The Indian Express ·
Silk, Coral and Fiat: Italy’s long economic ties with India
Italy never ruled India, but Italian traders found ways to participate in, and profit from, the colonial economy. From silk and coral to Fiat, Italian enterprise navigated British control, relied on Indian commercial networks, and adapted to the changing politics of access.
In February 1896, Primo Lanzoni, a professor at Venice’s Higher School of Commerce, set out for India with Gualtiero Fries, a representative of the company that operated Italy’s Adriatic railway network. They had been given a practical assignment: to study Indian imports and exports, identify goods Italy could sell, find firms worth dealing with, and determine how traffic between Europe and India might be channelled through Venice and the Suez route rather than rival ports.
Less than a month after their journey began, an Italian army was defeated by the forces of Emperor Menelik II at Adwa in Ethiopia, East Africa. The two seemingly unrelated episodes unfolded almost simultaneously. While Italy was attempting to expand its territorial empire in Africa, Italian commercial planners were travelling through British India in search of markets and trading connections. One sought territory; the other, commercial access.
By the late nineteenth century, Italy had acquired colonies of its own and was actively seeking greater influence overseas. Its position in colonial India, however, was more complicated. Here, Italy operated without territory, jurisdiction, or political control.
This is the story of Italians in colonial India, caught between opportunity, enterprise and British control.
Italian interest in India dates back to before unification, when Italy was not yet a nation-state. Along with China, India was among the most appealing destinations in the vast ‘Orient’, attracting travellers, merchants and missionaries. “Indian ports had an impressive attractiveness for Italian businessmen, politicians and experts of economy and commerce,” writes academic Marzia Casolari in Bengal and Italy: Transcultural Encounters from the Mid-19th to Early 21st Century (2024).
Initially, Bombay was the main hub of Italian economic activity. Bengal, despite its thriving industrial sector in the mid-eighteenth century, declined in the face of competition from British manufactured goods. Calcutta, however, retained its political and cultural importance.
Casolari notes, “If Bombay was the ‘gateway to India’, Calcutta was the gateway to the Far East.”
Silk offers one of the earliest points of contact between Italy and the colonial Indian economy. Italy entered the Bengal silk economy before a unified Italian state existed. In 1769, the English East India Company decided to introduce Piedmontese methods of silk reeling into Bengal.
Developed in Piedmont in north-western Italy during the seventeenth century, the Piedmontese method was designed to produce finer, stronger and more uniform raw silk. It combined specialised reeling equipment with closer control over production and became an influential model for silk manufacture elsewhere in Europe and, from 1769, in Bengal.
Company officials wanted Bengal raw silk to meet the requirements of European markets more effectively. With the introduction of the Piedmontese silk reeling machine into the East India Company’s filatures, the recruitment of Italian silk experts became a common practice.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the pébrine crisis in Europe led to a substantial increase in the presence of Italian silk traders in Bengal. Pébrine, a disease affecting silkworms, had devastated sericulture across parts of Europe. In 1859, Italian noblemen Giovan Battista Castellani and Gherardo Freschi organised a scientific and commercial expedition to India and China in search of healthy silkworm stock. Freschi travelled through Bengal, where he inspected local breeding establishments. Bengal, however, did not provide the solution he had hoped to find. He concluded that the disease was present there too.
Although the expedition did not succeed, its premise was significant. An ecological and industrial crisis in Europe had turned Indian silkworms, breeding practices and environments into objects of scientific inspection. India had become a possible biological reserve for the repair of a European industry.
A few decades later, silk was moving in the opposite direction. Historian Santosh Kumar Rai, in his journal article Colonial Knowledge Economy (2022), found that India imported 43 tonnes of Italian silk yarn in 1907, practically all of it destined for Banaras. Local weavers encountered Italian suppliers who were difficult to bargain with because mill owners had formed a cartel and raised yarn prices. Attempts by the Banaras Silk Weavers’ Cooperative Association to approach European manufacturers directly ran into the agency arrangements already controlling the trade.
With Italian unification in 1861, India began to occupy a larger place in Italian economic thinking and ambition.
Coral had been part of Indian commercial and cultural life long before Italian firms established themselves in the subcontinent. Mediterranean red coral had travelled through interconnected Mediterranean and Asian trading networks for centuries. By the late nineteenth century, Torre del Greco, near Naples, had become a major centre of coral processing and commerce, putting Italian merchants in a strong position to profit from already established Indian demand.
From the late 1870s, traders from Torre del Greco established branches in Calcutta and placed agents in Bombay and Madras. Researcher Antonella Viola’s work, Italians in India, 1860-1920 (2008), reconstructs an intensely profitable business organised around Indian demand. Before the First World War, coral was Italy’s most important export to India. Some manufacturers produced particular shapes and objects specifically for Indian buyers. The firms were often family enterprises, with relatives supplying capital and trusted personnel across considerable distances.
Getting coral to Calcutta was only the beginning. Reaching markets beyond the port city depended on commercial networks that Italian firms did not themselves control. Marwari merchants figured prominently among buyers in Calcutta. Parsi firms were important in Bombay, while Tamil and Gujarati traders appeared in the Madras networks. Indian merchants connected imported coral to jewellers, craftsmen, centres of traditional medicine and markets far beyond the port cities. Some Indian firms dealt directly with manufacturers in Italy.
Indian merchants were also a crucial source of market intelligence. Business letters carried news about prices, demand, fashion, reputations and preferred designs. Viola finds Italian manufacturers altering products on the basis of suggestions received from agents and trading partners familiar with Indian consumers.
By the late nineteenth century, the expanding availability of Japanese coral was beginning to reshape this trade. Italian merchants from Torre del Greco travelled to Kobe and Osaka and began purchasing Japanese coral. Raw coral was shipped to Italy for processing. Calcutta became an important junction in this traffic, and processed coral could then return from Italy to India for sale. Viola identifies Italian traders based in Bengal among the pioneers of this Japanese connection.
A single piece of coral might therefore pass from Japanese waters to an Italian workshop before returning to India for sale. The distance made commercial sense because different stages of the trade were concentrated in different places. Japan supplied the coral; Torre del Greco supplied specialised processing; and Calcutta linked overseas firms to Indian capital and buyers. Indian merchant networks, meanwhile, provided the knowledge and distribution needed to turn the finished object into a sale.
This is where the coral story departs from the more familiar colonial pattern. The raw material was not being taken out of India; it was being brought in. The Italian advantage lay elsewhere. Coral reveals a form of value capture that can disappear when colonial economic history is mapped only through outward flows of cotton, jute, tea, minerals and other Indian resources. Italian firms could profit from Indian purchasing power, knowledge of Indian tastes, control over processing and privileged positions in transcontinental circulation. The raw material might originate in the Mediterranean or Japan, while a significant part of the commercial value still depended on a colonised Indian market.
The path to success was not straightforward. Italian firms faced British competition and structural disadvantages, while many remained modest family businesses. In Bengal and Italy, Viola writes, “Most Italians residing in British India were traders who operated family-run, small- or medium-size firms.” The lack of institutional backing significantly reduced their ability to compete successfully in Asian markets.
At the same time, Italian traders were dependent on the commercial networks of Indian businessmen. Lanzoni, however, advised prospective Italian traders to be suspicious of Indian merchants in the port cities. He generally preferred European commercial partners, although he made exceptions for some Muslim and Parsi traders. Such recommendations reflected the racial hierarchies that shaped colonial commerce.
In practice, however, Italian firms soon realised that Indian brokers, merchants, financiers and customers possessed forms of knowledge and expertise that were indispensable to navigating the local market. At the same time, Italy’s relationship with Britain was beginning to change.
Until the end of the nineteenth century, Italy accepted British predominance in Asia and was careful to avoid a clash with British interests. During World War I, and especially in the years between its end and the rise of the fascist regime in Italy, however, Italian ambitions began to shift.
Casolari notes, “The Versailles Treaty, which did not assign to Italy those territories in the Balkans and in Africa that the London Pact had promised in 1915, provoked an uproar and stirred up feelings of revanchism. In these years, Italy started to cultivate colonial ambitions beyond its traditional areas of expansion, which up to that moment had been mainly North and East Africa and the Middle East. The relationship with Great Britain changed too, turning from subordination to competition.”
From colonial access to postcolonial negotiation
Independence changed the conditions of access. Italian technology and capital continued to enter India, now within an industrial order in which the postcolonial Indian state claimed a much greater say over ownership, manufacturing and foreign collaboration.
The automobile sector provides a good example. Premier Automobiles, established by the Walchand Hirachand group in 1944, entered a technical relationship with Fiat in the early 1950s. Cars derived from Fiat models would eventually become familiar features of Indian urban life.
However, the coral trade and Fiat belong to different political worlds. The point of connection lies in the changing politics of access. Under British rule, Italian entrepreneurs entered institutions fashioned by colonial power and negotiated whatever space they could obtain within them. After independence, foreign firms encountered a sovereign Indian state intent on deciding how overseas capital and technology would serve domestic industrial development.
Italy’s Indian history leaves us with a less comfortable map of empire. Colonial sovereignty was territorial, but the advantages generated by a colonial economy could travel beyond the nationality of the ruler. Italian merchants could use Calcutta’s port without exercising sovereignty over the city. Silk producers could influence prices in Banaras from afar, while workshops near Naples adjusted designs in response to Indian tastes. Their leverage came through access to markets, pricing power, and information, rather than territorial control. In this, Indian actors remained central.
Italy never ruled India. It found ways to profit from the colonial order that Britain had built.
This article is based on research conducted at the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Linnaeus University, Sweden, and funded by the Swedish Research Council grant 2025-01142.
Casolari, Marzia. (2024). “Italy and the Discovery of India: The Early Phase of Italian Foreign Policy in Bengal (1849–1936).” In Paromita Chakravarti and Mario Prayer (eds.), Bengal and Italy: Transcultural Encounters from the Mid-19th to the Early 21st Century, pp. 145–163. Routledge.
Davini, Roberto. (2009). “Bengali Raw Silk, the East India Company and the European Global Market, 1770–1833.” Journal of Global History, 4(1), 57–79.
Hutková, Karolina. (2017). “Transfer of European Technologies and Their Adaptations: The Case of the Bengal Silk Industry in the Late-Eighteenth Century.” Business History, 59(7), 1111–1135.
Jackson, Jason. (2026). Constructing Economic Nationalisms in Brazil and India. Elements in the Politics of Development. Cambridge University Press.
Rai, Santosh Kumar. (2022). “Colonial Knowledge Economy: Handloom Weavers in Early Twentieth-Century United Provinces, India.” International Review of Social History, 67(3), 435–465.
Viola, Antonella. (2008). Italians in India, 1860–1920: Trades, Traders and Trading-networks. PhD dissertation, European University Institute, Florence.