Book review: Ruby Maloni,The Route to European Hegemony: India’s Intra-Asian Trade in the Early Modern Period

Historians of Mughal India should be familiar with Professor Ruby Maloni’s two previous works, one on the East India Company’s Surat factory records during the seventeenth century (1992), and then on Mughal-period Surat (2003). In the present work, she takes up what amounts to a study of India’s entire overseas commerce from the arrival of Vasco da Gama to the establishment of British supremacy. While giving a very competent account of India’s own commercial world in Mughal times, Maloni maintains her focus on the European intervention. This reviewer confesses she did not know so much literature exists on the subject in English, much of it published in the last two or three decades that Maloni draws upon for her account of India’s ports and hinterland and the progress of European intervention. What results is a very rich narrative of how English ascendancy was achieved over India, after a conflict successively with the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French. The story is, however, not only of the struggle between European rivals but also the subjugation of Indian mercantile classes, despite survivals which Maloni duly notes.

Maloni is straightforward in her approach, and one notes that she emphasises the element of force (like D. Rothermund) rather than better commercial organisation (àla N. Steensgaard) for European success over Indian and other Asian merchants. With such a vast canvas as hers, one can indeed entertain particular grouses. I, for one, would have liked a little more attention paid to the advantage Western Europe had come to obtain because of the large flow of silver from the Americas through the savage use of Amerindian labour, and its employment of part of that silver in the purchase of Asian staples and manufactures—much of these, therefore, in essence, for free. The mercantilists, by their objection to export of bullion, were, in effect, trying to deny Europe the very advantage for which such large numbers of Amerindians had been driven to death in the mines of Mexico and Peru. Indeed, while the mercantilists might have laid the foundation of Economics, their arguments had no chance against the surge of sheer profit that the export of treasure represented to West European mercantile oligarchs.

Maloni revels in detail, and punctiliously provides references, even for some generally known events from general texts. I find one statement rather surprising, namely, ‘the Sultan of Turkey had many Ottoman ships built in Chittagong’ (p. 87). The source quoted for this makes no such claim. Indeed, I do not recollect any statement in any source that the Ottoman sultans ever constructed any ship in any Indian yard.

Maloni organises her rich information very well, and deserves to have a large readership.