1 - Connected Cochin: VOC's Shipping network in the Indian Ocean World 1663-1795

The article investigates early modern commercial shipping network set up by the Verenigde Oost Indisch Compagnie (henceforth VOC) or the Dutch East India Company during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for extracting maximum profit from trading in the Indian Ocean World. Keeping Fort Cochin on the Malabar Coast as the centre, I will focus on the networks connecting Cochin to the Indian subcontinent (Indian landmass and Ceylon).  From which port in the Indian subcontinent did Cochin receive maximum ships? To which ports in Gujarat, Ceylon, Coromandel, Odisha and Bengal did ships leaving Cochin go to? During the 130 years that the VOC functioned from Cochin, which commercial networks remained unchanged? During this long period, were new ports brought into the network? Secondly, I will incorporate port outside of the Indian sub-continent: the Arab peninsula and islands in the region, east coast Africa, Malay world and further south-east Asia, posing identical questions that will lay out Cochin’s overall shipping connectedness in the larger Indian Ocean world. This will enable me to map the interactions of Cochin with other nodes from South China Sea in the East and perhaps to the Eastern Mediterranean in the West. What were the strongest and weakest links of Cochin in the diverse interregional and transnational commercial networks? The emerging trends will help us ascertain the role and nature of the VOC in the Indian Ocean network and the strength of the natural endowments of the Malabar coast.