If there is one system that survived the rise and fall of so many empires in India, it is the Hundi system; the system of credit and payments that served as the backbone of the caravan trade between India and Central Asia.
In the economic history of India, Indian traders, if mentioned, are usually spoken of as middlemen. But many Indian merchants, in Sindh, Gujarat, and Punjab, were prominent businessmen. The explorer Richard Burton described the Hundi system as ‘the crude instrument with which the Shikarpuri Rothschild work.” And indeed, the merchants of Sindh were every bit as intimidating a financial empire as that of the Rothschilds.
When the Suez canal first opened in the 1860s, Sindh merchants were swift to make a business out of it. “Sindworkies’ set up shop there selling curios to travellers returning to the Orient. These goods included handicrafts from Bombay and the Sind. Sindhi merchants utilized manpower from Hyderabad (now in Pakistan) in particular, selling products and moneylending services as far as Kobe in Japan to the Canary Islands and Panama in the Americas.
Shikarpuri merchants, by contrast, went West to Iran and North to central Asia, where they set up shop for generations. Who ran and utilized this system? When it came to trade, the Shikarpuri Shroffs were the dominant players in Afghanistan and Central Asia. Shikarpur, as a gateway to Kabul, was a major trading hub. Alexander Burns described a trade network that stretched from Astrakhan to Calcutta, and said:
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