There is then little doubt about the state of craft production and trade in India by the time the Europeans arrived. The newcomers were amazed at what they saw, amazed at the extent of cloth production and at the riches of the country, quite overshadowing their own. While there are many disagreements about the comparative standards of living in Europe and India, it was not the case that luxury was confined to the palaces of the Maharajas while the rest lived in poverty. On entering Murshidabad, the old capital of Bengal in 1757, Clive wrote: ‘The city is as extensive, populous and rich as the city of London, with this difference that there were individuals in the first possessing infinitely greater property than in the last city.’ Similar words were used of Agra, Fatechpore, Lahore and many other Indian towns. At this time the percentage of the population living in cities was higher than in the countries of Europe and America before the middle of the nineteenth century.

By comparison with some of India's great merchants, the English were by no means rich nor yet remarkable in other ways. For merchants from Cambay and later Surat already traded in cotton, cloth, indigo, opium and hides, plying the sea routes from Aden to Malacca, where Pires claims to have met 1,000 Gujarati merchants plus some 4–5,000 seamen. When the British arrived on the coast of Gujarat, houses in Surat already had windows of Venetian glass imported through the Ottoman empire.