Thread by @wiavastukala

Indian export to ancient Persia included dyes,especially indigo; precious and semi-precious stones, such as diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and topaz; minerals unavailable in Persia, especially sulfuric acid, mercury, tin, iron, and other metals; as well as large quantities of sugar.

In the 19th century, Indian exports to Persia included an array of cotton textiles, Kashmiri shawls, dyes (especially indigo), spices, sugar, non-precious metals, precious stones, and a variety of goods that had been imported from other regions.

After the murder of Nadir Shah,Qājār dynasty comfortable social environment was fully restored for Indian merchants in Persia by 1802, when Waring observed that, in Bušehr, “the Hindoos live unmolested by the Persians, and are neither insulted nor oppressed by the government”.

At the beginning of the 16th century, Bābor noted that 7-10,000 horses were transported annually to India via Kabul (Bābor, p. 202). Indian demand for horses increased dramatically over the early modern period; ...

.....and during the 17th and 18th centuries annual imports from Persia and Central Asia numbered in the tens of thousands, with late 17th-century estimates reaching as high as 100,000 (Manucci, II, pp. 390-91).
(Encyclopedia Iranica)

In 1623, the Russian merchant F. A. Kotov recorded the presence of a Multani diaspora community in Isfahan, and in 1637 Adam Olearius reported that this community consisted of some 12,000 merchants (Kemp, pp. 36-37; Olearius, p. 299).

In the 1660s, Jean de Thévenot estimated the number of Indian merchants in Isfahan to have grown to 15,000 (Thévenot, p. 111). In the 1680s, Englebert Kaempfer suggested that the population was lower, though still remarkable, at 10,000 (Kaempfer, p. 204).

In the 1660s, Jean Chardin reported that the total number of “Multani Indians” in Safavid territory exceeded 20,000 (Chardin, 1686, p. 100). In addition to Isfahan, Indian communities established themselves in the Persian Gulf port cities of Bandar-e ʿAbbās and Bušehr, .....

.....a number of Caspian Sea ports in the provinces of Širvān, Gilān, and Māzandarān, as well as in virtually all of Persia’s important inland commercial centers.

The economic activities of these merchants focused on moneylending and large-scale, trans-regional trade between India and Persia and also between Persia and Russia (Thévenot, p. 111; Tavernier, II, p. 62; Olearius, p. 299; Dale, chap. 4; Levi, chaps. 3 and 4).

The importance of the Multani merchants in supplying Persian markets with Indian textiles is underlined by Raphaël du Mans’ collective identification of them as bazzaze (“cloth merchant”) in his late 17th-century account (du Mans, pp. 180-81).

Furthermore, according to Chardin, the Persians produced some cotton cloth; but they had no incentive to improve their own textile industry, as they received better quality textiles from India at a lower price (Chardin, 1811, IV, pp. 155-56).

In the 17th century, John Fryer also noted that cloth was the most important commodity in Indo-Persian commercial relations, adding that next in importance was the spice trade, which by that time had surpassed sugar and copper (Fryer, p. 233).