Asian and South Asian history and social anthropology.

List of Maps Acknowledgements Introduction Radhika Seshan and Ryuto Shimada Part 1: India and Japan Trade and Culture in the 17th Century: The Japanese traveller Tenjiku Tokubei’s Idea of India Ruby Maloni Textiles in the Pre-modern Economies of India and Japan-a comparative study Ishrat Alam Gold Trade between Japan and India by the Dutch East India Company Ryuto Shimada Surat and Nagasaki: A comparison of two international port cities in the 17th century Hiromu Nagashima Part 2: Merchants and Trading Networks Road and Security between Agra and Surat during the 17th and Early 18th Centuries Shinsaku Kato Merchants of the Coromandel Coast in the 17th Century: From Masulipatnam to Fort St. David Radhika Seshan Trade of Adil Shahi Sultanate of Bijapur in the Indian Ocean (1489-1686) Kiran Jadhav Index

Radhika Seshan is former Head and retired Professor in the Department of History, Savitribai Phule Pune University, India and is now Visiting Faculty at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune, India. Her work has been primarily in the areas of economic history, particularly maritime and urban history of early modern India. Author of three books, she has edited or co-edited many others, and her most recent publication is Wage Earners in India 1500–1900: Regional Approaches in an International Context, co-edited with Jan Lucassen (2022). Ryuto Shimada is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian History, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo, Japan. The author of The Intra-Asian Trade in Japanese Copper by the Dutch East India Company During the Eighteenth Century (2006), he has published extensively in Japanese and English on aspects of the networks of the Indian Ocean world in the early modern age.