ABSTRACT
If the passage of empires was one defining feature of early modern India, another was Indo-European trade. Maritime trade was well developed in the Indian Ocean region in the 1500s, when the Europeans made footholds in the Malabar Coast and Southeast Asia. They were after Indonesian spices but soon discovered that the means of payment for these needed to be procured locally rather than from Europe, thereby engaging ever more deeply with established channels of trade within Asia. In this pursuit they were sometimes partners and sometimes rivals of the Asian traders. In the western part of the Indian Ocean, a similar pattern of exchange between Africa and Asia had begun to develop centred around the trades in slaves and ivory. A decisive moment of transition came late in the seventeenth century, when Europeans were able to pay for Asian goods with silver procured from the Americas and bought Asian manufactures, mainly cotton textiles, for European markets, thus redirecting an important segment of Asian trade towards Europe.
