Book Excerpts - An Earthly Paradise

Local and Global: Bengal and Early Modern Historical Processes 

Raziuddin Aquil 

Historians have identified over half a dozen large-scale processes which together constitute the main features of the early modern world during the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The creation of global sea passages augmented the world economy through long-distance maritime and overland routes. The discovery of the route around the Cape of Good Hope especially connected the world and facilitated long-distance commerce with the faster movement of large ships carrying vast amounts of commodities for international trade (though it was probably more dangerous for shipping trade than the Red Sea route, it broke an Egyptian and Venetian monopoly on the spice trade). The world, united by water and, thus, circumnavigable by ships, gave a considerable boost to the global trading network.  

The period also witnessed the formation of extensive and stable empires or states, whether in Europe (Spanish, French and British, in particular), or the big inter-connected Asian empires of the Ottomans-Safavids-Mughals, besides the massive presence of China and Japan as formidable forces in the world economy. The new, sophisticated gunpowder technology was a game-changer in all this, and yet the empire-builders themselves came down from the steppes on their horses as mounted archers or sword-wielding sawars. Besides gunpowder, the diffusion of new technologies, such as the introduction of the printing press and new cash crops (tobacco, cocoa, coffee, etc.) had a transformative potential. The expansion of frontiers and the extension of agriculture – the clearing of for­ests to reclaim land for cultivation or commercial pastoralism for the mass supply of meat for consumption and hide for leather industry were important features of this early modern world. Yet, these processes indicate that some areas were going to get severely exploited, creating considerable unrest in the rural sectors even as new regional markets and urban centres proliferated.

In general, political stability and economic prosperity led to the doubling of the world population during the period – from 400­-500 million in 1500 CE to 850-950 million in 1800 CE. Also, even as early initiatives for much of the processes mentioned above came from the Europeans, South Asia was inextricably connected with the early modern system, and Bengal was an important node, start­ing as a frontier zone to become a significant site of international trade. With the Indian ports being the major hub for facilitating global commerce, the new world bullion came to the subcontinent as enormous profit, making the Indian subcontinent and Bengal a significant beneficiary of the early modern international mercan­tile enterprise. Further, the connections were not limited to trade alone. Faster travel and transport networks enabled quicker movements of people and circulation of ideas, including concerns on how history was sought to be understood in locations as far apart and varied as England, Iran, India and China.

Viewed from this perspective, the traditional classification or periodization of Indian history, and its narrow scope regarding sources and historiography – as Ancient (Sanskrit), Medieval (Persian) and Modern (English) – no longer hold. Indeed, a vast corpus of vernacular literature has been showing the way. In the context of Bengal, medieval and early modern Bengali literature cover a whole gamut of themes in a variety of genres but historians are still fighting for Persian in their traditional strongholds. Thus, Mughal India or Mughal Bengal cannot be seen in its exceptional isolation anymore. Much water has, undoubtedly, flown down the Bengal delta since the publication of Jadunath Sarkar’s edited (1948) classic on medieval Bengal. Significant strides have been made in the divergent fields of Bengal’s early modern scholarship in recent decades. Diverse themes in politics, trade and culture are covered using a wide variety of vernacular sources, besides returning to the conventional Euro­pean Company archival material for fresh substantiation and validation. Indeed, early modern Bengal bore witness to a plurality of developments in various spheres, which together made it something of an earthly paradise, many facets of which require a serious discussion and understanding.

(Footnote: Some fine works by JF Richards, Joseph Fletcher, Stephen Dale and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, among others, have shown interesting parallels and considerable interconnections at various levels, amidst processes which are identified as vertical and independent or horizontal and integrative).

Extracted from the Introduction to An Earthly Paradise: Trade, Politics and Culture in Early Modern Bengal, edited by Raziuddin Aquil and Tilottama Mukherjee, New Delhi: Manohar, and London and New York: Routledge, 2020.