Trade between Bengal, Bihar, Nepal and the Gangetic World

Detailed chapter description

Trade connected the socio-economic worlds of Mithila, Vajji and Anga to regions far beyond their political boundaries. The Ganga formed the principal east–west trunk between the upper Gangetic plain and Bengal; Patna developed as a major inland entrepôt; Munger and Bhagalpur lay on the eastern river corridor; Hajipur and Tirhut fed northward routes toward Nepal; and Kathmandu connected plains commerce with Himalayan and Tibetan exchange. These links were already visible before European companies became major actors, then intensified and changed as English and Dutch merchants entered Bihar’s commodity markets. The evidence, however, is uneven. A late-sixteenth-century traveller, a seventeenth-century factory letter, a 1790s diplomatic mission and Buchanan-Hamilton’s early-nineteenth-century trade account cannot be collapsed into one timeless picture. This chapter therefore reconstructs circulation through securely dated layers: routes, transport, merchants, credit, commodities and market nodes are compared across sources while each observation remains tied to its own period. The commercial history of Mithila, Vajji and Anga cannot be reduced to a single Patna–Bengal route or to a modern India–Nepal border crossing. Early modern exchange worked through overlapping scales: weekly rural markets gathered produce; river landings concentrated bulky cargo; towns provided storage, credit and brokerage; long-distance merchants linked those towns to Bengal, the upper Gangetic plain and the Himalayan world. A commodity could therefore change carriers, forms and destinations several times before reaching a final consumer. The useful unit of analysis is the network—nodes, seasonal routes, intermediaries and transaction costs—not a straight line drawn between political centres.