Symposium on "South Indiat The Maritime Trade” of the South Indian History Congress (Pune Session), 1988: SOUTH INDIA*S MARITIME TRADE: Some Questions of Approach with special reference to the Portuguese Estado da India Teotonio R. de Souza Birector, Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa thankful, Surprised, because I was invited to participate and lead this symposium, while I am unsure whether I am a south Indian or even a maritime historian. I am thankful if 1 am adopted as both! I am happy for another reason as well, and that is to be back at my alma mater, the University of Poona. I cherish many happy memories of my years in the Department of History as a student, as a research scholar, as a member of the teaching staff, and even as an editor of Rojnishi, 2 research bulletin of its Academy of History. What do T propose to do here? All that I could think of ist 1) To raise some questions concerning the approach to maritime history in general and report on some developments in the fields 2) Point out to some interesting issues in SouthIndian maritime trade history that could be taken up for a deeper studys 3) Question some stereotypes in the context of my specialisation and my familiarity with the history of the Portuguese Estado da India. I hope that I will have said something levant for my audience of historians of South Indian History Congress. z s¢ imvited Prof. Achin Das Gupta to = ‘entre of Historical Research in of India. It Sresariathg otaom armen HaratanenDetetee er yi © Meenas when I was informed that Prof. Ashin would be with us here to speak on his dear sea, peddlars and nakhudas. I was eager to know if he would still regard himself as he did then as "A historian at sea" and if his anxieties in that regard have diminished or grown. He described maritime history then as new to Indian historians, so much so that they were not sure what it was. He had also expressed his concern with his characteristic tongue-in-cheek humour that if Indian historians don the divers suit for underwater archeology not many would surface Certainly more efforts have been observed since then in the form of two Perth conferences on Indian Ocean Studies (ICTOS 1979, 1984), which led to the foundation of the Centrefor Indian Ocean Regional Studies (CIORS, 1986) at the Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia. Closer at home an International Seminar on the Indian Ocean was held in Delhi in 1985 and from it seems to have emerged a Society for the Indian Ocean Studies (SIOS). These efforts and quite a few excellent publications 7 that have resulted from them have produced clearer definitions of the maritime history, and the tendency seems to be to strike a balance between the sea and the Aas. The maritime history thus understood tends to be a multidisciplinary exercise, covering maritime elements in the economic, social and political history, and without looking at it as a kind concession to the less endowed in technicalities of navigation or deep secrets of the Indian Ocean. , T was comforted to know that a maritime economic history group has come into existence since August last year as a result of the 9th International Congress of Economic History that met in Berne (Switzerland). This new Norway-based group ( c/o Prof. Helge W. Nordvik, Norwegian School of Economics, Norway) seems to be in @ position to bring more comfortably together and reconcile what had been causing anxieties to those engaged in the studies of the sea and the land as members of the same fraternity. Its latest Newsletter has compiled a directory listing over 450 scholars from all over the world described as "principally maritime economic and social historians". The same group is all set to launch in coming June the first number of the International Journal of Maritime History, which will follow a policy of cross-pollinization and not of rigidscholarly categorizations that have till recent past weakened the constructive intellectual interchange. 2. Peninsular History Like most of us participating in the South Indian History Congress session here I am primarily a historian of the people on land. However we are “peninsular” historians. As a historian of Goa, I am also a “littoral* historian, and as such I am forced to develop amphibian interests. The sea-land interaction has been vital in the history of Goa, starting from the pauranic days of Parashurama who helped the reclamation of this patch of the Konkan ( the myth prevails elsewhere along the coast as well ) from the sea, and continuing with every other neighbouring or more distant ruler who needed this coastal board for his commercial and strategic needs. All these maritime interventions have left their marks on the economy and society of the place, and to that extent maritime history is more inextricably interwoven with the socio-economic history of the region. The main argument of my doctoral research was to analyse the Portuguese colonial penetration of the Goan society and village economy in the seventeenth century, that is, a century after the Portuguese had already been in Goa. Why did they wait for a century? The simple answer is that until then the maritime trade had been a rewarding occupation, but with the arrival of the English and the Dutch the Portuguese misfortunes had began. It was then that investment in the lands of the Goan village communities became a more attractive proposition, It is true that theurbanization caused by the maritime trade of the sixteenth century had already begun influencing the villages in the suburbs of the capital town of Goa by introducing greater monetisation in the village economy and diluting the traditional social relations of production, but the conflict became critical with the collapse of Goa’s maritime trade.® The history of South Indian maritime trade will certainly present parallels to this situation with their own unique regional differences. In the wake of growing interest in research in maritime history, there is a challenge to explain political, economic, social, cultural, religious history of the hinterland with reference to happenings on the sea front and vice-versa. We need to know more about the changing equilibrium in the power formations in South India and the role played in this by the agrarian surplus or by trading resources. To what an extent was the Islamic factor (resulting from maritime trade expansion) responsible for the polity differentiation in the different regions of South India? Gne author has argued recently that Malabar had a personality of its own and goes on to identify it with “South-East Asia personality". There have also been studies of the "segmentary* state under Cholas and Vijayanagar, and the Islamic factor is once again brought in to explain the rise of what has been called "Asian absolutism" in the successor nayakdoms in the Tamil country. The ability of the new rulers to shift their dependance from agricultural surplus to foreign trade is believed to be one important factor.We, as historians of India, know that the fortunes of India’s coastal cities and coastal societies were closely related to the ebb and flow, the shifts and changes of maritime trade. But unlike the stress put on the sea by some older classic maritime historians, like A. Toussaint, K.M. Panikkar and R.K. Mookerji,” a dominant section of the new generation of historians of India and Indian Ocean see the relationship between the activities on land and sea as symbiotic but asymmetric, meaning thereby that man’s greatest achievements and mundane actions normally take place on the land, and only sometimes they are influenced by the sea.® It is true that we speak only in terms of "sons of the soil" and not yet of the "sons of the sea", but I am still inclined, to qualify the asymmetry and lay greater emphasis on symbiosis. Reasons: If I am not mistaken, the evolutionists tell us that life has originated from the ocean, but certainly the "monsoons" draw their existence from the climatic interdependence of the Asiatic land and sea masses. We may need the right expertise from the right quarters to articulate this interdependence which is not limited to littoral areas where the sea and shore visibly meet, or even to its immediate vicinity. While there is increasing interest in the coastal societies, we need to begin talking and researching also in terms of "peninsular societies® as distinct from the societies in deeper subcontinental heartland. In this connection I may refer to a comment of an historian of Leiden School, who said that "a landlocked heart is a bad heart -- the good heartsare the maritime ones." " We could add that the peninsular heart is perhaps the healthiest one. But we need to work harder on the inter-relationships of the littoral and hinterland in the peninsular context. Here again we need to beware of easy generalisations. Historians have the facility of making sweeping statements on the basis of insufficient evidence, and of sweeping many substantial problems under the carpet. Many studies that I have been reading about trade, merchants, companies, empires, and what not, in the Indian Ocean, all state or imply a direct linkage between the prosperous maritime trade and as deep and wide a hinterland as possible to draw its sustenance from. Ashin Das Gupta has given us a fascinating theory of the quasi-simultaneous rise of the three great Asian empires, namely the Mughal, the Safavid and the Ottoman empires, which created land blocks larger than ever before with wider links and greater administrative efficiency. Such control over the hinterland gave rise to the most prosperous period of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean during the pre-colonial times. If the search for souls had provided a religious-political platform for the Portuguese commercial adventure in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman-Safavid-Mughal promotion of haii quickened the Arab dhow across the Indian Ocean lanes in the seventeenth century. A quasi-simultaneous collapse of the three empires at the turn of the eighteenth century, we are told, brought to an end the “age of partnership" (if not dominance) of the Asian merchant vis-a-vis the Europeans.®But how do we reconcile this phenomenon with another phenomenon, namely the hastening of the disintegration of the same large blocks as a result of the access that smaller contendants for power had to resources of maritime trade, particularly as means of access to horses, fire-arms and ri 9 mercenary soldiers? Another issue in South Indian history that has direct or indirect connection with its maritime trade and needs to be examined more in detail is the role of the revenue-farmers, who often combined power-politics with strong interests in overland trade and overseas shipping. Historians like Moreland and J.F. Richards have attributed widespread rebellions and consequent weakening and disintegration of Mughal India and Golkonda to the oppression of the revenue farmers. 9. Arasaratnam and Joseph Brennig have made important contributions to this issue, but Sanjay Subrahmanyam has also presented some very good insights in an article which I have extensively used here. He sees revenue-farming as a crisis measure for stabilising income: Golkonda under Mughal threats Chandragiri under pressure of Deccan sultanates} Portuguese Estado da India under manifold external threats. Sanjay believes that these revenue-farmers whom he calls “portfolio capitalists" ( Persian and some Habshi sar-samatus and Niyogi hawaldars in Golkondas Komattis, Beri Chettis, and Balija Naidus in the Nayak kingdoms) were not fly-by-night operators, but that they knew the compulsions of the prevailing situations and structures, and contributed positively andprofitably with investments for the growth of local agriculture and manufactures. This is a very different picture from the bogey of the revenue-farmer as representative of anarchic tendencies in a system of organized and bureaucratic fiscal administration in the classic K.A.N. Sastri-N. Venkataramannayya approach which corresponds to the Aligarh depiction of the evils of revenue-farming in Mughal India. But in Tamil country which had no kshatriyas and where no single group had monopoly of the use of force, the revenue-farmers could not operate without striking a balance between those above and those below them in the fiscal hierarchy. Hence, what has been easily classified as "disintegration" hastened by European penetration and external induction of arms and mercenaries, needs to be re-examined as a process of political adaptation to expanding economy under the so-called “portfolio capitalists" in the late 17th century in the Tamil regions. Large scale Telegu migrations into Tamil regions and consequent social flux, plus the influx of new elite elements, particularly Persians and some Abyssinians, seem to contain part of the answer to the development of the ‘portfolio capitalist’ in this part of south Indi What needs to be done is to examine the individual characters and careers of the revenue farmers as Sanjay has done in the case of Achyutappa and Chinanna, who played important role in politics of Senji, es well as in the wider political arena of Tamilnadu and southern Andhra. Most of these were neither purely mercantile nor purely agrarian. From this at least two conclusions havebeen drawn and need to be followed up: 1) Tt is no longer possible to hold to the Pearson~Ashin disjunction between the “great tradition" of landbound activity and the “little tradition" of the sea in the context of south Indian peninsular history, 2) One cannot accept anymore that between Pax vijayanagarica and pax britannica there was nothing but warfare and chaos. '° One more angle of South Indian maritime trade that could be or needs to be studied more at length is concerning trade in humbler commodities. The Coromandel coast has always been connected with fine textiles and we only read of Malabar- Kanara pepper. Trade in less exotic items was more vital and unvoidably more widespread, but since it did not interest the Eurocentric scholars it has remained in limbo. What of rice, coconuts, salt, teak, coir? The demand for these items has shaped the destiny of many South Indian peoples. Incidentally, the teak of Kanara and Malabar and the coir of Maldives were coveted items that helped substantially the construction and maintenance of Indian Qcean shipping. Long before the recent abortive attempt of Tamil mercenaries in Maldives, a sultan of Madura had once contemplated a naval expedition to conquer 1! the Marathas made their debut Maldives in mid 14th century! in the sea with a salt fleet and it became a serious irritant to the Portuguese ever since. But it was the rice of Kanara that determined the fortune and fate of many coastal settlements with the arrival of the Portuguese. The Arab crews had since long depended on rice supplies during their 10transshipments in the southwestern ports, and there is rich evidence of towns and merchant guilds in the region since 1ith-12th centuries. +? The trade was largely centred around the port of Bhatkal, which later became the chie# outlet of Vijayanagar on the western coast. This port was connected to the imperial capital on the banks of Tunghabhadra through the hinterland by a road cutting through the Ghats. The imports of Vijayanagar, particularly war-horses, depended largely on exports from Bhatkal to the Red Sea and Persian Gulf regions. Rice was an important component of these exports. But the large-scale needs of the Portuguese fort-settlements in East Africa and Asia from the beginning of the 16th century sunt brought about a new situation of demands and conflicts. Bhatkal lost much of its importance after the defeat of Vijayanagar in 1565 and the shift of its capital to Penugonda. The Portuguese could then have a freer hand in controlling the rice trade to suit their needs. Annual shipments of rice were demanded as "tribute" from the various local chieftains and merchants. There were regular convoys that shipped rice from Kanara ports to Goa and this remained their most important life line throughout the 1éth and most of the 17th centuries. What we need is more vernacular documentation to be tapped to shed more light on the agrarian relations resulting from this trade, and also to get better idea of its ramifications and volume beyond the picture available from the Portuguese and other European records. One interesting detail that seems to link the maritime trade of South India on either coast, namely Coromandel and Kanara, is the presence of Komatti Chetties. 1% 113. Der eS 2 Another stereotype that seems to have come to us from WH. Moreland is the neat categorization of the history of maritime trade into three distinct periods corresponding to three distinct centuries, namely the Portuguese period in the 16th century, the Dutch period in the 17th century, and the British period in the 1@th century. Various reasons have been presented to explain the declining fortunes of the Portuguese Estado da India. I shall not go into them here, but both contemporary observers and modern authors agree that there was decline. What did the decline mean? A Jesuit observer in the 14660’s was somewhat more specific,(though also more picturesque and extravagant than accurate) about what the decline meant. Fr. Manuel Godinho wrote: “If it was a tree, it is now a trunk; if it was a building, it is now a ruins if it wa aman, it is now a stumps if it was a giant, it is now a pigmys if it was great, it is now nothings if it was the viceroyalty of India, it is now reduced to Goa. Macau, Chaul, Bassein, Daman, Diu, Mossambique and Mombasa, with some other fortdresses and places of less importance - in short , relics and those but few, of the great body of that State, which our enemies have left us, either as amemorial of how much we formerly possessed in Asia, or else as a bitter reminder of the little which we now have there". ‘4 12There is an abundance of accounts and descriptions of the unrelieved decline, but if one concentrates on the maritime aspect of the trade one finds it difficult to give in fully to the story of complete and absolute collapse. The glory days of the 16th century were certainly not there, but many Goans could still make money and be innovative as they traded all over the Indian Ocean and beyond. In other words we need to try not to be too influenced by the political decline, and must look beneath the surface at the everyday activities of Goans in these two centuries. One needs to distinguish between several constitutive elements of the Goan life in the 17th century: First there was the Goa of the Portuguese crown and administration which was conceived of as a distant royal possession maintained for its strategic, economic and religious importance to the metropolis, and for imperial prestige. Then there was the Goa of the local elites -- European merchants, settlers, and officials in their private entrepreunial capacities, together with the Indians, mostly Brahmins and Banyas, who collaborated with them in business and administration, To these groups Goa was principally a funnel for commercial enterprise. There was the Goa of the religious establishment, especially of the great and powerful Roman Catholic Orders. Finally there was the rural majority, which included both the traditional land-owning class in the villages, and the great mass of landless labourers, fishermen and other underprivileged groups. ‘© 13I want to concentrate further on the second of these four groups, and within that on one single business house and its less known angle of business involvement. We will need many smaller studies of this kind in order to write the maritime history of Goa after 1600, It may surprise you to know that no researcher has come up with a detailed picture of Goa’s sea trade after 1600. It is wrongly believed that no picture means nothing to write about. Holden Furber’s very comprehensive survey of this period has much on the Dutch and the English, and even on the Danes and the French, but nothing on the Portugu The recent Cambridge Economic History of India, K.N. Chauduri’s two surveys, Arasaratnam’s work on Coromandel, as well as Ashin Das Gupta’s two fine works on Malabar and Surat, Bruce Watson’s and Nightingale’s studies, all leave the Portuguese trading peers in the cold. The only exceptions to general neglect of Goa in surveys of trade and commerce in our period are the wroks of Gervase Clarence-Smith’s The Third Portuguese Empire (Manchester, 1985) and Newitt’s Portuquese in Africa (Exeter, 1987). These have given considerable importance to activities of traders based in Goa and other Portuguese possessions, but have at times failed to get their details correct. Survey generalizations have taken the regional variations for granted. Though I have yet to see it, I am informed that the recent work of G.B.Souza, namely The viv: f Empire (Cambridge, 1986) could serve as a model for a researcher working on Goa. Souza seems to have been able to draw data from the Dutch, English and Portuguese archives to document trade based on Macau between the early 14seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth century. This is precisely the sort of study we need for Goa. But such a comprehensive survey will be possible, and the generalizations of surveys will be avoided by starting with case-studies of individual traders or specific trading activities. That is what I have been wanting to do when I contributed my brief vignettes on the Mhamays of Goa and Bombay-based Sir Roger Faria on the occasion of the Bombay session of the Indian History Congress (1980) and the Third International Seminar on Indo-Portuguese Studies (1983). 16 We know it from the customs data and budget data provided by A. Disney and A. Teodoro de Matos respectively that there was substantial decline from the 16th century onwards in Goa’s trade. In terms of rupees the income appears to have fallen from 72 lakhs at the end of the 16th century to little over 10 lakhs at the end of the 17th century. A little known but useful book by Magalh%es Teixeira Pinto, namely Memorias sobre as _possessbes portuquezas na Asia (1859) gives a good, but melancholy picture of the situation around 1820. The only people in Goa, Daman and Diu with any wealth were the vania. Diu had a total of three merchant ships. Goa’s sea trade was totally moribund, almost non-existent. ‘7 This bleak picture of decline does not, however, mean that everyone in Goa was poor. The Government’s finances were certainly in a state of chronic crisis, but some individuals still did very well. Among them the Jesuit Order, 15which from skillful investment in land and trade remained a powerful economic force until their expulsion by Pombal later in the 18th century. Many 17th-century viceroys made large fortunes during their tenures from trading in diamonds and with East Africa. So did some Goa-based Europeans, both Portuguese and others. Thus for instance one Manuel de Moraes Supico and some other slavers of Mozambique who had trade links with Goa and Brazil. Earlier there were the Flemish Coutre brothers and Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo and Antonio Coelho Guerreiro. Prof. Boxer, who has followed the career of the some of these adventurers denounces that it is an over- simplification to state that the Portuguese did not possess business skills like the English or the Dutch. The share of the Gujarati vanias and the Saraswat Brahmins in underpinning, or indeed dominating , the Goa economy has been demonstrated by Prof. M.N. Pearson as well as by my own writings. And Prof. Ashin Das Gupta has correctly stated that by the second halt of the seventeenth century, if not before, Daman and Diu were basically vania cities with Portuguese governors and officials taking a part of the Hindu traders’ profits in return for naval protection or cooperation. And we have the testimony of a veteran State Councillor in Goa, Dom Manuel Lobo da Silveira, at the end of the 17th century: He complained that there were many wealthy Christian Canarins in Goa, Salcete, and Bardez (the old conquests of Goa) whom he proceeded to name individually with his etimate of their reputed worth. He added that there were 16many Hindu Banianes, who were still richer, and who could easily raise a loan of 120,000 xerafins for the colonial government if asked to do so. It was the Banianes, he claimed, who took away the butter and fat from the Portuguese and the Canarins, as they monopolized Goa’s entire export trade, not merely in rice and foodstuffs, but in any profitable commodity imported ¢rom Portugal, Macau and Mozamabique. They likewise, he averred, acted as monopolists and engrossers in the retail trade of Goa, charging what prices they liked, and hoarding what they could not sell, all Government orders to the contrary notwithstanding.!® nd we know it from the Portuguese chronicler Antonio Bocarro that around mid 17th century nearly two million xerafins from the total of little less than three million xerafins invested in Goa’s interport trade belonged to native Indian traders. It is believed that between 1750 and 1850 90% of the economies of Goa, Daman and Diu were controlled by Indians.?% I must refer to a second attempt of the Portuguese administration (after they had failed to do once in the early i?7th century) to emulate the English and Dutch company systems. In 14695 a company was established in Goa in imitation of one set up little earlier in Lisbon. This company was meant to revive the Indian Gcean trade. Goan capital was heavily involved. In 1700 the Portuguese crown tried to merge the two companies with a total capital of 700,000 cruzados, two-thirds of which belonged to Goans. But it turned out to be a still born as a result of the loss of Mombasa in 1698 and the lack WVof government control over the trade and inhabitants of Mozambique and Zambesi. 7° Let me quote another instance of Indian dominance. In 1739 Goa was attacked by the Marathas and a disorderly crowd of soldiers instigated by Augustinian monks looted the house of a Goan Hindu named Phondu Kamat, who has been described as "the wealthiest merchant in Goa". He lost 130,000 xerafins in the mob attack, and still soon therlatter the State could extort another 130,000 xerafins from him to help in Goa’s defence. 7! As Goa’s military-political stature declined her great merchants often moved out. The European agents found it possible and profitable to settle in other Indian ports. Those working for themselves also often left Goa. They traded far and wide in a multitude of products and in many places. Boxer has reconstructed the career of Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo, and important trader in south and southeast Asia in the 17th century.** Boxer has also presented sketchy details on the careers of four other 1?-century private traders. ”° One problem for the local traders who owed allegiance to Portugal was that the officials tried to enforce the old monopoly and control system. More detrimental was the insistence that all Portuguese craft trading on the west Indian coast must call at Goa and pay duties, regardless of whether or not they did any trade in Goa. In the late 17th century Macau’s traders were affected by this. Blocked from 18= trading in the south China sea, they had developed a trade on the west Indian coast, buying pepper in the Dutch Malabar ports and trading with it to Surat. These traders had no desire or need to call at Goa. They did after much hassle get exemption from this irritation. 74 Refore concluding I shall come to what IT promised to say about one single business family and its one single aspect of business involvement. It is the family of Mhamay Kamats that retained its trading base in Goa. T have written about the various activities of this business house elsewhere, and I shall limit myself here to their slave-trading activity. I ha where. 2" T shall draw only an published the details ¢ outline of this subject here on the basis of the information available in the private papers of Mhamay Kamat family, which was associated closely with the French in India since 1760's. Incidentally it was in Poona that the Mhamays got in touch with the French first. Surprisingly this association has received only passing mention in the studies on the French in India. The Camotine of Goa (Mhamay Kamat) do figure in the catalogues of the old manuscripts of French in India published by G. Gaudart, but the references are official in character and one has to rely upon the inward-outward correspondence of the Mhamay Kamat family with many prominent and less prominent names of Frenchmen in India till 1791 to imagine that much more was transacted than met the eye. That is where I thought I was in a position to throw some light on what the historians of Mauritius, namely Toussaint and Filliot regard as 19prevailing vagueness about the Indian side of the slave supply during 1773-1810 compared with the supplies arriving from the African coast or from Madagascar. It was the period when the commerce in the Indian Ocean was no longer a preserve of the French Company, and Goa had become a much frequented “comptoir” for the French privateers. This went on until the Engli occupation of Goa during the Napoleonic wars blocked to the French a free access to Goa harbours. Although the Mhamays seem to have functioned from 1744 as their “courtiers" or brokers of the French in Goa, the correspondence picks up from 1777. That was the beginning of a new active period of the French political intrigues in India, coinciding with the French active interest in the American War of Independence. In India the new phase was marked by the arrival of Mons. de St. Lubin and Montigny to the Maratha and Mughul courts respectively. The Mnamays were actively involved as bankers issuing bills of exchange on Poona, Bombay and Surat to meet the expenses of these French envoys, as well as friends of the Poona gawkars to obtain political information or to mediate with the Poona court in favour of the French businessmen when they got into trouble. The Mhamay papers reveal a high degree of dependance of French merchants, agency houses and Mauritian country traders on them. It was on the resourcefulness, contacts and business acumen of “courtiers” like the Camotins of Goa that the bulk of the private trade of the French colonial administration 20rested. Among other services rendered and goods supplied to the French by the Mhamays there is evidence of regular supplies of slaves obtained from Mozambique or bought in Goa. This must have been part of the flourishing trade in slaves in the Indian Ocean area based on Mozambique. It is believed that even during the first half of the nineteenth century some 200,000 slaves were sold. The actual capture and their transportation to the coast was done by the prazo holders and officials of Zambezi, but the finance and shipment out was handled by Indian trading houses, especially vania ones, on the coast in Zanzibar and Mozambique island. These vanias as Portuguese subjects could operate with impunity as they were not subject to the prohibition of the trade which their fellow vanias under British jurisdiction were liable to. The participation in the slave trade of this period is an example of the way in which increasingly Goa’s traders operated within the gaps and interstices of more powerful and successful imperial and trading systems, This was nothing new to Goa’s traders who had learned to defy the Portuguese monopoly even in the heydey of the Portuguese power. Now that the Portuguese system lay in ruins, they did it with the outside systems. They had a windfall when the metropolitan trade with India revived in the 1780’s as Portugal was neutral in the European wars of this time. Until the French invaded Portugal in 1807, and indeed until the end of the wars in 1815, Lisbon was revived as a major entrepot for the importation of Asian goads into Europe, especially Chinese tea and textiles from Bengal. The trade in opium was another bonanza for the Portuguese 2Indian commercial houses in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is believed that the Portuguese capital in Panjim was built between 1827 and 1835 largely from the profits made from this trade by the government and individuals. Summing up 1, We historians will always be historians of the people, not of the sea. However, our treatment of people’s past will never be satisfactory if we do not pay due attention to the happenings in the sea around us. This is particularly important for the historians of South India to keep in mind. So much of South India is littoral, and the whole of it is peninsular. 2. Maritime trade in South India needs to be studied carefully for all the implications it has had on more than pure economy of South India. It has influenced major political developments. Contrary to the dogma that has been propagated for too long, it was not political chaos only that brought the English in control of the country, but also the willing cooperation or unwilling need of protection on the part of the leading merchants, such as the “portfolio capitalists" of Tamil region. Without their finances the English Company may not have been able to reach far. Study of South Indian maritime trade needs also to be extended beyond exotica to trade in essential consumables that also influenced importantly the destinies of the region and 22helped shaping the history of its peoples. 3. Finally, we need to question certain stereotypes which have tended to oversimplify our understanding of the past and discourage further research. One such oversimplication is the presumed disappearence of the Portuguese for the maritime scene after the closing of the sixteenth century. That does not seem to be the full truth and one could still find many Portuguese and native Indian traders from the Estado da India roaming in the Indian Ocean seeking gaps in the monopoly system of the Dutch and later the British. As Pearson has remarked "at particular times, in particular places and made", 26 Wr L particular products, gaps were found and profits w 23REFERENCES 1. Ashin Das Gupta & M.N. Pearson, eds. India and The Indian Ocean, 1500-1800, Calcutta, Oxford University Press, 1987, p.ir "Gur concern in this book is with people who have a close relationship with the sea and the coast, and who live by exploiting the resources of these areas". 2. Satish Chandra, ed. The Indian Ocean: Histor: Commerce Politics, New Delhi, Sage Publications, 1987. This volume and India and the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800 (cf.supra n.1) survey critically betweeen them all the existing relevant bibliography in the field. 3. Teotonio R. de Souza, Medieval Goa, Delhi, Concept Publishing Co., 1979, pp. 72 ##.,85} “Goan Agrarian Economy in Crisis", Itihas, I, Hyderabad, 1974: 55-70. 4. Stephen F. Dale, Islamic Soicety on the South Asi Frontier: + ir, 1498-1922, Oxford, 1980; Burton Stein’s chapters in the Cambridge Economic History of India,I, eds. Irfan Habib and Tapan Raychaudhuri, Delhi, 1984, and also his Peasant State and Society in Medieval South ; Delhi, 19803 David Luden, Peasant History in South India, Princeton, 1985. Quoted by S. Subrahmanyam, "Aspects of State formation in South India and Southeast Asia, 1500-1650", The Indian Economic and Social History Review, XXIII, n.4, pp.357-77. This is an excellent and thought-provoking piece of research. 5. Toussaint, A., History of the Indian Ocean, London, 19663 Pannikkar, K.M.,India and the Indian Ocean: An Essa‘ the Influence of Sea Power on Indian History, London, 19515 Mookerji, R.K., Indian Shipping: A Histor f Sea-borne Trade and Maritime Activity of the Indians from the Earliest Times, Calcutta, 1957. é. Ashin Das Gupta & M.N. Pearson,op-cit., p.5 7. H. L. Wesseling, quoted in Ashin Das Gupta & M.N. Pearson, op.cit., p.8 8. Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat €. 1700-1750, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1979, pp. 8-9) Irfan Habib and Tapan Raychaudhuri , eds. The Cambridge Economic _H. of India,I, Delhi: OQrient Longman, 1984, p.425} Ashin Das Gupta & M.N. Pearson, op.cit., pp. 18-19; M.N. Pearson, "The Hajj (Pilgrimage) from Mughal India: Some Preliminary Observations”, Indica, vol, 23, nn. 1&2, 1986, pp. 143-58. 24?. ri f India, I, pp. 206-7. 10. S$. Subrahmanyam, op.cit.s The Cambridge Economic History of India, I, p.32,211-13. 11. The Cambridge Economic History of India,I, 129. 12. Om Prakash Prasad, "Trade and the growth of towns: A case study of Karnataka, c. A.D. 600-1200", Essays in Ancient Indian Economic History, ed. B. Chattopadhyaya, New Delhi, 1987, pp. 175-181. 13. Teotonio R. de Souza, op, cit., pp.34, 175) &. Subrahmanyam, "The Portuguese, the port of Basrur, and the rice trade, 1600-50", The Indi E ial History Review, XXI, n.4, 1984, pp. 433-62. 14. Quoted by C.R. Boxer, Pe ue: i Empire, London, 1949, pp. 128-9. 15. A.R.Disney, ‘Goa in the Seventeenth Century", The First Portuquese Colonial Empire, ed. M.D. Newitt, Exeter, 1986, pp. 85-6. 16. Teotonio R. de Souza, "Mhamai House Records: Indigenous Sources for Indo-Portuguese Historiography", Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Bombay session, 1980: 435- 45} Teotonio R. de Souza, "Capital Input in Goa’s Freedom Struggle: The Bombay Connection", Roinishi,I, n.2, ed. T.R. de Souza, (Poona University, Dept. of History), 1983: 8-15. I am drawing extensively from M.N. Pearson, “Goa- based seaborne trade, 17th and 18th centuries”, that will appear in a volume on An Economic History of Goa through the Ages to be edited by me and published by the Goa University. 17. G. de Magalhtes Teixeira Pinto, Memorias sobri possesstes portuquesas na Asia, Nova Goa, 1859, pp. 30-1, 41-3, 53, 59-63. 18. Quoted by C.R. Boxer, P. we: dia_in Mid-Seventeenth Century, Delhi, 1980, p.43: 19. T. R. de Souza, "Goa-based Portuguese Seaborne Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century", The Indi nomi nd Social History Review, XII, 1976, pp. 433-42. 20. Chronista de Tissuary, II, Nova Goa, 1867, pp.123- 131,147-155, 171-183. 21. Teotonio R. de Souza, "Mhamai House Records: Indigenous Sources for Indo-Portuguese Historiography", II Seminario i e Hi ia _Indo-Portuquesa: Actas, Lisboa, 1985, p. 935. a22. C. R. Boxer, Francisco Viei de we 1 8- Gravenhage, 1967. 23. C, R. Boxer, "Casados and Cabotagem in the Estado da India, 16th/17th Centuries", I] Seminario Internaci le Historia Indo-Portuquesa, pp. 121-195. 24. Souza, G.B., The Survivi ire; Portuquese Trade and Soci i i He na Se 1630- B Cambridge, 1964, pp. 177-9. Quoted by M.N. Pearson, gp.cit. 25. T. R. de Souza, “French Slave-Trading in Goa", Essays in Goan History, ed. Teotonio R. de Souza, New Delhi, Concept Publishing Co., 1988. 26. M. N. Pearson, op.cit (vide supra n. 16). 26