The Dutch and English trading companies, who had begun their activities in India at the outset of the 1600s, made a major contribution to the Indian economy by supplying the bullion that enabled the twin trends of monetization and commercialization to gather steam. Desire for their bullion and for revenues arising from trade led the Mughals and local rulers in the far south to permit and even encourage European traders to settle within their realms. The number and size of European trading posts went up steadily during the hundred years between 1650 and 1750; so too did the volume of trade in which they engaged.

Fueling the growth of the European trading companies was a new demand for Indian products within Europe. The large quantities of Indian textiles purchased earlier by the Dutch and English companies (the VOC and EIC, respectively) had been sent to Southeast Asia to be exchanged for spices or, alternatively, to the Middle East. Africa was another outlet for Indian cotton goods, which were used widely to purchase slaves. Very little could be sold in Europe due to lack of consumer interest. Around the middle of the seventeenth century, however, Europeans discovered a taste for chintz, the intricately patterned textiles discussed in chapter 6. Hand painted and/or printed in predominantly reds and blues on a white ground, the resist technique described earlier continued to be used for these chintz exports to Europe. The initial demand for these magnificent pieces was as household furnishings, to be displayed on walls or placed in the bedroom. Bed coverings, such as this example from the early eighteenth century, were known in English as palampores, a distorted form of the original Persian name for them.

Just as there were specific designs desired by the long-standing South­east Asian market, so too the European market had its own particu­lar tastes. One of the most popular patterns in Europe, shown here, is the tree of life. The designs on pieces destined for Europe were based on a combination of European, Persian, and Chinese motifs and pro­vided rich color accents for the often dark European household interiors. The favored designs and even the thickness of the hanging or bed cover changed quite rapidly, at times leaving the exporter with outmoded goods that were difficult to sell. So, for example, palampores featuring the tree of life design continued to be popular in the late eighteenth century. But because Chinese porcelains were enjoying a vogue in Europe, the trees in later palampores were thinner, adhering more to a Chinese aesthetic than did earlier ones.

By the 1680s, Indian cotton had become hugely fashionable in Europe, not only as a covering for furniture and walls but also for clothing. Cotton was cheap and comfortable compared to linen or wool, and Indian dyes produced colors that were much brighter and longer-lasting than those of Europe. The rapidly expanding market in Europe led to a very quick rise in the volume of imports of Indian textiles. In 1682, according to K. N. Chaudhuri, the East India Company ordered 2.8 million pieces of cloth from India, a ten-fold increase over what they had ordered just two decades previously. The importance of textiles soon came to overshadow that of spices, the Asian trade item that had originally been most coveted by Europeans. The "calico craze" sweeping England became so strong that domestic linen and wool manufacturers, concerned about the state of their businesses, pressured Parliament into passing a series of laws prohibiting the import or wearing of dyed and printed cloth from India. This did little to diminish the popularity of Indian textiles in England, since they could be readily smuggled in from other countries.

t of the Indian textiles sent to Europe in the late seventeenth cen­ture where produced on the Coromandel coast of southeast India and increasingly from its southern half. Prices were cheaper in the southern Coroman­d Europeans could obtain more trading concessions there due to competition for trade between its numerous small kingdoms. The English for instance, had been granted a complete remission on import port duties at Madras, the town they acquired in 1640 from a local ruler for a small fee. Madras was the biggest beneficiary of the boom in the Coromandel trade, growing to around 100,000 in population by 1700. Another popular settlement was Pondicherry, founded by the French in 1674.Both Madras and Pondicherry allowed Indian ships to freely operate from their ports and gave each resident community the right live by their own laws, unlike the situation at Dutch and Portugese ports.

 Madras and Pondicherry both also enjoyed virtual auton­omy outside political interference, an important consideration in the early eighteenth century. There were numerous contenders for power far south however, as the Mughal empire began to collapse in the north: former Mughal officials, the Marathas who were entrenched in Tanjavur nji forts, and local kings based inland from the coast.

But Madras was not only the largest source of Indian textiles for the European market, it also became a center for commerce with Southeast Asia. Thus a new group of merchants the Southeast Asian traders where private English traders based at Madras, mostly employees of Company, who used their own resources to trade on the side. Because the East India Company was the only British entity authorized to engage in international trade between Europe and Asia, private English traders were only allowed to invest in the trade within Asia that was of no interest to the Company. Many high-ranking EIC officials like Elihu Yale, governor of Madras from 1687 to 1692, amassed fortunes from their private trade. As later, Yale was persuaded to donate a small part of it, he made it possible for Yale University in North America to exist.

Since the Dutch trading company, unlike the East India Company, made much of its profits from trade within Asia, it prohibited its employees from engaging in any private commerce. This difference was a factor in the eventual ascendance of the English traders over the Dutch.

Although Madras was the most successful of their trading posts between 1650 and 1700, the East India Company also had settlements in other regions of India. Bombay was a Portuguese possession acquired by the British crown and given outright to the Company in 1668; like Madras, it enjoyed a good deal of autonomy. Lying off the coast of the western Deccan, Bombay consisted of a series of small islands that were drained and joined together by the English. A number of Indian merchants were quickly attracted from the main Mughal port at Surat, which was subject to Maratha attacks, to the relative safety of Bombay; within ten years its population had risen to 60,000. After its initial spurt of growth, Bombay's population increased only at a moderate rate. Politi­cal instability in the western Deccan sometimes hampered access to food supplies from the mainland, and it was difficult to obtain goods for expon nearby. Its fine harbor and good defenses gave Bombay considerable mil­itary significance for the EIC, however.

In Bengal, the third coastal region in India where textiles could be obtained, the East India Company's position was weaker than in the Coromandel or western India. For the past century Bengal's premier port had been Hugli, named after the river in western Bengal where it was located. Hugli earlier had been a base for private Portuguese traders in the Bay of Bengal, some of whom were mercenaries, slave-raiders, or pirates. The Mughals, who had at long last consolidated their con­trol over Bengal, expelled the Portuguese from Hugli in 1632 and invited other European traders there. The flourishing Dutch settlement at Hugli in 1665 with its offices, warehouses, and gardens is just one example. The VOC did much more business in Bengal than the EIC in this era. Although British trading activity in the region grew substantially, the value of the goods they exported from Bengal was still half that of the Dutch in the last decade of the seventeenth century.

Both Bombay and Hugli, unlike Madras, were situated within Mughal territory, and the East India Company believed local imperial officials were constantly putting obstacles in the way of its trade. In an effort to force better terms of trade, the Company sent a well-armed fleet of ten ships to India in 1686 and, in effect, declared war on the Mughal empire.

They seized numerous Indian ships off the west coast and blockaded Surat port, leading to Mughal retaliation and an attack on Bombay. Things went no better for the English in the Bay of Bengal, where the objective was to capture the port of Chittagong, advance to the Mughal provin­cial capital at Dhaka, and negotiate a new trade agreement. The war ended instead in total failure and the peace treaty of 1690 required the EIC to pay a hefty indemnity. Continuing piracy by English freeboot­ers off India's western shores kept tensions high, however. The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was further irritated by a new coin issued by the East India Company at Bombay. This silver half-rupee coin was similar to Mughal coins in weight and design, but had the names of the British monarchs, Wi1liam-III and Mary, inscribed on it in Persian. It was seen as a direct challenge to Mughal authority, since issuing coins was the prerogative of a sovereign in the Islamic tradition. The Company was soon forced to discontinue the coin and assume responsibility for the safety of Indian ships in the western waters.

The founding of Calcutta was the direct outcome of the war with the Mughals, which forced the English to flee from Hugli. In 1690, soon after the war ended, the EIC regrouped in Bengal, this time settling downriver from the town of Hugli. By this time considerable silt had built up in the Hugli river and it was difficult for large ships to sail that far up river; Calcutta, at a distance of 154 kilometers from the Bay of Bengal, was a more convenient location. Unfortunately, the stagnant water in the nearby marshes and swamps was a breeding ground for mosquitoes, making Calcutta an unhealthy place to live. This did not stop the growth of the city. The EIC soon became landlords of the villages around the Calcutta settlement and built a fortified structure there known as Fort William.

By 1700, the East India Company had thus acquired the three sites of Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta that were to become the great centers of British power in the colonial era. It had also caught up to the VOC in terms of dominance in the Indian Ocean trade, although it would be several more decades before the Dutch were finally eclipsed. In the Coromandel, the English and, to a lesser extent, the French, possessed trading enclaves that were well on their way to becoming independent city-states, secure from the demands of the Indian kingdoms surrounding them. The political fragmentation of the Coromandel region, and the huge volume of its overseas trade, were the significant factors accounting for the greater European clout there. Within the Mughal empire, however, the political power of the European trading companies was still negligible. The ease with which the East India Company's attacks on Mughal ports were crushed demonstrates how English ambitions far surpassed their ability to attain them in the 1680s. Only after the final collapse of the Mughal empire did the balance of power between Indian states and the East India Company change radically.

While the English might not yet have had a major impact on India in 1700, India had become far more important to them. Their trade with India not only led to huge profits and considerable political influence for those in the East India Company, but it was also a source of national pride and concern. The nature of their export trade had also drawn the English into far more involvement with the internal economy of India by 1700. Unlike raw materials such as spices, which could be easily purchased at a port from wholesalers, textiles were a manufactured commodity that went through a complicated and lengthy production process involving spinning, weaving, washing, dying, and printing. The Europeans were entirely dependent on Indian intermediaries for the procurement of tex­tiles from the interior; the Indian merchants in turn had to advance sub­stantial sums of their own money in order to get weavers and others to produce the type of cloth and designs ordered by the Europeans. By 1700, the English in the Coromandel were attempting to get greater control over Indian merchants and weavers so as to obtain the quantities and quality of cloth they desired. Coromandel merchants were gradually confined to a role as broker-agents or financiers of the Europeans, rather than as their partners. The number of ships owned by Indian merchants in the Coro­mandel also declined as a result of the rise of English private shipping. These trends were to spread to other regions as the East India Company's dominance in local economies grew.

Although the cities were still firmly under the control of the Mughal state, the countryside seemed to be slipping out of its hands as peasant rebels increasingly refused to pay their taxes and took up arms during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The large highways that joined the three great Mughal cities of Lahore, Delhi, and Agra ­all with populations as large as 400,000 - were rife with bandits and outlaws, making travel and the transport of goods along this central axis of empire more and more hazardous. The uprisings in the rural areas were a different kind of threat to the empire's existence than the disaffection or even defection of some of its nobles, for they were a challenge to the entire structure of established authority. What appeared as an assault on law and order by criminal rabble from the perspective of the Mughal court can, on the other hand, be more positively interpreted as a growing wave of opposition by the rural localities to the entrenched power of the imperial elites.

The first area to be beset with lawlessness was the corridor between Delhi and Agra to its southeast. The Jat community of the Agra-Delhi countryside started to rebel as early as 1669, during Aurangzeb's reign, when villagers near the town of Mathura overcame local Mughal forces and began looting the wealthy. The rebellion spread among other Jats, peasants largely engaged in agriculture, who came together to form an army of 20,000 men, a quarter of whom had died by the time the outbreak was suppressed a year later. Renewed armed resistance to the Mughal state occurred in the late 1680s. Large bands led by Jat chiefs not only withheld the agrarian revenues that were owed to the state but also repeat­edly pillaged traffic on the main roads. They even attacked Akbar's tomb near Agra and took many valuables. This was more than just the sack of a magnificent structure, it was an affront to Mughal dynastic pride, as the European traveler Niccolao Manucci observed at the time. Soon after Aurangzeb's death, the court had no choice but to appoint a Jat chief to guard the imperial highway from Agra to Delhi, in effect giving him the right to plunder at will.

Jat strength in the Agra-Delhi region reached its height in the mid eighteenth century, when one of their chiefs, Badan Singh, carved out the small state of Bharatpur south of Agra. The Jats established a fairly traditional fort at Bharatpur, but in nearby Dig built themselves an elab­orate garden palace combining styles seen at Amber and Agra. Its buildings are modeled on those forms first developed under Shah Jahan; for example, curved bangla roofs on pavilions set in four ­part Mughal-type gardens, with large tanks to provide cooling waters in what is otherwise land on the edge of a desert. Here the language of poetry and painting, thunder and rain evoked by the yearning of lovers, is implemented in the architecture in the form of mechanical devices allow­ing water to pour from the roofs as the sound of thunder is emulated. While there is a tendency to consider the Jats as unsophisticated peas­ants or marauders, clearly they were capable of producing sophisticated architectural creations using cutting-edge technologies.

Immediately after Aurangzeb's death, the countryside to Delhi's north­west also experienced a serious uprising. A man called Banda Bahadur took over a long belt of territory just south of the Himalayan foothills, extending from the Ravi river in the Punjab as far east as the northern Yamuna-Ganga doab (the alluvial lands between the northern Yamuna and Ganges rivers), beginning in late 1709. Described as "an army of innumerable men, like ants and locusts, belonging to the low castes and ready to die," Banda's forces reportedly included as many as 70,000 to 80,000 men at times. (Khafi Khan, quoted in Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556-1707, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 397. )

They raided wealthy towns as well as cara­vans traveling through the region and once even entered the outskirts of Lahore. Banda Bahadur collected revenues from the agricultural lands he captured, issued his own coins, and called himself the true emperor, in a bid to set up a separate state. For years he eluded first the local Mughal troops and later the imperial army, occasionally taking refuge in the hills where minor rajas sheltered him from capture. The threat Banda Bahadur posed to the empire was finally eliminated when he was executed in Delhi in March 1716.

Allegiance to the Sikh faith was the bond that rallied the men who fought with Banda Bahadur in this uprising, which began right after the death of Guru Gobind Singh in 1708. Gobind Singh was the tenth and last of the Sikh leaders in a direct line of spiritual transmission from the founder of Sikh ism, Guru Nanak (1469-1539). Like Kabir, Guru Nanak was part of the Sant tradition, discussed in chapter 4, that rejected insti­tutionalized forms of religion while stressing the equality of all individuals before god. Nanak's god was without form but pervaded by light, to be worshipped through meditation on and repetition of his name. From early on, special emphasis was placed on congregational activities, par­ticularly singing hymns and eating together. Guru Nanak's poems and those of his first four successors were compiled in the Adi Granth text, along with poems by Sant and Sufi poets including Kabir. This holy scrip­ture came to hold a central place in the Sikh religion after Guru Gobind Singh's death in the early eighteenth century. Without any more spiritual descendants of Guru Nanak to lead them, the Sikhs in later times turned increasingly to the Adi Granth, often called the Guru Granth Sahib, for guidance.

The belief in the continuity between Guru Nanak and the later Sikh gurus is revealed in a number of paintings that depict the first guru in an imaginary meeting with them. This example from the late eighteenth century shows Guru Nanak, dressed here in the patchwork robes of a mystic saint, indicating his piety, with his nine spiritual suc­cessors and a musician who is identified in the painting as Guru Nanak's Muslim companion, the musician Mardana. Nanak, spiritually inclined since his childhood, was educated in both Hindu and Muslim schools and had acquaintances belonging to both religions. He was influenced by Muslim teachings as well as Hindu ones, while simultaneously rejecting both religions as practiced in his day.

An accepting attitude toward Islam had long been customary among Sikhs, but during the seventeenth century they frequently came into con­flict with the Mughal state. Although religious tension may have been a factor in the empire's antagonism, the main reason for its repeated attempts to suppress Sikh leaders was their growing secular power. The religion had gained considerable popularity by this time, and the Sikh gurus wielded much local influence and wealth, as well as armed support.

On more than one occasion they supported a contender for the Mughal throne who was unsuccessful, leading to retaliation from the next emperor. For example, Jahangir executed the fifth guru Arjun Dev in 1606 for his support of Jahangir's son, Khusrau, rather than Jahangir. Violent opposition to the imperial state and hostile attitudes toward Muslims became more widespread between 1675 and 1708, the period when Gobind Singh was the Sikh guru. He was the most militant of the gurus, engaging in numerous battles himself and advocating the use of force on the part of his followers.

In 1699, Gobind Singh founded a new order, the Khalsa, which reflected the militaristic orientation the religion had taken under his leadership. Male initiates into the Khalsa order adopted the surname Singh, meaning lion, a royal symbol. They were physically differentiated from the general populace by five emblems - a dagger, bracelet, comb, soldier's undershorts, and unshorn hair on the head and face - that had strong martial nuances. The distinct Sikh identity offered by the Khalsa attracted more and more people into its fold over the course of the eight­eenth century, so much so that the Khalsa is now almost synonymous with Sikhism.

Many people who considered themselves followers of Guru Nanak did not join the Khalsa, however. Notable among them was a large segment of the Khatri community to which all ten of the Sikh gurus had belonged, along with most of their fifteenth- and sixteenth-century adherents. Khatris were a high-caste group based mainly in urban centers, where they made their living as shop-keepers, traders, moneylenders, clerks, and administrators. Over time people from other backgrounds were attracted to the Sikh religion, lessening the Khatri role in it. First were the Jats, who became Sikhs in large numbers during the seventeenth century; later on, Arora merchants, various untouchable groups, and artisan-craftspeople also joined the religion in smaller numbers.

The Jats are a striking example of how new communities and new iden­tities were arising throughout the centuries covered in this book. Jat is a broad label applied to diverse peoples who were originally pastoralists in the lower Indus region of Sind. Over time they migrated northward into the Punjab, bringing their herding lifestyle with them. Those Jats who moved into the more fertile localities of the Punjab, in its central and eastern portions, slowly took up agriculture. Facilitating the spread of agriculture in this semi-arid region was the introduction of the Persian wheel, a device powered by draught animals that drew up water from wells. By the sixteenth century, Punjabi Jats were known as peasant vil­lagers, and some were among the land-controlling local notables of the captured, issued his own coins, and called himself the true emperor, in a bid to set up a separate state. For years he eluded first the local Mughal troops and later the imperial army, occasionally taking refuge in the hills where minor rajas sheltered him from capture. The threat Banda Bahadur posed to the empire was finally eliminated when he was executed in Delhi in March 1716.

Allegiance to the Sikh faith was the bond that rallied the men who fought with Banda Bahadur in this uprising, which began right after the death of Guru Gobind Singh in 1708. Gobind Singh was the tenth and last of the Sikh leaders in a direct line of spiritual transmission from the founder of Sikh ism, Guru Nanak (1469-1539). Like Kabir, Guru Nanak was part of the Sant tradition, that rejected insti­tutionalized forms of religion while stressing the equality of all individuals before god. Nanak's god was without form but pervaded by light, to be worshipped through meditation on and repetition of his name. From early on, special emphasis was placed on congregational activities, par­ticularly singing hymns and eating together. Guru Nanak's poems and those of his first four successors were compiled in the Adi Granth text, along with poems by Sant and Sufi poets including Kabir. This holy scrip­ture came to hold a central place in the Sikh religion after Guru Gobind Singh's death in the early eighteenth century. Without any more spiritual descendants of Guru Nanak to lead them, the Sikhs in later times turned increasingly to the Adi Granth, often called the Guru Granth Sahib, for guidance.

The belief in the continuity between Guru Nanak and the later Sikh gurus is revealed in a number of paintings that depict the first guru in an imaginary meeting with them. This example from the late eighteenth century shows Guru Nanak, dressed here in the patchwork robes of a mystic saint, indicating his piety, with his nine spiritual suc­cessors and a musician who is identified in the painting as Guru Nanak's Muslim companion, the musician Mardana. Nanak, spiritually inclined since his childhood, was educated in both Hindu and Muslim schools and had acquaintances belonging to both religions. He was influenced by Muslim teachings as well as Hindu ones, while simultaneously rejecting both religions as practiced in his day.

On more than one occasion they supported a contender for the Mughal throne who was unsuccessful, leading to retaliation from the next emperor. For example, Jahangir executed the fifth guru Arjun Dev in 1606 for his support of Jahangir's son, Khusrau, rather than Jahangir. Violent opposition to the imperial state and hostile attitudes toward Muslims became more widespread between 1675 and 1708, the period when Gobind Singh was the Sikh guru. He was the most militant of the gurus, engaging in numerous battles himself and advocating the use of force on the part of his followers.

In 1699, Gobind Singh founded a new order, the Khalsa, which reflected the militaristic orientation the religion had taken under his leadership. Male initiates into the Khalsa order adopted the surname Singh, meaning lion, a royal symbol. They were physically differentiated from the general populace by five emblems - a dagger, bracelet, comb, soldier's undershorts, and unshorn hair on the head and face - that had strong martial nuances. The distinct Sikh identity offered by the Khalsa attracted more and more people into its fold over the course of the eight­eenth century, so much so that the Khalsa is now almost synonymous with Sikhism.

Many people who considered themselves followers of Guru Nanak did not join the Khalsa, however. Notable among them was a large segment of the Khatri community to which all ten of the Sikh gurus had belonged, along with most of their fifteenth- and sixteenth-century adherents. Khatris were a high-caste group based mainly in urban centers, where they made their living as shop-keepers, traders, moneylenders, clerks, and administrators. Over time people from other backgrounds were attracted to the Sikh religion, lessening the Khatri role in it. First were the Jats, who became Sikhs in large numbers during the seventeenth century; later on, Arora merchants, various untouchable groups, and artisan-craftspeople also joined the religion in smaller numbers.

The Jats are a striking example of how new communities and new iden­tities were arising throughout the centuries covered in this book. Jat is a broad label applied to diverse peoples who were originally pastoralists in the lower Indus region of Sind. Over time they migrated northward into the Punjab, bringing their herding lifestyle with them. Those Jats who moved into the more fertile localities of the Punjab, in its central and eastern portions, slowly took up agriculture. Facilitating the spread of agriculture in this semi-arid region was the introduction of the Persian wheel, a device powered by draught animals that drew up water from wells. By the sixteenth century, Punjabi Jats were known as peasant vil­lagers, and some were among the land-controlling local notables of the area. In the western Punjab and other localities where settled agriculture was not productive, many Jats continued to herd animals.

The Jats also provide an important insight into how religious identi­ties evolved during the precolonial era. Before they settled in the Punjab and other northern regions, the pastoralist Jats had had little exposure to any of the mainstream religions. Only after they became more integrated into the agrarian world did the Jats slowly adopt the dominant religion of the people in whose midst they dwelt. The affiliation of the Jats varied depending on their location: Jats living between Delhi and Agra were pri­marily Hindu, those in the eastern Punjab were mainly Sikh, and those ofthe western Punjab were Muslim. This division among Jats reflects the relative strengths of the three religions in the different regions where they settled. Similar processes of gradual incorporation into the mainstream culture were occurring elsewhere in less developed areas of the subconti­nent, adding considerably to the social dynamism and religious diversity of its regional societies.

Jats were the largest component in the new Khalsa Sikh order, and many of them joined Banda Bahadur's rebellion. The disorder in the Punjab region did not subside with Banda's execution, for some of his former followers fled to the hills while others remained in the plains and continued to harass Mughal officials and travelers on the main roads. Small pockets of territory in the central and eastern Punjab gradually came into the hands of the leaders of separate Khalsa warbands. The various Khalsa chiefs became the rulers of the Punjab in the aftermath of the 1761 Battle of Panipat, in which the Afghans finally put a stop to the advance of Maratha power in north India. In the early nineteenth century, a single Sikh state was finally formed by the famous Ranjit Singh (1780~ 1839). Thus, the political aspirations of the Sikhs of the Punjab and the Hindu Jats of the Delhi-Agra region both eventually found _expression in the formation of new states.

The bulk of the men in the Sikh and Jat armies were peasants who owned small amounts of land, and so these uprisings have often been characterized as peasant rebellions. Several noted historians, including Irfan Habib, believe that the condition of the peasantry worsened under Mughal rule. In Habib's view, the greater efficiency of the Mughal fiscal system made it possible for the state to extract agrarian revenues from cultivators at ruinously high levels. The situation was made worse by the practice of frequently transferring jagir revenue assignments, since there was no incentive for Mughal nobles to protect peasants or promote long­term agricultural development in any given locality if their association with it was to last for only a few short years. The Sikh and Jat peasant uprisings are attributed by Habib to this callous disregard of the lower classes, who could no longer endure their economic oppression. Strong support for Habib's position comes from European travelers to Mughal India, who repeatedly comment on the abject poverty of the countryside.

Some scholars have suggested that Indian peasants on the whole became more prosperous during the Mughal heyday, although within the peasant ranks greater differences in income developed between those at the top and bottom. Increased expectations for future prosperity coupled with the economic means to rebel culminated, in this school of thought, in a wave of rural uprisings during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Muzaffar Alam and others also question the charac­terization of these uprisings as peasant rebellions because the rebel lead­ers were men who occupied positions of local power. They were known as zamindars in Mughal times, a broad label that encompassed a wide range of intermediaries between the peasant cultivator and the imperial state. Zamindars typically had the right to retain a certain fraction of the revenues in the localities over which they held sway. Some of them were mighty hereditary chiefs or princes, like the Rajput lineages of Mewar or Amber, who were independent for all practical purposes within their ancestral territories. Other, much less powerful, zamindars held author­ity over just one or a handful of villages. They may have attained that status through descent from the original founder of the village, through conquest, or by purchasing the position from a previous holder. The zamindars who led the Sikh and Jat uprisings were of this latter, smaller, type.

The Mughals never, even at the height of their power, fully controlled the zamindar class. The foremost among them were co-opted into the mansabdar system. The Rajput chiefs, for instance Raja Man Singh, were given watan jagirs or homeland territories in addition to the normal type of jagirs, in recognition of the power they wielded in their home regions. The imperial center was able, by this means, to secure the loyalty and military services of the Rajput chiefs as well as their kinsmen, retainers, and dependent clients. No such effort was made to incorporate the less powerful zamindars, whose writ ran only over a small locality. Instead, they were typically held responsible for the collection of tax revenues in their village or villages, which would be trans­mitted to provincial Mughal officials and then redistributed either to the imperial court or to those mansabdars who held jagirs in the area. Mili­tary force was sometimes needed at the provincial level to make zamindars comply with state revenue demands, but the state apparatus never pen­etrated individual villages or established direct ties with the peasantry. All relations with peasant-cultivators were conducted through this inter­mediarv laver of zamindars.

Petty zamindars had intimate knowledge of local conditions and close ties with the local peasants, to whom they might even be distantly related. Because of their position, they often already had a small band of armed troops and could easily raise more; they also fortified their own dwellings when possible. Without the leadership of this class of rural gentry, it is unlikely that armed resistance by peasants could have spread as far or lasted as long as it did with the Sikhs and Jats. Zamindars may have spear­headed the campaigns of resistance against the state on some occasions, while at other times they may have joined an insurrection after it had already been initiated. In either case, it was zamindars who mainly ben­efited from local uprisings against state authority, rather than the peasants who fought for or with them. Thus, the primary outcome of both the Sikh and Jat rebellions was that zamindars from these communities increased the amount of territory under their control. The more successful among them even rose to the status of minor kings, as we saw with the Jat ruler Badan Singh of Bharatpur.

The Deccan also had a rural gentry similar to the zamindars of north India. In the Maratha territory, they were known by titles such as desh­mukh or patil, depending on the number of villages they controlled. Shivaji, came from a newly ascendant deshmukh family and enjoyed the support of many of the petty gentry: the smaller deshmukh families as well as village headmen and other minor office holders. In his rise to power, Shivaji fought against the large, elite desh­mukh families of the western Deccan, who had long-established privi­leges granted by the Bijapur or Ahmadnagar Sultanates. The Maratha movement initiated by Shivaji was therefore a struggle not only against the Deccan Sultanates and the Mughal empire, but also against the entrenched local power structure, which included a number of aristo­cratic Maratha clans.

Indeed, zamindars and their equivalents were rising up to oppose state demands all over the empire from the late seventeenth century onward. These men, whose power originated in local rights and authority rather than from any privileges granted by the empire, sought to cast off the mantle of the imperial state imposed on them from the top. In their bid for greater power, zamindars recruited support from among the peas­antry of their localities. The Sikh, Jat, and Maratha gentry were par­ticularly effective in mobilizing large numbers of men because of their close ties to them and to each other. Their communities were relatively new, lacked rigid class boundaries, consisted largely of upwardly mobile peasant-warriors, and possessed a strong sense of identity. When bonds between the zamindars and peasants were weaker or when the zamin­dars of an area had no incentive to work together, their resistance to higher authority resulted in only localized unrest. Rulers of the successful new states that splintered off from the empire were therefore able to reassert control over the unruly minor gentry in their regions. The general trend is nonetheless clear: everywhere, as the grip of empire loosened, locally based interests tried to overthrow the existing power structure for their own benefit. The disintegration of the Mughal empire was brought about not only by the disaffection of its nobility at the cent er but also through widespread incidents of defiance or rebellion at the local level.

 

Transformations of the economy.

At the height of empire in the seventeenth century, the use of money, the cultivation of commercial crops, and the production of manufactured goods had all become more widespread. The intensification of monetiza­tion and commercialization meant that even peasants were now enmeshed in economic relationships that extended considerably beyond their vil­lages. Those who held political power, from the Mughal nobility of the great cities to the petty gentry of the countryside, also became more dependent on merchants to transform the agrarian riches they controlled into the cash or credit they needed to sustain their lifestyles. Commer­cial activity was not only intruding deeper and deeper into local agrarian economies, it was also operating in more expansive networks across the subcontinent as the Mughal empire grew in size. Cash and credit, a wide range of goods, and even people circulated on a much larger scale during the seventeenth century than in earlier times. As a consequence, all kinds of merchants - the small village moneylender, the urban shopkeeper, the long-distance trader, and the merchant-banker - flourished.

Growing monetization and the expansion of economic networks were partly an outcome of the needs of the Mughal state. Revenues extracted from the hinterland, typically in the form of cash, had to be dispatched to the capital, while funds for military campaigns or specialized goods had to be sent out to the provinces. This process could be cumbersome, as in the early seventeenth century when Bengal's revenues were physically transported to the imperial heartland in a convoy of bullock-carts. A better means of remitting money from one place to another was soon developed, the hundi or bill of exchange. The hundi was a note from one banker to another, instructing him to issue a specified amount of money to the person who delivered it. Large bankers at major urban centers like Surat, in Gujarat, could readily issue hundis for large amounts to be paid out in Agra or elsewhere in the imperial heartland.

The relative ease of travel and exchange over long distances also stim­ulated the expansion of economic networks in the seventeenth century. Even bulky raw materials and foodstuffs were circulated from one end of the empire to another. Rice, sugar, and oil from Bengal, for instance, were sent inland along the Ganges river to Agra and also down the eastern coast to the Coromandel. In its turn, Bengal imported large quantities of salt from Rajasthan. Transport costs must have been quite low, for artisans in certain areas came to depend largely on supplies from distant regions. Bengal was the source of most of the raw silk used by Gujarat's important silk textile industry, while Coromandel weavers relied heav­ily on raw cotton from the western Deccan. High-end luxury items like precious stones and finely worked metal ware were widely coveted and distributed.

People too had to travel to far-off places to procure goods or clinch business deals and needed safe accommodations while away from their homes. A large city like Agra had as many as sixty resthouses or serais for travelers, according to Jean Thevenot, who visited it in the mid sev­enteenth century. The one illustrated here was built between 1659 and 1664 by Daud Khan Quraishi while he served as the Mughal governor of Bihar. It is located in a town named Daudnagar, after Daud Khan, located not far from the city of Aurangabad on the Son river. Daud Khan had been successful in finally suppressing a local zamindar whose family had long been a thorn in Mughal authority and built this serai in celebration of the fact. Today only the arched entrance gates remain, but originally the entire complex was protected by exterior walls whose gates were locked at night. Serais were usually provided with a place of religious worship, a mosque in this instance, and cells in the perimeter walls served as the equivalent of hotel rooms. The large open courtyard could be used for animals and goods in transit. Even into the late nineteenth century many of these serais still functioned. They dotted the Indian highways and were built at a distance of a day's travel from one another.

The two linchpins of the extensive markets in finance and commodities were the cities of Agra and Surat. Goods from all over north India were transported to Agra: items like the high-quality indigo of nearby Bayana, or saffron from Kashmir far to the north, or fine muslin cloth from Bengal to the east. These commodities were distributed from Agra into the hinterland or sent westward to Lahore and southward to Surat. Surat was the main maritime outlet for goods from the imperial heartland that would be shipped out to foreign destinations or along the coasts of the subcontinent. This port also became the hub of India's financial markets because the large volume of international trade that flowed thmugh its port brought in vast quantities of bullion.

The complex economic networks that bound the subcontinent together during the height of the Mughal empire could thrive only when there was relative security on the major arteries through which goods and peo­ple circulated. As we have seen, conditions in the imperial heartland were rapidly deteriorating in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The situation was worsened by the invading armies of Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali, which wreaked havoc as they fought their way from Afghanistan to Delhi in the 1730s and 1750s, respectively. More and more land was lost to the effective control of the empire, either because of the defection of former nobles or through the appropriation of local power by zamindars and other rural gentry. Maratha armies based in central and western India also encroached increasingly on the empire's territory. Within the short span of a half century or so, the fabric of empire unraveled, and new, shifting configurations of power arose in many regions.

What effect did the political decentralization of the eighteenth century have on the Indian economy? For many years, historians believed that the economic benefits arising from political unification vanished along with the empire. Peaceful travel and trade became difficult, local economies were disrupted by recurrent warfare, and the misery of the common peo­ple deepened. Eighteenth-century India has been considered an era of political anarchy and economic recession, a kind of Dark Age ushered in by the collapse of the Mughal empire. The notion of an economic breakdown accompanying political disorder was promoted by the East India Company, which justified its growing involvement in internal Indian affairs during the late eighteenth century on these grounds. In the past two decades, however, several historians have challenged the assumption that imperial decline led to a weakening of the Indian economy. C. A. Bayly, for example, suggests that the devolution of imperial political and economic power to smaller domains was a largely positive phenomenon, resulting in long-term growth and stability in several regions of the sub­continent. Others believe the Mughal state's impact on local economies has been overstated and point to the encroachment of the European trad­ing companies as a more significant development for the economy than the collapse of empire.

A closer look at the economic picture reveals considerable variation from region to region. The areas that suffered most from the decline of Mughal power were the former hubs of the diffuse, but closely inter­meshed, imperial economy. The Agra-Delhi corridor was the first to be affected, due to the Jat insurrection. By 1690, large numbers of merchants and weavers had fled Agra for safer surroundings, and a Dutch trader trav­eling to Agra needed 300 guards for his protection. Travel between Agra and Surat became hazardous in the early eighteenth century, as internal struggles for power broke out at court after Aurangzeb's death, the Sikhs of the Punjab revolted, and Maratha power grew in western and central India. Dutch traders traveling from Agra to Surat in the entourage of the Surat governor's son reported repeated attacks by peasant-bandit armies as large as 5,000 men. As a result, Surat bankers refused to issue hundis for Agra, causing the Dutch trading company to close its trading post there in 1716. The severing of the road link to Agra and the imperial heartland led to a permanent decrease in trading activity at Surat. The number of ships based there dropped sharply and many merchants moved to other parts of India, especially Bengal.

The Punjab, one of the wealthiest provinces of Mughal India, was also badly affected by the events of the early eighteenth century. Much of the Punjab's prosperity had come from the vigorous trade with Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran along the grand highway that ran from the Gangetic region through Agra to Delhi. From Lahore, the Punjab's main city, one trade route went to Qandahar and on to Isfahan, the commercial center ofIran. An estimated 20,000 to 25,000 camel loads had traversed the Lahore-Isfahan corridor yearly in the early seventeenth century. Another route ran from Lahore to Kabul and then into Central Asia. Horses were the chief item imported from the west, while various textiles were the primary export. Some of these textiles were produced within the Punjab, one of the four main regions in India manufacturing cotton goods for export along with Gujarat, the Coromandel coast, and Bengal. The disintegration ofIran's Safavid empire (1501-1722) and the growing strength of Afghan tribes also had a detrimental impact on Surat, whose major export markets by 1700 were in the Middle East.

Other regions of India that had not been as central to the imperial net­works of exchange had a different experience in the eighteenth century. The Maratha homeland in the western Deccan, now under the direct control of the Brahmin peshwas, witnessed an expansion of agricultural cultivation. Agriculture was extended in eastern Rajasthan as well, where the leadership of the Kachhwaha Rajput rulers led to improving economic conditions. When Sawai Jai Singh (r. 1700-43) decided to shift his capital from Amber to Jaipur, 10 kilometers to the south, he took active mea­sures to ensure the new city's economic success. He invited prominent merchant families from various localities, both within and outside the modern state of Rajasthan, to migrate to Jaipur and gave them large plots of land upon which to build their houses. The elegant mansion of the wealthy Natani family, one of the first to migrate to Jaipur, was located close to the palace and had a temple attached to it that Sawai Jai Singh often visited. Today this enormous house, based loosely on Mughal­style mansions, is divided into a girls' school and a police station.

The economic picture is hence quite mixed. The waning of imperial power led to an economic recession lasting well into the eighteenth cen­tury in the Delhi-Agra region, the Punjab, and Gujarat. Whether regions outside the imperial system like the far south suffered any economic reper­cussions is unclear; nor is there a consensus on economic conditions in the central Gangetic valley or eastern Deccan. In areas like the western Deccan or eastern Rajasthan, the efforts of the new rulers actually stim­ulated economic growth. Bengal, a province that was already prosperous in the second half of the seventeenth century, continued to experience a boom in the early eighteenth century, for reasons we will explore shortly.

In some respects, the various regions of the subcontinent were now developing along differing trajectories, depending on local conditions. Regional economies had become so intertwined during the seventeenth century, however, that they could not fully prosper without a certain degree of long-distance trade and exchange. Some of the old routes had diminished in importance, but other routes soon supplanted them, in a reorientation of commerce that was increasingly centered on the port cities of the East India Company rather than the old sites of Mughal power. As a series of smaller states arose in the place of the large, unified Mughal empire over the course of the eighteenth century, the big Hindu

and Jain merchant firms became even more indispensable. Regional polit­ical elites had to rely on these merchant-bankers with branches in several parts of India, because only they had the resources to conduct major commercial transactions across regional boundaries. Without their sup­port, the regional states of the eighteenth century could not survive, and hence the large merchant houses came to possess considerable political influence in the new, post-imperial era.

Another important change contributing to the blurring of commerce and politics was the growth of revenue farming, the selling of rights to col­lect revenues to the highest bidder. In the past, taxes on agricultural pro­duce had typically been gathered and transmitted by officials appointed by the Mughal state, which had a substantial bureaucratic apparatus pre­cisely for that purpose. The states that arose in the aftermath of Mughal decline instead often contracted the collection of agrarian revenues to individuals who kept for themselves whatever surplus they could gather over and above the amount promised to the state. The authority to col­lect other taxes like transit duties was also sold to such entrepreneurial revenue-farmers, as were state monopolies in the trade of certain goods. Meanwhile, a variety of statuses and privileges that had in the past been obtained mainly through membership in a local community, such as the positions of village headman or zamindar, were also becoming commod­ified, that is, available for sale, purchase, lease, or mortgage. Wealthy merchants sometimes purchased agrarian rights or revenue farms, but more typically advanced money to those who did.

The weakening of the Mughal imperial state, on the one hand, and the spreading commercialization of the economy, on the other, there­fore led to the rise of people who occupied an intermediate status in society between the peasantry and the great nobility. Zamindars appro­priated lands and income that had formerly been possessed by the state, revenue-farmers took the place of state officials and controlled the flow of revenue from the localities to regional political centers, and the ser­vices of merchant-traders became vital to all sectors of society. All three groups - zamindars, revenue-farmers, and merchant-traders - wished to enlarge their own wealth and power at the expense ofthe imperial officials and local kings. Their interests could sometimes clash but at other times could coincide when confronted by regional rulers attempting to consoli­date central power. The support of large merchant-banking firms proved especially vital to the rise to power of the English East India Company, who shared their commercial interests and perspectives. We now turn to a detailed look at Bengal's flourishing economy and the events that led to the dominance of the English there.

Bengal's prosperity ultimately derived from its phenomenal agricultural productivity. During the seventeenth century, its rice, sugar, and oil fed the needs not only of distant regions within the empire but even offar-off lands in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The price of commodi­ties was so low in Bengal that virtually every foreign visitor remarked on the fact. "At Hugli may be procured beeswax, pepper, civet, rice, but­ter, oil and wheat; all at about half the price of other places," wrote an East India Company official in 1650.2 With food so cheap, labor costs remained low in Bengal, and its manufactured goods were competitively priced relative to other areas. Even transportation was inexpensive within Bengal, because boats could easily haul goods along the many waterways that crisscrossed the region.

Why was Bengal so remarkably productive? Much of lower Bengal was a vast delta or floodplain formed by the many streams that flowed down out of the massive Ganges and Brahmaputra river systems. Highly fertile soil was continually deposited by these streams, which were, in effect, creating productive, new land at an astonishingly rapid rate. As layers of silt laid down by the waters built up, riverbeds would overflow and new channels were carved through which the waters would run in future years. In this dynamic manner, the delta was steadily extended as the rivers continued to shift their courses over the centuries. The older centers of settlement in Bengal had all been in the northwest, and most of the waters of the Ganges had flowed into the Bhagirathi and Hugli rivers in the western end of the delta, in what is today the West Bengal state of India. But the main flow of the Ganges gradually migrated toward the southeast, and by the late sixteenth century it was entering into the Padma river in the eastern delta, in modern Bangladesh, where the Brahmaputra also contributed its waters and its silt. The eastern delta's rich soil, abundant rainfall, and ample water supplies provided ideal conditions for the cultivation of rice and other crops.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a tremendous expansion of agriculture in eastern Bengal. It was a land full of jungles and swamps whose sparse population had previously mainly been fisher­folk and hunter-gatherers. Colonists, mostly Muslims, had gradually been arriving from the long-settled regions to the west, and their numbers swelled after Bengal was incorporated into the Mughal empire. As the pioneering colonists cleared the eastern Bengal wilderness and turned it into cultivated land, settlements of local people coalesced around them. These local people were introduced to agriculture at the same time that they were introduced to their first world religion, Islam. Agriculture and Islam thus came to be associated along Bengal's agrarian frontier, and a large Muslim peasant community emerged in what is now Bangladesh, as described by Richard M. Eaton. Just as in the western Punjab, in modern Pakistan, the spread of Islam among the common folk of eastern Bengal was a relatively late development. And in both cases it accompanied the incorporation of local communities who were originally not cultivators into an expanding agrarian civilization.

The integration of Bengal into the Mughal empire was a major stimu­lus to the growth of commerce, just as it was to the growth of agriculture. Bengal was not quickly subjugated, however, for its distance from the capital, its marshy and wet terrain unsuited for cavalry warfare, and its many entrenched local lords all slowed the advance of Mughal dominion. The Mughals began the process of conquest in 1574, with the capture of the Bengal Sultanate's capital in the northwestern corner of the region, at roughly the same time that the merging of the Ganges and Padma rivers opened up a direct internal water route from the imperial heart­land to eastern Bengal. In 1610, the Mughals moved their local base to Dhaka, and soon thereafter the eastern delta was finally subdued. Bengal's richest agrarian zone was now easily accessible, and its products were carried away in increasing quantities to supply the great metropolises of the empire.

Shortly after the final pacification of Bengal, the Mughal ruling elite began to invest heavily in the trade of what was essentially their new colony. Involvement in commerce started at the very highest levels, among the imperial princes and governors posted to the province, but a range of other Mughal officials also participated. Although high-ranking Mughal nobles sometimes tried to corner the market in certain goods or claim precedence in the buying of imports, overall their interest in Bengal's trade was a positive factor. The safety of the ports and waterways was made a high official priority, leading to a crackdown on the rampant piracy of the Bay of Bengal. It also led to the infusion of substantial cap­ital resources into local enterprises and infrastructure. As one example, when Muhammad Sayyid Ardistani, formerly Mir Jumla of the Golkonda kingdom, joined the Mughal nobility in the mid 1650s, he brought his own fleet of over ten ships with him to Bengal along with his personal fortune. The majority of the large ocean-going ships in Bengal during the seventeenth century were in fact owned by Mughal nobility and officials.

By 1690, the same year that Calcutta was founded, the Mughal elite had largely withdrawn from Bengal's commerce. Local shipping declined ships in the first decade of the 1700s to at least fifty in the 1750s. Since the English private traders of Calcutta could not ship goods to Europe because that was a monopoly of the Company, they concentrated instead on commerce to the Malabar coast, Surat, and the Persian Gulf. For­merly, many of the ships sailing back and forth from Bengal to Surat, the most important destination of the Calcutta fleet, had been owned by wealthy Muslim merchants of Gujarat. The Gujarat ships dwindled rapidly, and, by the mid eighteenth century, English private traders thor­oughly dominated the Bengal-Gujarat maritime route. In the process, Hugli port was eclipsed by Calcutta, which reached a population of about 120,000 in 1750.

The rise of private English shipping in the eighteenth century thus led to the waning of Indian shipping between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, just as it did on the route from the Coromandel coast to Southeast Asia. Indian long-distance merchants were more and more dependent on the English in order to export and import goods overseas. English private traders also began intruding into the substantial internal trade in commodities, not only in other localities within Bengal like Dhaka, but as far up-country as Patna. Although the understanding was that the English should confine their activities to purchasing goods for export or disposing of imported items, in fact they also dealt in bulk commodities for domestic consumption such as salt and grain. The English further abused the terms of agreement by extending their own tax-exempt status to the goods of favored Indian merchants. By 1750, the East India Company had made considerable inroads into Bengal's economy and had extensive dealings with local merchants and bankers.

The ongoing prosperity of Bengal, and the growth of European com­mercial activities there, was facilitated by its political stability. Under the excellent stewardship of Murshid Quli Khan in the early eighteenth century, Bengal's system of revenue collection was strengthened, and a greater degree of political centralization was instituted at the regional level. Although Murshid Quli Khan's reforms led to a sharp reduction in the overall number of zamindars, there was a corresponding growth in the size and power of several large zamindars. Fifteen zamindar families like those based at Rajshahi, Nadia, and Burdwan (all located strategically on major rivers) accounted for almost half of the region's revenues in 1727. Both Murshid Quli Khan and his successor, Shuja Khan (r. 1727-39), continued to send about 10 million rupees annually to Delhi, a mas­sive tribute that served to mask the reality of Bengal's self-governance. Assisting the rulers of Bengal in collecting and remitting these huge sums was the Jagat Seth banking house. Jagat Seth, meaning "merchant of the world," was a title conferred on the head of the family by a Mughal emperor, indicating the favor he had curried at the imperial court. The Jagat Seth firm had a monopoly over the minting of coins in Bengal and functioned in essence as the banking arm of the regional government. Only with the cooperation of the large zamindars and banking firms could the Bengal state run smoothly.

Things remained largely stable under Alivardi Khan, who ruled from 1740 to 1756, although Maratha armies from central India made sev­eral destructive campaigns into western Bengal. The expense of fighting the Marathas caused Alivardi Khan to demand additional tribute from the major zamindars, the wealthy merchant-bankers, and the European trading companies. His successor, Siraj al-Daula, who was only nineteen when he became ruler in 1756, moved quickly to strengthen his power. He succeeded only in alienating important interests in his realm. Among them was the powerful Jagat Seth, whom Siraj al- Daula struck after being refused an exorbitant tribute of 30 million rupees. When Siraj al-Daula heard that the EIC was improving its fortifications at Fort William in Calcutta, he took that as a threat to his sovereignty and ordered the suc­cessful capture of the fort. The East India Company, the Jagat Seth and other banking families, important officials in the regional administration whom he replaced with his own men, and several leading zamindars were now among Siraj al-Daula's many enemies.

Even a decade or two earlier, the East India Company might have needed a long time to regroup and take back their critical base at Calcutta. But the English and French trading companies had been at war with each other for some years in south India, and so a British fleet with British soldiers had been sent out to Madras in order to aid the East India Company there. This British force now sailed from Madras to Bengal and soon retook Calcutta. It was commanded by Robert Clive, who had achieved distinction in the south Indian wars between the English and French traders.

The earlier conflict in south India had other significant repercussions for what was to transpire in Bengal, because it had revealed the many benefits that Europeans could gain through military intervention into internal Indian political disputes. Between 1746 and 1754, the French and English trading companies in south India not only fought each other, but they also allied themselves with competing contenders to the thrones of Hyderabad in the eastern Deccan and Arcot in the Coromandel. In return for their military assistance and political support, both European companies received large grants of revenue rights, while some of their employees profited through individual investments, loans, or the pur­chase of revenue farms from the rivals in these succession disputes. Small forces of several hundred European foot-soldiers, assisted by contingents emperor, indicating the favor he had curried at the imperial court. The Jagat Seth firm had a monopoly over the minting of coins in Bengal and functioned in essence as the banking arm of the regional government. Only with the cooperation of the large zamindars and banking firms could the Bengal state run smoothly.

Things remained largely stable under Alivardi Khan, who ruled from 1740 to 1756, although Maratha armies from central India made sev­eral destructive campaigns into western Bengal. The expense of fighting the Marathas caused Alivardi Khan to demand additional tribute from the major zamindars, the wealthy merchant-bankers, and the European trading companies. His successor, Siraj al-Daula, who was only nineteen when he became ruler in 1756, moved quickly to strengthen his power. He succeeded only in alienating important interests in his realm. Among them was the powerful Jagat Seth, whom Siraj al- Daula struck after being refused an exorbitant tribute of 30 million rupees. When Siraj al-Daula heard that the EIC was improving its fortifications at Fort William in Calcutta, he took that as a threat to his sovereignty and ordered the suc­cessful capture of the fort. The East India Company, the Jagat Seth and other banking families, important officials in the regional administration whom he replaced with his own men, and several leading zamindars were now among Siraj al-Daula's many enemies.

Even a decade or two earlier, the East India Company might have needed a long time to regroup and take back their critical base at Calcutta. But the English and French trading companies had been at war with each other for some years in south India, and so a British fleet with British soldiers had been sent out to Madras in order to aid the East India Company there. This British force now sailed from Madras to Bengal and soon retook Calcutta. It was commanded by Robert Clive, who had achieved distinction in the south Indian wars between the English and French traders.

The earlier conflict in south India had other significant repercussions for what was to transpire in Bengal, because it had revealed the many benefits that Europeans could gain through military intervention into internal Indian political disputes. Between 1746 and 1754, the French and English trading companies in south India not only fought each other, but they also allied themselves with competing contenders to the thrones of Hyderabad in the eastern Deccan and Arcot in the Coromandel. In return for their military assistance and political support, both European companies received large grants of revenue rights, while some of their employees profited through individual investments, loans, or the pur­chase of revenue farms from the rivals in these succession disputes. Small forces of several hundred European foot-soldiers, assisted by contingents of Indian artillerymen whom they had trained, easily won victory over larger indigenous armies in a series of battles during the course of this south Indian conflict. Indian armies still relied primarily on cavalry, which could not use the improved weaponry of the eighteenth century effec­tively, whereas European infantry forces were now extensively drilled in fighting in formation using firearms and light field artillery. The demon­stration of European military superiority during the south Indian wars made powerful Indians eager to enlist their help, and the East India Company was more than willing to do so.

Back in Bengal, the East India Company therefore joined the Jagat Seth banking family and others in a plot to get rid of Siraj al-Daula. In the famous Battle of Plassey, fought in June 1757, few of Siraj al­Daula's soldiers were willing to engage the British troops, and he was killed soon afterward. One of Si raj al-Daula's generals, who was in on the plot and whose contingent had stood on the sidelines during the battle, became the new ruler of Bengal. But the English had realized that the riches of Bengal were now readily available to them and pressed hard for cash payments, trading monopolies, and zamindar rights. They put a second, even more amenable, puppet ruler in place in 1760, who also proved unsatisfactory to the East India Company. In 1764, the Company won a resounding victory against an army sent by the king of Awadh and the Mughal emperor in support of this ruler of Bengal. The East India Company had, in just a few short years, become the dominant political player within Bengal, with the backing of influential mercantile and zamindar interests operating in an environment where power was already heavily commercialized.

Individual Englishmen employed by the Company did very well for themselves in this era, quickly and rapaciously amassing princely sums that soon came to seem scandalous even to their countrymen back in England. Their luxurious lifestyles emulated that of local lords, so much so that former Company officials who returned to England with riches were dubbed nabobs, after the Indo-Islamic term nawab designating a deputy or provincial ruler.

How was it possible for the English to attain this position of power by the mid eighteenth century, when just eighty years earlier they could so easily be vanquished by the Mughals, even on the seas where they were strongest? An obvious answer lies in the disintegration of the Mughal empire, resulting in the emergence of numerous smaller states in its place. Yet that explanation does not suffice, for at least several of these new states were strong enough, had they wished, to oust the East India Company from their realms.

The East India Company, and the other European easily be vanquished by the Mughals, even on the seas where they were strongest? An obvious answer lies in the disintegration of the Mughal empire, resulting in the emergence of numerous smaller states in its place. Yet that explanation does not suffice, for at least several of these new states were strong enough, had they wished, to oust the East India Company from their realms. The East India Company, and the other European traders, represented a valuable internal source of income te of regional states which they wanted to retain. The Europe time also controlled almost all of the long-distance oversea which had largely superseded the overland trade routes, and only significant conduit through which items like bullion or te enter or leave India. Over the hundred plus years that the particular had been operating within India, they had formed associations with Indian merchants that were intensified by th ity of procuring textiles. The economic opportunities provid, ing with European trading companies aligned Indian mercant with their own and could, as we have just seen in the case of I these Europeans a decisive advantage in any confrontation wit state.

The fact that the lines between political and commercial power had become so indistinct by this time also facilitated the entry of the East India Company, essentially a business enterprise, into the Indian polit­ical arena. Moreover, the EIC could call upon its nation's resources for assistance when necessary; at several critical moments both before and after the Battle of Plassey, Britain supplied military forces and/or money that sustained the Company's rise to power. By the mid 1700s, the su­perior training methods and firepower of European armies also gave the English a military edge and provided another incentive for Indian politi­cal elites to welcome their presence. All these factors account for the East India Company's ability to acquire Bengal and its riches, which launched them on the path that would lead to dominion over all of India.

British success at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 marked a decisive upswing in the East India Company's fortunes, for less than a decade later in 1765 the Mughal emperor gave it the official right to collect Bengal's revenues. This was little more than a recognition of the Company's actual position as de facto ruler of Bengal; by this time the independent government of Bengal had been rendered toothless. A good deal of Bengal's resources was already entering the coffers of the EIC and its employees; now all of the state's revenues would officially belong to the Company, except for the annual tribute owed to the Mughal emperor in Delhi. The conferment of an official position on the East India Company was primarily a pragmatic means for the imperial court to ensure that it obtained some small share of Bengal's riches. Its symbolic significance was tremendous, however, since it meant that the English were now formally incorporated into the Mughal imperial system. Foreigners and merchants they might be, but now they were also sanctioned participants in the realm of Indian politics.

In practical terms, by 1765 the Mughal state was merely a small regional kingdom among a welter of others. Several Mughal successor states had made cash payments to the imperial dynasty in their first decades of existence, but by this time had ceased to express any loy­alty other than in name. Yet none of the new states was strong enough to become the central power that the Mughal empire had been at its height, and so none could command the respect that the Mughals had formerly earned. Despite the dismantlement of its empire, the Mughal court continued to be regarded as the ultimate source of legitimacy in much of eighteenth-century India. The new states also adopted the cer­emonial etiquette and cultural practices that were first established under the Mughals. They maintained the custom of giving gifts in the form of jeweled swords and robes of honor, for example, and they felt compelled to build elaborate cities, palaces, and gardens in order to express their strength in a tangible manner.

Following their lead, the East India Company continued to pay homage to the symbolic authority of the Mughal dynasty, even decades after 1803 when it replaced the Mughals as the real power in Delhi. Persian, the language of the Mughal court, was retained as the Company's official administrative language until 1835, while coins were struck bearing the image of the Mughal emperor, who remained a respected figurehead until the revolt of 1857-58. Meanwhile, Calcutta, Madras, Delhi, and Bombay grew to be extensive, sophisticated cities with European-style buildings that were, in some cases, more grand than their counterparts in Britain. Certainly the comforts that many of the British in India enjoyed - a life with multiple servants and large open houses with huge gardens - were much more luxurious than what they could have experienced back home.

The legacy of the Mughal empire lived on in the administrative and fiscal practices of the post-imperial age. Its successor states retained Mughal official titles and aspects of the old Mughal bureaucratic struc­ture, military system, and revenue assessment and collection procedures. Even those who had militarily opposed the Mughal empire, such as the Marathas and Sikhs, adopted a number of their characteristic practices, especially in the fiscal sphere. Mughal influence was so pervasive that their Perso-Arabic administrative terminology eventually replaced indigen­ous equivalents in the far south, where the Mughal imperium had never extended. The East India Company, in the early days after its recognition by the Mughal house as Bengal's official revenue-collector, also preserved some Mughal administrative practices, although its own distinctive sys­tems were instituted later on as the belief escalated that British rule and customs were superior. Considerable portions of the older Mughal judi­cial system remained in place even after one based on English custom was introduced, in part to avoid political and social repercussions with the Company's Indian subjects.

The pretense of being a Mughal servant and the preservation of Mughal forms could not mask the East India Company's catapulting wealth and power. It used a portion of the Bengal revenues to rapidly expand its military forces. By 1782 the Company had 115,000 men, 90 percent of whom were Indian, stationed in various areas of the subcontinent, and they were soon deployed against the state of Mysore in southern India and some years later against the Marathas in western India. Bengal's revenues also financed the Company's purchases of items intended for export to Europe, and for a quarter century the EIC could dispense with the bullion imports that they had for so long supplied in exchange for Indian goods. The Company even used resources from Bengal, including opium, to pay for its new thirst for Chinese commodities, among which tea reigned supreme. The burgeoning English commerce with China caused a shift in trade toward the eastern seas, after about a century during which the westward routes from India to Europe had been the most important. The dominance of English traders in the Indian Ocean was hence extended to the South China Sea in the late eighteenth century.

Indian merchants, who had originally been their partners and collabo­rators, were badly affected by the economic supremacy of the English in the late eighteenth century. English intrusion into the South China Sea reduced the few opportunities left for Indian merchant-traders to engage in overseas commerce, after they had already been largely driven out of ship-owning. Within Bengal and adjacent areas in eastern India, the inter­nal trade in commodities had been opened up to the EIC and its private traders after Plassey, and the greed they displayed soon occasioned con­cern even in England. The Company created trade monopolies for itself in items as lucrative as salt, saltpeter, and opium, while private traders dealt in valuable commodities like raw silk, sugar, and indigo. Once the English had established clear dominance in a certain sector, such as tex­tiles, they began to enforce harsh terms on the Indians who produced and distributed those items in both Bengal and the Coromandel. The poverty of Indian weavers is traced by some scholars to this era of plummeting wages. Some individual merchants continued to prosper from their asso­ciation with the English, but the scope of activity for Indian merchants had been drastically reduced on the whole.

Both economically and politically, therefore, the Battle of Plassey ush­ered in a new age of English ascendancy. An increasing number of historians consider the 1820s or 1830s to be the true beginning of the colonial period, on the other hand, for it was only then that fundamental transformations in economic and political structures occurred. By the 1820s, the East India Company had demonstrated its military strength against every potential contender with the exception of the Sikhs far to the northwest; after a century of political decentralization consequent to Mughal decline, power had now been centralized in British hands. In an even more startling shift, India lost its centuries-old position as an exporter of manufactured goods to the rest of the world in the early nine­teenth century, and became instead primarily. a supplier of raw materials to the British empire. British traders and businesses in India were so prosperous and influential that they no longer required the finances of Indian bankers or the services of Indian agent-brokers, which left Indian capital with few outlets other than moneylending at the local level. Even intermediaries like revenue-farmers were eliminated, and the position of zamindars weakened, when the British made their revenue arrangements directly with peasants in many areas of India. The British also began intervening in non-economic spheres more consciously in the 1820s and 1830s, as they came to see themselves as the stewards of India's progress toward a higher civilizational state. Throughout all these changes, and even after the last Mughal emperor was exiled to Rangoon and the royal house abolished following the 1857-­58 revolt, the Mughal empire continued to retain a lingering hold on the English imaginary.

Ironically, even though the British saw themselves as the legitimate successors to Mughal authority and were happy to employ a Mughal architectural vocabulary in the new Indo-Saracenic style, the general attitude toward Muslims was beginning to shift. This was in part due to the role several Muslim states, notably the Mughals and Nawabs of Awadh, played in the 1857-58 uprising, which led the British to suspect all elite Muslims of disloyalty. This is not to say that the British had earlier been uniformly positive in their view of Indian Muslims. The allegedly cruel and tyrannical character of Indo-Muslim rule, represented as a form of Oriental despotism, had long been a tenet of European writ­ing on India. The belief that the British colonial regime was far more just and principled than those of the Mughals and various sultanate prede­cessors was what vindicated their wielding of power in a far-off foreign land, in British eyes. Moreover, the EIC and other European traders had for centuries preferred to work with Hindu merchant-financiers rather than Indian Muslim ones, who might have undue political clout or con­nections. Nonetheless, Islamic culture was familiar and comprehensi­ble to Europeans, compared to the exotic polytheism of Hinduism, and early Company officials had learned the Persian language well before they became conversant with Sanskrit.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, simultaneously with their increasing antipathy toward Indian Muslims, the British conviction that South Asian society was fundamentally divided along religious lines grew stronger. This conviction was not only expressed in British modes of thinking about South Asia's peoples but also in their policies toward them.

In the long run, the British thus intensified and solidified the sense of reli­gious difference within the subcontinent, leading Indian nationalists and others in the early twentieth century to cast the Muslims of India's past as similar to the colonial British of their present in being alien invaders and oppressors. By about 1900 the rulers of Vi jay an agar a, for example, were presented not as kings who promoted a cosmopolitan culture that valued Islamicate traditions, but rather as champions of Hinduism against predatory Muslims. The situation is no better today, as Hindu nationalists refute any contributions Indian Muslims may have made, while their common South Asian heritage is often denied in Pakistan. All of this has served to obscure the rich composite culture of South Asia that we have written about in this text, which started to come into being after 1200 and fully matured during the Mughal era. We stand firm in our own convic­tion that South Asian society and culture cannot be properly understood without an appreciation of the many interactions and exchanges, some negative but many positive, between Muslim and non-Muslim traditions and peoples. We therefore urge our readers to think about the past in a manner that matches its contemporary attitudes and not read the present into the context of the past.

No doubt the most significant event of this period was, when in 1858 all powers formerly held by the East India Company were transferred to the British crown, and Queen Victoria was declared Empress of India in 1876, assuming what was essentially a Mughal title. The leaders of the British Raj, the British government in India after 1858, continually represented themselves as legitimate successors of the ‘great’ Mughals.

In 1877, a huge celebration known as the Imperial Durbar was orga­nized in recognition of Victoria's new status as Indian empress, and much of it was modeled on Mughal ceremonial, from the riding of magnificently decorated elephants to an assemblage of princes reminiscent of Mughal courtly processions and the gathering of nobles at the imperial court. The British Raj's adaptation of Mughal performative and visual culture was a compelling reminder of their claim as the heirs, a message that was further underscored by the holding of the Durbar in Delhi. Even though Calcutta was the capital of the Raj in 1877 and Delhi was no more than a city badly damaged during the events of 1857-58, the British chose the former Mughal capital for their Imperial Durbar, since only that city fully evoked the associations with the magnificent Mughal past that they desired.

For the transformation from ‘Company’ to ‘military force’ see our case study 1, 2, 3.
 

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