How did the Tamil merchant become India's first link to the outside world? The tale of the Tamil merchant is a fascinating story of the adventure of commerce in the ancient and early medieval periods in India. The early medieval period saw an economic structure dominated by the rise of powerful Tamil empires under the Pallava and Chola dynasties. This book marks the many significant ways in which the Tamil merchants impacted the political and economic development of south India.

The book focuses on the changes in the trading world of the Tamil merchants in the southern Coromandel region, with the arrival of European trading companies and the concomitant creation of European port enclaves and the rapid expansion of demand for Coromandel cotton textiles. The author uses impressive range of original sources literary, inscriptional and archival to cover a long period of history (beginning with the maritime trade in the Sangam period) to argue that the merchants evolved over the centuries into a distinct class of merchant capitalists with a conscious perception of their identity as an economic and social class.

How did the Tamil merchant become India's first link to the outside world? The tale of the Tamil merchant is a fascinating story of the adventure of commerce in the ancient and early medieval periods in India. The early medieval period saw an economic structure dominated by the rise of powerful Tamil empires under the Pallava and Chola dynasties. This book marks the many significant ways in which the Tamil merchants impacted the political and economic development of south India.

This volume, by offering a score of new insights derived from a wide variety of recent archaeological and textual sources, bring to life an important overseas trading port in Southeast Asia: Quanzhou. During the Song and Yuan dynasties active official and unofficial engagement in trade had formative effects on the development of the maritime trade of Quanzhou and its social and economic position both regionally and supraregionally. In the first part subjects such as the impact of the Song imperial clan and the local élites on these developments, the economic importance of metals, coins, paper money, and changes in the political economy, are amply discussed. The second part concentrates on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of archaeological data and materials, the investigation of commodities from China, their origins, distribution and final destinations, the use of foreign labour, and the particular role of South Thailand in trade connections, thus supplying the hard data underlying the main argument of the book.

Drawing on new research on textile trade and production in the regions that depended on the Indian Ocean, the book contributes to a new understanding of the role that Indian cloth played in the making of the modern world economy.

How did the British colonial administration view the Tamil natives? How did the natives, in turn, view the colonial power brokers? Underscoring a transactional rather than one-way reality of colonial politics, The View from Below is a balancing act of scholarship. Kanakalatha Mukund considers the 'attitudes' and 'responses' as dialogic, whereby the colonial state and indigenous society are locked in a fierce but subtle combat for attention and dominance in the Madras region. The Tamil institution upon which Mukund focuses her study for the most part is the temple. Moving further on from this politically crucial and socially focal site, the study covers a number of other related phenomena: the staging of sectarian and caste conflicts aimed to seize the control of the temples; the new social leadership and patterns of patronage; the construction of identity by aspiring elite groups of both parties; and the folk representations of Poligar rebellions. This book will be useful to historians, anthropologists and specialists on South India, and those interested in the history of Madras.

Even in ancient India, money is always a good thing and everyone wants it. The stories in The Mouse Merchant—selected from the Sanskrit universe, from the period of the late Rig Veda to the twelfth century—tell us how money was dealt with in everyday life in ancient and medieval Indian society. At the heart of these tales is the merchant. Sometimes gullible, sometimes greedy; ingenious at some moments, dim-witted at others; and hopelessly in love with courtesans but also loyal to their wives, our merchant heroes show how innovation in business is sometimes more important than capital. The Mouse Merchant puts these stories into the context of Indian business history, giving not only rare insights into the romance of the ancient seafaring life but also great wisdom about money.