I had made a set of remarks on the nature of imperial sovereignty before the Industrial Age (i.e. before the 19th century) in general, using Mughal sovereignty as a particular case.
Imperial sovereignty had and has no 'nature'. No type of sovereignty does. It is merely a legal concept or claim. Mughal sovereignty was like Maratha sovereignty. It was essentially contested and existed, de facto, at certain times in certain areas while remaining a de jure legal fiction at other times.
Here is a summary of those remarks:
1. What is an empire?
That whose sovereign is an Emperor.
I had asked you what you thought distinguished an empire from the pre-Industrial world as a kind of state from the nation-states we inhabit today.
Nation-States aren't ruled by Emperors. Japan might appear an exception. But its Emperors hadn't ruled shit for many many centuries.
It emerged from our discussion that a complex of at least three inter-related factors distinguished it from a nation-state:
Prashant is completely wrong. An Empire, de jure, has an Emperor. There was a Holy Roman Emperor from 800 AD to 1806. It was completely unlike any other Empire but did come to approximate something like a nation state from about the 15th Century.
a) an empire was composed of several ethnic groups
India is so composed. It isn't a fucking empire. It is a nation-state. If Prashant, who was born in India, didn't notice this, we have to ask- how fucking stupid is he?
Germany, from 1870 to 1918, had an Emperor. Why? Because under the Emperor were several Kings. The Kaiser was the German Emperor. But Germans constitute just one ethnicity. Why did this cretin not know this?
in relations of conflict and compromise with each other; that it was at any point in its history a particular conflicted stage in the developing relations between its constituent groups.
Meaningless jibber jabber. Everybody is in a relation of compromise and conflict even with their own cat or dog.
. And that b) these constituent relations were unequal ones.
Like that between your cat and you.
And that, furthermore, c) this political inequality was never fundamentally questioned
No. It wasn't just 'fundamentally questioned', it was often replaced by something else- e.g. Shogunate or Military dictatorship or an oligarchic cabal. By 1916, the Kaiser had no power. The Army High Command ruled the German Empire. The British Empire only existed for a short time (commencing when Queen Victoria was crowned as Empress of India, probably so that her daughter, the wife of the new German Kaiser, didn't outrank her). But the British Empire soon became a Commonwealth of equals. Thus, when George VI ceased being an Emperor, because India turned into a Republic, it was little consolation that he became the King of Pakistan.
even if groups fought for greater powers because an empire was based on a source of norms for governance that valorized and instituted political inequality.
Unless it didn't. Elective monarchies, like Poland, might go too far in the other direction. The Holy Roman Empire, which was elective, was a loose confederation by the sixteenth century.
This ‘source of norms for governance’ was what we termed a ‘constitution’.
No. Some nation-states or Empires had a written or unwritten constitution. Others didn't. The thing was wholly inconsequential save if 'dual sovereignty' (e.g. in USA) arose. But even then- as the Civil War showed- the law didn't matter at all.
In this sense, we said that an empire was a constitutionally unequal kind of state.
One could say this of any social or political formation.
Notice that Shaiḵẖ Ahmad Sirhindi
had zero importance. If he influenced Aurangazeb, us Hindus might say that the stupid fucker helped end Islamic tyranny over a large portion of the sub-continent.
in the Sources of Indian Traditions (Vol 1) analogizes the relation of emperor to his empire -which is typically nothing less than the whole “world”- with the relation between the soul and the body:
Sultan should kill kaffirs. The problem is kaffirs might slaughter Muslims or chase them away.
to the world is like the soul in relation to the body”
Nobody, save God, knows what that relation might be. What Islam says is that the soul is the master and it will be put back in the body for 'questioning in the grave'. Sirhindi was saying 'Sultan Sahib, kill kaffirs already. Otherwise, you will go to Hell.' He was a fanatic. Still, because he advocated killing kaffirs like Prashant, Prashant thinks he was the cat's whiskers.
and that both the Aḵẖlāq-i-Jalāli and later Ab’ul Fazl, the emperor Akbar’s famous ideologue, analogize the hierarchy of the four classes of state officials to the order of natural elements of fire, air, water and earth (pp.431-433).
Muslims weren't utterly stupid. They understood that this was flowery talk. The question was whether killing kaffirs was safe and profitable.
What these naturalistic analogies for the hierarchy of government must be understood as attempting is to authorize the
killing of kaffirs. That's what mattered. The problem was that the Emperor was more secure against Islamic rivals if he could depend on kaffir Princes, Treasurers and Tax-gatherers.
constitutional inequality characteristic of empires
& Nation States. Prashant isn't equal to POTUS or King Charles III, monarch of Canada.
before the Industrial Age by assigning it a basis in nature.
God. God created Nature. Prashant is as stupid as shit.
As such, this naturalistic basis for royal absolutism was a trait shared by many empires from roughly 1500 to 1800,
Nope. Everybody was talking about God, not Nature. The US Declaration of Independence mentions God, or the Creator, or Divine Providence, four times. The 1791 French Constitution didn't mention God but, soon enough, Napoleon took over. The Pope was present to take care of the religious side of things when he crowned himself Emperor.
empires that have come to be termed “early modern” to distinguish them from the colonial modernity that eclipsed this early modernity from the late 18th century onward.
The US became modern when it ceased to be '13 colonies'. There was no 'colonial modernity'. Perhaps this cretin means the East India Company. But it held 'Diwani' & 'Nizami' from its own Mughal puppet.
By way of illustration of such constitutional inequality we remarked on how the Mughal
emperor remained right until 1857
a puppet of the Brits as he had previously been a puppet of the Marathas. But no British or Indian or other court or Government accorded him any fucking authority or legitimacy whatsoever. Indeed, his eyes might be put out or his head chopped off at any moment.
the singular source of governmental legitimacy across most of South Asia.
No. The only source of legitimacy was killing those who challenged it. What fairy tale world does this cretin inhabit?
That is, even as the empire began to disintegrate because
it was shit at fighting.
of a complex of reasons
Nope. There was just one. It was shit at fighting. Why? Its soldiers were shit. Its commanders were shit. Its administrators were shit.
(central among them being the great agricultural prosperity the early Mughal rulers had made possible
Agricultural prosperity is compatible with being shit at fighting. Equally, being good at fighting can correlate with a shitty agricultural base.
and the consequent empowerment of regional elites), not even the most powerful of regional leaders ever presumed to rule as Emperor himself.
Why bother? What mattered was fighting. The problem was that sooner or later your brother or uncle or general would slit your throat and take over till his throat was slit. The reason everybody wanted to do a deal with John Company was that the guy who slit your throat would not get to take over your territory. The Company would use the excuse to kill him and take it over themselves.
Rather, he (and we cited the example of Scindia, the 18th century Maratha leader who controlled Mughal Delhi)
Shinde was a General of the Peshwa. He used the puppet Mughal to keep from coming under the thumb of the leader of the Maratha confederacy. In any case, what mattered was money not some empty title.
I enumerated the characteristics of the early modern
i.e. stuff that happened after about 1500
by noting that:
1. it refers to the emergence of large and long-stable states like the Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman empires from roughly 1500 onward.
But there were even larger states before that- e.g. Sultanate or Mauryan Empire. Prashant has shit for brains. What is remarkable about 1500 is the manner in which small states peripheral to the Oikumene- e.g. Portugal, Spain, Holland, England, etc begin to rise through oceanic trade.
2. A royal absolutism that made free with religious doctrine to suit its own purposes.
But the age of God Emperors was long over.
In India a rift emerged between dharmashastra (theologically based Sanskrit jurisprudence) and nītishastra ̄ (discourses on statecraft)
Nope. Both were useless. The rift was between guys who were good at fighting and those who were good at getting killed or enslaved.
whereas the latter had previously been subordinate to the former.
Nonsense! Neither mattered in the slightest. Niti just means 'policy'. If your policy meant you won wars- well and good. You might pay a couple of Pundits to gas on about how Dharmic you were but, if your son or nephew or general killed you and usurped the throne, those same Pundits would gas on about how dharmic the murderer was.
The Mughals reflected this emergent breaking free of statecraft from theology by the new emphasis placed in the education of their elites and in the dissemination of didactic texts on aḵẖlāqi norms of governance that came to displace the juridical meanings of the terminology of theologically based Muslim jurisprudence or sharīā’.
No. What happened was that Mexican Silver and new markets for Indian goods meant that any agricultural surplus could be invested in cottage industries which in turn yielded cash. This meant a larger bureaucracy and thus more 'ars dictaminis'. Islamic jurists tended to get disintermediated from the commercial realm because, as Timur Kuran (or Mohammad Ali Jinnah!) pointed out its 'waqf' law was pants. Also usury is totes 'natural'. Islam was burying its heads in desert sands while the West was embracing Oceanic commerce.
3. A prolonged period of conflict between sedentary and nomadic groups
that occurred much earlier. Nomadic groups were getting disintermediated as Oceanic trade burgeoned. The last 'nomadic' Empires perished in the 14th century. Some groups- e.g. Bakhtiaris in early twentieth century Iran or some of the forces of Ibn Saud or 'Hamidiye' Kurds during the massacre of the Armenians- may appear similar but they were merely auxiliaries who required payment.
such as led to a new wave of urbanization across South and West Asia;
Nonsense! Conflict with 'nomadic groups' leads to deindustrialization and deurbanization. Prashant is an idiot.
an enhancement of agrarian productivity and a concomitant growth of populations.
That had to do with new plants and animals being introduced thanks to oceanic trade.
I remarked in passing that the violent settling of the Americas by Europeans must be understood as a phenomenon from this historical trend.
Nope. It had to do with oceanic trade of a type never seen before in human history.
The emergence of new literary and philosophical forms that codified a new consciousness of these political phenomena.
This was wholly irrelevant. Moreover, 'political phenomena' were heterogenous. Holland wasn't like Portugal nor was England like Holland.
STEM subjects got better in places active in oceanic trade. This raised productivity and fostered 'endogenous' growth.
(Scindia) would seek the Mughal Emperor’s permission to do as he pleased, being ultimately content with the official status of a tribute-paying underling (zamīndār) even if he was far more powerful in reality.
Nonsense! He got the title 'Naib Vakil-i-Mutlaq (Deputy Regent of the Empire)' thus positioning himself as equal to the Peshwa. But such titles meant nothing.
We must regard this
if we are as stupid as shit
as spectacular proof of our thesis that an empire was a constitutionally unequal kind of state in the sense that
a Rohilla chieftain, seeking treasure, could torture the Imperial family and put out the Emperor's eyes. Scindia chased him away but the Emperor remained blind.
its polity collectively recognized and subscribed to its norms for governance.
Norms like putting out the eyes of the Great Moghul Emperor if he couldn't tell you where treasure was buried.
2. Aḵhlāq: In the case of the Mughal Empire, this source of governmental norms lay in a
corpus of texts- a corpus whose increasing importance, production and circulation in
Mughal madrasas (schools) leads me to ask whether it became a genre- called aḵhlāq.
Ignorant shite. Ibn Muskaiyah, in the tenth century, had written the Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq. A couple of centuries later, Nasirudin Tusi wrote the Akhlaq-e-Nasiri which incorporated material on governance. But the thing had no great significance because the Mongols soon showed up and Tusi proved himself a double-dyed traitor rather than a model of ethical behaviour.
Aḵhlāq referred to a discourse of royal ethics. These were compendia of anecdotes that,
often quarrying from each other, offered the Mughal prince exemplary cases of royal
behavior from the historical and apocryphal past, arranging these anecdotes under
headings like ‘On Being Lenient in the Administration of Justice’, ‘On How to Present
Yourself to Ambassadors’, ‘On the Necessity of Spies’, ‘On the Conduct of War’ and so
forth.
A weak Prince might put up with that shite. A strong one concentrated on killing everybody- more particularly brothers or nephews or ambitious generals- who might possibly be a threat to them. Jurists justified this as 'nizam-i-alem'- i.e. necessary for good governance. Obviously, if they didn't justify it, 'nizam-i-alem' would have chopped their fucking heads off.
A central aḵẖlāqi value was the equitable dispensation of justice by the King
amongst the empire’s many groups and easily access to such justice.
No. The central value was to get some money from the King. At the very least, he should very kindly chop the heads of your rivals.
This conception of sovereign power historically derived from
the 'rightly guided Caliphs' and other Kings famous in legend. The thing was hilarious.
late Byzantine and, thence, Greek ideals of political power that analogized the body of the empire or polity with the biological body to advocate a harmonious distribution of humors.
Those who talked in this manner were analogized to lickers of the arsehole of the soul of the body politics.
This aḵẖlāqi tradition of political thought had remained a minor tradition within the Muslim world until the devastation of the urban Muslim civilizations of the Iranian plateau by non-Muslim Mongol nomads during the mid 13th century.
The Mongols did to Muslims what they had done to Kaffirs.
It was this encounter with non-Muslim overlords that compelled Muslim intellectuals to
run the fuck away or pretend to be crazy dervishes.
devise conceptions of state and ideals of sovereignty that would take account of the possibility of large non-Muslim populations that could not satisfactorily be taken account of by the old category of protected peoples or the z*immi.
Nonsense! The Ummayads in Spain had been rather good at that sort of thing. I suppose one could trace this back to Mu'awiya & Yezid.
The fact is the Muslims were initially less horrible than the Christians or, previously, the Romans. The Jews were allowed back into Jerusalem. The Monophysites and Sabaeans were freed from persecution.
Aḵhlāqi norms of governance were a result of this renewal of political thought.
No. There was a bigger bureaucracy which paid lip-service to this sort of shite. It meant nothing whatsoever.
Aḵhlāqi texts probably began to circulate in western India from the early 16th century, entering by way of Gujarat.
Tusi was an Islamili. It is likely that his work had come to Gujarat (to which Ismailis had fled from Sindh some centuries previously) in the 13th/14th Century.
Recent scholarship has shown that these texts came to acquire a place of privilege in Mughal elementary schools (madrasas) where not only Muslim but also Hindus of the Kayastha ̄ and Khatri castes- as also often of Brahmin and other castes studied.
This was just 'ars dictaminis'- fine writing in between extorting money from the tax payer and indulging in intrigue.
What is crucial to bear in mind is that the kings and nobles who acted on these
norms did so in the name of the sharīa’.
No. What is crucial to understand is that Sharia is a real thing. Akhlaq is not. Go against Sharia and you will burn in Hell for all eternity. Nobody gives a fuck if some scribe says you were unethical. Anyway, if you did happen to chop your Daddy's head off, you can always expiate your sin by killing lots of kaffirs.
Whereas the sharīa’ had thus far mainly designated a corpus of Muslim jurisprudence, it now came to be appropriated as a label by Mughal rulers to refer to aḵhlāqi rather than juridical norms of governance.
Any ethical action can be justified by referring to Scripture. Even the most pious Mughal would pick and choose 'fatwas' from whichever 'mazhab' permitted what he wanted to do.
This displacement of the meanings of the word sharīa’
has never happened. Perhaps, some non-subcontinental Muslim reading this may get the idea that Islam degenerated in India. This wasn't the case. Yes, rulers in India- like those elsewhere- did what was expedient, not ethical, but they weren't ignorant heretics.
is what allows us to argue that if relations between Muslims and Hindus were largely harmonious
as was the case in 1947 when one or two million people died very harmoniously during the Partition riots
and even richly creative (witness the many artistic traditions of painting and music that resulted from the coming together of Persian and Indian aesthetics) under Mughal dispensations
witness the very harmonious Hindi film industry in Bombay at that period. This proves that everybody thought 'Sharia' actually meant 'Akhlaq'. Also all Hindus were fluent in Arabic and Persian. Sadly, ever since BJP came to power, people like Prashant are having to go to McGill University to discover all this.
it was not because Islamic norms of governance compromised with themselves out of banal pragmatism, not in other words because India was an exception to the rule of Muslim imperialism,
no. The thing was shit. Had it been less shit, there would be no kaffirs in the sub-continent.
but because the rule of Muslim imperialism itself changed to include what might otherwise have been exceptions elsewhere in the Muslim world.
Very true. That is why there is no such country as Pakistan.
3. The normative nature of Mughal sovereignty: Try and imagine, if you can, a state such
as the Mughal empire where from the 16th century till
1739 when Nadir Shah looted Delhi. The fact that he didn't want to stay showed that the tide had turned against Islam.
1857 the vast majority of its people never saw the emperor;
because India is big
only heard occasional ceremonial mention of his name at Friday sermons in mosques (if they were Muslim, which most were not) when they paid their taxes to the local Mughal collector who, moving armed with men from the local Mughal garrison, did his job in the emperor’s name; or read (if they could, which most could not) his name on the coins that circulated.
People in cities knew the names of Rajahs, Nawabs, Emperors, Saintly personages, but also some poets and singers. This is because they knew how to talk to each other.
I described to you how Mughal authority was sustained across time and space by a code of behavior for its courtiers .
I described to you how that code might involve torturing and blinding the Emperor.
These courtiers (of Uzbek, Iranian, Rajput and other ethnic backgrounds) formed an elite corps of officers who were bound by loyalty to the person of the Mughal emperor
this could only hold true if
1) the Emperor had a long reign
and
2) his own armies and commanders kept winning. Otherwise, he'd have to rely on coalitions headed by a particular Prince or General who had his own reasons for being loyal
If the Moghuls had primogeniture then 'personal loyalty' could be maintained. If brother fought brother, it was merely a matter of chance whether one was on the right (i.e. the winning) side.
because they had been raised as children within the precincts of the Emperor’s palace or royal encampment. In Persian such an officer was called a ḵẖāna-zād. Ḵẖāna means house, in this case the imperial household; and zād is a suffix meaning offspring. While these offspring of the royal encampment were not biological offspring of the Emperor, they were perceived and perceived themselves as imperial slaves who, because of their education in aḵhlāqi values that centrally included a reverence for the Emperor, would defend his sovereignty to the death.
This has no application to India where 'Slave dynasties' were old news.
As such they did not constitute more than a few hundred at most and commanded vast armies in the localities they governed. Their immediate subordinates respected them for their proximity to the Emperor but little if any of their aḵhlāqi values
there were none such. Military prowess mattered. Administrative skill- i.e. squeezing money- mattered. True, some may rise by literary ability and then show other capabilities.
permeated the populations they governed.
Thankfully, this was not the case. Not everybody killed his brother.
Why is this a significant set of observations?
Because it shows Prashant is stupid and ignorant.
Its significance lies in how it helps you appreciate that the non-interventionist or minimally interventionist character of Mughal sovereignty allowed for:
It was a brutal despotism but preferable to anarchy
Imagine how profoundly different this barely interventionist sovereignty is to that of our
modern governments! A British friend of mine once remarked that the reason her teeth were
in excellent condition was that as a child she’d been
taken to the dentist by her parents.
the beneficiary of a British government welfare scheme
a collective Insurance scheme known as the National Health Service.
that had ensured that children of a certain age got dental check-ups and braces for free.
No. Their parents paid tax and national insurance.
What does it tell you about modern sovereignty when it controls the dental
health of its subjects?
It doesn't. Nobody is forced to go to the dentist. Prashant isn't just stupid. He is mad.
I think it shows you how modern sovereignty takes the form of the micro-management of the life of its subject populations
That was a feature of medieval sovereignty. Modernity is about letting people find ways to be more productive.
. And here we mean life in the sense of biological life (as in the phrase Life Sciences).
Think of governmental health schemes for millions of citizens, and of how this governmental ability to manage the life of its citizenry is always matched with an ability to annihilate entire populations in an instant with bombs, an ability to impose death as extensively and minutely as life.
Nonsense! Plenty of countries with Public Health Insurance don't have nukes. Prashant isn't just ignorant about Mughal India. He doesn't know shit about Canada- where he fucking lives.
I am hoping this will help you appreciate by contrast the disparate nature of political sovereignty in the pre-industrial world, in the Mughal Empire for instance.
In countries at peace in the modern world, sovereignty is neither contested nor of any fucking significance whatsoever. In Moghul India, brothers or usurpers declaring themselves Emperor meant costly wars which in turn meant a higher tax burden which in turn meant higher threat of famine which in turn militated for depopulation and deindustrialization.
I don't hope Prashant will appreciate this. He has shit for brains.
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