INTRODUCTION

The history of Bengal opium and the Dutch East India Company (the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the VOC or the Company) over the long eighteenth century (or from 1684–1796) is examined in this essay. From the Company's perspective, it was a period that may be characterized as the end of the age of commerce, metamorphosis from a commercial organization deriving its profits from maritime trade to the exploitation and colonial administration of agricultural production and mineral resources and revenues from tax farming, and of decline. The Company was not omnipotent. By 1684, the Company may be characterized as being more pragmatic than bellicose in its commercial inter-relationships with other states and Asian and European merchants. By 1796, with its maritime trading activities long surpassed in Asia and Europe by European competitors, especially the English East India Company (EIC), the VOC had to declare bankruptcy.

A series of specific questions are raised and answered in the first and second sections of this essay: how important was Bengal opium in the Company's commercial and imperial activities? What was the relationship of the Company's maritime trade in opium between Bengal and Batavia with the non-Company maritime trade of Asian and other European merchants at Batavia? And, specifically, how important was the revenue from the sale of Bengal opium at Batavia in the Company's local and imperial finances? The Company's prodigious records were examined to find answers to those questions. The empirical data that was found and examined was subjected to a series of traditional quantitative economic—supply or commodity chain, trend and transactional—analyses.

INTRODUCING THE SULTANATE FRONTIER MILITARY COMMANDERS

Social and political formations in the Indus and Gangetic plains were not unduly troubled by political developments in the mountainous Hindu Kush or Karakorum regions in the north-west. These lands were too poor and fragmented to support large state systems and the pastoral inhabitants of the area indulged in relatively localized plundering expeditions into the plains. Although trade routes into Iran and Central Asia were more easily disturbed by the turbulent politics of the region, Afghanistan seized the attention of political regimes in north India only when the area became a part of larger geopolitical developments.

In the tenth through the twelfth centuries this happened when the Ghaznavid and Ghurid regimes attempted to sustain their control over eastern Iran by the revenues extracted from north India. The challenges posed by these developments were completely dwarfed by the Chinggisid invasions of the thirteenth centuries. The Mongols seized much of western Punjab and periodically threatened the Gangetic plains, destroying agriculture, displacing pastoralists and pillaging cities. Beyond the very real threat of Mongol depredations was the ‘great fear’ that gripped the land in the 1220s and after, when it seemed as if a holocaust of proportions already witnessed in eastern Iran, Transoxiana, and Afghanistan was awaiting north India.

INTRODUCTION

The authority exercised by the Mughal dynasty over much of northern India in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries depended in part on various forms of legitimacy that were provided to it from outside the narrow sphere of elite politics. To be sure, the Mughals were also able to rule for so long and with such success because they successfully managed a composite political elite made up of elements both from northern India and from the Deccan (as well as other ‘peripheral’ regions), and migrants from Central and West Asia. However, as with a number of dynasties of the Muslim world in the period, a crucial element in the strategies of rule that they adopted were their relations with religious figures of various sorts. This essay is an attempt to understand the changing relationship between the Mughal rulers and the Sufi shaikhs, focusing on the early days of the formation and consolidation of the Mughal state in India. The question of the Mughal–Sufi equation, as we know, has generally been discussed with reference to the Naqshbandi order. Scholars have devoted particular attention to Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624), the founder of the Mujaddidi branch of that order, his disciples and his ideology. Their questions have revolved around the extent and the nature of the influence of this group on seventeenth-century Mughal Indian politics. There is no denying of the importance of this debate, and as a matter of fact, the present essay was initially motivated by the desire to contribute to it.

INTRODUCTION

Historians have long struggled with the task of interpreting narratives that although written in the past tense are yet hard, if not impossible to reconcile with each other or indeed, the modern historical sense of there having been a singular past. The usual response has been to ‘mine’ them for historical knowledge as ‘such consciousness is not always visible and has to be prised from sources which tend to conceal it’. Alternatively, we can treat historical texts as literary ones and allow them all to benefit from the suspension of disbelief available to the literary understanding. Thus, Hayden White proposed in 1966 to treat historical explanation as something that ‘can be judged solely in terms of the richness of the metaphors which govern its sequence of articulation’ because, after all, ‘there is no such thing as a single correct view of any object’.

Gabrielle Spiegel, an important scholar of pre-modern narrative has sought a middle ground between these opposed positions arguing that the ‘alternative between seeing language as either perfectly transparent or completely opaque is simply too rigidly framed’. She then pointed out a vital difference between the way that historians and literary scholars needed to approach texts.

INTRODUCTION

John Richards' The Unending Frontier is a magisterial survey of the formation of a globally connected society in the early modern age. For Richards, the main forces creating a global society were ‘a critical conjuncture between two developments: the expansive dynamism of European early modern capitalist societies, and the shared evolutionary progress in human organization that appears to have reached a critical threshold across Eurasia, if not the entire world’. These two forces—markets and states—drove the increasingly intensive exploitation of natural resources around the globe, uniting continents, empires and traders in a tighter network of trade and administration. It is a brilliant synthesis of environmental and political history, which will shape all future work on this period.

For Richards, frontiers are sites of penetration by outsiders seeking control over borders and productive natural resources. A relentless process of warfare, consolidation, investment and exploitation of nature leads over the long run to heavy resource usage, and often exhaustion, driving the conquerors to push farther into the hinterlands in search of further gains. Native peoples of the frontier borderlands, for the most part, are merely victims of the much more powerful organized states and trading companies around them.

Although the nineteenth century is not the subject of this book, and the North American continent appears only in discussion of the fur trade, the ghost of Frederick J. Turner still hovers over Richards' work. It is now not a uniquely American story, but a global one, and it begins three centuries earlier. Still, the story of penetration of empty or underutilized lands and their increasingly intensive exploitation resonates with Turner’s original account.

INTRODUCTION

Not much analysis has yet been conducted on the global patterns and global interactions of family life. Anthropologists and sociologists have tended to analyse families as local, ethnically based organizations, whose rules and structures have been inherited from the ancestors and reproduced without much regard for the outside world. While the ethnic particularities of families are unmistakable, it would be strange if families were uniquely resistant to global influences in a world where economic, political and ideological trends are now thought to have circulated and interacted widely.

Migration opens an obvious avenue for thinking of family in transregional terms. One need only think of merchant families, stretched across the lengths of their trade routes, to recognize the significance of migration as a non-local factor influencing family life. Working from this insight, the present study considers migration and its influence on family structure. I argue that there exists a social nexus linking migration to family structure—that migration, though highly variable, is typical in family history. This interpretation focuses on modelling the dynamics of family structure, the dynamics of migration and the familial mixing resulting from their interaction. I present my interpretation of change and interaction in families by deploying and documenting several simplified models of family, migration and their interaction. If family structure can be shown through this analysis to have been influenced significantly by migration, the door is then opened to further studies of the influence of migration on the governance and ideology of family life.

INTRODUCTION

In May 1748, Nizam-ul-Mulk Asaf Jah arrived in the central Indian city of Burhanpur. He was seventy seven years old and exhausted after undertaking an extensive tour of his dominion. While in Burhanpur, the Nizam caught a cold that caused his health to swiftly deteriorate. Sensing death upon him, the Nizam called a gathering of close confidants and family. The atmosphere was intimate and sad. Among other matters, the Nizam dictated his last testament (wasiyyatnama). Spanning seventeen clauses, this testament was intended to provide insights into a lifetime of almost unparalleled success in statecraft and a template of how to govern Hyderabad, the nascent state founded by him in the early 1720s in south-central India. Although the tone and content of the will suggest the Nizam is worried about the future of Hyderabad, he also seems concerned to shape his own historical legacy. There is little doubt that the Nizam wished to be remembered as the most successful politician, general and administrator among the post-Mughal rulers. The will is occasionally pontificatory and self-aggrandizing, yet there can be no disagreeing with the Nizam's own conclusion that he had lived a blessed life. Here, after all, was a man who had not only survived, but also thrived amidst the uncertainty accompanying the collapse of the Mughal Empire during the first decades of the eighteenth century.

In 1938, Raja Rao (1908–2006) published his short story “The Cow of the Barricades,” a revisiting of the themes taken up in his most famous novel, Kanthapura (1938), where Rao describes the effects of Gandhian politics on a small village in Uttar Kanara. Rao had for a long time been a commentator and writer on contemporary developments in India for English language audiences, and the story was picked up in the New York-based journal, Asia and the Americas. In the short, imagistic and fabular narrative, life in an unnamed village is made difficult by the violent repression of Indian National Congress-led boycott activities by Indian soldiers “from Peshawar and Pindi” who are working for “the red man's Government” (Rao 1947, 177). When workers at a nearby mill decide to help, they immediately come into conflict with the president of the local Congress committee, a Gandhian named “the Master,” who characteristically recommends a nonviolent strategy for resistance. The workers want to build a barricade in order to fend off the coming attack: