Capital and Crowd in a Declining Asian Port City: The Anglo-Bania Order and the Surat Riots of 1795

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Abstract
Surat, the waning port city of the departed Great Mughals, was rocked by riots on 6 August 1795. The lower orders of the Muslim population fell upon the shops and houses of the Bania residents of the city, looting grain, demolishing the images of their gods and tearing up their account books. This was the response of a collapsing social order to the thrust of a highly adaptive banking and trading group which had adroitly allied itself to the rising English power on the West Coast of India. A combination of circumstances in the half century following 1750 had resulted in the formation of a mercantile and political order distinguished by the mutually beneficial cooperation of the English East India Company and the Bania bankers and merchants of Surat and Bombay. The violent protest by the Muslims against the new order served only to reaffirm the significance of the Anglo-Bania alliance as the central fact in the unfolding political and commercial situation on the West Coast. The once powerful Mughal ruling élite and the once wealthy Muslim shipping magnates1 were no longer in a position to offer much resistance to the English East India Company and its Bania allies. Likewise the popular Muslim disaffection failed to shake by violence the foundations of the emerging Anglo-Bania order. An analysis of the August riots in Surat would afford the historian a unique opportunity to assess the nature and impact of the new order on the West Coast and to understand the crumbling social structure of a traditional port city—the composition of its lower orders and its burgher groups and their responses to the major changes that were taking place in the political and trading structure of Surat in the second half of the eighteenth century.

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