Many of them came from rural areas and seaports.
The arrangement covered education, communication, water supply and a seaport development project.
Most merchants did not live in any of the big seaports from which they had to sail.
They were undertaken not just in the main towns or seaports, but even in the smallest towns.
Railways were also built to bring mining areas into direct contact with the seaports.
Surat continued to be the focus of large merchant diasporas long after it ceased to be an active seaport.
Palembang, for instance, combined functions of pangkalan, confluence of rivers, and seaport.
Ormskirk's population was about 950 in the mid-seventeenth century, rising to 2,554 in 1801, thus increasing more slowly than some of the county's seaports and industrial towns.
