Western India comprises roughly the long narrow coastal area from the Rann of Kutch to north Kanara; the wide flat Gujarat plains and the Deccan plateaus. The new system of survey and assessment framed by G. Wingate and Goldsmid in 1835, called the Bombay Survey System, was introduced with some modifications into all the government villages of the Presidency, including British Gujarat. After the conquest of greater Gujarat in 1803 and 1817, the Peshwa's domains, about one-third of Gujarat, became part of Bombay Presidency; another third of Gujarat proper and part of Saurashtra was assigned to the Gaikwad's Baroda state, and in the remaining third, about 150 small princely states were recognized. From the middle of the nineteenth century, western India began to emerge from the sustained depression of the first third of the century, when prices and output were low, and when large tracts of land and many villages and small towns were deserted.

The Indian sub-continent enclosed by these ranges and the sea, approximately between latitudes 8° N and 37° N and longitudes 61° E and 97° 30' E, contains two broad physical divisions, the Indo-Gangetic plains and the peninsula. The Indo-Gangetic plains cover less than a third of the area of the sub-continent. South of the plains, lies the peninsular block, consisting of series of hills, scarps, plateaus and valleys, interspersed with some sizeable stretches of alluvium, notably, the Gujarat plains, Orissa, coastal Andhra, Tamilnadu and the Kerala coast. The Brahmaputra river made a large bend eastwards after its entry into Bengal. This channel carried its main stream well to the east of Dacca. Until an advanced stage of industrialization is reached in a country, the distribution of its population is likely to be governed by agricultural productivity. In the Indus delta, there was a firmly sited inner port, Thatta, near the head of the delta.

In so far as the foreign trade of the Indian sub-continent is concerned, the aspirations and the activities of the Estado da India represented several institutional innovations. As a result of the Portuguese naval watch, at the end of the sixteenth century few Indian ships could venture to east Africa, the Spice Islands, or to China and Japan unless, the shipowners entered into indirect partnerships with Portuguese officials or merchants in Goa. Both the coast of Coromandel and the Gujarat plains in western India produced a wide variety of patterned cotton fabrics which found specialized markets in the islands of south-east Asia. During the eighteenth century, India's foreign trade underwent a considerable expansion as a result of the tripartite participation of the Dutch, English, and the French. It is inconceivable that European trade with India, in general for that matter, could have been sustained on a large scale for any length of time without the discovery of American silver-mines.