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During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, British and American codependence in the India trade heightened, and so too did codependence in British industrial production and American cotton cultivation. American ships and merchants provided ready access for British Indian goods into Napoleon’s Europe, and they supplied Britain with raw cotton from the southern U.S. states. Yet the French Wars also reignited conflict between Britain and the United States, and the resulting embargoes and the War of 1812 magnified the dangers of British dependence on American cotton. By the time of the East India Company’s charter renewal in 1813, British production of India goods and the demand for India’s raw materials had eliminated the benefits believed to have come from the Company’s monopoly.

Even as their Revolution freed Americans from direct British rule and from the East India Company’s monopoly, American merchants and consumers quickly entered into newly codependent relationships with Britain in the India trade. Americans were ideal partners for private British merchants seeking to use their capital and experience outside the East India Company’s monopoly. The U.S. flag increasingly filled the interloping role previously filled by European flags in the port of Ostend in the Austrian Netherlands. The impeachment proceedings against British India’s governor-general Warren Hastings, meanwhile, informed American debate over the making and merits of the 1787 constitution and the proper regulation of the new U.S.-India trade.

In the context of the comprehensive preferential trade agreements (PTAs) signed by India since the mid-2000s, which include liberalization commitments in agriculture, services, and investments, in addition to trade in goods, this chapter provides a critical survey of the available literature and methodologies for analysing trade agreements. The nature of most current analyses prevents an understanding of the economy-wide implications of this shift in India’s trade policy of engaging in multiple PTAs with overlapping commitments. Therefore, going beyond the analysis of tariff liberalization, the chapter attempts to provide an analytical framework for examining the systemic and developmental implications of PTAs. It is argued that the legally binding policy commitments in India’s recent PTAs can have serious repercussions on financial stability, food security, and industrial development.

The eighteenth-century economy of the Indian subcontinent was an uneven one. On the one hand, there were present a rich indigenous commercial tradition; territorial states that respected private property in land and trade; a literate elite running the fiscal administration; and rich cities that were home to highly skilled artisans. But much of that wealth was confined to the riparian, deltaic, and seaboard regions. The greater part of peninsular India consisted of drylands, poor peasants, few roads, slow traffic, few towns, forests, waterless uplands, and uninhabited deserts. With such divergent initial conditions, the onset of globalization and the emergence of British power led to a variety of trajectories, as Chapter 2 shows.

From the late 1970s, theorists of economic liberalization have argued for positive growth, allocative efficiency, and employment effects of reforms in various markets, of which the labour market and export and import markets have been considered the most prominent from the point of view of employment creation. This chapter is about the relationship between trade and employment in the Indian case. The chapter reviews the broad trends in trade and employment from the beginning of the 1990s in India, and provides a review of the theoretical and empirical literature on the trade–employment relationship in general and then specifically for the Indian case.

Economic change in colonial India followed a definite pattern. Chapter 3 describes the pattern with statistical data. The chapter shows that the average rate of growth of national income per capita was low, but that the average picture is misleading since the experiences of agriculture on the one hand and industry and services on the other differed greatly. The presence of dissimilar trajectories complicates the task of explaining the pattern of change. The chapter suggests that instead of asking if colonialism and globalization made India rich or poor, we should be asking why colonialism and globalization made some livelihoods rich and left some others poor. Chapter 3 surveys the statistical data that enables asking question like this one.

Ongoing bilateral disputes and mistrust between Beijing and New Delhi, coupled with China’s growing economic, political and military role, have been important motivators behind India’s engagement with Asia. The relationship between the two countries involves territorial disputes, elements of rivalry for political dominance in Asia but also strong incentives for cooperation. Therefore, the Look East policy has been conceived as an attempt to not only balance and deter but also engage China. India seeks to create a virtuous circle by which engagement with India China will mitigate the consequences of the capacity gap between India and China and will provide India with the economic, military and political resources necessary to alter the Asian power structure in its favour.

This chapter examines the trade model reflected in the Muziris papyrus, contrasting its peculiarities with those of other trade patterns between Egypt and the west coast of India. The history of trade relations between India and Egypt from Antiquity to the Early Modern era may be divided into periods based on the role played by the emporia in the Gulf of Aden, which over time operated either as stopovers for ships sailing all the way from Egypt to India (a direct sea-route system), or as intermediate meeting points for vessels sailing from each end of the sea route (a multi-stage sea-route system). At the time of the Muziris papyrus, while the South India trade still retained the old model, the commercial relationships with the Indus delta and Barygaza may have already evolved towards the multi-stage arrangement, which offered additional options. The westbound trips were able to benefit from the late north-east monsoon, and the eastbound voyages could use the early south-west monsoon as well. In terms of the pepper trade, this meant that while the Roman pepper carriers had to leave India by 13 January, the ships of the medieval pepper trade could stay in India for all of February and part of March.

This chapter examines the commerce and communications of the Early Islamic Red Sea, discussing the ports and hinterlands of the north (Palestine, Egypt & the Hijaz), the Sudan (Wadi al-‘Allaqi, al-Shunqayr, Wadi Baraka), and the south (Yemen & Ethiopia). It discusses the continued expansion of slaving and mining, whilst examining the rise of new trades and industries, including textiles, aromatics and the ‘India trade.’

This chapter studies literary sources that are critical for understanding the extant parts of the Muziris papyrus texts and for reconstructing those parts that are lost. Written several generations before the Muziris papyrus, some passages from Strabo, Pliny, and Periplus give precious information on what were probably consistent features of the South India trade during the first two centuries of the Roman Empire. These features include the items traded, the size of the vessels, the sailing timetables, and the structure of the customs duties. The chapter also considers Ptolemy’s Geography, which was written at a time close to that of the papyrus. Despite the poor placement of South India on its world map, its relevant paragraphs are important, as they provide a more or less contemporaneous perspective of the region’s political landscape.

After decades of mutual indifference, India’s and Australia’s strategic interests are converging. Both countries share increasing apprehension about China’s rise. Yet, despite a common concern regarding Chinese assertiveness and growing trade between the two countries, engagement remains limited. Both states see a lot of risk but few security benefits in appearing confrontational toward China. Moreover, their respective partnerships with the United States constrain the development of their bilateral security relations as they feel no need to deviate from their current parallel trajectory. In that sense the relations between India and Australia illustrate the limits of the Look East Policy. Deep ambivalence persists between the two countries and defence cooperation is largely restricted to soft security and dialogue. Both sides remain cautious about giving the relationship a strategic significance that could be interpreted as the beginning of a coalition against China.

This chapter explores the extent of Italian trade with and transport to the Red Sea and beyond. It focuses on individuals collectively referred to as the Peticius family, or Peticii: a wheat merchant of the first century BC, a wine merchant of the triumvirate period, a prominent traveller between Coptos and Quseir, whose name is known from the Paneion of Wadi Hammamat dated to the end of Augustus’ rule, and a leading wine merchant of the mid-first century AD. The name of the first is unknown, the second and third are both called ‘C. Peticius’, and the fourth is M. Peticius Marsus. This family represents a merchant dynasty, some of whose members became very wealthy thanks to trade with India.