Politics, Economy and Islam in ‘Dutch Ponnāni’, Malabar Coast

Abstract Ponnāni was a port in southwestern India that resisted the Portuguese incursions in the sixteenth century through the active involvement of religious, mercantile and military elites. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Ponnāni was the only place where the Dutch East India Compa...

Full description

Saved in:  
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Kooria, Mahmood (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Check availability: HBZ Gateway
Interlibrary Loan:Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany)
Published: 2019
In: Journal of the economic and social history of the Orient
Year: 2019, Volume: 62, Issue: 1, Pages: 1-34
Further subjects:B Indian Ocean networks
B Islam
B Dutch East India Company (VOC)
B Zamorins
B Calicut
B Ponnāni
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Summary:Abstract Ponnāni was a port in southwestern India that resisted the Portuguese incursions in the sixteenth century through the active involvement of religious, mercantile and military elites. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Ponnāni was the only place where the Dutch East India Company had commercial access into the kingdom of the Zamorins of Calicut. When the Dutch gained prominence in the coastal belt, this port town became the main centre for their commercial, diplomatic, and political transactions. But as a religious centre it began to recede into oblivion in the larger Indian Ocean and Islamic scholarly networks. The present article examines this dual process and suggests important reasons for the transformations. It argues that the port town became crucial for diplomatic and economic interests of the Dutch East India Company and the Zamorins, whereas its Muslim population became more parochial as they engaged with themselves than with the larger socio-political and scholarly networks.
ISSN:1568-5209
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of the economic and social history of the Orient
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341473