Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Foreword
- Introduction
- 1 At Empire's End: The Nizam, Hyderabad and Eighteenth-century India
- 2 The Ignored Elites: Turks, Mongols and a Persian Secretarial Class in the Early Delhi Sultanate
- 3 ‘Silk Road, Cotton Road or … Indo-Chinese Trade in Pre-European Times’
- 4 The Political Economy of Opium Smuggling in Early Nineteenth Century India: Leakage or Resistance?
- 5 Opium and the Company: Maritime Trade and Imperial Finances on Java, 1684–1796
- 6 The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of the Akbari Dispensation
- 7 Notes on Political Thought in Medieval and Early Modern South India
- 8 Becoming Turk the Rajput Way: Conversion and Identity in an Indian Warrior Narrative
- 9 Nature and Nurture on Imperial China's Frontiers
- 10 The Frontiers of Memory: What the Marathas Remembered of Vijayanagara
- 11 ‘Kiss My Foot,’ Said the King: Firearms, Diplomacy and the Battle for Raichur, 1520
- 12 Frontiers of Family Life: Early Modern Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds
- 13 Chinese Revenue Farms and Borders in Southeast Asia
- Publications
- Index
3 - ‘Silk Road, Cotton Road or … Indo-Chinese Trade in Pre-European Times’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Foreword
- Introduction
- 1 At Empire's End: The Nizam, Hyderabad and Eighteenth-century India
- 2 The Ignored Elites: Turks, Mongols and a Persian Secretarial Class in the Early Delhi Sultanate
- 3 ‘Silk Road, Cotton Road or … Indo-Chinese Trade in Pre-European Times’
- 4 The Political Economy of Opium Smuggling in Early Nineteenth Century India: Leakage or Resistance?
- 5 Opium and the Company: Maritime Trade and Imperial Finances on Java, 1684–1796
- 6 The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of the Akbari Dispensation
- 7 Notes on Political Thought in Medieval and Early Modern South India
- 8 Becoming Turk the Rajput Way: Conversion and Identity in an Indian Warrior Narrative
- 9 Nature and Nurture on Imperial China's Frontiers
- 10 The Frontiers of Memory: What the Marathas Remembered of Vijayanagara
- 11 ‘Kiss My Foot,’ Said the King: Firearms, Diplomacy and the Battle for Raichur, 1520
- 12 Frontiers of Family Life: Early Modern Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds
- 13 Chinese Revenue Farms and Borders in Southeast Asia
- Publications
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
In his discussion of Southeast Asia's commerce with India and China, Anthony Reid remarks, ‘Situated between the world's two major sources of fine cloth—India for cottons and China for silks—Southeast Asia became internationally known as a consumer rather than as a producer of textiles.’ Reid's allusion to Southeast Asian consumption of Chinese silk and Indian cotton cloth implicitly raises questions about the nature of commercial relations between these two great Asian civilizations. While it is well known that India and China supplied much of the Southeast Asia and West Asia with cotton and silk cloth respectively, much less is recorded about the degree to which these ‘countries’ or regions sold their apparently complementary textile products to each other, and whether or not other additional natural or manufactured goods comprised an important segment of Indo-Chinese trade. While the available sources to study the commerce between South Asia and China in pre-European times are predictably fragmentary, they suggest a pattern of complementary trade relations in textile manufactures as well as a broader range of commercial exchanges.
In broad outline, Indian and Chinese sources suggest two things about Indo-Chinese commerce in textiles prior to the sixteenth century. These are, first, that China sold silk textiles to India throughout nearly two millennia from the early years of the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) to the period of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 CE), and did so even though Indians began producing the cloth in the early Gupta period and vastly expanded silk cloth production from the thirteenth century onwards.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World HistoryEssays in Honour of John F. Richards, pp. 72 - 80Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013