Military entrepreneurs farmed revenue, engaged in local agricultural trade, and tried to build up holdings of zamindari land in the countryside. From the early eighteenth century the Company had emerged preeminent on India's external routes. In the case of Bengal, Indian mercantile capitalists allied with revenue entrepreneurs and disenchanted soldiers to encourage the expansionist ambition of Company servants. The operation of the new British courts which came into being after 1772, and the greater access to landed income afforded by the early colonial regime, offered them a secure base. The accommodation between British power and indigenous capital a relationship in which Indians were rapidly becoming subordinate was forcefully illustrated in the coastal cities. Indian merchants also took part in the rituals of the European city burgesses, filling several offices in the Madras Corporation which had been founded in 1688. In Surat, the English Company increased its control over its European and Indian rivals after 1730.

This chapter discusses significant developments, which occurred in the pattern of trade in early medieval centuries in the expansion of maritime activity in the eastern waters of the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. The presence of Indian traders, and of Indian men of religion as a civilizing force, led not only to a shared common culture, but also an expansion of the textile trade towards the growing markets, to developments of shipbuilding in southern and eastern India, and the entry of Indian merchants into direct trading with China. By 1200 commodities of the maritime trade were mainly carried in two types of vessel, evolved at the eastern and western ends of the trade, and plying almost exclusively within their particular sectors, the dhow and the junk. The expansion of Muslim maritime influence was a process independent of the encroachment on south Asia of Muslim arms, and the great Muslim expansion of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.