Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (39 page)

They opted for the latter; but kings who lack legitimacy need some other source of power to give them authority, and what could the Safavids tap? They had nothing to turn to but their armies—and by this time their armies were armed and trained and “advised” by European military experts. In short, Persia ended up with European Christians helping Safavid kings clamp down on Muslim religious scholars who were closely tied to the masses: obviously a formula for trouble.

As the eighteenth century waned, succession struggles over the throne grew ever more ferocious. Contending factions began recruiting more European military consultants and importing more European arms to gain the edge on their rivals. A time came when the power struggles failed to produce single winners. Different contenders took possession of different areas. And as Persia came apart, Sunni provinces broke away from
the kingdom, and Sunni neighbors such as the Uzbeks and the Afghans broke into the kingdom to wreak terrible havoc.

When the smoke cleared the Safavids were gone. In their place, stood a new family monarchy. Nominally, this so-called Qajar dynasty ruled the shrinking country of Iran for the next 131 years. (It was still “Persia” to Europeans, but locals generally were calling the country Iran by this point, although the name did not switch at any one moment: both names go back to ancient times.) Under the Qajar kings, the disturbing trends of Safavid times became the ordinary, accepted order of things. The national armies were riddled with European advisers and officers. The ulama were chronically at odds w
ith the throne. Repelled by foreign influences at court, these ulama set themselves up as guardians of traditional Islamic culture, to which the lower and middle classes were still wedded. The kings were generally lazy, rapacious, shortsighted, and weak. Europeans pulled the strings that made these puppets jerk and squeak in a most lifelike manner.

Europeans never invaded Persia, never made concerted war on it. They just came to sell, to buy, to work, to “help.” But there they were when things came apart. And like opportunistic viruses that lurk in the body unnoticed but flourish into illness when the immune system breaks down, the Europeans flowed into whatever cracks opened up in the fragmenting society, growing ever more powerful as the cracks grew wider, until at last they were in command.

Europeans pretty much failed to notice they were taking over Persia; and that’s partly because there was no “they.” Westerners came to Persia from various European countries, and Persians were not the enemy to them but the backdrop. The enemy, for each group of Europeans, was another group of Europeans. The British, the French, the Russians, the Dutch and others kept moving into power vacuums in Persia not so much to conquer Persia as to block other Europeans from conquering Persia. The rivalry eventually boiled down to Russia versus Great Britain, and to understand this competition,
one must factor in the thunderous events happening further east, in the last of those three big Islamic Empires, the land of the Moghuls.

 

In the Moghul empire the core contradiction had always been Hindus versus Muslims. Akbar the Great had worked out a sort of ac
commodation, but his great-grandson Aurangzeb reversed all his policies, enforcing orthodox Islam rigidly, restoring discrimination against Hindus, squashing smaller religious groups such as the Sikhs, and generally replacing tolerance with repression. And yet, say what you will about the man’s narrow-minded zealotry, Aurangzeb was a titanic talent, so he not only held his empire together but extended it. The whole time, however, he was sowing the discord and tension that would erupt to ruin the empire as soon as a less capable ruler took charge.

This less capable ruler was the very next one after Aurangzeb—and the next one after him and the next one after that and so on down. In its first two hundred years, the Moghul empire had just six emperors; in its next fifty years it had eight. Of the first six, five were world historical geniuses; of the last eight, all were midgets.

During the fifty-year era of those midgets, Hindu kings called the Marathas surged again in the south. The Sikhs became a militant force. Nawabs, Muslim provincial governors, began to ignore orders from the capital and rule as independent princes. In fact, India broke up into smaller states and each state dissolved into turmoil as clashes broke out between Hindus and Muslims and others, making life uncertain for all.

Throughout this fragmentation, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the English were hovering on the edges, doing business from their trading posts along the coast. At first the Portuguese had dominated this trade. Then the Dutch had outflanked them, planting forts and trading posts in both Southeast Asia and Persia, and beating the Portuguese at sea with better ships and bigger guns. Then the French came in and held their own, and so did the English, who built a fort at Madras in 1639, acquired Bombay (now called Mumbai) a bit later when their king married a Portuguese princ
ess (Bombay came with her as part of her dowry) and then planting a colony on the Bay of Bengal, which grew into Calcutta.

The Europeans who came to East Asia in this era represented something new and unprecedented in world history. They weren’t generals or soldiers, they didn’t come as the envoys of kings, they didn’t represent governments. They were employees of private companies, but companies of a new kind: joint stock-holding companies or, as we now call them, corporations.

The first such company was born in 1553, when forty English merchants ponied up twenty-five pounds apiece to finance a search for a sea route to India. The expedition they funded found Moscow instead of India (don’t ask), but it brought home a tidy profit and when this news spread, other people clamored to buy into “the Russia Company.” Those who paid the subscription fee got slips of paper entitling them to a proportional cut of any profits the company’s future ventures earned, slips of paper they could sell to speculators if they wished (and thus the institution of the stock market was born).

Around 1600, three gigantic national versions of that first corporation were created in Europe: they were the English, the Dutch, and the French “East India Companies.” Each was a limited liability corporation with private shareholders. Each was founded for the sole aim of turning a profit on trade in East Asia in order to enrich its shareholders. Each was run by a board of directors. Each was chartered by its national government, and in each case the government in question gave its company a national monopoly on doing business in the Islamic east. The actual entities jockey
ing for advantage in Persia, India, and Southeast Asia, then, were these corporations.

Over the course of two centuries in India, these European corporations altered the texture of the Indian economy in ways reminiscent of what was happening in the Ottoman world. In Bengal, where the British elbowed out all other Europeans, the East India Company pretty much destroyed the Bengali crafts industry, but hardly noticed itself doing so. It was simply buying up lots of raw material at very good prices. People found more profit in selling raw material to the British than in using those materials to make their own goods. As the native economy went bust, indigenous Bengalis b
ecame ever more dependant on the British and finally subservient to them.

When the corporations first arrived in India, they competed to earn the favor of the Moghul emperor, but as the empire broke down, the favor of the central government mattered less and less. The Europeans came to realize they had better align themselves with various local rulers rising up. But they had to pick the right ones of these, because some turned out to be losers and got churned under. Guessing wrong about the subcontinent’s internal politics would cost the company money. It was tempti
ng, therefore, to take the guesswork out of it and try to control the outcomes of local power struggles. To this end, the companies brought in private armies to help their allies. Here, as in Persia, the enemy, for each group of Europeans, was not the local population but other Europeans. In supporting their Indian allies, the European corporations were actually fighting proxy wars against one another. The Portuguese lost out early, the Dutch were eliminated next (from India, anyway—they remained dominant in Southeast Asia) and the contest for India finally came down to the British versus the French.

As it happened, the French and the British were also the finalists in the contest for North America, halfway around the world. There, a skirmish between a few dozen Europeans kicked off a chain of events that ended up making all of India a British colony. It started in the spring of 1754, when a British army major named George Washington was leading a surveying party up the Ohio River and stumbled across a French scouting party. Shots were fired, one Virginian and ten Frenchmen died, and a global conflict erupted between Great Britain and France, with most of the other European pow
ers jumping in quickly. In North America the conflict was called the French and Indian War, in Europe the Seven Years’ War, and in India the Third Carnatic War.
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As the name implies, the European rivals in India had already fought two proxy wars in the Carnatic region north of modern-day Madras, trying to seat their respective allies on minor thrones. The fighting, in each case, was conducted by the East India Companies of Britain and France. In 1756, the nawab of Bengal, Siraj al-Dawlah, overran the British fort at Calcutta. On a sweltering June night, someone (not the nawab; he knew nothing about it) locked up sixty-four British citizens in an airless underground prison cell. “Someone” was supposed to process them out that night and send them home
, but signals got crossed and the prisoners were left in the dungeon overnight. By morning, forty-three of them were dead.

The report swiftly made its way to England. The press went crazy. They titled the nawab’s dungeon “the black hole of Calcutta.” In each retelling of the story, the dimensions of the cell shrank and the number of prisoners burgeoned, finally reaching 146, while the number of dead rose to 123. The story outraged the British public. In India, a one-time company clerk named Robert Clive, now a captain in the company’s priva
te army, marched to Calcutta to extract revenge. He deposed the nawab, and installed the nawab’s uncle in his place. (The so-called battle of Plassey, which effected this change, consisted of Clive bribing the nawab’s bodyguards to go home and then arresting and executing the abandoned nawab.)

Even then, the British did not name themselves rulers, not even of this one provincial piece of India. Officially, Bengal remained a Moghul possession and its government remained Bengali. Clive appointed himself a mere employee of this provincial government, setting his own salary at thirty thousand pounds a year. The East India Company enshrined itself as the Bengali government’s “advisers,” nothing more. For the sake of efficiency, the company decided to go ahead and collect taxes on behalf of the Moghul government. And again, for efficiency’s sake, they decided to go ahead an
d spend the money themselves, directly, locally: what was the point of sending it to the capital and having it come back again? Oh, and henceforth the company’s private army would take care of security and maintain law and order. But the company insisted that it was not now governing Bengal: it was just providing needed services for a fee.

The first few years of British rule worked out poorly for Bengalis. The company left day-to-day administration in local hands and focused only on matters relevant to its business interests. In practice, this meant the (powerless) “government” was responsible for solving all problems while the (powerful) company was entitled to reap all benefits but disavowed any responsibility for the welfare of the people; after all, it was not the government. Rapacious company officials bled Bengal dry, but those who complained were referred to “the government.” The plundering of the province resulted i
n a famine that killed about a third of the population in just two years—we’re talking about an estimated ten million people here.
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The famine damaged the company’s interests too, however, just as a parasite suffers when the plant on which it is feeding wilts.

At this point, the British government decided to step in. Parliament appointed a governor-general for India, brought the East India Company under control, and sent troops to the subcontinent. For the next hundred years, there were
two
British armies in India: so-called “John company” troops who worked for the corporation and “Queen’s company
” troops, who worked for the British crown. It should be noted, however, that only the officers were European. The grunts who carried the rifles and took the bullets were local recruits or draftees known as sepoys.

In Bengal, Clive set a precedent that would soon be repeated in many other states. He established that Britain had the power and right to appoint and depose rulers in any part of India where the East India Company had business interests. After 1763, this was every part of India, because France lost the Seven Years’ War and had to abandon the subcontinent.

Britain soon decreed that whenever an Indian ruler died without a male heir, the British crown inherited his territory. In this way, Great Britain gradually took direct control of many states. In others, it installed a proxy who ruled in accordance with British wishes and interests. India became a patchwork of states ruled directly or indirectly by the British, the East India Company gradually emerging as the top power in the subcontinent and the true successor of the Moghuls.

Great Britain lost its North American colonies at almost exactly the same time that it was gaining control of India. General Cornwallis, well known to American-history buffs as the man whom George Washington beat at Yorktown, was the second governor general of India and the one who really consolidated British control there. Seen only in the context of American history, Cornwallis was a loser, but the chances are that he died proud of his life’s accomplishments, because India became “the jewel in the British crown,” the country’s most precious colonial possession, and the key to
its dominance around the world.