The globalisation of diamonds via East India Company networks in the late-seventeenth century:...

Joshua Ivinson (April 2014)

Reinterpreting the role of non-Europeans inthe ‘English private trade’: The

globalisation of diamonds via East IndiaCompany networks in the late-seventeenth

century

As Tijl Vanneste has observed, in the late-seventeenth century, under the

aegis of the East India Company (EIC), the global trade in Indian diamonds

was “finally stabilized and its organisational framework established.”1

Previously imported irregularly via Portugal, diamonds from the Deccan

plateau - sourced largely from 23 mines in Golconda and 15 in Bijapur2 -

were imported from India to London on with unprecedented scale and

regularity after 1660, from where merchants would re-export them “into

France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Flanders, and other foreign [European]

countrys.”3 As the Portuguese diamond trade collapsed to just 3,000 cruzados

annually in the mid seventeenth-century,4 having previously averaged roughly

150,000 cruzados,5 the English trade boomed: Although Bal Krishna calculated

an annual trade of £92,000 worth of diamonds aboard EIC ships in 1700,6

contemporary accounts of £100,000 of diamonds aboard just three EIC vessels1 Tijl Vanneste, Global Trade and Commercial Networks (London, 2011), p.472 Søren Mentz, The English Gentleman Merchant at work (Copenhagen, 2005), p.110; Henry Howard, ‘A Description of the Diamond-Mines’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 12, 136 (1677), p.9083 Gedalia Yogev, Diamonds and Coral: Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade (Leicester, 1978), p.684 Vanneste, Global Trade, p.465 James Boyajian, The Portuguese trade in Asia under the Hapsburgs (Baltimore, 1993), p.44, table 3 [4 cruzados = 1 English pound sterling]6 Bal Krishna, Commercial relations between India and England (London, 1924), p.312

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or £26,000 exported by Thomas Pitt alone in a single year (according to

accounts which clearly have omissions) suggest that there unofficial

figures are certainly too low.7 By 1729, when the first feasible alternative

source of diamonds was found in Brazil, the market for Indians diamonds was

of sufficiently global character that, according to contemporary accounts,

this competition instantly “put a stop for the present to that Trade of

East India, thô not to the London market” until prices recovered.8 But to

what extent was the globalisation of this local Indian resource essentially

just the work of the Europeans who handled its international shipping, as

previous historians have indicated?

Occurring during what has been referred to as the ‘private trade period’ of

East India trade9 - whereby the EIC increasingly allowed employees and other

fee-payers to partake in individual trade in certain goods – the tendency

has been to see the expansion of the diamond industry in terms of these

internal company developments. As Yogev convincingly demonstrates, before

the ‘private trade period’ began in the 1660s “there is no evidence

whatsoever for the existence of a regular and organised importation of

diamonds into England … Thereafter the situation changed completely.”10 Yet,

while it may be true that “The diamond trade was institutionalized only

7 Mentz, English Gentleman p.121, 125, table 4.28 Lord Tyrawly to the Duke of Newcastle, 2 May 1732, cited in Vanneste, Global Trade, p.509 Emily Erikson and Peter Bearman, 'Malfeasance and the Foundations for Global Trade: The Structure of English Trade in the East Indies, 1601–1833', American Journalof Sociology, 112, 1 (2006), p.19910 Yogev, p.83

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after the European expansion”,11 when this trade is put in its proper global

and Asian context, it becomes doubtful whether the role of these private

European merchants was as all-important as previously been argued.

Crucially, William Methwold claimed in 1625 that the largest and most

productive mines of Golconda were only “lately discovered in this

kingdom”12, which is attested in Dutch sources such as that of Pieter de

Lange,13 indicating that the local Indian factors were equally important in

expanding the trade at this time. Furthermore, the fact that in

Masulipatam, the principle port for the diamond mining regions, there were

32 English free merchants compared to only 18 EIC employees must indicate

that focussing on the diamond trade as predominantly part of an EIC history

is unrepresentative of the interests involved.14

Thanks largely to research on the individual commercial networks of English

and Jewish merchants based in London, current scholarship is successfully

moving “away from this focus on Empire”, however this scholarship has

largely just shifted focus away from the Company and towards the private

interests of the metropole.15 Existing histories have failed to take a

sufficiently global approach and have “exaggerated the role of Europeans in

11 ‘Diamond Industry’, in Joel Mokyr (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Economic History (Oxford, 2003), Vol. 1, p.7612 William Methwold, ‘Relations of the Kingdom of Golchonda (1625)’, in W.H. Moreland, Relations of Golconda in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1931), p.30-113 Ishrat Alam, 'Diamond Mining and Trade in South India in the Seventeenth Century', The Medieval History Journal, 3, 2 (2000), p.29614 Søren Mentz, ‘English private trade on the Coromandel coast, 1660-1690’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, 33 (1996), p.16115 Timothy Davies, British Private Trade Networks in the Arabian Seas, c. 1680 – c. 1760 (unpublished PhD thesis, Warrick, 2012), p.3

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Asian trade [and] … ignored ‘traditional Asian transactions’” in the

diamond trade.16 By analysing these commercial networks in their totality

and by following the commodity chain to its origins, it is clear that other

Asian entrepreneurs, merchants, and political capitalists also played an

invaluable role in globalising the trade Indian diamonds. In this light, it

can be argued that the often neglected influence of changing European’s

demand for diamonds, rather than its domination of supply in the hands of

the EIC, provided a more significant stimulus for the expansion of this

long-distance, cross-cultural trade.

*

In the post-war period, Holden Furber influentially emphasised the

important metropolitan connections that allowed EIC merchants to remit

their private fortunes home from India, particularly through the diamond

trade.17 Following this lead, historians including Ian Bruce Watson and P.J.

Marshall pioneered the study of the private trade of EIC merchants while

underlining its transformative effect on the Indian Ocean economy, key to

which was the “the important role played by the diamond trade for the

remittance of private wealth from Madras and Calcutta.”18 Elizabeth Saxe’s

unpublished PhD which provided an in-depth research of “the wide-spread

interest in using diamonds as the ultimate form of investment and

16 Alam, 'Diamond Mining’, p.29317 Holden Furber, John Company at Work: A Study of European Expansion in India in the Late Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1948)18 Davies, p.257

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remittance to Europe”19 has been equally influential in positioning the

diamond trade into “a more complex 'company history'” that highlighted the

multiple interests of English merchants and networks alongside the

superstructure of the EIC.20

Initially, from as early as 1614, diamonds had been exported to Europe

under the official EIC monopoly.21 However, due to the small size and high

value of the stones, illegal private trade in diamonds was rife. For

example, in 1624 alone three EIC merchants died with smuggled diamonds in

their possession,22 and in 1633 Anthony Verneworthy was found to have

returned home with 2,095 rupies of diamonds, for which he was fined only

minimally, seemingly because of an acceptance that such practice was rife

and that he was still “an able man … ready to do them further service.”23 As

a result, the EIC legalised the private trade of diamonds by its officers

in 1625, and by the 1660s this trade was opened to all EIC members, and

even external merchants, provided certain commission and duties were paid

to the EIC.24 Although the reasoning behind this policy is little discussed

in EIC sources, it is clear that “these ordinances are indicative of the

ultimate tendency to surrender this branch of commerce to private traders,

19 Elizabeth Lee Saxe, Fortune's Tangled Web: Trading Networks of English Entrepreneurs in Eastern India, 1657–1717 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Yale, 1979), p.9620 Francesca Trivellato, 'From Livorno to Goa and Back: Merchant Networks and the Coral-Diamond Trade in the Early-Eighteenth Century', Portuguese Studies, 16 (2000), p 19621 MEMSO CSP (1513-1616), p.30322 Chas.Cornwallis, Richard Furland, and Nathaniel Hallsted, in MEMSO CSP (1622-1624), p.266, 324, 38923 MEMSO CSP (1630-1634), p.39524 Vanneste, p.45

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probably in consideration of the high costs entailed in monitoring such a

trade.”25

As historians have demonstrated, EIC servants of all levels, even those who

were distant and disconnected from the diamond-mining regions, used the

diamond trade to remit money home.26 According to correspondence between EIC

members, diamonds were a “safer and better way of remitting your Mony home”

than more expensive official EIC instruments.27 These remittances were more

significant among the richer governors, notably Thomas ‘Diamond’ Pitt who

remitted £55,190 of the stones during his first four years in Madras,28 but

also included more average EIC members. Even ordinary women with connection

to the EIC in India favoured the diamond trade over secure EIC Bills of

exchange: Ursula O’Niel, widow of a captain of the Madras garrison, and

Mary Lacy, widow of Captain Lacy, had continued to trade in India and remit

money home in diamonds after their husbands’ deaths,29 and Catherine Barker,

who arrived in India as a single woman subsequently returned to England

after a failed marriage, had her wealth remitted to her in diamonds in the

1690s.30 Another woman, Mary Deuatt, asked for money to be remitted to her

by Robert Cranwell in Madras using diamonds, because they were the good

which she could “most easily get ashore [i.e. smuggle].”31 Edward Littleton,

25 Trivellato, 'From Livorno to Goa’, p.20726 P.J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1976), p. 219-22027 Edward Harrison to Robert Adams, 31 January 1721, cited in Davies, p.26028 Mentz, English Gentleman p.8629 Saxe, p.13530 ibid, p.14231 Mary Deuatt to Robert Cranwell, 28th November 1710, cited in Mentz, English Gentlemen, p.121-2

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an EIC factor in Bengal with no other interest in the diamond trade,

typified the widespread interest of English company merchants in that he

“remitted most of his profits to Europe by the established means of

bottomry bonds or diamonds from Masulipatam to England or Holland.”32

Until recently, this financial function remained the only significant

discussion of late seventeenth-century Indian diamonds in Anglophone

literature. This work served to reinforce the idea that European structures

were largely responsible for globalising and modernising the Asian sub-

continent by “facilitating coordination across poorly linked markets” by

attributing the agency in the diamond trade solely to Europeans.33 Recently,

Søren Mentz has even used similar arguments about the structure of diamond

investment and remittance to suggest that it was the diamond trade – not

the ‘country trade’ – that provided successful private traders with funds

and profit;34 thereby side-lining Subrahmanyam and Bayly’s suggestion that

local capital networks of bazar and Mahajan finance were crucial to the

expansion of European shipping in Masulipatnam35 and Ashin Das Gupta’s

notion of an “age of partnership” between European and Asian merchants in

this period.36

32 Saxe, p.184-19133 Erikson and Bearman, p.19734 Mentz, ‘English private trade’, pp.156-173, passim35 Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C.A. Bayly, ‘Portfolio capitalists and the political economy of early modern India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 25, 4 (1988), p.42136 Ashin Das Gupta ‘Indian Merchants in the Age of Partnership, 1500-1800’ in AshinDas Gupta (ed.) Merchants of Maritime India, 1500-1800, Section XIV, p.28-32

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Nevertheless, scholars of the diamond trade have gradually come to

understand the importance of private merchant networks in allowing the

intensification of the diamond trade, thanks largely to research on the

Jewish merchant communities that became involved in the London trade in the

late seventeenth-century. Between 1664 and 1680, the fees that Jewish

merchants had to pay on exporting capital to India and importing diamonds

via the EIC were twice reduced until they equalled member rates, which

encouraged Portuguese Jews, who had experience and knowledge of the diamond

and jewellery trade, to realign themselves to the EIC commercial routes.37

These merchants not only provided capital for diamond purchases – relying

on EIC commissioners such as Nathaniel Chomley and Streyensham Master until

Anglo-Jewish communities were authorised to settle in Madras and Surat in

168538 – but their networks helped create a formalised structure to the

trade that had previously relied on the incidental trading of individuals.

Yogev believes that the existing private trade in diamonds only developed

into “a regular trade by professional merchants” when communities of

Portuguese Jews settled in London and later Madras, thereby linking the

commercial centres of Lisbon, Amsterdam and London in a system in which

consistent consignments of coral, precious metals and emeralds were shipped

from Europe via EIC vessels in exchange for raw diamonds to be processed in

Holland.39 It is therefore certainly true that, while Jewish merchants may

not have started the English diamond trade, they were crucial in

37 Yogev, p.83-438 Alam, p.30439 Yogev,p.88

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“consolidating London’s position in the second half of the seventeenth

century as the largest European market for trade in unpolished diamonds.”40

However, while this research successfully showed “the interdependence of

the chartered monopolistic joint-stock companies and the network of private

merchants”41 it still saw developments within the diamond trade as being

completely driven by European trade structures, albeit now also focused the

personal networks of mainly-Sephardic merchants. In spite of the increasing

emphasis given to the wider commercial networks of both private English

merchants and Jews, the Asian component of these networks remains

neglected. While the role of diaspora networks between London and India

provided an important source of credit in the diamond industry, other

mercantile kin-groups had similar interests in the diamond trade.

Like Jews, Armenian merchants were also key figures in the diamond trade.

As early as 1658, VOC representatives stated that they were being squeezed

out of the diamond trade because the Armenian competition had driven prices

up 40%.42 In Surat, a French envoy complained that Armenians, along with

Sephardim, were controlling the diamond trade there,43 while a significant

group of Armenian merchants were “integrated as ‘portfolio capitalists’

into the higher echelons of power” at the Golcondan court at Hyderabad,

40 Mentz, English Gentleman (Copenhagen, 2005), p.11841 Trivellato, ‘From Livorno to Goa’, p.21542 Vanneste, p.4543 Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers (London, 2009), p.236

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allowing them to direct invest in the diamond trade at its source. 44

Crucially, these often-itinerant merchants traded via an alternative route

to Europe – by land, via their communities in Isfahan and New Julfa –

completely outwith the EIC infrastructure: A tomar (account roll) preserved

in Venice summarises the typical transactions of one Armenian agent, who

was consigned to source diamonds from intermediaries in Surat in 1673 and

then told to travel through Julfa, Izmir, Constantinople, and Frank’stan

[i.e. Europe, notably Venice and Livorno] to sell his merchandise.45 This

meant that they were able to directly access different target markets, such

as Italy, Eastern Europe, or Russia, where Armenians presented a diamond-

studded throne to Czar Alexei in 1659.46

The success of this competing route motivated the EIC to cooperate and

encourage Armenian trade just as it had with Jewish capitalists. Armenians

were found at Madras as early as 166647 and in Bombay two years later, where

an Armenian church was later founded.48 In 1688 the EIC entered into an

official agreement with the ‘Armenian nation’ in order to “alter and invert

the ancient course of their trade.” The privileges offered demonstrate the

value the EIC placed on attracting the Armenian diamond trade in

particular: Diamonds could be freighted via the EIC for 2%, as opposed to

44 Sebouh Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of ArmenianMerchants from New Julfa (Berkley, 2010), p.5045 Ibid, p.7446 Ibid, p.15047 ibid ,p.5148 Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800 (Oxford, 1976), p.90

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the 5% chargeable on most goods, which was even less than “persons in

England doe pay … for diamonds and other precious stones.”49

The importance of these various mercantile groups in the diamond trade

effectively challenges existing attempts to define the diamond trade in

terms of a ‘company history’. The unrestricted nature of the trade was

clear to contemporaries, such as Abbé Raynal, who observed several decades

later that, “None of the [European] companies … had any concern in the

trade of diamonds; which was always left to private merchants, and by

degrees fell entirely into the hands of the English, or the Jews and

Armenians.”50 Indeed, as well as these more coherent groups, numerous

individual traders from various regions were also able to partake in the

industry on a smaller, personal scale , albeit often outwith the EIC route:

Venetians who travelled overland via Syria to “specially to deale in

stones”;51 itinerant Turkish diamond merchants;52 and a wide range of Dutch

and French adventures who acted as commissioners and dealers without any

great affiliation to their own country’s India Companies (which had far

less luck in integrating the inherently-intractable diamond trade into

their own spheres53).

49 ‘[EIC] Court Minutes, 22 June 1688 [Trade Agreement]’, in Vahé Baladouni and Margret Makepeace, Armenian Merchants of the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries: English East India Company Sources (Philadelphia, 1998), no.112, p.86-850 Abbé Raynal, quoted in Trivellato, Familiarity of Strangers, p.22451 Arthur C. Burnel (ed.), The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten, 1598 (London, 1885), Vol. 1, p.20552 Gilles Veinstein, ‘Commercial relations between India and the Ottoman Empire’, in Sushil Chaudhury and Michel Morineau, Merchants, Companies and Trade: Europe and Asia in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 1999), p.10053 Mentz, English Gentleman, p.117

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However, perhaps more importantly, this focus on imported capital and

diaspora has obscured, or rather ignored, the crucial role of native Indian

merchants in the earlier stages of the commodity chain. It was Indian

merchant adventures, not Europeans, who oversaw the extraction of the

diamonds. These mines were generally rented by local elites to sub-

contractors, who would then attract the investment of numerous lesser

entrepreneurs. According to Methwold, one revenue farmer rented the mines

at Golconda for 300,000 pagodas and sublet the area “to others by square

measures according as they agree, in which some gaine, others lose, as in

all other adventures.”54 These sublets could often sold on a daily or even

hourly basis, occasionally even to individual miners to whom the contractor

extended credit. 55 Europeans had no input at this stage in the industry:

Only once, in 1675, was an EIC merchant – the diamond commissioner Robert

Freeman – reported to have purchased revenue farms from the Sultan of

Golconda, and he withdrew from this business within a year after he was

reprimanded by the company.56 Instead, the extraction of diamonds was

organised with adequate efficiency for European traders to take little

interest in this process, since they were still able to obtain a sufficient

supply at an acceptable price. Contemporary figures of 30,000 or even

54 Methwold, p.3255 Makrand Mehta, Indian Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Historical Perspective (Delhi, 1991), p.96; Teotonio R. de Souza, ‘A New Account of the Diamond Mines of the Deccan’ in A.R. Kulkarni, M.A. Nayeem, and R.R. de Sourza (eds.), Mediaeval Deccan History (Mumbai,1996), p.12756 Mentz, ‘English private trade’, p.163

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60,000 at certain mines, while evidently exaggerated, show that Asian

commercial interests oversaw a competent and thriving production.57

Furthermore, the local trade between these mines and European re-exporters

was similarly described as being “carried by Moslem and Gentu merchants,

with whom we [European traders] cannot well interfere.”58 Although their

shorter migration has been less documented and studied, the activities of

Gujarati middle-men represented “a true trading Diaspora” of huge

significance.59 In the mid-seventeenth century, 3,000 to 4,000 migrant Bania

merchants apparently lived in villages nearby the Kollur mines,60 and would

regularly travel to Surat, Dabhol, Goa, and Masulipatam by land in journeys

that would take up to 80 days.61 The key role primary trading role was

elucidated by the EIC merchant Henry Howard in 1677:

“the Banians of Guzzerat, who for some Generations have forsaken their own Country to take up the

Trade, in which they have had such success, that ‘tis now solely engros’d by them; who corresponding

with their Country-men in Surra, Goa, Colonda, Visiapore, Agra and Dillee, and other places in India,

furnish them all with Diamonds.”62

57 Karin Hofmeester, ‘Working for Diamonds from the 16th to the 20th Century’ in Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds.), Working on Labor (Leiden, 2012), p.25-6; Alam, p.29958 ‘Anonymous [Dutch] Relations, c.1614?’ in W.H. Moreland, Relations of Golconda in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1931), p.6959 Hofmeester, p.4560 Alam, p.29661 Sanjay Subrahmanyan, The Political Economy of Southern India, 1500-1650 (Cambridge, 1990), p.8062 Howard, ‘A Description of the Diamond-Mines’, p.915

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Europeans rarely entered this stage of the trade due to the success of

Indian merchants in this channelling diamonds from the mines to European

purchasers. The Indians’ efficiency in this role meant that the EIC saw no

need to set up a factory at the Golcondan court because it was believed

that the company benefited more from “local dealers bringing the stones to

Masulipatam, which was actually closer to the mines that Hyderabad was.”63

Scholarship of cross-cultural commercial links, such as that of Tijl

Vanneste and Francesca Trivellato, has only hinted at the equally vital

role of these merchants who were “more than intermediaries between mine-

owners and Europeans”, but instead formed an equal part of the “extensive

commercial networks” which they have uncovered.64 From the early

seventeenth-century, sources indicate the existence of vital personal and

profession ties between Indian intermediaries and European diamond trades.

In the 1610s, “two Gujarati merchants dealing in diamonds” informed Jacques

de Coutre that they were associates of the Portuguese da Silveria brothers,

65 while the Golcondan Sar-i-Khail reportedly had wide-ranging business

relations with the Portuguese General of Ceylon.66 Later in the century

these links, now involving greater numbers of London and EIC merchants,

only seemed to grow stronger: Governor Thomas Pitt of Madras obtained his

diamond fortune by regularly entrusting significant sums of money to an

63 Saxe, p.4864 Vanneste, p.4365 de Souza, ‘A New Account’, p.126-766 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 'Persians, Pilgrims and Portuguese: The Travails of Masulipatnam Shipping in the Western Indian Ocean, 1590–1665', Modern Asian Studies, 22, 03 (1988), p.519

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Indian agent named ‘Ramchund’;67 Govenor Beynon’s personal papers show that

the diamond merchant Cashi Chetty Andeappah died with credit owed by a long

list of EIC merchants and successive governors of Madras;68 and Kasi Viranna

and Beri Timmanna were sought out by English diamond merchants due to their

invaluable friendships the Golconda governors.69 Most interestingly,

Trivellato has uncovered correspondences between native Indian merchants

and London-based Sephardim that demonstrate the astonishingly effective

integration of these merchants into international trust-based networks:

Egras and Silvera, two London Jewish merchants, relied heavily on native

Hindu intermediaries, namely Gopala and Nilea Camotin in Goa, in order to

procure diamonds. These cross-cultural arrangements, in which both parties

extended credit to each other and occasionally had to wait up three years

for a return from their investments, were only possible through strong and

sustained personal ties of trust which were maintained over many decades,

despite it being practically impossible for either partner to prevent

fraud, embezzlement, or the theft of their goods.70

While this trend may well support Erikson and Bearman’s argument that “the

integration of the world trade system under the aegis of the EIC was the

unintended by-product of systematic individual malfeasance (private

trading)” by fostering deep personal commercial ties in certain regions,71 67 Bruce Watson, Foundations for Empire (New Delhi, 1980), p.26868 S. Arasaratnam, 'Trade and political domination in South India', in Patrick Tuck(ed.), The East india Company 1600-1858 (London, 1998), p.14869 Kanakalatha Mukund, The Trading World of the Tamil Merchant (Chennai, 1999), p.7170 Trivellato, Familiarity of Strangers, p.23871 Erikson and Bearman, p.195

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it must be emphasised that these intermediaries were in no way victims of

EIC domination but equal beneficiaries of trade. Furthermore, while Pearson

may have a point when claiming that “In none of [the Indian] elite

preoccupations did maritime affairs play any role at all”,72 the diamond

trade, somewhat uniquely, appears to have befitted form local governmental

interest and stimulus in India. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam has pointed out, the

Persianate rulers the principle diamond-mining region of Golconda provided

an exception to this Pearson’s statement and facilitated the exploitation

and global trade of diamonds, which crucially cannot “be explained through

the use of the concept of the trading 'diaspora.'”73 According to

contemporaries, Golconda’s principle port of Masulipatam was “the most

famous market on the Coast”74 and its merchants were said to “equip many

ships to diverse quarters, since the land is great and this nation are

merchants by nature.”75 William Methwold focused extensively on the area in

his ‘Relations’, in which he reports that locally build vessels of up to 600

tons sailed “to Mocha in the Red Sea, to Achyne upon Sumatra, to Arrecan,

Pegu, and Tannassery on the other side the Gulfe, and to many ports on

their own coasts”, once with exports of a “store of diamonds, which were

sold to great benefit … when the myne was first discovered.”76 This trade

72 M.N. Pearson, ‘India and the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century’, in Ashin Das Gupta and M.N. Pearson (eds.), India and the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800 (Oxford, 1987), p.7973 Subrahmanyam, 'Persians, Pilgrims and Portuguese’, p.530; Saxe, p.20-174 Anthony Schorer, ‘Brief Relations of the Trade of the Coromandel Coast (1615?)’ in W.H. Moreland, Relations of Golconda in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1931), p.5575 The Heren XVII (VOC) , 1651, cited in Subrahmanyam, 'Persians, Pilgrims and Portuguese’, p.53076 Methwold, p.36, 38

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was dominated by a ship-owning Muslim elite under a system of “political

capitalism”77 in which the three most important men in the kingdom – the

Sultan, Mir Jumla and Sar-i-Khail – all profited from trade and from

supplying diamonds to Europeans, until the Mughal conquest in 1687.78

Clearly, there had existed a modest but fragmented trade in diamonds before

the arrival of Europeans. In seminal works, both Andre Gunder Frank and

Janet L. Abu-Lughod have emphasised the observation, first made by Holden

Furber, that “Golconda diamonds found their way to all parts of Asia”79

before the arrival of Europeans. Yet while such examples demonstrate that

Asian trade networks had the capacity to carry out significant long

distance trading – thereby reinforcing the fact that Indian traders and

middle-men continued to fulfil significant trading roles – it is equally

evident that European merchants saw little profit in supplying this limited

demand. Despite Garcia de Orta’s deduction in 1563 that “In Cambaia and

Martavam and Pegu … there is a good market for diamonds, as there are none

there”,80 only in isolated cases did well-connected European merchants

attempt to engage in an inter-Asian diamond trade; a French cartel that

occasionally traded diamonds between the Golcondan court and Siam or

77 John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1995), p.15578 Subrahmanyam, 'Persians, Pilgrims and Portuguese’, p.51979 Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (London, 1998), p.86-7; Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, Parts 1250-1350 (Oxford, 1991), p.28; quoting Holden Furber, Rival empire of Trade, p.26080 Garcia de Orta, Colloquies on the simples & drugs of India (1563), Sir Clements Markham (ed. and trans.), (London, 1913), p.346

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Persia,81 and a French vessel that left Surat with a cargo of diamonds for

the King of Siam in 1681 being rare examples.82

Instead, it was Europe, and France in particular, that provided the most

significant demand, due largely to new baroque fashions and the rising

prosperity of the bourgeoisie in Europe.83 When taking the changing nature

of this European consumption into account, it appears entirely possible

that this demand, rather than supply-side developments within the EIC’s

private trade, constituted the true dynamic stimulus underlying the growth

of the organised diamond trade.

The consumption of Louis XIV provides the clearest example of the rising

status and demand for diamonds in Europe at this time. While also

influencing concepts of taste, the demand of the King himself was hugely

significant in its own right: Before the visit of the Turkish ambassador in

1669, Louis had purchased an unprecedented 1,500,000 livres of diamonds,

including 900,000 from Tavernier.84 Later, in 1715, upon the visit of a

Persian delegate, Louis sought to “demonstrated just how far he had taken

the art of the diamond” and cast himself in the image of the idealist, all-

powerful oriental despot by displaying his entire 12,000,000 livre

collection.85

81 Saxe, p.28982 Aniruddha Ray, The Merchant and the State: The French in India, 1666-1739 (New Delhi, 2004), Vol.1, p.15483 Hofmeester, ‘Working for Diamonds’, p.3084 Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France, Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the Ancien Règime (Oxford, 2008), p.25485 Joan E. DeJean, The Essence of Style (New York, NY ,2005), p.170-1

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Royal influence helped France become the most significant re-export market

for London diamonds.86 By 1696 the Compagnie des Indes Orientales appeared as the

majority purchaser of some of the EIC’s largest cargoes.87 In the 1710s

Thomas Pitt maintained contacts in France with the specific aim of selling

his 410-carat prize stone there, and eventually sold it to the French

Regent for £124,000 in 1717,88 where it contributed to a diamond-laden

outfit described by Saint Simon as winning the prize for bon goût (good

taste).89

The coverage of d’Orleans’ extreme act of orientalist consumption in an

English newspaper demonstrates the international profusion of this

sentiment through its description of the diamond as “the greatest that was

ever was seen in the worlds, and not only so, but of the most perfect

beauty”. The 20,000,000 livre price, 100,000 livre cost of cutting, and the

150,000 livre price of the offcuts were all stated to demonstrate that the

exotic stone was so luxurious, desirable and excessive that “there was

nobody found rich enough in England to buy it.”90 Meanwhile, similar

patterns were felt in Germany where, in 1707, a London merchant complained

to his associates at Madras that, following a Swedish raid into Saxony,

“there is [temporarily] no demand for diamonds from thence which there used

to be”.91

86 Mentz, English Gentleman, p.11087 Saxe, p.25688 Mentz, English Gentleman, p.12489 Saint Simon, cited in McCabe, p.25590 Saturday’s Post, 6 October 171691 Francis Chamberlain to Robert Nightingale, 10th April 1707, cited in Yogev, p.67

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The sudden new demand for diamonds across Europe in the late seventeenth

century is evident in the letters of a prominent Jewish jeweller in

Hamburg, who stated in the 1690s that “the trade in gems was not

flourishing [in the 1660s] as it is now, and the burghers and young engaged

couples among the gentiles seldom or never wore jewels.”92 Only later, due

to the rising prosperity of these classes, coupled with their changing

tastes –from gold to gemstones according to Glückel93- did diamonds become

an important item of trade for such merchants.94 By the end of the

seventeenth century, the status of diamonds had risen significantly and

were seen as one of the “publically recognised criteria for gauging social

success and social property”95

Meanwhile, in India, demand was still largely restricted to rulers and

subahdars. There, diamonds were generally collected as a show of power by

rulers who retained ownership of the any stone found above a certain weight

in their mines:96 The Mughal throne for example, “sprinkled over with

rubies, emeralds and diamonds and the throne valued at four kourours of

roupies”, clearly elicited the desired respect from European travellers. 97 As

such, these diamonds were generally slowly amassed rather than traded:

“These jewels never leave the palace” reported François Catrou, and were

92 M. Lowenthal (ed.), The memories of Glückel of Hameln (New York, 1932), p.33-493 Ibid, p.3494 Yogev, p.8995 Marina Pointon, ‘Jewellery in Eighteenth Century England’ in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds.), Consumer and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650-1850 (Manchester, 1999), p.13896 De Orta, p.345; Methworld, p.31-297 Francois Bernier, ‘Travels in the Mogul Empire, AD 1656-1668', Archibald Constable (ed.) and Irving Brock and V.A.Smith (trans .), (London, 1891), p.268

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“placed in a condition rendering them incapable of being placed on the open

market.” Even when Catrou came across a fair near the Kashmiri capital that

was selling diamonds, he reports that only the local ruler and his extended

family were allowed to purchase them.98

Hofmeester may argue that “there was a large internal consumer demand in

India” beyond that of rulers, but the actions of the European and diaspora

merchants groups indicates that the demand for diamonds in particular was

far inferior to in Europe. Although she references De Coutre’s statement

that any man with wealth would purchase precious stones, these were more

commonly rubies or emeralds, with diamond only rarely mentioned as

offsetting other jewels worn by women.99 Indeed, the Indian consumer

appeared to prefer there more colourful gemstones, which were often

imported from South East Asia and Ceylon.100 In the sixteenth century de

Orta found that in India “and in all the world among lapidaries they think

more of an emerald or of a ruby, which have more value … than of a

diamond,”101 a fact also observed by Tavernier a century later.102 Based on

similar findings that “Diamonds are not esteemed” in China and Japan, the

EIC curtailed its own plans to for a ‘country trade’ in diamonds.103

98 https://archive.org/stream/historymoguldyn00catrgoog#page/n189/mode/2up][Catrou,p,291, p.16399 Hofmeester, ‘Working for Diamonds’, p.29-30100 Methwold, p.39; Bruce P. Lenman, ‘The East India trade in Non-Precious Materialsfrom Sir Thomas Rose to Diamond Pitt’, in H.V.Bowen, Company and the Trade Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby (eds.), The World of the East India Company (Leicester, 2002), p.107101 Francois Catrou, History of the Mogul Dynasty in India (1826), p.342102 Saxe, p.296103 MEMSO - Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, East Indies, China and Persia (1625-1629), p.379

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Moreover, the Indian taste for diamonds appears to have been for rough

stones – because “a virgin is more valuable than a woman who is not one”,

de Orta was told104 - rather than the European fashion for a ‘brilliant’ cut

with a multifaceted ‘pavilion’ top.105 The two fashions arguably became so

divergent that it was impossible to service both, and in the 1670s John

Freyer advised Europeans to buy the stones which came “short of the

Fringies in Fancy” in India, and leave well alone stones cut for the Indian

market.106

The trade in Indian diamonds, unlike other private ‘country trading’

commodities, became remarkably focused towards European demand: Both

William Jersey and Robert Mohun, two leading country traders based in

Masulipatam between the 1660s and 1680s, engaged in an extensive country

trade with South East Asia, as well as working as diamond commissioners who

shipped diamonds back to Europe. However, despite being heavily involved in

trade to Aceh, Pegu, Siam and Persia, there is little evidence that any of

the diamonds in which both men dealt were ever outbound on these routes.

Instead they were destined for the more profitable European markets from

which their working capital was exported.107

*

104 Garcia de Orta, p.345105 Hofmeester, ‘Working for Diamonds, p.35106 John Freyer, A New Account of East-India and Persia in Eight Letters being Nine Years Travels, Begun 1672 and Finished 1681 (London, 1698), p.113107 Mentz, English Gentleman, p.163-6

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Therefore, while EIC infrastructure and the private profiteering of many of

its merchants were hugely important in linking Indian diamonds with

European demand, they were but part of a much more complex commodity chain.

In the narrow sense, it may well be true that the “the diamond trade was

controlled by Europeans” in the seventeenth century.108 The high-value, low-

bulk nature of diamonds made them an unparalleled tool for remitting money

home for ordinary Europeans in India who were otherwise unconnected with

the trade. As the century progressed EIC realised that the ease of

smuggling made diamonds “a resource best fostered through informal rather

than formal relations”109 and so in deregulating the industry they allowed

private commercial motivations to drive the industry, while charging fees

for the shipping to London that they still monopolised.

However, as recent work on commercial networks has shown, “It is nonsense

to suggest that the EIC was in any way dominant in some sort of global

‘system’” of diamond trading at this time.110 Instead, its merchants, acting

privately and not in company interests, merely “formed part of the private

trading network” which was of far greater proportions, acting as

commissioners for European capitalists and independent merchants, just as

other groups did.111 Indian ‘adventurers’, merchants, and intermediaries

dominated primary stages of the supply chain just as European monopolised

freighting. They were joined by diaspora groups, whose kin-based business

108 Saxe, p.113, 308109 Trivellato, ‘From Livorno to Goa’, p.209110 Lenman, p.108111 Mentz, English Gentleman, p.112

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networks often crucially connected both sides of the trade, and who

frequently – in the case of Jewish and Armenian groups – forwarded the

capital needed to carry out the trade.

The networks that underpinned the diamond industry were therefore not

definitively European, rather the EIC had “extended its trading connections

to truly global proportions, often by interacting with other Europeans, and

always by working closely with Asian commercial and financial groups.”112 It

would seem that it was this successful utilisation and fostering of

independent commercial networks – rather than ‘protection cost’ theories

that have been used to elucidate the success of the EIC monopolises113 –

that allowed the India-London route to gain the competitive advantage in

this private, largely unregulated trade.

Nevertheless, the force that enhanced the diamond industry the most between

1660 and 1720, while also naturally was directing it into European hands,

was surely that of demand. Existing scholarship has shown that “diamonds

were forever in demand as a means of transporting one’s capital relatively

safely back to Europe”114, however, the effectiveness of this function

relied on their being an even greater demand for the product back home.

Fashions of Baroque Orientalism115 and the gradually rising demand of a

uniquely European consumer – that of the bourgeois middling sorts – meant

112 Lenman, p.108113 Niels Steensgaard, Carracks, caravans and companies: The structural crisis in the European-Asian trade in the early 17th century (Copenhagen, 1973), pp.60-113114 de Souza, ‘A New Account’, p.125115 Nicholas Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford, 2009), pp.6-7 and passim

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that Europe offered a regular, profitable market for diamond exports that

could not be matched by that of Asia. It would therefore appear that the

European involvement in the diamond trade was not exaggerated per se, but

rather misfocused on supply-side factors in which, when observing the

commodity chain as a whole, other native and diaspora groups played equally

significant roles. Instead, the dynamic amplification of demand for

diamonds in Europe should receive a far greater focus for directing

commerce towards Europe and in transforming industry into a regular, global

trade in the late seventeenth-century ‘private trade period’.

25


Bibliography

Primary Sources: Collected Volumes

Moreland, W.H. (ed.), Relations of Golconda in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1931)Baladouni, Vahé and Makepeace, Margret (eds.), Armenian Merchants of the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries: English East India Company Sources (Philadelphia, 1998)

Primary Sources: Books

Arthur C. Burnel (ed.), The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten, 1598 (London, 1885)Garcia de Orta, Colloquies on the simples & drugs of India (1563), Sir Clements Markham (ed. and trans.), (London, 1913)Francois Bernier, ‘Travels in the Mogul Empire, AD 1656-1668', Archibald Constable (ed.) and Irving Brock and V.A.Smith (trans .), (London, 1891)Francois Catrou, History of the Mogul Dynasty in India (1826) [https://archive.org/details/historymoguldyn00catrgoog]Henry Howard, ‘A Description of the Diamond-Mines’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 12, 136 (1677)John Freyer, A New Account of East-India and Persia in Eight Letters being Nine Years Travels, Begun 1672 and Finished 1681 (London, 1698)M. Lowenthal (ed.), The memories of Glückel of Hameln (New York, 1932)

Primary Sources: Other

Saturday’s Post, 6 October 1716 (http://find.galegroup.com/)

Medieval and Early Modern Sources Online - Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, EastIndies, China and Japan [abbr. MEMSO CSP] http://www.tannerritchie.com/books/19/ (1513-1616), (1622-1624), (1630-1634)

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Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, Parts 1250-1350 (Oxford, 1991)Aslanian, Sebouh. From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkley, 2010)Boyajian, James. The Portuguese trade in Asia under the Hapsburgs (Baltimore, 1993)DeJean, Joan E. The Essence of Style (New York, NY ,2005)Dew, Nicholas. Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford, 2009)Frank, Andre Gunder. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (London, 1998)John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1995)Furber, Holden. John Company at Work: A Study of European Expansion in India in the Late Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1948)Furber, Holden. Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800 (Oxford, 1976)Krishna, Bal. Commercial relations between India and England (London, 1924)

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Marshall, P. J., East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1976)McCabe, Ina Baghdiantz. Orientalism in Early Modern France, Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the Ancien Règime (Oxford, 2008)Mehta, Makrand. Indian Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Historical Perspective (Delhi, 1991)Mentz, Søren. The English Gentleman Merchant at work (Copenhagen, 2005)Mokyr, Joel (ed.). The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Economic History (Oxford, 2003), Vol. 1Mukund, Kanakalatha. The Trading World of the Tamil Merchant (Chennai, 1999)Ray, Aniruddha. The Merchant and the State: The French in India, 1666-1739 (New Delhi, 2004), Vol.1Steensgaard, Niels. Carracks, caravans and companies: The structural crisis in the European-Asian trade in the early 17th century (Copenhagen, 1973)Subrahmanyan, Sanjay. The Political Economy of Southern India, 1500-1650 (Cambridge, 1990)Trivellato, Francesca. The Familiarity of Strangers (London, 2009)Vanneste, Tijl. Global Trade and Commercial Networks (London, 2011)Watson, Bruce. Foundations for Empire (New Delhi, 1980)Yogev, Gedalia. Diamonds and Coral: Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade (Leicester, 1978)

Articles

Alam, Ishrat. 'Diamond Mining and Trade in South India in the Seventeenth Century', The Medieval History Journal, 3, 2 (2000)Arasaratnam, S. 'Trade and political domination in South India', in Patrick Tuck (ed.), The East india Company 1600-1858 (London, 1998)Das Gupta, Ashin. ‘Indian Merchants in the Age of Partnership, 1500-1800’ in Ashin Das Gupta (ed.) Merchants of Maritime India, 1500-1800

Erikson, Emily and Bearman, Peter. 'Malfeasance and the Foundations for Global Trade: The Structure of English Trade in the East Indies, 1601–1833', American Journalof Sociology, 112, 1 (2006)Hofmeester, Karin. ‘Working for Diamonds from the 16th to the 20th Century’ in Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds.), Working on Labor (Leiden, 2012)Lenman, Bruce P. ‘The East India trade in Non-Precious Materials from Sir Thomas Rose to Diamond Pitt’, in H.V.Bowen, Company and the Trade Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby (eds.), The World of the East India Company (Leicester, 2002),Mentz, Søren. ‘English private trade on the Coromandel coast, 1660-1690’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, 33 (1996)Pearson, M.N. ‘India and the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century’, in Ashin Das Gupta and M.N. Pearson (eds.), India and the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800 (Oxford, 1987)Pointon, Marina. ‘Jewellery in Eighteenth Century England’ in Maxine Berg and HelenClifford (eds.), Consumer and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650-1850 (Manchester, 1999)

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de Souza, Teotonio R. ‘A New Account of the Diamond Mines of the Deccan’ in A.R. Kulkarni, M.A. Nayeem, and R.R. de Sourza (eds.), Mediaeval Deccan History (Mumbai, 1996)Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 'Persians, Pilgrims and Portuguese: The Travails of Masulipatnam Shipping in the Western Indian Ocean, 1590–1665', Modern Asian Studies, 22, 03 (1988)Subrahmanyam Sanjay. and Bayly, C.A. ‘Portfolio capitalists and the political economy of early modern India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 25, 4 (1988)Trivellato, Francesca. 'From Livorno to Goa and Back: Merchant Networks and the Coral-Diamond Trade in the Early-Eighteenth Century', Portuguese Studies, 16 (2000)Veinstein, Gilles. ‘Commercial relations between India and the Ottoman Empire’, in Sushil Chaudhury and Michel Morineau, Merchants, Companies and Trade: Europe and Asia in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 1999)

Other

Davies, Timothy. British Private Trade Networks in the Arabian Seas, c. 1680 – c. 1760 (unpublished PhD thesis, Warrick, 2012)Saxe, Elizabeth Lee. Fortune's Tangled Web: Trading Networks of English Entrepreneurs in Eastern India,1657–1717 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Yale, 1979)

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