The World the Plague Made by James Belich

Author:James Belich [Belich, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691215662
Publisher: Princeton UP
Published: 2022-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

This rather rosy picture of Mughal modernity seems broadly accurate, but needs qualification. First, it is not clear that the mass of the people benefited from commercial prosperity, or from Mughal rule. Taxes on grain went as high as 50%, and there were some terrible regional famines. One study finds a decline in Indian GDP per capita from 1600, though others dispute this.102 Second, the Mughal’s empire was arguably of the now familiar “patchwork” variety, with difficult terrain excluding many regions from real control. The Emperor must “be regarded as ruling no more than half the dominions which he claims, since there are nearly as many rebels as subjects”.103 Third, there is some residual truth in the notion that the Mughals and other large Indian states kept maritime concerns at arm’s length. The imperial family and leading officials had ocean-going ships built for them in Gujarat from the 1570s, and were very interested in annual voyages for the Hajj pilgrimage, which was a major exercise in overseas trade as well as religion.104 But they seldom tried to fight Europeans or Omanis on the open ocean, and failed when they did. Between 1639 and 1698, the Mughals were sporadically at war with the tiniest of European lodgments in India, that of the Danes. The Danish “empire” in India was based at Tranquebar in the Coromandel and had a few unfortified factories as well. The Mughals could seize the factories, and probably Tranquebar too, but they kept losing ships to the Danes—two were blown up in the Hughli River, 35 kilometres north of Calcutta, in 1671.105 This was no more than a pinprick to the Mughals, whose land power enabled them to hold European land possessions and trade networks hostage in a “balance of blackmail”.106 But the capacity to threaten Indian ships and the Hajj pilgrimage gave Europeans (and Omanis) more leverage than the other merchant networks. The final qualification is that Mughal “modernity” and success were not strictly Mughal, but rather a variant of West Eurasian expansion, Muslim style.

That the Mughals acquired and adapted a West Eurasian expansion kit, and used it for successful expansion, is only half of the argument here. Many experts would say that the expansion lapsed quickly into dispersal, losing strong connections to its homelands in Iran and Turan, with which relations were sometimes actively hostile. “For their own reasons, Indian historians working in the Orientalist, Marxist, nationalist, and other traditions have tended to minimize any connections that the Mughal nobility retained with their ancestral homeland”.107 The Mughals were just another wave of Muslim invaders, it is assumed, to be quickly domesticated by India except in religion. Yet Babur was not welcomed by the preexisting Muslim population. “Most Indian Muslims … regarded Babur as alien”.108 To a significant extent, the Mughal Empire remained rooted in Greater Persia until the beginning of its decline in 1707, without controlling the space between their “informal metropolis”, to coin a term, and their great Indian “colony”. Their continuing “obsession” with the homelands is sometimes dismissed as nostalgic and irrational.

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