The Eastern Routes and Inland Trade

The trading routes eastward from India were very different from the western ones. The voyages to western Asia had been worked by Europeans for a long time; it was a trading world relatively well understood. The ports represented the seaward edge of large inland systems of trade and transport, a well-organized world. In the port cities brokers specializing in different products, in changing money, in acting for foreigners, mediated between the European traders and the local commercial community. ¹ Trade was, for the most part, in the form of freely negotiated contracts between merchants, with state supervision limited to the taking of customs duties, with some monopoly control of certain products. This well-documented world was no longer functioning as well and as profitably by 1720 as it had been in the previous century. The evolution of trade in reaction to economic and political changes only partially understood took numerous forms. The best known movement is that of the European traders. In the early eighteenth century their trade was chiefly on the western routes from India; by the late eighteenth century it had changed to an eastward flow towards the islands of the south-east Asian archipelago, to the Philippines and, above all, to China.