ABSTRACT
The key position of India in the structure of Asian trade was also reflected in the important role of the Gujarati and other Indian trading groups in the conduct of this trade. India's capacity to manufacture the textiles in large quantities and to put them on the market at highly competitive terms made it in some sense the ‘industrial’ hub of the region surrounded by west Asia on one side and southeast Asia on the other. By about the middle of the seventeenth century, then, the Dutch East India Company had become a major participant in intra Asian trade with trading links all along the great arc of Asian trade. It need hardly be stressed that the relationship between the Dutch and the other European Companies on the one hand and the Mughal Indian authorities on the other was a delicately fine tuned one based on a perception of mutual benefit.
