Between 1979 and 1981, across a series of articles, historians Karen Leonard and John F. Richards debated the relationship between banker-merchants and the Mughal empire. Whereas Leonard argued that private finance played a key role in first bankrolling and then toppling the empire when it threw its support behind eighteenth-century post-Mughal successor states, Richards contended that the Mughal empire, especially at its height in the seventeenth century, was financially self-sufficient and not reliant on private bankers thanks to the empire’s control over a large share of northern India’s agrarian wealth. Although subsequent scholars occasionally revisited this imperial–private capital debate, their findings have been inconclusive so far. With Sudev Sheth’s Bankrolling Empire, we finally have a fresh and full update on the Leonard–Richards dispute. Hewing a line between the two scholars, Sheth asserts that, from a position of relative unimportance in the first decades of the seventeenth century, the role of private capital in the empire gradually increased over the latter half of the seventeenth century. A key turning point was the ill-fated and abortive attempt by the Mughals to conquer the Deccan (circa 1682–1707). As imperial expenses gradually outstripped revenues, the empire and its elites started to look to banker-merchants to plug the growing financial shortfalls. In some cases, this led to relatively well-regulated relationships that helped to prolong Mughal rule. In other instances, extortion and strong-arm tactics undermined Mughal authority, leading to intensifying alliances between banker-merchants and successor political groups. The bargain that they struck was relatively straightforward: in exchange for badly needed capital, new regional political elites gave land grants and access to land revenue administrations to increasingly empowered banking-merchant groups. A small handful of them survived into the nineteenth century, leveraging their ownership of land, under a now dominant British colonial regime, to build modern industrial enterprises—some of whom survive to this day. One such family are the Gujarat-based Lalbhais who, prior to the twentieth century, were known as the Jhaveris.

The Jhaveris and their shifting relationships with the Mughals, the Marathas, and the British comprise the central through line of Bankrolling Empire. The book opens with a dramatic account in which the then head of the family, Khushalchand Jhaveri, is whipped, beaten, and imprisoned by Sarbuland Khan, the politically embattled and financially destitute Mughal governor of Gujarat. Khan resorted to violence in a desperate attempt to extort money. From this beginning, we learn about the rise and survival of this remarkable family of Oswal Jains. Chapter 1 sets the stage by offering thumbnail accounts of the history of the Mughal empire and their successful conquest of Gujarat under Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605). Chapter 2 traces the first phase of Jhaveri–Mughal relations, between the late 1620s and 1658. Sheth characterises this as a period of ‘court mutualism’—a mutually beneficial alliance between the Mughal state and this banker-merchant family. During this period, the Mughals sought out families such as the Jhaveris for luxury items, especially jewels. Their private capital was not needed to run the empire itself. The Jhaveris, in turn, benefited from imperial patronage, including Mughal efforts to facilitate trade and protect merchants. The central figure in this story is Shantidas (d. 1659), the effective founder of the Jhaveri banking-merchant dynasty and chief jeweller to both Emperors Jahangir (r. 1605–1627) and Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658). The period between 1658 and 1707 is the focus of chapter 3. Sheth argues that ‘political commensalism’ was its dominant feature. What he means by this is a growing willingness by Mughal authorities to coerce groups such as the Jhaveris to give them loans in times of crisis—such as during wars of succession. What marks this from later periods, however, is the readiness of imperial authorities to provide financial restitution to the Jhaveris and others.

Chapter 4 steps back from the specifics of the Jhaveri–Mughal story to examine how Emperor Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir’s efforts to conquer the Deccan overstretched the empire’s finances. This, in turn, weakened Mughal control over provinces such as Gujarat as men and other resources were redirected toward the Deccan. Sheth nonetheless argues that the empire’s representatives in Gujarat maintained the upper hand in their relations with the province’s financial elites throughout the 1720s, not only by assaulting and extorting them with growing frequency, but also by forcing them to participate in the politics of imperial administration and finance, if only to protect themselves against rising oppression. Chapter 5 takes a deep dive into Jhaveri–Mughal relations between the years 1719 and 1730. Shantidas’s grandson, Khushalchand Jhaveri (d. 1748), is an important character. He was repeatedly victimised by extortionist Mughal governors, who engaged in a phenomenon that Sheth describes as ‘expedient extortion’. We also learn of the way in which Khushalchand worked to protect himself by employing his own soldiers and deploying influence, money, and information to play Mughal rivals against each other and make good with rising regional competitors such as the Marathas. Ultimately, Sheth argues, it was Mughal collapse that enabled Khushalchand Jhaveri’s accession to extraordinary power. The focus of chapter 6 is on the increase in monetised and exclusive rights to Gujarat’s resources, revenues, and administrative offices between 1730 and 1818—something that Sheth describes as ‘competitive copacenary’. This story is primarily told through the interactions of Khushalchand’s sons and the Haribakhti family (an unrelated Gujarati banking family) with the ruling Gaekwads of Baroda, who, as the eighteenth century progressed, were themselves wedged between the Maratha Peshwas who were based in Pune and the increasingly dominant East India Company that was operating out of Bombay. Chapter 7 highlights how the period between 1750 and the 1850s was both a financially lucrative yet increasingly dangerous time for private financiers. A small handful of regional banking families, such as the Jhaveris, survived. Most, like the Haribakhtis, did not. Failure was mostly a consequence of decisions that emanated from the colonial state, which now asserted greater control over princely state finances and forbade certain indigenous banking practices such as money changing, minting, and providing loans to native rulers. Bankrolling Empire concludes with a comparative global discussion of the intersection of private wealth and public power in the early modern period (circa fifteenth to eighteenth centuries). It also brings the story of the Jhaveri/Lalbhai family up to the present.

Clearly written, rich in detail, and with sharp analytical insights, Bankrolling Empire offers important contributions to our understanding of finance and administration in the Mughal empire, of Mughal decline/decentralisation, of the rise and subsequent hollowing of post-Mughal successor states in Gujarat, and of the history of Indian capital as South Asia transitioned to full-blown colonial rule. These wide-ranging contributions are built on an admirably large foundation of archival materials: historical chronicles, administrative records, accounting ledgers, literary texts (including ballads and praise poems), genealogies, a Mughal nobleman’s private diary, a French training manual, travelogues, and all manner of correspondence. Some of them have never been previously used. Although Persian and Gujarati sources dominate, Sheth also draws on materials that were written in Sanskrit, English, Dutch, and French to tell his story. In this work, Sheth demonstrates the value of using often widely accessed Mughal and foreign sources in conjunction with infrequently deployed vernacular materials, which allow Sheth to highlight contemporary socioeconomic critiques, public opinion, and cultural contexts that have generally been ignored by other economic historians.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the Mughal and post-Mughal periods, as well as the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, I would caution the reader to unfix Sheth’s terms—‘court mutualism’, ‘political commensalism’, ‘political commensalism’ and ‘expedient extortionism’—from the distinct periods that he outlines. It seems to me that these terms occasionally undermine the complexity of Sheth’s story, as features that are seemingly characteristic to one period sometimes appear in others. For instance, financial extortion by princes or their allies during wars of succession was a common feature between 1627–1628 and 1712. ‘Court mutualism’ was also an important characteristic of Jhaveri–Mughal relations in the latter half of the seventeenth century. I was also left wondering about Shantidas Jhaveri’s well-recorded and troubled relationships with other Jain communities. Do they provide any insights into his rise to power, or even the nature of the larger Jain banker-merchant community? This leads to a related observation: we never get a sense of how Shantidas or his descendants interacted with other equally powerful merchants in Gujarat (men such as Haji Muhammad Zahid Beg, Virji Vohra, Mulla Abdul Ghafur, Hari Vaishya, Ahmad Chalebi, Muhammad Ali, and Mulla Fakhruddin, to name a few) or even Indian representatives of the rising Dutch and English East India Companies (such as the Parekhs and Rustamjis). To what extent was the Jhaveri experience similar or distinct from those of other powerful Jain, Muslim, and Hindu merchants in the Mughal and post-Mughal periods? And did it matter that the Jhaveris were based in an inland city like Ahmedabad versus a port city like Surat or Cambay? Finally, if the rise of Shantidas and his immediate successors was premised on their ability to supply luxury goods to the Mughals, then some context for such imperial consumption would have been useful, especially for the nonspecialist. Yet, needless to say, Bankrolling Empire is a superb book that is unlikely to be superseded for many years to come. I especially enjoyed reading it after Michael O’Sullivan’s No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities, 1800-1975 (Harvard, 2023), Samira Sheikh’s ‘Persian in the villages, or the language of Jamiat Rai’s account books’ (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2021), Ghulam Nadri’s Eighteenth-Century Gujarat: The Dynamics of Its Political Economy, 1750-1800 (Brill, 2008), and Farhat Hasan’s State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572-1730 (Cambridge, 2004).