GROWTH OF MONEY ECONOMY 29 century an important change had taken place, little documented, and only discussed, to my knowledge, in an enigmatic paragraph in Furbcr, where he notes that copper tended to displace cowries in many regions (Furber, 1976). The areas where they had originally circulated and where they remained important in the 18th century included Burhanpur, Agra and Bengal, while in the 17th century bitter almonds (badam) were brought from Persia for use in South and Central Gujarat, including Surat. What marks these areas is the fact that they were regions characterised by a widesprad dcvelopmet of manufacturing in both countryside and town. Also, by the early 18th century, cowries were being shipped to major new markets outside Asia (new, less in the sense that cowries had not been used before, than in the fact that they were now integrated into new patterns of international exchange and tliat their use occurred on a much vaster scale than ever before.) West Africa, in particular, became the chief destination, while \) .rib in the Indian Ocean and East Indies became major entrepots for their further shipment westwards. When we add to this list ports such as London, Hamburg and Amsterdam we begin to reconstruct the complex web of commodity exchanges which enabled cowries to become the payments medium par excellence for the developing Atlantic export of slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean and Americas. European companies could be found purchasing cowries in India, while Asian and European private traders re-exported cowries from Surat (having been brought there from ports in the Indies, or directly from tlie Maldives) to entrepots such as Mocha.5 Scattered evidence suggests that European companies became increasingly interested in purchasing cowries in the interior of India and directing them westwards towards Europe (for West Africa). This was the case in the mid-17th century when Dutch traders sought cowries around Burhanpur, a major area of textile manufacturing at this time. By the early 18th century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was issuing reports on the cowrie trade and giving orders for cowries to be redirected away from their major source of demand in Bengal, to VOC factories in Ceylon and elsewhere from where they would be shipped onwards.6 Finally, West Africa and Bengal were indeed the major markets for cowries, but they or a number of other more unusual types of currency medium, such as lead, iron and bitter almonds, also seem to have been used elsewhere in Asia, such as Thailand. What were the reasons for these extraordinary developments? Why did African, Indian and other Asian economies absorb these vast quantities of payments media? What were the conditions which permitted an elaborate international exchange of commodities to develop, both of payments media and of goods more generally? On what developments elsewhere did the growth of Europe's own international trade and