SUNY series in Hindu Studies

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438474366
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500–1800 uses the innovative approach of "connected histories" to address a series of questions regarding the early modern world in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. The period between 1500 and 1800 was one of intense inter-imperial competition involving the Iberians, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the British, and other actors. Rather than understand these imperial entities separately, Sanjay Subrahmanyam reads their archives and texts together to show unexpected connections and refractions. He further proposes, in this set of closely argued studies, that these empires often borrowed from each other, or built their projects with knowledge of other competing visions of empire. The emphasis on connections is also crucial for an understanding of how a variety of genres of imperial and global history writing developed in the early modern world. The book moves creatively between political, economic, intellectual, and cultural themes to suggest a fresh geographical conception for the epoch.

1

Introduction

Revisiting Empires and Connecting Histories

An empire formed by forcing together a hundred nations, and a hundred and fifty provinces, is no body public, but a monster.

– J.G. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der
Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91)¹

OVER THE PAST MANY centuries, histories and historians have tended to focus repeatedly on around half a dozen major sites of reflection: cities, regions, communities or ethnic groups, kingdoms and their ruling dynasties, and empires.² Since the late eighteenth century – the epoch when Herder wrote his incendiary works – a newcomer in the form of the nation-state has been added to this list and has arguably even displaced a number of the others. To be sure, the specific themes and angles of intellectual attack can vary and will continue to do so. But regardless of whether one picks up a work of history written in 500 CE or 1500 CE or 1900 CE, it is more than likely that one or the other of these sites has found its way in as a fundamental way of structuring the historical enquiry. This would be equally true whether one were located in China, India, the Mediterranean, or Scandinavia. To the extent that the survival of source materials slants and filters the modern-day historian’s understanding of a distant past, it is inevitable that we remain even today constrained in some measure by these conceptual and organisational choices made by actors of another age: our histories cannot entirely liberate themselves from their way of seeing history.³ We may turn matters this way and that, read texts and other sources “against the grain”, or claim to adopt a perspective “from below” while favouring or downplaying this or that group; in the end, however, there may be good reason consciously to accommodate our ancestors and their preferences in some measure, because the institutions and sites that mattered to them did not do so as a simple matter of hazard. Or, to put it in a more familiar language deriving from linguistics, our perspective – the “etic” one – can surely find a place for theirs – the “emic” one.

This book centres on one of these long-familiar sites, namely the empire. But it does so in a particular way. Many recent works continue to deal with empires, usually by focusing on a single imperial entity. Indeed, historians are often trained to see themselves as specialists of, say, the British empire, the Spanish empire, the Ottoman empire, or the Mughal empire. Often, their specialisations are even narrower, coming down to a specific time period within the trajectory of these empires, or – in the case of some of the more spread-out imperial examples – to picking one theatre rather than another. Thus, it has often been a complaint that historians of the British empire in Asia (or the Indian Ocean) and of the British Atlantic have few occasions for creative conversation, let alone ongoing intellectual cross-fertilisation.⁴

In this book, the strategy explicitly chosen is to break out of the straitjacket of the “single-empire” framework. This is not to deny that many important works have been produced in that framework, and will probably continue to be, whether for the Roman empire of antiquity or the imperial Qing in China. Nonetheless, the fact remains that few empires have existed in lonely splendour; rather, they were more often than not located in a wider inter-imperial context. This is why it seems useful to conjugate the study of empires with the approach known as “connected histories”, which has been of particular significance for early-modern historians over the past two decades or so.⁵

These past years have seen no reduction in the intensity of debates and discussions concerning the place of empires in the early-modern and modern worlds. The debates have if anything been aggravated and sometimes become more confused in their conceptual terms, partly on account of the current called “post-colonial studies”, in which historians of India and South Asia have played a quite significant part.⁶ Three issues seem to be central in these debates, and I shall address each of them in turn here in the hope of allowing a possible dialogue to emerge between historians of different parts of the world – more particularly Latin America and South Asia – who work on the period between the late-fifteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.⁷ The three issues I consider in turn are:

(1)A “synchronic” problem, namely how to reconcile the very different trajectories followed by societies in Asia and America in the face of European empire-building projects.

(2)A “diachronic” problem, namely the conceptual relationship between the empires of the early-modern period (say, 1450–1750) and those of the later period, which is sometimes read as a shorthand for the relationship between the Iberian empires and those of France and Great Britain.

(3)The issue of the passage from empires to nation-states, and the consequent reflection on the “modernity” or “archaism” of empire itself as a political form.

But before getting to these issues, it may be useful to look, if only briefly, at some central questions of definition. A recent and ambitious work of synthesis on the subject by two well-known historians begins by noting that an empire is a “type of state”, which for them must above all be defined in opposition to the nation-state. Burbank and Cooper write: “Empires are large political units, expansionist or with a memory of power extended over space, polities that maintain distinction and hierarchy as they incorporate new people”, and add that “the concept of empire presumes that different people will be governed differently.”⁸ This repeated insistence on the “politics of difference”, while helpful to a certain extent, is also somewhat reductive because of its anachronism. For greater clarity we may turn to two important and yet contrasting books, published a decade earlier, which address the question of empires. The first is a relatively succinct and synoptic essay of some two hundred pages by the historian and political theorist Anthony Pagden.⁹ The second, by contrast, is a collective enterprise over five hundred pages long (the outcome of a conference) simply entitled Empires.¹⁰

Pagden begins by discussing what an empire is for him, while noting that “today, the word is generally used as a term of abuse, although one that is often tinged with nostalgia.” Eventually preferring a form of description to a rigorous definition, he nevertheless notes that from the time of Tacitus (ca. 56–120 CE) anyone who alluded to “empire” usually had in mind a reference “as much to its size as to its sovereignty, and ultimately it would be size which separated empires from mere kingdoms and principalities.” Pagden goes on to note that “because they have been large and relentlessly expansive, empires have also embraced peoples who have held a wide variety of different customs and beliefs, and often spoken an equally large number of different languages.” We are thus already edging somewhat closer to a definition, and this is confirmed by the statement that “because of their size and sheer diversity, most empires have in time become cosmopolitan societies”, structures of political authority in which rulers “have generally tolerated diversity [but] … have also inevitably transformed the peoples whom they have brought together.” The key elements can now be brought together in a sort of definition: an empire is a large sovereign state which is relentlessly expansive, embracing a wide variety of different customs, beliefs, and peoples who practice a vast array of languages; the imperial society tends to be cosmopolitan and the political system is tolerant of diversity, even if “empires have [also] severely limited the freedoms of some peoples”.¹¹ We may compare this to the false precision, and many unstated and indefensible assumptions, in the definition offered by another recent author, Charles Maier: “Empire is a form of political organization in which the social elements that rule in the dominant state – the ‘mother country’ or the ‘metropole’ – create a network of allied elites in regions abroad who accept subordination in international affairs in return for the security of their position in their own administrative unit (the ‘colony’ or, in spatial terms, the ‘periphery’).”¹²

It seems that Pagden’s purpose, unlike Maier’s, is to permit a broad and inclusive notion of what the category “empire” means, one that allows him to run the chronological gamut from Alexander the Great and the Romans through to the Safavids and the Ottomans, to the Habsburgs, and as far down as Queen Victoria.¹³ The editors of the second volume referred to above (namely the classical archaeologist Susan Alcock and her co-editors) chose, however, to limit their temporal ambit in order to explicitly exclude empires from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. While saying that the division between on the one hand the “early” empires – such as those of the Achaemenids, the Satavahanas, the Assyrians, and classical Rome – and on the other the empires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were artificial, and even expressing scepticism about “the intellectual legitimacy of this divide”, they nevertheless reiterate that the Iberian empires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were quite distinct from the British and French empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹⁴ I shall return to this problem later, when discussing the “colonial empire” – usually schematised as a particular sub-category of empire within which exploitative economic relations between an imperial core and a subject periphery are a crucial element. An empire may possess all the characteristics set out by Pagden and yet show neither systematic unequal exchange nor tributary economic flows towards the imperial centre.

In this respect the Iberian experiences in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century America and Asia were obviously quite markedly different. From the second quarter of the sixteenth century, massive tribute in the form of precious metals flowed into the Habsburg imperial centre from its American possessions, first through de-thesaurisation and then through the direct exploitation of celebrated mines such as Potosí in Bolivia. The structure of empire, whether in New Spain or the Peruvian viceroyalty, remained deeply dependent on raising resources through systems of forced labour or corvée, and also in some areas on the creation of plantation systems that exploited slave labour. Whether one looks at the Spanish or the Portuguese possessions in America, therefore, it is clear that their relationship to Iberia was in economic terms that of a dependent and tributary. This did not mean of course that locally implanted elites – and even some descendants of native Americans – did not benefit from imperial processes. Nor did it mean that the net effects of these tributary flows were necessarily positive for the Iberian economies – where they produced inflation and a social redistribution of wealth, but not necessarily high rates of growth either in agriculture or artisanal production.¹⁵ Yet the contrast in the relationship with Asia at the very same period is striking. Trade on the Cape Route for the Portuguese was essentially balanced and bilateral, with bullion and other goods being sent out to Asia in order to purchase pepper, spices, indigo, and textiles. The financial resources raised through fiscal means in Asia by the Portuguese Estado da Índia did not constitute a sizeable surplus that allowed the state to finance intercontinental trade on a tributary basis, and it is difficult to talk of systematic “unrequited flows” from Asia to Iberia in this period. And the Spanish presence in the Philippines did not permit the exaction of a net tribute large enough even to finance a small proportion of the trade between Manila and Acapulco. Both Portuguese and Spaniards undoubtedly had imperial ambitions in Asia at this time, but the notion of empire that existed among them was based on the idea of extensive dominion and layered sovereignty (an emperor being a “king over kings”), rather than on a “colonial empire” in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Revisiting Empires and Connecting Histories
• Beginnings
• Connections and Comparisons
• Representations
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover