Paper Details

The incorporation of Assam into the British colonial empire was neither sudden nor accidental; rather, it was the outcome of a long process of commercial exploration, economic penetration, and gradual political intervention. From the late eighteenth century, British merchants and officials viewed Assam as a commercially promising hinterland endowed with fertile land, navigable river systems, rich forest resources, and strategic trade routes linking Bengal with Tibet, China, and Burma. This paper examines the evolution of trade and commerce in Assam from the pre-colonial period to the end of the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the ways in which British commercial interests reshaped indigenous economic structures. Drawing upon archival reports, travelers’ accounts, gazetteers, and secondary scholarship, the study analyses pre-British trade patterns, early Company intervention, the salt monopoly, frontier and trans-border trade, internal market reorganization, and the rise of merchant capital under colonial rule. It argues that British commercial policies fundamentally transformed Assam’s economy by integrating it into the global capitalist system as a supplier of raw materials and a consumer of imported manufactures, while simultaneously marginalizing indigenous economic agency and altering long-established socio-economic relations.

Assam, Colonialism, Commerce, Markets and Transformation.