Internal commerce of India.
- tinued to be the great rendezvous alike for the traders
of the West and the East.[1] Nor has it lost in any way its ancient fame as a place of call. At the harbour of Galle the steamships from Europe, by way of the Red Sea, destined for Calcutta and the ports of China, now exchange their passengers and specie with the lines of steamships which trade to the ports of Australia; while traders from Bombay to Bengal, and other ports of the East, still make it the centre to which, and from which, their respective routes converge or diverge. Again, India within itself has, from the earliest period of authentic history, carried on a large internal commerce both by land and sea. Rice and other necessaries of life must have been transported from the countries along the Ganges, where they grow abundantly, to the sandy shores of the peninsula; and cotton, though manufactured with the same activity on the coasts as in the interior, differed so much in each district, in its texture and mode of preparation, that a large interchange of its various kinds must naturally have occurred. Again, the mode of life, especially in such cities as Ayodhya (Oude) implies the existence of a multitude of wants, natural and artificial, which could only be supplied by a corresponding system of active commerce between the different parts of India.
It is clear, from Ptolemy, that along the shores of the Indian peninsula there were a number of ports known to the traders of his time by the name of "Emporia," or places of rendezvous; but, as Dr. Robertson has pointed out, we have no means now of
- ↑ Ammianus speaks of ambassadors from Ceylon to the Emperor Julian, xx. 4.
