Place · Mughal port · India

Surat

Function

Trade & production

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

21.170, 72.830

Connections (18)

• Trade routeMachilipatnam / Masulipatnam / Bandar

  Surat on the Gujarat coast and Masulipatnam on the Coromandel were the two great Indian ports of the seventeenth century, serving the Mughal empire and Golconda respectively, and the English, Dutch and French all had factories at both. Surat handled the Hajj traffic and the western trade; Masulipatnam sent painted cottons to Persia and Southeast Asia. Both were ruined within a century — Surat by Maratha raids and the rise of Bombay, Masulipatnam by silting and by Madras.

• Trade routePatan patola

  Patan double ikat left Gujarat through Surat for Southeast Asia, where patola cloths were treated in Indonesia as heirloom objects with ritual and political value rather than as clothing — held by families for generations, displayed at ceremonies, and imitated locally. Some of the oldest surviving patola are in Indonesian collections, not Indian ones, because they were kept rather than worn.

• Traveller routeAgra Fort

  Thomas Roe landed at Surat in 1615 as James I's ambassador and followed Jahangir's court for three years, mostly at Ajmer, trying to obtain a commercial treaty he never got — what he secured instead were working privileges at Surat that the English factory was built on. The route from the port to the Mughal capitals is the standard one for European embassies, and Ajmer is omitted here only for want of a node.

• Image migrationGokul

  The Pushti Marg carried Krishna images west out of Braj during the seventeenth century, and Surat — the Mughal empire's main western port and its Hajj embarkation point — became one of the sect's important centres, with havelis endowed by the Gujarati merchant families who had taken up Vallabhacharya's teaching. The trade wealth of the western ports funded a Braj devotional movement, and several of the svarupas that left Gokul and Mathura ended in Gujarat rather than Rajasthan.

• Trade routeOld Goa

  Goa and Surat were the Portuguese and Mughal empires' principal western ports, and the rivalry between them shaped the Arabian Sea for two centuries — Portuguese cartazes licensing Mughal shipping, Surat's Hajj traffic depending on Portuguese permission, and the English eventually displacing both. Goa emptied as its trade went; Surat emptied when Bombay took its.

• Trade routeJamnagar Bandhani

  Gujarat's tied and printed cottons left through Surat and Khambhat for Arabia, East Africa and Southeast Asia, and the medieval block-printed fragments excavated at Fustat in Egypt — thousands of them, in Gujarati patterns — are the physical proof of how large that trade was. Jamnagar's bandhani belongs to the inland end of it, dyed in a town whose water was held to fix the colour better than anywhere else.

• Trade routeMoti Daman

  Daman and Diu sat on the Gujarat coast beside Surat, the Mughal empire's main western port and its Hajj embarkation point, and the Portuguese use of them was partly commercial and partly a licensing system: the cartaz, a pass every ship in the western Indian Ocean had to buy from them or be treated as a prize. Enforcing that on the Mughal Hajj traffic out of Surat is what made the relationship permanently hostile.

• Power passed toDiu Fort

  Diu was ceded in 1535 by Bahadur Shah of Gujarat, who wanted Portuguese ships against the Mughals. Akbar annexed Gujarat in 1573 anyway, and Surat became the Mughal empire's western port — but pilgrim ships to Mecca still had to buy a Portuguese cartaz at Diu, so the emperor's Hajj traffic sailed on a licence issued by a foreign fort.

• Imperial administration ofFort St George, Chennai

  Surat and Fort St George are the Company's two starting positions and they were opposite kinds of place: a factory inside a Mughal port, held on an imperial licence and paying imperial customs, and a fort on ground bought outright from a local Nayaka. The second model — own the land, fortify it, collect the customs yourself — is the one that grew.

• Succession in timeKappad beach, Kozhikode

  A hundred and fifteen years separate da Gama's landfall from the first English factory at Surat, and the English got their licence partly by beating a Portuguese squadron in the Surat roads in 1612. Every later European company entered India through the door Portugal had opened and the customs system Portugal had built, and then dismantled both.

• Power passed toKhambhat / Cambay

  Cambay was the great port of western India until its estuary silted and its tidal bore made approach dangerous; Surat, sixty kilometres south on the Tapti, took the trade in the sixteenth century. Surat's own river then silted and Bombay took it from Surat. The same gulf hosts three successive principal harbours, and each was abandoned for hydraulic rather than political reasons.

• Power passed toBombay Castle

  The Company moved its western headquarters from Surat to Bombay in 1687 after Maratha raids and Mughal customs disputes, and because Bombay was English sovereign territory rather than a licensed factory. Surat kept more trade than Bombay for another forty years but lost the government, and with the government went the shipping.

• AnalogueHampi / Vijayanagara

  Two coin standards ran side by side in early modern India: the gold pagoda of the south, inherited from Vijayanagara, and the silver rupee of the north, inherited from Sher Shah. European companies kept accounts in both, and the Madras presidency used pagodas until 1818. The 1835 Act abolished the pagoda and made the rupee the currency of the whole country.

• Institutional successionKolkata: Fort William & the Maidan

  The Company minted at Surat and Bombay in the Mughal emperor's name, then in its own at Calcutta, then under the Crown after 1858. The design changed three times and the weight essentially once. A currency whose standard was fixed in 1540 by an Afghan ruler of Bihar survived every change of sovereignty until decimalisation in 1957.

• Trade routeKilwa Kisiwani

  Kilwa's gold came north from Sofala and was paid for in Gujarati cloth and Indian beads; Gujarat took East African ivory, mangrove poles and, later, slaves. Indian merchant communities were settled on the Swahili coast for centuries, and Indian glass beads are among the commonest finds in Kilwa's levels. The trade is older than any European presence in either place.

• Trade routeHormuz

  The Gulf's most valuable export to India was horses. Indian climates and fodder could not sustain cavalry breeding at scale, so every north Indian and Deccan army bought Persian and Arabian mounts shipped through Hormuz to Cambay, Surat and Goa. Marco Polo describes the trade, and the Delhi Sultanate's military edge over southern kingdoms partly rested on access to it.

• Trade routeIsfahan

  Isfahan and Surat are the two hinges of the overland-and-sea route between Europe and Mughal India, and the Armenian houses of New Julfa financed both ends. European merchants wintered at Isfahan, drew credit there, and crossed to Surat on the monsoon — which is why a Safavid capital appears in the itinerary of every seventeenth-century French traveller to India.

• Historical linkPortuguese Estado da Índia xerafim

  The Portuguese xerafim circulated alongside the Mughal rupee at Surat and set the exchange rate between the two systems.

On these journeys

• Early modern ports & companies
• Jean-Baptiste Tavernier — six voyages for stones (1630–68)
• François Bernier — physician at the Mughal court (1658–68)
• Sir Thomas Roe — the first English embassy (1615–19)
• The Indian Ocean World — the whole rim
• Indian port cities — the coast itself
• British India — 1600 to 1947

Sources

English East India Company records

• Wikipedia