Commerce and Culture in the Bay of Bengal 1500-1800

India and South-East Asia have a long history of intensive contacts via the Bay of Bengal. While commerce was probably the most dominant province of such interaction, it also embraced politics, culture and religion. This collection of essays seeks to explore some of these links in the early modern period by looking at the Bay of Bengal region as a unity rather than simply as an agglomeration of distinct political entities.

In the domain of commerce, an important theme explored in the volume is the nature and the extent of the maritime trade carried on between the two regions mainly by the Indian merchants, both in the period prior to the arrival of the Europeans in the Indian Ocean at the end of the fifteenth century, as well as in the period between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The volume also contains contributions dealing with the trade carried on by the Europeans in the Bay of Bengal during these centuries. Contributions in the field of culture and religion include a study tracing the Indian influence in the matter of patterns and designs on the specific varieties of textiles used by different sections of the Thai society and another analysing the strong links between the Singhalese Sangha and the Arakanese and Burmese Theravadin communities.

This collection of essays will be of abiding interest to the historians of both India and South-East Asia as well as to the historians of the Indian Ocean.