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IRAN
AND THE WORLD IN THE SAFAVID AGE
Abstracts
Blake, Dr. Stephen, St. Olaf College, Minneapolis, Indian Merchants in Mid-Seventeenth Century Isfahan
Many of the Europeans who
visited Isfahan during the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries remarked on the importance of Indian businessmen.
Not only were they were among the leading merchants in the
city - especially important in the cloth trade with Mughal India -
but they were also heavily involved in financial activities -
banking, money-changing and money-lending.
Two scholars have presented dramatically different
interpretations of these men. Mehdi Keyvani divided the Indians
into banias (who specialized in money-changing, money-lending, and
banking) and Multanis (who were primarily cloth merchants).
He argued that the banias had been a detrimental presence
in the urban economy, debasing the currency and draining the city
and country of scarce specie. Stephen Dale, on the other hand, maintained that Keyvani's
dichotomy of Multani merchant and bania moneylender was false and
that Indian financial experts had provided important services to
the economy of the Safavid capital.
In addition, Willem Floor and Scott Levi have in the last
few years added significant new information regarding the role of
the Indians that has challenged the interpretations of Keyvani and
Dale. Given these
disagreements, it seems time to reopen the basic questions
regarding Indian merchants in early modern Iran.
Who were they? Where
did they come from and when did they arrive?
How many were there?
What did they do? And, most importantly, what was their impact on the urban
economy?
The
paper re-examines these issues for mid-seventeenth century Isfahan
utilizing a range of sources not fully exploited before -
especially those on urban caravanserais.
A description of the principal caravanserais of the city
(where the major Indian merchants lived and worked) by an
anonymous Isfahani and written in the 1660s helps to answer some
of these questions (A List of the Caravanserais of Isfahan,
British Library, Sloane 4094).
This man, because he was a resident and a Shi'ite Muslim,
presents a much clearer picture of the ethnic and religious
make-up of the Indian merchant community.
He also helps us, along with the evidence from the European
travellers and the other Persian sources, to gauge their
importance in the urban economy - revealing for example, that the
Indian merchants dominated economic life in 11 of the 28 principal
urban caravanserais. Finally,
his description, together with a close reading of the Mughal
Indian material, allows a much better estimate of the engagement
of Indian merchants in brokering, money-lending, and
money-changing activities. Thus, utilizing the full range of
European and Persian sources, a more complete and nuanced
understanding of Indian merchants in the life of
mid-seventeenth-century Isfahan is presented.
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