wash brook

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/002249910X12573963244485

Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53 (2010) 266-289 brill.nl/jesh

Merchants, Markets, and Commerce in Early Modern South India

David Washbrook*

AbstractClassically, economic theory and anthropology have been concerned with the dichotomy between non-market and market systems of exchange, and with the transition from the former to the latter. From this perspective, the two are necessarily conceived as juxtaposi-tional and antithetical. However, for long periods of history, non-market and market sys-tems of exchange subsisted side-by-side, creating a hybrid institutional environment. In the context of South India between sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this paper seeks to explore a range of issues arising from such hybridity and, especially, how market and non-market factors could work together to sustain particular economic structures and to direct development in very particular ways. It especially focuses on the implications of institu-tional hybridity for merchant and banking capital.

Depuis pas mal de temps les historiens conomiques et les anthropologues sont proccups par la dichotomie qui existe entre le systme dchange qui a des formes non marchandes de circulation du produit social et celui ayant des formes marchandes de circulation des biens. Et dans le prolongement de cette division, par le passage du premier systme au second. Cest dans cette perspective que ces deux mondes conomiques sont perus comme juxtaposs et antithtiques. Durant de longues priodes historiques les deux systmes dchange se sont maintenus cependant cte cte, et par cela ont cr un cadre institu-tionnel hybride. Cette contribution se propose dexaminer lventail de sujets soulev par cette division binaire dans le contexte de lInde du Sud aux seizimedix-huitime si-cles. Elle sintresse particulirement lassociation des dterminants des deux catgories qui, eux, ont soutenu des structures conomiques spci ques et qui ont contribu au dveloppe-ment de faon tout fait spciale. Larticle traite en particulier des consquences de lhybri-dit institutionnelle dans le domaine des fonds de commerce et des fonds bancaires.

Keywordsnon-market and market-systems, South India, early-modern economic development, economic institutions

*) David Washbrook, Trinity College, Cambridge, United Kingdom, [email protected]

Merchants, Markets, and Commerce in Early Modern South India 267

One of the most enduring conceptual dichotomies in economic anthro-pology is the one posited by Polanyi between market and non-market forms of exchange.1 Whereas the rst involves the exchange of goods in relation to scarcity, competition, and (usually) monetary mediation, the second involves exchanges of gift determined by status, power, and com-munity need. Th e presumption has been that, with the growth of trade andcertainlythe emergence of capitalism, the latter would give way to the former, which Polanyi himself clearly regretted. And not Polanyi alone: E. P Th ompsons idea of moral economy comes close to Polanyis concept of non-market exchange, and was also seen to su er an unfortunate and regressive fate at the hands of the (presumably immoral) principles asso-ciated with Smithian economics.2

Th e sharpness of these conceptual dichotomies and the value judge-ments of their authors have necessarily guided subsequent approaches to analysis. Market and non-market, moral and immoral, phenomena are seen as standing in juxtaposition and their history is represented in terms of the inevitable (if brutal) displacement of the one by the other. In par-ticular, non-market, moral economies tend only to be viewed in retreat. Yet this may miss the extent to which, over very long periods, the princi-ples of the two have co-existed together creating hybrid structures of remarkable persistence. It may also miss the extent to which, even in advanced capitalist economies today, markets continue to be distorted by relations of gift, based on status, power, and community need, espe-cially through the mediation of the nation state. Th e institutional eco-nomics associated with Douglass North has drawn attention to these distortions and demonstrated their signi cance in determining speci c market outcomes in the real world.3 Nonetheless, North-ians are also inclined to have their own implicit moral view: albeit, in reversal of the Polanyi/Th ompson position, one in which the market ought to overcome distortions in order to achieve greater e ciency. Th is, no less, lends an element of teleology to their perspectives on history.

In this paper, conversely, I want to explore issues related to hybridity and, especially, how market and non-market factors may work together to

1) K. Polanyi, Th e Great Transformation: Th e Political and Economic Origins of our Time (New York: Rhinehart and Company, 1944).2) E. P. Th ompson, Th e Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Cen-tury. Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-136.3) D. C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

268 D. Washbrook / JESHO 53 (2010) 266-289

sustain particular economic structures over a long period, but also direct them in very particular ways. For the purposes of this paper, I also want to consider the special implications for merchant and banking capital of operating in such a hybrid environment.

I

My case study concerns the economy (or economies) of southern India between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, which by all accounts con-tained most of the elements associated with a market economyand one given to expansion (albeit unstably) at various points in this period. Th e region, of course, lay at the core of an international textile trade stretching from South-East Asia to Europe. Its systems of production strongly favored both an advanced division of labor and an exchange of raw materials over long distances, much cotton being brought from the interior for weaving in coastal settlements.4 Th e relations of both waged (in various ways) labor and raw cotton and thread exchange were mediated by monetary values and took place in institutionalized and recognizable markets.5 Moreover, the cotton industry did not sit on top of an economy otherwise characterized by subsistence production. Large quantities of basic food stu s were also moved around in itKerala was fed from Th anjavur, northern Tamil Nadu from Andhra and even Bengal. Capital goods were also traded through widely dispersed markets, especially cattle which would not breed in the rice-producing, deltaic lowlands but were brought to market from the upland hills.6 From at least the eleventh century, there is also evidence of rights to land being bought and sold and taxes being paid in money. Th e resulting transactions gave rise to substantial merchant and banking institutions whose activities were multiple and various.7 In

4) P. Parthasarathi, Th e Transition to a Colonial Economy Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India 1720-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).5) F. Perlin, Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia. Past and Present 98 (1983): 30-95.6) D. A. Washbrook, Land and Labour in Late Eighteenth Century South India: Th e Golden Age of the Pariah? In Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour in India, ed. P. Robb (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993) 68-86.7) On the general characteristics of the southern economy in this era see, Sanjay Subrah-manyam, Th e Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); D. Ludden, Peasant History in South India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).


reviewing the recorded prices across many economic sectors during this period, K. N. Chaudhuri was in no doubt that they re ected strong ele-ments of price rationality.8

But, at the same time, there were many features of the economy which suggested a di erent kind of rationality. Issues of caste had rami cations in all markets. Th is was, of course, most obvious in the labor market where the division of labor and skills broadly followed caste prescriptions. But it was true, no less, in capital markets where (especially with regard to paraiyansUntouchables) caste in uenced access to land and could deter-mine even more minutely the distribution of state and community taxa-tion. And it was even true of certain commodity markets where the price of a good (for example, paraiyan cloth) was often determined as much by who had made it as by what its quality and intrinsic value might have been.9 Recent studies of the grain market have made clear that, in spite of evidence of large-scale exchange, there was little integration so far as price factors are concerned.10

Equally, the rights to property and resources that were bought and sold were de ned by criteria that were distinctly non-economic. Claims to superior land rights (kaniachi, later mirasi) were validated by reference to ancestry (connections to those who had originally cleared the land), to gifts from the gods, and to recognition by relevant kings. Th eir formal sale was also divinely mediated: land rights were gifted to a god who then gifted them onto the new owner in return for a gift of money, which the god then passed back to the original giftee. Property documents were usually lodged with the gods too, held in choultry depositaries.11 Other important forms of property, such as maunyam or inam privileges to reve-nue immunity were simply de ned as direct gifts from kings and gods, which in many cases would then pass into market circulation.12

8) K. N. Chaudhuri, Markets and Traders in India during the Seventeenth and Eight-eenth Centuries. In Economy and Society: Essays in Indian Economic and Social History, eds K. N. Chaudhuri and C. Dewey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979): 256-75. 9) Washbrook, Golden Age. 10) R. Studer, India and the Great Divergence: Assessing the E ciency of Grain Markets in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century India. Journal of Economic History 68 (2008): 393-437.11) Ludden, Peasant History.12) B. Stein, Privileged Landholding. In Land Tenure and Peasant in South Asia, ed. R.E. Frykenberg (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1977): 67-77.


Moreover, even money itself was subject to extra-economic forms of valu-ation. Most of the South lay outside the zone of the Mughal (classically, the Akbar) silver rupee, made use of multiple coinages, and preferred to make gold its ultimate standard of value.13 However, in e ect, it operated a tri-metallic systemgold, silver, and copperon bullionist principles, with the value of each being determined by demand and the availability of the others in local markets. Nonetheless, certain communi-ties developed an atavistic attachment to certain types of coinage and would take no other, regardless of actual metal content. In the late eight-eenth century, for example, the East India Company experienced serious problems in procuring Salem blue cloths from its new territories in Kar-nataka since the local weavers insisted on being paid only in pagodas minted by the Portuguese in their Porto Nuevo settlement, which had long lost its minting functions.14 Equally, the Canteroi pagoda of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan carried particular prestige and a premium over the East India Companys star pagoda for several years after the defeat of Mysore. In South India, money was never simply money.

In the 1960s, the existence in the same eld of so many aspects of both a market and a non-market economy drew the attention of the Soviet historian Chicherov. Deferring to the principles of classical Marxism, he understood the situation to re ect a particular moment in the transition to capitalism. On the one hand, he supposed that a subsistence economy, premised on the caste-based principles of the jajmani system, existed side-by-side with, and parallel to, a market-based system (serving the interna-tional demand for textiles) and that the two were not inter-penetrative, except for the division of labor time. He also supposed that the market system would progressively overtake the subsistence system, drawing the whole economy under the logic of global capitalism.15 However, much of Chicherovs data came from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, if we were to return to South India at the end of the eighteenth century, it would still not be clear how far the transition had gone. While pressure (much of it coercive and extra-economic) from the European companies was beginning to make its mark on economic organization, the same

13) J. F. Richards, ed., Th e Imperial Monetary System of Mughal India (Delhi: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2000).14) Washbrook, Golden Age.15) A. Chicherov, Economic Development in the Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries: Outline His-tory of Crafts and Trades (Moscow: Moscow Publishing House, 1971).


curious combination of market and non-market relations remained very much in evidence.16 Moreover, it was hardly the case that the subsistence and market systems ever ran parallel without touching. As noted previ-ously, subsistence itself frequently depended on an ability to buy food, commodities, and capital goods from outside: the subsistence and market economies were, in fact, inter-penetrative.

Elsewhere, I have attempted to reconcile this paradox.17 To summarize brie y, the local provision of subsistence was always very di cult. Cli-matic and environmental factors made the delivery of water to particular placeswhether by monsoon rain or river spateunpredictable and haz-ardous. Yet when water arrived, it was possible to produce tropical crops in super-abundance. In response, local societies developed relations of exchangeinvolving labor and capital as well as commoditiesto iron out the di erences. Th e South was never characterized by the existence of self-contained, subsistence-oriented village communities. It rather depended on circulating resources over large areas, and the larger the better since risk was then more widely spread. Money came to penetrate these exchange-for-subsistence relationships and to facilitate their progressive expansion. By the seventeenth century, London, Amsterdam, Manila, and Arabia were all economically part of South India: sales in their markets provided cash which could be used to buy food from Bengal and South-East Asia.

But, and importantly, the institutional con guration supporting the market in South India did remain based in local institutions geared, in rst instance, to subsistence provision and response to community need. Caste organizations (guilds) dominated the labor market and the dissemi-nation of skills. Temples played a critical role in the redistribution of resources and in ensuring trust through the threat of divine sanctions. Especially in the interior, lineage organizations and little kingships deter-mined primary access to resources. Th e key here was the weak (or attenu-ated) development of big kingship or the centralized bureaucratic state/empire. Although the Chola Empire (tenth-twelfth centuries) may have been more centralized than, for example, Burton Stein conceived in his model of the segmentary state, there seems little doubt that thereafter de-centralization was the core feature of subsequent politiesVijayanagar,

16) Parthasarathi, Transition.17) D. Washbrook, India in the Early Modern World Economy: Modes of Production, Reproduction and Exchange. Journal of Global History 2 (2007): 87-111.


the Nayaksuntil the late seventeenth century.18 Th e Mughal drive south into Golconda o ered the promise of a stronger imperial state, but was never fully realized before the British conquest. Several new regional states arose or sought to con gure state power in new waysTravancore, Mysore, Arcot, Hyderabadand put increased pressure on local commu-nity institutions.19 But they became involved in half-a-century of bitter political con ict with one another and were unable to consolidate their new claims to authority. Th is left the state in South India very dualistic in the sense outlined by Frank Perlin for Marathawad.20 Authority over resources derived from two di erent sources: from the prerogatives of kings and emperors, but also from those of community institutions. Th e two continued to exist side-by-side, betimes coalescing but also potentially clashing. Before the British conquest, what the state was, and who repre-sented it, were complex questions in South India.

Complex, too, was the relationship of this state to the market, and how monetary exchanges were institutionalized. Actual markets tended to form around all and any point of available authoritytemples, armies, little kings, lineage and caste headships. Necessarily, there was little uni-formity between them in rules and conventions. Few royal authorities, for example, insisted on payments being made in their own coinages: bullion-ism meant the acceptance of many coins, even in revenue payment. Also, measurements were largely matters of local custom. Not only did they vary across regions (for example, the Chingleput veli was six times larger than the Th anjavur veli) but, in the same place, the same standard of measure-ment could be applied di erently to di erent commodities and even peo-ple. Th e maund and the garce were deemed to be of di erent weights when weighing grain, cotton, or salt.21 And the East India Company discovered, in the villages which it acquired behind Fort St David, that the tola had fourteen di erent meanings depending on the caste to which it was being applied.22

18) B. Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions: Making Politics in Early Modern South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).19) D. A. Washbrook, South India 1770-1840: Th e Colonial Transition. Modern Asian Studies 38 (2004): 649-721.20) F. Perlin, State Formation Reconsidered. Modern Asian Studies 19 (1985): 415-80.21) Chitra Sivakumar and S. S. Sivakumar, Peasants and Nabobs: Agrarian Radicalism in Late Eighteenth Century Tamil Country (Delhi: Hindustan Publishing House, 1993).22) Ibidem.


Equally, the resolution of commercial disputes raised tricky issues. Th ey were easiest to handle within discrete caste organizations where the threat of out-casting provided a potent sanction. And, among merchant castes, there is some evidence of a cross-caste mahajan supplying similar functions. But trade was never con ned to merchant castes alone and the multiplicity of di erent authorities, together with the high degree of physical mobility, made it possible for many to evade unfavorable judgements. Sometimes recourse might be had to divine sanctions: the priests of the Tirupati tem-ple, it was said, experienced few defaults on the money they lent out since failure to repay brought a ferocious curse from Sri Venkateswara himself.23 Nonetheless, if Arjun Appadurai is correct in his assessment that the authority applied by kings to temple disputes was administrative rather than executive, there was a serious problem.24 Administrative authority appears to have meant the recognition and validation of locally-derived arrangements. But where the local community lacked means to discipline peripatetic members, there was little hope of resolution.

II

Elsewhere, I have attempted to outline the logic of development implied by the early modern South Indian economy, but mainly with regard to production and reproduction.25 To summarize: the system appears to have been geared to ironing out instabilities in local production regimes and recovering from (if less surviving) sharp famines, which could be frequent (north Coromandel, for example, experienced signi cant famines in 1718-9, 1728-36, 1747, 1769, 1781-3, 1789, 1792, and 1798).26 Th e system also favored the physical expansion of production, albeit with the implication of a somewhat careless use of natural resources. Virgin land was constantly being cleared for the plough, and labor and capital were adept at moving onto new pastures. But this was often at the expense of vacating land which (usually due to water problems) had lost its fertility, sometimes permanently due to silting up or deserti cation.

23) Ibidem.24) A. Appadurai, Worship and Con ict Under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).25) Washbrook, World Economy.26) R. Ahuja, Labour Relations in an Early Colonial Context: Madras c. 1750-1800. Modern Asian Studies 36 (2002): 793-826.


Moreover, what the system did not encourage were xed, permanent investments. Th e technologies of the time were inadequate to signi cant water storage or altering the courses of rivers in spate. Some e orts were made at tank storagebut ine ciently under a burning sunand at well-digging, but rarely very deep. For the most part, irrigation technolo-gies centered on the better distribution of water when it arrived, but they could do little to make it arrive. Nonetheless, there was an expansionary drive within the economy, perhaps re ective of the increasing ability to tap external resources through trade. In population terms, there appears to have been a strong growth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, checked (probably by war and disturbance) in the rst half of the eighteenth cen-tury, but beginning to recover by the turn of the nineteenth century.27

However, here my major interest lies less in the history of material pro-duction and social reproduction than the implications of the system for the organization of exchange and merchant and nance capital. First, of course, the system made huge demands for an infrastructure of exchange. At least as much value was added to production by moving it to the right place for sale, at the right time, as by growing or manufacturing it. In the grain basket of Th anjavur, paddy could be produced so super-abun-dantly that it had little value except in so far as it could be shipped to Kerala and Sri Lanka; equally, cotton in the interior districts where it grew had a limited value until transported to the textile industries and outlets on the coast. Th e nature of the economy made exchange a near-ubiquitous activity (even landless laborers in the paddy-producing areas were said to exchange rice, which they received as wages in shares of the crop, for dry grains brought from inland, which they preferred to eat).28 It also gave rise to an enormous infrastructure supplying functions of transporting, exchang-ing, and buying and selling practically everythingincluding money (bul-lion) itself, i.e. shro ng. As Dharma Kumar noted from evidence from the turn of the nineteenth century, South India had an exceptionally large services sector for a pre-modern economy.29

Exchange even began within the village, where the jajmani system (albeit archetypically) re ected the distribution of resources between the di erent

27) Sumit Guha, Th e Population History of South Asia from the Seventeenth to the Twen-tieth Centuries: An Exploration. In Asian Population History, eds Tsui Jung Lui et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001): Ch. 4.28) Washbrook, Golden Age.29) Dharma Kumar, Th e Forgotten Sector. In Colonialism, Private Property and the State, ed. Dharma Kumar (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998): 55-92.


castes. It extended to larger villages which acted as casbahs to surrounding territories. It acquired regional dimensions through the activities of the banjaras, whose vast herds of pack bullocks brought cotton, iron, and dry grains from the interior and took back salt, ne rice, and ne cloth. And, also, through the activities of maritime communities where a coastal sea trade followed the winds, bringing rice from the north and taking back salt from the south. And it reached sub-continental and international dimen-sions through the activities of specialist merchant communities, freighting southern manufactures (especially textiles) to foreign ports from Europe to the Levant to South-East Asia.

Each of these di erent levels of trade involved somewhat di erent people and gave rise to somewhat di erent kinds of organization. At, as it were, the bottom of the system, much primary exchange of goods and commodities was in the hands of people linked to production. Large farm-ers, who also lent money to small producers, appear to have dominated the bases of the grain trade; and head weavers and small merchants drawn from the weaving castes were in charge of the cloth trade.30 For a long time, shro ng was largely carried out by gold and silver smiths. But inter-regional trade necessitated a di erent kind of connection. Banjaras not only carried goods across the interior on their pack bullocks but bought and sold them in their own right. Th ey were very far from the pedlars and gypsies depicted in colonial times. Th eir caravans could stretch to thou-sands of bullocks and they articulated the interior economy with that of the coast. If sometimes treated with suspicion (for their legendary criminal activities), they also enjoyed considerable prestige and no little power. Th eir annual arrival in parts of Th anjavur, for example, was greeted with festivals and the conveying of temple honors to their nayaks; and their non-arrival was greatly feared since it portended economic marginaliza-tion.31 Th eir bullocks were also vital to military operations: the East India Company kept close surveillance on the relations of its nemesis, Tipu Sul-tan, with the banjaras and, in 1792, gained its rst con rmation that he planned war when reports from Seringapatnam indicated that he had negotiated the supply of 25,000 carriage cattle.32 Indeed, it was not least

30) Parthasarathi, Transition.31) Washbrook, World Economy.32) M. Wilks, Historical Sketches of South Indian History from the Origin of the Hindoo Government of that State to the Extinction of the Mohammedan Dynasty in 1799, ed. M. Hammick (Mysore: Government Branch Press, 1930).


the success of the Company in disrupting Tipus access to cattle, and thus means of mobility, that led to his eventual demise.33

Parallel to, and frequently working with, the banjara caravans were specialist merchant castes, who used their own internal organizations to develop trade over long distances. Most prominent, down the south-east coast, were Telugu Komatis who specialized in chilli, turmeric, and tobacco, grown in Andhra, but were also involved in the cloth and rice trades. Th ey spread across many of the casbahs in the Tamil and Kannada countries, but kept their identity and cohesion through maintenance of their language and, also, worship at their own sectarian temples.34 Across smaller regions, and in relation to di erent trades, similar caste organizations played simi-lar functions among a variety of Chetty groups, and also in the extreme south among Tamil Muslim Labbai merchants. At the apex of the system were two di erent kinds of foci. On the one hand, there was the very long distance or international sea-borne trade. Some discrete Chetty and Labbai families carried this on in their own right. But frequently it depended on knowledge of overseas markets and foreign contacts. Foreign tradersArmenians, Persians/Mughals, Jews, Arabslong played an important role in southern commerce. From the sixteenth century, they were progressively joined by a variety of Europeans. From the rst, the Europeans behaved dif-ferently, especially at sea: seeking to link the control of trade to the exercise of armed power.35 However, on land, their impact was very limited until the eighteenth century and, like other foreigners, they were largely dependent on their ability to connect to internal commercial networks.

But there were also other foci of inter-regional trade. Courts and armies, in their own right, were major consumption centers, drawing supplies from wide areas and passing them upward to imperial authorities as vari-ous kinds of tribute. Temples were also important centers for economic investment and re-distributionto support masses of annual pilgrims but also to create fairs for the trans-regional exchange of specialist goods, and these were not always of a religious nature.36 Th e small temples around

33) Washbrook, South India.34) D. A. Washbrook, Th e Development of Caste Organisation in South India. In South India: Political Institutions and Political Change, eds C. J. Baker and D. Washbrook (Delhi: Macmillan, 1975): 150-203.35) Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Th e Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History (London: Longman, 1993).36) B. Stein, Th e Economic Function of a Medieval South Indian Temple. Journal of Asian Studies 19 (1960): 163-76.


Arni, in the north Arcot district, for example, long served as the fair ground for peninsular Indias largest sale of war horsesmany shipped from Ara-bia to the west coast and then trekked across the Ghats.37

It was principally in relation to foreign, courtly, and temple centers of trade that caste as the organizing principle of commercial relations was inclined to break downor, at least, to be supplemented by others.38 Access to the privileges of authority allowed many people from non-commercial ormanufacturingcastes into the market place: high-status Brahmins, Muslim warriors and grandees, even the occasional Untouch-able (e.g. Nadars).39 Power could transcend caste here, albeit that overtime it might give rise to caste-like developments (for example, Smartha Brah-mins from Kallidaikurichi who became a specialist money-lending caste).40 As the Souths trans-regional and international trading connections expanded, so did the social pluralism of those involved in trade, especially via banking where cash could often be the solvent of tradition. Certainly by the early eighteenth century, the commercial communities of most major trading centersboth coastal and interiorre ected the most diverse of origins.

In other contexts, most notably China, attempts have been made to map a hierarchy of connections between di erent levels of the marketing system, which also served to di use political power and state authority.41 But, in South India, any such map would look more like anarchy than hierarchy. In the rst place, there were multiple rival centers at the top: di erent courts, di erent ports, even di erent temples competing for the same mobile resources. Trades in di erent products followed di erent routes: even basic foods were not necessarily locally supplied. Th en, ban-jara caravan routes followed a haphazard set of courses, depending on the availability of water and grazing. Th ere was very little symmetry but, rather,

37) J. Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and Highroads to Empire 1500-1700 (London: Taylor and Francis, 2002).38) On this breakdown in the environs of Madras city, see T. Mizushima, Nattar and Socio-Economic Change in South India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Tokyo: Tokyo University press, 1986).39) R. L. Hardgrave, Th e Nadars of Tamil Nadu: Th e Political Culture of a Community in Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).40) H. L. Pate, Gazetteer of the Tinnevelly District, vol. 1 (Madras: Government of Madras, 1917).41) G. W. Skinner, Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China, part 1-3. Journal of Asian Studies 24 (1964-5): 3-44; 195-228; 363-99.


a constant uidity and circulation. Indeed, far from providing a stable socio-economic map onto which political authority could graft itself, the nature of the exchange economy in South India tended to undermine the possibilities of such authority. Faced with an oppressive power, labor and capital were inclined to move, banjara caravans to take new routes, merchants to seek other markets, bankers to look for other clients.42 Th e high levels of movement in the southern economy, which helped it to sub-sist and survive, also tended to neutralize attempts to create xed geo-graphical points from which to exercise political power and authority: particular kingdoms were, for the most part, short-lived a airs.43

Yet if socio-economic, or institutional, conditions were so anarchic, and transaction costs necessarily so high, how were often distant markets kept supplied, and why should merchant capital remain interested in the South? To some extent, it should be noted, that the Souths problems did undermine its erstwhile position in world trade. From the late seventeenth century, trade with Persia seems to have declined, and the Europeans began to move their operations to the easier elds of trade to be found in Ben-gal.44 Nonetheless, the southern textile trade never entirely declined and the grain and salt trades certainly continued. Th e answer to the Souths problem may have lain in internal systems which discounted particular di culties against other advantages.

Th e inability to deliver products on time was a major weakness of the system (as the records of the European Companies with their ships waiting in the roads to catch tide and wind make clear). Banjara caravans fol-lowed variable routes and producers were more responsive to the weather (which determined the allocation of their time between, say, spinning and farming) than to money. Also quality was a constant issue.45 Th e struc-ture of power in, for example, the weaving industry strongly favored corporately organized producers against competing merchant capitalists. Before the nineteenth century, merchants never advanced thread (i.e. put out) or controlled product design, which was in the hands of the produc-ers themselves. By convention, producers could cancel contracts at any time prior to delivery simply by returning any money advances which they

42) Washbrook, South India.43) Subrahmanyam, Political Economy.44) Om Prakash, Th e Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal 1630-1720 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985).45) Parthasarathi, Transition.


might have received from merchants. Labor, here, was the master of capi-talor, at least, a remarkably equal partner.46 It were, especially, the prob-lems connected to time and quality that drew the European Companies, and particularly the English, into seeking forms of political power inland.

But these disadvantages were o -set against other advantages, especially of potential cheapness. Banjara caravans may not have been very predict-able, but their transport costs were very low. Th eir bullock herds ate o the land and bred on the hoof. Equally, the coastal craft plying the salt and grain trades followed the tides and winds without costs of power. Th e high oscillations in the markets for everythingincluding bullionalso cre-ated opportunities. Weavers, for example, were often paid in copper, whose value against gold and silver depended on local conditions of supply and demand. Where copper was plentiful, their cloth could have a very low value in the gold or silver terms in which most merchants (including Euro-peans) made their nal evaluations. In that case textiles might be acquired very cheaply indeed. Th e Dutch established their strong position in south-ern markets in the seventeenth century especially through their ability to import Japanese copper.47 Equally, when local agricultural conditions were poor, much labor time would be spent spinning thread in compensation. Th is, however, glutted local thread markets, driving down prices and mak-ing textiles especially cheap. By playing the various intersecting marketsin bullion, cotton, thread, and grainit was possible to speculate very high levels of pro t from southern trade.

But it was also possibleand very easyto lose out. Great fortunes might be made in the commerce of this period as, for example, by Kasi Viranna who was the English Companys rst dubash in Madras and, by legend, the author of their own success.48 But, as Ashin Dasgupta has pointed out, such fortunes rarely lasted very long and, usually, fell foul of a vagarious fortune represented by famine, war, ship-wreck, or changes in political power.49 In e ect, wealth was di cult to accumulate, protect, and convert into institutionalized forms of capital. But the way in which mer-

46) Perlin, Proto-Industrialization.47) T. Raychaudhuri, Jan Companie in Coromandel: A study in the Interrelations of European Commerce and Traditional Economies (Den Haag: Nijho , 1962).48) K. N. Chaudhuri, Th e Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company 1660-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).49) A. Dasgupta, Foreign Trade: Indian Merchants and the Trade in the Indian Ocean, 1500-1750. In Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. I: c. 1200-1750, eds I. Habib and T. Raychaudhuri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982): Ch. 13-2.


chants attempted to do so had important implications for the nature of trade and the development of the economy.

Necessarily, they were highly risk-averse and looked to share and o -load risks at every opportunity. One strategy, as K. N. Chaudhuri has noted, was to divide their activities as widely as possibleinvesting in multiple trades so that failure in one could be o -set against success in others.50 Th is made capital widely available for short-term adventures and encouraged commercial entrepreneurialism. But it also restricted invest-ments in long-term, xed arrangements. Partnerships for single voyages were not uncommon in sea trade, and various insurance mechanisms seem to have been developed. But permanent (e.g. joint-stock) commercial insti-tutions were rare, even within the bounds of caste (where, for example, the banking consortia organized by the Nattukkottai Chetties in the nine-teenth century do not appear to have had an early modern precedent).51

A second strategy, noted by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, was to seek security (such as it was) by approaching various authorities to gain the protection of rights supported by their in uence.52 While tax-farming may have been a late, and post-Mughal development in North India, it was a feature of the South from, at least, Vijayanagar times.53 Merchant communities were also major donors to the principal temples, often gaining trading privileges in return. A dominant mercantile strategy in the early modern period was portfolio capitalism, the building up of rights and shares in various aspects of the scal system, which could be used to gain liens on crops or goods or to hold position in competitive markets. In the eight-eenth century, as regional states of the period began to take on aspects of the Mughal sovereignty brought south against Golconda and the Mar-athas, the claims of the state on resources expandedand, with them, the importance of such connections. Monopolies and demands for taxation pressed heavily on an increasing number of markets.54 But the fragileand intensely competitivenature of this state power meant that it rarely pro-vided security for very long. Moreover, the tightening nexus with the state also implied a shift in the character of commerce, from which many mer-chant groups could lose out. States intensi ed their relationship with the

50) Chaudhuri, Markets and Traders.51) D. Rudner, Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India: Th e Nattukottai Chettiars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).52) Subrahmanyam, Political Economy.53) B. Stein, Vijayanagara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).54) Washbrook, South India.


market in order to raise greater quantities of cash to support their military machines. Th is began to give primacy to functions of banking over mere tradingbringing, for example, northern (especially Gujarati) banking houses into the South, from which they had been remote before.55 Banking capital was even better able to secure itself, notably against the powers over production enjoyed by local community institutions. But its ties to the state also put it at very great risk in the event that it banked for the wrong side.

III

But if the structural features of the southern economy suggest multiple risks, to o -set the prospects of great pro t, how did they evolve over time, in what direction(s) was the economy moving in this era? In terms of pro-duction, there appears to have been considerable dynamism, at least in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Th e new crops from the Americas (chilli, potato, maize, tobacco, tomato, banana) were rapidly absorbed and adoptedalthough in interesting ways. What might be thought of as subsistence crops, capable of enlarging the Souths local food base, were perhaps the least successful. Rather, it was chilli, tobacco, and tomato, which expanded the most rapidly (especially, in Andhra), where they met needs more for pleasure and leisure than immediate survival.56 Moreover, they were produced largely for the marketexpanding yet further the Souths exchange economy. Equally, southern artisans showed remarkable skills of innovation, proliferating textile designs to suit multiple foreign markets (often in response to direct demands from them)57 and in develop-ing other handcraft skills, from furniture-making (especially, in Andhra) to iron-working (in Tamil Nadu) to ship-building (especially down the west coast where even Europeans sought opportunities to outsource produc-tion).58 More tradable goods and services meant more resources to exchange for subsistence. By these means, the population appears to have grown quite rapidly in this period.

55) Gujarati bankers appear to have followed the Mughals south.56) Subrahmanyam, Political Economy.57) R. Crill, Textiles from India: Th e Global Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).58) S. Sangwan, Ship-Building in India during the Company Rule. In History of Traditional Navigation, eds Y. Subharayalu et al. (Th anjavur: Tamil University Press, 1989): Ch. 5.


However, at least before the end of the seventeenth century, there also seem to have been few signs of any signi cant changes in the organization of production or of the institutions securing and re-distributing surplus. Production remained dominated by artisan and farmer corporations with both the state and mercantile capital kept rmly in their place. Yet it is possible to see problems beginning to emerge. On the one side, relations of exchange were becoming increasingly elongated over space, making them vulnerable to disruption. From the 1680s, for example, problems in Persian markets began to cost Andhra important markets; and, for a time, the Mughal invasion of Golconda cut the coastal districts o from the interior.59 But small southern polities and risk-averse southern mercantile organizations were incapable of providing trade routes with much protec-tion. Also, even by the early eighteenth century, European merchant com-panies were showing restlessness with their weak positions on land, especially in relation to their inability to control time and quality factors in production, and were looking to exert the political pressure which they already possessed at sea.60

Further, a range of internal anomalies was starting to grow. Greater quantities of specie now permeated production, but linked to a bullionist economy without secure coinage, transaction costs (especially from shro -ing) were consequently inclined to in ate. Also, the growing market in property rights raised questions about the meaning and legitimacy of those rights themselves. As noted, in the river valleys, the predominant form of property was kaniachi (later mirasi) right linked to ancient priv-ileges derived from connection to the community which had originally cleared the land. But as such rights were e ectively bought by outsidersmerchant Chetties, entrepreneurial members of lower castescorporate cohesion could come under threat. Noticeably, for example, by the 1770s when the East India Company took control of the Chingleput Jaghir behind Madras city, only half of its villages still practised periodic re-distri-bution of land among their shareholders.61 Also, many other rights were starting to be bought and sold in peculiar ways. Palaiyakarrar rights involved the payment of fees in return for protection. But, by the mid-eighteenth century, these were being acquired by peoplesuch as the

59) J. F. Richards, Mughal Administration in Golconda (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).60) Parthasarathi, Transition; S. Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast 1650-1740 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986).61) Sivakumar, Peasants.


French Companys dubash, Ananda Ranga Pillaiwho were from non-martial castes (Pillai was an Idayan, shepherd) and had no means of pro-viding protection.62 In e ect, and in ways similar to France at the end of the ancient regime, market forces were penetrating and eating away at the rationale of an erstwhile feudal law.

However, in South India, any revolution proved to be still-born, and the crisis ultimately may have ushered in a colonial rule which, if anything, reversed its direction. Th e rst moment of change can be associated with the fall-out from the Mughal conquest of Golconda, which, by the rst quarter of the eighteenth century, had unleashed a struggle for succession across the South, which was not nally settled until the centurys end. It featured attempts by a series of regional states to intensify their extraction of resources, most notably to support their expanding and increasingly expensive military apparatuses. Monopolies on tradable goods were tight-ened up, tax immunities (for example, enjoyed by temples) were clipped, and new experiments (for example, Tipu Sultans visionary ryotwari sys-tem) were tried with regard to direct taxation.63 All this put pressure on the corporate side of the dualistic state, threatening to break its erstwhile power over production and exchange in order to establish a new system of claims to, and thus rights in, property and resources.

But the e ort to centralize state power failed, largely because of inter-necine strife in a context where resources (including human resources) remained highly mobile. Th e nascent regional states of the epochMysore, Travancore, Th anjavur, the Marathas, Hyderabad, Arcot (through which the English Company increasingly expressed its in uence)fought one another to a standstill. Th ey all indulged in the practices which Chris Bayly has termed Asian mercantilism, attempting to attract one anothers labor forces and capital resources and to destroy one anothers trade and productive bases.64 But their attempts came close to a zero sum game. Sub-stantial sections of the population moved and/or ed with serious conse-quences for the economy in many places. Th anjavur, once the grain basket of southern India, experienced a continuous decline in production across the eighteenth century, made worse in the middle decades when Mysore

62) Ananda Ranga Pillai, Private Diary 1747-1763, trans. J. F. Price and K. Rangachari (Delhi: Asia Educational Services, 2006).63) Washbrook, South India.64) C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).


attempted to force its population toward the upper Kaveri.65 In Malabar, there was considerable displacement of the upper castes and of capital as a result of Mysores invasion there.66 Weaving communities appear to have moved hither and yon to nd protection and to try to continue tradethread, which could always nd a market, being a particularly popular form of loot for pillaging armies. Moreover, in a curious way, the politi-cal maelstrom at the top of the dualistic state order gave some means for the local corporations at the bottom to defend themselves. In the weaving industry, as Prasannan Parthasarathi has noted, artisans were by no means passive in the face of pressures to weaken their control of production and to cheapen the price of their labor.67 Equally, farmer communities resisted in ated revenue demands by refusing to plant crops, concealing produc-tion, or moving on.68 In the end, less a new, clearly de ned structure of rights emerged than, simply, new claims to rights were lodged over old ones, with the two struggling to nd accommodation. Shrotriems (tax immunities given to their clients by many of the new states) sat alongside maunyams granted by local corporations themselves, and sometimes merged into the broad category known by the subsequent East Indian Company state as inam. Temples conceded some of their resources to aggressive new rulers, such as Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan in Mysore. But then, as the latter found themselves struggling to make allies and secure their legitimacy, they were often re-endowed again.69 Th e old structure of rights did not just disappear: rather, it became increasingly complicated.

For merchant capital (including that of the Europeans), the times were particularly testing. On the one hand, the attempt to strengthen rulers power o ered means of o -loading some of the very high risks which had to be borne. Producers could be coerced into yielding control over time and quality; monopolies could secure market positions against competi-tion. But, on the other hand, new forms of risk emerged. Th e new rulers commercialized70 their royal powers in return for more secure cash owsand, if they did not receive them, could prove coercive themselves.

65) Subrahmanyam, Penumbral.66) M. Frenz, From Contact to Conquest: Transition to British Rule in Malabar 1790-1805 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).67) Parthasarathi, Transition.68) Washbrook, South India.69) K. Brittlebank, Tipu Sultans Search for Legitimacy: Islam and Kinship in a Hindu Domain (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).70) Bayly, Rulers.


Many a tax farmer ended up in jail or worse. Th ere was a tension between the claims of capital and those of the state, which, given capitals lack of armed force, could easily lead to the short-term liquidation of its agenciesalbeit, then, with longer-term consequences for the ability of the state to sustain credit.

Also, engagement with the state necessarily began to a ect the nature of the operations of mercantile capital. Th ere was a need for money to sup-port the states military operations. Th is put a premium on the kinds of organization which could command it, raising ever higher the functions of banking over those of mere commodity trading. Th e eighteenth century was the age of banking in South India no less than John Richards and Karen Leonard have documented for the North.71 And also, no less, its logic led to the doors of the English East India Company which, by then, dominated the long distance sea-trades bringing scarce specie metals to India. Increasingly, the success or failure of particular banking and mer-chandising households depended on their relationship to the Company. Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, perhaps alone among South Indian rulers, spotted this implication and, from the 1760s, tried to set up their own navywith Mangalore as their own alternative entrepot, guaranteeing independent specie ows.72 But, by then, Indias loss of sea-power to the Europeans was too advancedand with it, in an economy reproduced through exchange and armed by mercenary force, Indias ultimate loss of sovereignty.

Where the Companys conquest of the South left the relations of mer-cantile commerce, and the structure of claims and rights supporting it, remain questions for another paper. But, in the early days, those Indian mercantile houses which had supported its functions, especially in relation to banking, enjoyed a range of immediate bene ts. Th e Company in Madras was perennially short of cash and those who could supply it gained considerable privileges, not least consolidated into zemindari rights to land revenue, especially in Andhra.73 But, over time, the bene ts began to peter out. Th e Company attempted to take the states nancial system under direct management, progressively reducing its own reliance on tax farm-

71) See the exchanges between Karen Leonard and John Richards on banking in the Mughal Empire in J. F. Richards, Mughal State Finance and the Pre-Modern World Economy and K. Leonard, Indigenous Banking Firms in Mughal India: A Reply Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 285-313.72) Washbrook, South India.73) Ibidem.


ing, and thus on Indian bankers. Also, by the mid-nineteenth century, it was able to look for its credit needs increasingly to London and to British interests in the locale. Indian capital lost its place at the heights of an economy more and more under the states e ective direction. What did remain were important mercantile functions in the interior economy, in which the Company and European business had little interest, and also abroad where South India became a staging post for the opening out of South-East Asia,74 but Indian opportunities in the colonial age were of a di erent kind and dimension.

Th e Company also took a long time to sort out the tangle over rights and claims to property and resources, which it had inherited. It was torn between the imperatives of consolidating itself as a traditional state (as it saw it)recreating a Hindu Golden Age represented by the restoration of Indian corporate privilege and powerand servicing the new demands of colonial capitalism by pressing ahead with the centralization of state power at the expense of local corporations. In the end, of course, it deferred to the latter but, for a long time, it was beset by internal contradictions: not least between its legal system, which defended ancient rights, and its revenue system which claimed an omni-competent rulers prerogative.75

Its task in establishing the greater dominance of the state and capital over labor and production was helped by two factorsboth of which related to an increasing sedentarization of society, which was crucial to the process.76 In the early nineteenth century, the Companys progressive elimination of rival state powers reduced the forces of competition within the system. Labor and local capital had fewer places to which they could move and thus became more susceptible to coercive pressures to yield their control over time and quality. Nonetheless, there were some places (for example, in the princely states which continued to be highly in uential across the South) where a limited retreat remained possible.77 Also, politi-cal resistancein the form of revenue strikes, use of law courts, and

74) Rudner, Caste and Capitalism.75) D. A. Washbrook, Sovereignty, Property, Land and Labour in Colonial South India. In Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East and West, ed. H. Islamoglu (I.B. Taurus: London, 2004): 69-99.76) C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).77) B. N. Ramusack, Th e Indian Princes and their States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).


occasional violent revoltslimited the e ectiveness of state authority.78 Ultimately, perhaps, it was the population expansion of the nineteenth century, which proved to be the decisive factor. Across the century, the South Indian population at least doubled, and possibly trebled, lling up the land and reducing the system of circulation which had previously governed both the use of resources and the predominant strategy of sur-vival.79 Th e southern economy became increasingly sedentarized, sup-ported by xed water resources (in the expanded Krishna-Godavari and Kaveri deltas) and new technologies of well-digging. It also became di er-ently structured with a greater emphasis on agricultural production and less on manufacturing. Although whether it bene ted from these changes still remains questionable: the savage famines which beset parts of the South in the 1870s and 1890s suggest that basic food security problems were not to be resolved until the twentieth century, if they entirely have been.80

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