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1 - European Trade with India

from XIII - Foreign Trade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
K. N. Chaudhuri
Edited by
Tapan Raychaudhuri  and
Irfan Habib
K. N. Chaudhuri
Affiliation:
University of London
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Summary

THE COMMERCIAL AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF TRADE

The appearance of the Portuguese on the coast of Malabar in the closing years of the fifteenth century was one of those rare events in history, whose future implication was fully perceived by contemporaries. When Vasco da Gama's ships reached Calicut in 1497, it seems that the Portuguese already came well endowed with a profound belief in their mission. This is seen in the famous reply addressed to some Tunisian merchants present in Calicut that the Portuguese purpose in coming to the Indies was to seek for Christians and spices. Two years later when Vasco da Gama returned to Lisbon with the news of his discoveries and exploits, King Manuel unambiguously declared himself, in a letter written to the Cardinal Protector in the Vatican, ‘Lord over conquests, navigation and trade with Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India’. The Portuguese claim to an armed domination of the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean found an even more striking expression in the instructions issued to Pedro Alvares Cabral, the commander of the fleet which sailed for India in 1500. Cabral was instructed to inform the King of Calicut of the ancient enmity which existed between Christians and Muslims, which imposed on every Catholic king the obligation to wage war on these enemies of the holy faith. The ‘Moor’ merchants who resided in and traded with Calicut could not clearly be exempted from that duty and the king must know that if the Portuguese encountered their ships at sea, they would take possession of them, ‘of their merchandise and property and also of the Moors who are in the ships’.

Keywords

Gujarat plainsAmerican silver-minesCoromandel CoastEuropean tradeIndian OceanPortuguese merchantsSpice IslandsIndia's foreign trade
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Economic History of India , pp. 382 - 407
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1982

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