Emigration Branch. 1916 Source

Emigration Branch. Source Source A market by tariff barriers, Indian textiles now faced stiff competition in other international markets. If we look at the figures of exports from India, we see a steady decline of the share of cotton textiles: from some per cent around to per cent by . By the 1870s this proportion had dropped to below per cent. What, then, did India export? The figures again tell a dramatic story. While exports of manufactures declined rapidly, export of raw materials increased equally fast. Between and , the share of raw cotton exports rose from per cent to per cent. Indigo used for dyeing cloth was another important export for Fig. – East India Company House, London. This was the nerve centre of the worldwide operations of the East India Company. Fig. – A distant view of Surat and its river. All through the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Surat remained the main centre of overseas trade in the western Indian Ocean. Fig. – The trade routes that linked India to the world at the end of the seventeenth century. many decades. And, as you have read last year, opium shipments to China grew rapidly from the 1820s to become for a while India’s single largest export. Britain grew opium in India and exported it to China and, with the money earned through this sale, it financed its tea and other imports from China. Over the nineteenth century, British manufactures flooded the Indian market. Food grain and raw material exports from India to Britain and the rest of the world increased. But the value of British exports to India was much higher than the value of British imports from India. Thus Britain had a ‘trade surplus’ with India. Britain used this surplus to balance its trade deficits with other countries – that is, with countries from which Britain was importing more than it was selling to. This is how a multilateral settlement system works – it allows one country’s deficit with another country to be settled by its surplus with a third country. By helping Britain balance its deficits, India played a crucial role in the late-nineteenth-century world economy. Britain’s trade surplus in India also helped pay the so-called ‘home charges’ that included private remittances home by British officials and traders, interest payments on India’s external debt, and pensions of British officials in India. Surat Goa Madras Masulipatam Hoogly Bangkok Hanoi Canton Malacca Batavia Bantam Acheh Muscat Bandar Abbas Basra Aleppo Alexandria Jedda Macha Lahore Bukhara Yarkand The Great Wall Mombasa Mozambique Sea route Land route Volume of trade passing through the port Red Sea Persian Gulf Indian Ocean