Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750

Download or read book Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750 written by Stephen Frederic Dale and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this remarkable 1994 work of comparative economic history, Stephen Dale studies the activities and economic significance of the Indian mercantile communities which traded in Iran, Central Asia and Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author uses Russian sources, hitherto largely ignored, to show that these merchants represented part of the hegemonic trade diaspora of the Indian world economy, thus challenging the conventional interpretation of world economic history that European merchants overwhelmed their Asian counterparts in the early modern era. The book not only demonstrates the vitality of Indian mercantile capitalism, but also offers a unique insight into the social characteristics of an Indian expatriate trading community in the Volga-Caspian port of Astrakhan.