India and the Silk Roads

The History of a Trading World

Jagjeet Lally

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781787383265
• eBook ISBN: 9781787386433
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

India’s caravan trade with central Asia was at the heart of the complex web of routes making up the Silk Roads. But what was the fate of these overland connections in the ages of sail and steam? Jagjeet Lally sets out to answer this question by bringing the world of caravan trade to life—a world of merchants, mercenaries, pastoralists and pilgrims, but also of kings, bureaucrats and their subjects in the countryside and towns.

The livelihoods of these figures did not become obsolete with the advent of ‘modern’ technologies and the consequent emergence of new global networks. Terrestrial routes remained critically important, not only handling flows of goods and money, but also fostering networks of trade in credit, secret intelligence and fighting power. With the waning of the Mughal Empire during the eighteenth century, new Indian kingdoms and their rulers came to the fore, drawing their power and prosperity from resources brought by caravan trade. The encroachment of British and Russian imperialism into this commercial arena in the nineteenth century gave new significance to some people and flows, while steadily undermining others.

India and the Silk Roads is a global history of a continental interior, the first to comprehensively examine the textual and material traces of caravan trade in the ‘age of empires’. By showing how no single ruler could control the nebulous yet durable networks of this trading world, which had its own internal dynamics even as it evolved in step with global transformations, Lally forces us to rethink the history of globalisation and re-evaluate our fixation with empires and states as the building blocks of historical analysis. It is a narrative resonating with our own times, as China’s Belt and Road Initiative brings terrestrial forms of connectivity back to the fore—transforming life across Eurasia once again.

1

ENVIRONMENT

In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the northern hemisphere suffered massive fluctuations in temperature and weather phenomena amidst overall climatic cooling. This ‘Little Ice Age’ varied from place to place, but in such distant locales as Ottoman Anatolia and Ming China the oscillation from severe rainfall and flooding to deep drought destabilised agrarian production. The evidence of such widespread environmental calamity has resuscitated the notion of a ‘General Crisis’, famously first proposed as a European phenomenon, and most recently studied under a single geographically expansive lens by Geoffrey Parker as a Global Crisis.¹ The effect of climatic cooling—from Europe to east Asia and north America—and the changes in weather patterns that resulted was to stunt economic output, driving a wedge between food prices on the open market and the state’s fiscal receipts. Unable to provide for the hungry masses, the legitimacy of the hereditary rulers of agrarian states was called into question as the economic crisis exacerbated. In turn, as the petty revolts that squeezed the state’s increasingly slender finances proved difficult to suppress, charismatic local leaders were able to coalesce the support of peasants, roving bandit gangs, and demobilised soldiers into an assault on the centre, often resulting in regime change—as for example from the Ming to the Qing, or the Stuart monarchy to the Commonwealth and back again; or instability at the centre, as in the Ottoman Empire.²

The wave of late-seventeenth- to eighteenth-century regime change sketched in the introduction was part of a wider pattern of political and economic change rooted more or less deeply in environmental flux. ‘Mughal decline’ and its causes have been much debated, but Parker’s analysis serves to draw together the detrimental effect of imperial overstretch amidst climatic change and, thus, of economic hardship on the power and prestige of the empire, on the loyalty of elites and peasants, and on their belief in the emperor’s leadership.³ The result was neither regime replacement per se nor significant instability at the centre, but a change in the balance of power between the imperial heartland and the provinces. Regional rulers slowly asserted their autonomy from the emperor, while even relative newcomers were able to carve out political niches for themselves over the long eighteenth century.⁴ The harshness of Iran’s environment made the Safavid economy especially fragile and much more sensitive to small changes in climatic conditions than was the case in the more fertile and agriculturally productive cores of the Mughal and Qing empires. Yet, climatic fluctuations from 1666 to 1696 combined with tectonic activity along the Iranian Plateau, the resultant scarcity and uncertainty—even if not toppling the Safavid padshah—perhaps weakened the centre’s ability to deal with the early-eighteenth-century tribal assault that precipitated regime change.⁵

Alongside their neighbours in Iran, India, and China, the changing fortunes of the Uzbek khanates are also locatable within this picture. The rise of Khokand was rooted in the Bukharan crisis of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, starting as a fiscal crisis connected to the contraction of the availability of silver in the Bukharan economy.⁶ Scott C. Levi has contested the notion that this liquidity crunch resulted from Bukhara’s growing global isolation as a result of the marginalisation and decline of the Silk Roads in the era of trans-oceanic trade. But this is perhaps to miss the possibility that caravan trade might have been starved rather suddenly (and temporarily) of goods and cash in consequence of famine and scarcity in the Mughal, Safavid, and Qing domains—as well as the growing slowdown of global trade and bullion flows from the Atlantic world to India and China—during the seventeenth-century Global Crisis.⁷ Ultimately, the shortage of silver compelled the rapid debasement of coinage and the dramatic loss of its value. This made it ‘increasingly difficult for an inherently decentralised regime such as the Bukharan Khanate to maintain patronage systems’, precipitating the erosion of the allegiance and loyalty of the Uzbek elites to the khan. This meant, in turn, the erosion of the centre’s military strength and political legitimacy.⁸ Within this context, rebellions became more frequent amidst incursions of mobile peoples from beyond the khanate as well as from neighbouring powers, serving to shatter Bukharan prestige and power. As Bukhara’s control over the Fergana valley weakened, Shah Rukh Biy established his authority in 1709 over what would become the Khokand state under the rule of the Shahrukhid dynasty.

The environment—qua the physical landscape, ecology, climate—is neither a fundamental determinant nor immutable, but a factor manipulable by human agency and frequently changing or changeable. Whether in the longue durée or in distinct episodes, as above, the environment is thus a powerful explanans of both the pattern of political and material life and of periods of change therein, and forms an overarching framework structuring the analysis in this book. The first half of this chapter introduces the notion of the Indo-central Asian trading world, the space integrated by the caravan circuit, its mobilities and exchanges. It highlights the embeddedness of the annual transhumance within the distinctive seasonal rhythms across this space. The second half looks at the logic of trade, rooting it within environmental differences between the dry and wet zones of Eurasia, and the opportunity for specialisation and exchange resulting therefrom.

Hot and Cold: Geography and Climate

Fernand Braudel conceived of the ‘Mediterranean world’ as constituted of the sea, the littoral, and their environs in his magisterial study published in the early twentieth century. Following his lead, in the 1960s and 1970s Ashin Das Gupta, K. N. Chaudhuri, and Om Prakash, among others, pioneered what has now become a rich corpus of scholarship on the ‘Indian Ocean world’.⁹ According to the scholarly consensus that has since emerged, the early modern Indian Ocean trading world was a system of fiercely competitive and overlapping segments, each home to particular commercial communities, and each possessing coastal hinterlands that were sites of specialised production and distinctive consumption patterns.¹⁰ In similar spirit, a Eurasian system can be conceived that at once also fractures ‘the popular concept of the Silk Road’ into its underlying trading worlds or commercial circuits and segments: trans-subcontinental, Indo-central Asian, Indo-Persian, Perso-central Asian, Russo-Persian, Russo-central Asian, Sino-central Asian, and Sino-Russian.¹¹ The Indo-central Asian trading world is more compact than the Indo-Persianate world that has so fruitfully framed other scholarly inquiries, but is also more expansive than Indo-Khorasan, a term recently proposed by Sajjad Nejatie to bring into focus the integrating effect of Durrani political authority from what is now eastern Iran to north India.¹² I utilise both these terms—Indo-central Asian and Indo-Persianate—to draw attention to the highly mobile holy men, litterateurs, and mercenaries who moved into and integrated the trading world, giving caravan trade a larger significance than as mere conduit for the exchange of goods. At the same time, the space that is the focus of this book had a definite and distinctive shape, even as it must be approached flexibly.

Just as knowledge of the monsoon system and sea currents were critical to Chaudhuri’s understanding of the natural delineation of distinct commercial segments and seasonal patterns of circulation within them, so too is an awareness of the role played by the environment central to the definition of trans-continental circuits, including the Indo-central Asian. Writing of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), J. R. McNeill observes that its ‘settlement pattern resembles that of Polynesia more than that of China or India, with larger and smaller “islands” of habitation existing where enough water could be found.’ These arid spaces were home to ‘small [and often non-contiguous] zones of continual settlement, […] together making up an archipelago’, usually along or in proximity with water courses such as rivers or other sources of fresh water.¹³ The land was either too dry for farming or too marginal even for pastoralism, making the availability and reliability of water a critical variable in the sort of activity possible and the density of population supported.¹⁴

Over time, its contours shifted in response to changes in ecologies, commercial opportunities, and political authorities, but broadly the core of the Indo-central Asian trading world covered a region represented at its southern end by the boundaries of the provincial states of Punjab and Rajasthan in present-day India, and at its northern end by the nation-states of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan. Outside this region, the threads of this cobweb-like network clung to more distant outposts of continual habitation where traders took their goods for sale—on the Kazakh steppe, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, in the trade towns of Russia, China, Turkmenistan, Iran, and north India. And within this region, trade-related activities—production, procurement, packing, transportation, wholesale, retail, consumption—were spread unevenly, with some settlements or areas shifting into or out of the trade network, and others isolated from long-distance trade throughout the period covered in this book.

Punjab, as a territorial unit stretching from Delhi to the Indo-Afghan frontier (including the North-West Frontier Province carved out of Punjab in 1901), formally came into being after the British conquest of the Sikh kingdom in the 1840s. ‘Mughal Punjab’ did not exist as an administrative unit, except as the aggregate of the Mughal subas (provinces) of Lahore and Multan.¹⁵ The Lahore suba corresponds to central Punjab and eastern Punjab (now Haryana). The Multan suba, which incorporated parts of present-day Sindh, is referred to as western Punjab in this book and is at the centre of much of its analysis. Within this space is the area known as Derajat and such towns as Multan, Dera Ghazi Khan, Dera Ismail Khan, and Bahawalpur, which feature prominently in the following pages, as well as Jhang, Muzaffargarh, Shujabad, and Ahmedpur. This was an area corresponding to what the Punjab Census of 1921 designated as the ‘northwest dry area’ and what today falls within the boundaries of Punjab in Pakistan.¹⁶

Until the reign of Abdur Rahman in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, ‘Afghanistan’ was not a term used by the region’s rulers, nor were the northern and southern borders of the Afghan state territorially fixed, both of which were of European invention.¹⁷ Instead, a bundle of terms were employed by the Mughals, Safavids, and Durranis, and by the inhabitants of the region, including Khorasan, Balkh, Roh, Pashtunkhwa (Pakhtunkhwa), and Hazarajat. In what follows, therefore, these terms are used alongside the names of specific urban centres, although the term Afghanistan is also used as shorthand for the coteries of these places and peoples. Such usage is made with appreciation of the fact that Afghanistan’s borders were both bigger and smaller than the territory as it exists today, and that Afghans and Afghan polities spilled into neighbouring empires and states, and vice versa. Balkh, for example, was commercially and culturally more closely integrated into central Asia to the north than the region to the south.¹⁸ And whereas scholars of Afghanistan have sought to support or undermine the conflation of ‘Afghanistan’, ‘Afghan’, and ‘Pashtun’ (today the dominant ethnic group), some sections of the following chapters aim to probe these descriptors to dispel the strict separation of Afghan and Indian, to examine the elusiveness of Afghans within central Asia, and to thereby highlight the fuzziness of individual identities.¹⁹

India and the Silk Roads is rooted in south Asia, both in terms of centring on western Punjab and the Indo-Afghan frontier and, in turn, on the archives and repositories left by India’s rulers. The book casts its gaze from this vantage point into central Asia, broadly conceived. This category is used alongside Turan and Turkestan, which to contemporaries in the medieval and early modern periods denoted the area enclosed by the mountains to the south (Hindu Kush) and east (Tien Shan), the steppe to the north, and the (Qara Qum, ‘black sands’) desert to the west greened by the Amu (Oxus) and Syr (Jaxartes) rivers and their tributaries.²⁰ Bukhara was a critical node from whence merchants took goods for sale into the neighbouring states of Khiva and Khokand, to the steppes, and to the towns and fairs on the fringes of the Russian Empire. By the seventeenth century, Bukharan traders in Siberia were constitutive of what Erika Monahan characterises as a merchant diaspora.²¹ Bukhara was the northern terminus of much of the traffic flowing around the north–south caravan circuit. It was also one of the most populous and prosperous cities of the three Uzbek polities throughout the period under investigation, and an important centre (political, commercial, cultural, spiritual) in the imaginary of European and south Asian travellers and rulers. It thus takes a central place in much of the analysis.²² In contrast, Khiva—which was relatively inaccessible to Western merchants, travellers, and commentators—features much less prominently.²³

Merchants and Their Mobilities

The east–west to north–south pivot of the Silk Roads’ primary axis deepened the involvement of severa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. Environment
• 2. Exchanges
• 3. Power
• 4. Traders
• 5. Material Culture
• 6. Colonial Conquest
• 7. Knowledge
• 8. Technology
• Conclusion
• Appendix I: Varieties and Prices of Silk
• Appendix II: British Subjects Trading in Central Asia
• Appendix III: Volume and Value of Cotton Cloth
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover