Ilhan Niaz's Blog
December 8, 2019
How the East was Won (Review of William Dalrymple's The Anarchy in Dawn, December 1, 2019)
William Dalrymple
William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company is a fast-paced history of South Asia set during the turbulent 1700s. It tracks the emergence of the British as the successors to the paramount power of the Mughal empire, while also covering the rise and fall of various other contenders. Its rich narrative is engrossing and, once you pick up this book, you aren’t likely to put it down.
When the Epilogue begins, you are likely to wish that there were another hundred pages left to read. There cannot be a better introduction than this book to the South Asian history of the period covered and one can only marvel at the author’s skill at relating a story rendered all the more remarkable for it being fact, not fiction.
Dalrymple does not try to formally set forth an explanatory framework to guide us through his narrative of events and people. Nonetheless, The Anarchy provides much to reflect upon. Perhaps the most important in terms of understanding the effects of the past on the present is that three key reasons emerge for the eventual success of the British at empire-building in India.
The first is that none of the Indian contenders had anything remotely resembling a sense of national outlook or a framework of loyalty that extended beyond that owed to an individual leader. The second is that none of the local rivals were able to consolidate a fiscal-military base strong enough to enable them to unilaterally drive the British into the sea. And the third is that India’s own capitalist and military-service classes preferred collaboration with the British owing to the uncertainty that prevailed elsewhere.
The predatory and selfish behaviour of the contending factions in post-1707 South Asia is brought out in great detail. What is troubling is that, while there were serious disagreements within the emerging British colonial regime, representatives of which — such as Robert Clive — were ruthless in their plundering, the local forces were beset by murderous internecine rivalries on an altogether different order of magnitude.
Take, for instance, the British conquest of Bengal. Siraj-ud-Daulah, the nawab ousted by the British in 1757, had years earlier risen in revolt against his predecessor, the infinitely more capable Aliverdi Khan. Luckily for the rebel, Aliverdi Khan had a soft corner for him and thus survived the intrigue. After Aliverdi Khan’s death, Siraj-ud-Daulah succeeded him, but so antagonised the seths and his own nobles that they conspired with the British to get rid of him.
Years later, in 1764, the British defeated the remnants of the Mughal forces (Awadh, the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II and a suddenly patriotic Mir Qasim), and co-opted the first two. Meanwhile in the centre and south of India, the Marathas — often formidable, always tough to beat on the defensive, but chronically disorganised — had too many rival power centres to mount an effective, sustained campaign against the British, even when it became clear to their leaders that failure would be catastrophic for all of them.
While the lack of an institutional framework for political loyalty crippled the local ability to counter British machinations, the failure to develop stable financial bases for organised war-making on a scale that would be effective against the new hegemonic power, added to South Asian woes.
Dalrymple describes the terrible ordeal that Bengal endured between 1757 and 1773 and the horrific famine that ravaged the province between 1769 and 1772. But he also brings to life the process by which the British learned from their mistakes and gradually restored Bengal’s agriculture, commerce and administration. This turned Bengal into a revenue-generating machine that paid for the modern army that conquered the rest of South Asia for the British: “By the end of the century, Bengal was annually yielding a steady revenue surplus of Rs 25 million at a time when Scindia struggled to get Rs 1.2 million from his territories in Malwa.” In comparison, the sultanate of Mysore, at the height of its power under Haider Ali, managed annual revenues of Rs 12 million.
Elsewhere, regular (or even irregular) revenue collection was a distant memory and local factions (Jats, Sikhs, Rohillas etc) and foreign invaders (Afghans and Persians) took what they could. The superior revenue generation ability of the British was critical to their long-term success because the military-technological gap had closed by the 1780s.
Under these circumstances, a great many local communities and interests threw their support to the British. Yes, the British were strange in their ways, but if you were a soldier they paid well, on time and in full — a feat that local rulers managed only infrequently. Yes, the British were subordinating India’s trade and commerce to serve the needs of their imperial political economy, but if you were a local merchant, a banker or a broker, they offered unprecedented security of property, better returns, lower risk and were generally creditworthy.
By providing an island of relative calm in a sea of anarchy, the British were able to attract to their service the martial labour class and mercantile capital of South Asia as none of their rivals could. While it is consistent with the prejudices and conceits of the nationalistic present to dismiss or condemn the support extended to the British by so many Indians, it must be borne in mind that at the time there was no ‘nation’ to betray.
Tying these threads together, we can see how the situation that emerged in the 1700s worked to advantage the British. The disintegration of Mughal power was swift and triggered wars of succession. In these wars, the states that emerged, and which at times did reasonably well, lacked an institutional basis of political loyalty and succession (like the empire they had emerged from). This left them acutely vulnerable to being compromised from within by other actors, while the British had no comparable vulnerability.
Clive might have been a rascal of the highest order, but he wasn’t going to sell Bengal out to the Afghans or Marathas once it was under British control. The repeated disruption at the territorial and political levels experienced by local powers made it difficult for them to create a fiscal-military foundation as secure as that achieved by the British in Bengal. This meant that, to get rid of the British, they needed to cooperate, but efforts to this end proved desultory on account of there being no discernible sense of national or even dynastic solidarity. And then, as the anarchy became perpetual in most of the region, the relative stability of British-ruled territory allowed for the effective utilisation of local capital and military power for the purpose of colonial conquest.
As wonderful as The Anarchy is from the standpoint of historical narrative about 1700s South Asia and the emergence of British rule, there is a powerful global lesson on offer as well. The Anarchy testifies to the horrors that ensue when corporate power is left unchecked. This is not merely a lesson applicable to frail states, but it is also relevant to the experience of developed countries.
The past 40 years of neoliberal hegemony in policy-making have seen an astonishing consolidation of corporate power, plutocratic influence and growing socioeconomic inequality. The consequences for the environment have been devastating, with the 2020s poised to be the last decade in which relatively normal climactic conditions will prevail on Earth. And this is due in large measure to the reckless pursuit of corporate profit and material aggrandisement by business elites, who can then buy enough political support to block meaningful reform.
In Dalrymple’s account of the rise of the East India Company, one can see the precursor to the oil and gas companies, social media giants and industrial-scale farming corporations of our own time — capitalism run amok. The central question of the present century may well be whether or not states and peoples are able to break the power of the monstrous corporations pushing us all to extinction for the sake of their next quarterly profit and their investors’ annual dividends.
The reviewer is the author of The State During the British Raj: Imperial Governance in South Asia, 1700-1947
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
By William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury, UK
ISBN: 978-1408864371
320pp.
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 1st, 2019
William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company is a fast-paced history of South Asia set during the turbulent 1700s. It tracks the emergence of the British as the successors to the paramount power of the Mughal empire, while also covering the rise and fall of various other contenders. Its rich narrative is engrossing and, once you pick up this book, you aren’t likely to put it down.
When the Epilogue begins, you are likely to wish that there were another hundred pages left to read. There cannot be a better introduction than this book to the South Asian history of the period covered and one can only marvel at the author’s skill at relating a story rendered all the more remarkable for it being fact, not fiction.
Dalrymple does not try to formally set forth an explanatory framework to guide us through his narrative of events and people. Nonetheless, The Anarchy provides much to reflect upon. Perhaps the most important in terms of understanding the effects of the past on the present is that three key reasons emerge for the eventual success of the British at empire-building in India.
The first is that none of the Indian contenders had anything remotely resembling a sense of national outlook or a framework of loyalty that extended beyond that owed to an individual leader. The second is that none of the local rivals were able to consolidate a fiscal-military base strong enough to enable them to unilaterally drive the British into the sea. And the third is that India’s own capitalist and military-service classes preferred collaboration with the British owing to the uncertainty that prevailed elsewhere.
The predatory and selfish behaviour of the contending factions in post-1707 South Asia is brought out in great detail. What is troubling is that, while there were serious disagreements within the emerging British colonial regime, representatives of which — such as Robert Clive — were ruthless in their plundering, the local forces were beset by murderous internecine rivalries on an altogether different order of magnitude.
Take, for instance, the British conquest of Bengal. Siraj-ud-Daulah, the nawab ousted by the British in 1757, had years earlier risen in revolt against his predecessor, the infinitely more capable Aliverdi Khan. Luckily for the rebel, Aliverdi Khan had a soft corner for him and thus survived the intrigue. After Aliverdi Khan’s death, Siraj-ud-Daulah succeeded him, but so antagonised the seths and his own nobles that they conspired with the British to get rid of him.
Years later, in 1764, the British defeated the remnants of the Mughal forces (Awadh, the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II and a suddenly patriotic Mir Qasim), and co-opted the first two. Meanwhile in the centre and south of India, the Marathas — often formidable, always tough to beat on the defensive, but chronically disorganised — had too many rival power centres to mount an effective, sustained campaign against the British, even when it became clear to their leaders that failure would be catastrophic for all of them.
While the lack of an institutional framework for political loyalty crippled the local ability to counter British machinations, the failure to develop stable financial bases for organised war-making on a scale that would be effective against the new hegemonic power, added to South Asian woes.
Dalrymple describes the terrible ordeal that Bengal endured between 1757 and 1773 and the horrific famine that ravaged the province between 1769 and 1772. But he also brings to life the process by which the British learned from their mistakes and gradually restored Bengal’s agriculture, commerce and administration. This turned Bengal into a revenue-generating machine that paid for the modern army that conquered the rest of South Asia for the British: “By the end of the century, Bengal was annually yielding a steady revenue surplus of Rs 25 million at a time when Scindia struggled to get Rs 1.2 million from his territories in Malwa.” In comparison, the sultanate of Mysore, at the height of its power under Haider Ali, managed annual revenues of Rs 12 million.
Elsewhere, regular (or even irregular) revenue collection was a distant memory and local factions (Jats, Sikhs, Rohillas etc) and foreign invaders (Afghans and Persians) took what they could. The superior revenue generation ability of the British was critical to their long-term success because the military-technological gap had closed by the 1780s.
Under these circumstances, a great many local communities and interests threw their support to the British. Yes, the British were strange in their ways, but if you were a soldier they paid well, on time and in full — a feat that local rulers managed only infrequently. Yes, the British were subordinating India’s trade and commerce to serve the needs of their imperial political economy, but if you were a local merchant, a banker or a broker, they offered unprecedented security of property, better returns, lower risk and were generally creditworthy.
By providing an island of relative calm in a sea of anarchy, the British were able to attract to their service the martial labour class and mercantile capital of South Asia as none of their rivals could. While it is consistent with the prejudices and conceits of the nationalistic present to dismiss or condemn the support extended to the British by so many Indians, it must be borne in mind that at the time there was no ‘nation’ to betray.
Tying these threads together, we can see how the situation that emerged in the 1700s worked to advantage the British. The disintegration of Mughal power was swift and triggered wars of succession. In these wars, the states that emerged, and which at times did reasonably well, lacked an institutional basis of political loyalty and succession (like the empire they had emerged from). This left them acutely vulnerable to being compromised from within by other actors, while the British had no comparable vulnerability.
Clive might have been a rascal of the highest order, but he wasn’t going to sell Bengal out to the Afghans or Marathas once it was under British control. The repeated disruption at the territorial and political levels experienced by local powers made it difficult for them to create a fiscal-military foundation as secure as that achieved by the British in Bengal. This meant that, to get rid of the British, they needed to cooperate, but efforts to this end proved desultory on account of there being no discernible sense of national or even dynastic solidarity. And then, as the anarchy became perpetual in most of the region, the relative stability of British-ruled territory allowed for the effective utilisation of local capital and military power for the purpose of colonial conquest.
As wonderful as The Anarchy is from the standpoint of historical narrative about 1700s South Asia and the emergence of British rule, there is a powerful global lesson on offer as well. The Anarchy testifies to the horrors that ensue when corporate power is left unchecked. This is not merely a lesson applicable to frail states, but it is also relevant to the experience of developed countries.
The past 40 years of neoliberal hegemony in policy-making have seen an astonishing consolidation of corporate power, plutocratic influence and growing socioeconomic inequality. The consequences for the environment have been devastating, with the 2020s poised to be the last decade in which relatively normal climactic conditions will prevail on Earth. And this is due in large measure to the reckless pursuit of corporate profit and material aggrandisement by business elites, who can then buy enough political support to block meaningful reform.
In Dalrymple’s account of the rise of the East India Company, one can see the precursor to the oil and gas companies, social media giants and industrial-scale farming corporations of our own time — capitalism run amok. The central question of the present century may well be whether or not states and peoples are able to break the power of the monstrous corporations pushing us all to extinction for the sake of their next quarterly profit and their investors’ annual dividends.
The reviewer is the author of The State During the British Raj: Imperial Governance in South Asia, 1700-1947
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
By William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury, UK
ISBN: 978-1408864371
320pp.
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 1st, 2019
November 6, 2019
On Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order
Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order
On Grand Strategies
Charles Hill’s Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order is a remarkable work that defines and explains the importance of a broad liberal education based on intensive and extensive reading for the purpose of prosecuting interests of states. The central message of Grand Strategies is that “the world should recognize high political ideas and actions of statecraft as aspects of the human condition that are fully within the scope of literary genius, and ones that great writers have consistently explored in important ways.” Hill laments that over the past decades the intellectual foundations of the international state system have been assaulted with great success by popular cultures and instant punditry. With the advent of the Internet attention spans have shortened, book reading of the serious kind has fallen by the wayside, and statesmen and their advisers are increasingly ignorant of the broader issues of history, politics, and human imagination.
The critical and essential characteristic of grand strategy is the ability to integrate experience, imagination and knowledge, into a broader and deeper insight. This integration requires the would-be integrator to be profoundly learned and capable of deriving meaningful conclusions from the swirls of facts and data points that now permeate the intellectual universe.
Hill, of course, focuses on the Western intellectual tradition, with smatterings of East Asia mixed in. His treatment, however, of the Greek and Roman classics, Shakespeare, the Enlightenment, and later philosophies of history is profound. Grand Strategies is a book of wisdom and insight with few peers in the contemporary-era.
In his treatment of strategic thinking and decision-making Hill proceeds with great humility and consciousness of the limitations of the decision-makers. Statesmen must make decisions before consequences are known. Resultantly, grand strategy must calculate the reactions of adversaries and allies. Statesmen engaged in the formulation and execution of grand strategy must guard against “the certainty of the unexpected blow.” They must be able to draw lessons from the past and apply them imaginatively to the present and future they seek to shape. They must also take into consideration their own and other’s economic base, leadership, diplomatic traditions, culture, and world view. Grand strategy is thus the art of comprehending the total assets of your own state and that of its adversaries and allies and deploying those assets to achieve large objectives fundamental to survival and prosperity. All of this asserts Hill, requires an integrative intellect formidably educated, tempered by experience, and capable of applying insights into the human condition to real world problems and issues.
Grand Strategies is also a philosophy of history that sees the advent of the modern world as being heralded by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. That peace established the nucleus of an international state system that overcame regional civilization systems and forged through war, diplomacy, and commerce, an order of states. This order was challenged, time and again, by utopian ideologies and movements promising to abolish the state system in favor of a harmonious community of man. The order of 1648 was itself the outcome of 30 years of brutal warfare instigated by the universal eschatological preferences of the Catholic Church and the pan-European imperial ambition of the Habsburgs and set the stage for a reaction in which universal churches and empires gave way to a system of sovereign states.
This system, argues Hill, has survived and evolved in the face of severe challenges, ranging from the French Revolution to the First World War, to Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. It is presently threatened externally by a combination of archaic utopian movements (such as Islamism) and globalization, and internally by the growth of pop culture, post-modernism, libertarianism, and other movements that regard the state as passé. Hill maintains that while speaking on behalf of the state may no longer be fashionable it is increasingly necessary for without states the global challenges that we face will overwhelm us for lack of organization to implement things on the ground. Hill insists that our understanding of the state must be historically rooted in order to have context for “there are fundamental commonalities between the states of millennia before and those around today.”
Hill laments the decline of reading serious works in the West and quotes from Kissinger to the effect that “Reading books requires you to form concepts, to train your mind to relationships…but now we learn from fragments from facts. A book is a large intellectual construction; you can’t hold it all in mind easily or at once. You have to struggle mentally to internalize it. Now there is no need to internalize because each fact can instantly be called up again on the computer. There is no context, no motive. Information is not knowledge.”
If we were to apply Hill’s approach to Pakistan, a land full of strategic thinkers and foreign policy experts, it emerges that here by his standards there is precious little strategic thinking in the real sense. Of course, educated Pakistanis parrot glittering western concepts and articulate clever sounding doctrines but they know very little of their own history and are hardly acquainted with the region’s own tradition of grand strategy. One wonders, for instance, how many of Pakistan’s strategic thinkers have really read the Arthashastra, the classical Indian compendium on statecraft, administration and diplomacy that matches in complexity and substance the finest works of western classical political thought? Or then, how many Pakistani would-be grand strategists have digested Ibn Khaldun’s Muqqadimah or Tusi’s Siyastnamah or Abul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari or Al-Beruni’s Kitab-ul Hind? Still, to be fair, it appears that even Western strategists operating on the policy side of the equation are increasingly out of touch with their own classical tradition of thought.
This brings us to the fundamental challenge of grand strategic formulation, which is to establish a hierarchy of threats that a country is facing, identify the causes of said threats, and work out the policy direction that is needed to address the challenges so identified. It needs to be accepted that this is not an exact science since there might be divergent perceptions regarding what constitutes a real long-term challenge to the survival of a country. It is also often the case that decision-making is captured by elements with an irrational hierarchy of threats in mind or that vested interests can push political leaders to ignore strategically serious threats and focus on kinetics and tactics.
The tragedy of the human condition is that success in politics depends upon cunning, moral flexibility, and the ability to pander to the interests and wishes of the temporarily powerful or relevant. These very qualities, however, are often anathema to the wisdom, clinical detachment, and immense reserves of knowledge and insight that statesmen (and their advisers) engaged in grand strategy must posses. The trouble is that without being adept at politics one isn’t likely to get into a position where it is possible to influence strategic thought, and yet, engaging in such politics is profoundly distasteful to those are actually capable of thinking in strategic and macro-historical terms. This is a paradox as old as human history – those wise enough to comprehend power rarely seek it, while those who seek it are rarely wise enough to wield it. This paradox is normally worse in societies where the voice of reason can be silenced by those in power.
Ilhan Niaz
November 2019
Islamabad.
On Grand Strategies
Charles Hill’s Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order is a remarkable work that defines and explains the importance of a broad liberal education based on intensive and extensive reading for the purpose of prosecuting interests of states. The central message of Grand Strategies is that “the world should recognize high political ideas and actions of statecraft as aspects of the human condition that are fully within the scope of literary genius, and ones that great writers have consistently explored in important ways.” Hill laments that over the past decades the intellectual foundations of the international state system have been assaulted with great success by popular cultures and instant punditry. With the advent of the Internet attention spans have shortened, book reading of the serious kind has fallen by the wayside, and statesmen and their advisers are increasingly ignorant of the broader issues of history, politics, and human imagination.
The critical and essential characteristic of grand strategy is the ability to integrate experience, imagination and knowledge, into a broader and deeper insight. This integration requires the would-be integrator to be profoundly learned and capable of deriving meaningful conclusions from the swirls of facts and data points that now permeate the intellectual universe.
Hill, of course, focuses on the Western intellectual tradition, with smatterings of East Asia mixed in. His treatment, however, of the Greek and Roman classics, Shakespeare, the Enlightenment, and later philosophies of history is profound. Grand Strategies is a book of wisdom and insight with few peers in the contemporary-era.
In his treatment of strategic thinking and decision-making Hill proceeds with great humility and consciousness of the limitations of the decision-makers. Statesmen must make decisions before consequences are known. Resultantly, grand strategy must calculate the reactions of adversaries and allies. Statesmen engaged in the formulation and execution of grand strategy must guard against “the certainty of the unexpected blow.” They must be able to draw lessons from the past and apply them imaginatively to the present and future they seek to shape. They must also take into consideration their own and other’s economic base, leadership, diplomatic traditions, culture, and world view. Grand strategy is thus the art of comprehending the total assets of your own state and that of its adversaries and allies and deploying those assets to achieve large objectives fundamental to survival and prosperity. All of this asserts Hill, requires an integrative intellect formidably educated, tempered by experience, and capable of applying insights into the human condition to real world problems and issues.
Grand Strategies is also a philosophy of history that sees the advent of the modern world as being heralded by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. That peace established the nucleus of an international state system that overcame regional civilization systems and forged through war, diplomacy, and commerce, an order of states. This order was challenged, time and again, by utopian ideologies and movements promising to abolish the state system in favor of a harmonious community of man. The order of 1648 was itself the outcome of 30 years of brutal warfare instigated by the universal eschatological preferences of the Catholic Church and the pan-European imperial ambition of the Habsburgs and set the stage for a reaction in which universal churches and empires gave way to a system of sovereign states.
This system, argues Hill, has survived and evolved in the face of severe challenges, ranging from the French Revolution to the First World War, to Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. It is presently threatened externally by a combination of archaic utopian movements (such as Islamism) and globalization, and internally by the growth of pop culture, post-modernism, libertarianism, and other movements that regard the state as passé. Hill maintains that while speaking on behalf of the state may no longer be fashionable it is increasingly necessary for without states the global challenges that we face will overwhelm us for lack of organization to implement things on the ground. Hill insists that our understanding of the state must be historically rooted in order to have context for “there are fundamental commonalities between the states of millennia before and those around today.”
Hill laments the decline of reading serious works in the West and quotes from Kissinger to the effect that “Reading books requires you to form concepts, to train your mind to relationships…but now we learn from fragments from facts. A book is a large intellectual construction; you can’t hold it all in mind easily or at once. You have to struggle mentally to internalize it. Now there is no need to internalize because each fact can instantly be called up again on the computer. There is no context, no motive. Information is not knowledge.”
If we were to apply Hill’s approach to Pakistan, a land full of strategic thinkers and foreign policy experts, it emerges that here by his standards there is precious little strategic thinking in the real sense. Of course, educated Pakistanis parrot glittering western concepts and articulate clever sounding doctrines but they know very little of their own history and are hardly acquainted with the region’s own tradition of grand strategy. One wonders, for instance, how many of Pakistan’s strategic thinkers have really read the Arthashastra, the classical Indian compendium on statecraft, administration and diplomacy that matches in complexity and substance the finest works of western classical political thought? Or then, how many Pakistani would-be grand strategists have digested Ibn Khaldun’s Muqqadimah or Tusi’s Siyastnamah or Abul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari or Al-Beruni’s Kitab-ul Hind? Still, to be fair, it appears that even Western strategists operating on the policy side of the equation are increasingly out of touch with their own classical tradition of thought.
This brings us to the fundamental challenge of grand strategic formulation, which is to establish a hierarchy of threats that a country is facing, identify the causes of said threats, and work out the policy direction that is needed to address the challenges so identified. It needs to be accepted that this is not an exact science since there might be divergent perceptions regarding what constitutes a real long-term challenge to the survival of a country. It is also often the case that decision-making is captured by elements with an irrational hierarchy of threats in mind or that vested interests can push political leaders to ignore strategically serious threats and focus on kinetics and tactics.
The tragedy of the human condition is that success in politics depends upon cunning, moral flexibility, and the ability to pander to the interests and wishes of the temporarily powerful or relevant. These very qualities, however, are often anathema to the wisdom, clinical detachment, and immense reserves of knowledge and insight that statesmen (and their advisers) engaged in grand strategy must posses. The trouble is that without being adept at politics one isn’t likely to get into a position where it is possible to influence strategic thought, and yet, engaging in such politics is profoundly distasteful to those are actually capable of thinking in strategic and macro-historical terms. This is a paradox as old as human history – those wise enough to comprehend power rarely seek it, while those who seek it are rarely wise enough to wield it. This paradox is normally worse in societies where the voice of reason can be silenced by those in power.
Ilhan Niaz
November 2019
Islamabad.
