Trade: India’s Direct Influence on World Events
Rohan Rajesh
What do Pliny the Elder, the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, and Venetian merchants have in common? All had reason to resent India’s influence in global trade. Before the British Raj, India was a major source of almost everything the West desired: spices, indigo, texts, ships, diamonds, etc. Since ancient times, he who controlled the Arabian Sea controlled Europe. The centrality of the Arabian Sea came about in Ptolemaic Egypt. An Indian merchant was blown off course to Egypt. In Egypt, he gained an audience with the pharaoh who agreed to help the merchant get back home if the merchant gave information on sea trade with India. The merchant agreed and taught the Ptolemies about how the monsoon wind patterns negate the need for merchants to hug the coast of Arabia and Iran and instead sail directly across the Arabian Sea from the Gulf of Aden to the west coast of India. The Arabian Sea thus provided an efficient conduit for trade to take place between Egypt, Greece, and India.
When the Romans conquered Egypt, they inherited this knowledge, and the global economy boomed. Roman, Greek, and Egyptian sailors would sail across the Arabian Sea to India. There they rested and stocked up on everything a wealthy Roman would desire: magnificent fabrics, luxurious diamonds, spices, etc. However, there was only one good that the Romans had in relative abundance and that Indians desired and lacked: high-quality gold coins, which Indian monarchs used to fashion their own high-quality Indian coins. This created a significant outflow of nonrenewable Roman gold in exchange for an influx of renewable Indian goods. See the problem? This is why Pliny the Elder lamented,
“Both pepper and ginger grow wild in their respective countries, and yet here we buy
them by weight—just as if they were so much gold or silver.”
It is also why one finds significant deposits of Roman coins in temples and beaches near the ancient ports of southern and western India.
Unfortunately, with the collapse of the Roman and Gupta empires, the vibrant trade ecosystem also collapsed until the Arabs created the largest empire ever established at the time, stretching from the Indus River to Spain. In time, the Mamluk dynasty that controlled Egypt, the Levant, and the Hejaz (which includes the holy Islamic cities of Mecca and Medina) would dominate the sea lanes from India to Europe. Venetian merchants struck deals with their Muslim counterparts and held a monopoly on Indian goods flowing into Europe. That naturally led to attempts to find alternative routes to India, including Columbus’s Spanish expedition to the Americas and Vasco da Gama’s Portuguese expedition around the Cape of Good Hope to India. Once the Portuguese found this around-Africa route, they proceeded to harass Mamluk merchants trading in the Arabian Sea, diverting the Arabian Sea trade around Africa to Portugal. This led to significant losses for the Mamluks and the Venetians.
The economic instability led to the Mamluks’ collapse and the Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate. On gaining the Hejaz, the Ottoman emperor gained the right to become a caliph, a position that the Ottomans would hold until the establishment of the Republic of Turkey (the end of the caliphate also has an interesting Indian connection that you can read about here). At the same time, however, the Ottomans also inherited the Mamluks’ economic struggles and, with the collaboration of the Venetians and the local Gujarat sultanate, unsuccessfully tried to wage naval warfare on the Portuguese. However, the Ottoman’s show of strength allowed them to retain the highly coveted ports of Basra and Aden, meaning the Ottomans remained a powerful force in Europe and the Middle East for centuries to come even as Venice declined. Meanwhile, the Portuguese became a force to be reckoned with for some time from Iberia to India until the Dutch, the English, and the French made gains in the region. However, Portugal would continue to hold on to territories in India until 1961.
Thus, India was able to have a significant role in western events from the rise of Rome to Portugal even without intending to do so. This fascinating history also belies the notion that globalization is a recent phenomenon. The world has been interconnected for millennia, and events in one corner of the world can have effects everywhere: something for today’s neo-isolationists to remember.