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Eighteenth-Century Issues in South Asia
Eighteenth-Century Issues in South Asia
Author(s): D. A. Washbrook
Review by: D. A. Washbrook
Source: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2001), pp.
372-383
Published by: BRILL
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3632357
Accessed: 19-04-2015 17:00 UTC
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* Dr. D.A. Washbrook, St. Antony's College, Oxford University, 62 Woodstock Rd.,
Oxford,OX26JF, England,david.washbrook@st.antonys.oxford.ac.uk.
? KoninklijkeBrill NV, Leiden, 2001
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JESHO44,3
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
ISSUESIN SOUTHASIA
373
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374
D.A. WASHBROOK
growth. This stands in sharp contrastto the general perspectiveon the epoch
advancedby Irfan Habib,which takes economic decline to have become established much earlier,with the waning of Mughalimperialpower.3Chaudhuryand
Prakashadd importantsupportto the 'revisionist'interpretationsassociatedwith
ChristopherBayly, AndreWink and MuzaffarAlam, who see Mughalpolitical
decline in the context of secular economic growth.4With regardto the second
half of the century,however,Chaudhury'sargumentis seriously questionedby
the more recent researchesof Rajat Datta. In examining the commercialisation
of Bengal, Datta casts doubton the accuracyof data suppliedby contemporary
Company officials, who had an interestin maximising the appearanceof economic decline, not least to reduce the levels of revenue which they were
required to remit to their superiorsin Calcutta. Chaudhury'scase rests very
heavily on the uncriticaluse of this same data. In contrast,Datta surmisesthat,
while episodes such as the famine of 1770 and increased pressureof revenue
extractionmay have slowed growth in the last decades of the eighteenthcentury, contemporaryimages of mass immiserationwere greatly exaggerated.5
In many ways, it is supremelyironic that Chaudhury'sargumentshould fall
a victim of 'false' propagandaby Companyofficials because it is plainly meant
as a root-and-branchdenunciationof colonialism, and fits into a venerablehistraditionreachingbackto AlexanderDow's firstHistoryof Hindostan,
toriographical
which critiqued the rapacity of the Company, and DadhabhaiNaoroji's UnBritish India, which signalled the beginnings of the Indian nationaliststruggle
against British rule. It would be difficultto deny the realities of colonial domination in the nineteenthcentury:of the subordinationand exploitationof an
'Indian' by a 'British' economy. Equally, by this era, the categories 'Indian'
and 'British' were clearly definedand sharplyjuxtaposedin almost every walk
of social life. However, in consideringthe eighteenth century there is a danger-ever presentin historicalinterpretation-thatthe shadowof subsequentevents
will serve to obscure the natureof antecedentconditions.
Several of the key debates on this era turn, in effect, on how far the catecolonialismand nationalismcan be read back into
gories of nineteenth-century
the
the events bringing
Europeans to power a hundred years earlier. Were
'Indian' and 'European' interests always juxtaposed? Did the conquest take
place through the impact of a superiorexogenous force-wholly formed and
fashioned outside South Asia-on a pristine, indigenous (and proto-national)
Muzaffar
Alam,TheCrisisof Empire.
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375
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D.A. WASHBROOK
Western India and for a slightly later period. Subramanianmakes critical the
way in which Indianbankinggroups,who previouslyhad financedthe states of
the Maratha Empire, came to direct their support towards the East India
Company.The reasonswhy they did so may certainlyhave reflectedaspects of
European 'superiority'-but in specific and limited areas. In particular,the
Company'sdominationof the sea and its policies protecting'capital' (including
its own) from political confiscationwere importantin an era of declining overseas trade opportunities(caused by disturbancesin West Asia) and vagarious
militaryfiscalism. But such 'superiorities'-or advantages-on their own could
scarcely have given the Europeans power over the Western Indian hinterland. Rather, it was Indian financial agency which combined with them and
drew them forward.The Company'sinitial empire in the west was very much
an Anglo-Indian affair, created by shared interests in advancing the dominance of capital over trade and production.In Subramanian'sperspective,the
eighteenthcenturyis best seen in terms of a history of capitalism,which was
as yet cross-culturaland multi-national:clearer categories of colonial domination and nationalistresistancewere to emerge only later.
By contrast,SudiptaSen's Empireof Free Tradewould seem to suggest that
they had emerged in India ratherbefore most historians would regard them
as having done so in Europe or anywhere else in the world. Sen returns to
Chaudhury'scontext of eighteenth-centuryBengal but views it from a very
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ISSUESIN SOUTHASIA
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
377
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D.A. WASHBROOK
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379
forty years ago and (interestingly)has just been re-issued in the United States.
It attemptsto view the spreadof global capitalism in terms of the imposition
of a modernist,Westernideology on Bengal. The significanceof the conquest
of Bengal for the future of global capitalism can readily be accepted. But
whetherthat significancelay in the impositionof ideas, which few eighteenthcentury Britons can be thought to have possessed yet, is altogether another
matter.If the key debates about 'the Mogul Constitution'are examined, they
world of induspoint much less forwardto the nineteenth-and twentieth-century
trial capitalismthanbackwardsto the political strugglesof the seventeenthcentury: their principalreferentis the 'Anglo-SaxonConstitution'which defended
principlesof libertyand, above all, rights to property."5
If contemporaryunderstandingsof these rights are explored, it has to be
asked whether eighteenth-centuryBritons did not actually share the view of
Nawabi noblementhat they were deeply 'embedded'in social and politicalrelations-if not necessarilyexactly the same relations.If Sen had followed through
his investigationof the 'market'to consider how it was treatedas 'property,'
'5 Travers,'Notions.'
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D.A. WASHBROOK
to reducing propositionsabout the 'incommensurability'of Europeanand Indian cultures in the eighteenthcentury.Dean Mahometwas, or claimed to be,
an Indian boy who attached himself to a British officer, travelled the subcontinentwith him and followed him back to Britain.Later,he establishedhimmarriedan Irishwomanand becamea minor
self in Irelandas a surgeon-barber,
fashionable
of
on
the
society. Fisher's introductionneatly
celebrity
fringes
Dean
Mahomet's
the
of
adventures although it might have
context
places
dwelled a little more on the question of who, actually, wrote his book and
whether it constitutes fiction more than biography. But the text is of special
interestto students of eighteenth-centuryIndian society and British 'manners,'
where it supplies copious materialfor consideringthe complexity of relations
between gender, racial, class and regional identities. Whatever else, Dean
Mahometdid not live in a world where eastern and western culturesexisted in
different,hermetically-sealedspheres.
The second book relevant to this context is Matthew Edney's MappingAn
Empire-although, ostensibly,it might have been supposed(and might even be
read) to support Sen's (and Guha's) thesis. Edney examines that definitive
Enlightenmentproject, indicative of the new 'scientific' culture of eighteenthcenturyEurope:the projectto survey and map 'India.' He dwells heavily on the
ideology of the project,with its implied connectionbetween definition,possession and control, and properlyrelates it to later nineteenth-centurytheories
of imperialism and nationalism.But the way in which he relates it is quite
16
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381
382
D.A. WASHBROOK
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EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
ISSUESIN SOUTHASIA
383
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