Place · colonial port town · India
Balasore (Baleshwar)
Also known as Baleshwar, Balasor, Baleswar
The Odisha roadstead at the mouth of the Budhabalanga that served as the first European entry point into Bengal, before the Hooghly was navigated regularly. The Danes had a factory here from about 1636, the English from 1633 and the Dutch and French too — four companies in one silted river mouth.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 21.494, 86.934
Worth knowing
Balasore's shipping had to anchor far offshore and lighter its cargo in, which is why the trade moved up the Hooghly and the town declined into a district headquarters. The Danes reopened their factory in 1763 under a Maratha farman and kept it until the 1845 sale to Britain.
Connections (5)
- Trade routeTranquebar (Tharangambadi)
Tranquebar on the Coromandel and Balasore in Odisha are the two ends of the early Danish trade: cloth bought in the Tamil country, rice and saltpetre in the Bay's northern roadsteads, and both shipped from the same anchorages as the English and Dutch. Denmark's Indian commerce was never large enough to need a monopoly, so it survived by working other companies' coasts.
- Trade routeMachilipatnam / Masulipatnam / Bandar
Masulipatnam and Balasore were the Danish company's two northern factories, established in 1625 and about 1636, and they bracket the Bay's textile coast. Neither was fortified and neither was defended; when the Danish company went bankrupt in 1650 both were simply left, and a reconstituted company had to negotiate its way back in decades later.
- Power passed toKolkata: Fort William & the Maidan
Balasore was the door to Bengal until the Hooghly channel was surveyed and Calcutta founded in 1690. The shift is purely navigational: a roadstead where ships anchored miles offshore was replaced by a river berth a hundred kilometres inland, and the province's entire export trade moved with it within two decades.
- AnalogueSonargaon
Balasore was unusable because ships could not get in over its bar; Sonargaon became unusable because the water went away from it. Bengal's export economy had to keep relocating its loading point for two opposite hydraulic reasons, and Calcutta was the compromise: a hundred kilometres up a dying channel, deep enough to berth in and shallow enough to defend.
- Site adjacencySimlipal Biosphere
Simlipal Biosphere in Mayurbhanj district sits in the north-eastern corner of Odisha, with its principal access points at Pithabata and Jashipur gates on the Baripada-Keonjhar road and its coastal spill-over through Balasore district on the Subarnarekha delta. Balasore (Baleshwar) was the colonial port town and the inland supply head for the Mayurbhanj kings' hunting establishment in Simlipal through the nineteenth century. The Bhanja royal palace at Baripada, the Chau dance of Mayurbhanj and the ancient Jagannath temple at Baripada are the cultural landscape in which Simlipal sits.
On these journeys
- Early modern ports & companies
- Ports transformed by rivers, sediment & coastlines
- Indian port cities — the coast itself
- Danish India — 1620 to 1868
Sources
Wikipedia, “Baleswar”. The English Factories in India, ed. William Foster (1906–27), vols for 1633–41; Ole Feldbæk, India Trade under the Danish Flag 1772–1808 (1969).
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