Surat During the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century: What Kind of Social Order?

1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 679-710 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelguglielmo Torri
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Social Order ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The West ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
History Of ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
The City

In a recent and thought-provoking article, Dr Lakshmi Subramanian has forcefully made the case that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the history of the West Coast of India in general and the history of the city of Surat in particular are explained by the rise of what she terms the ‘Anglo-Bania order’, namely ‘a mercantile and political order distinguished by the mutually beneficial cooperation of the English East India Company and the Bania bankers and merchants of Surat and Bombay’.More specifically, Dr Subramanian claims that the rise of the Anglo-Bania order is at the roots of the first Hindu—Muslim communal clash about which a reasonably good documentation has survived, namely the ‘great tumult’ of August 1795, when ‘the lower orders of the Muslim population fell upon the shops and houses of the Bania residents of the city, looting grain, demolishing the images of their gods and tearing up their account books’.

Capital and Crowd in a Declining Asian Port City: The Anglo-Bania Order and the Surat Riots of 1795

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
West Coast ◽  
Social Order ◽  
East India Company ◽  
New Order ◽  
Port City ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
The West ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
The City

Surat, the waning port city of the departed Great Mughals, was rocked by riots on 6 August 1795. The lower orders of the Muslim population fell upon the shops and houses of the Bania residents of the city, looting grain, demolishing the images of their gods and tearing up their account books. This was the response of a collapsing social order to the thrust of a highly adaptive banking and trading group which had adroitly allied itself to the rising English power on the West Coast of India. A combination of circumstances in the half century following 1750 had resulted in the formation of a mercantile and political order distinguished by the mutually beneficial cooperation of the English East India Company and the Bania bankers and merchants of Surat and Bombay. The violent protest by the Muslims against the new order served only to reaffirm the significance of the Anglo-Bania alliance as the central fact in the unfolding political and commercial situation on the West Coast. The once powerful Mughal ruling élite and the once wealthy Muslim shipping magnates1 were no longer in a position to offer much resistance to the English East India Company and its Bania allies. Likewise the popular Muslim disaffection failed to shake by violence the foundations of the emerging Anglo-Bania order. An analysis of the August riots in Surat would afford the historian a unique opportunity to assess the nature and impact of the new order on the West Coast and to understand the crumbling social structure of a traditional port city—the composition of its lower orders and its burgher groups and their responses to the major changes that were taking place in the political and trading structure of Surat in the second half of the eighteenth century.

This Is an Abridged Account of Delhi Which Is an Old City and One of the Chosen Ones amongst the Cities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirza Sangin Beg
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Work Spaces ◽  
History Of ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Local Traditions ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The City ◽  
Cost Of Construction

The second part of the translation has three segments. The first is dedicated to the history of Delhi from the time of the Mahabharat to the periods of Anangpal Tomar to the Mughal Emperor Humayun as also Sher Shah, the Afghan ruler. In the second and third segments Mirza Sangin Beg adroitly navigates between twin centres of power in the city. He writes about Qila Mubarak, or the Red Fort, and gives an account of the several buildings inside it and the cost of construction of the same. He ambles into the precincts and mentions the buildings constructed by Shahjahan and other rulers, associating them with some specific inmates of the fort and the functions performed within them. When the author takes a walk in the city of Shahjahanabad, he writes of numerous residents, habitations of rich, poor, and ordinary people, their mansions and localities, general and specialized bazars, the in different skills practised areas, places of worship and revelry, processions exemplifying popular culture and local traditions, and institutions that had a resonance in other cultures. The Berlin manuscript gives generous details of the officials of the English East India Company, both native and foreign, their professions, and work spaces. Mirza Sangin Beg addresses the issue of qaum most unselfconsciously and amorphously.

Building borders in a borderless land: English colonialism and the Alam Minangkabau of Sumatra, 1680�1730

2021 ◽  
Vol 9s4 ◽  
pp. 58-89
Author(s):  
David Veevers
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
West Coast ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The West ◽  
The People ◽  
The Creation ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Trading Networks ◽  
Kinship Ties

This article adopts the concept of securitisation to understand the failure of the English East India Company�s attempt to build a territorial empire on the island of Sumatra in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Securitisation formed a key component of European colonialism, involving the creation of fortified and militarised borders both to exclude groups from entering newly defined territorial spaces, but also as a way to control goods, labour and resources within those spaces. Ultimately, this form of imperialism failed on the west coast of Sumatra, where a highly mobile society participated in a shared political culture that made any formal boundary or border between Malay states too difficult to enforce. Trading networks, religious affiliations, transregional kinship ties, and migratory circuits all worked to undermine the Company�s attempt to establish its authority over delineated territory and the people and goods within it.

English Private Trade on the West Coast of India, c. 1680–c. 1740

Itinerario ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Davies
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The West ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
West Coast Of India ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Indian Ocean World

This article explores the private trade networks of English East India Company merchants on the west coast of India during the first half of the eighteenth century. Existing studies of English private trade in the Indian Ocean have almost exclusively focused on India's eastern seaboard, the Coromandel Coast and the Bay of Bengal regions. This article argues that looking at private trade from the perspective of the western Indian Ocean provides a different picture of this important branch of European trade. It uses EIC records and merchants' private papers to argue against recent metropolitan-centred approaches to English private trade, instead emphasising the importance of more localised political and economic contexts, within the Indian Ocean world, for shaping the conduct and success of this commerce.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Tom McInally
Keyword(s):  
East India Company ◽  
Islamic Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Lack Of Information ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
English East India Company

The introduction provides a background to the calls that have been made by scholars over the last half-century for a detailed biography of Strachan. The greatly increased interest in the history of the interaction of the West with eastern societies has caused a number of researchers to regret the lack of information on a scholar that many have come to realise was an important early contributor to European understanding of Islamic culture and eastern languages. The difficulties caused by the paucity of Strachan’s own description of his life and works are explained and the wide range of archives requiring to be consulted is covered – Papal, Carmelite, Jesuit, English East India Company records as well as accounts of other travellers in the East. Particular attention is given to Strachan’s album amicorum (book of friends) and collection of manuscripts in Arabic and Farsi

Inventing the English Massacre

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
English Language ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Violent Event ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
British Culture

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

Delhi in Transition, 1821 and Beyond

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
English Translation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Original Manuscript ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
The Times ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

Commissioned by the English East India Company to write about contemporary nineteenth-century Delhi, Mirza Sangin Beg walked around the city to capture its highly fascinating urban and suburban extravaganza. Laced with epigraphy and fascinating anecdotes, the city as ‘lived experience’ has an overwhelming presence in his work, Sair-ul Manazil. Sair-ul Manazil dominates the historiography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions on Delhi in Persian and Urdu, and remains unparalleled in its architecture and detailed content. It deals with the habitations of people, bazars, professions and professionals, places of worship and revelry, and issues of contestation. Over fifty typologies of structures and several institutions that find resonance in the Persian and Ottoman Empires can also be gleaned from Sair-ul Manazil. Interestingly, Beg made no attempt to ‘monumentalize’ buildings; instead, he explored them as spaces reflective of the sociocultural milieu of the times. Delhi in Transition is the first comprehensive English translation of Beg’s work, which was originally published in Persian. It is the only translation to compare the four known versions of Sair-ul Manazil, including the original manuscript located in Berlin, which is being consulted for the first time. It has an exhaustive introduction and extensive notes, along with the use of varied styles in the book to indicate the multiple sources of the text, contextualize Beg’s work for the reader and engage him with the debate concerning the different variants of this unique and eclectic work.

Ecology and Imperium: State Formation in Early Colonial Bengal c. 1765–1800

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-281
Author(s):  
Baijayanti Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
State Formation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Remote Areas ◽  
Tribal Communities ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
The Hill ◽  
Outlying Regions ◽  
Power And Authority

This article looks at the process of state formation in Bengal in the second half of the eighteenth century when the English East India Company emerged as the paramount authority in the province. The article argues that compared with the previous regime of the Nazims who were content in exercising a loose sovereignty over the outlying regions of Bengal, the Company showed greater initiative in conquering and pacifying the remote areas of the province. In terms of its ecology, the province of Bengal could be divided into three distinct zones: the plains, the hills and the delta. The process of state formation varied in these three distinct eco-zones. While it was easy for the Company to establish its control over the Bengal plains, it became increasingly difficult for them to establish their power and authority in the hill forests (home to autonomous tribal communities who resented and resisted British interference) and in the deltaic tracts where the maze of rivers provided safe refuge and a means of escape to the Magh pirates and every other state fugitive. This article is an account of the Company’s struggles to establish its supremacy in Bengal, but it also looks at the resistance offered by autonomous tribal groups to retain and preserve their independence. Finally, this article attempts to link ecology with the process of state formation in early colonial Bengal.

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