The Commerge of Cambay From the Earliest Period To The Nineteenth Century (An Old & Rare Book)

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This work is a companion volume to "Some Aspects of the Historical Geography of Surat" and like its predecessor it traces the development of the Commerce of Cambay up to the 19th century from a historio-geographical angle. Those who have devoted some time to the study of past geographies of any region should be fully aware of the difficulties in the path of the researcher who digs into the past. This is particularly so in India where most histories are accounts of the achievements of the ruling dynasties and very subjective in their approach. Travellers' accounts, of which there are many, parti cularly after the Europeans discovered the Cape route, are often impressions of individuals of a culture foreign to them, and are sometimes motivated by considerations other than mere recording of facts. To control the mass of detail available from observations made by the Arabs and later European travellers and merchants and pursue the fate of Cambay, which by the time of the East India Companies, had become a port of secondary importance giving way to Surat, was a challenging task. Reliable maps of the trade of India and the littoral states of the Indian Ocean had to be constructed with the confusing and conflicting accounts of the travellers. But no science, more than the twin sciences of historiography and cartography, provide a graphic account of man's achievements and activities in the past. To give a visual expression to what happened in the past and interpret the time factor in terms of the space factor is the real purpose of geography.

**Contents and Sample Pages**