The Eighteenth-Century Social Order in Surat: A Reply and an Excursus on the Riots of 1788 and 1795
TL;DR: The Banias of eighteenth-century Surat, whom Michelguglielmo Torri earlier treated with indifference if not innocence, have invited his wrath since they were brought into focus by the publication of my essay as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The Banias of eighteenth-century Surat, whom Michelguglielmo Torri earlier treated with indifference if not innocence, have invited his wrath since they were brought into focus by the publication of my essay on the Banias and the Surat riot of 1795. In his ‘rejoinder’ to my article, he seeks to wish away their existence altogether (to him there was no specific Bania community, the term merely signifying traders of all communities engaged in the profession of brokerage), and seeks to provide what he regards as an ‘alternative’ explanation of the Muslim–Bania riot of 1795. the Muslim-Bania riot of 1795. It shall be my purpose in this reply to show that his alternative explanation is neither an alternative nor even an explanation, and is based on a basic confusion in his mind about the Banias as well as the principal sources of tension in the social structure of Surat. I shall treat two main subjects in this reply to his misdirected criticisms. First, I shall present some original indigenous material as well as European documentation to further clarify the identity, position and role of the Banias, whom Irfan Habib in a recent article has identified as the most important trading group in the trading world of seventeenth and eighteenth-century India. It is also my purpose to show how the social order of Surat operated under stress by presenting some archival material, the existence of which Torri seems to be completely unaware of, on the Parsi-Muslim riot of 1788.
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06 Nov 2014TL;DR: Ocean of Trade as mentioned in this paper explores the region's entangled histories of exchange, including the African demand for large-scale textile production among weavers in Gujarat, the distribution of ivory to consumers in Western India, and the African slave trade in the Mozambique channel that took captives to the French islands of the Mascarenes, Brazil and the Rio de la Plata.
Abstract: Ocean of Trade offers an innovative study of trade, production and consumption across the Indian Ocean between the years 1750 and 1850. Focusing on the Vāniyā merchants of Diu and Daman, Pedro Machado explores the region's entangled histories of exchange, including the African demand for large-scale textile production among weavers in Gujarat, the distribution of ivory to consumers in Western India, and the African slave trade in the Mozambique channel that took captives to the French islands of the Mascarenes, Brazil and the Rio de la Plata, and the Arabian peninsula and India. In highlighting the critical role of particular South Asian merchant networks, the book reveals how local African and Indian consumption was central to the development of commerce across the Indian Ocean, giving rise to a wealth of regional and global exchange in a period commonly perceived to be increasingly dominated by European company and private capital.
57 citations
01 May 2014
TL;DR: The food riots of 2007-8 in dozens of developing countries placed food security on the agendas of the global political economy as mentioned in this paper, and food riots (crowd violence: usually seizing food, intercepting carts and barges, or setting prices) set in motion political processes that often led to food relief or repression.
Abstract: Summary
The food riots of 2007–8 in dozens of developing countries placed food security on the agendas of the global political economy. Material outcomes remain to be assessed. The problematic of the politics of provisions is: Under what circumstances do the common people's necessities create a political necessity for their rulers to act? What combination of ingredients gives them political leverage (or not)? Food riots (crowd violence: usually seizing food, intercepting carts and barges, or setting prices) set in motion political processes that often led to food relief and/or repression. To riot about food, rioters needed much more than motivations of hunger and outrage, or else world history would consist mostly of food riots. In addition rioters needed both sufficient solidarities to be able to act collectively, and sufficient confidence that the benefits (getting food, both immediately and in more sustained supply) would outweigh the risks and costs of repression and punishment. The latter would be based on reciprocal relationships with the rulers. The outcomes of such ‘trials-by-ordeal’ were then entered into social memory to be consulted in the next crisis. Of course rulers also had their social memories and political calculations. So the ‘politics of provisions’ – the political economy of food crises and their resolutions – has typically included such components as: political, social, and economic structures; the players' sociopolitical assets, capacities, and relationships; shared ideologies; strategic bargaining in the moment between chief actors; and accidental factors. Those components vary from one time and place to another, so this paper compares the politics of provisions in: pre-modern England and France; famines in Ireland and India; ‘famine-proofed’ Ming and Qing China; Mao's Great Leap Forward Famine; the IMF austerity riots of the 1970s and 80s; and the food riots of 2008, particularly in Egypt, West Africa, and Haiti. The point of such comparisons is not to construct a unified theory of provision politics, but to illuminate significant parameters that shape policies and conflicts over food.
20 citations
Additional excerpts
...22 For Indian food riots, see Arnold (1979, 1984, 1988, 2000); Hardiman (1996); Sharma (1993); Subramanian (1985, 1991); and Yang (1979)....
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01 Jan 2013
20 citations
TL;DR: In the literature on the early-modern Asian commercial world, the lack of historical longevity of mercantile wealth has been accepted as a major attribute as mentioned in this paper, and it has been shown that some merchant families of Surat did experience longevity and family fortunes were kept up for five or six generations.
Abstract: In the literature on the early-modern Asian commercial world, the lack of historical longevity of mercantile wealth has been accepted as a major attribute. This paper establishes that some merchant families of Surat did experience longevity and family fortunes were kept up for five or six generations. It analyzes the institutional dimensions of trade and examines the ways in which these merchants articulated commercial strategies to ensure a long span of their family businesses. The paper demonstrates that fortunes were built and sustained primarily through trade and that the association with the European Companies was an important but additional means of achieving commercial affluence. La litterature scientifique traitant du monde commercial asiatique dans la periode moderne parait unanime a constater l'absence de longevite de la richesse fondee sur la pratique du commerce. Or, l'analyse du parcours de quelques familles de negociants de Surat durant cette periode temoigne que des fortunes familiales furent conservees sur cinq ou six generations. Les dimensions institutionnelles de ces activites, mais egalement les strategies commerciales utilisees par ces familles pour maintenir leur statut, sont examinees. Ces fortunes etaient edifiees et soutenues en premier par la pratique du commerce, l'association avec des compagnies europeennes, certes importante, n'etant qu'un moyen complementaire pour assurer leur prosperite.
17 citations
TL;DR: The authors traces three separate instances of the outbreak and prevention of Parsi-Muslim communal riots in colonial India sparked by three representations of Muslim prophets - pictorial, narrative and theatrical - within the city of Bombay in 1851, 1874 and 1891.
Abstract: In the making of colonial modernity, the newspaper, novel and theatre were three fundamental implements for the development of a bourgeois public sphere. Nevertheless, their introduction led to significant alterations in modes of inter-communal social contestation. This article traces three separate instances of the outbreak and prevention of Parsi-Muslim communal riots in colonial India sparked by three representations of Muslim prophets - pictorial, narrative and theatrical - within the city of Bombay in 1851, 1874 and 1891. Through this analysis, the article traces the embedded predilection within colonialism's secular juridical mechanisms towards majoritarian religious sensitivities. It argues against the equation of Indian secularism with substantive values, reintroducing questions of hegemony and demography to normative analyses of secularism. Secularism's legal machinery thereby emerges as neither dispassionate nor independent of the epistemological claims of the majority, exposing the limits of current views of Indian secularism as distinctive from its western counterparts.
1 citations
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TL;DR: In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the British administration was concerned with clipping the wings of the malicious Indian shroffs (Bankers) and their manoeuvres and secret dealings.
Abstract: The pressing preoccupation of the British administration in the early decades of the nineteenth century to clip the wings of the malicious Indian shroffs (Bankers) and their manoeuvres and secret dealings was in sharp and in a sense valid contrast to their earlierperceptions of the Indian shroffs and their Hundi empire. By 1807, Mr Rickards, senior member of the Bombay establishment, was urging the Governor-General in Council to establisha General Bank whose operations would extend throughout India, facilitate remittances andcredit transfers from one part of the country to another, and above all ‘free the mercantile body from losses and inconveniences suffered in the exchange and from the artifices of shroffs’. Their ‘undue and pernicious influence over the course of trade and exchange’ could no longer be treated with forbearance, and the urgency of remedy was stressed. It was both strange and ironical that such advice should stem from a quarter where in the crucial years of political change and transition in the second half of the eighteenth century, the cooperation and intervention of the indigenous banking fraternity and their credit support had proved vital to the success of the Imperial strategy. The experience was admittedly not unique to Bombay and the English East India Company (hence-forth E.E.I.C) and in a sense the guarantee of local credit and the support of service groups for a variety of reasons, was clearly envisagedas a basic ingredient to state building in the eighteenth century.
53 citations
TL;DR: SURAT, the waning port city of the departed Great Mughals, was rocked by riots on 6 August 1795 as mentioned in this paper, when 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.
Abstract: 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 6lite and the once wealthy Muslim shipping magnates' 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
27 citations
TL;DR: Subramanian as mentioned in this paper argues 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.
Abstract: 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’.
15 citations
TL;DR: In this article, Ashin Das Gupta has so convincingly shown in a recent and important book that the mercantile prosperity of Mughal Surat was intimately connected with the existence of a system of great Islamic states that controlled most of the Near Ea,t and South Asia.
Abstract: As Ashin Das Gupta has so convincingly shown in a recent and important book, the mercantile prosperity of Mughal Surat was intimately connected with the existence of a system of great Islamic states that controlled most of the Near Ea,t and South Asia. This system assured reasonable stability to the whole area. In turn, it made possible a thriving commerce along a network which, in its maritime part, stretched from the western coast of India to the &dquo;Gulphs&dquo;, namely the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. This system, which had had its halcyon days in the 17th century, began to disintegrate at the commencement of the following century. ’The decline of Surat naturally followed.’ As a consequence-to borrow Bruce Watson’s2 expression-by the 1740s the Surat merchants were finally trapped between the devil and deep blue sea. On one side there was a situation of economic difficulties and political anarchy, on the other there was the increasing power of the Europeans. When a long spell of city civil war started in 1748 and the Dutch and the English took active part in it on opposite sides, the merchants had to choose. They could try to uphold the old order-a city ruled by an independent Nawab-or seek the establishment of some kind of European protectorate over their city. At least at the beginning, such leading merchants as Mulla Fakaruddin and Saleh Challabi made an attempt for the first solution. Soon enough this policy showed its lack of realism and the bulk of the merchants decided for the latter alternative. As the English and the Dutch
15 citations