Ancient and Medieval Trade in the Indian Subcontinent

The Indian subcontinent has one of the oldest and most continuous trading histories in the world. Archaeological evidence from the Indus Valley Civilisation (roughly 3300–1300 BCE) — standardised weights and measures, uniform brick sizes across widely separated sites, and Harappan seals found as far away as Mesopotamia — shows that cities such as Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, and Lothal (which had a specially built dockyard) were already part of an organised, long-distance trading network reaching West Asia, several thousand years before commerce as a formal subject existed.

Through the ancient and medieval periods, the Indian subcontinent earned a lasting international reputation for a handful of highly prized goods. Spices — particularly black pepper and cardamom from the Malabar coast — were so valuable to Mediterranean and West Asian buyers that the Roman writer Pliny the Elder famously complained about the drain of Roman gold to India in exchange for them. Fine cotton and silk textiles (the famously delicate muslin of Bengal, and the silks of the south) were exported widely, and precious stones, pearls, and diamonds (notably from the Golconda region) drew traders from across Asia and Europe. This reputation for high-value finished goods — not raw materials — is an important point to hold onto, because it stands in sharp contrast to what happened to Indian trade under colonial rule (covered in the next section).

This trade moved along well-established routes of two broad kinds. Overland routes included the famous Silk Route connecting north-western India to Central Asia and China, and internal trunk routes such as the Uttarapatha (the 'northern route', linking the Gangetic plain to the north-west) and the Dakshinapatha (the 'southern route', linking the Deccan plateau to the ports of the peninsula). Maritime routes were equally important: ports such as Muziris and other centres on the Malabar coast, Bharuch (Barygaza) on the west coast, and Kaveripattinam on the Coromandel coast connected Indian trade by sea to the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and further east to Southeast Asia and China — traders timed their voyages to the seasonal monsoon winds, using them to sail out and to return.

The map of ancient and medieval Indian trade routes can be summarised as follows: