Sundara Vadlamudi
Sundara Vadlamudi (Sundar) is a historian of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World. His teaching and scholarship efforts are guided by two objectives: to examine the connections between South Asia and the Indian Ocean World and to situate events in South Asia within broader developments in World History. He uses Transnational History as an approach and a process to understand the movement and exchange of people, goods, capital, and ideas across South Asia and the wider Indian Ocean region during the early modern and modern periods. Sundar’s teaching areas include History of South Asia, World History and the Indian Ocean World/Maritime History.
Sundar is from the American University of Sharjah (UAE). Prior to joining AUS, he was an ASIANetwork Luce Foundation Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Asian History at Wabash College (USA).
American University of Sharjah
Session
In South Asian historiography, the period from 1780 to 1840 CE is identified as the era of transition to colonial rule under the English East India Company (EIC). Existing studies on this transition focus on the territorial dimensions of colonial rule, such as land revenue policies, codification of laws, administrative ideology, and military campaigns against Indian rulers and rival European trading companies. In the process, however, we have overlooked the maritime dimensions of transition to colonial rule. This has limited our perspective on the changing characteristics of intra-Asian trade between South India and Southeast Asia during this period.
This paper focuses on a community of South Indian maritime merchants and examines their participation in transregional trade between South India and Penang in Southeast Asia within the context of the following developments: the establishment of EIC entrepôts in Southeast Asia to acquire products for the Company’s trade with China, an evolving system of tariffs and port duties designed by the EIC to regulate trade, and the changing character of Europe-Asia trade due to the Industrial Revolution. Under these conditions, the paper examines the carrying trade in Indian cotton textiles between South India and Southeast Asia by South Indian maritime merchants. The paper’s conclusions are drawn from shipping information at Penang, the applications for shipping passes, the construction of new ships and the purchase of second-hand vessels, and by the applications for the refund of a portion of port duties that were allowed for Indian cotton goods.