ABSTRACT
In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese Crown faced a growing range of problems in its Euro-Asian pepper trade. Like other Europeans, the principal interest of the English in the East, initially at least, was in the procurement of pepper and other spices for the European market. While the English had come to Coromandel in search of textiles for the south-east Asian markets, their attempts to penetrate the Gujarat trade were linked directly to their Euro-Asian trade. In intra-Asian trade, the decline in the Dutch Company exports as well as in those by the Indian merchants engaged in this trade was similarly much more than made up for by the spectacular rise in the English private merchants’ trade with China. The Dutch East India Company was an equally important channel used for the transmission of private savings to Europe.
