INTRODUCTION
How in the space of some three hundred years did the leading edge in global economic and military power pass from “East” to “West”? And how was this process related to the breakthrough to capitalist modernity in Western Europe? However formulated, the question of how “the West” came to rule has been at the forefront of social scientific debates since its inception. Whether focusing on Europe's unique cultural and institutional inheritance, its distinctively “restless rationalism,” and/or its advantageous ecological system, traditional explanations of Europe's rise locate its origins as immanent to Europe itself.Footnote 1 The “European miracle” is conceived as one of self-generation emerging from the unique if not peculiar attributes of a singular European developmental experience. “The ‘miracle’ of massive economic development,” Michael Mann writes, “occurred ‘spontaneously’ in Europe, and nowhere else.”Footnote 2 Similarly, Ricardo Duchesne insists on the “uniqueness of the West,” emphasizing its “higher intellectual and artistic creativity” and “exceptional” development of reason and freedom.Footnote 3 From such perspectives, there was, and perhaps still is, something inherently exceptional about “the West” that distinguished it from “the rest.”
Such self-aggrandizing narratives of Western “exceptionalism” have come under criticism from an array of scholars.Footnote 4 While diverging in their analyses and conclusions, they share a common theme of problematizing the notion of a uniquely self-propelling “rise of the West.” They have instead focused on conjunctural and sometimes downright lucky factors said to explain Europe's ascendancy, while highlighting the intersocietal conditions shaping this trajectory to global dominance. As such, revisionist perspectives provide a significant challenge to Eurocentric narratives by arguing that there was nothing unique or endogenous about Europe's rise to global supremacy.
Despite some affinities, this article challenges the revisionists’ conjunctural explanation of Europe's breakthrough and their tendency to deny substantive developmental differences between “West” and “East” and within Europe itself. After demonstrating the myriad difficulties the revisionists’ run into in theoretically explaining the “rise of the West” in Section I, we then provide an alternative explanation that builds on the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD). Such a perspective redresses the shortcomings found on both sides of the debate: namely, the traditional Eurocentric approaches focus on the immanent (sui generis yet structural) characteristics of European development, and the revisionists’ emphasis on the developmental homogeneity of Eurasian societies (the flattening of substantive societal differences) and the role of contingencies in explaining Europe's ascent. UCD resolves these problems by integrating structural and contingent factors into a unified explanation: unevenness makes sense of the sociological differences that the revisionists miss, while combination captures the aleatory processes of interactive development overlooked by Eurocentric approaches. In Section II, we examine the structural specificities of European and Asian societies’ development over the longue durée, along with the sociologically generative interactions between them reconceptualized through the perspective of UCD. This allows for the incorporation of ostensibly contingent, “external” factors into the realm of theory.Footnote 5
This sets up the conjunctural analysis offered in Section III, where we explore the multifaceted interaction of “internal” and “external” processes that led to the fall of the Mughal Empire and its colonization by the British. We argue that Britain's transformation from a capitalist to industrial capitalist society was appreciably assisted through the colonization of India. Not only did the exploitation of Indian raw materials and stronghold over their markets provide invaluable inputs to “kick-start” Britain's industrialization, but capturing the Indian landmass afforded the British Empire crucial strategic advantages. In addition to occupying a territorialized dominion at the heart of Asia, Britain obtained a substantial and relatively cheap military force, which it utilized to open up other markets throughout the world, further aiding Britain's industrialization. Britain's colonization of India was therefore a critical conjunctural factor that explains Britain's, and later Europe's, usurping of “the rest.”
RETHINKING THE “RISE OF THE WEST”: ADVANCES AND IMPASSES IN THE REVISIONIST CHALLENGE
Late and Lucky: Contingences, the Eurasian Homogeneity Thesis, and the Great Divergence
In revisionist works there has been an emphasis on the overall homogeneity of “Eurasian development.”Footnote 6 This stems from revisionist attempts to demonstrate the fallacy of traditional accounts of the “rise of the West” conceived in terms of a rigid East-West binary: that Europe and Asia's developmental paths strikingly diverged over the longue durée due to their internal structural attributes. Summarizing the key findings of the revisionist school, Jack Goldstone writes that “(1) most conditions in Europe do not seem broadly different from those in the advanced regions of Asia until relatively recently, ca. 1800; and (2) the later great divergence need not be rooted in great and long-standing prior differences, but could well be the result of small differences and chance events that created oddly exceptional political and cultural conditions not in ‘Europe’ but in small parts of Europe and, much later, in Japan.”Footnote 7
While correctly problematizing Eurocentric claims regarding the uniqueness of the European experience, revisionists nonetheless erase important differences between European and non-Western social structures when explaining the advent of capitalism, modernity, and industrialization. Jack Goody, for example, cautions “against drawing too sharp a contrast between East and West in those features of social organization that could relate to the onset of capitalism, modernization and industrialization” since “economically the distinct qualitative difference between East and West came only with industrialization.”Footnote 8 Similarly, Kenneth Pomeranz writes of the “variety of early modern core regions with roughly comparable levels and trends of development in their everyday economies.”Footnote 9 More radically still, Goldstone claims, “From 1500–1800 the major states of Europe, China, India, and the Ottoman Empire were all experiencing a similar course of advanced organic development, with absolutist bureaucratic states, highly productive agriculture, a sophisticated urban culture, and extensive long-distance trade in both luxuries and daily necessities.”Footnote 10
As laudable as such attempts are for downplaying any narrative of European “exceptionality,” the theoretical drawbacks are immense, to say nothing of the empirical difficulties of sustaining such arguments.Footnote 11 For if one flattens the myriad social structures that made up the early modern world it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to explain the striking divergences in their developmental trajectories.Footnote 12 The point here is not to reinstate any “European exceptionalist” explanation, but rather to highlight how the interactively generated differences between Europe and other societies were key to “Western” ascendancy. As we examine in this article and elsewhere, the very “backwardness” of feudal Europe facilitated the propitious conditions from which capitalism could emerge, while this process was structurally conditioned by Europe's near-constant interaction with more advanced non-Western agents.Footnote 13 With the initial breakthroughs to capitalism made in the Netherlands and England, this led to increasing material disparities—a widening of the competitive gulf—between these societies and others. Nonetheless, the advent of capitalism in Northwestern Europe did not immediately translate into the kind of hierarchical power relation that characterized the nineteenth century. While capitalism offered the productive potential for increased technological innovations (including, significantly, within the military sphere) and superior financial and organizational capacities, the developmental effects were not instant or undifferentiated, but staggered, uneven, and interactively conditioned by opportunities and pressures emanating from non-Western sources.
An account of the origins of capitalism in Northwestern Europe is not enough, in itself, to explain the region's subsequent ascendancy. Rather, capitalism should be conceived as having provided the conditions of possibility for Europe to eventually overcome and dominate their Asian rivals. Joseph Bryant is therefore correct to argue, “The protracted and forcible dominion of the West over the Rest … cannot logically be accounted for on the basis of fundamental similarities between conqueror and conquered, oppressor and oppressed, but must, in the very nature of so inequitable an outcome, register the relational consequences of differences and disparities … as these played out in a coercive contest for land, resources, mastery.”Footnote 14
Without recourse to some form of structural explanation of these diverging paths of development over the longue durée, the revisionists are left to account for the “rise of the West” in terms of pure contingencies and world-historical accidents. In the words of John M. Hobson: “…the rise of the West could indeed be explained almost wholly through contingency.”Footnote 15 Likewise, Goldstone describes the factors that led to Britain's transformation into a modern, industrialized state as the “most freakish of accidents.”Footnote 16 For Pomeranz, the contingent combination of coal and colonies provided Europe with the necessary resources to launch itself into self-sustaining economic growth and escape the labor-intensive path of development.Footnote 17 Consequently, “In place of cumulative, path-dependent lines of causality and densely contextual interdependencies,” Bryant notes, “the revisionist paradigm offers a more episodic and atomistic view of social change, wherein determinant efficacy is vested not with ongoing trajectories and systemic institutional configurations, but with the autonomous play of variables and the re-routings occasioned by extraneous contingencies.”Footnote 18
This is, then, a historical sociological approach that essentially erases the “historical” and “sociological” from the equation as sociohistorical developments are conceived in radically discontinuous terms and sharp breaks, whereby antecedent conditions from which developments usually unfold are entirely displaced. This is not to deny that contingent or fortuitous factors may have aided the process of “catch up” and “overtake” development that occurred in Northwestern Europe. Nevertheless, something deeper—more structural—was also clearly at work.
While the revisionist challenge has marked some important advances over conventional explanations of the “rise of the West,” it nonetheless fails to offer a viable theoretical alternative. It remains beset by the problems of analytical indeterminacies, empirical shortcomings, and a reliance on a purely conjunctural mode of explanation that foregoes a theorization of the sociohistorical processes at work for the play of free-floating contingencies. In the absence of any alternative theorization, the revisionists are unable to fully overturn the prevailing paradigm. Hence, as Bryant concludes: “We need neither a new sociology nor a new history; all that is required is a fully integrative and encompassing historical sociology.”Footnote 19 As demonstrated below, this is what the theory of UCD provides: a more integrative and encompassing international historical sociology.
Uneven and Combined Development and the “Rise of the West”
Recent years have witnessed unprecedented scholarly attention to Leon Trotsky's idea of UCD as a potential resource in theorizing “the international” and, by extension, world history.Footnote 20 For implicit in Trotsky's original formulation of UCD was a reconceptualization of all development as interactive and multilinear, which redefined the very concept and logic of development itself.Footnote 21 Whereas the classical sociological tradition conceptualized “society” in the singular,Footnote 22 Trotsky's conception of development was inscribed with a “more-than-one-society” ontological premise.Footnote 23 So what exactly is the importance of UCD for explaining the “rise of the West”?
The significance of UCD is three-fold. First, it uniquely incorporates a distinctly intersocietal dimension of causality into its basic conception of development, and reconceives it as interactive, co-constitutive, and multilinear. Developmental outcomes are always the composite effect of a multiplicity of spatially diverse, nonlinear causal chains that combine in any given conjuncture.Footnote 24 Those aspects of world-historical development—alterity, mimesis, hybridity, and so forth—that revisionist and postcolonial scholars highlight are then rendered theoretically explicable in substantive historical and sociological terms. Such developmental characteristics are lifted from mere descriptive statements of otherwise arbitrary instantiations of societal differences into explanatory factors. Second, by reformulating “the international” as an “object of social theory—organically contained … within a conception of social development itself,”Footnote 25 UCD allows for the theoretical internalization of contingent, “external” factors and variegated developmental outcomes. Third, UCD allows for a holistic account of the “rise of the West” and “decline of the East” as interconnected and mutually constitutive that brings the role of “the international” to the forefront of social-theoretical explanation. This goes some way in breaking out of the analytical stalemate between “internalist” and “externalist” modes of explanations that characterize existing debates.Footnote 26 In demonstrating these points, the following offers a schematic exposition of the theory's two main concepts: unevenness and combination.
Unevenness denotes developmental variations both within and between societies, along with the attendant spatial differentiations between them. The starting point of analysis is then an empirical observation about the basic ontology of human development: that a multiplicity of societies varying in size, culture, political organization, and socioeconomic system is a general feature of human history—its “most general law.”Footnote 27 From this empirical observation, one may examine both the quantitative (multiple societies) and qualitative (different societies) character of development.Footnote 28 But rather than simply describing two static conditions of such development (multiplicity—difference), uneven development captures how their dialectical interaction formed the basic socio-relational texture of the historical process, wherein the shifting identity of any particular society accumulated and crystallized.Footnote 29
Developmentally differentiated societies are thus conceived as constantly impacting upon one another's (re)production, instigating various forms of combined development. Hence, while specific spatio-temporal patterns of socio-cultural diversity may be contingent, “the fact of this diversity itself is not.”Footnote 30 That is, when diverse and differentially situated societies interact—whether through cooperation, conflict, or cross-cultural exchange—this “results in particular outcomes that cannot be anticipated in advance and are therefore ‘contingent.’”Footnote 31 This international dimension of development imbues the historical process with a highly unpredictable, contingent character that generates widely diverse effects. As such, the dynamics and modalities of societal difference should not be visualized as the result of pure essentialisms—an inherent property of a society's endogenous development—but rather “dependent on a whole web of ‘necessary but contingent’ interactions.”Footnote 32
The indeterminacy of such “contingent” outcomes can therefore be reconceptualized as an intrinsic property of development itself. As such, UCD provides a theoretical means of explicating the differentiated forms of agency and outcomes emergent from these “necessary but contingent” interactions, which contradicts any predetermined, linear interpretation of causality and development. In these ways, “contingency” and “necessity” can be brought into a more historically-sensitive theoretical framework that goes beyond conjunctural and structural-based explanations of the “rise of the West.”
Combination refers to the ways in which the internal relations of a society are determined by their interactions with other developmentally differentiated societies. Such interactions, in turn, result in the intermingling and fusion of the “foreign” and “native,” “advanced” and “backward,” within a social formation, while ontologically blurring the analytical distinctions between such categories.Footnote 33 As with unevenness, combination holds a strong empirical referent: multiple societies do not simply exist hermetically side-by-side, but interactively coexist, which by necessity (and with varying degree) determines their collective social and geopolitical development.Footnote 34 For example, in Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, we find numerous processes through which the more “backward” Russian state attempted to developmentally “catch up” with a more advanced Western Europe by making use of their preexisting developmental achievements. The “privilege” of Russia's backwardness thereby entailed a “skipping” of stages, which ensured that attempts at catch up did not follow the same paths of antecedent developments.Footnote 35 In the context of debates on the “rise of the West,” this is a particularly important point since up until the mid-thirteenth century, it was those social formations that would come to make up “Europe” that were the least developed in the emerging “world-system” of increasing economic integration and cultural contacts.Footnote 36
Arising late on the periphery of this world-system, European development had the most to gain from the new intersocietal links being forged, particularly through the diffusion of new technologies and “resource portfolios” spreading from “East” to “West.” The principles of mathematics, navigational inventions, arts of war, and military technologies all originated in the more advanced “East” before passing to the “backward” West.Footnote 37 This enabled European states to acquire the means to revolutionize their own societies in much more time-intensive ways than had the original purveyors. Later developing states did not need to start from scratch but could instead acquire and refine the most advanced technologies and organizational forms pioneered by earlier developers. In this respect, European societies benefitted from a “privilege of backwardness” which was a key precondition for their transition to capitalism and subsequent global ascendency.
While the earlier and more developed tributary empires in Asia enjoyed certain “advantages of progressiveness” for a time, these advantages would eventually turn into strategic liabilities as less developed societies came to reap the “privilege of backwardness” concomitant to processes of developmental “catch-up.” As Andre Gunder Frank writes,
The common global economic expansion since 1400 benefited the Asian centers earlier and more than marginal Europe, Africa, and the Americas. However, this very economic benefit turned into a growing absolute and relative disadvantage for one Asian region after another in the late eighteenth century.… Europe and then also North America … were able to take advantage of this pan-Asian crisis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.… That may have afforded some “advantage of backwardness.”Footnote 38
In this sense, the qualitative unevenness of development afforded late-comers particular strategic advantages. This was neither an automatic nor predestined process, but one where conjunctural and structural factors and agency were key. Below, we historically unpack these structural and conjunctural combinations as key components in the “rise of the West.” First we examine the structural condition of Europe's feudal crisis before moving on to explore the conjunctural specificity of British colonization of India.
STRUCTURE AND CONJUNCTURE IN THE “RISE OF THE WEST”
Feudalism, Merchants, and the States System in Europe
So far we have emphasized the need to widen the analysis of the “rise of the West” to conditions and determinations that emerged outside of Europe in order to dislodge the familiar Eurocentric claims of some innate European dynamism. There is, however, one specific structural attribute unique to late medieval and early modern European development that requires further investigation since it provides some important clues into Europe's eventual attainment of a “comparative advantage” in the making of war and production: that is, the decentralized and politically fragmented nature of European feudalism that gave rise to a fiercely competitive multi-state system. Indeed, the ferociously conflictual character of the European states system has often been cited as a crucial factor in the conventional literature on the “rise of the West,” particularly among neo-Weberians holding to a “geopolitical competition model” of development.Footnote 39
The main problem with these accounts emphasizing interstate competition is the implicit syllogism that underlies the model's causal sequencing: “political multiplicity—anarchy—competition.” The technological and organizational innovations in European state-building practices that neo-Weberians derive from the persistent “whip” of geopolitical competition takes for granted precisely what needs to be explained: why was the European states system so competitive and war-prone? Neo-Weberians smuggle in the highly problematic (neo-)realist assumption that any anarchic system of multiple political units will automatically induce geopolitical competition, rivalry, and war. However, this only works if “we assume the anthropologically questionable idea of man as a natural power-maximizer or a psychologizing rational-choice model, where risk minimization creates an inherent security dilemma.”Footnote 40
Moreover, by emphasizing the relatively undifferentiated effects of military rivalry on European state formation, there is a partial convergence between neo-Weberians and neorealism over the role of geopolitical competition as a Darwinian selection mechanism sorting the weak from the strong.Footnote 41 Yet European state responses to the universal problem of war that faced them in the late medieval and early modern epochs were strikingly different.Footnote 42 What we need, then, is a theory that organically combines both “sociological” and “geopolitical” factors in a unified conception of development. This is what the theory of UCD offers as the historically-specific sources, dynamics, and scales of unevenness and combination must be grounded in historical social structures. What then explains the particularly war-prone nature of the European states system and were its effects beneficial to processes of state and military “modernization”?
The answer lies in Europe's feudal relations of production. At first sight, this might seem like an illicit return to the kind of internalist Eurocentric theorizing we have been trying to avoid. Yet, when we widen our analysis beyond Europe we recognize that while feudal relations, and the geopolitical system emerging therewith, were indeed unique to Europe, their technological, military, and ideological components all bore distinctly intersocietal origins. Indeed, the rise of feudalism in Europe was the consequence of the “catastrophic collision of two dissolving anterior modes of production”: namely, the “decomposing slave mode of production” of the Roman Empire and the “deformed primitive modes of production of the Germanic invaders which survived in their new homelands” after the conquests.Footnote 43 The developmental trajectory of Europe's Germanic forest “tribes” converged with the remnants of the ancient Roman Empire to generate an entirely novel, synthesized form of sedentary society hitherto unknown in human history—feudalism. Moreover, the recombination of the “disintegrated elements” of these two anterior modes of production—the “Romano–Germanic synthesis”—into feudalism proper, was “itself a product of the constant and eventually unbearable pressure of the nomadic Huns on the Germanic world of the Teutonic tribes.”Footnote 44
In addition, the nomadic-sedentary interactions generated by the Mongol Empire's expansion into Europe and the accompanying spread of the Black Death impinged upon and (re)directed the trajectory and nature of European development.Footnote 45 Yet such “extra-European” dimensions of feudalism's development reached far beyond these initial nomadic-sedentary interactions. For not only was feudalism the result of new technologies (notably, the stirrup) diffusing from Asia to Europe, but the ideological underpinnings of the system (Christendom) was continually evolving in response to the Ottoman “Islamic threat.”Footnote 46 As Hobson observes, Christendom was in many respects imagined as “Catholic Christian in contradistinction to the Islamic Middle East.”Footnote 47 What is more, it was only through the conjunctural combination of the Euro-Ottoman conflict with the Euro-Amerindian encounter that Christendom was destroyed as the defining normative order, which cleared the way for an emergent quasi-secular identity of “Europe.”Footnote 48 As such, it would be a mistake to conceive of feudalism and its crisis as solely European developments.Footnote 49
While keeping these intersocietal, extra-European sources of the making of European feudalism in mind, we must now return to the original question we set out to address: how did feudalism generate such a competitive and war-prone geopolitical system?
In the absence of the kind of unprecedented economic dynamism afforded by capitalist relations, war was an expedient mode of expanding the surpluses available to the ruling classes under feudalism. Feudal relations offered few incentives for either peasant or lord to continuously and systematically introduce more productive technologies, particularly since peasants had direct access to their means of production.Footnote 50 The result was that lordly interests lay in extracting more surpluses by directly coercive means. This could be done by pushing the peasants to the limit of their subsistence or by seizing the demesnes of other lords. The latter course resulted in a process of “political accumulation” amongst the lords themselves—a war-driven process of state formation.Footnote 51
This condition meant that the aristocratic ruling class required the sufficient political, ideological, and military means to exploit the peasantry and extract surpluses for lordly consumption.Footnote 52 However, unlike the tributary Asian empires, these means were not controlled by, or concentrated in, a centralized and unified state, but instead dispersed across the nobility.Footnote 53 The dispersion of coercive capabilities meant that political authority in Europe was fragmented, parcelized, and therefore highly competitive, with heightened intra-lordly struggles taking place over territories within and outside of feudal “states.”Footnote 54 In short, military competition and war were more structurally pronounced within Europe than within tributary empires in Asia.
The lords left standing at the end of the process of geopolitical accumulation formed the basis for the absolutist state. Representing a “redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination,”Footnote 55 the absolutist states system remained driven by the systemic imperatives of geopolitical accumulation, which explains the endemic state of warfare that marked the early modern epoch. The uneven and combined development of feudal-absolutist Europe was thus rooted in this territorially-expansionist dynamic of geopolitical accumulation that entailed a deep systemic pressure (Trotsky's “whip of external necessity”) for European states to continually innovate the means of violence. Over time this had the unintended effect of generating military and armament industries pioneering distinctly capitalist relations.Footnote 56
Since European powers had an interest in the conquest or control of lucrative overseas territories, this also meant that the dynamic of geopolitical accumulation spawned significant technological and organizational innovations, particularly in the military sphere. The reason was due to the relative backwardness of European feudalism which was, in contrast to the tributary empires in Asia,Footnote 57 dependent on wealth drawn from merchants and financiers to either fund geopolitical accumulation (in the case of Habsburg Spain and Austria) or to reproduce the ruling class itself (as with city-states such as Genoa and Venice).Footnote 58 Because of the fragmented and parcelized character of political power, Europeans who went to war required extraordinary financing outside of day-to-day ruling-class reproduction. In order to raise armies, European rulers borrowed from international banking houses or asked wealthy sections of society for contributions, either in terms of military support or taxes.Footnote 59 A by-product of European war-making was an attendant rise in the political autonomy, power, and influence of merchants, who enjoyed increasing degrees of representation in state decision-making structures.Footnote 60 As a result, the state was sensitive to, or at the behest of, merchant interests, wherein state resources, especially military, were deployed in order to obtain and maintain commercial advantages.
The key difference between the functioning and sociopolitical position of merchants within feudal Europe and the tributary Asian empires was, then, the structural dependence of feudal governments on merchants for war-financing and reproduction. This gave merchants a relatively stronger position of social and juridical autonomy. European governments often provided merchants with considerable resources and state backing, most dramatically exemplified in the Dutch Republic where the VOC represented the institutional fusion of political and mercantile interests in which “[c]ompany shareholders and members of government, were often one and the same.”Footnote 61 By contrast, in Mughal India state managers exhibited an attitude of “indifferent neutrality” towards merchants’ maritime activities.Footnote 62 There was very little oppression of merchant activities, but neither was there much support.Footnote 63
The overseas orientation of European expansionism led to a number of significant military innovations, particularly in the naval field. Over time, this provided Europeans with a small but decisive edge in the means of violence vis-à-vis the primarily land-based tributary empires in Asia, such as the Mughals. We therefore partially agree with Ronald Findlay's assessment that “it was the long history of naval rivalry in the North Sea and the Atlantic that developed the sailing ship as a floating gun platform, a combination of the two technologies” that later enabled the Portuguese, Dutch, and British to dominate the Indian Ocean and South Pacific.Footnote 64 It was these latter two burgeoning Dutch and British merchant capitalist empires that came to attain a critical military advantage on the seas. “Mediterranean naval techniques and conceptions”—where the Ottomans were dominant—would prove ineffective in competing with the new, Atlantic-based sea powers of Holland and England.Footnote 65
To reiterate, the point is not to claim that the Northwestern European powers were somehow cleverer and more resourceful in the arts of naval warfare than the tributary empires, but rather that there was simply very little systemic incentive or compulsion for these empires to make sustained investments and innovations in naval technologies past a certain point. As Findlay points out, “A very significant difference between West and East appears to be that long-distance trade was a vital interest to commercial city-states like Venice and Genoa, and also to smaller nation-states such as Portugal and later Holland and England, while the Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern states drew their revenue mainly from the taxation of land.”Footnote 66
Moreover, the variegated character of external threats facing European states compared to the tributary empires, as well as the differential nature of warfare, had important effects on the types of military strategies and innovations states’ focused on. In late medieval and early modern Europe, there was little possibility for a single empire or state to subdue the entire continent, however much various states tried. This lent itself to a more unstable and fluid geopolitical environment in which military competition and war were a near-constant feature of European life over many centuries. Consequently, European states were in almost ceaseless conflict with one another, which forced each “to adopt quickly any [military] innovation by their rivals.”Footnote 67
One of the primary reasons why geopolitical conflict and war in this period was so persistent in Europe was that the feudal ruling classes were themselves under serious threat. Feudalism had virtually exhausted all possibilities for further internal expansion, precipitating a sharp fall in seigniorial revenues, which was further exacerbated by the plague-induced demographic crisis spread from Mongol expansion into Europe. This lead to a dramatic rise in peasant revolts and class conflicts more generally.Footnote 68 This perilous situation was continually exacerbated and “overdetermined” by the persistent geopolitical-ideological threat of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 69
Under such conditions, a near continuous state of war—including both intra-ruling class struggles and the incessant efforts to crush peasant rebellions—was a sociological “necessity.” And since European states “did not have the resources of an agrarian empire in cheap manpower” they were unable “to substitute ‘quantity for quality.’”Footnote 70 By the early modern period, this resulted in an unprecedented dynamism in the military sector which “could maintain productivity growth for centuries, a feat virtually unknown elsewhere in preindustrial economies.”Footnote 71 The rapid growth in Europe's military sectors was perhaps a key reason, along with the development of stronger fiscal and organizational capacities,Footnote 72 for Europe's later successes in overseas conquests. In these ways, the overall conditions of uneven and combined development emanating from both within and without Europe created the propitious “geo-social” environment in which specific countries, notably the Dutch and English, could emerge and consolidate themselves as capitalist states.Footnote 73
Over the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Mughal Empire was, by contrast, considerably weakened by the incessant interstate wars in Asia, along with insurgency and piracy within the region. The Mughals had to contend with both the “conventional threat” posed by the invading armies of the Durrani Empire from Afghanistan and the “unconventional warfare launched by the Marathas.”Footnote 74 That these geopolitical pressures did not translate into the kind of self-sustaining technological military dynamism witnessed in Europe was primarily due to the different types of geopolitical challengers faced by the Europeans and Mughal Empire, which dictated that very different military strategies and technologies be developed and used. Since most of Europe lacked any significant nomadic threat during this period, wars were predominately fought using foot-soldiers. European military innovations thus focused on the tactics and weaponry of infantry, which gradually arrived at a stage where it could successfully defeat the horse-based troopers and tactics of the Mughal army, which were more suitable to fighting the Mughal's traditional nomadic challengers. It was only within this geopolitical context in Europe that “the military revolution involving gunpowder weaponry made sense.” With increasing levels of standardization and other seventeenth-century military innovations (e.g., bayonets, flintlocks, and prefab paper cartridges), the military balance “invisibly tilted … in favour of European infantry.”Footnote 75
While Britain had by the mid-seventeenth century come to attain a slight advantage in fiscal-military capabilities vis-à-vis the Mughal Empire, their ability to colonize the Indian landmass was appreciably aided by the external pressures and internal divisions ravaging the empire. The Mughals were particularly vulnerable to a European intervention at this time because the various contending regional rulers were unwilling or unable to unite against the Western threat. The British were thereby able to play one ruler against another, which facilitated its capturing Plassey and other regions.Footnote 76
Unevenness Combined: North-South Interactions in the “Rise of the West”
These points go some way in turning on thier heads typical Eurocentric conceptions of the more “backward” and “stagnant” tributary empires of Asia, since it was the less-developed nature of European feudal societies—their very reproductive weaknesses—that made them more susceptible to potential capitalist breakthroughs.Footnote 77 However, in order to fully subvert Eurocentric accounts, we must move beyond a comparative historical sociology of the differences between feudal and tributary systems, and examine how their interactive developmental dynamics produced the structural and conjunctural conditions enabling Europe's global ascendency. We see here again the operation of uneven development as demonstrated by the “privilege of backwardness” granted to feudal Europe and “penalty of progressiveness” befalling the tributary empires of Asia. In the geopolitical interactions between feudal and tributary societies, it was the latter that presented the “whip of external necessity” to the former.
Indeed, the various state-backed forms of commercial expansion noted above were dependent upon the geopolitical conditions generated by Europe's constant interaction with non-European societies. Over the “Long Thirteenth Century” (1210–1350), the Pax Mongolica lowered commercial protection and transaction costs along Asian overland trade routes and thereby provided European merchants an opening to take over the preexisting trade and exchange links of the “world system.”Footnote 78 Then, during the sixteenth century, the capitulations given to particular European states by the Ottomans and the concomitant economic blockade they imposed upon Europe resulted in a structural shift away from the geopolitical and commercial centrality of the Mediterranean and toward the Atlantic. At the same time, Ottoman military pressure on the Habsburg Empire and Papacy acted as a geopolitical “buffer,” which provided the propitious conditions (“isolation”) that enabled the modern state-building activities in Holland and processes of primitive accumulation in England.Footnote 79 The American “discoveries” in turn resulted in hugely significant effects on trade and production by injecting large quantities of bullion into a European economy increasingly oriented around the deployment of finance and capital.Footnote 80 Moreover, the emergent forms of territorialized state sovereignty first forged in the Atlantic crucible would radiate back to the imperial core in Europe, forming a crucial step toward the formation of the modern system of territorially defined states.Footnote 81 These territorial sovereign states were subsequently taken over and reconstituted by the capitalist revolutions in Holland, England, and France that stretched from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.Footnote 82 Finally, through the colonial activities of merchant companies (specifically, the Dutch and English East India Companies) and slave traders, communities across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean littoral were incorporated into an integrated system of exploitation and extraction. In these ways, the value appropriated from a globally dispersed mass of labor-power constituted a key input for the formation and reproduction of European capital.Footnote 83 Europe's “unique” developmental trajectory out of feudalism and into capitalism, assisting its rise to global preeminence, was therefore rooted in and conditioned by extra-European determinations and agents. It was the combination of these multiple spatio-temporal vectors of development, many of which were non-European in origin, which explains the so-called European “miracle.”
These conditions of uneven and combined development emanating from within and without Europe created a favorable “geo-social” environment in which specific countries could emerge and consolidate themselves as capitalist states: territorialized sovereign centers of capital accumulation.Footnote 84 In these ways, ostensibly “sociological” and “geopolitical”—“structural” and “contingent”—factors interacted and entwined in setting certain European states on the path to acquire what would become a decisive comparative advantage in the means of violence and in their fiscal and organizational capacities,Footnote 85 particularly once these capacities were harnessed to dynamically industrial-capitalist social structures. Moreover, Northwestern European states had attained this comparative advantage before 1800, by which time they had already “conquered some 35 per cent of the globe” whilst controlling “lucrative trade routes as far away as Asia.”Footnote 86 Thus while the advent of industrialization “helps to explain how the Europeans extended their control over the total land area of the globe from 35 percent in 1800 to 84 percent in 1914, it cannot explain how they managed to acquire that initial 35 percent.”Footnote 87 What is more, that initial 35 percent was in fact crucial for conquering much of the other territories, as exemplified by the Indian case that we will examine below.
To put all of this in more theoretical terms, we can see how “unevenness” (in terms of both the divergent development between a feudal-cum-capitalist “West” and tributary “East” and the differential forms of their respective geopolitical systems), and “combination” (operating at the level of geopolitical interactions and competition facilitating military and organizational innovations) were crucial explanatory factors in the “rise of the West.” While neo-Weberians are correct to single out geopolitical competition as significant, their inability to root this factor in a stronger conception of social structures and examine the differential forms and effects of military competition leads them into the well-worn (neo)realist cul-de-sac of ahistorical reification and state homogenization. By contrast, the theory of UCD solves both these problems: it offers a theoretical explanation of geopolitical competition and its effects that remains sensitive to substantive societal differences whilst incorporating a distinctly “geopolitical” causal component into its conception of development, thereby eliding the problem of reification. But to fully understand the sources of Western domination we must first look at the causes of the Mughal Empire's collapse and its colonization by Britain.
THE CONJUNCTURAL MOMENT OF “OVERTAKING”: BRITAIN'S COLONIZATION OF INDIA
The Significance of India's Colonization to the “Rise of the West”
Britain's colonization of India has been underappreciated in “rise of the West” debates,Footnote 88 which have largely centered around the origins of industrialization in Europe and, in particular, the question of why Britain was first to industrialize. Conceived as such, the prior history of British colonization is relegated to a secondary explanatory status, if it is examined at all. Yet not only was Mughal India the first of the great tributary empires in Asia to “fall” to the Europeans, but it also provided the greatest material and strategic benefits of all the colonized states. Not only did Britain appropriate from India the material inputs (notably, textiles and cotton) and capital crucial to start its industrialization, it also extracted a relatively cheap and sizeable military force that assisted the British in forcibly opening other markets around the world.
Thus even the more restrictive question as to the causes of Britain's industrialization within the debates have been both temporally and spatially misplaced. Temporally so, in the sense that in order to explain Britain's industrial ascent we must first look at the preceding epoch of British colonialism in both the Atlantic and India which, in turn, means that our spatial optic must be widened to include an analysis of these extra-European regions’ contributions to Britain's industrialization. Indeed, the Indian economy was critical to the “formation and consolidation of a UK-centered system of accumulation,” particularly through India's role in providing a continual balance-of-payments surplus for the empire.Footnote 89 Britain earned huge annual surpluses from its empire's transactions with India (and through it, China), which allowed Britain to sustain substantial deficits with the United States, Germany, and its white Dominion states. This surplus “became the pivot of the enlarged reproduction of Britain's world scale processes of capital accumulation and the City's mastery of world finance.”Footnote 90
In 1750, India produced approximately 25 percent of the world's manufacturing output. By 1800, India's share had already dropped to less than a fifth, by 1860 to less than a tenth, and by 1880 to under 3 percent.Footnote 91 It is therefore no stretch of the imagination to claim that Britain's industrial ascent was to a large degree predicated on India's forced deindustrialization.Footnote 92 And if so, it is then no mere coincidence that Britain's colonization of India preceded the start of Britain's industrialization by some twenty years.
The massive contribution of the British Indian army to Britain's overall strategic position has also been largely overlooked in debates. It numbered approximately 160,000 in 1900 and later, during the Second World War, reached nearly two million and made a substantial contribution to Britain's war efforts.Footnote 93 According to David Washbrook, the British Indian army was of great significance not only to the “rise of the West,” but also in the development of capitalism as a global system, as the Indian contingent operated as
the army of British imperialism, formal and informal, which operated worldwide, opening up markets to the products of the industrial revolution, subordinating labor forces to the domination of capital and bringing to “benighted” civilizations the enlightened values of Christianity and Rationality.… Moreover, because the British Empire was the principal agency through which the world system functioned in this era, the Indian army was in a real sense the major coercive force behind the internationalization of industrial capitalism.Footnote 94
Similarly, Geoffrey Parker writes of how, “The military resources of India, once under European control, were to prove decisive for the further rise of the West. For the Europeans now possessed the means to challenge even their most powerful opponents. The Western armies that invaded China in 1839–42, 1859–60, and 1900 all included important Indian contingents.… ‘It was as if the British had subjugated the Indian peninsula simply in order to use its resources against China.’”Footnote 95
An additional underappreciated factor in Britain's ascent over Asia resulting from India's colonization was Britain's resourceful appropriation and adaptation of Indian military technologies, particularly the Mysorean rocket, which came to play a crucial role in its decimation of the Imperial Chinese Navy in 1841. The rocket was first encountered by forces of the East India Company at the Battle of Pollilur in 1780, where the British suffered a shattering defeat at the hands of the Indian Kingdom of Mysore.Footnote 96 In an exemplary, if overlooked, case of a combined development, the British subsequently took the original Mysorean rocket designs and re-modelled them with their own industrial engineering techniques.
The resulting Mysorean-cum-Congreve rocket was later deployed against Chinese forces with devastating effects at the Second Battle of Chuenpee (7 January 1841). The case of the Mysorean rocket thus represents one of the many “non-endogenous sources of British imperial power,” suggesting that the period between 1780 and 1840 “was critical to Britain's ‘leap-frogging’ over the hitherto more advanced Eurasian polities.”Footnote 97 This development took place over the course of decades, and not centuries as traditionally assumed,Footnote 98 and it was fundamentally predicated upon Britain's colonization of the Indian subcontinent. In this respect, Britain was not an early, but “late-developer.”Footnote 99
The Uneven and Combined Development of the Mughal Empire
To comprehend the reasons for the fall of the Mughal Empire, we must first trace the nomadic lineages of Mughal state-formation. Though the empire's foundation is typically associated with the invasion of northern India in 1526 by Babur, a Chaghatai Turkish ruler descended from the Timurid dynasty of Turco-Mongol origin, the “prehistory of the empire dates back to Babur's great-great-grandfather Timur's invasion of north India in 1398.”Footnote 100 Though not formally nomadic, the conquering founders of the Mughal Empire “boasted a strong nomadic background” while seeking to maintain and reinvent “their nomadic outlook and organization.”Footnote 101
A number of scholars have therefore referred to the Mughal polity as a “post-nomadic” empireFootnote 102 that grafted nomadic organizational and social forms onto an agrarian sedentary society. Hence, while the Mughal Empire has often been conceived as a variant of the tributary mode of production,Footnote 103 it was nonetheless over-determined by the nomadic-sedentary interactions that originally produced the empire resulting in the amalgamation of agrarian sedentary and pastoral nomadic relations—a particular instantiation of a premodern form of uneven and combined development.Footnote 104 Having “emerged at the frontier of settled and nomadic worlds,” we find in the Mughal Empire a “dual society not only based on two different economic systems, but also on two different social structures and two different cultures.”Footnote 105 This nomadic-sedentary amalgamation was mediated by and articulated through the Mughals’ military-administration (mansabdāri) system and corresponding imperial revenue (jāgīrdār) system which, through their intersocietal (re)production, resulted in the absence of secure and stable private property relations in land.Footnote 106
After having successfully conquered the Indian subcontinent, Mughal rulers were faced with a dual problem common to all the post-nomadic empires of the period: how to effectively transform their capable but relatively small war-bands that had facilitated their conquest into a much larger imperial army that could sustain them in power, whilst co-opting real or potential internal and external enemies.Footnote 107 As a response to these challenges, Emperor Akbar (1556–1605) established the mansabdāri—an elaborate military-administrative system that became one of the central foundations of the empire. According to Jos Gommans, the system was an adaptation of the nomadic concept of nökör (the Mongolian term for the personal following of the ruler), which expanded and rearticulated the “supra-tribal principle of military service and loyalty.”Footnote 108
The mansabdāri system functioned to transform (semi-)nomadic warlords into a mobile state bureaucratic class in charge of ruling a sedentary society.Footnote 109 It acted as a recruitment strategy to entice and absorb independent military entrepreneurs into the fold of the imperial apparatus, as the mansabdārs “not only served as military commanders but also represented the ruling class of the empire at large.”Footnote 110 The Emperor's granting of mansabs incorporated these military entrepreneurs into a flexible imperial hierarchy with cost-based salaries partly financed in cash in part through the imperial treasury but mainly through the assignment of jāgīrs—the Mughal equivalent of the revenue system of the so-called iqta that had emerged under the Buyids in the eleventh century. Similar to the iqta system, the granting of a jāgīr bestowed the holder the right to collect revenue from an assigned piece of land on a temporary basis in exchange for certain military or administrative services.Footnote 111 The primary obligation of the mansabdārs was the maintenance of standing armies and particularly cavalry contingents which the emperor could call upon for the imperial army in times of war.Footnote 112 In their assigned jāgīrs, they collected land revenues and other taxes from the peasantry, who were nominally free, cultivating the land on behalf of the emperor who was allotted a set share of such revenues. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, approximately half of the agricultural product was extracted from the peasantry in the form of this imperial land revenue.
In order to counter the tendency for jāgīrdārs to take local roots and develop into feudal-like lords with their own landed estates and armed contingents,Footnote 113 the Mughals divorced them from any permanent rights to the land while constantly transferring them to different territorial assignments after short periods of time (usually three or four years).Footnote 114 The jāgīrdārs and mansabdārs were, then, not equivalent to feudal lords exercising direct personal control over their subjects. Rather, they approximated more of a “state class” that was circulated throughout the empire by a centralized political apparatus to extract surpluses—as tax or output—from a peasantry they did not personally control.Footnote 115 This permanent circulation of mansabdārs, in office and in jāgīrs, reflected and reinforced the nomadic foundations of Mughal state and military power, which relied upon the nomadic cavalry/mounted archer-based mode of warfareFootnote 116 consisting of a highly-mobile, deracinated elite of mansabdārs (what Joseph Fletcher calls “surrogate nomads”)Footnote 117 loyally serving the emperor but emphatically detached from him.Footnote 118 The Mughals’ reliance upon the highly-mobile nomadic mode of warfare, institutionalized through the mansabdāri system, in turn subverted the formalization of private property relations in land, although from the mid-seventeenth century a process of gentrifying the military apparatus began to undermine the system.
Additionally, in order to tap into India's vast resources of agrarian production, the Mughals used the mansabdāri systems to co-opt the powerful landed gentry (zamīndārs), who held significant power on the local level and mediated the payment of the land revenue.Footnote 119 The zamīndārs were a distinct class of potentates with varying claims to the shares in the produce of land and/or part of the land revenue. A key point of potential conflict between the imperial authorities and the zamīndārs revolved around the size of the latter's share. “The struggle between the imperial administration and the zamīndārs, breaking out frequently into armed conflict,” Irfan Habib writes, “was thus an important feature of the political situation.”Footnote 120
In their attempts to co-opt the zamīndārs into the mansabdāri system, the Mughals aimed to broaden their perspectives beyond their provincial sedentary background. Over the long term, however, this proved unsuccessful as an increasing number of zamīndārs became mansabdārs without giving up their local roots. At the same time, more and more mansabdārs were transforming themselves into “settled agrarian lordships, thus becoming zamindari landlords themselves.”Footnote 121 Consequently, from the mid-seventeenth century this zamīndārzation or gentrification of the “military apparatus engendered the long, drawn-out crisis of empire that continued into the eighteenth century.”Footnote 122 The empire's unravelling was thus rooted in its “dual structure,” constituted by the combination of agrarian sedentary and nomadic social forms that were mediated by and crystalized through the mansabdāri and jāgīrdārs systems.
Indeed, the zamīndār-led Maratha Revolt of the late seventeenth century was undoubtedly the most significant of the armed conflicts between the zamīndārs and the imperial authorities of the period.Footnote 123 While the conflict was in part a result of the shifting balance of power in favor of the zamīndārs vis-à-vis the Mughal emperor and his mansabdārs during the latter half of the seventeenth century, it also increased imperial pressure on the zamīndārs’ agrarian resources, which only exacerbated their discontent.Footnote 124 As a result of the Maratha Revolt, there emerged a distinct class of feudal-like lords, now separate and autonomous from the Mughals, who wielded significant powers over their subjects in occupied lands. “Unlike the Mughal jāgīrdārs,” Fukazawa writes, “the big assignees in the Deccan Muslim kingdoms exercised wide administrative powers in their assigned territories, which tended to become hereditary, unchecked by the central authority.”Footnote 125 This was a case wherein certain features of one mode of production (feudalism) emerged from and combined with the existing dominant mode of production (tributary), all the while being over-determined by the empire's nomadic lineages and intersocietal interactions.Footnote 126 Indeed, the Mughal-Maratha conflict was itself rooted within the amalgamated nomadic-sedentary structures of the empire, from which emerged a “struggle between ‘gentry’ groups, who were striving to build a stable and sedentary order of towns, markets and settled agriculture, and ‘warrior’ groups who were part of the old tradition of nomadic pastoralism.”Footnote 127
The importance of the rise of the Maratha challenge cannot be overstated since it “constituted the greatest single force responsible for the downfall of the Mughal Empire.”Footnote 128 The Mughal wars in the Deccan (1681–1707) against the Maratha were a major drain on imperial institutions and resources and eventually destabilized Mughal rule throughout its territories.Footnote 129 As imperial demand for revenue increased, so too did the exploitative pressures on the peasantry as the wars drew key resources out of the agricultural economy whilst leading to a considerable destruction of existing capital.Footnote 130 To understand how this translated into widespread peasant unrest and flight, we must first examine more closely the contradictions of the jāgīr system.
Empire Unravelling: Class Conflict, War, and Agricultural Decline
The land revenue system created by the Mughal Empire was perhaps unequalled by any of its contemporaries. It far surpassed the revenue structures in Europe in both its scale of operation (the total land area, population, and resources controlled) and its organizational sophistication and cohesion (the use of paid officials and formal administrative mechanisms). In contrast to the French kings of the ancien régime, the Mughal imperial authorities did not generally have to resort to private capital, short-term loans, and intermediary financiers to fund their war efforts except in the case of the wars against the Maratha.Footnote 131 Nonetheless, despite its organizational scale and sophistication, the revenue system over time developed a number of problems that came to hinder the overall functioning of the Mughal economy.
Beginning in the time of Akbar (1568), a practice was established whereby jāgīrdārs, who held no permanent rights to the land, were transferred to new territorial assignments every three to four years. This kept in check the tendency for them to develop into feudal-like lords. However, it also had a number of unintended negative consequences for the agrarian economy, which intensified over time. For as the jāgīrdārs were being continually transferred to different territorial assignment every few years, their short-term interest was not necessarily in increasing or even maintaining agricultural growth and productivity, but rather in maximizing the exploitation of the peasantry in their assigned territorial domain, thereby subverting the long-term objectives of the imperial authority.Footnote 132
This meant that a tendency toward the absolute “maximization of exploitation” was inherent to the Mughal revenue system to the point of destabilizing the entire agrarian economy.Footnote 133 Moreover, as military contingents were maintained by the mansabdārs out of the revenues of the jāgīrs, the imperial authorities tended to set revenue demand at a high enough level to secure the greatest amount of military strength for the empire. Yet if the revenue rate was set too high it would leave the peasant without enough subsistence to survive, and revenue collection could soon fall in absolute terms.Footnote 134
With the costly wars with the Maratha straining imperial revenues in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, increased revenue demands pressed harder still on the lower peasantry. For the Deccan campaigns were a very different story from earlier ones, when the Mughal Empire had expanded into wealthy regions and thereby recouped the costs of their conquests. In Deccan campaigns, Mughal military expenditures consistently outpaced revenues and office-holders saw their incomes decline. The Mughal state thus sought to step up its “revenue demands which in turn stirred up resentment in large parts of the empire that, when coupled with religious and political rivalries, manifested itself in the emergence of popular movements such as the Sikhs in the Punjab or the Marathas in Central India.”Footnote 135
This decline in noble incomes was in part the result of the intersocietal reproduction of the mansabdāri system itself, which had always operated through a parallel process of imperial expansion and incorporation.Footnote 136 During the Deccan wars, Aurangzeb awarded lucrative mansabs as a “carrot” to induce warlords and former officers of the Deccan Muslim sultanates to defect to the Mughal camp. However, the incorporation of Marathas and other Dakhinis into the imperial apparatus strained the already limited resources of the empire.Footnote 137 This in turn alienated other long-established mansabdārs, who competed with new entrants for the empire's dwindling resources exacerbated by reduced yields of jāgīrs throughout the Deccan and other war-affected regions.Footnote 138 In the second half of the seventeenth century mansabs were therefore becoming much less attractive since mansabdārs were increasingly unable to realize their salary rates from their assigned jāgīrs.Footnote 139 Moreover, because the Marathas were already zamīndārs, their incorporation into the imperial structure only exacerbated the existing tendency toward zamīndārization, while warlords throughout the empire now sought the more attractive option of becoming zamīndārs themselves.Footnote 140 This resulted in widespread factionalism, conflict, and demoralization within the established Mughal nobility. The class struggle between the peasantry and ruling class was thus overlain by conflicts between segments of the Mughal nobility, compounding the empire's troubles.
State revenue demand had in fact more than doubled between the eras of Akbar (1556–1605) and Aurangzeb (1658–1707).Footnote 141 And as the centralized Mughal authority began to crack under the continuing geopolitical pressures from the Marathas, the state increasingly resorted to tax-farming, which became ever more widespread within its successor states.Footnote 142 This raised the effective rent share of the state to 50 percent or higher, greater than the 40 percent that the Mughals had previously extracted.Footnote 143 The massive fiscal pressure that the Mughal state brought to bear on the peasantry led to increasing indebtedness in the villages, causing peasant flight and rebellions. “As oppression increased, the number of absconding peasants grew, cultivation declined, and peasants took to arms, giving birth to rural uprisings of varying intensity.”Footnote 144 Some scholars have located a generalized “agricultural crisis” in the Mughal Empire by the late seventeenth century and place primary blame on the jāgīrdār system and its associated high taxation, land desertion, and peasant unrest, all exacerbated by the increasing costs of war.Footnote 145
Indeed, peasant unrest and rebellion were generally increasing during this period, politically destabilizing many Mughal territories.Footnote 146 At the same time, the political fragmentation and warfare that accompanied the Maratha Revolt disrupted India's major internal trade routes, increasing transportation costs and insurance rates.Footnote 147 As a result, “The available social surplus [in the empire] was insufficient to defray the cost of administration, pay for wars of one type or another, and to give the ruling class a standard of living in keeping with its expectations.”Footnote 148 Curiously enough, Washbrook suggests that the very vibrancy and strong economic growth of the Mughal Empire over the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries may have been a cause of its later troubles as “economic growth started to nurture the political ambitions, and the regional and “community” forces, which eventually undermined it.”Footnote 149 Here we find another expression of the “penalties of progressiveness,” resulting from the overall uneven and combined character of development, besetting the Indian economy.
European Trade and Colonial Conquest: Towards the Battle of Plassey
A number of other related international factors further exacerbated the Mughal Empire's economic woes. For over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the world economic and geopolitical environment in which the empire was embedded was dramatically transformed as the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and later French made their excursions into the Indian Ocean. Firstly, the Mughal-Maratha Wars (1680–1707) were themselves “overdetermined” by an array of uneven causal chains generated by a geopolitical environment fundamentally transformed by the entry of the Europeans. Occupying key coastal areas in the commercial shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean, the Marathas had extensive geopolitical contacts with Europeans from the sixteenth century onward. This was a relation of “contained warfare,” with belligerence and collaboration employed in near equal measure. On the one hand, the Marathas developed a powerful naval force that was able to repel European ships if and when they so desired.Footnote 150 On land, a large and sophisticated network of fortresses formed the backbone of Maratha military might.Footnote 151 Both land and sea capabilities were often mobilized in response to European penetration into the region. On the other hand, the Marathas sought to reap the “privileges of backwardness” in any areas in which Europeans held a comparative advantage—namely, their use of firearms and modern military strategy.
The Portuguese and the French were the main suppliers of firearms—gunpowder, cannon balls, and lead were all purchased and entered use in the Maratha army.Footnote 152 Such was the integration of the Euro-Maratha military-commercial complex that the Marathas allowed the French to build a factory at Rajapore in 1679 and “employed Portuguese agents to purchase artillery from them.”Footnote 153
But the integration of Europeans extended beyond exchange in military goods. As early as 1692, the French Governor Martine was providing tactical assistance to the Marathas at the time of their war with the Mughals.Footnote 154 A number of European adventurers of Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English origins were employed as mercenaries and commanders, responsible for training and organizing armies and assisting Maratha chiefs in battles. The expansion of European-trained battalions and the purchase of European expertise and weaponry proved to be costly incentivizing processes of geopolitical accumulation.Footnote 155 The Maratha confrontation with the Mughals was arguably a direct, if partial, outcome of the need to finance the hybridization of Euro-Maratha military operations. This military combination proved remarkably efficient and, up to that point, historically exceptional in challenging the hitherto preponderant Mughal Empire.
Meanwhile, increasing Dutch and English penetration into Asian markets during the period caused serious disturbances to the Mughal economy and intensified the ruling classes’ financial difficulties. As the costs of luxury goods they consumed increased, and as they were diverted from “traditional” markets and carried to Europe, revenue demands rose. Accordingly, ruling class “income previously obtained no longer sufficed,” resulting in an even “greater agrarian exploitation” of the peasantry and eventually, after that failed, “reckless factional activities for individual gain, leading to interminable civil wars.”Footnote 156
K. N. Chaudhuri observes, for example, that “the 1730s were a bad time for southern India” and that “the great Anglo-French wars of the mid-eighteenth century further dislocated trade that was already in serious difficulties.”Footnote 157 Around the same time in Jugdia, the most important Bengali cotton producing region, matters were “coming to a crisis in the production sphere.” By the middle of the eighteenth century there were already “some signs of deindustrialization” under the impact of strong foreign economic competition and weak local mercantile organizations.Footnote 158
Many Indian merchant groups in the empire suffered from the presence of European traders, with “most indigenous traders” in key exporting regions assuming “a position subordinate to the servants of the East India companies.”Footnote 159 Furthermore, under the competitive pressures of European trade, the early eighteenth century witnessed the collapse of one of the empire's hitherto greatest commercial ports in Gujarat and the concomitant disappearance of its fleet “arguably the most important developments in the trade of the Indian Ocean during the period.”Footnote 160 Similarly, the substantial commerce of the Coromandel Coast was dramatically hindered by the intrusion of Dutch merchants over the seventeenth century, who cut “deep into the trade that had been traditionally carried out in the region” and interrupted “the ancient links between Coromandel and Southeast Asia which had been, in many ways, the lifeline of Coromandel's commerce.” As Arasaratnam goes on to say: “It was this commercial artery that was punctured violently in the course of the 17th century…. In a series of military and naval actions, these ports and markets were shut off from competitive trading. It meant the denial of a lucrative export trade in spices to Coromandel. And it meant the denial of minerals—gold and tin—which had formed a profitable import to India. It must be emphasized that all these were achieved by brute force and not by superior commercial expertise.”Footnote 161 It is crucial to underscore that it was not the “superior commercial expertise” of the Dutch merchants that made them so competitive and disruptive, but rather their comparative advantage in the means of violence, and particularly their naval superiority.
Indeed, both the Dutch and English had attained positions of relative naval superiority over the Mughal Empire by the late seventeenth century.Footnote 162 Given their continuing inability to outcompete Indian merchants on the open market, both continually utilized the use or threat of violence to back up their commercial activities. In the end, this superiority in the means of violence would prove crucial in the fall of the Mughal Empire to the British, dramatized by the Battle of Plassey in Bengal of 23 June 1757.
The immediate motivations behind Major-General Robert Clive's coup of 1757 seem to have arisen from Britain's increasing preoccupation with intensified French competition and a desire to protect British trading interests in Bengal against the perceived depredations of local rulers.Footnote 163 In this respect, the competitive pressures of European capitalist states, transmitted both economically and geopolitically, “overdetermined” and redirected the pattern and dynamics of India's development. Again we see how the uneven and combined nature of India's development in relation to the European powers came to play a causally decisive role in the Mughal Empire's collapse. A multiplicity of contemporaneous societies, all exhibiting varying forms of development (unevenness), came to causally interact (geopolitical combination) in ways that produced further axes and layers of sociologically differentiated patterns of development (sociological combinations), which in turn led to sharp divergences in their own developmental trajectories.
We must reiterate here that the Mughal Empire was already suffering from innumerable economic and political difficulties, stemming in part from the competitive pressures European traders had brought to bear on the empire during the preceding century, well before Britain's formal colonization of the country over the second half of the eighteenth century.Footnote 164 As we have shown, divisions among local regional rulers undermined their ability and willingness to join military forces to thwart European incursions,Footnote 165 meaning the British could pit one ruler against another in their conquering efforts.Footnote 166 Indeed, at the Battle of Plassey, “Clive's success owed much to divisions among the Nawab's army.”Footnote 167 Meanwhile, the British conquest was further assisted by various indigenous merchant and financial groups whose political and economic power had been steadily growing since the late seventeenth century as centralized state power began to break down.Footnote 168 In this rather perverse sense, “Eastern agency” played a significant part in Britain's successful colonization efforts.
With the capture of Bengal, probably the wealthiest Mughal province, the East India Company and its servants achieved an enormous advantage in dealing with all states and economies in the subcontinent, further aiding subsequent British conquests as they came to bring the entirety of the empire under their dominion.Footnote 169 And with the colonization of the entire Indian landmass completed by the early nineteenth century, the British state accrued significant strategic and material advantages in further expanding and buttressing its bourgeoning global empire as it sought to open all the markets of the world to its industrial products. In these ways, the “decline of the East” and the “rise of the West” were mutually conditioning and co-constitutive processes.
CONCLUSION
If we were to choose a single symbolic moment to mark the beginning of the West's systemic “overtaking” of the “East” in its rise to global dominance, the years between the British taking of Bengal in 1757 and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 would suffice. It was during these seven world-transforming years that the first of the great tributary Asian empires fell at the hands of the Europeans, while the final external systemic threat to the development of British (and thus world) capitalism, the French monarchy, was extinguished in a string of spectacular military victories.
After the defeat of France and Spain in this conflict, Britain acquired dominion over a large portion of three continents under the terms of the 1763 Treaty. This also meant that the white settlers in North America would no longer need protection from British forces.Footnote 170 The decisive defeat of the French in 1759 both paved the way for the establishment of the Raj in India and made the emergence of North America possible. Thus, Frank McLynn is correct to claim that this was the year that marked the beginning of Britain's (and subsequently Europe's) dominance of the world since the “entire history of the world would have been different but for the events of 1759. If the French had prevailed in North America, there would have been no United States (at least in the form we know it)” and if “France had won in India, the global hegemony of the English language could never have happened.”Footnote 171 In short, McLynn concludes, “The consequences of 1759 really were momentous; it really was a hinge on which all of world history turned.”Footnote 172
While anti-capitalist and colonial struggles would continually and forcefully challenge capitalism's global hegemony, the capitalist world system was by this time now firmly entrenched and resting on solid (geo)political foundations, notably the British Empire. From the second half of the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, the world witnessed the steady growth and domination of capitalist social relations, spread by force or otherwise. In the process, the Global South became subjugated in a tangled web of economic, (geo)political, and racial hierarchies with the Europeans and subsequently the United States sitting at the top. The rich and powerful states grew richer and more powerful on the backs of the weak and impoverished. The process of Western domination culminated in the imposition of unequal trade treaties on China and Japan in the mid- and late nineteenth century. Nearly a century later, the sublime dictatorship of capital over the world was largely completed.
In this article we have argued that the “rise of the West” was the composite outcome of multiple and uneven processes of historical development that were international in their origins and scale. In so doing, we have moved away from self-aggrandizing Eurocentric narratives that locate European supremacy exclusively in the peculiar and internal characteristics of Europe itself. We have demonstrated this through an analysis of the breakdown of European feudalism, a process that is inexplicable if non-European agency is not taken into account. We have also moved beyond those revisionist accounts that explain away the “rise of the West” through recourse to contingency—the claim that Europe rose to prominence because of luck, chance, and accident.
When reassessed from the vantage point of UCD, we demonstrated that the homogenized conception of global history—a global history expunged of substantive sociohistorical difference—that the revisionists hold breaks down upon closer scrutiny. By reintroducing the multilinear and interactive dimension of development as our basic premise, we have argued that the “rise of the West” is best understood as the interconnected outcome of structural and contingent historical processes that were, in each instance, overdetermined by intersocietal interactions. In making this argument, we do not claim the final word on debates around the “rise of the West,” but rather hope to introduce UCD as a framework through which these debates can be assessed anew. In this respect, we hope that revisionist, internationalist approaches might be advanced and strengthened against the increasingly untenable assumptions of Eurocentrism that have hitherto plagued our understandings of this crucial issue.
