Exporting goods from Bengal into the Malay world took a new turn with British imperial expansion. The EIC established monopolistic maritime trade, which reshaped the commercial network for the circulation of Bengali commodities across the Indian Ocean world, particularly in the intra-Asian markets around the rim of the Bay of Bengal. They transported Bengali commodities to long-distance seaports, including Europe, Africa, the Americas and Australia. The movement of these goods steadily increased, which integrated the market and facilitated Bengali mobility within the British colonies. Most of the formal professions undertaken by the Bengalis in the Malay world have been discussed in the preceding chapter. This chapter explores two other aspects related to Bengali migrant employment: the flow of products from Bengal and the involvement of Bengali migrants in trade and commerce. It mainly focuses on Bengali petty traders who played an essential role in shaping a transnational commercial space from the late nineteenth century.

Bengal Commodities across the Indian Ocean World

Before the advent of colonialism, seaports in the Indian Ocean, particularly those located between the coast of Bengal and the Malay Archipelago, were integrated into local, intra-regional and inter-regional networks of merchant communities and zones of commodity exchange. In other words, these commercial zones were structured in micro-, meso- and macro-regions. The increasing dominance of European, and especially EIC, shipping from the mid-eighteenth century did not change this spatial organisation of commercial activities around the seaports. After getting hold of Bencoolen, Bengal and Penang by the end of the eighteenth century, the British controlled the trade network across the northeastern Indian Ocean. During the early nineteenth century, the British took over Malacca and Singapore and formed the Straits Settlements, which included three main seaports: Penang, Malacca and Singapore. These seaports were made duty free for all merchants and were clearinghouses of intra-Asian and long-distance trade. A large quantity of Bengal commodities was transported from the Calcutta port to the ports of the Malay Peninsula, notably Malacca, Penang and Singapore. The EIC re-exported most of the commodities from these seaports to the eastern coast of the Indian Ocean, particularly Java, China, Thailand and Australia. Thus, the British created an exclusive commercial zone between South and Southeast Asia.