spices in a three-way trade equation between China, India and Europe, topped up later by the British Empire with gold bullion from Britain's new colonies in South Africa and Australia at the southern corners of the Indian Ocean. Indian entrepreneurs-in Calcutta the Marwari traders and moneylenders originally from Raiasthan, in Bombay the Parsis (Zoroastrians originally from Persia)-began moving into large-scale industrial production late in the 19th century
Smaller traders also took advantage of Pax Britannica by taking steamer passages to all corners of the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia-no passports were needed-and opening small stores and service stations. Most were from Gujarat; a large proportion of these from Kathiawar. Two of the biggest commercial families in Uganda, the Mehtas and the Madwhals, came from Porbander, and the thriving Chandarlas of Kenya came from Jamnagar. Until 1938, the free port of Aden was part of the Bombay administration. The East African shilling, the currency of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade, was virtually pegged to the Indian rupee in value.
The Guiaratis were stingy with their customers and stingy with themselves. Bhaskar Bhattarcharya, a television broadcaster in New Delhi, spent his childhood years in Uganda where his father was a British colonial official. The epicurean ways of the Bhattarcharyas from Bengal contrasted sharply with those of the Patels or Shahs from Gujarat. 'When we first arrived, the women took my mother aside and said: this is the way you do things,' he remembers. 'If you were invited for dinner, you got a couple of vegetable dishes and rice. My parents liked to splash out, and serve meat and fish to their guests. Of course, by the time we left, the Guiarati peon in my father's office had probably saved more than he had.'
The wealth was the result of rigorous saving, abstemious living, and endless hours of work by unpaid family members-a migrant's success story in many parts of the world. In East Africa, it created a resentment that led to the expulsion of the Indian traders and appropriation of their assets after the colonies became independent in the 1960s. The effect was to fling the Gujarati diaspora worldwide, to start the process of capital