After Tamerlane (24 page)

But, at the moment of dissolution, a new political force appeared to drive off the Ottomans, Russians and Ghilzais. The Safavid claimant Tahmasp recruited Nadir Kuli (1688–1747), a Khorasan warlord of humble origin (a former shepherd), to his cause. Nadir was a general of Napoleonic talents and aspirations.
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He was a careful strategist, but skilled in the use of shock tactics and light cavalry, and alert to the value of light artillery, drill and musketry.
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By 1730 he had reconquered the cities of Meshed and Herat, smashed the Afghan tribes at Mehmandost, reoccupied Isfahan and Shiraz, and inflicted a devastating defeat on the once-triumphant Ghilzais. By 1735 he had recovered Tiflis and Erivan from the Ottomans, and forced the Russians to disgorge Mazanderan, Astrabad, Gilan, Derbent and Baku. In 1736 he declared himself shah. In 1737–8 he captured Kandahar, and in the following year Mughal Delhi. Kabul and the right bank of the Indus were annexed to his new Iranian empire, and in 1740 Nadir turned his attention to the Uzbeks in Bukhara and Khiva. This astonishing career was prematurely terminated by the madness and irrational cruelty (perhaps exacerbated by the effects of disease) that provoked his assassination in 1747. But a new imperialist appeared in Nadir's image. Ahmad Shah Durrani, one of his Afghan lieutenants, carved out an inheritance from Nadir's Indian and Afghan conquests. At its height his Durrani empire stretched from Khorasan to the Ganges and from the Amu-Darya to the Sea of Oman.
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Not until the loss of Multan (1818), Kashmir (1819) and Peshawar (1834) to the British was it pressed back into the Afghan highlands.

What lay behind these two great ventures in empire-building that dominated the vast Indo-Iranian borderlands for half a century and had such a seismic impact on the politics of the whole subcontinent? One explanation might be that they were symptoms of a ‘tribal revolt' against the encroachment of the bureaucratic sedentary states: Russian, Safavid and Mughal. But the persistence of the enterprise and the imperial aspirations of its leaders suggest that some deeper force was at work. It has been argued that the careers of Nadir and of Ahmad Shah coincided with the dramatic rise in the economic impor
tance of the commercial corridor that stretched between North India and Russia and far away westward towards Meshed and Iran.
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North India, as far south as modern Karachi, was part of a trading system newly invigorated by the buying power of Russian silver. If this was the case, then this new round of empire-building was aimed at controlling the commercial wealth of the region and was fuelled by the hope of exploiting it further. It may have been primed by the social tensions of the nomad economy, with its secular tendency towards overpopulation. Militarily, it made use of the old nomadic advantage of tactical speed and strategic mobility, adapting handguns to cavalry warfare
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and, under Nadir Shah, also using artillery and even sea power.
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On this view, neither Nadir nor Ahmad Shah could be described as a throwback to a barbaric era. Instead, they were state-builders in search of a new formula. They combined an imperial style with the brutal discipline of tribal politics. It is even possible to imagine the scenario of which they may have dreamed: a Greater Iranian Empire along Manchu lines, in which a nomadic warrior elite was transmuted into the hereditary administrative class of an agrarian state.

It was not to be. The imperial project failed – perhaps because its agrarian base was much too narrow to sustain its scale; perhaps because of the inherent instability of the tribal confederations on which it still depended; perhaps because external pressure (not least the advance of British power in India)
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allowed too little time for the vital transition to a more settled government. Nevertheless, a significant legacy remained: the Afghan state first organized by Ahmad Shah in 1747, and the eventual reconstruction of Iran under the Afshar dynasty of the Qajars, whose rule lasted down till the 1920s.

EUROPE'S PLACE IN EURASIA

Historians have often been tempted to see the later part of early modern times as the grand prelude to the supremacy of Europe, and to imagine the imminent triumph of a global economy dominated by commercially advanced ‘core' states in North West Europe. In fact there are few grounds for taking so deterministic a view of a period whose most striking feature was the limited influence that the Euro
pean states could muster across most of Eurasia. From a European perspective, the most significant change was to be found not in Europe's relations with the Indo-Islamic world or the civilizations of East Asia, but in the consolidation of a huge region of settlement, trade and slavery in the Euro-Atlantic: West Africa, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the French and English colonies in eastern North America. While the enlargement of European settlements was comparatively slow, the new slave-based plantation economies built up after
c
. 1650 created valuable new markets for European exports and shipping. Exotic produce from the Americas whetted the appetites of European consumers. The spectacle of America had a similar impact on the European imagination. It is hard to exaggerate the intellectual and cultural impact of sudden mastery of an entire ‘new world' on hitherto embattled subcontinental societies. As a source of knowledge, innovation and experience; as a treasure trove of bullion; as an employer of mercantile capital; and as a vast zone of navigation: its transatlantic provinces had helped to make Europe perhaps the richest and most dynamic of the Old World civilizations by the early eighteenth century.

But we should be cautious about assuming that this wealth and dynamism were sufficient to drive European power deeper into Eurasia. As we have seen, except in parts of the Near East, Europeans had made little headway in carving out new
markets
in Asia, and still less in asserting their physical domination apart from in a few favoured locations. The great vanguard of European power in Asia, the mighty Dutch East India Company (the ‘VOC'), was staggering under the burden of its administrative and military costs after 1720, lurching into deficit and ‘profitless growth'. By contrast, the volume of Indian textile exports threatened to overwhelm the cloth industry in Britain, which sought commercial safety in protective tariffs. European consumption, rather than European production, regulated the trade between Europe, India and China. And if Indians and Chinese were intrigued by aspects of European art and technology, the traffic in the opposite direction was just as heavy.

Still, we might be swayed by the claim that the most prosperous regions in Europe had established by 1740 an unbeatable lead over the rest of Eurasia in the ‘modernity' of their economic and social
institutions – a lead that would be translated sooner or later into a form of global hegemony. After all, the Netherlands had pioneered the ‘modern economy', and Britain and France were following in its wake. Here could be seen the generic features of economic modernity: ‘reasonably free and pervasive' markets for both commodities and the factors of production (including land and labour); a scale of agricultural productivity capable of supporting a complex division of labour; a state that promoted property rights and the freedom of movement and contract; and levels of technology and commercial organization capable of supporting sustained development, a rich material culture and the diffusion of market-oriented consumer behaviour.
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Yet none of this saved the Netherlands from economic decline in the eighteenth century. Rapid development had unforeseen environmental consequences that affected water quality and agriculture. Urbanization and internal migration upset marriage patterns and checked population growth. High costs of production and the loss of export markets, as trade rivals raised tariffs, damaged manufacturing and drove capital towards public lending at home and abroad – a strategy shipwrecked by the political and diplomatic crises at the end of the century. Altogether the Dutch experiment in pre-industrial modernity was aborted by three forces endemic in early modern Europe: the ‘mercantilist' tendency towards closed markets and commercial autarky – the trade-suppressing policies castigated by Adam Smith in
The Wealth of Nations
– the high costs of pre-industrial manufacturing, coupled with the environmental limits on agricultural growth; and the drastic consequences of intra-European conflict for the fiscal systems of European states. Dutch experience suggested that the limits of preindustrial modernity would soon be felt for Britain and France also, and that it would require a technological, political and geostrategic revolution before the European style of economy could successfully colonize the rest of Eurasia – and the world.

4. The defeat of Tipu Sultan

Between the 1750s and the 1830s the long equilibrium of cultures and continents was swept away by the Eurasian Revolution. During these years the European states gained for the first time a commanding lead over the rest of Eurasia and acquired the means to project their power into the heartlands of the great Asian empires, and not just their maritime fringe. Looking back at this change, historians have usually been struck most of all by the great transformation in economic potential from which the Europeans had profited. The ‘Industrial Revolution' in technology and economic organization seemed the obvious source of the Europeans' new power. In fact it was not the only or sufficient explanation of European expansion. The Eurasian Revolution was in fact three revolutions: in geopolitics, in culture and in economics. It did not impose an era of universal European dominance. In the 1830s European mastery of the world was still partial and limited: the scope for resistance still seemed to be wide. In the deep interiors of Afro-Asia, it was scarcely a rumour. But it opened the road for an imperial order in which European control was riveted on the rest of the globe.

These three revolutions were closely connected and mutually dependent. Each reinforced the others' effects, extending their range and increasing their force. Commercial expansion sharpened the rivalry of Europe's maritime states. It increased the importance of European trade with other parts of Eurasia, especially with India, but made Europe more vulnerable to its sudden disruption. By increasing the stream of Asian commodities (especially cottons, silk and porcelain) into Europe, it may also have helped to spread the ‘industrial' methods through which European manufacturers hoped to copy these desirable products in order to compete and survive. But Europe's overseas trade could not look after itself. The European traders' advantage lay in their system of credit and their command of the sea lanes. But before 1750 across much of Eurasia their position was far from secure. Without ‘industrial' goods, their competitive position was weak. With little to tempt the Asian consumer, they were forced to pay for the goods that they wanted in silver or gold, a practice frowned on by
governments at home. To make matters worse, the cost of their overheads (mainly their fleets and fortresses) was cripplingly high, mainly because of intra-European rivalry. Thirdly, in both India and China, the two greatest markets for European trade, commercial access depended upon the agreement of rulers who might choose to reject it as a political danger (as happened in Bengal) or restrict it drastically (the ‘Canton system' in China).

As a result, a great geopolitical shift was required before the Europeans could reverse the commercial imbalance of their Asian exchanges. In turn, the effects of European coercion and conquest were widened and deepened by the machine technologies that revolutionized transport and textile production. In a similar way, the visible benefits of scientific inquiry and technical innovation reinforced the impact of the cultural changes that allowed Europeans to imagine, explain and justify their claim to moral and intellectual as well as material ascendancy. But the making of maps, the charting of coasts, the gathering of ethnographical data, the collecting of plants, the viewing of monuments and the purchasing of curios – the vital prerequisites of a universal thought-world – all required access to informants and places, an apparatus to process the information accumulated, and an immediate motive to make the effort required. These were theoretically possible without a ‘geopolitical' presence. But, without the military and political leverage that the British enjoyed in India after 1760, British knowledge of Indians would have been much smaller in volume as well as different in kind. Cook's three voyages in the Pacific Ocean would have proceeded more slowly had he been forced to depend on the cooperation of Maori and Aboriginal peoples, or encountered the sea power of a non-European state. Here, as in India, it was geopolitical strength that shaped the production of knowledge as well as the enhancement of trade.

This is the argument that shapes much of this chapter. Disentangling the threads of such a complex upheaval as we are here concerned with is a hazardous business. But the immediate cause of the revolutionary change in Europe's relations with the rest of Eurasia was not greater economic efficiency, since industrialization had barely set in before the turn of the century. Nor did it spring from using science and technology more dexterously than Asians. Before the arrival of steamships,
European technology conferred little advantage, even on the battlefield, as the British found in India. Europe's sudden acquisition of a Eurasian pre-eminence was the result not of commercial success or scientific prestige, but of a series of forced entries or forcible overthrows. Each instance can be traced to a quarrel between interlopers and locals. Together they formed a vast Eurasian frontier of friction from the Crimea to Canton. But this too must be placed in its larger context. For the really astonishing feature of this revolutionary age was the geopolitical earthquakes that occurred not just in Eurasia but all over the world. They reached a pitch of intensity in Europe itself (where wars were fought for nearly half the whole period from 1750 to 1830), but some were triggered by pressures that had little to do with European activity. Nor was it obvious that their cumulative impact would be to Europe's advantage. In the most violent phase of the European conflict after 1790, the reverse seemed more likely. But when the pattern emerged by the 1830s (as many contemporaries believed), what it revealed more clearly than anything else was the colossal enlargement of Europe's zones of influence, occupation and rule. It was not just a matter of Europe's place in Eurasia: the whole global balance had been shifted as well.