deal precisely with some themes of my own research:(posted 8755 days ago)>Looking very briefly at a couple of examples, work in >recent years on C18 South Asia (notably, but not only, by Chris >Bayly) demonstrates how the East India Company's empire rested for >sixty years on collaboration with sophisticated and extensive >merchant classes.
True but: 1.) Our knowledge of the 18th century (Bengal to some extent excepted) is still extremely scanty. That this is best known for the EIC is mainly because these sources are easier to use. It would not be that hard to show however, I think, that the Maratha svaraj was also built on support of powerful and sophisticated Indian merchants too or, for that matter, that this also applied to the Dutch and the Portuguese. And if there's one thing we should be wary of, it is to overestimate the importance of the EIC in the early eighteenth century. The VOC (Dutch) was a far bigger organization than the EIC until about 1720. Why were the English succesful then ? I think rather because they were able to rally rural elites who felt threatened by the disintegration of the command-structures of the Mughal empire after 1730.
2.) The problem with the term `the merchant class' is that it covers everybody from the local seller of arrack to the Jagat Seth. I do not think the Indian merchants were a single group, let alone a class. The social formation (often clumsily called the `middle class') where large merchants belonged to, would include very diverse groups of warriors, priests and poets too. And, moreover, the middle classes were very unclear divided from the landlord-elites, particularly in the case of giant banking-house like the Jagat Set, who were very much part of the `old' Mughal elite.
So yes - class-analysis is more critical for research than the cross- country analysis of the Landes-discussion, since the critical issue is not how much wealth there is but how it is divided. So, I fully agree with Brian on this, but we need a far more refined model of the class-structure in the eighteenth century, starting from South Asian categories rather than European.
What comes out of a reading of this era is that, >with the exception of Tipu Sultan, no-one in South Asia realised >the nature of the people with whom they were dealing, and thus did >not undestand the dynamics of capitalism.
I do know what Barry means by capitalism - if he means commercial capitalism then Indian merchants had a pretty good grasp of it (and so, for that matter, had Indian soldiers) if he means industrial capitalism, then that only seriously began to infer with the Indian trade after 1820. But, anyhow, it could be argued that British expansion Wellesley-style was not so much grounded in capitalism but was very much grounded in the military absolutism (like Russia and Prussia) of the eighteenth century and that it was rather anti- capitalist than capitalists. The Wellesley-brothers would have been horrified had they heard that they are now called `agents of capitalism' - or shortly probably portfolio-capitalist. Sure, the officers of the British Indian army were there for profit, but then so were the officers of the Marathas or the Rajputs. And if it would have been for the `capitalists' on the Board of the Company the British might not have built up an army to conquer an empire at all.
In fact, I think it was precisely because of the predominance of the military/landed groups within the administration of the Company after Cornwallis that the British were able to build up a coalition with Indian elites, since their military/fiscal idiom was very familiar to the latter. So, it was not the British elites did not understand the Indian elites the two understood each other very well - talking a common idiom of nobility and landed wealth which they largely shared.
Again, I would also argue that Indian elites perfectly understood the `geopolitics' of the EIC's army - at least I recently saw a couple of letters of Nana Phadnis, which prove that the peshwa, for one, was very well aware of what the British were doing - and well realized the British were aiming for dominion over the whole of India. The problem was that there was not much the Marathas could do about it - because the British were using an instability within the Indian state- system which resulted from the same mechanism of dissent (Andre Wink's fitna) as what the Marathas were using. Basically, Indian elites sited with the British because it was in their interest to do so - mainly since the British protected elite's both against rural revolts and against rival groups.
So, The British were thus able >to wage a successful class struggle against these merchant classes in the >first three decades of the C19 - even though they had been formally ruling >them for the previous sixty years.
Again, which groups are you talking about ? If there was one revolutionary measure of the British it would be the permanent settlement. It could be argued that permanent settlement favoured two groups: the zamindars and rural money-lenders, while inflicting massive damage to the peasant-economy and the peasantry. I would certainly argue that permanent settlement was class-war and was meant as class-war against the small independent peasants. But it was certainly not intended - and didn't work out either - as class-war against the merchants or against the landlords. What it did was to handle the control over the peasants precisely to those groups who had helped the British.
>Thus there is nothing inherent about who's more advanced than someone >else - it depends on the material conditions of a society and the >most important element in this is class conflict, inside particular >societies or between ruling classes in different societies.
This may be an unpopular position but I agree - basically, I would argue, the rapid development of trade, agriculure and of state control over taxation under the Mughals caused the old patronage- system of power to break down in the first half of the eighteenth century. A breakdown which had some elements of a class-struggle but was mainly a struggle within the elite: a restructing of relationships of power away from the `central state' to the local landlords. It was this struggle which gave the British their initial chance.
And in reply to Thomas C. Bartlett:
May I remind you that Louis Dermigny studied the silver-flow to China already in the ninety - fifties and sixties for the eighteenth century as did Vitorinho Magelhaes Godinho for the sixteenth and may I, please, point out that historians at IGEER (Leiden) have been working on the bullion-trade of the VOC for twenty years now ?
Maybe the theme on which IGEER is now working (that is the flow of bills between Asia and Europe) will be discovered by a new `Californian school' in twenty years which will reason (as has been argued for the bullion-flow to the Baltic) that it was not so important after all, since more `invisible' money was flowing back to Europe than was sent in cash to China (and to India). This, of course, presupposes that there was a global market for fiduciary money in the seventeenth and eighteenth century but for the eighteenth century this argument does not seem so far fetched. Particulary for India, for it may be emphasized that the largest European trading-organization in Asia, the VOC, sent very, very little cash to China and more than half of the cash received was - in the late seventeenth century - sent to Bengal alone.
Since India was receiving as much cash as China I find explanations of bullion-flows starting from `local' Chinese conditions alone improbable. Rather, I would argue, the bullion-flow `to the East' (including Ottoman Turkey another major recipient which is always forgotten !) resulted from the increasing substitution of taxation in services and goods by taxation in cash which necessitated more media of exchange. And, therefore, this was a function of the strengthening of the state in Europe and Asia. As such the bullion-flows were a result of the class-relations within the countryside which is to argue Barry Pavier's overall point more vigorously.