Partly responsible for these changes in cultural identity were powerful, interconnected transregional forces. These included the movement of pastoral communities into agrarian zones, the expanding geographical and social reach of cash, and the growing integration of India’s economy and society with wider networks of commerce. Such forces were part of a quickened, worldwide exchange of ideas, commodities, technologies, peoples, diseases and cultural traditions that transformed all participants, not least the Mughal empire.
In early December 1572, during his first attempt at conquering Gujarat, Akbar visited the ancient seaport of Cambay, at the time the region’s principal window on the outside world. Upon being welcomed at a pleasant spot by a delegation of foreign merchants – Turks from the Ottoman world, Persians from Safavid Iran, possibly some Portuguese – the emperor and a select body of men embarked on a ship. This brief excursion out on the water had no military or commercial purpose. It was made, records Abu’l-fazl, merely ‘to witness the spectacle of the ocean’.53 Never before had any ruler in Akbar’s direct line of descent, going back to Timur himself, seen the ocean. But from this moment on, the Mughals would learn what peoples in coastal India had long known: that the sea was a source of wealth and power. Appropriating existing ports or establishing new ones, owning ships and investing in trade would open up to the Mughals a much wider world than the one they had previously known. In a larger sense, Akbar’s direct encounter with the open sea symbolized the joining of the land-based Mughal imperium with transoceanic commercial networks. To obtain direct access to the sources of spices, pepper and textiles, fifteenth-century Portuguese navigators had already pioneered an all-maritime route from the North Atlantic Ocean to India, where they established a series of fortified trading enclaves along the coasts of the peninsula, Gujarat and Bengal.
Although Portuguese strategists imagined that they had ‘conquered’ large parts of the Indian Ocean world, they were actually accommodating themselves to a dense web of maritime commerce that had been built up over many centuries by a mix of seafaring peoples – Arabs, Gujaratis, Malays, Iranians, Tamils, Swahilis, Chinese. Yet, soon after Vasco da Gama lowered anchor at Calicut in 1498, and especially after the Estado da India’s grand strategist Afonso d’Albuquerque established a permanent, colonial enclave at Goa in 1510, the Portuguese enterprise introduced new commodities, ideas and technologies to India. A vigorous Catholic mission in Goa carried religious ideas to Akbar’s court in Agra. New crops that the Portuguese brought from America – for example potatoes, maize, chillies, squash and tomatoes – utterly transformed the Indian diet. Europe’s direct maritime connection with India also facilitated technological transfers, as when Deccani engineers applied the idea of swivel cannon, which the Portuguese had mounted on their ships’ gunwales, to the massive cannon that were then positioned atop the Deccan’s hill forts.
By the dawn of the seventeenth century, other European enterprises had reached the Indian Ocean: the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, and its smaller counterpart, the English East India Company, founded in 1600. Unlike Portugal’s Estado da India – a royal endeavour in which soldiers, merchants and clergy all worked for the king – these were joint stock companies launched by independent merchants in Amsterdam and London. Although they enjoyed the support of their respective governments, the companies were primarily responsible to their investors. Private merchants working for them would pool their resources, buy and equip ships and launch overseas ‘ventures’ in which stockholders shared profits or losses – an early instance of global capitalism. These two north European operations, followed somewhat later by Danish (1616) and French (1664) overseas trading companies, established a number of trading posts that paralleled the network of Portuguese enclaves already scattered around the Indian Ocean rim. By 1700 European companies were importing annually over 877,000 untailored pieces of cotton cloth from India.54 And yet, because the Mughals controlled the ports in textile-rich Gujarat and Bengal, Europeans were in no position to dictate the terms of commerce. Rather, they had to petition imperial authorities for permission to establish trading enclaves. Even then, they could conduct business only on Mughal terms.
Nonetheless, Europe’s new commercial connection with Indian markets had profound effects on the subcontinent’s economy, as reflected in India’s currencies. Prior to the Mughal era, only Gujarat possessed a reliable and stable silver coinage, based on the high volume of maritime commerce that had attracted silver from the Middle East ever since the early centuries AD.55 Other Indian regions, lacking extensive silver mines of their own and not enjoying Gujarat’s volume of overseas trade, relied on other media for their coinage, such as copper, gold, billon or cowrie shells. All this changed in the late sixteenth century. The Indian economy being largely self-sufficient, in order to purchase Indian goods Europeans had to export silver, the one foreign item that the Mughals lacked and wanted, apart from war-horses. Luckily for the fledgling overseas companies in England and the Netherlands, Spain’s plundering of rich silver mines in Mexico and Peru from about 1550 was followed by the diffusion of tons of silver into northern Europe, driven largely by Spain’s costly wars there between 1568 and 1648. That money, in turn, allowed both the Dutch and English companies literally to buy themselves into India’s export markets.56 Between 1586 and 1605, overseas silver flowed into the Mughal heartland at the stunning rate of about 185 metric tons a year.57 ‘India is rich in silver,’ noted the English merchant William Hawkins in 1613, ‘for all nations bring coyne and carry away commodities for the same.’58 American silver arriving in India was immediately minted into silver rupees, which became the Mughals’ principal currency medium from about 1580. In 1615 one observer estimated the Mughals’ annual revenue at 120 million silver coins, compared to forty-five million for the Ottoman empire and just fifteen million for neighbouring Iran.59 In fact, between 1600 and 1800 India absorbed about 20 per cent of the precious metals produced throughout the world.60
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, then, the Mughals had experienced two fundamental economic transformations. First, their conquest of north India and subsequent rule in the sixteenth century completed a long-term process that had been initiated by the Turkish invasions of upper India in the late twelfth century, whereby the warrior institutions of semi-pastoral Central Asia merged with the revenue institutions of agrarian India.61 By the end of the sixteenth century the Mughal empire had undergone a second transformation as it became integrated with a global economy, symbolized by Akbar’s capture of Gujarat, India’s most highly commercialized subregion. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most imported silver was no longer carried to India by the Portuguese Estado da India, but by the Dutch, English and French trading companies. These north European companies, however, were not content with merely establishing enclaves where they would receive and ship to Europe finished goods that Indian merchants brought to their coastal warehouses. Rather, needing to maximize profits for their investors and stockholders back home, the managers of these companies endeavoured, wherever possible, to reduce costs by gaining direct or indirect control over the factors of production – the land, labour and capital – that went into making the goods.
The economic and political objectives of the English company would prove decisive in this respect. Ever since the mid sixteenth century (with much earlier antecedents), the English Parliament had been passing laws giving the state and employers coercive powers over English workers, while setting limits on their wages and controlling their mobility. Passed in 1563 and remaining on the books until 1813, the Statute of Artificers stipulated, among other things, that English workers could not leave an employer until after at least one year’s labour for him, that workers seeking new employment required a termination certificate from a former employer, and that workers’ wages would be set by government officials.62 Measures of this nature aligned with prevailing mercantilist thought that obliged the state to take any necessary steps to keep domestic manufactures competitive at home and abroad. And when Queen Elizabeth gave the East India Company a monopoly on England’s trade with the Indian Ocean region, company officials took such ideas with them to India. For a century and a half after its founding in 1600, however, the Company was in no position to intervene coercively in the economic factors that had created the goods in greatest demand at home, namely India’s finely woven and world-renowned cotton textiles, whether plain, printed, painted or patterned on the loom.
By contrast, neither the Mughals nor other Indian states with which the English company dealt claimed the right, or ever wished, to intervene directly in the production process. For officials of the Mughal empire and those of the English East India Company occupied very different moral universes. In 1778, for example, officers of the English company asked the nawab (ruler) of Arcot in the Tamil country to round up and forcibly return weavers who had fled from a company-controlled manufacturing centre. Astonished at the request, the nawab replied that such a thing was ‘contrary to custom and it was never done before’.63 Even taxation had its limits. Since the supply of arable land in pre-colonial India surpassed that of labour, villagers always had the option of simply abandoning their fields and establishing new settlements elsewhere if their taxes became too onerous. Aware of this, states sought non-coercive means to keep villagers productive. Emperor ‘Alamgir, for example, ordered that if any cultivator abandoned his fields, local revenue officers ‘should ascertain the cause and work very hard to induce him to return to his former place’.64 Such an order hardly suggests a ruler governing from a position of overwhelming strength vis-à-vis India’s labour force. For the Mughal empire was no mighty juggernaut, crushing everything in its path. On the contrary, despite its image as an absolute monarchy, Mughal officials co-operated with numerous stakeholders, making alliances with, and working through, countless petty zamindars and other local elites.65 Such officials were in no position to coerce merchants or others with whom they shared de facto sovereignty.66 Far less did they establish strict production schedules for labourers, impose maximum wages for producers or restrict their mobility. Yet these were the very kinds of mercantalist measures that employees of the English East India Company considered fundamental for maximizing their profits.
It was in India’s textile-manufacturing sector that such ideas most closely engaged with Indian economic realities. And for good reason. Because their northern location and temperate climate prevented them from cultivating cotton, Europeans for centuries had clothed themselves in wool or linen. Spanish Arabs introduced cotton to Europeans in the tenth and eleventh centuries – the English word for the fibre is derived from the Arabic qutun – and from the twelfth century northern Italy supported a modest textile industry based on raw cotton imported from across the Mediterranean Sea. A strong demand for cotton products did not take hold in northern Europe, however, until after the establishment of direct maritime contact with India, which had been the world’s leading manufacturer of cotton for more than five millennia.67 This demand grew steadily through the seventeenth century. In 1664 alone, the English East India Company imported a quarter of a million pieces of cloth, nearly half of them from Coromandel, a third from Gujarat and less than a fifth from Bengal. Twenty years later the Company was annually importing 1.76 million pieces of Indian textiles to England, which represented 83 per cent of the Company’s total trade.68 This was the height of the so-called ‘calico craze’, when India’s cotton textiles were in feverish demand in England and across Europe generally. Indeed, England’s sustained commercial connection with India is seen in the many textile-related Indian words that entered the English language in this period – for example, dungaree, chintz, seersucker, calico, pyjamas, shawl, khaki, cummerbund, taffeta, jaconet and bandana.
Nor was this just an English craze. Indian textiles occupied the centre of a global phenomenon that transformed the economies and societies of five continents. By the dawn of the eighteenth century, India’s cotton textiles had displaced rice and spices as the principal item of trade in the Indian Ocean. And by the mid eighteenth century, when more than three-quarters of all the English East India Company’s imports from India consisted of textiles, Asia, Europe, Africa and the two Americas were all tightly integrated by the white fibre and the textiles spun from it. To obtain slaves for their transatlantic plantations, Europeans purchased captives from West Africa using mainly Indian textiles, which were in great demand among African merchants and political elites.69
However, in order to obtain the Indian textiles that were in such high demand in Europe and Africa, European payments to Indian merchants and producers had to be made mainly in treasure. This posed a serious problem, since, according to prevailing mercantilist thought, states should be hoarding silver and gold in their national treasuries, not exporting such precious metals for overseas purchases. Only by restricting the flow of silver bullion to India, and by reducing the cost of overseas purchases, could the Company align its commercial policies with mercantilist objectives. By acquiring political authority in India’s major textile-producing regions – Coromandel, Bengal and Gujarat – the Company achieved both objectives. Two factors allowed this to occur. One was the fierce competition between European powers over access to India’s textile-manufacturing sector, which led ultimately to armed conflict between Europeans. This, in turn, militarized the Company, which by the 1760s had a private army of 20,000, a figure that would grow to about 260,000 by 1803.70 Second, from the mid eighteenth century, Indian rulers, in order to advance their own fortunes on an increasingly fragmented political stage, willingly surrendered revenue-collection rights in return for access to European weapons and/or European-trained soldiers. Such rights became the principal mechanism by which the English company would leverage its commercial operations into outright domination over Indian territory.
These processes began quietly enough in the 1750s along the Coromandel coast. There, rivalry between the French and English companies intensified when each company backed opposing claimants to succeed as the nawab of Arcot, a remnant of ‘Alamgir’s conquests in the south-eastern Deccan. In 1763, after armed forces of the British East India Company defeated those of the French company for commercial hegemony in the region, the British-backed nawab became heavily indebted to his European sponsors and surrendered to the British company the revenue-collecting rights to lands adjacent to its base at Madras. Later called Chingleput District, this region was styled the Company’s jagir. The use of this Mughal administrative term suggested that the British were merely servants of the nawab of Arcot, who in theory ruled under the authority of the nizam of Hyderabad, who governed the Deccan theoretically as governor (subahdar) of the emperor in Delhi. In this way the Company inserted itself on India’s political map, albeit at the bottom of a largely fictitious chain of political authority that stretched from Delhi down to Chingleput.
Secure in their position as the legitimate collectors of revenue in their jagir, officers of the British company soon aligned their commercial operations with mercantilist ideals. By 1766, the Company was using its authority to order weavers in its jagir to accept advances only from Company merchants, thereby creating a monopoly of the textile trade in its territory. Company officials also began advancing loans directly to the weavers, thereby circumventing the merchants who had been doing that for generations. Placing the looms in their jagir under the supervision of a Commercial Resident, the Company was then in a position to reject any cloth that did not meet its stringent standards, impose minimum quotas of cloth to be produced per loom per month, reduce the amount of cash advanced to weavers, and insist upon prompt deliveries of goods to meet its tight shipping schedules, which were governed by monsoon winds. The Company also used its judicial power to enforce contracts made with producers, and its military power – in the form of Company-trained Indian soldiers, or sepoys – to prevent weavers from absconding with cash advances.71 By the 1760s, then, the profile of the Company had changed dramatically from what it had been for more than a century and a half. In short order, the political complexion of India, too, would change.
Similar developments took place in Mughal Bengal. In 1756 the British company had refused to obey the provincial nawab’s orders to cease building fortifications, which were driven, again, by Anglo-French rivalry. In response, the impetuous twenty-three-year-old nawab seized the British company’s base of Calcutta. The following year Robert Clive, a military officer who had already played a leading role in the Company’s territorial acquisitions in Coromandel, was ordered to sail from Madras and recover the city. After accomplishing that goal, Clive, being well beyond the reach of Company or Parliamentary checks on his ambition, exceeded the terms of his authorized mission by conspiring with the nawab’s disaffected commander-in-chief to overthrow the unpopular nawab. In June 1757 he defeated the nawab’s forces 150 kilometres north of Calcutta and then installed his native co-conspirator as Bengal’s new Mughal nawab, who then became in effect a Company puppet.
After its troops defeated a coalition of Mughal armies at Buxor (thirteen kilometres west of Patna) in 1764, the East India Company tightened its de facto authority in Bengal. In the following year Clive personally met the virtually powerless Mughal emperor, Shah ‘Alam II (r. 1759–1806), who signed a document – the so-called Diwani of Bengal (August 1765) – formally giving Company officers the right to assess and collect the province’s revenue. As in Coromandel, the Company swiftly made use of its newly won political authority to enact mercantilist policies in eastern India. Company officials seized textiles woven for their Dutch rivals and obliged all weavers in Bengal to work exclusively for them. In 1767, pieces being made for the French were cut off the looms and their weavers made subject to bodily and monetary punishments. The Company also coerced intermediary merchants and weavers to work for them on terms far below the market, forcing many weavers to abandon their craft altogether.72 Merchants who refused to sign papers agreeing to the Company’s harsh terms were caned or jailed. In a poignant application of the new regime’s economic philosophy, in 1767 one merchant who appeared before Company officials with a piece of cloth fifty centimetres shorter than the required length was made to rub his nose on the ground several times for that exact distance.73
Such disciplinary measures came more slowly where the Company still lacked political power or where, as in Gujarat, it was forced to share power with other actors.74 Nonetheless, the 1765 Diwani of Bengal had set a precedent for what would subsequently happen elsewhere in India: the acquisition of de facto governing authority not through outright conquest but through mutual agreements concluded between regional powers and an overseas trading company – albeit a company authorized not just to monopolize trade but to mint coins, exercise justice and wage war. Moreover, the Company’s acquisition of Bengal’s public finance meant that it could use that province’s revenues to help pay for its investments in the region’s goods for export, thereby sharply reducing its reliance on silver bullion shipped from Britain to India.75 As a result, between 1760 and 1829 silver accounted for only 18.6 per cent of the value of goods that the Company sent to Asia, a significant drop from the period before 1756, when that metal accounted for 70–85 per cent of those exports.76