Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  It is bad for both emperors and water to remain at the same place;

  The water grows putrid and the king's power slips out of his control.

  In touring lie the honour, ease and splendour of kings:

  The desire of comfort and happiness makes them untrustworthy.8

  39. The Mughal annual ‘radius of action’.

  Although the Mughal emperors went on progress every year, they almost always returned to their capital ahead of the annual monsoon. Since this limited the time for travel to nine months, and since the Court travelled at an average speed of about five miles a day, the emperor's effective ‘radius of action’ was around 800 miles. Significantly, this included Kabul (which the Mughals managed to retain) but not Qandahar or Balkh (where repeated campaigns failed).

  This state of affairs, he added, ‘makes fear and distress, poverty and famine the universal air and genius of those unquiet abodes’.9

  True to his own advice Aurangzeb, like his predecessors, spent over one-third of his reign on the move – although, also like them, he seldom strayed further than 800 miles from Delhi (Fig. 39). Three factors explain this precise radius. First, the Mughal emperors moved slowly (never more than 10 miles a day and often less) because it took time to receive in person (and thus overawe) the major vassals along their route. Second, the court normally returned to the capital before the monsoon, which halted travel throughout Hindustan between July and October. Finally, moving too far or too long from any given area might encourage rebellion. As Ovington noted:

  The frequent revolts in India render those parts very miserable, and reduce the inhabitants to a very distressed state. For hoping to retrieve their liberty, and regain the kingdoms they have lost, they often declare for a rajah (which is a native Indian prince), and stand by him till the Mogul overpowers their forces, defeats their rebellion, stints their progress, and reduces them to a tame obedience again.

  Ovington exaggerated: only the ‘rajahs’ on the periphery of the Mughal state possessed the means to defy the emperor, drawing strength from regional cultures distinct from the Persian idiom adopted by the central government. Moreover, the Mughals often chose to end these rebellions by negotiation and compromise rather than by force, not least because India boasted a vast military labour market that favoured the ‘seller’: the emperor was merely the largest, never the only, ruler recruiting troops each year. According to the calculations of Mughal ministers, some four million men in northern India possessed military equipment and training, and the emperor needed to raise enough of them not only to execute his own designs, but also to prevent any of his rivals from creating an army capable of mounting a challenge. Shah Jahan therefore maintained an army of 200,000 cavalry and 40,000 infantry, supported by elephants, horses, camels and oxen.10

  Since such unparalleled concentrations of humans and animals could not live off the country, the emperor not only took with him on campaign enough money to pay his troops punctually and in cash, but also prepared large strategic reserves of specie along the line of march, and arranged for bankers travelling with the army to transfer revenues from outlying territories to the ‘sublime camp’. This practice allowed his troops to buy their food from merchants who set up bazaars every time the camp halted. The Mughal military system had no peer in the early modern world, and for almost the entire seventeenth century it allowed the emperors to rule their territories effectively.

  Nevertheless, like other dynasties with Central Asian origins, the Mughal regime suffered from one serious weakness: the system of ‘tanistry’, by which each ruler emerged only after a process of ruthless competition, sometimes between siblings but also between father and sons (see chapter 2 above). When rumours spread in 1622 that Emperor Jahangir had fallen ill, his eldest son Shah Jahan demanded sole command of the imperial armies and, when he failed to receive it, he led an army from Gujarat in the west to Bengal in the east in an attempt to create a coalition strong enough to depose his father. He failed, and only the surrender of his own sons as hostages secured a reconciliation. A succession struggle ensued when Jahangir died in 1627, with court factions supporting the claims of various rival princes, and after Shah Jahan prevailed he executed his rivals. Thirty years later, rumours that Shah Jahan was mortally ill would trigger a civil war between his sons; and the same would happen in 1707, after the death of the victor, Aurangzeb.

  ‘A perfect drought’: The Great Indian Famine of 1630–2

  No sooner had Shah Jahan consolidated his authority and murdered his male relatives than a natural catastrophe struck his empire. The well-being of India and its neighbours has depended for at least six millennia on the annual monsoon, which brings 90 per cent of the subcontinent's annual rainfall. But whereas a catastrophic monsoon failure normally occurs only once per century, the seventeenth century saw four: in 1613–15, in 1630–2, in 1658–60 and again in 1685–7. Each failure produced widespread famine, especially in Gujarat whose population relied heavily on imported food. The worst catastrophe occurred in 1630 (a year that saw both strong volcanic activity and a major El Niño episode, which often coincide with a weak monsoon) when virtually no rain fell, and 1631 (another year of high volcanic activity). The emperor's official chronicle recorded that

  Throughout the Deccan and Gujarat a perfect drought prevailed. Consequently the inhabitants of those regions suffered severely from the dearness of grain and the want of the common necessaries of life. The cravings of famine compelled parents to devour their offspring, and high and low were clamouring for their bread and dying from sheer exhaustion … he mortality was so dreadful that in all the cities, towns and villages of those kingdoms, the streets and marketplaces were so thronged by the immense number of corpses that a [traveller] could scarcely make his way through them.11

  One of the ‘travellers’ was the Cornish merchant Peter Mundy, who recorded distressing details of the famine in his Journal. He witnessed parents

  driven to that extremity for want of food that they sold their children for 12, 6 and [even fewer] pence a piece; yea, and to give them away to any that would take them… No less lamentable was it to see the poor people scraping on the dunghills for food, yea the very excrement of beasts, as horses, oxen, etc, belonging to travellers, for grain that perchance might come undigested from them, and that with great greediness …

  Like the Mughal chronicler, Mundy noted that ‘All the highways were so full of dead bodies that we could hardly pass from them without treading on or going over some.’ Other Europeans commented on the ‘Universal dearth over all this continent, of whose like no former age has record, the country being wholly dismantled by drought’, and noted that the ‘weavers, washers, dyers’ abandoned ‘their habitations in multitudes’, only to perish ‘in the fields for want of food to sustain them’. Then, in 1632, ‘At last it pleased God to send rain, but in so great abundance that it drowned and carried away all the corn and other grain.’ The region suffered ‘such inundations as have not been known or heard of in those parts’, unleashing water-borne epidemics, above all malaria and dengue fever, with the result that ‘Not a family’ escaped ‘agues, fevers and pestilential diseases … so that the times here are so miserable that never in the memory of man [has] any the like famine and mortality happened’ (Plate 17).12

  Although no census and (as yet) no ‘natural archive’ exists to quantify the scale of the disaster, Peter Mundy believed that ‘The famine itself swept away more than a million of the common or poorer sort; after which the mortality succeeding did as much more amongst rich and poor.’ Foreigners did not escape: of the 21 Englishmen living in the East India Company's factory at Surat in 1630, 17 died in the following three years – a mortality rate of over 80 per cent. In Goa, 500 miles to the south, the viceroy of Portuguese India estimated that famine and plague had killed four million Mughal subjects, and (he claimed) although a hardened soldier he could hardly bring himself to recount the suffering he had seen.13

  As usual during such climatically in
duced catastrophes, the purchasing power of most families fell as food prices rose, and since buying staples now absorbed almost all their income, the demand for services and manufactured goods fell. At the same time, high prices for staples encouraged farmers to plant more grain and fewer ‘industrial crops’. Both manufacture and trade therefore atrophied, producing unemployment among artisans and transportation workers. In Gujarat, trade and industry came to a standstill. Even in 1634 the English merchants at Surat found no textiles for sale on account of

  The great price which all sorts of grain has yielded for some years past, which has undoubtedly disposed the country people to those courses which have been most profitable for them, and so [they] discontinued the planting of cotton, which could not have been vented [sold] in the proportion of former times, because the artificers and mechanics of all sorts were so miserably dead or fled.14

  In the event, neither the production of cotton nor indigo in the region ever recovered their previous levels. The famine thus proved the ‘universal calamity of this country’, because what ‘was in a manner the garden of the world is now turned into a wilderness, having few or no men left to manure their ground, nor to labour in any profession; so that places here that have yielded 15 bails [bales of] cloth made there in a day hardly yield now 3 [bales] in a month’. Ahmadabad, the capital of Gujarat, ‘that likewise yielded 3,000 bails of indigo yearly or more, now hardly yields 300’. Peter Mundy predicted that with ‘the country in a manner desolate, scarce one left of ten … in my opinion it will hardly recover its former estate in fifteen, nay in twenty years’.15

  Welfare State versus Warfare State

  Mundy's forecast proved too pessimistic only because Shah Jahan used some of the vast resources at his disposal to respond to the disaster with a series of measures eschewed by most other rulers of the time. First he established soup kitchens and almshouses ‘for the benefit of the poor and destitute. Every day sufficient soup and bread was prepared to satisfy the wants of the hungry.’ At this time the emperor resided in the capital of one of the Hindu states of the Deccan he had recently conquered, and he ordered that, as long as he remained there, ‘5,000 rupees should be distributed among the deserving poor every Monday, that day being distinguished above all others as the day of the emperor's accession to the throne. Thus, on twenty Mondays, one lach [100,000] of rupees was given away in charity.’ Moreover, since ‘Ahmadabad had suffered more severely than any other place’, Shah Jahan ‘ordered the officials to distribute 50,000 rupees among the famine-stricken people’; while, since ‘want and dearness of grain had caused great distress in many other countries’, he ‘forgave’ taxes worth seven million rupees, ‘amounting to one-eleventh part of the whole revenue’ in order to ‘restore the country to its former flourishing condition and the people to affluence and contentment’. The emperor ordered his major vassals to take similar steps.16

  Once the monsoons resumed their normal rhythm, Shah Jahan sponsored a number of initiatives to promote economic recovery: he donated ploughs to the poor as he visited each region, ‘so that the forests might be cleared and land cultivated’ in order ‘to populate the country’; and he and his principal courtiers founded hundreds of market towns. The emperor also took steps to increase exports. He sponsored the cultivation of cotton, sugar cane, silk, tobacco and indigo in Bengal to attract European merchants; and, since the newcomers paid for what they bought with silver bullion, their purchases stimulated rapid growth in the regional economy and also produced vast customs revenues for the emperor. Shah Jahan ordered the construction of great ships in Gujarat, which allowed him to participate in the lucrative carrying trade between Mughal India and the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. Thanks to this combination of ‘tax breaks’ and ‘stimulus spending’, within a decade Gujarat (as well as other regions) once again reported a revenue surplus. In the opinion of Indian economic historian Tapan Raychaudhuri, although ‘it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that the Mughal age saw the emergence of an integrated national market’, nevertheless ‘the commercial ties which bound together different parts of the empire had no precedent’.17

  Expenditure on famine relief still left Shah Jahan with plenty of money to spend on other things: ten million rupees on his ‘Peacock Throne’, encrusted with jewels; seven million on the Taj Mahal (a sumptuous mausoleum for his late wife); seven million more on Shahjahanabad; and almost a million on creating the Shalimar gardens at Lahore. He also waged war almost constantly. The illustrated chronicle by Abdul Hamid Lahori, based on documents in the state archives, devoted well over half its pages and images to campaigns by the emperor's forces against the Hindu states of the Deccan and against the Portuguese in Bengal. In the northwest, Shah Jahan also campaigned against the Sikhs, led by Guru Hargobind, the sixth ‘master’ of the faith, whose predecessor had been captured and executed by Jahangir. This action radicalized the Sikhs, who had previously eschewed violence, and Guru Hargobind encouraged martial training and built up armed forces that repulsed four Mughal assaults. Nevertheless, even after all this expenditure during his first two decades on the throne, Shah Jahan had accumulated a reserve of 95 million rupees.

  Three reasons explain this unique fiscal outcome. First, the productivity of both rural and urban workers, coupled with the fertility of many areas under Mughal rule, yielded high tax revenues. Second, Shah Jahan's wars often turned a profit – both in booty and in the massive number of Hindu captives sold into slavery in Central Asia. Finally, the emperor limited his expenditure on foreign-policy goals. Although the Mughals campaigned in the Deccan, they never seem to have contemplated an attack on the Tamil lands further south or on Sri Lanka; and although they expanded into Bengal and founded Jahangirnaga (now Dhaka), a Mughal city that by 1640 numbered over 200,000 inhabitants, they made no serious plans to advance into Burma. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam has observed: ‘We may see the Mughal empire as an unfinished project, in a territorial sense, but also as one that had a proper sense of its limits.’18 The sole area of imprudence was Afghanistan.

  Afghanistan: The Perpetual Battleground

  The Mughals prided themselves on their direct descent from both Chinggis Khan and Timur (Tamerlane), and their official chronicles frequently noted plans to recapture Central Asia, their ancestral home; but only Shah Jahan attempted to achieve this goal. According to his historians, ‘the mighty soul of the world-subduing monarch had been bent upon’ conquering the lands ‘which were properly his hereditary domains’ ever since ‘the time of the last emperor Jahangir's death’ in 1627. Twelve years later, Mughal troops seized Qandahar in southern Afghanistan from its Safavid defenders, and the emperor and a massive entourage crossed the Khyber Pass for the first time. They spent the summer at Kabul while they prepared to conquer the lands beyond, ‘which were once included in the kingdom of his imperial ancestors’, but the Uzbeks, who had occupied the Mughal ‘homeland’ ever since expelling Shah Jahan's ancestors more than a century before, mounted such an effective defence that the emperor's ‘mighty soul’ decided to return to India.19 Then a succession dispute arose between two Uzbek rulers, one of whom appealed for Mughal assistance. In spring 1646 Shah Jahan therefore returned to Kabul, whence a Mughal army at last crossed the Hindu Kush and occupied the fertile alluvial plain around the great trading city of Balkh. When news of this success reached the emperor, still at Kabul, he hosted a party that lasted eight days and wrote a boastful letter to the shah of Iran predicting that his troops would soon also take Timur's former capital, Samarkand.

  Admittedly, Shah Jahan had much to boast about. His armies had overcome remarkable logistical obstacles in crossing the Khyber Pass (3,000 feet above sea level) to Kabul, more than 800 miles from the Mughal capital, and in advancing a further 200 miles over the Salang Pass (almost 12,000 feet above sea level) to Balkh. His expeditionary force was probably the largest ever to enter the region before the Soviet invasion of 1979. Nevertheless, even at the best of times, Afghanistan lacked both the crop surpluses and the cr
edit networks required to feed a large slow-moving army like that of Shah Jahan – and the Little Ice Age was far from the best of times. Unusually heavy snowfalls in the 1640s reduced both the campaign season and the quantity of supplies that could be brought over the passes from India, while a shorter growing season throughout the Himalayan region reduced local crop yields. Both factors made the Mughal troops dependent on what they could forage from the countryside, but the ‘scorched-earth’ policy pursued by the Uzbeks made foraging impossible. So although the gold, jewels, silk and brocade of the imperial army, as well as their weapons, horses and war elephants, initially impressed the population of Balkh, the winter of 1646–7 brought such intense cold that the Mughal garrisons ‘burned themselves in the fires they lit for warmth, and no one left their house for fear of being frozen’.20

  Rather than give up, in spring 1647 the emperor returned to Kabul for the third time while his son Aurangzeb led another army across the Hindu Kush. The prince used his war elephants as well as his new troops to defeat Uzbek counter-attacks (incidentally winning immense renown when he calmly dismounted in the middle of a battle to perform his ritual prayers), but three months later he had to admit defeat and abandon Balkh. The Central Asian ‘wolves’ now closed in and captured large numbers of Indian ‘slave sheep’ as they retreated. Many of them did eventually see Samarkand, but as slaves: prisoners from the Mughal army were so numerous that the price of Indians in the slave markets of Central Asia fell by two-thirds. It took Aurangzeb and the survivors a month to regain Kabul, arriving just in time to accompany the emperor back across the Khyber Pass.21