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Asian Maritime Trade - Portuguese and English Country Trade from Western India in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Contrast

In the seventeenth century many European nations came to trade around the Indian Ocean for highly profitable products, including pepper, spices, cotton piece goods and indigo. Of these peoples, the most important were the Portuguese who, having discovered the Cape route, entered the region around 1500 and controlled it as a mare clausum for the rest of the century; the English and the Dutch, both of whom came in the early seventeenth century; and the French, who came in the 1660s. After bloody conflicts among the first three in the first half of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese were forced to concede the Indian Ocean as a mare liberum and to seek peace with the others. 1 All these countries were very active in the trade of Surat, Western India, the Red Sea and Southeast Asia in the 1600s, but in the next century the French shifted to Pondicherry on the Coromandel coast.2 The Portuguese government controlled the trade routes and the commercial monopoly, and it administered its Asian and East African settlements and forts as the Estado da India from Goa. The English and Dutch, on the other hand, operated as chartered trading companies with private capital being vested with a monopoly over the eastern trade to their home countries. The trade from India to the mother country was termed "Europe trade" while the commerce from port to port within the Indian Ocean littoral and Asia was called "country trade." The latter was for the most