The-Polyester-Prince

LESSONS FROM THE SOUK
Early in the 1950s, officials in the treasury of the Arabian Kingdom of Yemen noticed
something funny happening to their country’s currency. The main unit of money, a
solid silver coin called the Rial, was disappearing from circulation. They traced the
disappearing coins south to the trading port of Aden, then a British colony and
military bastion commanding the entrance to the Red Sea and southern approaches
to the Suez Canal.
Inquiries found that an Indian clerk named Dhirubhai Ambani, then barely into his
twenties, had an open order out in the souk (marketplace) of Aden for as many Rials
as were available. Ambani had noted that the value of the Rial’s silver content was
higher than its exchange value against the British pound and other foreign
currencies. So he began buying Rials, melting them down, and selling the silver
ingots to bullion dealers in London. ‘he margins were small, but it was money for
jam, Dhirubhai later reminisced. After three months it was stopped, but I made a
few lakhs [one lakh = 100000 rupees] of rupees. I don’s believe in not taking
opportunities.” Dhirubhai had gone to Aden soon after finishing his studies in
Junagadh at the age of 16, following the long tradition of boys from Bania families in
Kathiawar heading for the Arabian trading ports or the market towns of East Africa to
gain commercial experience and accumulate capital.
A network of personal contacts kept jobs within the same community. Dhirubhai’s
elder brother Ramniklal, known as is Ramnikbhai, had gone to Aden two years
before, and was working in the car sales division of A. Besse & Co. Founded by a
Frenchman named Antonin Besse, the company had developed from trading in
animal hides and incense between the world wars into the biggest commercial house
in the Red Sea area, selling cars, cameras, electrical goods, pharmaceuticals, oil
products and food commodities to both British and French territories in the Arab
world and the Horn of Africa, as well as to Ethiopia.
Another Gujarati, Maganbhai Patel, from the Porda district, joined Besse as a junior
accountant at the age of 18 in 1931 and was made a director in 1948. He estimates
the company controlled about 80 per cent of the region’s commerce soon after the
Second World War. It had 30 branches, and six to eight ships of its own in the
subsidiary Halal Shipping. It was indeed successful: shortly before his death at the
age of 72 in 1948, Antonin Besse made a donation of one million pounds to endow St
Anthony’s College in Oxford.
Thereafter, the company was run by two of his sons, Tony and He was hired, and
soon after arrived by steamer in Aden. As Susheel Kothari notes: ‘The first sight of
Aden is always a shock.’ The oil-filled blue waters of the port are backed by steep
crags of dark-brown rock, remnants of an old volcano, with no sign of vegetation.
Aden had flourished in Roman times as a way station on trading routes between
Egypt and India. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 revived its importance, and
it became a major coaling port for European shipping to Asia and Australasia. From
its occupation by a detachment of Indian sepoys sent by the East India Company in
1839, Aden had been an important link in the ties of Britain to the Indian Raj. Until
1937, when it was put under the Colonial Office in London, the territory was
administered from India. The Indian rupee circulated as its currency until it was
replaced by the East African shilling in 1951.