The port of Surat declined by the end of the eighteenth century.
By the 1750s the network, controlled by Indian merchants, was breaking down.
(i)The European companies gradually gained power – first securing a variety of concessions from local courts, then the monopoly rights to trade.
(ii)This resulted in a decline of the old ports of Surat through which local merchants had operated.
(iii)Exports from these ports fell dramatically, the credit that had financed the earlier trade began drying up, and the local bankers slowly went bankrupt.
(iv)In the last years of the seventeenth century, the gross value of trade that passed through Surat had been Rs 16 million.
(v)By the 1740s it had slumped to Rs 3 million.Trade through the new ports came to be controlled by European companies, and was carried in European ships.
