The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India, Awadh and Punjab, 1707-48

"I came to it while I was doing comparisons between Rome and the Mughal Empire. If you are studying these structures of government without bureaucracy, you can mistakenly see them as being very ephemeral because of their limited superstructure. A lot of imperial history is about how empires fragment, about their decline. But what was interesting about Muzzafar Alam’s book on the crisis of the empire of the Mughals in north India was that the period of what we normally see as decline is also a period of deeper penetration of imperial statecraft. The form of statecraft that the Empire represents becomes more deeply entrenched in provincial society. So, you could say that the fragmentation is, in a way, the price of success. It’s not failure. It boils down to this: if you do government without bureaucracy, you’re basically relying on local forces. And empire tends, in the long run, to strengthen local forces because they thrive under it. If you go to the Mediterranean as a tourist in the summer, when you get tired of lying on a beach, you can go and see a Greek and Roman ruin nearby for entertainment, and you can go back to the beach afterwards, less bored. All these ruins were basically built by local elites under the Romans, who then managed the empire for the Romans, and thrived under it, because the Romans allowed them to skim a large part of the agricultural surplus. And this is what happened in Mughal India too. The Mughals enabled the local zamindars to get a stronger hold on agricultural society. But that also means that they become stronger and able to drive a harder bargain with the central authorities. So then you have to build up strength in order to control local society more. All of a sudden, the governors and nobles of the Mughal Empire don’t want to change their postings and revenue assignments frequently, because that means they are without power because they have to build up power on a local basis. This is when the Empire fragments. If you look at late Roman history, from one perspective—the old-fashioned one—historians have identified the development of a very strong bureaucratic machine. It certainly did become stronger bureaucratically than the early Roman Empire. But it’s certainly not a ‘strong bureaucratic machine’. What is really happening is that local elites are getting imperial offices. So they rise in local society. What looks as if you’re getting a bigger state apparatus does not actually quite transform into the much increased power that you would expect. It is the local power holders that are getting more power, so they can actually renegotiate their deal with the state to prevent it from extracting too much. The Roman central government is, in other words, having to run faster to stand still. And, for that reason, as it strikes deeper roots in Roman provincial society, you also see that the Empire begins to fragment into regional courts. In that respect, late Roman history and late Mughal history have surprising structural resemblances. “The successful empire is characterised by being reconquered constantly from within itself” Of course every historian has learned that everything is always unique. They will tell you, ‘Ah, but it wasn’t quite like that.’ No, it wasn’t. Nothing ever is. Historians often resemble Heraclitus, who said you can never step into the same river twice, which is of course true. On the other hand, it is useful to be able to observe that there are some banks of the river and that they stay relatively stable and make the water run in something which is recognisable as the same course. One can easily recognise that there are a lot of specificities about how these forces play out. But there are also some very important, general characteristics that show that these empires are created out of the same impulses, and that they also revert to some of the same solutions. When you start to look into it, these imperial administrative techniques and cultures are rarely simply reinvented from scratch every time. They actually build on previous experiences and traditions. Muslim imperial statecraft grows out of late antiquity, so it belongs to the same family as its Perso-Hellenic-Roman predecessors. It’s not just that everything is created uniquely anew every time. Of course there are lots of inventions and variations, but they often belong within a family of solutions."