Journey

Early modern ports & companies

Stops (16)

1. Surat · Mughal Gujarat's port

   The empire's main western harbour, the embarkation point for the Hajj, and the site of the first English factory in 1613. Shivaji sacked it in 1664 and again in 1670, the Company moved its headquarters to Bombay in 1687, and the river silted; a city of two hundred thousand became a district town and later a diamond-cutting one.

2. Khambhat / Cambay · Cambay

   The Gulf of Khambhat port that every medieval traveller from Marco Polo to Barbosa describes as western India's greatest market, exporting cotton, indigo and the agate and carnelian worked at Ratanpur. Its tidal bore and silting estuary killed it, and the trade moved down the coast to Surat and then to Bombay.

3. Machilipatnam / Masulipatnam / Bandar · Golconda's port

   Masulipatnam shipped the painted and printed cottons of the Coromandel to Persia, Arabia, Burma and Southeast Asia, and held Dutch, English and French factories at once. Bussy took it for France in 1751 and Forde stormed it for the Company in 1759, after which the Northern Circars became British. After 1759 the Company held the Northern Circars, and did so until 1947.

4. Old Goa · Estado capital

   The capital of everything Portugal held from East Africa to Nagasaki, larger than Lisbon at its height, with a customs house that licensed other people's shipping. Malaria and the silting of the Mandovi emptied it; by 1800 the churches stood in scrub and the administration had moved downriver to Panaji.

5. Kozhikode / Calicut · Calicut

   The Zamorin's port, where da Gama landed and where Ibn Battuta, Abd al-Razzaq and Zheng He's fleets had all called before him. Its Muslim shipowners financed the Malabar pepper trade and fought the Portuguese for a century; the Danes, the Dutch, the French and the English all later kept factories here.

6. Ponnani · Ponnani

   The Malabar port at the Bharathappuzha mouth that was both a working harbour and the seat of the Makhdum family's Islamic college, whose jurists wrote the Tuhfat al-Mujahidin urging resistance to the Portuguese. Trade and scholarship in the same building, funded by the same shipping. Trade and jurisprudence in the same institution, funded by the same shipping and destroyed by the same war.

7. Beypore · Beypore

   The Malabar port where the uru — the ocean-going dhow of the Arabian Sea trade — is still built by Khalasi shipwrights without drawings, in teak from the Nilambur forests. The craft that carried the trade is the part of it that has survived, and it is now built largely for Gulf owners.

8. Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) · Danish Tranquebar

   Fort Dansborg and a square mile of walled town leased from Thanjavur in 1620 and held until 1845. Denmark's neutrality in European wars was its commercial asset: cargo, capital and refugees moved through here when Madras and Pondicherry were blockaded. Ziegenbalg printed the first book in an Indian language on movable type here in 1713, and Carey's Serampore press followed ninety years later on the same flag's ground.

9. Fort St George, Chennai · Fort St George

   The first English fortification in India, built in 1640 on a beach bought from a Vijayanagara feudatory, with the weaving village of Madraspatnam beside it. The Company first collected revenue, minted coin and held a court here, and the town became the third largest city in the empire. Madras became the third largest city in the British empire within two centuries.

10. Bombay Castle · Bombay

    An island chain of no commercial importance, received as a royal dowry in 1661 and leased to the Company in 1668, which then moved its western headquarters here from Surat. It had a defensible harbour and was sovereign English ground, and that combination beat Surat's much larger trade within fifty years.

11. Hooghly–Chinsurah · the Hooghly reach

    Thirty kilometres of one river carried Portuguese Bandel, Dutch Chinsurah, Danish Serampore, French Chandernagore, Ostend Company Banquibazar and English Calcutta. None held more than a few square miles. What they competed for was the Bengal weavers and the Nawab's customs terms. Six European flags stood within thirty kilometres of one another, none of them holding more than a few square miles, all buying from the same weavers and bargaining with the same Nawab.

12. Kolkata: Fort William & the Maidan · Fort William

    Job Charnock's settlement of 1690 on three villages, fortified after 1700 and rebuilt on a far larger plan after Siraj ud-Daulah took it in 1756. From 1765 the revenue of Bengal was collected here, which is why a trading post became the capital of British India rather than one port among several.

13. Balasore (Baleshwar) · Balasore

    The Odisha roadstead that was Europe's first entrance to Bengal, before the Hooghly was regularly navigated: English from 1633, Danish from about 1636, Dutch and French too. Ships anchored far out and lightered cargo in, which is why the trade moved up the river and the town became a district headquarters.

14. Murshidabad · Murshidabad

    The Nawabi capital from 1704, a city Clive said was as extensive and populous as London, with the Jagat Seth banking house that financed both the Nawab and the Company. After Plassey the revenue moved to Calcutta and the court stayed here as ceremony, which is what the palaces are.

15. Sonargaon · Sonargaon

    The old capital of eastern Bengal, on the deltaic channels that carried the muslin of Dhaka and Sonargaon to the Bay. Ibn Battuta sailed from here for Java. When the Ganges channels shifted the city was left off the water, and Panam Nagar's street of merchant houses is the late remains of it.

16. Makli Necropolis, Thatta · Thatta

    The Mughal port city of Sindh, with a school of tilework and a necropolis of half a million graves on the Makli ridge above it. The English had a factory here from 1635; the Indus moved, the trade went to Karachi, and the cemetery is now much larger than the living town.