Pathikrit Das

II B.A. (Hons.)History

Topic: The Eighteen Century Crisis

Introduction

Early historians of the Mughal India viewed the events of the 18 th century as being integral to the political
developments in the Mughal Empire. As Seema Alavi pointed that since the “Big Event” of the century was political
collapse of the empire , it was only logical that the historiography of the period was linked to the imperial decline.
Founded by Zahiruddin Babur in 1526 and expanded to its full glory by emperor Akbar in the second half of the 16 th
century , the Mughal began decline rapidly since the reign of its last great ruler Aurangzeb. Sekhar Bandyopadhaya
opines that however, less dispute about the fact that the process of decline had set in during the time of
Aurangzeb and that it could not be arrested by his weak successors. The situation was further worsened by the
recurrent wars of succession. However , scholars from recent past have provided with a wide plethora of factors
which led the fall of Mughlai glory and penetration of western colonialist fundaments. Various possible
argumentation and scholastic contestation had resulted three major historical interpretative positions which are
related to the academic brilliance of various related scholars. There are three major historical positions which
includes :1) The Traditionalist with the Dark Age prespective , 2) The Revisionist leading the Dynamic perspective
and 3) The Post Revisionist who laid much emphasis on the regional dynamics.

The predominant nineteenth-century view of the eighteenth century as a period of anarchy between the age of
Mughal hegemony and the imposition of “pax Britannica” persisted until very recently. Research during the past
decade has broken new ground and signaled fresh departures in late Mughal and early colonial historiography.
From a balanced angle of vision, as opines Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, the eighteenth century does not appear
any more as a dark valley in the shadow of towering empires. What emerges is a mixed scenario of shadow and
light, with high points and low points. It is important in any study of India between empires not to confuse the
erosion of power of the Mughal court and army with a more general political, economic and societal decline. While
a process of fission, separation and renegotiation of the terms of suzerainty may have been built into the logic of
the empire, dissent from the turn of the eighteenth century reached unprecedented levels of intensity. According
to Tapan Raychaudhuri, the empire was of course not a firmly unified modern nation state and subsistence
agriculture sustained a hard core of economic isolation in all but the most commercialized regions. Yet imperial
unification under the Mughals had, beyond reasonable doubt, strengthened the economic links connecting its far-
flung territories and stimulated an expansion of commerce and productive effort. By the middle years of the
eighteenth century the empire lay in ruins, its once vast possessions reduced to “roughly a rectangular wedge of
territory about 250 miles from north to south and 100 miles broad”.

Kenneth Pomeranz in his “Great Divergence” argues that there is nothing different in parts of China and England in
the 18th century. Chinese had developed the use of Gunpowder, printing press as well the idea of paper currency
was introduced. The reason why China did not development was because of application failure. Whereas Britain
escaped such situation by manipulating colonial resources. “Resource Constraint” was an important propelling
factor. Prasannan Parthasarathi opines that because of enormous availability of productive soil and grains, the
cost of production was low. The export of textile to Britain and Europe threatened the out flow of money which in
turn responded to the emergence of technology. The cost of production and market were detrimental. Hence,
proper exploitation with machine and technology yielded much a profit.

Hindu Reaction

Influential historians of the early twentieth-century, notably Jadunath Sarkar, had read into Maratha, Sikh and Jat
resistance a strong element of ‘Hindu reaction’ against Aurangzeb’s religious bigotry. Seema Alavi in this context
refers the studies of Sri Ram Sharma and Ishwari Prasad which reflects the religious policy of the rulers that
created politically chaotic period. But resistance to the later Mughals was not primarily Hindu in composition.

Economic Crisis

Historians of a later generation have equated the decline of the Mughal empire with sharp downward trends in
the Indian economy, and assumed that by the mid-eighteenth century it had reached its lowest ebb. In many parts
of the empire for varying lengths of time, war and anarchy did produce dire economic results. Delhi declined
through the weakness of central authority and repeated incursions. A number of contingents withdrew to the
provinces and the metropolis lost its primacy as a market for goods and services. Large groups of craftsmen moved
to other towns in quest of more secure livelihoods. Tapan Roychaudhuri pointed with dramatic essence that by
the mid- eighteenth century the city was well on its way to becoming the deserted garden of Ghalib's melancholy
poetry. Irfan Habib in his classic “The Agrarian System of Mughal India” depicted the revolts as peasant uprisings
owing primarily to economic oppression. According to this view, to the high Mughal revenue demand had been
added the rapacity of the proliferating mansabdars bent on squeezing the resources of their fast diminishing jagirs.
But revolts against the Mughals appear to have occurred in the relatively prosperous regions and were usually led
by locally wealthy zamindars, which casts some doubt on the validity of the exploitation ,poverty– resistance
causal chain. Athar Ali accepted Habib’s model of fiscally centralized state, but attributed its decline not so much
to the high land revenue demand but rather to a shortage of jagirs. Other historians have stressed factional conflict
among the nobility at the Mughal court, a process related to the mansabdari crisis, and offered more nuanced
explanations of the problem of jagirs. According to Satish Chandra the efficient functioning of Jagir and Mansab
depended on the availability of revenue and its collection and distribution. The Mughal failure to ensure the
smooth functioning of these institutions became more pronounced during Aurangzeb’s reign and was to herald the
process of imperial collapse. Another view pointed to the withdrawal of financial support to the empire in crisis by
the great banking firms. The latest research, especially the work of Muzaffar Alam, emphasizes the regional aspect
of the motivation and articulation of revolt. Control of the peripheries by the Mughal center was sought to be
replaced by the manipulation of central authority by regionally based powers.

External threats and crisis

In addition to internal contradictions, a couple of major trends outside the subcontinent exerted serious
pressures on the Mughal empire. First, a general South and West Asian crisis found expression in the eighteenth
century in the form of tribal incursions from Central Asia, Eurasia and Afghanistan into the heartlands of the great
Muslim empires – the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal. The effete empire was threatened by the familiar spectre of
invasions from beyond the mountains to the north-west. In 1739, the Persian emperor, Nadir Shah, defeated and
plundered Delhi. The loot which included the Peacock Throne and the Kohinoor gave the Persians a tax holiday for
three years as points Tapan Roychaudhuri. Second, in addition to the inter-regional crisis, Sugata Bose and
Ayesha Jalal points that the disruptions to bullion flows from Europe, which the Mughal financial system had come
to rely on, became more frequent in the early eighteenth century even as a surge in European production and
trade began to alter the framework of Europe–Asian economic relations.
Cultural Crisis

Seema Alavi and Sekhar Bandyopadhayay opines that the downfall of the empire is also viewed as a “Cultural”
failure. Culture is seen in terms of technological, intellectual and economic referents. Here the economic crisis that
underlined the decline is attributed to the relative economic, technological and intellectual rise of Europe in the
period 1500-1700 as a center of world commerce. The increase in the cost of luxury items in India and intensified
the financial difficulties of the ruling classes. This was compensated through the intensified agrarian exploitation.
In addition, the intellectual and technological aridity of India did not allow towns to emerge as “Safety valves” for
the people. Therefore, there was no escape from the fiscal arm of the state. As Athar Ali opines, all these reasons
made the empire politically and economically vulnerable. “The follies of imperial policy threw the empire out of
gear and paved the way for its eventual demise” points Seema Alavi.

Administrative crisis

Tapan Roychaudhuri in his essay of mid eighteen century background, throws considerable significance to the
decline in the standards of administrative efficiency that aggravated the negative results of war and anarchy. In the
days of Jahandar Shah, revenue forming, that familiar specter which invariably appeared at times of administrative
anarchy, was introduced on a large scale. Under his successor, the khalisa (imperial domain) itself began to be
farmed out. The wazir's deputy, Ratan Chand, violated the established administrative practices and corruption
reigned supreme. Bankers and speculators invested their money in ijaras. Powerful zamindars carved out
taalluqadaris and rich bankers emerged as absentee landlords. The expansion of the bureaucracy had proceeded
faster than the resources of the empire had grown, and since the last years of Aurangzeb's reign the empire had
experienced a scarcity of jagirs; the distinction between jagir and the khalisa began to break down in consequence
and by Muhammad Shah's time all khalisa lands had been assigned away. That political disarray and armed conflict
had severely affected economic life in many parts of the country is beyond doubt. It is not equally clear that this
implied a general decline in India as a whole. Even at the heart of the much ravaged empire, Agra under Jat and
Maratha occupation was a flourishing city until 1787 with many of the wealthy Delhi citizens finding refuge in its
comparative security. In general, the effects of war and administrative disarray were felt more in the west than in
the east and to some extent the losses of one region were the gains of another. Roychaudhuri mentions that Mrs.
Kindersley, writing in 1765 of the common people could not 'speak of them without pain'. She compared the poor
of India with those of England and concluded, 'these are poor indeed; scarce any covering, their food rice and
water; their miserable huts of straw ; no liberty, no property, subject to the tyranny of every superior'. This
description, however, is strikingly similar to Pelsaert's account of the city poor in Jahangir's Agra except that in Mrs
Kindersley's account water replaces “ghi” in the diet of the poor and to Bernier's description of the peasants'
'debasing state of slavery' in Aurangzeb's time.

Alongside there also existed views on the eighteen century political economy. These moved beyond the Mughal
“Agrarian system” and the machinery of “Revenue extraction” to other kinds of non-economic productions and
politico-economic engineering by the Mughal Functionaries. They can be traced in the works of Hermann Goetz on
eighteen century music and architecture and in the American Anthropologist Bernard S. Cohn’s study of Benares.
Goetz documented the resilience of the Mughal society as reflected in the evolving musical and architectural styles
in the wake of imperial collapse. Cohn, on the other hand, pieced together the efforts of the Mughal
functionaries , such as Zamindars and Amildars , to manipulate both imperial and regional level power structures
so as to carve independent niches for themselves.

Shifts and developments

A different set of Scholars took over the task of surveying the regional economies based on the shifting patterns of
trade, movement of mercantile capital from center to periphery, war, pillage and political maneuverings by
regional elites. Ashin Das Gupta indicates that corporate mercantile institutions transcended political boundaries
for overseeing the transportation of goods and the provision of credit and insurance services in the period of
decline. Even though inland trade increased, export trade and port cities suffered relative eclipse in the face of
European advances. If the politics of the eighteenth century was marked more by decentralization than decline,
economy and society were characterized by general buoyancy and creativity despite some key weaknesses and
contradictions. As the old commercial centres of Surat, Maslipatnam and Dhaka degenerated, colonial port-cities
like Bombay, Madras and Calcutta took their pride of place. But the decline of the Mughal capitals Delhi and Agra
was offset by the rise of regional capitals including Lucknow, Hyderabad, the various Maratha cities and
Seringapatam. B.R. Grover maps a general picture of rural commerce in eighteen century north India. He
concludes that the vicissitudes caused by foreign invasions, European and English competitions in trade and the
ruination of the Mughal nobility and aristocracy notwithstanding, local rural commercial production found new
avenues in provincial markets within the subcontinent. This greatly compensated for the comparative loss of the
foreign trade with respect to handicrafts and cottage industries. Karen Leonard emphasizes the movement of
mercantile from Delhi to regional centers as being critical to the buoyancy on the latter’s political economy and the
relative decline decline of the former. Burton Stein formulates the notion of military fiscalism as a revenue
extractive and distributive process involving the military. He pointed that war and military mobilization constitute
the fulcrum of change.

Rise of Regional powers

Studies highlighting regional level changes in the period of transition provoked a reconsideration among historians
working on Mughal India as well. Sekhar Bandyopadhayay and Seema Alavi pointed in the works that there is a
strong tendency for a strong case study of the period which saw emergence of various regional political order. Two
important figures in this field are Muzzafar Alam and Chetan Singh. Muzaffar Alam’s study of the early eighteen
century Awadh provides evidence of the economic growth and prosperity which resulted Zamindari unrest in the
region. Economic prosperity was a consequence of increased commercialization and monetization of the economy
that was initiated in the heyday of Mughals. The wealthy Zamindars took advantage of their newly acquired assets
and refused to comply with the Mughal commands. Chetan singh, following the general region- centric trend laid
out by Alam, suggests that the political unrest in some provinces such as Punjab, was linked to tensions generated
between agrarian economy of the Mughal plains on the one hand, and fringe tribal societies as they moved
towards a sedentary existence. Various factors led to the decentralization which includes Peasants and Zamindars
rebellion, agrarian conflict over religion as pointed by Habib, increased military expenditure, “ Revenue Farming”,
developments of merchants and bankers and “Commercialization of Sovereignty” as calls Bayley. C.A.Bayly in his
“Rulers, Townsmen and Bazars”, threw light upon the general features across regional dissociation. Bayley suggests
that the political crystallization was a consequence of three important developments: 1) emergence vibrant cross
caste mercantile organization, 2)the gentrification process and 3) the practice of military fiscalism. The emphasis
was laind on the revenue collection which raised the question of intermediaries C.A. Bayly and Sanjay
Subramanyam termed the rise of revenue collecting intermediaries, who derived their power from variety of
portfolios , called “ Portfolio Capitalists”. However, Parthasarathi argued that the portfolio model tries to
generalize the economic class. Bankers can be grouped under one rubric but other merchants involved in
commodities cannot be generalized.

Bose and Jalal points out the typology of Mughal successor states which would reveal at least three distinctive
forms. First, there were the independent kingdoms where subadars or provincial governors had amalgamated
offices kept separate by the Mughals and then asserted independence. Warrior states established by Sikhs, Jats
and, most important, the Marathas were the second major form of the eighteenth-century state system. The third
major form of Mughal successor states were compact local kingdoms whose sovereignty acquired more substance
in the eighteenth century. Such were the Rajput petty states of the north and the polities of Telegu-speaking
warrior clans in the south.

In 1757, after defeating Nawab Siraj-ud-daula at the battle of Plassey, the English East India company took
effective political control of Bengal. The Mughal emperor, a refugee at the Lucknow court of the Nawab of Awadh,
put up an army alongside the nawabs of Awadh and Bengal in the battle of Buxar in Bihar in 1764, a battle in which
the company’s army prevailed. The emperor was forced to concede the diwani (the right to the revenues) of
Bengal to the company in 1765. The weakening of the Mughal emperor and nobility enabled the strengthening of
other groups who were the products of dynamic processes of social mobility and change. Among the more
important social groups which rose to prominence were Hindu and Muslim revenue farmers, mostly Hindu and Jain
merchants and bankers, and mostly Muslim service gentry. . The Mughal shahenshah, or king of kings, continued
to be, as C.A. Bayly puts it, ‘the highest manifestation of sovereignty’. Below the imperial level were regional
rulers, small potentates and even rajas or little kings of villages. The eighteenth century saw an increasing
devolution of real power to the lower levels of sovereignty. Mughal legitimacy proved to be longer lasting than
Mughal power.

Incase of Hyderabad, Leonard opines that Hyderabad polity was based on Patron- Clint relationship, the nizam
being the chief patron. He doled out the military and administrative favours and presided over a range of
patronage centers: nobles, vakils, the financial and military groups. The coming together of the nobles , vakils and
military groups paved the way for the Mughal Subedar to move towards political autonomy. Muzzafar Alam’s work
on Awadh is an important survey. He provides evidences of marked economic growth and prosperity, the
prevalence of cash nexus and monetization in the region. This economic growth resulted in the emergence of
wealthy Zamindars who refused to part with their revenue and who rose in revolt against the Mughals, points
Seema Alavi. The zamindar finally increased his power by acquiring the additional offices of Faujdar and Amil.
Thus , the new “Subedari” in Awadh gain power and cut itself off from the Mughal realm. However, Michael H.
Fisher has pointed out that, the dissociation of the region was only in the economic realm, culturally the realm
remained “ Mughalized”.Irfan Habib explains Punjab’s experiment towards regional autonomy in terms of support
derived by local leaders from the peasantry suffering fiscal exploitation under the Mughal regime. The empirically
exhaustive studies of Ande Wink locate the Marathas within a novel model of Mughal kingship. Here kingship rests
not so much on the exploitative revenue structures but on maze of conflicting and multiple alliances that reflect
the shifting concurrent rights that Characterized Mughal Expansions. The notion of “ Svarajya” compounded the
absolute authority of the emperor. Stewart Gordon’s work has emphasized the rise of the Citpavan Brahmins as
peshwas and the high level bureaucratization , intensification of trade, banking and financial activities.

Major Developments during the crisis

The level of urbanization was clearly higher in 1800 than a century before. What had changed in the urban centres
was the relative balance of power between rulers and merchants. In some instances, commercial and financial
magnates were arrogating to themselves the powers of the state. But merchants faced a political backlash in some
states, notably Tipu Sultan’s Mysore. Even with the passing of Mughal grandeur, India in the eighteenth century
retained its cultural vitality. The tendency, according to C.A. Bayly, was ‘towards greater complexity and richness
of religious and cultural tradition rather than towards homogeneity.’ Devotional cults remained popular among
Hindus and Muslims and were patronized by regional rulers. The Marathas, for instance, supported the old shrine
of the Sufi saint Sheikh Muinuddin Chishti at Ajmer. Vaishnavite bhakti flourished in Nadia under the nawabs of
Bengal. Important innovations took place within the high traditions of Islam and Hinduism as well. . South Indian
classical music took shape in the courts of the Carnatic in the eighteenth century. Devotional themes were
depicted with great skill and passion in the Kangra, Bundi and various Rajasthani schools of painting which
represented a fresh departure from Mughal miniature painting. The scramble for resources during the coming
apart of a great empire did lead to some sectarian, communal and ideological conflicts between Shia and Sunni,
Sikh and Muslim, and Hindu and Muslim. An ideology of Sunni orthodoxy aimed at purging Islam of poly- theistic
accretions was articulated by Shah Waliullah (1703–62) and his son Shah Abdul Aziz (1746–1824), which provided
impetus for Saiyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly’s jihad between 1826 and 1831. Yet, the existence of a discourse on
religious or sectarian differences and episodic religious or sectarian strife must not be confused with the
twentieth-century notion of ‘communalism’. If the eighteenth century was not an era of perfect amity, it was far
less characterized by ingrained or overarching communitarian animosity.

Conclusion

Overall, India in the eighteenth century held out many attractions to Europeans, particularly the British, who set
about to appropriate a relatively buoyant economy by harnessing the dynamic social and political changes taking
place to their own advantage. In what was an early revisionist piece written in 1918, the same Aurobindo Ghose,
who had written in glowing terms about the Mughal empire, argued that ‘a new life’ which ‘seemed about to rise
in the regional peoples’ in the eighteenth century was ‘cut short by the intrusion of European nations’.” It is
difficult to arrive at a convenient middle ground between the “ Traditional” and “ Revisionist” histories , nor it is
easy to dismiss them” as pointed Sekhar Bandyopadhyay. The Revisionist history has been taken to task for
understanding the cohesiveness of the Mughal Empire and for ignoring the contemporary muslim concepts of
centralized sovereignty. We may, however conclude by saying that the idea of “Decline” is perhaps an inadequate
theme for understanding the eighteen century in the Indian history. The Mughal system continued even long after
the De Facto demise of the empire, which was followed by the rise of regional powers. According to
Bandyopadhyay, the Eighteen century in Indian century is not a “ Dark Age”, nor an age of overall “ Decline”. The
decline of “Pan- Indian” empire was followed by the rise of another, the intervening period being dominated and
manipulated by various regional centers. Thus, this century should, therefore, be considered, as Satish Chandra
has argued as a “Distinct Chronological Whole”.

Bibliography

1) Bandyopadhyay Sekhar:- From Plassey To Partition And After: A History of Modern India .
2) Alavi Seema:- The Eighteenth Century in India .
3) Bose Sugata and Jalal Ayesha:- Modern South Asia : History, Culture, Political Economy .
4) Kumar Dharma and Roychaudhuri Tapan :-The Cambridge Economic History Of India .
5) Ali Athar M. :- Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb .
6) Bayly C. A. :- The Cambridge History Of India: Indian society and the making of the British
Empire.