Purchase, Not Production: The VOC, Ceylon, and the Maldivian Cowrie Trade
The Dutch East India Company’s conquest of the Portuguese coastal forts in Ceylon changed the geography of purchase in the Maldivian cowrie trade, not the geography of production. The money cowrie, Monetaria moneta (then Cypraea moneta), continued to be gathered in the central atolls of the Maldives, packed under a royal staple, and exchanged above all for Bengal rice. What changed after the middle of the seventeenth century was where European buyers could meet that export, and how cheaply they could move it toward the Netherlands and, beyond the Netherlands, toward the Guinea coast.
Production had long been fixed. Arab notices from the ninth and tenth centuries already tied the shells to the Maldives, and Ibn Battuta, who stayed in the islands in 1343–44 and had seen the same shells in West Africa, described their barter for Bengali rice. The islands could not grow enough grain; Bengal could. Ceylon and the Malabar coast did not monetize cowries, so they were not a natural market. Collection remained a Maldivian business, concentrated on Haddummati, Huvadhu Ari, and Mulaku Atoll. Shells were taken alive, buried until the animal rotted, and tied into a kotta of 12,000, weighing about 24 pounds. A royal monopoly over export, interrupted but not ended by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, was again clear to Dutch observers by the 1670s.
The VOC’s alliance with Kandy against the Portuguese altered only the coast. Galle fell in 1640. Colombo was taken in 1656, Jaffna in 1658, and Portuguese rule on the island ended. Once those ports were Dutch, Maldivian vessels on the monsoon run could be met at Colombo and Galle without a Bengal middleman, and shells could be shipped home from Ceylon. The saving was roughly 1,500 miles and one handling stage. H. C. P. Bell, working from the Colombo records, notes that a vessel was sent from Ceylon toward the Maldives with rice as early as 1640 to test the trade. Direct company voyages remained the exception. From the mid-seventeenth century the ordinary pattern was Maldivian craft bringing cowries, dried fish, coir and coconuts to the Dutch ports, with a VOC ship sent to Malé only when the annual arrivals fell short.
Bell’s extracts make the exception precise. In 1669 the hooker Cocatoe returned from Malé with 1,149 kottas, 27,576 pounds, at 1¾ rix-dollars the kotta. A second voyage is recorded in 1671. In 1688 the price stood at 6½ larins, and the Dutch were already pressing for an exclusive contract. The settled pattern at the end of the century is described by Governor Thomas van Rhee, in office from 1692 to 1697:
For some years Maldive vessels (Bahtheli) or Odi) have arrived here (Colombo) and at Galle with dried-fish (comblemass) ކަޅުބިލަމަސް and now and then with cowries. These small shells we have purchased from them, in settlement of the home demand, for 1½ rix-dollars the kotta of 12,000, or 24 lbs. In exchange they take arecanuts and spices of small value.
“Home demand” meant the Netherlands chambers. Batavia repeatedly instructed successive governors of Ceylon to enlarge purchases because those chambers needed shells for the West African trade of the Dutch West India Company and of private Guinea merchants. Jan Hogendorn’s work in the Hague archives shows that arguments inside the company went further: a buying monopoly, it was said, might make the Dutch “complete masters of the Slave Trade.” That was an aspiration. Contemporaries on the African coast treated the shells as close to indispensable. William Bosman wrote that the slave trade could not be carried on without them; the Royal African Company called them almost a sine qua non.
The arithmetic of the kotta makes the scale concrete. Around 1720–21 the Netherlands demand communicated to Ceylon was 20,000 kottas, about 480,000 pounds a year. The Ceylon price had been raised from 1½ rix-dollars a kotta to 2 rix-dollars, or 5 stuivers a pound, in 1703, and held there until 1718. It was not enough. In 1721 Governor Isaac Augustin Rumpf complained to the sultan that French ships were still lifting large quantities at Malé for 1½ rix-dollars a kotta, under the Dutch offer. The briskest years of company effort were perhaps 1720 to 1750. Cargoes of rice and spices were sent to the islands , two ships in 1723, instructed to bring back 8,000 to 10,000 kottas, and further voyages in 1727, 1728, 1732 and 1734 , but Hogendorn notes that these were not the ordinary trade. Maldivian boats continued to bring the greater part.
In 1740 Governor Gustaaf Willem van Imhoff pressed the Maldive merchants “to give us exclusively all they can find,” and the company obtained a sultan’s order that vessels calling at Balasore ( district in northeastern Odisha,) should consign their cowries to the Dutch factory there. Hogendorn and Marion Johnson judge the period of real market power to have been narrower than Bell’s phrase “with fair success” suggests, and strongest in the 1750s and 1760s, when part of the flow was turned from Balasore to Colombo and Galle and English access at Balasore was limited. Prices tell the same story. After touching about 2½ rix-dollars in 1740 they fell to 1 rix-dollar in the early 1750s and were still about 1.04 just before 1767. The sultan’s request to restore 2 rix-dollars was refused in 1769. Low Ceylon prices periodically drove carriers back to Bengal or to English and French buyers. A sultan’s letter of 1734 had already explained that Balasore and Bengal merchants gave credit advances, while the Dutch required cash.
Dutch control was therefore real and never complete. Maldivian rice voyages to Bengal did not stop. Thomas Bowrey in the 1670s and Alexander Hamilton in 1727 both still described Balasore as a regular cowrie port. English East India Company purchases in Bengal continued, and the English later held a direct contract of 2,000 ކޯއްޓޭ kottas, 50,000 pounds, a year on top of what they bought in Bengal. French ships were regular visitors to Malé. Rumpf reprimanded the sultan over them in 1721; a French contract of 1770 for 50,000 pounds a year was still being reported in Dutch letters, and French purchases were noted again in 1777. Some Maldivian captains even sold cargoes intended for Ceylon to French shipping.
What did move was still very large. Hogendorn and Johnson’s reconstruction of auction sales at the Dutch chambers and of English export figures puts combined Dutch and English shipments toward West Africa in the eighteenth century at about 26 million pounds ,on the order of ten billion shells or more ,with the Dutch ލަންދޭސީން the larger supplier for long stretches, especially the 1710s to the 1740s. An anonymous Dutch account of Ceylon in 1747, printed in English in 1754, already recorded the African consequence: where 12,000 weight of cowries had once bought a cargo of five or six hundred captives, 12 or 14 tons were now required. The link is confirmed from the other end. After British abolition in 1807, cowrie shipments to West Africa collapsed, to a little over a ton in 1808. They revived only with the nineteenth-century palm-oil trade, and were finally ruined by the cheaper East African ring cowrie.
The VOC, in short, did not conquer a Cowry fishery. It conquered a set of ports, and from those ports it inserted itself into an older Maldivian,Bengal exchange whose ultimate European use had become the purchase of people. The shells were still gathered in the atolls, still packed in kottas, and still carried, more often than not, in Maldivian hulls. Ceylon changed the ledger of purchase. It did not change the place of production.
References
Bell, H. C. P. The Máldive Islands: An Account of the Physical Features, Climate, History, Inhabitants, Productions, and Trade. Colombo: Frank Luker, 1883. Especially pp. 98–100, on the 1640 probe, the Cocatoe, van Rhee, Rumpf, and the Netherlands demand
Hogendorn, Jan S. “A ‘Supply-Side’ Aspect of the African Slave Trade: The Cowrie Production and Exports of the Maldives.” Slavery & Abolition 2, no. 1 (1981): 31–52. On royal monopoly, diversion to Ceylon, the 1720–50 voyages, van Imhoff, and the English contract of 2,000 kottas.
Hogendorn, Jan, and Marion Johnson. The Shell Money of the Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Chapters 4–5, and the chamber-sales tables underlying the eighteenth-century total of about 26 million pounds.
Johnson, Marion. “The Cowrie Currencies of West Africa.” Journal of African History 11 (1970). For the 1754 translation of the 1747 Dutch Ceylon voyage and the African price series.
A Voyage to the Island of Ceylon, on board a Dutch Indiaman, in the year 1747… Written by a Dutch Gentleman. London: J. Bouquet, 1754. The “12,000 weight / 12 or 14 tuns” passage.
Arasaratnam, Sinnappah. Dutch Power in Ceylon, 1658–1687. Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1958. For the consolidation of the coastal forts after Jaffna.
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