6
Fakir Khair-al Din Illahabadi, Fakir, ‘Ibrat Nama, BL, OIOC, Or. 1932. f1v
CHAPTER 1: 1599
1
James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, London, 2005, pp. 303–8.
2
Henry Stevens, The Dawn of British Trade to the East Indies, as Recorded in the Court Minutes of the East India Company 1599–1603, Containing an Account of the Formation of the Company, London, 1866, pp. 1–10.
3
Marguerite Eyer Wilbur, The East India Company and the British Empire in the Far East, New York, 1945, pp. 18–24.
4
Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653, Princeton, 2003, pp. 19–23, 61–4; James Mather, Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World, London, 2009, pp. 4, 40–2.
5
Stevens, The Dawn of British Trade, pp. 1–10.
6
Sir William Foster, ‘The First Home of the East India Company’, in The Home Counties Magazine, ed. W. Paley Baildon, FSA, vol. XIV, 1912, pp. 25–7; Beckles Willson, Ledger and Sword: The Honourable Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies 1599–1874, 2 vols, London, 1903, vol. 1, pp. 19–23.
7
Stevens, The Dawn of British Trade, pp. 5–6; P. J. Marshall, ‘The English in Asia to 1700’, in Nicholas Canny, The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, The Origins of Empire, Oxford, 1998, pp. 267–9.
8
A pauper in comparison to Mughal prosperity, England was not however impoverished by north European Standards, and conducted a large and growing textile trade, largely through the Netherlands.
9
Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1430–1630, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 12, 33, 256.
10
Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, London, 2003, pp. 6, 7, 9; G. L. Beer, The Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578–1660, London, 1908, pp. 8–9.
11
Giles Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg or, The True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History, London, 1999, pp. 15–20.
12
Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, pp. 176, 200–22, 309, 314; Ferguson, Empire, p. 58.
13
National Archives of India Calendar of Persian Correspondence, intro. Muzaffar Alam & Sanjay Subrahmanyam, vol. 1, New Delhi, 2014 (henceforth CPC), p. xxxi.
14
William Foster (ed.), Early Travels in India 1583–1619, London, 1921, pp. 1–47; G. V. Scammell, The World Encompassed: The First European Maritime Empires, London, 1981, p. 474.
15
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 20–1; Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, pp. 7, 42–52; Holden Furber, ‘Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800’, in Maritime India, intro. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, New Delhi, 2004, p. 31, 343n.
16
Furber, ‘Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient’, pp. 31–2; Shapiro, 1599, p. 303; Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, p. 260.
17
K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company 1600–1640, London, 1965, p. 11; Mather, Pashas, p. 40.
18
Willson, Ledger and Sword, pp. 19–21.
19
Stevens, The Dawn of British Trade, pp. 5–6.
20
Sir William Foster, England’s Quest of Eastern Trade, London, 1933, pp. 144–50.
21
Mather, Pashas, p. 41.
22
Philip J. Stern, The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty & the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, Cambridge, 2011, pp. 6–9.
23
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, London, 2003, p. 26.
24
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 12–13.
25
Willson, Ledger and Sword, p. 31.
26
John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company, London, 1991, p. 13; Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, p. 77.
27
Keay, The Honourable Company, p. 9.
28
Stern, The Company State, pp. 12, 56–8.
29
Philip Stern has shown brilliantly how much earlier than was previously understood the Company acquired real and tangible political power. See stem, The Company State.
30
Stevens, The Dawn of British Trade, p. 13.
31
Ibid., pp. 14–20, 42–3.
32
Ibid., pp. 30–46, 52.
33
Sir William Foster, John Company, London, 1926, p. 5.
34
Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, pp. 77–80.
35
Keay, The Honourable Company, p. 15; Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, pp. 80–2.
36
Keay, The Honourable Company, p. 23.
37
Furber, ‘Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient’, pp. 38–9.
38
Marshall, The English in Asia to 1700, p. 268; Scammell, The World Encompassed, pp. 480–1.
39
Cited in H. Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 2 vols, London, 1913, vol. I, p. 533, vol. II, p. 299.
40
Scammell, The World Encompassed, p. 479.
41
Furber, ‘Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient’, p. 42.
42
Ferguson, Empire, p. 21.
43
CPC, p. xxxi; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 49; Furber, ‘Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient’, p. 39; Marshall, The English in Asia to 1700, pp. 270–1; Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, p. 270.
44
Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765, London, 2019, p. 373.
The Cambridge historian Angus Maddison shows that around 1700 India briefly overtook China as the largest economy in the world. This was due to many factors: Sher Shah Suri and the Mughals had encouraged trade by developing roads, river transport, sea routes, ports and abolishing many inland tolls and taxes. Their aesthetic obsessions also helped bring Indian textile manufacturing to a new height of beauty and brilliance. As the French traveller François Bernier wrote around 1700: ‘Gold and silver come from every quarter of the globe to Hindostan,’ words echoed by Sir Thomas Roe, who remarked that: ‘Europe bleedeth to enrich Asia.’ Maddison’s exact figures show than in 1600 Britain was creating 1.8 per cent of world GDP, while India was creating 22.5 per cent. The figures for 1700 are 2.88 per cent vs 22.44 per cent.
On the other hand, Maddison also shows that from 1600 onwards GDP per head was already higher in England than in India, which implies that the wealth in India in this period, as today, was concentrated in the ruling and business classes, and very unevenly distributed. European travellers constantly remarked on the wealth of the rulers and the bankers and the poverty of the agricultural classes. Maddison’s work does show, however, that GDP per head was higher in seventeenth-century India than in any previous period.
Shireen Moosvi, who did her dissertation under the supervision of Irfan Habib, undertook a detailed study of Ain-i-Akbari in the 1980s. Her conclusion was that the Mughal state was unusually extractive and appropriated 56.7 per cent of the total produce. Her research focused on five north Indian provinces: Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Allahabad and Avadh. The total population of these provinces was estimated at 36 million. She estimated the average income per peasant family to be 380 dams per annum – roughly 1 dam per day (a ‘dam’ was the standard copper coin in Mughal India. Roughly 40 dams made a rupee).
According to W. W. Hunter, in 1882 the total revenue of Aurangzeb in 1695 was estimated at £80 million. The gross taxation levied by British India between 1869 and 1879 was £35.3
million. So the Mughal Empire under Aurangzeb (circa 1700) collected twice as much land revenue as the British Raj (circa 1880), though the economy size was about the same in both periods. See W. W. Hunter, The Indian Empire (London, 1882). With thanks to Śrīkānta Kṛṣṇamācārya for bringing this to my attention.
45
D. A. Washbrook, ‘Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c. 1720–1860’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 22, no. 1 (1988), pp. 57–96.
46
Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 ad: Essays in Macro-Economic History, Oxford, 2007, pp. 116–20, 309–11, 379; Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did in India, New Delhi, 2016, pp. 2–3.
47
Shireen Moosvi, Economy of the Mughal Empire, c1595: A Statistical Study, New Delhi, 1987, p. 376; Foster (ed.), Early Travels, p. 112; Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, p. 371.
48
Furber, ‘Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient’, p. 45.
49
Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution, Oxford, 1988, p. 135. The figure may not be correct: Parker probably gets this from Irvine, who got it from Abu’l Fazl’s Ain-i Akbari. Dirk Kolff’s Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy, London, 1992, makes a compelling case that this number by Abu’l Fazl was actually an estimation of the ‘military labour market’ of the twelve subahs of the empire in the 1590s (essentially northern India) and should not be understood as the actual size of the Mughal army. See pp. 3ff (basically the whole chapter on the ‘armed peasantry’).
50
Milo Cleveland Beach and Ebba Koch (eds), King of the World – the Padshahnama: an Imperial Mughal Manuscript from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, London, 1997, pp. 56–7, 58–60, 179–80; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia: A Political and Economic History 1500–1700, New York, 1993, pp. 165–6, 201; Tirthankar Roy, The East India Company: The World’s Most Powerful Corporation, New Delhi, 2012, p. 83.
51
Furber, ‘Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient’, p. 40.
52
The best biography is Michael Strachan, Sir Thomas Roe 1581–1644, Salisbury, 1989.
53
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, Princeton, 1996, p. 17.
54
Sir Thomas Roe and Dr John Fryer, Travels in India in the 17th Century, London, 1873, pp. 26–9, 38–9.
55
Ibid., pp. 103–4. See also Sir William Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India 1615–9, as Narrated in his Journal and correspondence, New Delhi, 1990.
56
Roe wrote a wonderful love letter to Elizabeth, Lady Huntingdon, from ‘Indya’ on 30 October 1616. I would like to thank Charlotte Merton for sending me this reference. Pasadena Library, Hastings Collection, 5 Box 7 (1612 to 1618, Thomas Roe to Elizabeth, Countess of Huntingdon, HA10561).
57
Roe and Fryer, Travels in India, p. 74. See William Pinch’s brilliant essay, ‘Same Difference in India and Europe’, History and Theory, vol. 38, no. 3 (October 1999), pp. 389–407.
58
Strachan, Sir Thomas Roe, pp. 86–7.
59
Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, Contayning a History of the World, 20 vols, Glasgow, 1905, part 1, IV, pp. 334–9.
60
This is certainly the argument of Beni Prasad in his History of Jahangir, Allahabad, 1962.
61
Roe and Fryer, Travels in India, pp. 83–4.
62
Jahangir Preferring a Shaykh to Kings, by Bichitr, c.1615–18. Opaque watercolour and gold on paper. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution. Purchase F1942.15. I am in debt here to Simon Schama’s brilliant and witty analysis of the painting in BBC/PBS Civilisations, Episode 5. Jahangir’s dream pictures are all enigmatic and difficult to decode. In this case the painting reflects one of Jahangir’s own dreams which revealed how the pious Emperor was actually the Millennial Sovereign of Islamic thought: master of time as well as space, ushering in the new millennium in which all other kings are beneath him and of little account; instead the Emperor turns his gaze towards the inner mysteries of Sufi wisdom. See A. Azfar Moin’s brilliant The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship & Sainthood in Islam, Columbia, 2014, and Kavita Singh’s perceptive Real Birds in Imagined Gardens: Mughal Painting between Persia and Europe, Los Angeles, 2017.
63
C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, Cambridge, 1988, p. 16.
64
CPC, p. xxxiii.
65
Quoted in G. J. Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India 1600–1784: A Grand Strategic Interpretation, Woodbridge, 2013, p. 4.
66
Marshall, ‘The English in Asia to 1700’, pp. 272–3.
67
Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, p. 373.
68
Rupali Mishra: A Business of State: Commerce, Politics and the Birth of the East India Company, Harvard, 2018, p. 6.
69
Keay, The Honourable Company, pp. 112–13.
70
Mather, Pashas, p. 53.
71
Thomas Mun, A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East Indes By T.M., London, 1621, quoted in Mishra, A Business of State, p. 3.
72
CPC 1, p. xi; Stern, The Company State, p. 19.
73
Stern, The Company State, p. 19; Keay, Honourable Company, p. 68; CPC 1, p. xi; Furber, ‘Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient’, p. 71.
74
Furber, ‘Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient’, pp. 71–2.
75
Stern, Company State, pp. 35–6.
76
Ibid., pp. 22–3; Keay, Honourable Company, pp. 130–1; Bruce P. Lenman, Britain’s Colonial Wars 1688–1783, New York, 2001, p. 85; Roy, East India Company, p. 77.
77
Lenman, Britain’s Colonial Wars, pp. 86–8.
78
Sir William Foster (ed.), The English Factories in India 1618–1669, 13 vols, London, 1906–27, vol. 3, p. 345.
79
Stern, Company State, p. 109, for the Bombay witchcraft trials.
80
Keay, The Honourable Company, pp. 136–7.
81
William Letwin, The Origin of Scientific Economics, London, 1963, p. 37.
82
Richard Carnac Temple, The Diaries of Streynsham Master, 1675–1680, 2 vols, London, 1911, vol. 2, p. 28; Foster, English Factories, vol. 4, p. 308; John R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal,Cambridge, 1993, p. 112; Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, London, 2016, p. 39.
83
Bryant, Emergence of British Power, p. 3.
84
Wilson, India Conquered, p. 49.
85
Ibid., p. 47.
86
Ibid., p. 53.
87
Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies, 2 vols, London, 1930, vol. 1, pp. 8–9, 312–15.
88
Wilson, India Conquered, p. 53; Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East, 1750–1850, London, 2005, p. 25.
89
François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, 1656–68, ed. Archibald Constable, trans. Irving Brock, Oxford, 1934, pp. 437, 442; McLane, Land and Local Kingship, pp. 29–30; Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630–1720, Princeton, 1985, pp. 75, 162–3.
90
Audrey Truschke, Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth, New Delhi, 2017, pp. 66, 105.
91
C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 20–1; Satish Chandra, ‘Social Background to the Rise of the Maratha Movement During the 17th Century’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, x (1973), pp. 209–18.
92
Dr John Fryer,
A New Account of East India & Persia 1672–81, ed. W. Crooke, Hakluyt Society, 3 vols, London, 1909–15, vol. I, p. 341; Irfan Habib, ‘The Agrarian Causes of the Fall of the Mughal Empire’, in Enquiry, 2, September 1958, pp. 81–98 and Enquiry, 3, 3 April 1960, pp. 68–80. See also Meena Bhargava, The Decline of the Mughal Empire, New Delhi, 2014, p. 43.
93
Fryer, A New Account of East India & Persia, vol. II, pp. 67–8.
94
Truschke, Aurangzeb, p. 66.
95
Kaushik Roy, ‘Military Synthesis in South Asia: Armies, Warfare, and Indian Society, c.1740–1849’, in Journal of Military History, vol. 69, no. 3 (July 2005), pp. 651–90; V. G. Dighe and S. N. Qanungo, ‘Administrative and Military System of the Marathas’, in R. C. Majumdar and V. G. Dighe (eds), The Maratha Supremacy, Mumbai, 1977, pp. 567–8. For Shivaji’s two coronation ceremonies the best source is the Sivarajyabhiṣekakalpataru (The Venerable Wish-Fulfilling Tree of Śiva’s Royal Consecration) dated 30 September 1596 Saka era (= 1674 ad). See Bihani Sarkar, Traveling Tantricsand Belligerent Brahmins: the Sivarajyabhiṣekakalpataru and Sivaji’s Tantric consecration, for the conference on ‘Professions in motion: culture, power and the politics of mobility in 18th-century India’, St Anne’s, Oxford, 2 June 2017; available at www.academica.edu; James W. Laine, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, Oxford, 2003.
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