Kilwa, the Richest City You Have Never Heard Of
In 1331 Ibn Battuta called Kilwa one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Said walks its coral ruins and explains how gold from Zimbabwe made a small island fabulously rich.
The Bankers of Surat and the Letters of Credit
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Show notes
Paper that crossed an ocean
Long before European banks reached the Indian Ocean, Gujarati merchant houses in Surat ran a credit network that stretched from Yemen to Sumatra. A hundi, a simple written order, could move a fortune across the sea without a single coin leaving port. This episode explains how it worked and who it made rich.
- The Surat waterfront in 1640, from Dutch and Persian accounts
- How a hundi was written, trusted and settled
- Virji Vora, possibly the richest merchant in the world, and his dealings with the English
- Family, caste and reputation as the real security
- What survived the decline of Surat and the rise of Bombay
A glossary of trade terms is on the episode page.
Transcript
Hello and welcome back to Monsoon Kingdoms, I am Said Al Harthi. Last time we walked a ruined city. This time we follow a piece of paper. In the 1600s a merchant in Surat, on the coast of Gujarat, could write a short note, hand it to a captain, and have it honoured for its full value by a trading house in Mocha, in Basra, or in Malacca, weeks of sailing away. No bank, no treaty, no coins in the hold, just a written order and a reputation. The system was called hundi and it ran the finance of an entire ocean. We go to the Surat waterfront in 1640, we meet Virji Vora, who may have been the richest private merchant alive, and we look at why the English East India Company needed him far more than he needed them. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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