Changing Nature of Maritime Trade

The title of the book immediately raised a question in my mind: how much new information on the maritime trade and ports of Gujarat would be available now, about three decades after the path-breaking work by Das Gupta, Pearson and other historians, and later, by Lakshmi Subramanian? As if in anticipation of this query, Hasmukh Shah of the Darshak Itihas Nidhi of Vadodara introduces this book with the statement that, notwithstanding its extensive overseas trade going back for more than two thousand years, the maritime history of Gujarat is a ‘much-neglected area’, and adds that ‘the more we tried to identify the areas of ignorance, the more one discovered new ones’ (p. ix). This book is intended to fill some of these gaps and is the outcome of the ongoing research undertaken by the institute, as well as the proceedings of a seminar on the port cities of Gujarat, conducted in 2012.