‘A great empire which marches with the Kingdomes of Delhi, Ceylon, Cathay and Vijayanagar’ (Roger Barlow, A Briefe Summe of Geographie, F.G.R.Taylor ed. Series II, V.69, London, The Hakluyt Society, 1929–32).

The ‘Primacy’ of Bengal?

From the historical accounts to academic works even today Bengal's inarguably large productive potential is taken to be an indicator of its primacy in business within South Asia and beyond. Its productive capacity is confused with the actual management of its resources and its weak commercial system. By commercial system is meant a system of controlling and diversifying production, dictating the quality of commodities and prices, a knowledge of transport networks and markets outside Bengal, and independent access to markets. Bengal's production system was agrarian-based and therefore doubly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of nature and the fluctuations in international trade. One tends to ignore these in favour of arguments highlighting the immense productivity capacity of Bengal in agriculture and crafts.

These accounts ignore the fact that despite its prodigious production, no independent mercantile activity on a large scale is noted for Bengal, after the first half of the seventeenth century. Thereafter, prominent merchants of Bengal functioned as dadni merchants, that is, as intermediaries between buyer and seller within Bengal, and rarely undertook commerce outside Bengal on their own initiative. Bengal merchants did not organise themselves into a trading combine vis-à-vis other ‘national merchants’ as did the Coromandel merchants from the seventeenth century.