Trade Routes Now and Then"In the old days, Indian agate beads were sold direct to Africa. The Babylonians already knew about them. The Persians controlled trade around the Indian Ocean from the 6th to the 10th century. Their successors in that region, the Arabs, maintained business branches in East Africa and in Indonesia. The glass and stone beads supplied to those countries were an important item. They were called "monsoon beads" because the Arabs used monsoon winds to sail with their sailing boats in different directions." (Cornelius Trebbin)
As for the agate trade, globalisation is nothing new. Since the 17th century we know about the export industries
of Cambay in Maharashtra, India. Pilgrims crossing the Indian Ocean to Mecca financed their journeys with easy to
carry along indian carnelian beads to trade them in with arab merchants. Caravans carrying spices and cloth through
the arabian deserts into central Africa brought the agate beads along with their usual wares. Kano, Niger, established
itself as the central market for indian made beads, which where believed here to origin from the holy city of Mecca, what
raised their value remarkably. Till the Idar-Oberstein competition appeared in Kano Cambay dominated the bead production.
As the german industry grew, the indian production went down. The european goods reached inner Africa via Cairo in Egypt,
or Dakar and Lagos at the west african coast. Cambay's gem industry flourished once more for a short period of time in
the 1940s, when the african demand for beads was extremely high, but went under almost entirely since.
With Idar-Oberstein's production a new continent jumped into the agate trade: South America. From Porto Allegro at
Brazil's east coast steam-liners brought the precious minerals taken from rich, seemingly inexhaustable mines by the ton
to Liverpool, England and Rotterdam, Holland and up the river Rhine all the way to Idar-Oberstein.
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