As signs of Mughal decline, it is easy to conjure up striking images of foreign invaders pillaging the north Indian countryside. One can readily visualize Nadir Shah, having sacked Delhi in 1739, marching through the Khyber Pass with long columns of pack animals loaded with looted treasures that included Shah Jahan’s Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. A more accurate image of imperial decline, however, would be of the empire being undermined from within and below, in the way that termites silently hollow out the base of a wooden structure. Across eighteenth-century India, local power holders were able to challenge imperial authority with resources ultimately derived from the higher volume of cash that circulated throughout Indian society as a result of the commercialization of the entire Indian Ocean region. As merchant wealth expanded, new market centres were established, boosting development in both agrarian and manufacturing sectors. Land use was greatly intensified, as happened when pioneers in Bengal used cash to mobilize labour for transforming dense jungle into arable fields for the cultivation of food crops.
Although coastal tracts first felt the impact of imported silver, the coined metal quickly diffused into India’s hinterland, owing, among other things, to the overall structure of the textile industry. Whereas cloth was woven, bleached, dyed and printed in coastal regions, the raw cotton was grown, harvested, cleaned and spun into yarn deep in the interior. Bengal depended on yarn from Gujarat, Coromandel acquired its cotton from the Deccan, Gujarat relied on raw silk transported from Bengal. The cotton grown on the black soils of the central Deccan was brought 400 kilometres to Coromandel by nomadic clans – the Banjaras – on huge caravans of 10,000–40,000 bullocks each.77 The entire hinterland of Madras was devoted to supplying rice to coastal markets and their weaving communities.78 As a result, the growth of maritime commerce stimulated India’s land-based economy both in the hinterland and along the coast.
But the diffusion of cash-based commerce into India’s interior also had political consequences. Since access to India’s military labour market was predicated on the availability of money, as more cash flowed from the coasts to the interior, provincial Mughal governors acquired greater means to mobilize standing armies with which to challenge or resist imperial demands. This also held true for intermediary orders of Indian society, including large and small zamindars, transregional merchants, Sikh chieftains, powerful bankers and revenue farmers, among others. Especially prominent were zamindars, India’s ancient class of hereditary, quasi-royal landholders who, with their armed retainers, their legacies of former sovereignty (real or imagined) and their claims to a share of a territory’s wealth, commanded respect and some legitimacy among rural folk. Neither the Mughals nor any other power had ever fully suppressed or co-opted them. Now, thanks to the waves of mobile wealth that washed over the Indo-Gangetic plain in the eighteenth century, zamindars, always ready to reassert their ancient political claims, could challenge imperial authority by tapping into the military labour market.79
Ultimately, what enabled growing European influence in the second half of the eighteenth century in India was local demand for European weaponry or mercenaries, which Europeans happily supplied. A single incident suggests the general trend. In April 1758 the acting governor of Portuguese Goa wrote to Tarabai, at that time the aged dowager of the Maratha kingdom, that he would be most pleased to supply her with the 2,000 guns she had ordered, provided she paid for them before delivery.80 Tarabai duly furnished the cash, drawn from the accumulated stocks of silver that had been flowing into Indian coasts for the previous two and a half centuries.
Did such deals constitute a significant break with the past? Many historians have seen the mid eighteenth century as a major – if not the major – point of rupture in the flow of Indian history. Yet the entry of Europeans as political actors was built upon long-established Indian institutions. One of these were the well-developed revenue-extracting bureaucracies that were still operating at local levels, even if the Mughal central government was not receiving those revenues. Another was India’s long-standing and extensive military labour market. For centuries before the mid 1700s, ambitious Indian rulers or would-be rulers had been buying into indigenous markets of military labour in order to advance their claims to political authority. From the mid eighteenth century onwards, however, those same figures began contracting European-trained military labour or, as in the case of Tarabai’s dealings with the acting governor of Goa, European weaponry. Yet the reverse also occurred, as both Frenchmen and – more successfully – Englishmen tapped into India’s indigenous military labour market. ‘British conquest’, writes the historian C. A. Bayly, ‘often meant no more than the slow drift to the East India Company of soldiers, merchants and administrators, leaving the Indian rulers with nothing more than a husk of royal grandeur.’81
In both moral and economic terms, then, the advent of a ruthlessly mercantilist ideology carried to South Asia by the East India Company certainly did represent a radical break with the Indian past. And yet neither that ideology nor its carrier – the British company – could have taken root and flourished without the pre-existing institution of India’s military labour market.