Indian Pilgrims and the Hajj “Bazaar” Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1707–1810

This talk addresses the commercial entanglements of the Hajj pilgrimage from India to the Hijaz over the long eighteenth century. It unravels the roots of what South Asian historians have dubbed the bazaar economy: an indigenous underbelly of goods, capital, and personage that, despite the hegemony of European trade, moved on a large scale between late Mughal India and the Ottoman Middle East. Fundamentally, my argument rests on an inquiry into the global market cultures inaugurated by the trans-Asiatic Hajj. Yet I also seek to show how the early modern pilgrimage economy was not solely based on cash and credit, but crucially, pegged to a sphere of circulation that had its own ideological coordinates of value and exchange, namely the traffic of gifts between various states and individuals.

This study uses ship manifests, epistolary exchanges, and gift inventories from Indo-Persian, Ottoman, and British sources and archives to trace the cadences of the bazaar economy before its subordination to British capital in the modern era. Yet while I underline how the Hajj was crucial to expediting economic exchanges between say, the Nizamate of Arcot and the Red Sea, I also reveal how the early British Company state in India attempted to gain a foothold in the bazaar through frequent interactions with the Sharifs of Mecca. Ultimately, I suggest that due to its position as a fixed bulwark in the monsoon calendar and as an event in which Company traders could not participate, the Hajj was central to forging a lively commerce between South Asia and the Middle East. This study thus stands to put nuance to present understandings of imperial transitions in the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean, when the Company apparently used its bases in Bombay and Bengal to radically transform this transregional arena into a “British lake.”