The triumph of British trade contributed much to the wealth of the British settlements and thus eventually to sustaining the British war effort in the age of Clive and Hastings. The most spectacular growth in English private trade during the seventeenth century took place on the Coromandel coast. Coromandel was an important textile producing area, specializing in exports to southeast Asia, but also developing trade with western India and the western Indian Ocean. Calcutta consolidated its position as the most important British trading settlement which it had won in the early eighteenth century. Interest in markets to the eastward, however, ran at a very high level among the British traders at all the Indian ports. The British in India were much too strong for them. Lists of ships for the 1790’s show a marked increase in English trade to Manila from India.