Abstract: The article complements and extends the literature pertaining to Asian traders’ responses to the Portuguese early modern commercial expansion into the Indian Ocean, addressing specifically the regional, contextual, and temporal variations discernible within each spatial unit and mercantile community. The study focuses on the different groups of Malabar’s Muslim merchants—the paradesi (foreign) Muslims, the Marakkar Muslims who controlled coastal trade between Coromandel and Malabar, and the local Mapilla Muslims of Malabar—and analyzes the evolving relations, both hostile and co-operative, between these communities, the Portuguese Estado da India, and Portuguese casado entrepreneurs. Muslim decisions to channel funds partially into state-building ventures at the expense of mercantile reinvestment, in order to contain and challenge the Portuguese expansion, are shown to have resulted in divergent and situationally contigent outcomes for the Marakkar and for the Muslims of Cannanore. The study is constructed within a framework of “world systems” theory and seeks to articulate regional and inter-regional processes in the context of a clash between the old Indian Ocean/Mediterranean “world system” and the emerging Atlantic/Indian Ocean one.

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