The consolidation of empires in North and South India entailed serious attempts to integrate the ports in the Deccan and Bengal with the land-based empires and revived channels of communication with Central Asia along which commodities and skills moved more freely than before. The movement of armies on the long-distance routes secured the major arteries of goods traffic and even created a few new ones. The Mughal Empire took these integrative tendencies to new heights. The consolidation of the empires led to urbanization in the two great riparian plains. The cities along the Ganges and the Indus were home to garrisons, courts, traders, artisans, intellectuals, and artists, and maintained commercial links with cities in West and Central Asia. The relationship between trade and the state was mediated by the consumption of traded goods by the elite rather than by income earned from customs duties. The main income of the states came, as before, from land tax. Urbanization and increased consumption needs, therefore, necessitated expansion in cultivation. In the words of Kosambi, “The inevitable counterpart of the caravan merchant . . . was the new armed feudal landlord who squeezed a greater surplus from the land by force.” The consequence of the extension of the political and agrarian frontiers was far-reaching for Bengal, Deccan, and Gujarat.

These attempts to integrate the ports with the inland cities produced limited results on the coasts. The empires did not have a well-designed maritime policy, and the conquest of the ports was usually driven by military and political concerns rather than by commercial ones. In Bengal, for example, the joint expansion of Islam and the new states focused on agrarian settlements. The coasts and the ports continued to have a relatively autonomous character; they were populated by migrant merchants and were only loosely governed by a regional state. As urban centers they were small when compared to the capital cities of the interior.