V - The Maritime Trade of India

Summary

A survey of the maritime trade of India during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries must consider the elements of continuity and change both in these centuries and in the centuries which preceded them. Many of the factors which characterize the trade in late medieval times can also be found in the perhaps more detailed picture which classical authors have provided of the commerce of India with the Roman world. These include its seasonal pattern, dependent on the winds of the monsoons, and the commodities exported from or imported into the Indian sub-continent. Already in Roman times western India and the Coromandel Coast were developing as centres of textile production to be exported across the Arabian Sea. Drugs, spices, the teak-wood of Malabar, precious stones, and a great variety of exotic luxuries passed westwards.

What the Indian market could absorb in exchange for its exports and profits upon transshipments was largely limited to strategic war-animals, spices and medicaments, rarities, toys and exotic textiles for the consuming classes, and base metals for the brass industry. In the fourteenth century large quantities of luxury textiles were imported from the Islamic Near East for the needs of the sultan of Delhi's court. In the correspondence of the fifteenth-century Wazir of the Deccan we even have mention of presents of Frankish cloth. Equally, from the eastern trade Chinese silk was highly esteemed, and Chinese porcelain was used in the kitchens of the Delhi sultan.