State Formation and Economy Reconsidered: Part One (original) (raw)
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State formation in South India and Southeast Asia
The paper is broadly divided into two sections. The first section critically surveys the historiography on the formation and transformation of states, drawing upon examples, from not only southern India, but from Indonesia as well as mainland Southeast Asia. The central purpose is to show parallel tendencies in the two historiographies, and to prepare the ground for a synthesis. We also note that, at least where the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are concerned, the two historiographies borrow from the same dictionary of ideas, without however referring to one another. The critique will focus in particular on the tendency to create a chronological sequence of state types by cobbling together borrowings from other contexts: the work of Europeanists in particular, and of Africanists to a more limited extent. Correspondingly, we note the failure to develop adequate Asianist models, or for that matter models that integrally discuss the evolution of state forms as opposed to mere cyclical fluctuations in them. The second section draws on documentary material, particularly from the archives of the Dutch and English East India Companies, to elucidate some elements of a model in the context of southern India, with a tentative conclusion on how well these fit the various Southeast Asian cases.
The State in Premodern South Asia
On the morning of December 28, 1979, members of the Indian History Congress settled in for the start of the second day of their fortieth annual gathering. It was to be a day focused on 'medieval' India, a term and periodization whose coherency for the South Asian context was increasingly in question. The conference had over the past decade gradually drifted southwards from its usual north Indian circuit and this year found itself amidst the aging coastal colonial campus of Andhra's Waltair enclave. Harbans Mukhia was set to deliver the morning's opening presidential address. Mukhia had spent the past decade at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University leading a course on medieval India that toed the dominant post-1950s historiographic line which, in a manner Daud Ali would later characterize as a "checklist" approach, sought to verify the authentically feudal nature of post-Gupta South Asian society. 1 Mukhia's address that morning verbalized years of frustration-shared by an increasingly large number of Indian scholars in the late 1970s-at the perceived gross inadequacy of the feudal model for the South Asian context. Bringing his broadside to a climatic end, Mukhia urged a move away from the "straitjackets" of both feudalism and the Asiatic Mode of Production-Marx's vague disqualification of pre-modern Asia that likely fueled the initial desire amongst Indian historians of the 1950s to prove the applicability of the feudal model for medieval India 2 . For Mukhia, these were non-universal models born of European experience and bias. What was needed instead was a renewed search for "a typology more specific to pre-British India". 3 Much of the historiographic conversation in the decades since Mukhia's Waltair address can be seen as a search for "typologies" better suited to the historical evidence from South Asia. This debate has largely centered around the nature and evolution of the political state. The following is an analysis of this conversation in three parts. We will survey key moments in pre-and postfeudalist historiography of the South Asian state, take up the particular case of the Mughal state as a bellwether for past and present trends in the field, before a brief final consideration of future directions. The concept of the state as a unitary entity has been increasingly unraveled, decentered, and passed over in favor of analyses of the entanglement of culture and power. While this is a necessary corrective to a long legacy of ahistorical projections of the premodern Indian state, it has a led to overly fragmented and abstracted scholarly discourse on precolonial power formations. I argue for an approach that better synthesizes cultural, material, and institutional histories of the state.
A History of India, Vol II: From the Break-up of the Mughal Empire to the End of Colonial Rule
2024
This is the second of a three-volume history of India, characterized by three main arguments: (a) Indian history has been crucially conditioned by the manifold and two-way connections linking the Indian subcontinent to the remainder of the world; (b) Indian society was never static, but always crisscrossed by powerful currents of change; (c) colonialism caused both the crystallization of a ‘traditional’ society – which, in that shape, had never really existed before – and, at the same time, the rise of modernity. This volume examines the history of India from the collapse of the Mughal Empire to the end of colonialism in 1947. It analyses the features of the most important pre-colonial Indian states and the role played by the British colonialism in their destruction or reduction to political irrelevance. Second, the volume highlights the contradictory role of the colonial order in freezing a previously evolving society, causing the coming into being of a ‘traditional India’ and, at the same time, somewhat unwittingly, triggering the rise of a new modern India. Furthermore, the volume analyses the role of India in supporting the British Empire both economically and militarily, and how the implementation of the liberal economic policy by the colonial rulers resulted in the loss of millions of Indian lives. Finally, the volume closely examines the rise and evolution of Indian nationalism, the reasons that forced for the British to end their rule, and, last but not least, the causes of partition and the responsibilities of the parties and political leaders involved.
Empire, Liberalism and the Rule of Colonial Difference: Colonial Governmentality in South Asia
2006
Abstract This article seeks to account for the ideological underpinnings of British colonial rule in South Asia. It will be argued, following Metcalf (1995), that two 'ideologies of the Raj'can be identified. The first of these, influenced by the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, sought to transform Indian society in accordance with the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment. The second ideology essentialized caste, ethnic and religious differences between Indians.
2020
Why Europe grew rich and 'Asia' became poor is the substance for the fiercely contested 'Great Divergence' debate where the prevailing Eurocentric view posits that European exceptionalism was responsible for the former's success. The essence of the picture painted in the arguments against 'oriental states' is a despotic and extractive one that hinders commercial activities. This paper tries to address this debate through looking at the nature and role of Mughal the administrative machinery and challenge image of despotic hegemony. In order to address the issue of commensurability of sources, the present author has only used European accounts and correspondences produced by the English East India Company and the Dutch VOC. The paper argues that the Eurocentric perspective essentially paints an ahistorical picture of the Mughal state by investigating European responses to the deaths of important Mughal emperors (Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb) and the economic consequences following it. Additionally, this paper also provides evidence of a strong role of bankers in the internal commercial system further undermining the image of the extractive state and supporting the 'Great Firm theory' of Karen Leonard. In conclusion, it is argued that the European-exceptionalism theory is fundamentally based on an orientalist imagination of South Asia and essentially suffers from the pitfalls of the 'historiography of decline' that plague the history of other 'Asian' empires such as the Qing and the Ottomans. Eighteenth century South Asia shows considerable similarities with early modern Europe and its commercial viability and agility does not appear to be dependent on the central government or the abilities of the emperor. Introduction-A Raging Debate Why India became the posterchild of oriental poverty and Europe emerged as the leading economic superpower in the nineteenth century is the substance matter for the fiercely fought Great Divergence debate within the field of global economic history. As Prasannan Parthasarathi elaborates, most arguments by Eurocentric historians and scholars since the 19 th century (e.g., Marx, Weber etc.) that have tried to explain this phenomenon, have essentially claimed that Europe was, in some ways exceptional, which set them on a path to economic prosperity while 'Asia,' (more specifically, the Ottoman Empire, China and India) were doomed to be a commercial failure due to their own political-economic arrangements and institutions such as caste, despotic, extractive states etc. 2
4. Imperial Sovereignty in Mughal and British Forms
History and Theory, 2017
Azfar Moin's recent work on millennial sovereignty in Mughal India prompts a consideration of the evolution of sovereignty in modern South Asia more broadly. Although the sovereign principles of the Mughals differed from those of the British Indian empire, which ultimately succeeded it, these empires shared important similarities in their linking of sovereign authority to visions of a cosmos in immanent interaction with human affairs. This article explores these similarities and differences and speculatively considers their implications for both similarities and differences in Mughal and British principles of statecraft. These similarities and differences provide an important backdrop for thinking about the meanings attached to popular sovereignty in modern India as well.