The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal 1630-1720

Om Prakash reveals the central role played by Bengal in the Dutch East India Company's activities in India in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century and the resulting integration of India in to the world economy. By the early 1700s, Bengal provided almost 40 percent of value of Asian goods sent to Holland, and over half of all textiles exported from Asia by the Company. Long before this, the Company had carried goods from Bengal all over Asia. Drawing on little-used documents in the General State Archives in The Hague, the author discusses the place of the Company in Bengal from the beginnings of its trading operations there in the 1630s until about 1720.

The book clearly demonstrates Bengal’s crucial part on the development of world trade networks that occurred after the discovery of the Cape route to the East Indies, and analyses the implications of the Company’s trade of Bengal’s economy, with special reference to import of precious metals. It examines not only the role played by Bengal in the Company’s trading activities but the structure  of Indian merchants trade, as well as the system of manufacturing products in the region.