Abstract
From at least the early sixteenth century, Basra has been one of the principal port cities of the Persian Gulf. It was connected through overland trade with the main centers of the Ottoman Empire via Baghdad and Damascus, with Shiraz and Isfahan in Safavid Iran, and by way of maritime trade with commercial emporia throughout the western Indian Ocean basin, from Surat and Coromandel to Mukha. Besides being a sizeable urban center of some 50,000 inhabitants—the largest city on the Persian Gulf littoral in the seventeenth century—Basra was above all a commercial hub.1 The trade flow going through Basra included the region’s most significant export product, dates, as well as horses, most of which were shipped to India, and some other commodities such as nutgalls, buffalo skins, henna, pearls, camels, and madder dye (used in the textile industry in Gujarat).2 But the volume of exports was far outstripped by the import of such commodities as spices and bulk goods such as sugar and coffee and, more importantly, enormous amounts of Indian textiles in myriad varieties. To make up for its structural trade imbalance with India, the Ottoman Empire exported large amounts of bullion and specie to the subcontinent. Basra served as a major way station for this precious metal trade.
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Notes
With some 50,000 inhabitants in the seventeenth century, Basra matched the estimated number of people in Hormuz in its heyday in the early 1500s. See Jean Aubin, “Le royaume d’Ormuz au début du XVIe siècle,” Mare Luso-Indicum 2 (1973): 150.
National Dutch Archives (NA), The Hague, Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) 1135, Geleynssen de Jongh, Gamron to Batavia, 30 March 1641, fol. 663; VOC 1188, Elias Boudaen, Report on Basra, 29 November 1651, fol. 541v. Dates were exported in large quantities, to places all around the Persian Gulf. See Pedro Teixeira, The Travels of Pedro Teixeira, trans. and ed. William Sinclair and Donald Ferguson (London, 1902), 29. Hamilton in the early eighteenth century claimed that Basra annually exported some 10,000 tons of dates.
See Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies, 2 vols., ed. Sir William Foster (London, 1930), 1:52. Pearls from the upper part of the Persian Gulf, collected near the island of Kharg, were especially coveted in India for being heavier and denser than the ones from Tuticorin in India. See NA, VOC 1251, Van Wijck, Gamron to Heren XVII, 6 April 1666, fol. 1232. Horses were more expensive in Basra than in Iran, but at least Muslim merchants were allowed to export them freely. For the authorities of Basra, access to horses was an important aspect of successful campaigns against neighboring tribal formations.
See Dina Rizk Khoury, “Merchants and Trade in Early Modern Iraq,” New Perspectives on Turkey 5–6 (1991): 67.
The recent publication of Willem Floor’s comprehensive study on the Persian Gulf in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries includes two major chapters on Basra. See his The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities 1500–1730 (Washington D. C., 2006). This came out too late to be fully incorporated into the present study. Aside from the classic study by Stephen Hemsley Longrigg, Four Centuries of Modern Iraq (Oxford, 1925), which remains the standard history for the period and the region, there is Dina Rizk Khoury’s excellent article, cited in the previous note, which considers Basra as well as Mosul,
and now Rudi Matthee, “Between Arabs, Turks and Iranians: The Town of Basra, 1600–1700,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 69 (2006): 53–78.
This trend has become prominent in the study of Mughal India. See, for instance, Sinnapah Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast 1650–1740 (Delhi, India, 1986)
and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500–1650 (Cambridge, 1990).
For Safavid Iran, see Rüdiger Klein, “Trade in the Safavid Port City of Bandar Abbas and the Persian Gulf Area (ca. 1600–1680): A Study of Selected Aspects” (PhD diss., University of London, 1994);
and, for a more implied example, Stephen Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600–1750 (Cambridge, 1994).
Hala Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf 1745–1900 (Albany, New York, 1997);
and Thabit A. J. Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth-Century Basra (Albany, New York, 2001).
See K. Heeringa, ed., Bronnen tot de geschiedenis van de Levantsche handel, 2 vols. (The Hague, Netherlands: 1910–17), 2:163; and Jean de Thevenot, Voyages de Mr. de Thevenot en Europe, Asie et Afrique, 3rd ed., 5 vols. (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1727), 4:557–58.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in India 1500–1700 (London, 1993), 76.
Colin Imber, “The Navy of Sülayman the Magnificent,” in Studies in Ottoman History and Law, Colin Imber (Istanbul, Turkey, 1996).
See Rudi Matthee, “The Safavid—Ottoman Frontier: Iraq-i ʿArab as Seen by the Safavids,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 9 (2003): 157–74;
reprinted in Kemal H. Karpat and Robert W. Zens, eds., Ottoman Borderlands: Issues, Personalities, and Political Changes (Madison, WI, 2004).
Le Gouz de la Boullaye, Les voyages et observations du Sieur Boullaye-de la—Gouz (Paris, 1657; repr. 1994), 163–64.
De Thevenot, Voyages, 3:536 and Hamilton, New Account, 1:89. Teixeira, Travels, 29, makes it clear that cereals and rice were grown around Basra as well, but he also mentions imports. Duarte Barbosa in the early sixteenth century claimed that “plenty of wheat” was exported from Basra. (See Duarte Barbosa, The Book of Duarte Barbosa, ed. Mansel Longworth Dames, 2 vols. (London, 1918), 1:89.) The first Portuguese foray into the port of Basra was also designed to purchase wheat and ship it back to Hormuz.
See Ronald Bishop Smith, The First Age of Portuguese Embassies, Navigations and Peregrinations in Persia (1507–1524) (Bethesda, MD, 1971), 59. All of this may have been wheat that had been brought to Basra from the coastal area in Iran. See for this question Khoury, “Merchants and Trade,” 64–65.
See Gilles Veinstein, “Commercial Relations between India and the Ottoman Empire (Late Fifteenth to Late Eighteenth Century): A Few Notes and Hypotheses,” in Merchants, Companies and Trade: Europe and Asia in the Early Modern Era, ed. Sushil Chaudhury and Michel Morineau (Cambridge, 1999), 97–98.
For a discussion of the changes, see A. Hotz, “Cornelis Roobacker’s scheepsjournaal Gamron-Basra (1645); de eerste reis der Nederlanders door de Perzische Golf,” Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, 2nd ser., 24 (1907): 370–71; and introduction by A. Hotz, 344–46.
André Wink, “From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean: Medieval History in Geographic Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44 (2002): 427, draws attention to the instability of rivers and coastlines along the Indian Ocean and the resulting lack of durability of ports and cities in the region.
See also Richard Schofield, “Position, Function, and Symbol: The Shatt al-Arab Dispute in Perspective,” in Iran, Iraq, and the Legacies of War, ed. Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 29–70.
NA, VOC 1135, Geleynssen De Jongh, Gamron to Batavia, 30 March 1641, fol. 663; and VOC 1088, Boudaen, Report on Basra, 29 November 1651, fol. 538v. Manuel Godinho, Intrepid Merchant: Manuel Godinho and His Journey from India to Portugal in 1663, ed. John Correia-Afonso, trans. Vitalio Lobo and John Correia-Afonso (Bombay, India, 1990), 124. Pietro della Valle, traveling from Kharg to Basra in 1625, relates how the pilot of his ship couldn’t find the “mouth of the river of Bassora.” See Della Valle, The Travels, 243.
M. B. Rowton, “Urban Autonomy in a Nomadic Environment,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 32 (1973): 201–15.
For the outbreak of 1044–45/1634–35, see Muhammad Maʿsum b. Khajigi Isfahani, Khulasat al-siyar: Tarikh-i ruzgar-i Shah Safi-yi Safavi (Tehran, Iran: 1368/1989), 195. The epidemics in the late seventeenth century are discussed at the end of this essay.
William Thurston and Edward Pearce, Basra to Company, London, 22 June 1640, in Armenian Merchants of the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries: English East India Company Sources, ed. Vahé Baladouni and Margaret Makepeace (Philadelphia, PA: 1998), 39.
René Barendse, “Reflections on the Arabian Seas in the Eighteenth Century,” Itinerario 25 (2001): 37.
Barthélemy Carré, Le courrier du roi en Orient. Relations de deux voyages en Perse et en Inde 1668–1674, ed. Dirk Van der Cruysse (Paris, 2005), 473.
See also René J. Barendse, “The Long Road to Livorno: The Overland Messenger Services of the Dutch East India Company in the Seventeenth Century,” Itinerario 12, no. 2 (1988): 34.
See R. J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century (Armonk, NY, 2002), 170.
For these fees in 1581, see the report by John Newbury in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 12 vols. (Glasgow, UK, 1905), 8:455.
Vitorino Magelhães-Godinho, L’Economie de l’empire portugais aux XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris, 1969), 772.
Ibid., 769–71. That not just Aleppo but the entire region surrounding it underwent an economic upswing is reflected in the fact that the city of Aintab (modern Gaziantep) witnessed an economic recovery and saw its tax revenue increase dramatically as of the mid-1530s. See Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley, CA, 2003), 28–30.
In this context Rhoads Murphey draws attention to the relatively modest size of the Ottoman fleet deployed in the Indian Ocean. See his review of Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Sea Power and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 58 (1998): 561–63.
Walter Posch, Der Fall Alkâs Mirzâ und der Persienfeldzug von 1548–1549 (Würzburg, Germany, 2000), 87, 350.
G. Schurhammer, Zeitgenössischen Quellen zur Geschichte Portugiesisch-Asien und seiner Nachbarländer zur Zeit des Hl. Franz Xaver (1538–1552), 2nd ed. (Rome, 1962), 230 [2524].
Salih Özbaran, “The Ottoman Turks and the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf, 1534–1581,” Journal of Asian History 6 (1972): 68.
Nicolau de Orta Rebelo, Un voyageur portugais en Perse au début du XVIIe siècle, ed. Joaquim Veríssimo Serrão (Lisbon, Portugal: 1972), 142–43.
In João Teles e Cunha, “Armenian Merchants in Portuguese Trade Networks in the Western Indian Ocean in the early Modern Age,” in Les Arméniens dans le commerce asiatique au début de l’ère moderne/Armenians in Asian Trade in the Early Modern Era, ed. Sushil Chaudhury and Kéram Kévonian (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’homme, 2007), 197–252.
B. J. Slot, The Arabs of the Gulf 1602–1784 (Leidschendam, Netherlands: 1993), 99.
In W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies, China and Persia, 1625–1629 (London, 1884), 661–62;
and Sir William Foster, ed., The English Factories in India, 1624–29 (London, 1909), 324; ‘Ali Pasha of Basra, to the English and Dutch Chiefs at Surat, ca. March 1629.
For this, see Tarik Nafi Hamid, “The Political, Administrative and Economic History of Basra Province 1534–1638” (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 1980), 77–83.
H. Dunlop, ed., Bronnen tot de geschiedenis der Oostindische Compagnie in Perzië, 1611–1638 (The Hague, The Netherlands: 1930), 16, 142, 158; Foster, ed., English Factories, 1622–23, 181, 186–87. The Dutch were explicitly enjoined by their superiors not to get involved in Safavid-Ottoman disputes. See Dunlop, ed., Bronnen, 158–59.
al-Shaikh Fath Allah b. Alwan al-Kaʿbi, Zad al-musafir wa lahnat al-muqim wa al-hadir, ed. Ala’ al-Din Fu’ad, 2nd ed. (Baghdad, 1377/1958), 18–19.
N. de Orta Rebelo, “Relacao da jornada que fez ….,” in Un voyageur portugais en Perse au début du XVIIe siècle, ed. J. Veríssimo Serrão (Lisbon, Portugal: 1972), 143.
Sir William Foster, England’s Quest for Eastern Trade (London, 1933), 313.
Frederick Charles Danvers, List of Factory Records of the Late East India Company (London, 1897), introduction, xxii.
NA, VOC 1146, Constant, Gamron to Batavia, 12 February 1644, fols. 908b, 913b. Also see Willem Floor and Mohammad H. Faghfoory, The First Dutch-Persian Commercial Conflict: The Attack on Qeshm Island, 1645 (Costa Mesa, CA, 2004).
NA, VOC 1425, Van Bullestraeten, Basra to Heren XVII. 26 September 1687, fol. 460v.; Ahmet Tabakoğlu, “The Economic Importance of the Gulf in the Ottoman Era,” Studies on Turkish-Arab Relations 3 (1988): 161.
This figure is given by Hamilton, A New Account, 1:82–3. Abbas al-Azzawi, Tarikh al-ʿIraq bayn al-ihtilalain, 7 vols. (Baghdad, 1954), 5:129, 131, speaks of 100,000 deaths in Baghdad in 1689 and up to 1,000 casualties a day for 1690. Other references to the plague in Basra and Khuzistan in 1691 are found in Carmelite Archives, O. C. D. 184a, Annales de la mission de Bassorah, 1691, fols. 54–5; NA, VOC 1476, Renshagen, Kung to Heren XVII, 19 May 1691, fol. 633a; VOC 1493, Van Leene, Isfahan to Batavia, 13 October 1691, fol. 283b;
and in Rasul Jaʿfarian, Ilal-i bar uftadan-i Safavian (Tehran, 1372/1993), 331. For other cities, see [Vachet], “Journal,” fols. 561–2, 574, 578.
Ashin das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat c. 1700–1750 (Wiesbaden, Germany, 1979; repr. Delhi, 1994), 136.
Rhoads Murphey, “On the Evolution of the Port City,” in Frank Broeze, ed., Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the I6th–20th Centuries (Honolulu, HI: 1989), 227.
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Matthee, R. (2009). Boom and Bust: The Port of Basra in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. In: Potter, L.G. (eds) The Persian Gulf in History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230618459_6
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