Bankrolling Empire is the first systematic study of business–politics relations in precolonial India. Writing a book on the subject is a formidable task because there are few state papers on it. Sudev Sheth overcomes that challenge by using the papers of a Gujarat-based banking firm, Shantidas Jhaveri, and his successors. The Jhaveri family had a close and direct relationship with the Mughal emperors, sustained for over four generations spanning the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Sheth combines that resource with others available on the history of the Gujarat region of western India. Getting that material to speak on the topic would have taken the author considerable perseverance and linguistic skill. The book’s success lies partly in that hard work and the highly readable writing style. More than that, the book’s impact stems from what it says about politically connected banking in Mughal India and, through that lens, about state capacity and the nature of the Mughal state. I will come back to these lessons.

The book has six core chapters. Chapter 1 presents a background history of the Mughal Empire and its conquest of Gujarat starting in 1572, showing the prominence of the local commercial and financial elite in the emerging state system. The next chapter discusses the business of the founding patriarch with the courts of Jahangir and Shah Jahan and the latter’s restoration of temple lands to Shantidas. Chapter 3 is about the crucial role of Jhaveri funding during the Mughal succession wars in the 1650s. Drawing terms from biology, Sheth calls the earlier phase of the relationship “mutualism,” in which both parties gain, and the second phase “commensalism,” where one gains at no cost to the other. Chapters 4 and 5 trace the social and administrative shifts in the Mughal Empire between 1680 and the 1720s in the wake of the costly Deccan campaign and rising financial pressure. Gujarat remains the region of interest. The narrative ends with the extortionate pressure placed on the Jhaveri successor in the early eighteenth century and how he survived by brokering deals between armed groups. Chapter 6 focuses on the consolidation of power by the Gaekwads of Baroda after the Mughal dissolution and the restructuring of debt relations and financial diplomacy in the emerging political landscape in Gujarat.

The book has three lessons of interest to three sets of readers. Business historians of India are one of these. The Gujarat seaboard and the peninsula played a prominent part in the development of capitalistic enterprises in India from antiquity to the present. Business history accounts must rely on European sources from the seventeenth century or community lores. Both these materials reinforce, in different ways, a tendency to see Indian capitalists as community-bound insular clubs. Maritime historians from the 1970s and recent historiographies of early-modern Gujarat have shown that, far from being insular, merchants were active political actors. Bankrolling Empire goes further in that direction, focusing on individuals, banking, and the Mughal state. The emphasis on finance is path-breaking because it forces us to see the close interdependence between state capacity and the business world.

The second set of readers who would find the book useful consists of historians debating the nature of the Mughal state, its strengths, and its vulnerabilities. This complex debate, which I have no time to summarize here, is inspired by one insufficiently explained phenomenon: the remarkably quick disintegration of the state in the early eighteenth century. Since there were no direct external threats, the only satisfactory solution to the puzzle would be to discover something organic to the state system that had once sustained imperial power and abruptly stopped doing so. While other historians stressed fiscal extraction generating rebellions or the state overstretching itself to fund a campaign to control South India, Karen Leonard suggested in a 1979 paper that this endogenous variable was credit. Bankers funded the Mughal fiscal system and shifted their services to regional centers, initiating the collapse. Critics thought Leonard’s claim was speculative, and the evidence was sketchy. While the paper is widely cited, its thesis is not widely accepted. Sheth’s book changes that and adds more weight and complexity to the idea that credit had a role in the empire’s collapse. It shows that the empire’s fiscalism was not too reliant on credit in ordinary years. Wars increased that dependence. Bankers mattered crucially when the fiscal system was under great stress.

The third set that the book will appeal to, and perhaps disappoint a little, is formed of the economic historians studying public debt in early-modern Europe. This large scholarship examines the changing relationship between capital and state during wars. Whereas repayment prospect is crucial to every loan, wars made that prospect uncertain with sovereign debt or made the debt-service-to-tax ratio unpredictable. Potential lenders had to guess the level of the uncertainty. Sheth’s account would be more complete if we could estimate this ratio or the uncertainty with fiscal data. However, Mughal fiscal data have remained under-researched and hard to read. We can confidently say that the reduced uncertainty of the debt-service-to-tax ratio was why bankers could rebuild their relationship with the Baroda state later. They could do so because British India guaranteed the military security of the surviving princes, ending internal wars and stabilizing their fiscal capacity.

Bankrolling Empire advances a series of bold and provocative theses in a highly readable package. It should instill life in a largely conventional historiography of capitalism in Mughal-ruled North India.