Imperial Meridian

The British Empire and the World 1780-1830

C. A. Bayly

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317870678
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

In this impressive and ambitious survey Dr Bayly studies the rise, apogee and decline of what has come to be called `the Second British Empire' -- the great expansion of British dominion overseas (particularly in Asia and the Middle East) during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era that, coming between the loss of America and the subsequent partition of Africa, constitutes the central phase of British imperial history.

CHAPTER ONE
Political and Social Change in the Muslim Empires, 1600-1800

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, large political units flourished in Asia as they did in Europe. The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal dynasties dominated, even if they did not control, the population and wealth of a huge territory between Algeria and the borders of Burma. In Java (considered below, pp. 67—9) the Muslim empire of Mataram emerged during the same period. As in Europe, the society of the great realms became more complex and conflict-ridden during the seventeenth century. However, their 'general crisis' reached its greatest intensity not in the seventeenth century like Europe's, but in the eighteenth century when all three empires (and Mataram) faltered or disintegrated. The demise of the Muslim land empires was a critical condition for the rise of European dominance across inland Eurasia and north Africa; it complemented the maritime ascendancy already established by France, Great Britain and the Dutch in the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. Western expansion was, of course, driven by a ruthless search for profit and was supported by a growing political and technological sophistication. But uneven economic growth and political instability within the Muslim empires and the seaboard fringes of Asia also created pressures and opportunities which encouraged European nations and trading companies to seize political power in key regions before 1800.

The beginnings of European territorial empire was most sharply demonstrated in the eastern province of the Mughal empire (Bengal) and also in its barely-consolidated southern fringes (the Deccan and Arcot) where the British were dominant by 1765. Europeans also made great inroads in Java where the Dutch East India Company had achieved supremacy by 1752; and in Egypt, an Ottoman province, which was invaded successively by French and British forces at the very end of the century. Another former Ottoman province, Algeria, was seized by the French in 1830. Yet the Muslim empires had been hollowed out from within by complex social and economic change well before they were knocked flat by external aggression. European conquistadors, indeed, commandeered the military, administrative and financial services of the earlier states during their rise to power. For this reason, social change in Asia and the Islamic world was a critical force in the creation of European world-wide dominance of the nineteenth century and not simply its immobile background. This chapter considers the nature of that social change; chapters 3 and 4 go on to analyse the complementary process, the growth of new ideas and compulsions to expansion within the 'British Empire in Europe' and the Western Hemisphere.

Stages of Change in Muslim Asia and North Africa

Over recent years, historians have begun to suggest that there were similar patterns of evolution in the political economy of these great and diverse oriental realms. Three broad eras of change seem to emerge. First, the long period of relative prosperity associated with the reigns of the great sultans and padishahs (emperors) in the sixteenth century (and in some areas on into the seventeenth century) encouraged specialisation in agriculture, the development of a rooted landed class and a flourishing commercial culture. However, these trends also encouraged the pretentions of provincial magnates and made it more difficult for the central military élites and bureaucrats to control increasingly complex and sophisticated societies.

During the second stage of change, after the mid-seventeenth century, all these regimes were faced with an escalation of internal contradictions and conflicts which arose from the uneven pace of growth between regions or from the varying economic fortunes of different groups of subjects. The emperors and their lieutenants could no longer compromise disputes over taxation, labour and status between overmighty magnates and peasants. At the same time, the expansion of the money economy and a widening of horizons also stirred the restive tribal groups on the fringes of the empires to mutiny. These tribes varied greatly among themselves, but they were all egalitarian warrior societies and they tended to seek wealth and fame either by serving or plundering the adjoining great kingdoms. Their restiveness culminated in what might be called 'tribal breakouts' in the course of the eighteenth century, a series of events which spelled the end of the 'Pax Islamica' but also put pressure on Western interests throughout Eurasia.

The third stage in this broad process of change during the eighteenth century saw regional magnates inheriting the mantle of the great emperors and constructing more compact and exclusive domains throughout the whole region from the Balkans to southeast Asia. These rulers tried to impose more severe trade 'monopolies' and regain the economic balance of power which had tipped towards peasant and landowner. This brought them into conflict with each other, damaging trade and agricultural production in some areas, but intensifying economic activity in others. It often also ranged the rulers of the regional regimes against European commercial interests which had built up protected domains on the fringes of the land empires during the heyday of Asian commercial growth. The resulting conflicts were resolved in several areas by direct European occupation.

The first stage of European expansion in Asia had coincided with the period of commercial activity following the establishment of the great land empires in the fifteenth century and the flowering of Indian Ocean trade and Chinese trade. It had facilitated this expansion through the release of silver from the New World into the Asian trading and political system (Richards 1981). In its second phase from the early seventeenth century, however, the European impact tended to become more restrictive and damaging as the Dutch and English fought to monopolise and channel trade, first in Indonesia (Villiers 1981; Reid 1975), later in India (Subrahmanyam 1987). This second, restrictive stage coincided with the wars of succession and monopoly within the Muslim empires and aggravated them. Asia was vulnerable to the European onslaught, therefore, not so much because it was impotent, decadent or stagnant, but because it was passing through a crisis in the relationship between commerce, landed wealth and patrimonial political authority comparable with that which convulsed Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century. The eighteenth-century English work which described Mir Wais Khan, a contemporary Afghan dynast, as the 'Persian Cromwell' was, perhaps, not entirely fanciful. The nature of this general crisis in Asia will now be examined in greater detail.

The Muslim Empires: Integration and Uniformities

Seventeenth-century European observers tended to speak of the three great Muslim regimes in the same terms. They were absolute and terrifying Moorish despotisms in which private property and the merchant classes were crushed out under the weight of the military machine and the luxury of the court. Yet contemporaries were aware of the great contrasts between them, and modern scholarship has also emphasised the differences between their culture and government (Hodgson 1974). In the following account it will be necessary to keep in mind both the similarities and the differences. The similarities in economic and social structure across this vast area explain why a general crisis affected all three empires during the eighteenth century. But the differences help explain why the Ottomans had regrouped and survived, the Safavids had been replaced by a regional Persian kingdom (the Qajars), while the Mughals had become pensioners of the British by the early nineteenth century.

The success of the first great sixteenth-century emperors, whose courts in Delhi, Isfahan and Istanbul had dazzled their European contemporaries, rested on three great pillars. First, they were able through diplomacy, but in the last resort by deploying powerful cavalry armies, to dominate internal magnates, and to protect their territories from lethal coalitions of armed tribesmen on their fringes. The great tribal conquest-states like those of Genghis Khan or Tamburlaine were relegated to the realms of legend (until Nadir Shah of Persia tried to reconstruct one at the beginning of the eighteenth century). Secondly, the emperors were able to offer provincial élites and some outer 'barbarians' attractive rewards of service and a share in the brilliant cosmopolitan cultures of the great cities. Finally, the emperors protected and encouraged merchant families and scribal communities from the non-Muslim élites - Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Hindus. They were able to lay the basis for an international land-and sea-borne commercial culture. It was the slow erosion of these three pillars which was to bring down the house of the Muslim empires.

The similarities between the empires at their height were striking. Imperial rule was patrimonial rather than despotic (Blake 1987). The great royal households acted as patrons of peasants and merchants, tying together town and country, cultivator and herdsman. Taxation was owed predominantly in silver cash and may have accounted for as much as 30 per cent of the gross produce of the land. This in turn required the integration of markets and the spread of petty commodity production. Peasants, in short, had to sell their produce on the market in order to pay their revenue. The rulers rewarded their great commanders and cavalry soldiers with grants of the revenue owed to them by the villages. These grants, called jagirs in India (Habib 1963) and timars among the Ottomans (Shaw and Shaw 1977; cf. Savory, 1980), were payments for military and civil office; they were not 'landholdings' in the direct sense, and careful rulers kept moving their servants from one region to the next.

Far from being absolute and rigidly centralised, imperial rule allowed very great discretion to local leaders, tribal heads and great men of merchant corporations, although these had no formal standing in Islamic law. In the Ottoman empire, such local entities (called millets in the case of non-Muslim minorities) included a whole spectrum of communities from the Beduin of the deserts of Syria and Arabia to the 'Romoi', the Greek citizens of Pera, the Ionian Islands and the Peloponnese. The Safavid emperors ruled by a complicated balancing act, accommodating and sometimes chastising the powerful tribal groups of the central deserts and of the Zagros mountains. The Mughals similarly gave great discretion to the Hindu kings such as the Rajput of Rajasthan in northwest India. They ruled by patronising and overawing the deeply entrenched and predominantly Hindu magnates of the localities, the zamindars (lit. 'landholders').

The similarities between the great empires were refreshed by the constant flow across their borders of a stream of men, ideas and trade. The Muslim intelligentsia of this world was still linked by common assumptions and beliefs. Wherever there were Muslims, knowledge of the rational sciences of the Koran, the 'Sayings of the Prophet' and the great Arab commentarists were known and understood. Arabic and Persian operated as linguae francae throughout the lands from Budapest to Chittagong, and Christians and Hindus also studied them. Scholars and holy men moved in search of service, to venerate the shrines of Islamic saints and to study in the great teaching institutions. Afghans, central Asian Muslims and Persians enlisted in the Mughal armies and administration. Indian learned and holy men made their pilgrimage to the Schools of Mecca, Medina and Cairo. Istanbul, still the centre of the Caliphate and claimant to the mantle of the Prophet, retained its charisma as the exemplar of cities (Robinson, F. 1979; Hodgson 1974; Holt 1968; Lambton 1953 and Lewis 1961).

The peoples of these vast regions, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, numbering over 200 million in 1700, were also tied together by celebrated trade routes and by common patterns of consumption, which ranked nobility and signified ethnicity across the whole civilisation. Persian and Arab horses supplied the armies of all the empires. The coffee of Mocha stimulated Delhi, Istanbul and Belgrade, as did the spices of southern India and the Indonesian islands. Persian silk was brought in quantities to India and Istanbul. Cloth produced in Bengal, southern India and Gujarat found its way throughout Eurasia. As in contemporary Europe, Indian garments were an important component of the dress of wealthy families of the Ottoman empire by the seventeenth century.

A network of merchant communities, Gujarati Hindus, Jews, Syrian Muslims and Christians, Armenians, worked the trade routes, using common systems of double-entry bookkeeping, credit and trust. This economic connection had been enhanced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by a great increase in the sea-borne trade of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. A few big interconnected entrepots had channelled an increasing volume of manufactured goods as well as raw materials from one vast region to the next (Chaudhuri 1985: 98—118). These included Venice, Cairo, Istanbul and Aleppo, Isfahan, Surat and Delhi. Differences in forms of money and trade customs should not disguise the fact that there was considerable uniformity and integration in this Eurasian economy and that the great towns and trade routes did in fact exercise a powerful effect even on apparently isolated peasant and nomad communities (Perlin 1983). Islamic law codes sheltered a world economy and an international commercial culture pioneered by Armenians, Hindus and Greeks which was as developed as that of Europe, though lagging in technical expertise. It provided, in fact, an alternative context to Europe and China for the development of forms of capitalism, if by 'capitalism' is meant the propensity for administrators, merchants and peasant leaders to acquire capital and to devise political forms for its reproduction over generations (Gran 1978).

The Muslim Empires: Contrasts and Comparisons

Some important distinctions between the empires, however, help us to explain their differing fates as all three entered the era of 'so-called decline' (Owen 1981: 5) and ultimate abasement before European power. In the first place, the centralised bureaucratic machinery of the Ottoman empire was different in intricate detail and also more highly developed than that of the Safavids or Mughals. The imperial levy and training school in Istanbul (the devshirme) brought generation after generation of young men from the Christian lands to the north and the Arab and African lands to the south to be trained as the sultan's personal servants. The tradition of slave bureaucracy maintained tight bonds of loyalty and aspiration between the imperial house and its dependents on into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition, a secular bureaucracy (the kuttab) had emerged across the empire alongside the doctors of Islamic law (ulama). By the sixteenth century, these men had a profound dedication to the principles of imperial law (kanun) and a model of deportment formed by the style of Istanbul (Kunt 1983).

By contrast, the centralising forces within the Safavid and Mughal empires were rather weaker. The Safavid emperors relied on their charisma as embodied religious authority within the Shia Islamic faith and also on a volatile series of alliances by which they cajoled and overawed the leaders of the great tribal and nomadic coalitions whose influence stretched to the very gates of Isfahan (Garthwaite 1983). There was a Safavid bureaucracy, but it appears to have always been weaker, more dependent on the local magnates. The Mughals, again, constructed a flexible system of 'government by contract' through great nobles who acted both as imperial officers (mansabdars) and often also as heads of powerful, locally resident communities. Imperial officials could dispense royal and Muslim law but the great nobles of the Mughals were always less extensions of the will and culture of the emperors than those of the Ottoman Porte. Ethnic factions of Hindu Rajputs, local Muslims, and central Asian and Persian Muslims were in evidence right from the height of the empire (Athar Ali 1968; Satish Chandra 1959). Comparatively speaking, the Ottoman sultan's servants were more homogeneous in religion and culture.

To some extent, these differences derived from the historical traditions of the empires. The Ottomans took over the bureaucratic system of the Byzantine empire and grafted on to it the 'slave' caste system of central Asian Islam. The Mughals ruled a society which was 80 per cent Hindu, and where the Muslim administrative and service class was spread thinly across north India, clustering around rural towns. But economic factors also played their part. To a much greater extent than either Delhi or Isfahan, Istanbul was a 'primate city' for its whole region. In a rain-fed economy it acted as a mart for Anatolia and Turkey in Europe but also as a great sea port and emporium for the communities and skills of the whole eastern Mediterranean. Istanbul survived as a great centre of population and trade, probably never dropping below 600,000 in population even during its eighteenth-century travails (Owen 1981: 24—5). By contrast, Delhi and Isfahan were left high and dry by the political and economic 'decentralisation' of the eighteenth century, dropping perhaps to 20,000 (Perry 1979: 238) and 80,000 respectively. For the agricultural environs of Delhi and Isfahan were more vulnerable to climatic change and invasion, dependent as they were to a much greater extent on artificial irrigation than those of Istanbul. It was obviously easier to control the Ottoman population of 30 million from a city of such size than it was to control the Indian population of 150 million from a shrunken Delhi.

The Nature of 'Decline'

The 'decline' of these great empires has been a subject of moralising by Europeans from the seventeenth century when they already saw in the East a mirror of their own discontents with luxurious and arbitrary kings. The 'licence' and debauchery of the Ottoman Selim II (1566-74; the 'Sot') or the Mughal Muhammad Shah I (1719-48; the 'colourful') was said to have undermined the military and moral superiority of the empires in a welter of nepotism and harem faction among eunuchs. There were severe Islamic scholars to echo this view. As a Persian historian of the last days of the Safavids noted: 'The subjects all at once became rich and possessed of luxuries. The glorious sultan and the pillars of the state turned aside from the canons and traditions which past sultans . . . had followed'. (Lambton in Naff and Owen 1977: 115).

Over the last few decades, however, scholars have found this stark transition inadequate to explain the complexities of historical change which deeper archival research has brought to light. What in fact was the relationship between the 'wealth of the subjects' and the decline of the ruling house? It seems vacuous to characterise whole societies over centuries as gripped by decline and stagnation. If there were already signs of military decline in the Ottoman empire virtually from the death of Sulaiman the Magnificent, how can its longevity be explained, its continuing expansion until the early eighteenth century and finally its revival at the beginning of the nineteenth? If Mughals and Ottomans were always ruled by accommodation and bargaining with powerful local interests — if, indeed, the empires 'controlled' their subjects largely through their acquiescence — why then did powerful interests in the Ottoman, Mughal and Safavid empires decide progressively to withdraw their support during the early eighteenth century?

The problems of a simplistic model of decline are most evident when we consider the wide range of historical processes which seem to be common to the whole region and which have yet to be adequately accounted for within it. What was the significance of the growth among the Ottomans of freehold landholding, large estates and forms of 'property' in marketable tax farms and shares in village produce or labour? How are long-term processes of urbanisation and commercial expansion to be related to the decentralisation of power in the regions which gathered speed in the eighteenth century in the Ottoman empire, Iran and India? What weight is to be given to the import of Western bullion and fragmentary evidence of price inflation, by comparison with internal population growth and the spread of new styles of consumption? The feeling has emerged that the 'decline' of the central political institutions of all these empires must be related to the evolution of regional economies and the formation of classes in their societies. A simple picture of loss of control and military defeat mistakes symptom for cause. By looking at these deeper internal changes, historians might hope not only to explain the n...