Revisiting the ‘Decline of Surat’: Maritime Trade and the Port Complex of Gujarat in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

Ever since Ashin Das Gupta’s book on the decline of Surat, published in 1979, the question of Surat’s decline and Bombay’s rise to prominence as the commercial hub of the western Indian Ocean has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention.1 Das Gupta argued that Surat, the chief port of the Mughal Empire and northern India’s gateway to the Afro-Eurasian maritime world, declined in the early eighteenth century because of the disintegration of the Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman empires and lost its position to Bombay, the headquarters of the English East India Company (EIC) in western India. What precipitated the decline was, according to some scholars, the flight from Surat of merchants and their capital.2 Because a number of merchants fleeing Surat ended up in Bombay, the relevant literature never fails to emphasise an inverse relationship between the two ports. As Das Gupta wrote, ’surat did not decline because Bombay grew, Bombay grew because Surat declined.’3 Das Gupta’s ‘decline of Surat’ paradigm became a fad with many scholars, so much so that they find it hard to accept any view that contradicts or challenges it.4 The aim of this chapter is to move beyond the decline-growth binary between a Mughal port city (Surat) and a colonial port city (Bombay), and to explore the continued dynamism of Surat and Bombay and their respective roles and positions in the rapidly reconfiguring port complex of Gujarat during the region’s transition to a colonial economy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.