Mir Jumla arrived in Dhaka in 1660, in hot pursuit of Prince Shah Suja. The prince had already fled through the city towards Chittagong, and taken refuge in the kingdom of Arakan, laden with treasure and accompanied my an enormous entourage, said to have included a thousand palanquins. Jumla established Dhaka, effectively, as not only the capital city of Bengal, but also with oversight of the neighbouring provinces of Bihar and Orissa.
All financial roads of the time, it seems, led to Dhaka. This was clearly demonstrated by the immense wealth accumulated there, not least, in the following decades, by Mir Jumla’s successor, Shaista Khan, maternal uncle of, perhaps, one of the most successful of all the Mughal Emperors, Aurangzeb. Collecting not only his own revenues and, “other sources,” he was also able to toll the revenues accumulated by the nawabs of Bihar and Orissa.
It was Aurangzeb, intent on the conquest of as much of the subcontinent as he could, who is famously said to have described Bengal as, “the paradise of nations, for its wealth and trade.” And well he might have thought so. The sources for the accumulation of wealth, and the trade that was the foundation of such wealth, were many and various.
It seems that all those strands appealed to the Europeans who, around 150 years earlier, had “discovered” this remote, north eastern corner of the Great Mughal empire of such wealth and fame. Nor, of course, was it only Europeans; the central administration was overseen, in Dhaka, by representatives of leaders of Persian origins, with strong connections to the fairly newly conquering Mughals. And Armenians had also appeared on the scene, all of them accumulating immense and conspicuous wealth and influence.
The Portuguese had been the first of the Europeans to arrive, at the tail end of the 15th century, exploiting the allocation of their monopoly on oriental opportunities determined by the Pope. That was before, even, the Mughals had departed their Central Asian origin.
These Portuguese, with well established merchant connections with England, one of their earliest allies as a nation, undoubtedly were responsible for arousing interest in the European nations, especially those, like Portugal, at odds with the Spanish.
These included, especially, late in the 16th century, Netherlands, with their continuous attempts, as an emerging Protestant people, to free themselves from Spanish religious colonialism; and, of course, England.
Indeed, in the 17th century, the remote north-east of the subcontinent would attract trading attention, in addition to Portugal, Netherlands and the English, from France, Denmark, Flemish merchants of nascent Belgium, and even Prussia.
The journals and history of a large number of merchants and traders from, especially, the larger of those nations, would suggest that there were two very distinct strands in their trading interests, with a fairly wide range of the more traditional of those interests.
It is clear that, following the arrival of the first East India Company’s missions, and the establishment of their first, “factory,” at Balasore, in Orissa, as close to the Ganges deltaic streams as they could get, as early as 1633, there was, for them, a very great interest in saltpetre, the main ingredient of gunpowder. This naturally formed chemical, of which Bengal and Bihar have been estimated to have contained 70% of the world supply, shipped as ballast, left room for other cargoes. The English, as well as the Dutch, and, later, the French, also set up gunpowder factories beside the Ganges, and exported it completely mixed, with the other requisite components of gunpowder, charcoal and sulphur.
It may also be worthy of note that we can, from the record of the first East India Company vessel to arrive at Balasore, in 1633, assume that from that time, crew members were also recruited locally, laying the foundations of yet another trade, in sailors, that may well, too, have attracted revenues to the Dhaka based administration, as well as what was to become the foundation of Britain’s significant immigrant community today!
The fact that these three nations were to compete, worldwide, over the ensuing two centuries, for maritime and imperial dominance, may be related to that particular interest, for which they were, clearly, ready to pay well, often through such intermediaries as Armenian merchants, as well as the Mughal overseers, to fill coffers in Dhaka.
Some of the most significant of the other strands of these trading interests, including cotton and muslin cloths, and, later, opium, were not necessarily intended for home trade. Both slaves and fabrics were certainly traded by the Dutch to pay for spices in the East Indies, and there is clear evidence of links between such early English merchants as those of Bristol, who took both slaves from the Indian Ocean for transportation to America in the early years of the trade (which suggests that the Indian connections were significant in that development), but also bought cotton cloth from the subcontinent to pay Arab and local African suppliers of slaves for their cargoes. It has, indeed, been estimated that a third of all slave trades out of Africa were paid for with Indian textiles.
Gemstones, both originating in Orissa, as well as other parts of the subcontinent, and entrepot cargoes from South east Asia, as celebrated in the early 17th century novel by Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, were also certainly of trading interest.
In addition to the cotton based fabrics, including the much demanded muslin, silk also became a significant cargo. Although the factories set up beside the Hoogly by such as the Dutch, French, English and Danes were said to have produced some of the best in the world, it was, throughout most of the 17th century, to Dhaka that most of the taxes, dues and bribes for the factories, and the shipping, were, eventually, directed.
Slaves, themselves, were unquestionably also part of the tradable commodities. The Dutch East India Company is recorded as buying, from neighbouring Arakan, slaves who were carried to the East Indies to replace the local workers who were massacred as part of securing the very valuable spice cargoes. It is also clear that slaves of East African origin were traded as domestic servants; including the young male slaves emasculated in Colombo’s Slave Island, to be made suitably saleable for harem service in the grand homes across South and East Asia.
Indigo, the famous dye, certainly also formed a part of the trade, as did other agricultural crops that grew so prolifically in the rich agricultural soils of the Ganges basin. Not to forget rice, which was widely exported to neighbouring nations; and, of course, eventually, the immensely profitable opium.
In many of the local conflicts between Europeans and the Mughal administration, there were also, of course, plenty of revenue earning opportunities, since gold was, usually, the most common of European weapons for resolving such difficulties.
A report of such a “difficulty” in 1647, may be a good example of such potential conflicts, that, like the later confrontation, in the 1680s, between England and the Mughal regime, began with guns, and ended with gold.
Late in 1647, the Company vessel, Farewell, arrived at Balasore. Its arrival happened to coincide with the capture, by a Danish vessel, of a local craft carrying a cargo of elephants. Ivory had been a cargo originating around the Ganges from early times, and the significance of the living animals as social status was still important.
The East India Company’s agent was requested, by the governor of Orissa, to help in negotiating the release of the ship and cargo -- a request that the Danes refused. The governor then decided to hold the Company as responsible as the Danes, “as they are of the same religion” … (religious typecasting it seems, is not, after all, a modern phenomenon!).
Attempting to escape being blockaded, the Farewell came under attack from the Mughal forces, as did Dutch interests. The Farewell was eventually able to escape, using significant gunnery, but both Dutch and English trade was temporarily stopped, until the wheels of governance were, “lubricated.”
Throughout the century, wealth flowed into, and through, Dhaka, in almost unimaginable amounts, and, without doubt, it was during that period that the earliest manifestation of, the “City of Palaces” developed.
Half a century later, the seizure of control of the territories by the English, saw a rapid decline in the wealth and importance of Dhaka, giving way to the rapid rise of Calcutta. The period in which it was, in fact, Dhaka, that to the Mughal administration represented “the paradise of nations,” has a much neglected history of this, today’s capital city of a Bangladesh growing rapidly, in its wealth and trade. Perhaps it would be a little hard to describe it, these days, again, yet, as a “paradise,” but certainly setting fair in that direction.
