Preface

Summary

This work is a study of economies and trade routes, of merchants and their capital in Mughul India, Safavid Iran, Uzbek Turan and Muscovite Russia. It is, more particularly, a study of the characteristics and significance of the Mughul-Indian trade diaspora in Iran, Turan and Russia. The underlying purpose of the work is to use new evidence and employ a new perspective to amend radically the persistent Eurocentric bias that continues to characterize most research on Eurasian trade in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A remarkable number of articles and books have been published on this commerce in the last two decades, and many have focused on India, but nearly all of them have been primarily concerned with aspects of European maritime expansion. Two prevalent assumptions of this historiography have been that Indian commerce with its neighboring territories was comparatively insignificant when measured against European trade, and that Indian merchants themselves, to the extent that they ever had been involved in this trade in the first place, were by the seventeenth century in full-scale retreat in the face of European competition. As far as Mughul India's trade with Iran, Turan and Russia was concerned, these assumptions are incorrect.

I began this study in order to correct this erroneous, one-sided view of Eurasian commerce by examining the role of large numbers of merchants from Mughul India who lived semi-permanently and conducted business in Iran, Turan and Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.