Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  The Mughals’ spectacular failure encouraged Shah Abbas II of Iran to demand the return of Qandahar and, when no satisfactory answer came, in 1649 his forces recaptured the city. Shah Jahan promptly returned to Kabul, but even his official chronicler noted that at the siege of Qandahar the Mughals had brought ‘with them neither a siege train of battering guns, nor skilled artillerymen’. Therefore, when ‘grain and fodder were beginning to get scarce’ after 14 weeks, the emperor recognized that ‘the reduction of the fortress without the aid of heavy guns was impracticable’ and withdrew his troops. In 1651 he tried again, this time bringing a few siege guns, but two ‘cracked from constant firing’ and became ‘quite unserviceable’, while although the other five ‘continued to be discharged, yet as they were not served by scientific artillerymen, their fire was not so effective as could be wished’. Once again, the besiegers ignominiously withdrew. In 1652 Shah Jahan made one more attempt to take Qandahar; but after ‘five months, the winter began to set in, all the lead, powder and cannon-balls were expended, and neither was there any forage left in the meadows, nor provisions with the army’, and so the survivors and their emperor retreated. They never returned.22

  Shah Jahan's efforts had advanced the Mughal frontier scarcely 30 miles beyond Kabul, yet it resulted in ‘the killing of thirty to forty thousand’ soldiers and the expenditure of over 35 million rupees.23 The war also caused extensive damage to Afghanistan – Qandahar became an almost permanent battleground – but the fragmentary nature of the surviving sources makes it extremely difficult to assess the exact impact. The records of the shrine at Mazar-e Sharif (‘Tomb of the holy one’), close to Balkh, shed a rare beam of light. The shrine had prospered in the earlier seventeenth century as local Afghan rulers granted lands and founded medreses, until its activities involved over 3,000 people either as producers or consumers; but when Mughal troops entered the valley, the local merchants and many farmers fled, so that in their first year the army of occupation collected only half of the previous year's revenues, and in their second year only half of that. Grain prices skyrocketed, and firewood (essential for survival at that altitude) could not be found. The Uzbeks invaded after the Mughals withdrew, and only in 1668 did the administrator of the shrine dare to leave Mazar-e Sharif to secure a charter from the nearest ruler that restored the lands and revenues lost ‘because of the turmoil in the world’.24

  The Crisis of Mughal India

  Shah Jahan's eldest son, and his favourite, Dara Shikoh, resided with him at court and boasted jagirs (fiefs) almost equal to those of his three brothers combined. In contrast, the three younger sons resided in distant provinces as the emperor's representatives, and from time to time he entrusted them with command of major campaigns. Shah Jahan intended this arrangement to avoid any rebellion similar to the one that he and his brothers had mounted against their father, Jahangir, but he reckoned without the ambition, ability and charisma of his third son, Aurangzeb. In 1636, aged 18, the prince began to govern the newly conquered regions of the Deccan for his father. Over the next eight years Aurangzeb took a personal interest in all aspects of the administration and built up a retinue of loyal followers whom he rewarded with lands acquired in frontier warfare. He constructed a new city, which he named Aurangabad, and both there and in his conquests he made lavish grants to individual mosques and medreses; forged ties with religious zealots; and encouraged conversion to Islam by new subjects.

  This military prowess in the Deccan led Shah Jahan to entrust the reconquest of Central Asia to Aurangzeb and, although his efforts failed, the prince gained valuable experience of command. He also became convinced that his brother Dara Shikoh had held back supplies and reinforcements for his campaigns, and so in 1652 Aurangzeb met his two other siblings to ‘make plans for the preservation of their life and honour and the management of their affairs’ in case the emperor suddenly died.25 Aurangzeb then returned to the Deccan where, in preparation for the inevitable succession struggle, he developed links with religious leaders and ethnic groups whom Shah Jahan had failed to integrate into the imperial fabric. He also built up a cadre of talented and devoted military officers, and with their assistance he led successful campaigns against the empire's southern neighbours that secured substantial treasure and tribute. Aurangzeb thus possessed immense political, military and financial resources when, late in 1657, rumours spread that the emperor ‘was unable to attend to business’ through illness and that Dara Shikoh had taken ‘the opportunity of seizing the reins of power’.26 The princes governing Gujarat and Bengal at once seized the local treasuries, issued their own coinage and had Friday prayers read in their name.

  The ailing emperor responded by charging Dara Shikoh with restoring order; but the prince foolishly divided his forces and sent armies simultaneously against both usurpers. Aurangzeb now joined his rebellious sibling in Gujarat, but skilfully ensured that his brother's troops took heavier casualties in the decisive battle. Therefore when Dara Shikoh retreated, Aurangzeb's troops secured Agra and, with it, the imperial treasury, the principal arsenal and the person of Shah Jahan. The emperor now offered to partition the empire among his sons, but Aurangzeb, confident that he could triumph alone, declared himself emperor and undertook campaigns against each of his brothers in turn, executing them and any of their sons who defied him. He kept his father in prison until he died.

  Unfortunately for the new emperor's subjects, as a Mughal chronicler observed, ‘The disturbances and the movement of large armies for two years [1658–60] in different parts of the empire, particularly in the northern and eastern territories’, coincided with another ‘failure of the monsoons’. In Delhi, grain prices rose precipitously, and in an attempt to reverse the process Aurangzeb abolished ‘more than eighty taxes’ as ‘a relief measure to lessen the hardships caused by the rising prices of grain’.27 Nevertheless in 1659 southeast India saw ‘so great a famine’ that, according to resident English merchants, ‘the people [are] dying daily for want of food’, while in Gujarat ‘the famine and plague’ became ‘so great’ that (as in 1630–2) they ‘swept away the most part of the people, and those that are left are few’. The monsoon failed again in 1660, and the same English merchants lamented the ‘great dearth’ in the southeast ‘now these eighteen months’; while their colleagues in Gujarat believed that ‘never famine raged worse in any place, the living being hardly able to bury the dead’.28

  Meanwhile, according to a Mughal chronicler, ‘the scarcity of rains’ caused famine in the Ganges plain:

  The scarcity of foodstuffs grew every day and the poverty of the destitute people increased to such an extent that most of the parganahs [administrative units] became desolate. Large crowds of people from distant parts of the country and from the vicinity of the capital took the road to the city.

  Aurangzeb set up ten ‘free feeding houses’ in his capital, with more in surrounding communities, ‘besides the permanent public distributing centres of cooked and uncooked food’, and he obliged the leading noblemen to do the same. He also reissued his edict abolishing taxes until ‘at last a change for the better appeared in the condition of the people’.29 It did not last. In 1662 a major fire destroyed large parts of Shahjahanabad, while the price of grain in Gujarat approached famine levels because the ‘very little rain this last year’ was ‘not sufficient to produce corn except in some particular places, and [even] there not more than half and quarter crops’. The English merchants feared that the extreme drought would ‘utterly dispeople all these parts’ because ‘there are more than 500 families of weavers that are already fled, and the rest will certainly follow, if the famine should increase’.30 Although the 1664 monsoon was normal, ‘the past year's dearth’ produced widespread disease in Gujarat, where ‘all these towns and villages hereabouts are full of sickness, scarce a house free’. Meanwhile, famine, drought and disease also caused a sharp increase in the price of staples in Bengal; and, in the south, Kerala experienced three years of drought.31

  A French
physician residing in Delhi noted in 1668 that ‘of the vast tracts of country constituting the empire of Hindustan, many are little more than sand, or barren mountains, badly cultivated, and thinly peopled; and even a considerable portion of the good land remains untilled from want of labourers’; while a new revenue survey compiled for Aurangzeb's treasury showed that receipts from the ten core provinces of the empire had fallen 20 per cent below pre-war levels. The civil war also allowed Shivaji, a Maratha nobleman, to build up a powerful Hindu state that would defy and even defeat the Mughals (Shivaji sacked Surat, their principal port, in 1664 and again in 1670).32

  Although Shireen Moosvi, an economic historian, has suggested that the crisis of 1658–70 formed the watershed between Mughal expansion and decline, the empire continued to expand for four decades more.33 In the 1670s Aurangzeb captured, tried and executed the charismatic Sikh leader Tegh Bahadur, and thus halted a movement that had won both Hindu and Muslim converts; and in the 1680s he defeated a Rajput revolt led by one of his own sons, conquered the Deccan kingdoms of Bijapur and Golconda, and captured and executed the leader of the Maratha confederacy. After these spectacular successes, Aurangzeb seems to have forgotten his own advice that ‘It is bad for both emperors and water to remain at the same place’ (page 400 above), because he spent 27 years campaigning against the Marathas in the Deccan, despite monsoon failures in 1686 and 1687 (both years of intense El Niño activity and weak monsoons), which intensified the deleterious effects of his campaigns. According to the English merchants in the city, 35,000 people died in Madras while parents gave away their children and adults sold themselves into slavery in order to avoid starvation.34 Nevertheless, when the emperor died in 1707, despite spending millions on war, his treasury contained 240 million rupees – far more than the total left by previous rulers and almost certainly more than the resources of any other ruler in the world. Throughout the seventeenth century, the yield of taxes, tribute and plunder always exceeded the needs of the Mughal state. Nevertheless, Aurangzeb's Rajput, Sikh and Maratha neighbours all stood poised to exploit the inevitable succession war that erupted immediately after his death. Even the wealthiest state in the world could not overcome the weaknesses caused by ‘bloody tanistry’.

  Southeast Asia: Turning Plenty into Poverty

  Several rulers in the Indonesian archipelago in the early seventeenth century also boasted vast wealth – and for much the same reasons as the Mughal emperors: the tax yield from unusually fertile land and profitable commerce, combined with few wars. Nevertheless, also like Mughal India, their lands suffered from the unusual frequency of both El Niño and volcanic events in the mid-seventeenth century. Although most of the archipelago normally receives 4 inches or more of rainfall every month (there is no ‘dry season’), tree-rings from central Java between 1643 and 1671 reveal the longest period of low rainfall ever recorded. Not a single year during this period received the normal amount of rain, and 1664 was the driest year recorded in the last five centuries. Surviving written sources from Java, the most densely populated island, show famines in six years and poor rice harvests in ten more between 1633 and 1665, while those from the outer islands of the archipelago show famines in two years and poor rice harvests in ten more, with universal shortfalls in four years: 1633, 1657, 1660 and 1664 (Fig. 40).35

  Three natural advantages mitigated these effects of the Little Ice Age. First, since the archipelago straddles the equator, changes in solar energy had less impact: a fall in mean temperatures there is far less serious than in more northerly latitudes. Even during the great drought, abundant arable land remained available. According to Francisco de Alcina, an envious European visitor in the 1660s, ‘many and very extensive lands remain, lacking anyone to cultivate them. Although it is true that each village or populated area has its own boundaries … anyone who comes to settle among them, even though he was never seen or heard of, is given an option to select voluntarily all and as much land as he might wish, without asking him for a cent for it.’ Second, the tropical climate and fertile soil of the archipelago allowed a wide variety of edible crops to flourish, some of them resistant to adverse weather. William Marsden, who visited Sumatra, noted that if their staple crop failed, people turned ‘to those wild roots, herbs, and leaves of trees, which the woods abundantly afford in every season’. Therefore, Marsden continued, ‘failures of crops or grain are never attended with those dreadful consequences which more improved countries and more provident nations experience’.36 Third, the densely populated coastal areas managed to avoid some consequences of the drought by importing rice from unaffected areas. Above all, the ships of the Dutch East India Company normally brought rice from India to relieve famines, because crop failures in the archipelago and in the subcontinent rarely coincided.37 For all these reasons, although 20 million people inhabited the Indonesian islands in the mid-seventeenth century, few of them starved. The situation changed when, despite such natural abundance, human agency managed to create a crisis.

  The eagerness of several groups of merchants – Portuguese, Dutch, English, Muslim, Chinese and Japanese – to acquire individual spices (nutmeg on the Banda Islands, clove on Amboina, and so on) inexorably led to monoculture: each island concentrated on cultivating cash crops and abandoned all others. Until the 1630s, local growers prospered and, thanks to export taxes, so did their rulers; but this state of affairs changed rapidly as political and military events closed off one market after another. First, in 1638, the Japanese government prohibited all foreign trade both by its own subjects and by the Portuguese (see chapter 3 above); then in 1641 the Dutch East India Company captured Melaka from Portugal and thus gained a stranglehold over all ships passing through the Straits; finally after 1644 Chinese maritime trade contracted during the Ming-Qing transition. These three developments conferred enormous commercial advantages on the Dutch. On the one hand, they exploited their control of the sea lanes to exclude competitors, especially the Muslim traders and intermediaries who had grown rich from the long-distance commerce in high-value spices, and to increase the price of the food they imported to Indonesia. According to one estimate, rice prices quintupled once the Dutch wrested control of the import trade from their indigenous competitors. On the other hand, the Dutch could always blockade the ports of producers dependent on imported foodstuffs, creating an artificial famine that compelled the victims to sell spices cheap. In the 1650s, for example, pepper prices fell by half.38

  40. Drought and the seventeenth-century crisis in Indonesia.

  The dramatic fall in the population of Maluku, a group of spice-producing islands in the Indonesian archipelago, exactly paralleled the longest and most severe drought in the region's recorded history.

  The falling price of spices and the rising cost of food staples had profound consequences for the peoples of the archipelago. Some destroyed their pepper vines and reintroduced rice cultivation because, in the words of a verse epic composed in Acheh, the largest Muslim state of the archipelago:

  Marketing does not yield much profit, even if you grow pepper, my friends.

  If there is no rice in the country, nothing else will be of use …

  If there is nothing to eat, your children will starve and you will have to sell all you possess …

  What can you feed on if there is no food?

  If there is no rice in the country, the entire country starves.

  Other rulers in Monsoon Asia stopped producing spices for reasons of security. One Muslim prince forbade his subjects to plant pepper ‘so that they did not thereby get involved in war, whether with the [Dutch] or with other potentates’.39 Achieving this outcome was easier said than done, because the Dutch usually attacked in alliance with a rival ‘potentate’. Thus, in southern Sulawesi, the sultans of the prosperous port-city of Makassar overran the neighbouring state of Bone and then defied Dutch pressure to grant then monopoly trading privileges, instead welcoming all traders. They prudently invested some of the resulting revenues in constructing a large for
tress (Sombaopu) around the royal palace which, on the seaward side, boasted walls 14 feet thick with four bastions equipped with heavy guns donated by Danish, English and Portuguese traders, all of whom maintained factories in the city. After the fall of Melaka in 1641, between 2,000 and 3,000 Portuguese transferred their activities to Makassar, and the sultanate enjoyed unprecedented prosperity until Arung Palakka, the exiled prince of Bone, sought Dutch help. In 1667, at Palakka's request, Dutch warships bombarded the new fortifications of Makassar until they had secured important trading concessions. Two years later, claiming that the sultan had breached the agreement, the allies returned and took the city by siege. Arung Palakka now became the new sultan of Makassar, while the Dutch created a citadel from which they controlled all seaborne commerce in southern Sulawesi. A verse epic written just after the allied victory expresses local sentiment:

  Listen, sirs, to my advice:

  Never make friends with the Dutch.

  Possessed of a sort of devilish cunning,

  No country can call itself safe when they're around.40

  The war between Makassar and the Dutch came at a high cost for all protagonists: it left much of Makassar in ruins and, although the Dutch eventually gained from the elimination of a competitor, several decades passed before profits from trade equalled the cost of the two naval expeditions.

  The First World War: The Dutch versus the Portuguese

  The Dutch also ran up heavy losses fighting the Portuguese in what the distinguished historian Charles Boxer christened ‘the first world war’, because it took place on all four continents as well as on the seas around them.41 Throughout the 1630s Dutch warships blockaded Goa, the capital of Portuguese India, and its profitable outposts in Monsoon Asia: Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Melaka and Macao, all of which depended on the ability to export high-value cargoes. In 1640 an English merchant in India observed that the Portuguese were ‘in a most miserable predicament: Melaka and Ceylon besieged and (the Dutch say) as good as seized; their galleons fired; their soldiers decayed; themselves disheartened’. Unless ‘sudden and ample succour from Europe reinforce them,’ he predicted, the Portuguese would plunge to their ‘utter ruin, while the insolent Dutch domineer in all places, styling themselves already kings of the Indian seas’.42 Shortly afterwards a new viceroy arrived in Goa with reinforcements from Lisbon; but when, a year later, news arrived of Portugal's revolt against Spanish rule, he – like virtually all the Portuguese in Asia – declared for the new regime headed by King John IV (see chapter 9 above).