INTRODUCTION

In his discussion of Southeast Asia's commerce with India and China, Anthony Reid remarks, ‘Situated between the world's two major sources of fine cloth—India for cottons and China for silks—Southeast Asia became internationally known as a consumer rather than as a producer of textiles.’ Reid's allusion to Southeast Asian consumption of Chinese silk and Indian cotton cloth implicitly raises questions about the nature of commercial relations between these two great Asian civilizations. While it is well known that India and China supplied much of the Southeast Asia and West Asia with cotton and silk cloth respectively, much less is recorded about the degree to which these ‘countries’ or regions sold their apparently complementary textile products to each other, and whether or not other additional natural or manufactured goods comprised an important segment of Indo-Chinese trade. While the available sources to study the commerce between South Asia and China in pre-European times are predictably fragmentary, they suggest a pattern of complementary trade relations in textile manufactures as well as a broader range of commercial exchanges.

In broad outline, Indian and Chinese sources suggest two things about Indo-Chinese commerce in textiles prior to the sixteenth century. These are, first, that China sold silk textiles to India throughout nearly two millennia from the early years of the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) to the period of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 CE), and did so even though Indians began producing the cloth in the early Gupta period and vastly expanded silk cloth production from the thirteenth century onwards.

INTRODUCTION

Frontiers may be understood as spatial counterparts to revolutions: the one denotes a perceived break in continuous territory, the other a perceived rupture in time. In recent decades, historians have written of a worldwide military, or ‘gunpowder’ revolution that took place in the centuries following the fourteenth. Such a notion has in turn prompted several lines of enquiry. Some have tried to locate the moment in time when this revolution occurred in particular regions. Others have sought to identify and compare the various effects that the advent, spread and use of gunpowder had in different socio-political environments across the planet.

The present essay explores a little-studied event in South Asian history, the Battle for Raichur (1520), with a view to evaluating that battle's relevance both to the idea of the frontier and to that of the military revolution. The city of Raichur occupies the heart of an exceptionally fertile tract in India's Deccan plateau—the so-called ‘Raichur Doab’—which lies between the Tungabhadra and Krishna rivers (see Figure 1, Map). For several centuries before 1520, the Bahmani sultans to the north of the Doab and the kings of Vijayanagara to the south repeatedly fought over access to the Doab's economic resources. Control of the fortified city of Raichur figured in all of these struggles. The battle in question was also a prelude to the more famous Battle of Talikota (1565), a conflict that permanently reconfigured the geopolitics of the Deccan plateau.

The essays published here celebrate the work of Professor John F. Richards, a historian who significantly changed our understanding of Mughal history, and who, long before it became fashionable, argued the case for tackling certain historical problems from a global perspective. A list of his publications appears at the end of this volume and it is, by any measure, an impressive contribution to knowledge and understanding.

He was born on 3 November 1938 in Exeter, New Hampshire, USA and was the first of his family to go into higher education. They were happy to support him in this venture, since, whatever his undoubted intellectual prowess, he demonstrated from an early age an amazing lack of practical ability when it came to tasks like changing light bulbs or mowing grass. (Later in life he would, with a twinkle in the eye, rather trade on these shortcomings, despite the fact that they sat rather uneasily against his mastery of difficult languages and complex financial spread-sheets.) In 1961, he graduated Valedictorian of his class at the University of New Hampshire, marrying his childhood sweetheart, Ann Berry, on the same day. After Ann had completed her own Bachelor's degree, the couple moved to the West coast where John pursued a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley.

INTRODUCTION

This essay examines the role of Chinese revenue farmers in defining the borders of the various colonial territories and the states of Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century. The role of these individuals has largely been neglected in the current writing on the formation of state boundaries. Nicholas Tarling, in his Southeast Asia: A Modern History, notes, ‘Between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth almost all southeast Asia was divided into colonies or protectorates held by the Western powers, and new boundaries were drawn with the object of avoiding conflict among them’. His view is typical of most who have studied the period.

While his comment acknowledges the role of the Western powers in surveying the boundaries, drafting treaties and map making, it really says nothing about how those divisions were actually policed and made real on the ground. This aspect of ‘border making’ was left to the independent Chinese monopolists who worked on behalf of the colonial regimes. This essay examines their role during the middle years of the nineteenth century and attempts to give an account of their significance in the organization of colonial governance and in giving substance to the formalistic pronouncements of remote diplomats and statesmen.

BORDERS AND POPULATIONS

Southeast Asia presents a unique case historically because despite the fact that the major states have long-standing historical traditions, until the nineteenth century, most lacked clearly defined borders.

INTRODUCTION

The link between narcotics, imperialism and capitalism has long attracted the attention of scholars. Recently, Carl Trocki has reiterated the classical Marxist position, dating back to Karl Marx himself, on the incestuous relationship between drugs and empire, while recognizing that the opium trade also nurtured certain forms of indigenous capitalism in Asia. While he has focused on the global Asian opium scene, including India, China and Southeast Asia, other scholars have given more attention to the Indian context of the trade. Amar Farooqi, in a book which is probably the most detailed history of the opium trade as seen from India, has stressed the contribution of the ‘illegal’ trade in Malwa opium to capital accumulation in Western India in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. John Richards, more than twenty years after his pathbreaking essay on peasant production of opium has returned to the topic with a wide-ranging survey of the contribution of the drug to the finances of British India. In this essay, I propose to revisit the history of the Malwa opium trade with a view to discussing both its general impact on capital accumulation in early nineteenth century western India and its link with imperial expansion. I shall focus more specifically on the case of Sindh, a largely neglected region of the subcontinent, whose transformation into the main smuggling route for the drug after 1819 was one of the factors that led to its integration into the British Indian Empire.

INTRODUCTION

Past works on the nature and content of state-building in medieval South India have focused largely on the inscriptional corpus, and a limited set of narrative accounts, in order to support classic formulations of such ideas as the ‘segmentary state’ and ‘ritual kingship’. In this essay, we return to some of the questions raised by our colleagues and predecessors in the field, but with a view to looking at ideological and ideational issues far more than concrete institutional arrangements. We should note at the outset that the specter of a perpetually receding horizon of universal concepts—those that can be used with equal confidence, say, for the analysis of pre-1800 societies in Europe, Asia and Africa—has taken something of a toll in recent decades. Is it at all legitimate to assume that ‘money’ existed in all or even most of these continents? What of the ‘economy’ itself, or even ‘society’?

INTRODUCTION

In 1974, John F. Richards noted, ‘Muslim expansion into South Asia is one of the most important and prolonged instances of cultural encounter to be found in world history’. Considerably more is known today about the processes of Muslim expansion in the subcontinent than when these words were written, over thirty years ago. However, much of the scholarship on the spread of Islam is from the vantage point of Muslim courts and the Persian literature they produced; alternatively, it examines the process of Islamization only on a large scale. In this essay I adopt a different approach, one that is microhistorical. Relying primarily on a single text, I explore how an Indian Muslim gentry community represented their past and articulated their present identity. The text is the Kyamkhan Rasa (henceforth KKR), composed between c. 1630 and 1655 at Fatehpur, a town in the Shekhavati region of northern Rajasthan. Its author Nyamat Khan used the pseudonym Jan Kavi in writing this poem in Braj Bhasa, the literary language of Hindi, that covers the history of his lineage, the Kyamkhanis, so named after the ancestor who is supposed to have converted to Islam in the fourteenth century.

By the late sixteenth century, the Kyamkhanis were a well-established community with two main branches. The senior branch was entrenched in the town of Fatehpur (in modern Sikar district, Rajasthan), founded c. 1450 by Fateh Khan, the senior grandson of Kyam Khan, the founder of the clan. A junior branch had been established in the nearby town of Jhunjhunu (in modern Jhunjhunu district) by Kyam Khan’s second son.

These essays were originally presented at the retirement conference for Professor John F. Richards, which was held at Duke University on 29–30 September 2006. The conference, entitled ‘Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World History’, brought together students, colleagues and associates of Prof. Richards to discuss themes that have marked Richards' work as a historian in an academic career of almost 40 years. These themes focused on ‘frontiers’ in multiple contexts, all relating to Richards' work: frontiers and state building; frontiers and environmental change; cultural frontiers; frontiers, trade and drugs; and frontiers and world history.

Richards' academic work began with his study of Mughal administration on the Deccan frontier in Golconda in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His first book, Mughal Administration in Golconda (1975), which grew out of his doctoral dissertation, introduced two themes that were to run through much of his later work. The first was a focus on the frontier as a key arena for understanding the processes of state building. Relations between state bureaucracy and local actors, including regional warrior elites, were central to Richards' story. Second, and perhaps even more important for the long-term trajectory of his interests, Richards emphasized the importance of state institutions and finance to the Mughal system. State institutions were something that Richards took very seriously, and if these ultimately failed to cement Mughal rule in Golconda, he attributed the fault to various failed policies pursued by individual Mughal rulers.