Shared Histories of Modernity

Critical Asian Studies

Series Editor: Veena Das
Kreiger-Eisenhower Professor in Anthropology,
Johns Hopkins University
Critical Asian Studies is devoted to in-depth studies of emergent social
and cultural phenomena in the countries of the region. While recognizing
the important ways in which the specific and often violent histories of the
nation-state have influenced the social formations in this region, the books
in this series also examine the processes of translation, exchange, boundary
crossings in the linked identities and histories of the region. The authors
in this series engage with social theory through ethnographically grounded
research and archival work.

Also in this Series

Living with Violence: The Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life
Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehta
ISBN 978-0-415-43080-7
Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization
(Ed.) Saurabh Dube
ISBN 978-0-415-44552-8
The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi
Perveez Mody
ISBN 978-0-415-44604-4
Settlers, Saints and Sovereigns: An Ethnography of State Formation in
Western India
Farhana Ibrahim
ISBN 978-0-415-44556-6
Shared Histories of Modernity<br/>
China, India and the Ottoman Empire

Editors<br/>

Huri Islamoglu
<br/>
Peter C. Perdue
First published 2009
by Routledge<br/>

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 Contents
Foreword by Veena Dagvii
Preface and Acknowledgementsx
Notes on Contributorsxii

1
Introduction

1. Empire, and Nation in Comparative Perspective:

Frontier Administration in Eighteenth-Century China 21

2. Administrative Practice between Religious and

Stale Law on the Eastern Frontiers of the Ottoman
Empire 46

3. The Fate of Empires: Rethinking Mughals, Ottomans

and Hgfesburgs 74

4. Modernities Compared: State Transformations and

Constitutions of Property in the Qing and Ottoman
Empires 109

5. When Strong Men Meet: Recruited Punjabis and

Constrained Colonialism 147

6. Administering the City, Policing Commerce 205

7. Formal and Informal Mechanisms of Rule and

Bcanomie Development: The Qing Empire in
Comparative Perspective 231
 8. Heaven and the Administration of Things:
Some Remarks on Law in the Tanzimat Era 255

9. A World Made Simple; Law and Property in the

Ottoman and Qing Empires 273

10. A History of Caste in South Asia: From Pre-eolonial

Polity to Biopolitical State 299

Index 321
 Foreword
Critical studies on empire have typically taken the European and
the North American forms as ideal sites on which debates about the
implications of empire for national sovereignty, citizenship and
transnational social forms are engaged. The civilizations of China,
India and the Ottoman empire have figured in the narratives of
modernity mostly as sites of lack, as victims of history or as objects
of reform through which the story (‘narrative’ appears earlier in the
sentence) of the civilizing mission of the West could be told. This
volume brings together a powerful set of essays by historians and
historical sociologists who shift the emphasis of debate, focusing on
an entirely new set of questions. They ask, for instance, how we are
to understand the relative longevity of early empires as compared
to the short lifespan of nineteenth century empires. Or, can we give
a comparative account of how or why the Habsburg and Ottoman
empires eventually splintered into nation-states while the Mughal
and Qing empires, despite some fragmentation and reorganization,
continued with relatively stable boundaries? It is not as if any
readymade
answers are available or even that everyone would agree to
the form of the question. However, a systematic rendering of the
problems in management of territories and populations in terms
of administrative and legal techniques utilized by these historical
empires in the early modern period, and the portability of the
forms that were evolved, has the great advantage of correcting the
presentist bias (or what might be called a ‘tunnel’ view of history)
that marks much discussion of contemporary dilemmas about the
nation-state. The articles in the volume leave one in little doubt
that focusing the Qing, Ottoman and Mughal empires reveals the
shared histories of modern transformation in Eurasia from the
sixteenth century to the early twentieth century, rather than the
oppositionof tradition and modernity, or lack and plenitude in the
East and West respectively.
Among the most interesting questions that are posed is the
question of how diversities were managed, and how relations between
formal legal structures and local forms of justice evolved? Almost
all the articles demonstrate the various kinds of negotiated
practices
through which regional, denominational and other diversities
were nego-tiated. One could characterize these as ‘accommodative’
 Shared Histories of Modernity

practices, as many of the articles do, but the descriptions of the

actual practices through which the peripheries of the empire were
managed, and the negotiations with elite interests as well as non-
elite urban populations (petty traders, street vendors) that shaped
urban space show these to be normal ways of managing populations,
rather than as ‘accommodations’. Thus, for instance, the problem of
keeping peace at the frontiers was addressed through incorporating
local elites in central rule as a technique of statecraft.
There is an interesting inter-relation between discourse and
practice
here, and one can think of a productive disjuncture between
the two. For instance, the formalization of law into state law or
qanun in the Ottoman empire did not prevent particular practices
to be defended or opposed on the basis of sharia law. Contemporary
theories of legal pluralism would similarly point to the manner in
which the idea of custom is incorporated in state law and yet retains
a trace of its opposition to formal law. In their erudite Introduction
to the volume, the editors draw out the full implications of these and
related developments for the early modern scenario in these regions —
marked as they were by rapid commercial expansion; legal and
administrative reforms relating to policing, revenue collection, and
some mapping of populations circulating and acquiring new forms
as they interact with earlier institutions. But it is the specificity and
attention to detail in the individual articles that make for fascinating
reading on the gamut of state and imperial formations that marked
the early modern period in these three empires, ranging from court-
centred to bureaucratic mechanisms of rule. What is even more
stunning is the demonstration, in several articles, that earlier forms
of discourse and practice did not simply disappear — there is
evidenceof how these were reconstituted in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Thus, both in space and time, it is hard
to draw sharp boundaries between a Western Europe that formed a
single coherent entity in contrast to an equally coherent Orient. Such
myths, however, did perform the function of legitimating colonial
expansion, and influenced generations of history-writing by
providingready-made templates within which stories of the Orient
could be told.
Yet one may ask, may one not, what has changed? Even as we
reject the story of progressive modernity, can the other stories of
the panoptical surveillance of modern institutions, atomization
of communities within urban forms and, more generally, the
 Foreword

characterization of all violence as forms of biopower suffice for a

description of our contemporary world? I would suggest that the
tools with which the authors of this volume revisit the practices of
these three empires might be profitably applied to questions about
modern states. As I have written elsewhere, it is astonishing that
even the most powerful states or empires in the world, like that of
the United States, experience themselves as ‘unfinished’ projects
and seem to oscillate between an arrogant application of brute
power to the realization that negotiated settlements maintain the
peace better. Perhaps countries such as India need to learn from
their own past. Instead of the myths that now abound in certain
history textbooks and in public culture about the autocratic Mughal
rule as emblematic of early empires, we need to shift our attention
to questions of diversity, forms of justice, attention to the local,
and the long history of circulations between states and imperial
formations that formed the early modern world, and the continuities
we detect till later periods can form the archive from which there
is much to be learned.
I am grateful for the splendid set of articles that Huri Islamoğlu
and Peter C. Perdue have offered us in this volume in the series
on Critical Asian Studies.

Veena Das
Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology
Johns Hopkins University
 Preface and Acknowledgements
During the last decade, quite a few historians and theorists have
turned their attention to the comparative study of empires,
colonialism,
and their connection to modernity. Yet most of them still
rely on the classic European empires of Britain and France as the
primary reference point. A growing number of scholars, however,
recognize that the distinctive paths of non-Western empires deserve
equal treatment. With this volume, we intend to encourage this trend
toward genuinely comparative world-historical analysis.
This volume originated in 1999 and 2000 when a group of scholars
of the Qing and Ottoman empires Game together in two workshops.
The first workshop, Shared Histories of Modernity: State
Transformations
Contexts, Seventeenth through
in the Chinese and Ottoman

Nineteenth Centuries, was hosted by the, Kevorkian Center for Near

Eastern Studies at New York University. The second workshop,
Shared Histories of Modernity: Law and Administration in 19th
Century
China and the Ottoman
Empire, University
in Istanbul. We
was held at SabanCa
the contributions to
gratefully acknowledge our

discussion
of those who attended the
workshops: Agmon, Engin Iris
Akarli, Talal Asad, Karen Barkey, Jerome Bourgon, Peter Carroll,
Fred Cooper, Pamela Crossley, Rifaat Abou El Haj, Khalid Falimy,
Peter Gran, Baber Johansen, Vasant Kaiwar, Rebecca Karl, Çağlar
Keyder, Sucheta Mazumdar, James Millward, Roger Owen, Nancy
Paxk, Ariel Salzman, Derek Saver. Joanna Waley-Cohen, Frederic
Wakeman. Particular thanks are due to our hosts at the two
conferences, Timothy Mitchell, then Director of the Kevorkian:
Center
for Near Eastern Studies at NYU and to Ahmet Evin, the Dean
of Social Sciences at Sabanci University. Five articles by Huri
Islamoğlu, Dina Rizk Khoury, Melissa Macauley, Peter C. Perdue,
and R. Bin Wong were published in a special issue of the Journal
of Early Modem History, Vol. 9, No:. I (2001). We thank JEMH
and its editor, James D. Tracy for his warm reception of the initial
five articles and publishing them in a special issue of the journal as
well as for the permission to reprint.
The India part of the volume was initiated in discussions with
Professor Patricia Uberoi of Center for Developing Societies in
New Delhi and Peter Carroll generously guided us in the choice of
 Preface and Acknowledgements

articles for this part. We are grateful to both for their contribution,
and to Esha Béteille, now of Social Science Press in New Delhi;
without her grace, enthusiasm and warm support, this volume could
not have been possible.
 Notes on Contributors
Peter Carroll is a social and cultural historian of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century China, and Associate Professor of History at
Northwestern University. His research interests include urban
history and social geography, Chinese modernism and social science,
popular and material culture, gender/sexuality, and nationalism. His
book, Between Heaven and Modernity: Reconstructing Suzhou, 1895–
1937 (2006), was awarded the Best Book (Non-North American)
2007 prize by the Urban History Association. He is currently writing
a book on suicide and ideas of modern society in China during the
first half of the twentieth century.
p-carroll@northwestern.edu
Huri Islamoğlu is Professor of Economic History and Political
Economy at Boğazici XfeiYersity, Istanbul, and in Central European
University, Budapest. Her first book, State and Peasant in the
Ottoman Empire (1994) challenges notions of oriental despotism and
stagnant eastern economies; it examines the internal dynamics of
Ottoman rural economy in its relation to state policies. Constituting
Modernity: Private Property in the East and West (2004), an edited
volume, puts forth a research agenda on: the legal and administrative
makings of private property as an aspect of Ottoman modernity. Her
most recent book, Ottoman History as World History (2007)
contains
ten the economic and legal history of the Ottoman
essays on

empire. She is currently writing a book on two historical moments

of market formation: in the nineteenth century, and in the late

twentieth and early twenty-first ceiiturie# in the Middle East, Russia
and eastern Europe.
huricihanQberkeley. edu

Dina Rizk Khoury is Associate Professor of History and International

Relations at George Washington University in Washington DC. She
writes on the Iraqi provinces of the Ottoman empire in the early
modern period, with particular emphasis on urban rebellions and
Islamic reform agendas. Her book, State and Provincial Society in the
Ottoman Empire: Mosul 1540–1834 (1997) has won two prizes. She is
currently writing a book, ‘Postponed Lives: War and Remembrance
in Iraq’, on the impact of war on Iraq’s war generation. She is the
recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 2007–8.
dikhy@gwu.edu

Melissa Macauley is Associate Professor of History and the Charles

Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at
Northwestern
University. She is the author of Social Power and Legal
Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China (1998) and
various articles relating to Chinese social and legal history. She is
currently studying a southeast coastal region of China in its
transnational
context and will publish a book tentatively titled ‘Chaozhou
Sojourners: Crime and Migration in the South China Seas, 1856–1937'.

m-macauley@northwestern.edu

Şerif Mardin is Professor of Sociology of Religion and Political

Sociology at Sabanci University, Istanbul. He was educated at the
Johns Hopkins and Stanford universities:. He has taught courses
on sociology of religion, religious fundamentalism, the political

sociology of the Ottoman empire, and Ottoman intellectual history

at the Political ScienceFaculty of Ankara University, at Bogazici
University, Istanbul, and, in the US, Princeton, Harvard,
at
universities
and at the University of California at Berkeley, and at Los
Angeles. He has also taught at Oxford University in the UK and
at Eeole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in France.. Among
his numerous publications in Turkish and English are Religion and
Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of Bediüzzaman Said
Nursi (1989), The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought (1962) [Yeni
Osmanh Düşüncesinin Doğuşu (1996)], and Etik, Din ve Laiklik
( Ki liirs. Religion and Laicism) (1995).

smardin@sabanciuniv.edu

Rajit K. Mazumder has a BA in Economics from the University of

Delhi, an MA in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi,
and has completed his doctoral dissertation at the School of Oriental
and African Studies, University of London. He is currently Assistant
Professor of History at DePaul University, Chicago. He is the author
of The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab (2003), and is at
present working on the impact of the British Indian army on the
development of science and technology in colonial India.
rajit.mazumder@gmail.com

Peter C. Perdue is Professor of History at Yale University. He teaches

courses on East Asian history and civilization, Chinese social and
economic history, the Silk Road, and historical methodology. His
first book, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850
A.D. (1987), examines long-term agricultural change in one
Chinese province. His most recent book, China Marches West: The
Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (2005), discusses environmental
change, ethnicity, long-term economic change and military conquest
in an integrated account of the Chinese, Mongolian and Russian
contention
over Siberia and Central Eurasia during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. He is now beginning a new project of
comparative
research on Chinese frontiers.
peter.c.perdue@yale.edu

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Professor and Doshi Chair of Indian

History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where
he also directs the Center for India and South Asia. He was Directeur
d’études at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris)
from 1995 to 2002, and then held the Chair in Indian History and
Culture at the University of Oxford from 2002 to 2004. His chief
publications include The Political Economy of Commerce (1990);
The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (1997); Penumbral
Visions (2001), and the two-volume Explorations in Connected
History (2005).
subrahma@history.ucla.edu

Ananya Vajpeyi teaches South Asian History at the University

of Massachusetts, Boston. She was educated at the Jawaharlal
Nehru University (New Delhi), at Oxford, where she read as a
Rhodes Scholar, and at the University of Chicago. She has taught
at Columbia University (2006–7) and was named a fellow of the
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (2005–8). Her
monograph, Prolegomena to the Study of People and Places in Violent
India, appeared from WISCOMP in November 2007. She is currently
working on a book titled ‘Righteous Republic: The Political
Foundations
of Modern India’ for Harvard University Press.
ananya.vajpeyi@umb.edu

R. Bin Wong is Director of the UCLA Asia Institute and Professor

of History. His research has examined Chinese patterns of political,
economic and social change, especially since the eighteenth century,
both within Asian regional contexts and compared with more
familiar European patterns. Among his books is China Transformed:
Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (1997),
which also appeared in Chinese, and a Japanese edition is due for
publication in 2009. Wong has also written or co-authored some
fifty articles published in North America, East Asia and Europe, in
Chinese, English, French and Japanese, in journals that reach diverse
audiences within and beyond academia. His scholarly articles
include ‘Entre monde et nation: Les regions Braudelienne en Asie,’
Annales HSS 56(1) (Jan.–Feb. 2001: 5–42); ‘The Search for European
Differences and Domination in the Early Modern World: A View
from Asia,’ American Historical Review 107(2) (April 2002: 447–69).
More popular essays appear in the Nihon keizai shimbun (Japan
Economic Times) and the Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay,
India). A ten-page interview with Wong has appeared in the August
2004 issue of Shehui kexue (Social Sciences).
wong@history.ucla.edu
 Introduction

Huri Islamoğlu and Peter C. Perdue

Paradigms determine the writing of history. Whether acknowledged

or not, all historical writing rests on assumptions about the nature
of a given society, about its past and future trajectories of
development
and about its place vis a vis other societies. The history of non-
European societies has, for a long time, been set in opposition to
that of Europe. European history, written as the privileged domain
of commercial classes, of bourgeois revolutions and of liberal
constitutional
states, is pitted against a non-European history of stagnant
agrarian economies, stunted commercial development and absent
revolutions. Historians have held despotic states or disabling belief
systems — Confucian or Islamic — responsible for the
backwardness
of the East. This high drama of pitting absences and presences
against each other has achieved two interrelated objectives: it has
legitimated European domination over non-European areas and
it has reconstructed Europe, or ‘the West’, and non-Europe, or ‘the
East’ as homogeneous, ahistorical, hypostatised entities.
Two discourses which crystallized in the post-World War II
period, the modernization and world-system perspectives, addressed
the issue of interaction between the western subject and the
nonwestern
object of domination. Modernization theory focused on
‘westernization’, or the adoption of European institutions since the
nineteenth century, as a way of breaking out of stagnant ‘tradition’.
World system theory, by contrast, attributed the stagnation of
non-European areas to the European impact. The modernization
theorist saw the trajectory of world history as convergence toward
an idealized image of the West, but the world system theorist saw
only the reproduction of a dominant western center and a dependent
non-western periphery.
Despite their differences, both modernization and world-system
theories embraced a bifurcated conception of world history that
cast European and non-European histories as irreconciliable
trajectories of development. While the world system perspective
has been critical of the culturalist-essentialist tilt of modernization
 Huri Islamoglu and Peter C. Perdue

cum westernization approaches and has emphasized the historical

stagnation and backwardness of non-European regions, both
approaches address what is lacking in non-European regions
that has slowed down their progress in terms of capitalist
development, industrialization, democratic institutions and liberal
constitutionalism. This vocabulary of deficit has informed both
modern historical studies and social theories. Historians in China,
for example, have placed paramount emphasis on the question of
why China failed to have an industrial revolution. They have asked
why China deviated from the 'normal' path to capitalism in England
as defined by Marx. The reasons may include Confucian disdain for

commerce, repression of trade by the bureaucracy, neglect of military

technology by a literati elite or inadequate specialization
pacifist
in the rural economy, leaving an entrenched peasantry that blocked
the growth of an industrial labour force. 1 Similarly, Marxist and
liberal scholars of the Ottoman and Mughal empires identified the
existence of self-sufficient village communities or the appropriation
of rural surpluses by oriental despots as impediments to capital
accumulation and industrial development (Habib 1969 ; Islamoglu
andKeyder 1987).
Recently, scholars of Qing China’s economic history have
repeatedly
exposed the flaws in this picture of a stagnating economy
and society. In the revisionist view, the imperial state did not
uniformly
repress commerce, literati elites went into joint ventures
with merchants, peasant marketing developed vigorously, agrarian
productivity rose in the advanced regions and technological
innovation
continued in the agrarian economy through the eighteenth
century (Li 1998; Marks 1998; Mazumdar 1998; Pomeranz 2000;
Wong 1997). This work has set a new agenda for comparative study
in this area: to first investigate similarities between China and
Europe before specifying more nuanced degrees of contrast.
Studies of the economic history of the Ottoman empire have also
attempted to free themselves from the problematic of deficits in
comparison to western Europe. Suraiya Faroqhi ‘oppose[s] the
essentialist
thinking which underlies so many comparisons between ‘East
and West’, and plead[s] for a relatively late divergence between the
two, for the role of historical contingencies in causing disjuncture,
and for the importance of economic, social, and cultural
contradictions
within the two socio-economic formations in question…’. She
argues that dynamism and decline are found in both Europe and the
 Introduction

Ottoman empire; we cannot sharply split a progressive West from

a backward East. Just like tlieir Chinese: counterparts, Ottoman
historians have attacked the simple dichotomies of 'tradition'and
'modernity' that counterpoSed a dynamic West to a backward East;
these Ottoman historians draw attention to the complex and
dynamic eeonomie and social environment of the Ottoman empire
(Aksan 1999; Darling 1998 ; Faroqhi 1992: 217; Islamoğlu-Lia.n 1994;
•Salzman 1993; cf. Cohen 1984 ), Peter Gran likewise criticizes the
belief that the 'rise of the West implies a decline of the Other', and
argues that 'non-Western regions: collaborating in the larger social
transformation of the late eighteenth century had indigenous roots
for their own modern capitalist cultures' ( Gran 1979 : xii). All these
scholars reject the idea that western Europe constitutes a singles
coherent model against which; to: contrast an equally coherent,
opposing
totality. Instead, they argue for multiple contradictions within
ssocial formations and multiple interactions between different units.
Industrialization and modernization become global processes that
transform all the component units, not the privileged possession of
one civilization which is exported to another ( Gran 1979 ; Islamoglu

and Keyder 1987; Blaut 1993 , 2000).

Historians of the Mughal empire have also moved away from
the consensus that Mughal institutional structures were inferior
to those of an ‘idealized’ West. (Habib 1969; Labib 1969). Tapan
Raychaudhuri shows that an entrepreneurial class flourished and
commercial activity thrived in a number of coastal regions in
Mughal India (Raychaudhuri 1969). Chetan Singh has shown that
such development was not limited to coastal regions and extended
to the interior region of Punjab (Singh 1991).2 There has also been
a proliferation of studies of Mughal institutions, especially land
tenure and revenue assignment systems as well as the idioms of
rule (Alam and Subrahmanyam 1998). In his article in this volume,
Subrahmanyam further underlines the salience of the Mughal
institutional input for the makings of the British colonial state in
India. In the 1980s, Ranajit Guha and a group of Indian scholars
launched a criticism of the elitism which characterized the
historiography
of colonial India and set forth a research programme to
study the histories of ‘subaltern ’ groups or groups who have been
subordinated to the dominance of ruling groups. Subaltern studies
focused on the politics of the people, which, Guha argued, rested on
the capacities of the ‘exploited’ to achieve mobilization horizontally,
in contrast to elite politics and their vertical forms of mobilization
in the context of state institutions, including parliaments and
bureaucratic
commissions. Guha, however, admitted the significance
of the Gramscian insight that subordination cannot be understood
except in relation to domination for ‘subaltern groups are always
subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and
rise up’ (Guha 1982). Yet it appears to be left to a new generation
of scholars to overcome the analytical barrier represented by the
binary division of politics of the people and the politics of the elites.
State institutions or orderings of social reality may be more than
just instruments of co-optation and manipulation on the part of
state elites; they may also be domains of political activity of non-
elite groups. Articles in this volume may provide an opening for
scrutiny in that direction.
Finally, certain European historians have asserted multiple
routes to capitalism that do not raise England, or Marx’s models
of it, as the exclusive option. O’Brien and Keyder demonstrate
quantitatively, for example, that labour productivity in France
was in fact higher than in Britain through the nineteenth century.
They reject the diffusion model that focuses exclusively on superior
British techniques spreading to the rest of Europe. France’s path to
industrialization was different, but not backward or inferior. Ken
Alder’s study of the role of French military engineers in developing
production with interchangeable parts supports the idea of multiple
roads to technological progress and the significant positive role of the
early modern state, especially in its military activities. John Brewer
makes much the same case for England. These examples show how
economic and technological historians of all three regions have begun
to address related questions with a presumption of the existence of
multiplicity, indeterminacy and cross-regional similarities, instead
of binary divisions between the West and the rest ( Alder 1997;
Brewer 1990; O’Brien and Keyder 1978).
Yet recent historical scholarship, while pointing to different
paths of historical development, still measures non-European
histories against European models of development, including when
it uses economic measures like changes in agricultural productivity
and population growth, and political measures like representative
institutions and centralized bureaucracies ( Frank 1998; Inalcik
1973). To say that ‘non-Europeans had it too’ only reproduces the
binary conception of world history by taking Europe as its point of
reference. Such similarities need to be embedded in broader concepts
that transcend both East and West.
This volume brings together historians of the Qing, the Mughal
and the Ottoman empires and is motivated by a concern to
addressmodern transformation of these regions without reference to
‘idealized’ criteria of what qualifies as modern transformation and
what does not, which coincides with a geographical bifurcation of
world history into two irreconcilable trajectories, European and
non-European. It also seeks to transcend the temporal bifurcation
of that history into pre-modern and modern, as pre-modernity is
often considered to be the ‘time’ of non-European regions, whereas
modernity is assumed to belong to the West. Instead, the volume
explorescategories of historical explanation that might span the
European and non-European, pre-modern and modern experiences.
It does this, first, by addressing the shared experiences of modern
transformation or modernity in three regions which the conventional
historiography identifies as non-European and is therefore, by
implication,outside of modernity or only tangentially linked to it as
its victim. Here, modernity refers to the continuous processes of
exploring new institutional configurations in the world historical
context of the Eurasian land mass (subsequently to include the
Americas and other continents) since the fifteenth century. Two
interrelated features define this historical context: one, commercial
expansion both within imperial territories in Eurasia and in overseas
dominions; two, competition among multiple political entities giving
way to a gamut of state or imperial formations, ranging from court-
centred to bureaucratic and, recently, to one centred on autonomous
governance by bodies of experts.3
The developmental trajectories within this world historical
context
refer to highly complex processes with earlier institutional
configurations (and the interests they embodied), say of the
sixteenthand the seventeenth centuries, interacting with later ones
in the nineteenth century, whereby the old is recast in the terms
of the new and the new carries the imprint of confrontations with
the old. In this sense, modern transformation does not merely
indicate
the institutional configurations of the nineteenth century
but incorporates their early history in the sixteenth through the
eighteenth centuries. As such, modernity no longer stands for
experiences of ‘alienation’ from specific historical trajectories, a
characterization which often haunted the ‘modern’ histories of the
British empire in India, the Ottoman reform state or the communist
Chinese state.
Moreover, a focus on the experience of the modernity of non-
European regions has added salience in the present world economy,
as these regions assume leading roles in a new phase of modern
transformation.
Awareness of the early histories of these regions makes
one skeptical about evaluations of their present-day modernity
as being merely accidental. Such arguments, as promoted by the
‘clash of civilizations’ school, carry the implication that ‘essential’
civilizational structures will eventually dominate, leading to a new
equilibrium state in world history, dominated by the West. The
articles in this volume suggest instead that present transformational
patterns may have deeper roots than are generally assumed.
One thread in the making of modernity has been state formation.
Centralizing states have been the most readily identifiable shared
historical experiences throughout Eurasia since the fifteenth century.
These states interacted in peace and war, assimilating
institutions
and ideologies of rule. James Millward, in the spirit of Joseph
Fletcher, provides an impressive analysis of how steppe empires
linked the Chinese and Ottoman state formations, transmitting
techniques
of government between East Roman (Byzantine), Iranian,
Chinese and Turkic traditions (Millward 1999). To Europeans, the
Ottoman state was the visible face of this body of knowledge as
it came to embody the Renaissance ideal of governance, or
statecraft.
Machiavelli’s Prince approximated an idealized image of the
Ottoman ruler more closely than any other ruler in western Eurasia.
Later on, by contrast, as centralizing states in Europe looked to a
model of Rechtstaat, or well-regulated government under law, the
Ottoman and Mughal states and the Chinese Middle Kingdom
became metaphors for despotism, mirrors for criticizing the
absolutist
practices of the European rulers, deviating from the Rechtstaat
ideal. Russia, to the extent that it was seen as an ‘Asiatic’ power,
also fit the stereotypical model of despotism. Europeans
embracing
commercial and colonial expansion in the eighteenth and the
nineteenth centuries identified ‘oriental despotism’ as the single
most important cause of Asia’s political and economic stagnation.
The label also justified European colonialism. Western claims to
eliminate eastern stagnation by imposing domination laid the basis
for the perspectives of modernization in the twentieth century.
 This volume ‘brings the state back’ (Evans et al. 1985) into the
study of the three empires but does so by differentiating it into its
different institutions or orderings of social reality. Over the past
three decades, Qing, Mughal and Ottoman historical researchers
rejected the study of state institutions inspired by the ideal-type
analyses of Orientalism and the modernization perspective. Instead,
they turned to social and economic structures, long-term trends
and regional analyses. This new ‘return to the state’, however,
includesthe insights of social and economic history, underlining
the differentiated, pluralistic and diverse character of the early
modern societies and the flexibility, fluidity, and accommodative
nature of their state practices. For example, rejecting European
characterizations of the Ottoman state as ‘despotic’, we find
attractive
the notion of the early modern state as a negotiated enterprise
(Barkey 1994; Islamoglu 1987; Salzman 1993).
The concept of the early modern state as a negotiated enterprise
questions the assumption that state centralization must be a key
metric of success in modernization. China, because of its long-
lasting civil bureaucracy, often seems to have failed in its
modernization
attempts because it failed to confront creatively forces of
decentralization in the nineteenth century. The thesis of the ‘decline’
of the Ottoman and the Mughal empires raises similar arguments.
The contributions in this issue by Peter C. Perdue and Dina Khoury
challenge the decline thesis by pointing to the abilities of the Qing
and Ottoman imperial governments in the eighteenth century
to administer the frontier regions through an accommodation of
multiple local particularities within an overreaching structure.
Perdue discusses a series of administrative innovations introduced
by the Qing that included fixing of boundaries, classifying peoples
and designating reliable local leadership. These practices replaced
fluctuating alliances and multiple allegiances with one direct line of
authority. Unlike the interior, consolidation of the Qing conquest
on the frontier required organizing the population into multiple
administrative forms. During this consolidation, the empire created
and sustained diversity by moving people from the interiors to the
frontiers, and vice versa (Perdue 2005).
Dina Khoury emphasizes the particularities of the Arab frontier
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this period, the
Ottoman government sought to redefine the administration of the
Iraqi provinces by issuing regulations that represented negotiated
settlements between local elites and the central government.
Klioury shows how these administrative rules: accommodated tribal,
commercial and landed interests. Her analysis focuses On the use
of the legal idioms of kanun (state law) and the Islamic sharia to
negotiate claims. In her analysis, locnl Islamic jurists used sharia
to challenge the legitimacy of particular points in state law, but did
not reject the state's existence. The conception of justice embedded
in state In w. in turn, made it generally acceptable to jurists and the
local population (Islamoğlu 1994).
Subrahmanyam argues that the ‘Mughal compromise’, which
included assignments of revenue grants to different groups of
administrators
and a system of land management premised on negotiations
of the obligations of local magnates to the Mughal ruler and
privileges
these received from him, embodied the abilities of the
Mughal government to accommodate diverse regions and religious
and denominational groups to their rule. For Subrahmanyam, the
ideological basis for the ‘Mughal compromise’ or the idiom of rule in
the Mughal empire had been a notion of social equilibrium derived
from older Persian and Central Asian traditions. Subrahmayam
argues that, far from being a sign of decline, the pattern of regional
development supports this accommodative institutional capacity
of the Mughal empire.
The term ‘negotiation’ epitomizes the accommodative, flexible
nature of the Qing, Mughal and Ottoman states in the early modern
era. Although all three states used force when negotiations broke
down, they did not try to repress all resistance in the name of an ideal
future. The negotiated character of early modern states, however,
is often contrasted with the ‘despotic’, unyielding modern states,
as the Ottoman empire after the Tanzimat reforms, or Republican
China, or the British empire is purported to be ( Akarli 1999).
Articles in this volume addressing state formations in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries in the Ottoman and the late Qing
empires as well as in British India challenge the vision of the
modern state subjecting all social reality to its uncompromising
control (Foucault 1991). Such control is generally understood to
be embedded in administrative techniques defining property rights
on land, as well as citizenry with obligations of military service and
payment of taxes. Thus, administrative techniques, which included
aggregate categories for classifying land and persons employed in
population and cadastral registers, represented all encompassing
state ‘power’, mystified and unalterable through the actions of those
who were subordinated to it (Scott 1998).
One way to transcend the overdrawn contrast between ‘nego-
tiating’ the early modern state and uncompromising modern
administrations would be to reconsider the uses of the concept of
‘negotiation’ as an explanatory principle for different state actions. A
rigid governmentality perspective tends to confine analysis of early
modern and modern states to given definitions or ideal-types, not
allowing for understandings of the process of transformation of one
or the other. On the other hand, using the concept of negotiation
as an object of inquiry would allow for evaluations of the different
contexts in which negotiations take place and for tracing shifts in
these contexts, as had been the case with the transformation of
early modern into modern states.4
Rajit K. Mazumder’s article challenges the understanding of the
‘absolute’, ‘non-negotiated’ character of administrative power with
respect to Indian colonial rule in Punjab, by focusing on the multiple
negotiations or deliberations between the British administrators
and various local actors (most notably the landed interests and
soldiers) as well as those among the administrators themselves. Such
deliberations embodying power relations among different actors
resulted in continual amendments in the legislation on alienation of
lands, in rules of tax assessment and elections. Moreover, the varying
nature of interests, of power relations and colonial institutions as
sites for the negotiation of different claims largely accounted for
specific developmental trajectories in different regions of colonial
India. Mazumder shows that local actors in Punjab had particular
leverage vis-a-vis the colonial administration because this was a
region for the recruitment of the British Indian army. Because of
the primacy of security interests to the empire, British colonial
administrators made many concessions to the landed military
classes of Punjab in order to ensure the smooth flow of soldiers
into the army.
Further contesting polarizations of an uncompromising and
nonaccommodative
modern state against flexible and accommodative
q

early modern state, Islamoglu addresses the deliberative processes

in the Ottoman empire, focusing on the shift in context as the early
modern sixteenth to eighteenth centuries gave way to the modern
nineteenth century. Here, deliberations or negotiations refer to the
political activity of different actors (‘subordinate’ and elite), carried
out in relation to definitions or orderings of social relations in terms
of rules or institutions.
According to Islamoğlu, in the early modern Ottoman empire,
institutions represented particularistic settlements; negotiated
between the ruler and his various representatives: and different
groups or individuals. These institutions aimed towards distributing
among different groups or individuals a wide range of resources,
including the land-use, revenues; and titles to land, as; well as
trading
privileges, exemptions from taxes and from military service.
The distributive thrust of Ottoman institutions signalled an
accommodative concern and was rooted in the priority to maintain

social harmony. The ruler's legitimacy rested on his ability to secure

such harmony, which, in Ottoman parlance, was equated with his
ability to dispense justice. Such justice was the reference point
of all political activity and the recourse of all social actors seeking
accommo dat ion.
In the nineteenth century, in the world historical context of
intensified
inter-state
competition Eurasia, in western bureaucratic
authority prevailed and general rules replaced former particularistic
settlements. This passage was a highly conflictual one. involving
incessant negotiations or deliberations of general rules and
procedures. Islamoğlu's article focuses on Contestations of and
resistances to the Land Code, which introduced the general category
of individual ownership, replacing particularistic definitions of
multiple claims on land and threatening, for instance, use rights of
sharecroppers and subsistence farmers. It also focuses on resistances
to cadastral activity, including field mappings aiming towards a
spatial constitution of individual plots from which single state tax
could be collected, to the detriment of previous multiple revenue
claims from land, including those of pious establishments and tax-
farmers. One outcome of such contestations and resistances was a

certain 'particularization' of the general precept of the Land Codes

through the issuing of special provisions, the demands of
particular
groups hence accounting for diverse modern transformation
trajectories in different rr«i< >n> of the empire. Islamoglu also points
to the negotiated character of land registration accounting for its
incomplete:character in the nineteenth century and, especially, for the
failure to achieve extensive cadastral mapping, which was expected
to define precise boundaries for individually owned plots.
 Yet, Islamoğlu shows that such particularizsition and inability
to affect modern land registration did not signal a return to the
'old'; particularizaiion took place in reference to a general rule, not
in reference to justice or social harmony negotiated with the ruler.
Such a shift in the point of reference of negotiations distanced the
central government from individual, particularistic interests;; it
signaled a new kind of stateness where legitimacy rested on the
government's ability to deliver a bureaucratic kind of justTee. In the
nineteenth century, such justice was partly informed by notions of
public service, which in practice provided the bureaucracy with a
pretext to intervene in societal situations in order to ensure that
'general' interest and not only the particular interests of the few
were served, hi the Ottoman context, it was also informed by ancient
vocabularies of justice traceable to: Sassanid Persia, to: Central Asia,
also prevailing under the Mughals.
Peter Carroll’s discussion of the institution of a modern police
force in the city of Suzhou in Qing China in the early twentieth
century
captures the tension between the generalist thrust of the modern
institutional project and its particularistic local assimilations,
pointing to a competition between the state and business elites
for urban supremacy. The police reform in Qing China was the
brainchild of maverick state officials, industrial entrepreneurs, and
political–economic theorists; its focus was on urban structure and it
was viewed as a means for stimulating economic expansion and
ordering
society for advantage in the social Darwinian military, economic
and political competition against imperial powers. Yet, the reform
met with the serious resistance of different groups in Suzhou. For
one thing, measures taken by the police force (including street
order regulations) penalized petty tradesmen while promoting the
interests of business elites associated with large trading houses.
On the other hand, business elites claimed that the new police
force, often including soldiers of local armies and baojia who were
traditionally responsible for maintaining order in the cities, did
not ensure the security of their property and commercial activity.
In response, the business elites created their own urban militia to
protect their interests (Carroll 2006).
Carroll’s article captures the conflict-ridden process of the
makings of a modern urban environment in terms of power
relations
among urban actors, including the chamber of commerce
representing business elites, night-soil workers, petty street vendors
(possibly actors in the old baojia system) as well as soldiers who were
excluded from the new police force and the new merchant militia.
The outcome is an exposition of specific features of modernity in late
Qing — one that was premised on a tension between local business
elites and other urban actors as well as between these elites and
the central state for urban supremacy. In this picture, the Qing
government — not unlike its Ottoman counterpart — seems to have
been engaged in ceaseless balancing acts between elite interests and
its own legitimacy in the eyes of non-elite urban groups, desperately
seeking to negotiate social harmony in the cities and seeking to do
so (not very successfully) by trying to form an institution, the police
force, spanning the gamut of particularistic urban interests.
The discussion of states in this volume overlaps with that of
empire.
Unlike many theorists, we did not sharply distinguish empires
from European states (Wallerstein 1974: 1, 57–63). Subrahmanyam’s
article addressing the current debate on empires seeks an answer
to the question of why the Ottoman and Habsburg splintered
into numerous nation-states while the bulk of the Mughal empire
(except for Pakistan) and of the Qing empire (except for Mongolia
and Taiwan) still hold together in the form of a single nation-
state. Subrahmanyam examines these issues without engaging in
an idealization of early modern empires and their mechanisms of
cooptation which allowed them to negotiate with and incorporate
diverse interests.
For instance, Fred Cooper argues that such cooptative
mechanisms
explain the longevity of early empires, while increased levels of
rationalization, uniformity and standardization of state practice may
have accounted for the relatively short-life spans of the nineteenth-
and twentieth-century European empires (Cooper and Stoler 1997).
Similarly, Engin Akarli explains the survival of the Chinese empire
into the twentieth century by the fact that the Qing rulers continued
to accommodate the provincial elites through multiple
negotiated
settlements (Akarli 1999). By contrast, the Ottoman imperial
state in the first quarter of the nineteenth century ceased to govern
through negotiations with provincial elites. Instead, by subjecting
them to general and uniform regulations, the Ottoman government
lost legitimacy in the eyes of these groups and was compelled to
resortto coercive measures to maintain its authority. For Akarli, this
inability or reluctance to negotiate with provincial elites lay at the
heart of the collapse of the Ottoman empire.
 Distancing himself from the separation of early modern and
modern empires, Subrahmanyam engages in a comparison of the
Habsburg, Ottoman and Mughal empires in terms of their
interrelated
institutional capacities to manage regional diversity and
religious and denominational difference as well as to allow for
economic change. He argues that the Mughal empire’s ability to
manage regional and religious/denominational diversity, and the
fact that its central concern was not the siphoning of surpluses from
the regions, contributed to the development of regional economies
which became the locomotive of economic change. The positive
institutional capacities of the Mughal empire were assimilated by
the British empire in India. Similarly, R. Bin Wong confirms the
salience of regional development for the project of Chinese modernity
following the collapse of the Qing empire. In the Chinese case,
too, we may perhaps say that specific institutional features of the
Qing empire were incorporated by the communist and nationalist
governments as part of state formation on the mainland and Taiwan.
East Asian mandarins discussed enduring questions of bureaucratic
management for over thousand years. Alexander Woodside points
out the ‘lost modernities’ of the classical East Asian bureaucracies
of China, Korea, and Vietnam which modern nation-states ignore
at their own cost (Woodside 2006).

From Negotiation to Legal Practice

Discussions of the Qing and Ottoman states must also consider
the role of formal law. This includes topics like the autonomy of
the legal sphere, the interaction of different types of law, the law’s
role in governance, as well as administrative practice, law courts
as sites of negotiation. R. Bin Wong, in his discussion of Qing
law, draws attention to the blurred boundaries between formal law
(referring to statutory law) and informal mediation. The Qing law
code had relatively few major statutes that concerned merchant
transactions, but informal mechanisms like kinship associations
regulated commercial activity. By contrast, under the European
model, modern state building meant the replacement of informal
mechanisms by formal law. Formal law created and implemented
common standards and norms, while informal practices sustained
greater diversity. At the same time, the shift from informal to formal
institutions in European states was associated with the centralization
of power, whereas, in agrarian empires, the complementary use of
formal and informal institutions did not require centralized rule.
Wong refutes the characterizations of the Qing as ‘despotic’,
interventionist
and intrusive by showing how officials delegated much
of their power to non-state associations.
Wong’s distinction between formal and informal adjudication
tends, however, to regard statutory law, both European and non-
European, in Weberian manner, as a set of rational bureaucratic norms
and standards. This schematic reduction needs some qualification.
For one thing, in early modern and Ottoman settings, statutory law
often represented multiple negotiated settlements. In this sense, there
was a continuum from formal to informal mechanisms of mediation.
Magistrates’ courts in China and kadi courts in the Ottoman empire
equally focused on the mediation of disputes as well as statutory
adjudication (Fahmy 2000; Khoury 1997; Macauley 1998).
Şerif Mardin’s article points to an erosion in judicial culture based
on courts. In the nineteenth century, as judges lost their
administrative
powers, they lost local influence. When graduates of the state
school of public administration replaced judges, law came to mean
governmental edicts. At the same time, the introduction of
professional
attorneys changed court procedures. Iris Agmon, for instance,
argues that the new adversarial system directed the attention of the
judge away from litigants, therefore away from conflict resolution
and towards the legalistic arguments presented by the attorneys
(Agmon 2000). This change revealed the shift in the reference point
of law, from distributive justice resting on negotiated settlements
among litigants to the consistency and uniformity of law presented
in legal arguments. But we should not push the argument too far.
Does this transformation in legal practice point to a complete
erasure
of mediation in the legal domain and to a total ‘formalisation’?
The prominence of commissions and administrative tribunals in
the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century as spaces for the
negotiation and implementation of governmental edicts suggests
otherwise.
In sum, comparisons of the Qing, Mughal and Ottoman experiences
point to multiple paths to modernity in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. They also reveal that these paths were largely determined
not by emulation of European patterns but by the exigencies of
power configurations in the respective empires and by their historical
vocabularies of rule. Above all, comparative histories undermine
the thesis of ‘decline’, which postulates that China in the
nineteenth
century, and the Ottoman and the Mughal empires since the
seventeenth or the eighteenth centuries, were unable to transform
their institutions and meet the challenges of warfare and domestic
upheaval. The proponents of the ‘decline’ thesis pose the loss of
ability to innovate institutionally or to govern creatively as an
explanation for the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the
Ottoman malaise throughout the nineteenth century, with its final
collapse in 1918. The articles in this issue, by contrast, point to
continual
institutional transformations in both empires throughout their
existence. Peter C. Perdue shows that administrative practices that
characterized the Qing state-building enterprise in the eighteenth
century were neither centralized nor general or uniform. They
addressed
objectives associated with the modern state project,
including
the stabilizing of borders, the maximization of revenue
efficiency,
and the raising of armies to meet the exigencies of warfare
and domestic upheaval.
Macauley points to the attempt of the Qing in the eighteenth
century to simplify property claims on land and to establish
individual
ownership rights with a view to laying claim to a larger share;
of taxes from rural areas. She attributes the Qing failure to institute
individual ownership on land to the resistance of provincial elites and
to the fact that this attempt was not accompanied by an exercise
in building a centralized state. In contrast , Matjauley arguefs, in the
Ottoman empire during the nineteenth century, the constitution of
individual ownership Was integral to institutionalization of state
power, which focused on thg central bureaucracy and the central
army to the exclusion of provincial elites. klamoglu, however, points
tp the limits in the nineteenth-century Ottoman empire's definitions
of individual ownership incumbent on the struggles of groups whose;
access to land was threatened by the new system of individual titles.

Such limits were negotiated in the realm of bureaucratic practicest

The Qing and the Ottoman institutional reforms, from the
eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, remained part of the
history
of modernity, though their transformational trajectories did
not always translate into glowing successes in military, political and
economic competition against imperialism. In the Chinese context,
successful modernization depended on local, not central, and diverse,
not uniform, initiatives from either officials or elites (Wong 1997).
The Mughals’ ability to hold together geographically, ethnically,
and religiously diverse regions indicated powerful institutional
capacities which were taken over by the British colonial state.
Similarly, Ottoman legislation of the nineteenth century, defining
general rules and categories of individual, ownership on land and
of commercial transactions — largely derived from the precepts of
Islamic fiqh or jurisprudence — continued to provide the modern
vocabularies for landed property and commercial transactions in
the Middle East, including the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
These articles argue that modern transformation in the three
empires under discussion represented ruptures in continuities. Old
vocabularies survived, whether in transmutations of ruler’s justice
into the administrative justice of the Ottoman bureaucracy, or in
those of Mughal ‘social peace’ into some form of an angular
utilitarianism
of the British colonial administrators. The new order
of modernity was perhaps made more comprehensible through
recourse to familiar vocabularies. In addition to looking at these
legal, administrative and economic developments, Vajpeyi’s article
examines another kind of specific continuity: caste discourse, which
spans Indian history from medieval times into the present. Her
discussion resonates with our themes of negotiation and legacies of
the early modern period for modern nation state. For Vajpeyi, caste,
premised on inequality, provided an idiom for negotiating one’s
position in society. Her article focuses on three historical instances of
such negotiations: one, in the seventeenth century, in relation to the
kingship of Shivaji, the other in the nineteenth century, in relation
to Jotirao Phule’s rebellion against the caste oppression fired up
by enlightenment ideas of equality, fraternity and liberty, and
finally by Ambedkar at the time of Indian independence in the mid-
twentieth century. Ambedkar rejected caste and its vision of social
inequality, introducing, instead, the idea of citizenship premised
on equality under the Indian Constitution (of which he was the
principal author) as an organizing principle of the new Republic.
Yet Vajpeyi’s discussion suggests that the terms of such rejection
as it was negotiated in the text of the Indian Constitution through
categories of reservation, scheduled castes, and scheduled tribes,
may explain the perpetuation of caste into the present. Once again,
the social resources of early modern empires have not only survived
but thrived, this time in modern nation-state environments.
 Notes
1. See Philip Huang: ‘For the “classic” pattern of agrarian change in
the modern age, we of course look to England’s transition to
capitalism
… what is most striking is that in China the differentiation did not
end in the complete transformation of agrarian society, as happened
in the West … it led not to a capitalist industrial economy, but to a
differentiated peasant economy’ (1985: 10).
2. Studies of two such regions are by Richard M. Eaton (1993) and Farhat
Hasan (2004).
3. Fred Cooper, referring to the first version of this introduction, claims
that our definition of modernity includes ‘everything that has
happenedin the last 500 years’ (Cooper 2005: 127). We do no such thing.
Instead, we examine specific institutional transformations shared by a
significant number of large societies in Eurasia. We do not claim that
all of them happened everywhere, or that modernity consists of a single
homogeneous package of changes.
4. We are grateful to Baber Johansen for his analytical distinction
between negotiation as an explanatory category and as an object of
inquiry.

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 1
Empire and Nation in Comparative
Perspective: Frontier Administration in
Eighteenth-Century China
Peter C. Perdue

Introduction: A Comparative
Analysis of Empires
Nearly all comparative analyses have taken as normative the
European experience of state-building from ca. 1500 to 1800 CE,
when new monarchies built increasingly centralized bureaucratic
machines in an environment of ceaseless military and economic
competition. Charles Tilly notes that in 1500 CE there were about
five hundred political units in Europe, but by 1900 there were
only twenty-five (Tilly 1975: 15). Theorists view the formation of
the European state system as the essential foundation for the
subsequenthistory of industrialization and global colonization in the
nineteenth century. Using this benchmark, they look for elements
lacking in non-European states, instead of analyzing how the
non-European states functioned in their own terms. This vocabulary
of deficit informs both modern historical studies and social theories.
Historians in China, especially, place paramount emphasis on the
question of why China failed to have an industrial revolution. But
what if we look instead at direct comparisons between two non-
European empires, like the Ottoman and Qing?
We can begin by positing analogies between the structures of
these two agrarian empires, which derived originally from the era
of conquest. Beginning as small frontier states on the periphery
of larger empires, both expanded rapidly with powerful military
forces, eventually capturing the center of the older empire. Both
incorporated a wide range of different peoples under their rule;
both had to develop new administrative structures for taxation,
adjudication and local control. When we look for basic similarities
 Peter C. Perdue

in the specific arenas of social and administrative structures, we

find that the approaches to these questions taken by Ottomanists
and by Qing historians have striking convergences.

Convergent Historiographies
One theme that unifies both historiographies is the rejection of the
thesis of ‘decline’. In the Qing field, older historical studies
generally
stressed Qing China’s failure to respond adequately to
western
incursions in the nineteenth century. Domestic upheaval in
the empire and repeated losses in warfare indicate that the
dynastic
rulers had lost the ability to govern or to innovate creatively.
Scholars have explained the collapse of the dynasty in 1911 as the
inability of a traditional society to respond to western modernity.
Analyses of the Ottoman empire from the seventeenth or eighteenth
century forward have followed a similar framework (Hourani in
Khoury and Wilson 1993). Nationalist historiography has reinforced
the tradition/modernity divide by interpreting the transition from
empire to nation as a progression from decline to renewal. In the
nationalist view, the old empires were despotic, backward, stagnant
structures that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, despite
several reform efforts, failed to respond to the dynamism of western
powers. Therefore, they inevitably collapsed in the early twentieth
century, to be replaced by modern nations.
These interpretations rely on three key assumptions: culturalism,
linear concepts of time and centralization as an index of progress.
Culturalism views the state as the manifestation of underlying
ideals generated by texts and traditions that define universal norms.
This single coherent set of ethical norms and inherited traditions
guides the administrative practices of the ruling elites. If the state
can lead its subjects to realize these ideals, it has succeeded. Thus
the Ottoman state becomes simply the sponsor of Islam, while the
Qing implements neo-Confucian orthodoxy. A ‘classical age’ is
defined as the period during which state, social and normative
institutions
come closest to harmony, after which a period of decline sets
in. It encompasses the ‘flourishing age’ (shengshi) of seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century China and the first three centuries of
Ottoman rule (Fairbank 1998; Inalcik 1973).
A special interpretation of the origins of empire derived from these
culturalist models. The ghazi thesis of the origins of the Ottoman
 Empire and Nation in Comparative Perspective

state stressed the early role of the Turkish founders as warriors for
Islam. For the Qing, the ‘Sinicization’ thesis performed the same
function, as it claimed that the backward Manchus abandoned any
distinctive identity of their own, and adopted the superior Han
Confucian culture. In Ho Ping-ti’s interpretation, the Manchus
were the ‘ghazi’ warriors who imposed Confucian orthodoxy on
their subjects (Ho Ping-ti 1998). Just as Herder’s insistence on the
special characteristics of German folk culture led historians to focus
on the particular features of each national history, turning away
from the universal histories of the eighteenth century, culturalist
analyses of the empires directed attention not to what they shared,
but what divided them. By stressing the specific, unique cultural
ideals that structured each imperial formation, culturalists ruled
out meaningful comparisons between them.
But recent critiques have brought the two empires closer together,
by focusing on the common effects of the frontier experience. Cemal
Kafadar criticizes nationalist historians for ‘assum[ing] more or
less sealed cultural identities of peoples [Turks, Greeks, Spaniards,
Arabs, etc.] who have come into contact within the framework of
a larger bipolar division of equally sealed civilizational identities
[East/West, Muslim/Christian]’ ( Kafadar 1995: 20). Instead, he
stresses the ‘mobility and fluidity’ of identities in frontier
environments
and the possibility of ‘moving from place to place, allegiance
to allegiance, and identity to identity with an ease and
acceptability
hard to even imagine in more settled societies’ (Kafadar 1995:
140). Viewed in these terms, the borderlands of the Byzantine
empire,
where the Ottomans originated, bear a striking resemblance
to the fluid conditions of Manchuria in the late sixteenth century
(Perdue 1998).
Pamela Crossley likewise argues that there was no fixed ‘Manchu’
identity at this time, but that the Manchus were created pari passu
with the formation of the Qing state. ‘The monolithic identities of
“Manchu”, “Mongol”, and “Chinese” [Han] are not regarded as
fundamentals,
sources, or building blocks of the emergent order ...these
identities are ideological productions of the process of imperial
centralization before 1800’ ( Crossley 1999: 3). She particularly
stresses the flexibility of the banners, the combined military-
administrative and residential institution that incorporated
Tungusic tribesman, Han peasants, Mongolian pastoralists and other
diverse cultural formations under a unified hierarchy. If we see both
ruling elites not as univocally committed to a single religio-cultural
mission, but as balancing multiple cultural formations arising from
a fluctuating mixed frontier environment, we get a more accurate
picture of the historical origins of both states and we have some
common ground from which to view their subsequent evolution.
Linearity is the presumption that there is only one possible
path of development and one metric of success. In this respect,
classical culturalism and modern technoscientism share the same
assumptions. Nations and civilizations can then be ranked by their
closeness to this single standard, and their trajectories can be
described as either approaching or failing to meet it. The ‘decline’
paradigm fits closely within both metrics, when empires are seen
as failing both to achieve their cultural targets and to match the
technoscientific level of rival imperial powers.
State centralization, in this paradigm, is often taken as the
key metric of success. Strongly centralized regimes then represent
the maximal achievements of the state, because it can impose its
ideology and its institutions on localities and extract the resources
it needs from them. More loosely controlled structures, allowing
greater autonomy to localities, seem inferior, because they lack unity
and cannot defend the centre against outside incursions. The nation
state wins, in this interpretation, because it restores the necessary
power of the centre, backed by a new mobilization of the people
to replace the sacral power of the monarch. However, the notion
of a secular, democratic nation had to be introduced from outside,
because the cultural values of the imperial civilization could not
accommodate these radically different ideals.
Recent work on both empires has displayed considerable
skepticism
about these reigning assumptions of traditional historiography. 1
Regional social and economic studies, based on archival materials,
have replaced the monolithic focus on the culture of the centre.
We recognize that even the most powerful imperial centralizers
have conducted extended negotiations with ‘vernacular systems
of power’ ( Salzman 1999); they have not sought to eliminate all
variation, but to accommodate multiple local particularities within
an overarching structure. A focus on internal dynamics replaces
the exclusive attention to the impact of the West. The imperial
structures were not stagnant despotisms, but were composed of
fluid interactions between elites, administrators and local economies
and identities. Centralization could be one outcome, but was only
one of several possible paths, and it did not have to be supported
by foreign stimulus. However, the reform movements heralded as
presaging the modern state look more compromised: they may have
brought ‘despotization’ that delegitimized the central state more
than strengthening it (Akarli 1999). This conclusion may apply just
as well to the Tanzimat reforms of the early nineteenth century as
to the Qing reforms of the late nineteenth century.
If there are multiple paths to modernity, and centralization is
not the exclusive index, then the metaphor of ‘decline’ loses its
value. Analyzing the tracks of these empires becomes much more
complicated, since we have no clear single metric anymore. The
move to regional analysis, especially, threatens to fragment our
perspectives
so much that we lose any coherent view at all. But regional
analyses of empires need to retain an awareness of the imperial
centre. Despite substantial influence from the Annales long-term
perspective on both fields, it has proved impossible to kick the state
out entirely. Events, political and military contingencies, and even
the personalities of rulers must re-enter the picture, if in a more
complex way. Our goal is to discover how these large states held
themselves together, and why they fell, by examining convergent and
divergent ideologies, and interests generated by interactions between
elites, regions, the central apparatus and the world beyond.
I suggest that frontier administration is a useful site for examining
such questions of coherence and diversity in these large agrarian
empires.2 In this essay, I distinguish the frontier regions of China as
the regions encompassed by modern Manchuria, Mongolia [Outer
and Inner], Xinjiang, Qinghai and Tibet. As areas of reduced state
control, greater cultural alienation, poorer resources and more
dispersed populations, they contrasted sharply with the settled
agricultural regions of China Proper. They shared socio-economic
characteristics with the peripheries of macroregions as defined by
G. William Skinner, but they were not part of the regular imperial
administration (Skinner 1977).
The term ‘frontier’ can have many meanings, but there are
basically two traditions of analysis: the European one, which stresses
the creation of fixed borders between distinct states [the French
frontière], and the North American one, where frontier refers to
broad regions of interaction of multiple cultures (Adelman and
Aron 1999; Foucher 1986; Power and Standen 1998). The modern
Chinese term for frontier, bianjiang, combines both meanings, as
bian means a region, and jiang can mean a delimited border. In
imperial China, both processes occurred concurrently with imperial
expansion: the rulers came into contact with new cultural groups
who intermingled with each other, and administrators began to
draw lines in the sand dividing the region into demarcated zones
of bureaucratic control. The eighteenth century in particular is
the period when these intersecting processes are most salient. Qing
incorporation of the frontiers followed a sequence of ideological
construction at the center, military conquest in the periphery,
administrativeconsolidation of new lands and people, and social and
economic integration through migration and commercial exchange.
To begin briefly with imperial ideology: Pamela Crossley has
presented a brilliant exposition of the Qing emperorship as a ‘simultaneous
expression of imperial intentions in multiple cultural
frames’ (Crossley 1999: 11). The ‘cultural null’ of the imperial centre
represented itself as a universal language that transcended all the
particular diversities of its subject peoples, and therefore reigned
over all of them. By superscribing itself on the multiple forms of
cultural expression within the empire’s boundaries, imperial
discourse
embraced all their contradictions. Crossley rejects
traditional
historiography’s assertion of the ‘Sinicization’ of barbarian
conquerors and its assumptions of ‘decline’; she draws links to the
experiences of other early modern empires (including the Ottomans
and Romanovs); and she outlines how imperial structures created
the framework within which twentieth-century nationalists made
their territorial and ethnic claims, at the same distinguishing
imperial
from nationalist definitions of identity.
There is much to be learned from Crossley’s focus on the view
from the court and its associated institutions of the center: the
rituals, the secretariats, the emperor’s person, his kinship network,
and imperially commissioned histories and genealogies. We also
need, however, some perspective from the edges: on how the precepts
of universal rule were translated into administrative practice in the
empire’s far-flung regions. We risk falling into solipsism if we look
only at the central broadcasting station, without examining how its
messages were received. Here, I will discuss two specific examples
of the implementation of policy during and after the struggle for
Central Eurasia as described by two frontier governor-generals. They
concern the classification and movement of peoples and territories
as the empire expanded its scope. In conclusion, I will discuss how
these two examples of frontier expansion may generate some insights
about the relationship between empire and nation.

Nian Gengyao and the Incorporation

of Qinghai, 1724
The present day province of Qinghai is a vast region, 743,000 square
kilometers in size, with a sparse population in 1990 of 4.5 million,
consisting of many nationalities, including Han, Tibetans, Muslims,
Mongols, Kazakhs and Salars (Hsieh 1995: 11). Its capital, Xining, is
one of China’s most culturally diverse cities, containing significant
numbers of Han, Muslims, Mongolians, and Tibetans ( Gaubatz
1996). Qinghai, meaning ‘blue lake’ (Kokonor in Mongolian), is
named after the great shallow lake located 150 kilometers west of
Xining. Between Xining and the lake is the great Tibetan monastery
of Kumbum(Chinese Ta-er-si), home of the Panchen Lama.
During the early Qing dynasty, only Xining was part of the
regular provincial administration. The region to the west, known as
Xihai (‘west of the lake’) was controlled by Mongolian tribes known
as the Khoshots. They were recent arrivals. They had originally
been part of the federation of Western Mongols, with pastures near
Urumqi in Xinjiang, but in the early seventeenth century they
moved southeast into Kokonor (Howorth 1970; Hummel 1943–44:
265). Unified under the leadership of Gush Khan (d. 1656), they
established themselves as an autonomous federation and extended
their influence over Tibet. Gush Khan’s military support of the
Fifth Dalai Lama (1617–82) enabled him to create a centralized
Tibetan state with its capital in Lhasa. As an adherent of the Yellow
Teaching of Lamaist Buddhism, Gush Khan aided the Dalai Lama
in crushing his rivals of the Red Sect. Gush Khan’s son served as
temporal administrator under the Dalai Lama, and for the rest of
the seventeenth century, Khoshot Mongol Khans were the de facto
powerholders in Lhasa.
During the same period, the Zunghar Mongols were consolidating
their state in what is now western Mongolia and northern Xinjiang.
Batur Hungtaiji (r. 1634–53) established his authority as Khan and
led military campaigns to conquer Turkestan and collect tribute
from the tribes of Siberia. The new state then fell into disarray but,
in 1671, Galdan (r.1671–97) returned from his Tibetan lamasery to
lead the Zunghars in a vigorous campaign of expansion to the east,
which would ultimately lead him into conflict with the Manchus.
As the Manchus created their state in the northeast and prepared
to take control of China, the Khoshots found it advantageous to
ally themselves with the new Qing dynasty. In 1637, they formally
submitted to the Qing, but this submission was more like an
alliance
of convenience than incorporation into an empire. Only in
1644 did the Manchus, supported by their allies among the Eastern
Mongols and the Chinese bannermen, take Beijing, driving out the
Ming dynasty and beginning the reunification of China. During
the seventeenth century, Qing rulers were preoccupied first with
driving the loyalists of the last Ming ruler to the south, and with
invading Taiwan. Then, in the 1670s, the young Kangxi emperor
exerted his authority over the three autonomous feudatories of
the southwest (Sanfan), held by three generals who had aided the
Manchu conquest. After provoking them into revolt, he launched
a successful campaign to repress the revolt and make Southwest
China an integral part of the empire. The next phase of imperial
expansion moved to the northwest, where Kangxi fought four
military campaigns against Galdan. Although Kangxi defeated
Galdan twice in crushing victories in 1690 and 1696, the Mongol
leader refused to surrender. After Galdan’s death in 1697, the
Zunghar leaders continued to resist Qing domination.
During this time, the Khoshot Mongols dominated Tibet with
Qing support, but the rising Zunghar power would soon challenge
their control. Latsan Khan, great grandson of Gush Khan, struggled
for power in Lhasa with the regent (Diba) for influence under the
feckless Sixth Dalai Lama. The regent tried twice to poison Latsan
Khan, who retaliated in 1705 by killing the regent and proclaiming
himself ruler of Tibet (Hummel 1943–44: 758, 760). After the
Zunghars invaded Tibet in 1717, killing Latsan Khan and looting
the temples of Lhasa, the Kangxi emperor sent an army, led by his
fourteenth son, Yinti, which recaptured Lhasa in 1720, and drove out
the Zunghars. Yinti’s military successes gave him a credible claim
to be the presumptive heir to the Qing throne, but when Kangxi
died in 1722, it was his fourth son, Yinzhen, who took the throne
as the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723–35), while Yinti was put under
house arrest.
The Qing military intervention had not resolved the numerous
conflicts in Tibet between rival Tibetan nobles and Khoshot
Mongolian princes. Finally, Lobzang Danjin, a grandson of Gush
Khan, aimed to reunite the Khoshots and to restore their control over
Tibet. The threat of Khoshot unity induced the Yongzheng emperor
to send in Nian Gengyao as Fuyuan Dajiangjun (Generalissimo in
charge of Pacification of Remote Regions) with his army, to suppress
this ‘rebellion’. Qing forces defeated Lobzang Danjin’s army after a
short period of brutal warfare in 1724, burning large lamaseries and
massacring thousands of monks. Lobzang himself escaped to the
Zunghars but his wife, son, kinsmen, and followers were all captured.
At this point Nian Gengyao put forward a memorial containing
thirteen items for the reconstruction and incorporation of Qinghai
into the empire. Nian’s comprehensive plan included provisions for
military security, economic development and administrative reform.
It was designed to ensure that Qinghai, formerly an autonomous
territory ruled by Mongolian tribes, would become a permanent part
of the Qing realm (Nian 1971, Vol. 2: 518; Perdue 2005: 310–14;
Sato 1972: 731; YZHZZ 3/27–43).
Nian’s proposals epitomize the process of Qing imperial
formation
so well that they are worth discussing in some detail. Nian
began by emphasizing all the benefits that Gush Khan and his
descendants had received from the Qing emperors. The first task
was to determine rewards and punishments. Three princes who aided
the Qing suppression received titles of nobility. ‘Coerced followers’
(xiecong) were pardoned, but the active leaders of the rebellion
deserved execution. Nian explained the Qing decision carefully to
an assembly of the Khoshot princes, outlining in detail the crimes
of the eight ringleaders. Then he had the men dragged before the
assembly and had their heads cut off, in order to ‘rectify the laws
of the nation (guojia)’ (Nian 1971: 30a).
Second came the fixing of the territories of the Mongolian tribes.
According to Nian, the autonomy of the hereditary lineages of
Mongols and Tibetans in Qinghai led to continual plundering and
conflict. Now that the rebels had been rooted out, the Mongols
would be organized into banner companies, modelled on the military-
administrative units which had been the basis of the Manchu state’s
formation. Their pastureland boundaries would be fixed, and the
Mongol leaders would be named jasaks: commanders of the banners
subject to confirmation by the Qing. Each tribe would be allocated
a separate grazing ground, following the precedents of the Eastern
Mongols when they submitted to the Qing. No tribe could interfere
with another tribe’s pasturelands.
The Qing also exploited divisions among the Mongols to serve
imperial unification. The Khalkhas, or Eastern Mongols, had
submitted to the Qing in a great assembly in 1690, after Kangxi’s
first defeat of Galdan. In return for Qing protection, they agreed
to recognize the Qing emperor as their Khan, to be enrolled in
banner companies and to provide horses men and supplies to the
Qing armies. Several groups of Khalkhas, however, had fled from
the Zunghars to the south and instead sought protection from
the Khoshots of Kokonor. Now that the Qing had taken over this
region, these Khalkhas had the opportunity to free themselves from
Khoshot domination by accepting Qing rule. Their chiefs would
become jasaks, and they could take over territory confiscated from
Lobzang Danjin’s rebels. As Nian states, ‘thus we will divide the
strength of the Kokonor princes, and the Khalkha princes will no
longer suffer the shame of being slaves; they will become their
own tribes’. These Khalkhas were explicitly defined as a new tribe
(buluo) and settled separately from the Khoshots in Qinghai. The
multiple coexistence of different ethnic classifications aided the Qing
in promoting its policies of divide and rule. Westerners knew this
policy well as one of ‘setting barbarians against barbarians’.
Similar discriminations were applied to the Tibetans (Xifan) in
Kokonor. Nian regarded them as the original inhabitants of the
region, but they also provided the Qinghai Mongols with cattle,
grain and labour services. When Lobzang Danjin revolted, they
joined him ‘in swarms’, saying ‘they only knew of the existence of
Mongols, and knew nothing of Chinese civil administration (tingwei)
or garrisons’. Nian noted: ‘Now they have become obedient, but
if we do not put them in order they will disperse like birds and
beasts in the future.’ For Nian, these Tibetans were ‘our common
people (baixing)’; ‘their lands are our lands; how can they serve
the Qinghai princes?’ They would be liberated from dependence on
lamaseries and Mongol princes, their settlements would be registered
and taxes paid to Qing officials. But detailed population and tax
registers would be introduced only gradually, so as not to alienate
them. ‘Over several decades we will transform their dog and sheep
natures into good people.’
Nian thus envisaged the Qinghai region as inhabited by native
Tibetans, who naturally deserved to be incorporated as loyal subjects
of the Qing empire, owing duties directly to the imperial
administration.
This meant detaching them from their ties to lamaseries
and Mongolian lords. They would become another defined population
within the territory, with distinct administrative characteristics.
From a fluid mix of populations who owed multiple obligations to
different superiors, Nian aimed to sort out single, well-defined groups
who would be subordinated to only one superior authority.
Enforcing control over the local Tibetans also meant challenging
the Dalai Lama’s suzerainty, by splitting up the territorial boundaries
of Tibet. Two of the four Tibetan regions, Zang and Wei in western
Tibet, belonged under the Dalai Lama’s jurisdiction, but Qinghai
and Kham in eastern Tibet, because they were dominated by Gush
Khan, deserved a separate classification. After Lobzang’s defeat, the
Kham region was attached to the neighbouring interior provinces
of Sichuan and Yunnan. Nian did not regard this reorganization as
taking territory away from the Dalai Lama; his ‘lands of incense
and fire (xianghuo)’ in the west remained under his control. The
Qing would compensate the Dalai Lama for his loss of revenue with
annual payments and the right to conduct trade at Dajianlu on the
Sichuan border. This division of the Tibetan cultural region imposed
by the Qing corresponds closely to its current administrative
boundaries
under the PRC.
Further discipline of the Qinghai required severe limitations on
the power of the lamaseries. These were some of the largest monastic
establishments in the entire Tibetan region, containing up to 3,000
monks and many interconnected buildings (Ishihama 1988). They
were significant centres of autonomous power, supported by dues
from local Tibetans. From Nian’s point of view, the lamaseries
could not be authentic religious institutions, because they stored
weapons, gave refuge to ‘criminals’ and supported Lobzang Danjin’s
‘rebellion’. It was perfectly proper to burn them down and massacre
their residents as rebels. Afterwards, the lamaseries would be
limited in size to 300 monks, all of whom had to register with local
officials and undergo twice-yearly investigations. Rent payments
could not go directly to the lamaseries, but must be submitted to
the government for distribution to them.
To summarize these tactics: after eliminating a minority of
‘rebels’, the Qing administrators organized the remaining ‘coerced
followers’ into fixed ‘tribes’ defined as territorially and
administratively
circumscribed units, whose leaders were regulated by
the state. Different groups were intermingled so as to balance
them against one another. ‘Natives’ were distinguished from later
arrivals, and multiple allegiances were replaced with one direct line
of authority.
These practices of fixing boundaries, classifying peoples and
designating reliable local leadership were all key components of
the Qing imperial project in the frontiers, tasks which they shared
with other empires in the world. Virgina Aksan, for example, points
to parallel processes of defining stable borders and sharpening
classifications of peoples in the eighteenth-century Russian and
Ottoman empires.3 Like the British in India, the Qing rulers needed
to conduct ethnographic categorizations of the new regions they
ruled and to fix identities in place for the convenience of
registration
of fiscal duties and preservation of local order (Edney 1997).
They replaced the fluctuating alliances of the autonomous nomadic
society with fixed, hierarchically determined posts of authority. But
the bureaucratic structure was not the same as that of the interior:
it had to be adapted to the character of the frontier.
At the same time, promotion of immigration would enhance the
links to the interior and create a more peaceful, settled society.
Nian proposed to send 10,000 Manchu and Han settler households
into Qinghai in order to ‘dilute the strength’ of the Mongols and
turn them toward stable cultivation. These were, in some ways,
contradictory policies. The first aimed to untangle tribal affiliations
by creating separate territorial and kinship entities under an orderly
administrative structure, while the second introduced more diversity
into the region, adding new peoples who could come into conflict
with the indigenous inhabitants.
Trade was another crucial instrument for binding the frontier to
the centre. Before the conquest, as Nian saw it, the Mongols traded
as they pleased, exchanging ‘useless hides and furs for our useful tea
and cloth’ (Nian 1971: 32a). Han traders who headed for the territory
in search of profit created a ‘spirit of wickedness’ (jianxin). Free trade
relations also had allowed Lobzang to spy out conditions in the
interior before he rebelled. Now, trade at the frontiers would be
regulated.
Mongolians would be divided into three groups; each group
could come to the capital on a licensed trade mission once every three
years, in rotation. Over nine years, all would have a chance to trade.
Regular trade at border markets was allowed twice a year. Troops
would patrol the markets to ensure that no one crossed the border
without permission.
 These regulations anticipated similar trade regulations negotiated
with the Russians in 1727, where border trade was confined to the
town of Kiakhta, and tribute missions to the capital were allowed
only with official permission. The Canton trade system of handling
western traders at the end of the eighteenth century repeated these
principles. Joseph Fletcher has shown how Central Asian precedents
set the pattern for coastal treaties in the nineteenth century.
China’s first ‘unequal treaty’ settlement was negotiated with the
Khan of Kokand in 1835 (Fletcher 1978: 378). Its provisions for
extraterritoriality, merchant autonomy and permanent resident
political representatives were applied equally to the British after
the Opium War in 1842. The same is true for the earlier period: the
Canton trade system known to the western coastal traders had been
anticipated by these regulated trading arrangements on the Russian
and Qinghai frontiers.
Finally, Nian proposed a major new construction project to create
a new border along Qinghai’s northern frontier. A connected series
of fortresses would in effect extend the Great Wall line of defense
far into the Gansu corridor to Ganzhou and Anxi, cutting off
Qinghai from contact with the Zunghars to the north. All Mongols
would be cleared out of this area, and large numbers of settlers
from the interior would be brought to populate the garrison towns.
Criminals sentenced to military exile would make ideal cultivators
of the soil.
The Qing repression of revolt in Qinghai was brutal but not
wanton. The large lamaseries were dismantled and re-established
on a limited scale, with smaller influence, but they were not
eliminated. The Qing had no ideological hostility to Lamaism per
se; it was concerned only with the potential for the institution to
create centres of resistance. Under appropriate restraints, the monks
could facilitate imperial control, especially if it was endorsed by
the top of the hierarchy. By patronage and selective intervention
in the Lamaist hierarchy, the Qing obtained the personal loyalty of
the leading Tibetan Buddhist clerics: the Jebzongdanba Hutukhtu
of Mongolia, the Panchen Lama and the Dalai Lama among them.
When these personal links were intact, there was no need to impose
thorough administrative reorganization of the Tibetan regions.
Qinghai’s experience has uncanny parallels with events in Tibet
in the twentieth century. We may note the appearance of rival
incarnations, one backed by the orthodox hierarchy, one by the
Chinese; the use of forcible intervention to impose a solution on
Lhasa; and the concern to prevent lamaseries from becoming foci
of resistance to state control. But Tibet’s experience also illustrates
the difference between imperial and nationalist ideology. The Qing
never conducted all-out ideological campaigns against Tibet’s
religion; Mao’s notorious statement to the Dalai Lama that ‘religion
is poison’ would never have been used by a Qing emperor. Qing
administrators restricted lamaseries but left their leadership in
place. By contrast, the communists destroyed the landed base of
Tibet’s religious hierarchy, and during the Cultural Revolution,
thousands of monastic establishments were destroyed by the Red
Guards; monks and nuns were humiliated and killed. The Manchus
inflicted only a nasty, sharp military shock on the resisting lamas,
after which they allowed the institution to continue.
Except when they had their own militarily dominant empire in
the seventh to ninth centuries, Tibetans have always been in the
unfortunate position of choosing among unsatisfactory, violent or
indifferent protectors. Mongolian patronage did help the Dalai Lama
centralize his state from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries; but
the eighteenth-century Zungharian intervention in internal conflicts
left the Tibetans with the choice of only one patron: the Qing
emperor
in Beijing. Yet after the 1720s, Tibet remained at peace under
loose Qing suzerainty. Only twentieth-century nationalist upheaval
led to true threats to Tibetan culture.

The Deportation of the Turfanis

Qing policy toward the East Turkestani oasis of Turfan provides
another example of how the empire sought to impose control in the
face of great logistical difficulties (Perdue 2005: 231–32, 329–33).
Qing armies first captured the oasis from the Zunghars in 1720. This
represented the first extension of Chinese control into Turkestan
since the Tang dynasty, a thousand years earlier. But holding these
territories proved difficult. Zunghar raids on Turfan continued,
as it became clear that Turfan could not produce enough grain
to support both the local population and a substantial garrison
(Saguchi 1981).
Tsewang Rabdan (r. 1697–1727), the Zunghar leader, attempted
to carry off Turfanis to the west, because these agriculturalists could
be valuable producers of grain for his state (Fu Heng 1990, 1721/6).
Many Turfanis instead fled to the east, appealing for protection
from the Qing. But when Tsewang Rabdan retreated the next year,
the Qing generals, after some discussion, decided not to put a large
garrison in Turfan. Even though the Kangxi emperor had
embracedthe Turfanis as ‘our people’ (womin) and vowed to protect
them against Zunghar raids, his successor, Yongzheng, would not
expend large military resources in the distant oasis (Fu Heng 1990,
1725/4).
These considerations led to proposals to induce the Muslims
of Turfan to move closer to the Chinese borders by offering them
lands to settle around Anxi and Suzhou. Anxi was still 225 km
beyond the end of the Great Wall, but 665 km closer to the border.
In fact, very few Turfanis accepted the offer. Only 650 of a total
population of 10,000 left the oasis for a new home, even though
Qing troop withdrawals left them more vulnerable. Those who did
settle in Suzhou suffered from poor harvest and mistreatment by
local officials that drove them into debt. In 1731, however, when
Zunghar raids resumed, there was further unrest in Turfan. The
garrison now numbered 3,000, but it could not support itself,
and officials had to distribute relief to the local people as well
(Fu Heng 1990: 1731/6 jiawu; 1731/11).
General Yue Zhongqi then outlined an extremely ambitious
sixteen-point proposal for a massive military occupation of East
Turkestan (YZHZZ 19/990). He asked for substantial increases
in troop strength, expansion of military colonies, and shipments
from the interior. Thirty thousand troops in Barkul would move
to Turfan and be replaced by 18,000 more men from Ningxia and
the Ordos. Yue made detailed estimates of the supply demands
for such a large force. He expected that clearance of lands around
Turfan city could support 10,000 troops, and smaller towns in the
region could support at least 5,000 more, but additional supplies
of 30,000 shi of millet would have to be shipped annually from
Suzhou. The expanded army also needed a total of 60,000 horses,
including cavalry mounts and pack animals, 34,000 camels to carry
over 60,000 shi of grain and 200,000 sheep, while each soldier himself
carried two months of rations on his back.4
Yue’s careful estimates indicate the vast scale of preparations
necessary to launch a truly decisive campaign. He realized that a
serious military effort would take at least three to four years, and
would have to root out the Mongols from their faraway nests, at
the same time leaving enough troops in the oases to defend against
raids. The emperor regretfully refused Yue’s requests. Although
he understood how shameful it was for Yue’s garrisons to stay in
defensive positions holding off nomad raids, now was not the right
time for a decisive campaign (Fu Heng 1990, 1731/2 guichou).
At this juncture, Imin Kwaja, the chieftain of Turfan, besieged
by the Zunghars and desperate for Qing support, began to organize
a mass emigration (Saguchi 1981). Repelling Zunghar attacks, in
1733–34 he led nearly the entire population of 10,000 on a long
march inland, settling them in Xin Guazhou, just west of the Anxi
garrison. For his efforts, he was granted the title of jasak Fuguogong
(Prince who Supports the State), and his people were organized into
a banner, with Imin as the banner chief, the first Turki to receive
this honour. For two decades, the Turfanis lived there in poverty,
as in a refugee camp, while their homelands were devastated by
warfare. They were allowed to return in 1754, as the Qing prepared
its final blows against the fragmented Zunghar state.
The Turfani migration toward the border was ‘voluntary’, in
the sense that Imin’s people chose to protect themselves from
Zunghar attacks by abandoning their home. But an important
factor in their decision was the Qing refusal to guarantee the oasis
against attack. The limitations on supplies for large garrisons in
the oases of Turkestan meant that armies could not stay in one
place very long; they had to either attack vigorously, or retreat.
The long-term solution was to build up the productive resources
of Turkestan so as to support both an expanded population and
a military apparatus. This development only came after the mid-
eighteenth century, when the Qing began the aggressive promotion
of the settlement of Xinjiang.
This semi-voluntary population movement was only one of many
other migration projects promoted by the Qing. The Qing rulers
shifted not only military forces but thousands of agrarian settlers,
through coercive and material incentives, around their empire as
they progressively incorporated larger territories into the state.
From its origins as a ‘booty state’ in early seventeenth century
Manchuria, the Qing used deportations and mass kidnappings to
build their human resource base. As Hung Taiji commented in 1643,
‘One is not happy enough when merely taking goods, one is only
satisfied when one takes people’ (Crossley 1999: 99–100).
 The largest state-sponsored population movement delivered
civilian and military colonists to Xinjiang after the conquest of 1760.
The movement began with the establishment of military colonies
and the transport of criminal exiles to the region, later followed by
civilian peasants and merchants from the interior. These coercive
population movements served several purposes. In the early phase
of expansion, they deprived rival states of manpower. Later, they
relieved agrarian pressure on poor-yielding lands of the interior,
especially in the northwest. They increased agrarian productivity
in Turkestan by converting grasslands to fields, constructing
irrigation
works, and importing new seeds and animal labour. As in
Qinghai, they created a newly diverse population in the region,
whose different elements could be balanced against each other so
as to ensure permanent imperial control.

Symmetry
R. Bin Wong espouses the principle of symmetry in comparative
analysis (Wong 1997). If we are to view China through European
eyes, we should equally view Europe through Chinese eyes. This
principle leads him to develop new perspectives on both regions.
What is a major focus of attention in one society may only be a minor
key in another. Even though the repertory of human perceptions,
administrative structures or economic modes of production is finite,
different forms take prominence in different places.
What happens if we apply, even crudely, the principle of
symmetry
to the Qing/Ottoman comparison? An Ottoman
administrator
looking at the Qing would find much that is strangely
familiar. The Mongolian jasaks, confirmed as local leaders by the
Qing, look very much like yurts, ‘summer and winter pasturelands
the limits of which were determined and were entered in the
imperial registers’.5 The ‘feudatories’ of the early Qing (sanfan)
were large-scale timars. Both were grants of large territories to
provincial military rulers in return for service to the state. And
coerced population movements (sürgün) were prominent features of
the Ottoman and Qing states.6 Both of these states, during times
of expansion and conquest, chose analogous methods of controlling
the newly incorporated populations. For administering conquered
nomads, it was convenient to keep their leadership intact, while
supervising their mobility. Military commanders who allied with
the ruling elite gained their rewards in autonomous territorial
grants, at a time when regular taxation systems had not yet been
established. Uprooting populations from their homes could bring
them into greater dependence on the regime, and mixing them with
other subject peoples provided useful leverage, preventing united
resistance. These parallels may derive either from a common Central
Asian heritage or from common conditions of rule in frontier regions
(Fletcher 1995; Togan 1992). The Ottoman might be favourably
impressed with how effectively the Qing used these institutions for
imperial control.
A Qing frontier official of the eighteenth century might find the
Ottomans too generous, however, in leaving substantial autonomy
to frontier commanders (beyliks). He would have in his historical
memory the experience of the Tang dynasty (618–907), another
dynasty with strong Central Eurasian connections, where the
autonomy of frontier military commanders led to a major rebellion in
757 which nearly destroyed the dynasty. It was only restored to the
throne with the help of another group of Central Asian nomads, the
Uighurs. The Manchus and their Chinese advisors knew the Tang
precedents well. The Ottoman perspective indicates that Kangxi’s
repression of the Three Feudatories rebellion in 1681 was a decisive
turning point in the construction of the Qing state. By forcibly
rejecting the construction of loosely autonomous fiefdoms in return
for military service, he put the Qing on a new and different path,
and constructed a completely new foundation for imperial identity
(Crossley 1999: 105–108).

Empire and Nation: The Question

of Modernity
Inevitably, scholars of both empires must examine the relationship
between imperial formations and their successor nation-states. Once
again, most comparative analysis of the subject takes the European
experience of state and nation formation as normative. The nation-
state, in turn, represents the quintessential formation of modernity,
taken to subsume mass democracy, literacy, education and
technological dynamism, to name only a few. Images of the Chinese
and Ottoman empires as ‘sick men’, decaying despotisms unable to
adapt to the modern age, derive irresistibly from taking Europe as
the model, and from assuming that modernity is a single whole or
a uniform process. But if we unbundle modernization and look at
the pieces, then there seems to be less coherence and less obvious
superiority of one society as a whole to another. In some ways,
imperial policies then look precociously ‘modern’. Qing China’s
welfare
policies (orphanages and famine relief, for example) and price
regulation with evernormal granaries, exceeded those of most
European states until the mid-twentieth century. Ottoman tolerance
of multiple ethnic and religious communities looks preferable to
nationalist exclusions. Ariel Salzman has argued that the venality
and lifetime tax farming contracts of the early modern European
and Ottoman empires (malikane) ‘are only the uncelebrated
forerunners
of contemporary privatization’ of state power (Salzman 1993).
On the other hand, some eighteenth-century developments in
the Ottoman empire look remarkably similar to those of the Qing
dynasty in the nineteenth century. On the Ottoman frontiers,
control
over a centralized army was ceded to provincial elites through
contracts to local ‘state militias’ directed by prosperous elites;
this is echoed in the Qing policies of commissioning militia groups
(tuanlian) to secure local order (Aksan 1999; Khoury 1997; Kuhn
1970). By examining the two empires in tandem, we can raise new
comparative questions. Although there were parallel relationships of
local elites to the centre in elements of tax collection and military
organization, the ultimate outcomes for the central state were quite
different. The most striking distinction in the long run is that,
despite the collapse of both empires at the end of the nineteenth
century, the Ottoman realms were reorganized into nation-states,
while nearly all of the Qing empire was reconstituted under a single
nationalist regime.
From this perspective, it is worth examining how the ‘sprouts of
nationalism’ were planted by the Qing in the eighteenth century.
Much of the terminology used by Qing frontier officials prefigures
the classifications of twentieth-century nationalists. The term guojia
(literally ‘state-family’) appears frequently in discussions of the
northwest conquests. It is used to define the dividing line between
subjects of the emperor and those beyond. The dividing line between
‘our people’ (womin) and those beyond the obligation of subjection to
imperial authority was evolving during the period of expansion,
as the victorious armies successively brought new groups under
imperial control. The completion of the Central Asian conquests in
1760, with the designation of Xinjiang (‘New Frontier’) marked the
culmination of this process of delimitation, creating fixed territorial
limits where there had formerly been shifting personal allegiances
of individual leaders to the emperor.
But contrary to Chinese historiography, the Qing did not ‘unify’
the peoples of China under a ‘multinationality nation-state’. What
was still lacking was the concept of a fixed collective essence, rooted
in ancient history. Theorists have noted the fundamental
paradox
of nationalist ideologies: they claim to discover the primordial
essence of a people, yet the ideology itself is a quintessentially
modern creation. Nationalism evokes the progressive ‘awakening’
of a people to the recognition that they have always unconsciously
shared a common fate; it is the role of intellectuals and political
activists to open their people’s minds so as to mobilize them in a
unified movement (Fitzgerald 1996). This faith in the unitary
essence of an imagined community does not fit comfortably with
the conception of a classical empire. Where the empire was tied
together only at the top, by common subjection to the individual
ruler, nations are tied at the bottom, by common subordination to
a collective will. The most common fate of empires that confronted
this contradiction was to break into component units. All except
China have now done so. As the Romanov, Habsburg, Ottoman
and Mughal domains have split into multiple national units, the
process of fragmentation has not stopped, because the nationalist
principle of essential unity can be applied recursively ad infinitum.
Smaller minorities within the new nations then claim their own
rights to autonomy or separation.
Michael Walzer points out that large empires can accommodate
extreme collective cultural difference within their domains much
more easily than nation states (Walzer 1997). Multinational empires,
whether they are Romans, Ottomans or the Qing, embrace multiple
communities, each of whom is left relatively autonomous and
treated relatively equally. What the communities have in common
is subjection to the autocratic bureaucrats and ruler at the top;
they are all the same, in this respect, regardless of the size of their
population or cultural power. There were no ‘minority peoples’ in the
Qing dynasty. The Manchus, who ruled the Qing, had good reason
not to create the concept of ‘minority’, since they themselves were a
small percentage of the total population. But they did accommodate
difference and even constructed diversity in the new territories. No
less than five different administrative systems governed Xinjiang in
the late eighteenth century. These included Mongol banners, Han
settlers, Muslim begs ruling Turkic oasis agriculturalists, a variety
of Manchu banners and military colonists. It was because they
were Manchus, not because they assimilated into the superior Han
Confucian civilization, that they could create these multiple
structures
of classification and administration. These barbarians did
impose a kind of solution.
But under imperial rule, the price of multiculturalism is
autocracy.
Some commentators on the Middle East and the Balkans today
evince a certain nostalgia for the early modern empires: in their own
ramshackle forms of autocratic rule, they did keep their component
peoples from slaughtering each other. But imperial structures belong
to the past, or so it is claimed. Nation-states have to be built from
the bottom up, on pseudo-democratic principles of popular will,
not from the top down, on pseudo-sacral religious claims to divine
mandates. Nation-states are founded on the presumption that all
their peoples share a common history and destiny. These peoples
have to voluntarily recognize that they belong to a common cultural
matrix and create their political structures out of it.
Twentieth-century China inherited both the imperial claims
to territory and collective self-definition, and the assumptions of
national unity that claimed to derive from a linear, modernizing
march of history. These two models of collective destiny do not fit
together comfortably, either as historical interpretation or as
subjectively
lived experience. The clash between national and imperial
ideologies affects all of China’s population, but it is particularly
conspicuous for the non-Han minorities. Now they are no longer
collaborators with imperial conquerors, or autonomous cultural
formations within a variegated empire, but decidedly subordinate
members of a Han-dominated polity. The imperial legacy ties them
inextricably to Beijing, but the nationalist ideology accommodates
them with great difficulty.
The extent to which non-Han peoples support the People’s
Republican government today corresponds closely to their degree of
integration under the Qing. Manchuria, the homeland of the Manchu
rulers, is solidly part of China; Outer Mongolia, the source of the
most sustained resistance to Qing domination, is an independent
nation; Inner Mongolia, most of whose Mongols were loyal, and even
part of the Manchu conquest elite, is fairly secure, especially because
its population is majority Han, a result of massive immigration since
the seventeenth century. Xinjiang, conquered in the eighteenth
century and more loosely administered, is rather restive; and Tibet,
the most alienated region, was the least tightly controlled under
the Qing. Within the Tibetan cultural realm, Qinghai and Kham
(western Sichuan), are more loyal than the population in Lhasa.
Likewise, in Xinjiang, Turfan is the oasis with the most positive
feelings about China, while Kashgar is the most hostile (Rudelson
1997). Qing frontier administration strongly affected the strength
of the ties between these regions and the centre.
Taiwan, too, conquered only in the 1680s, a site of frequent
rebellions
in the eighteenth century, and a colony of Japan after 1895,
shares with Tibet a history of sporadic, contested imperial control.
Today, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tibet are looking for
alternative
definitions of cultural belonging to the straightjacket of the
nineteenth-century version of nationalism. Beijing, on the other
hand, endorses both racialist conceptions of cultural unity derived
from the nineteenth century while carrying on many of the
autocratic
practices of the empire.
Both empires and nations face the question of how multiple
collective identities, produced from personal memory, socialization,
and mobilization, can fit together under political structures that
tolerate difference but maintain unity. The empire is the spectre
that haunts the modern nation. Rejected as emblematic of the
dark past, it leaves its inescapable traces on the territorial and
subjective claims of the modern political community. As a source
of both pride and shame, it inspires inadequate histories that
attempt
to embrace its contradictions in a single narrative that links
it seamlessly to a people’s common destiny. But its diversity cannot
be suppressed. Recovering the multiple accommodations between
centre and locality, between state and local elites, or core and
periphery, makes the story much more complex, but truer to lived
experience. In the long run, national communities need genuine, not
factitious histories, that are sensitive to the unavoidable pluralities
of social experience.

Notes
1. ‘It is probably unwise to think of centralization — that is, the
movement
toward concentration of decisive power in the hands of a single
ruler — as the normal, or more vital motive in Qing political culture.’
(Crossley 1999: 158); ‘many political economists and social scientists
 still use the degree of centralization of administrative and coercive
capacity to measure the progress of state development ... [but] the very
longevity of the Ottoman state points to a paradox: that long-term
institutional decentralization may well be a viable strategy, in fact an
integral part, of the socio-organizational evolution of the modern state’
(Salzman 1993).
2. For a comparable examination of the Ottoman empire from a frontier
perspective, see Khoury 1997.
3. ‘From 1699 forward ... the whole bureaucratic apparatus of diplomacy
in Istanbul moved to strategies of peace which involved mediation and
fixed borders.’ In Russia, ‘A new fortress line was built in the northern
Caucasus’, further closing the ill-defined border between Russian and
nomad, between Orthodoxy and Islam (Aksan 1999).
4. Oneshi of grain weighs approximately 60 kilograms.
5. Inalcik and Quataert (1994: 37. Cf. Khoury 1997: 31), on the compilation
of registers as part of the ‘state’s policy of curtailing the movement of
pastoral groups by turning them into taxable subjects within a limited
geographical area.’
6. ‘The state’s deportation policy ... played a major role in the shifts of
population in the empire.... As was true in the Byzantine and Iranian
empires, the Ottomans, too, applied the policy of forced deportation
of population in an effort to get rid of a rebellious ethnic group or to
colonize a particular area important for the state’ (Inalcik and Quataert
1994: 32).

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 2
Administrative Practice between Religious
and State Law on the Eastern Frontiers
of the Ottoman Empire
Dina Rizk Khoury
The notion of early modern empires as negotiated enterprises is a
useful conceptual tool for historians engaged in the study of state-building
across time and space. Popularised by historical
sociologist
Charles Tilly in his comparative work on the different
paths of European state-building, the term itself is quite opaque,
its meaning premised on a very fluid concept of bargaining as
a tool of power (Tilly 1990; Tilly and Blockmans 1994). Various sectors
of the state elite in the early modern period deployed a host of
strategies to negotiate alliances with local political actors. The
mobilization and funding for wars, the administration of localities,
the collection of taxes, and a host of other functions central to the
maintenance of the state’s hegemony all fall under the rubric of a
series of negotiated settlements between the state and the locality.
The concept of bargaining between and state and society allows
us to explain what in reality was a very specific articulation of
relations of power between the centre and its subjects, and allows
us to do so without the pitfall of theoretical generalizations drawn
from the study of a limited set of historical experiences. The
concept of bargaining, it turns out, is a remarkably mobile one.
Shorn of its grounding in early modern European history, it can be
used across space and time to explain the variegated experiences
of different political hegemonies. At the same time, it provides
a relatively straightforward explanation for the transition from
early modern forms of hegemony to the modern. In contrast to
the fluidity and opaqueness of negotiated forms of control, social
scientists such as Scott now view, as the hallmark of modernity,
the modern state’s abilities to map territories and develop clear
categories of administrative practice where negotiation was curtailed
(Scott 1998).
 Administrative Practice on Eastern Frontiers of Ottoman Empire

Historians have done much in the past decade to complicate this

admittedly rough and schematic general narrative of the transition
from early modern to modern.1 Yet the pitfalls of using an elastic
term such as ‘negotiation’ are abundant. If power is exercised within
the parameters of negotiated contract between various groups
within society, what sets the limits of this negotiation?
Explaining
the coercive power of the state is crucial if we are to understand
the limits of consensus, and by implication legitimacy, and the
meaning
of rebellions as vehicles of change in political culture. In the
Ottoman case, the state was engaged in an almost continuous battle,
not only with its external enemies but also with its subject
populations.
Karen Barkey has viewed these rebellions as vehicles by
which groups outside the Ottoman political ‘system’ negotiated their
way in. Various local leaders rebelled in the interest of obtaining or
retaining economic and political entitlement from the state in the
early modern period. Ultimately, however, such rebellions, unlike their
counterparts in France and China, were negotiating ploys (Barkey
1994). As ploys, they did not change the nature of the state’s
hegemony,
clearly articulated in the series of laws set in the sixteenth
century. It was only in the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman
government
began of series of reforms with a massive and violent effort
to liquidate localized forms of rule, that the legal and administrative
culture of the empire was transformed in fundamental ways.
I will not attempt to address in this paper the nettlesome and
often circular argument of continuity and break between early
modern and modern forms of rule. Rather, what interests me are
two underlying assumptions of the way the concept of negotiation
can inform and at the same obfuscate our understanding of the
forms of power in the early modern Ottoman empire. At one level,
thinking of the relationship between the centre and local power
elite as a series of struck bargains dependent on the power of each
party in the contract allows us take into account the divergent
ways in which Ottoman control was exercised across the empire.
At another level, the emphasis we place on the distributive power
of the state, its ability and readiness to make concessions for its
various subjects through negotiations, moves our attention from the
active and often crucial role localities played in the articulation of
the political culture of imperial rule. What gets glossed over in this
schema is the extent to which local understandings and challenges
to state hegemony circumscribe and define both administrative law
and its legitimization through sharia (religious law).
 Dina Rizk Khoury

Three questions concern me in this essay. How did negotiation

between centre and local groups affect administrative laws imposed
at the provincial level? What were the vocabularies used by the
state and/or local claimants to legitimate and/or contest this
administrativepractice? Finally, in what ways did the imperial centre
adapt to the realities of frontier provinces where both military and
ideological challenges to the legitimacy of Ottoman rule were quite
common? I focus on the Iraqi provinces of the Ottoman empire
during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, particularly
the provinces of Basra in the south and Mosul in the north. For
much of the early modern period, these provinces were the military
and ideological frontiers of the Ottoman empire. Local political
households, independent warlords, and disruptive occupations
by Safavid forces and its successor states that emerged in the
aftermath of their fall in 1722, furnished the Ottomans with a
number of opportunities to define and redefine their administrative
practices in a volatile political environment. As such, a study of the
administrative practice in these provinces allows us to gauge the extent
and limits of negotiation as a tool of power, and to examine local
understandings and challenges to what constituted legitimate state
prerogatives. The provinces of Basra and Mosul provide good and
contrasting examples of the relationship between the centre and
the provincial subjects because the political economy of these two
provinces, the ethnic composition of their populations and their
places as frontier provinces in the Empire were quite different.
These differences were reflected in the way the state chose to apply
administrative law. Furthermore, I have chosen to examine two
periods in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, when the early
modern state engaged in conscious and concerted effort to reform
its administrative practices. Any conclusions about the relationship
of state law, sharia and local practice during these periods could
provide an instructive comparison with the modern state’s attempts
at reform.

Administrative Practice between

Kanun (State Law) and Sharia
Sometime during the 1670s, Hussein bin Hasan, known as Mimizadeh,
a scholar from the southern Iraqi city of Basra, dedicated an epistle
he authored on the art of ruling an empire (siyasat al-mamlakat)
to the newly appointed Ottoman governor of Basra (Mimizadeh
n.d.).2 In it, he expounded on the bases of a just Islamic order. At
the heart of any Islamic order, wrote Mimizadeh, was the belief in
the oneness and omnipotence of God. However, integral to being
a Muslim was the duty to advise God’s creatures about religion
and to admonish rulers, the caretakers of God’s creatures on earth,
not to forget their duties. Like fathers, rulers are to protect their
subjects from harm, guide them to the true path and ensure their
prosperity. In exchange, subjects owed rulers sanctioned taxes and
the commitment not to rebel.
Mimizadeh’s epistle on just rule echoed the advice literature
produced by the literati at the centre of the empire in the late
sixteenthand seventeenth centuries. Deeply aware of the crisis that
enveloped the empire, they sought to remedy the roots of this
economicand political crisis by finding exemplars in the early Islamic
or classical Ottoman period. The ruler, in this literature, was
at the centre of an order in which political stability and moral/
religious practice were intertwined. For Mimizadeh, more so than
for his contemporaries writing from the centre of the empire, the
Ottoman sultan’s rule was modelled on two cultural constructs:
the Persian construct, in which effective rule was maintained by an
efficient bureaucracy and a qualified administrative elite, and an
Islamic model based on the example of the Prophet and the early
rulers of the young Muslim community. Central to this view of an
ideal ruler was his ability to enforce administrative laws through
effective and ‘just’ taxation, and to maintain morality and social
stability through the application of sharia. Fiscal justice, maintained
through adherence to kanun, and moral order maintained through
the application of sharia by the provincial judicial courts, were
inseparable.
That this view of just rule was normative goes without saying.
However, it was a powerful ideal that continued to inform much of
the debate on administration and reform in the Iraqi provinces of the
Ottoman empire. In these provinces, administrative law was often
circumscribed by the realities on the ground. The Ottomans were
adept at modifying their fiscal expectations from these provinces,
and administrative laws governing land tenure and land taxes were
adjusted to suit the realities of the province. Furthermore, unlike
Qing China, where the line between customary law (law under
which transactions in land were covered) and state law were more
clearly drawn, for the Ottomans the relationship between kanun
and sharia on issues of land, its administration and/or ownership
was more ambiguous.3 Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in
the definition of property in land and its products. Islamic legal
scholars had developed a very sophisticated opus on the various
meanings of property by the late medieval period. Scholars of
the Hanafite school of law, which the Ottomans espoused, had
articulated the notion that all land was under the guardianship of
the sultan who was the representative of God on earth (Johansen
1988). The state extracted taxes from peasants based on the notion
of eminent domain in cultivated land. In exchange, the peasantry
had the right of protection, subsistence, usufruct (explained in
some legal literature as rental) and perpetuity as a peasant family.
Ottoman state law built on this Hanafi notion of property and
justified taxation of land on this basis. Property was categorized
according to taxes imposed (some taxes being strictly non-Islamic,
that is, recognized as state taxes) while others were defined as
religiously sanctioned. The different series of provincial state laws
(kanunamler) and the administrative guidelines attached to them
issued in the sixteenth century when the Ottomans conquered
Iraq reflect this uneasy symbiosis between kanun and the Hanafi
interpretation of sharia.
The guardianship of the sultan over land meant that the Ottoman
state was a distributive state in which privileges and rights flowed
downward. The sultan rented out the rights of cultivation, the
rights to collect taxes and a number of other rights to the produce
of the land through a series of contracts with one or more of the
following parties: peasants, tax farmers, administrative officials
and the prebendal cavalry. The articles on land cultivation and
administration in the provincial state laws are remarkable for the
contractual language that permeates them. Contracts tied a large
number of proprietors of rent who had access to the surplus of
the land in a hierarchy of rights and obligations that is often
quite complex. Tax farming registers for the late seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries for the province of Mosul, together with
petitions for the cultivation of deserted village lands, attest to the
negotiated and contractual nature of the application of the idea of
state ownership of land (Khoury 1997: 75–115).
Sharia, however, described property in land not only in terms
of ownership of land by the sultan and religiously sanctioned taxes
of this land, but also in terms of inheritance and individual rights
within the family. Thus, while state law did build on sharia, the
latter’s purview went well beyond the fiscal concerns of the state,
to the organization of familial relations and hierarchies, and to the
protection of such rights against what was viewed as threats by
the state’s fiscal prerogatives (Mundy 1988: 1–123). The state had
no monopoly over the production of knowledge of Islamic law, nor
did it control its scholars. Judges trained at the official schools
in Istanbul staffed the court system in the Arab provinces of the
Ottoman empire only at the highest level. Locally recruited jurists
as well as deputy judges engaged in defining the interpretation of
secular law and its perceived deviance or adherence to one school
or the other of the sharia in matters of land taxes and ownership
of land rents. They did so by writing non-binding legal opinions
(fetwas) on such matters. While adjudicating judges may not have
adhered to these legal opinions, they often defined the parameters
of action open to them (Rafeq 1994: 9–23; Rafeq 1999: 67–95). The
Ottoman provincial court system allowed for the opinion of jurists
outside its dominant Hanafi school of law and left it to the discretion
of the Hanafi judge as to whether to take these dissenting opinions
into consideration when making his decision.
The space available within the official court system of the empire
for dissenting interpretations of sharia and state law meant that legal
scholars could challenge the fiscal prerogatives of the state within
what E. P. Thompson has aptly called, in the context of the legal
culture of early modern England, ‘the rhetoric and rules of society’
(Thompson 1975: 265). At the level of administering justice, the lines
between kanun and sharia were often murky. Kanun itself was an
amalgam of sharia, customary law drawn from the Turkic tradition
of rule, local customary practice (örf), and Byzantine practices on
issues of taxation, control of resources and organization of artisanal
production. For political thinkers as well as for Islamic jurists, the
concept of justice (in its wider political as well as juridical senses)
was intimately bound to rule by a Muslim sultan. As a result, the
Ottomans more than any other Islamic rulers invested provincial
judges with a wide array of administrative functions. The Islamic
court judge was responsible for the administration of both kanun and
sharia, as well as for the implementation of a slew of other orders
coming from the state.4 The division of the tax burden among the
sultan’s subjects, the mobilization and provisioning for war, the
implementation of state laws governing the city’s crafts corporation
and the adjudication of disputes governing inheritance, marriage and
land revenues were among the many functions performed at the local
court. In areas where no strong provincial political class emerged, the
court became the main venue of Ottoman control (Goffman 2000,
Gradeva 1999: 177–90). However, despite what appeared to be a
state monopoly over the implementation of Islamic as well as state
law in the courts of the judges, the Ottomans never had the complete
acquiescence of their informed subjects on what was Islamic and
what was not. Nor did the state, with a few notable exceptions, try
to force such acquiescence. In fact, as the cases of Basra and Mosul
demonstrate, the Ottomans often made piecemeal modifications of
administrative laws as a concession to revenue holders and local
landowning groups, by bringing the state law closer to the sharia
definition of ownership of land. The boundaries separating sharia
and kanun were often redrawn by the state on the one hand and,
on the other, by local groups who chose to challenge its definition
of what it considered allowable in sharia terms.

Administering Frontiers
During the 1660s and 1670s the Ottomans, under the leadership of
the reforming Koprulu grand viziers, initiated a series of military
conquests and administrative reforms. The imprint of this new
era of reform on the legal norms of the Ottoman provinces was
particularly evident in a series of new laws issued to rule over the
newly conquered territories of Crete and Basra. Analyzing the
place of these laws in the development of Ottoman kanun will
allow us a concrete example of the reworking of the relationship of
kanun and sharia during a period defined by the state as a period
of renewal. Less than fifty years later, the Ottomans introduced
into the province of Mosul a more permanent form of tax farming
practice with a view to reforming the fiscal system and renewing the
empire after it had suffered its first major loss of territory in
Europe. The introduction of this form of tax farming had a profound
impact on the distribution of wealth and the understanding by the
local claimants to revenue of what it meant to be an owner of such
tax farm.
For much of the early modern period, the Iraqi provinces of the
Ottoman empire presented both ideological and military frontiers.
Early in the sixteenth century, the struggle between the Sunni
Ottomans and the Shi’i Safavids for control over trade routes
and the more legitimate version of Islamic rule was fought in
the territories that correspond roughly to modern day Iraq
(al-Azzawi n. d.; Olson 1975). Several wars were fought, some
culminating
in extended occupations. Despite clear demarcation of borders
between the two empires after Suleyman’s conquest of Baghdad
and Basra in the sixteenth century, these territorial borders were
rendered meaningless by the refusal of a number of Kurdish and
Arab tribal principalities to accept the transformation of these
fluid frontiers into well-delimited territories. The Ottomans’
attempt to impose administrative law in these areas was sporadic
and inconsistent. For the government, it was more important that
the local rulers of these areas provide them with the manpower to
fight wars on the Persian front. To that end, outside of the major
population centres of these areas (Mosul, Basra, Baghdad, Irbil,
Kirkuk), we have no indication that an Ottoman legal culture
developed as it did in the other cities in the area. In the absence of
effective Ottoman administration, of an Ottoman legal apparatus,
or rather of a common idiom, coercion more than negotiations
defined the relations between these areas on the frontier and the
Ottomans. Allegiances to the Ottomans were always tenuous,
rebellions frequent, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century official
documents replete with demands, sometimes exhortations, sent
to the governors in the major seats of the province to reestablish
order in these areas. Both the rugged and mountainous terrain in
the north and the southern marshes and deserts lent themselves
to the maintenance and perpetuity of local cultures less amenable
to control.5 The extent to which the Ottoman legal court culture,
with its mixture of sharia and kanun, impinge on the customary
practices and law of these populations is hard to tell. It is in these
areas that the Ottoman modern legal system, implemented during
the second half of the nineteenth century, resulted in great changes
in customary law and practice.6 During our period, however, the
Ottomans did not have the wherewithal, or perhaps the will, to affect
major changes in the legal culture of these areas.
The situation was quite different in the major population and
commercial centres on the eastern frontier. In both Basra and Mosul,
the Ottomans sought to establish a measure of control over resources
by the imposition of administrative laws. However, they came up
against two areas with distinct economies, populations and political
cultures. Basra, a commercial city-state governed by an alliance
of a tribal aristocracy and a merchant elite when the Ottomans
conquered it in the sixteenth century, proved the more challenging
of the two cities to keep within the Ottoman fold. The Ottomans
made a number of adjustments in the set of administrative laws
(kanunamler) they introduced into the province in the sixteenth
century to accommodate the situation. Mosul was a node for the
long distance trade in goods coming from Persia westward and Syria
going eastward; however, its importance lay in its role as the centre
of trade for its rich agricultural hinterland. Although the pastoral
population of the area often brought their animals to sell in the city,
they never came to dominate it as they did in Basra. As a
consequence,
the Ottomans found a stable agricultural population on
which they imposed, with minor concessions to local practice, the
series of administrative laws that governed the extraction of rural
resources that the existed in the other parts of the empire. From the
onset of Ottoman rule, the differences in matters of law and
administrative
practice were clear.

The Province of Basra as Commercial

and Military Frontier
The city of Basra and its surrounding hinterland were the main
segues of the Ottomans into the Indian Ocean trade. Located on
the Shatt-al-Arab waterway that connects the Euphrates and Tigris
river-trade to the Persian Gulf, its commercial importance was
paramount in the area of the Fertile Crescent. It was ruled by the
heads (shaykhs) of the Muntafiq tribe allied to local merchants at
the time of its conquest by the armies of Suleyman the Magnificent
in 1546.7 The leaders of the city had established commercial contacts
with the Portuguese and appear to have become part of the tug-of-war
over control of the Persian Gulf trade between the Portuguese and
various rulers of commercial city-states along both sides of Gulf
(Inalcik and Quataert 1994: 315–63; Khoury 1991). While the city
fell briefly to the Safavids, their rule remained nominal. Until Basra’s
subjugation by the Ottomans, there were no borders delimiting the
movement of goods and people across both sides of the Gulf. Nor
was there any kind of religious orthodoxy, either Ottoman Sunni
or Safavid Shi’i. Rather, the heterodox politico-religious movement
of the musha’shi’in seemed to have attracted most of the pastoral
populations while the city’s population was partly Shi’i, Sunni or
Sabaen.8 Both in the northern and southern areas, the Ottomans
faced a heterogeneous population. In the north, Sunni orthodox
Islam became predominant in Mosul after the Ottomans and their
local allies tried to weed out Shi’is from the city, while in the south,
the musha’shi’in movement gradually succumbed to the Safavid
persecution and Ottoman pressure (Imber 1996: 103–28).
For the Ottomans, control of Basra was essential for both
economic and political reasons. Basra was the main artery of the
India trade. As a result, bullion travelled out and into the empire
through its port. Controlling the flow of bullion was essential, and
the Ottomans established one of the few mints in Basra (Khoury
1991; Pamuk 2000: 104). At the same time, taxes accruing from the
lucrative India trade proved essential for the Ottomans. Politically,
the conquest of Basra allowed the Ottomans to launch two
unsuccessful
attempts to expel the Portuguese from the India trade, and
limited the spread of Safavid control to the eastern part of the Gulf
(Ozbaran 1972: 45–87). Furthermore, the population of the city was
ethnically and religiously diverse and its connections to the world
of the Indian Ocean strong, so that the development of a Sunni
Ottomanized elite amenable to Ottoman control was slow. Until the
eighteenth century, Basra’s political history alternated between the
ascendance of a commercial tribal aristocracy and the rule of an
elite household allied to this aristocracy. Because of the centrality
of receipt of trade to the economy of Basra, the Ottomans’ interest
lay in categorizing and taxing this trade. The sixteenth-century
kanunamler (administrative laws) are more detailed on issues of
trade than they are on the issue of taxing rural populations (Khoury
1991; Mantran 1967).
Perhaps because the counting and classifying of these mobile
rural populations was difficult, the Ottomans chose to list the male
adults by name only, without designating, as they did in other areas
of the empire, the amount of land the peasant cultivated. Rather,
it appears that the apportionment of taxes for each group was to
be determined by the local leader. The Ottomans did not impose a
prebendal elite on the rural population; thus they seem to have not
expected any military or administrative functions from the leaders
except for the submission of rural taxes.9 Whether this meant that
Ottoman administrative and legal culture did not penetrate into
the countryside is an important point to ponder. It appears that
classification of rural units under cift, cift hanes, and later tevzi
hanes remained alien to the rural population and its leaders. What
was more familiar in the texts was the classification of rural taxes on
produce, such as rice, wheat and dates, in addition to other goods.
These, however, did not seem to have profoundly changed customary
practices in the use of land.10
Whether the Ottomans planned to change this situation once they
had a firmer hold on the province is hard to tell. Basra proved hard
to control especially after a political dynasty called the Afrasiyab
took control of the city and its hinterland in the 1590s and ruled it
as an autonomous city-state. However, despite the apparent
autonomy of the city, the Afrasiyabs chose to exercise in the city a
distinct form of Ottoman control. They fashioned themselves into
an extended household, with a retinue, a private army and court
appointed literati. Janissary regiments, a local court, a council of
notables — in other words, all the trappings of an Ottoman urban
order — were maintained under the Afrasiyabs. In this respect, the
Afrasiyabs were mimicking a form of provincial rule that a number
of autonomous warlords had mastered in the seventeenth century.
However, the Afrasiyabs, more than other autonomous rulers, were
closely allied to the merchants of the city and their tribal allies in
the rural area ( Khoury 1991). When the Ottomans re-conquered
the city in 1669, they attempted to break this strong alliance by
coopting the two groups and by restructuring the hierarchy of power
in the city. In the rural areas, they accepted the de facto rights of
urban and tribal elites to the lands they had been cultivating for
commercial purposes, by officially declaring them private. In the city
itself, they appointed a new administrative elite and took stock of
the sixteenth-century administrative laws governing urban artisanal
and commercial taxes, by using a new tax register. There were no
new categories of taxes introduced in these laws, just an expansion
of tax farming practices to include the majority of taxes expected
from the different economic sectors of the city. A number of these
tax farms went to the commercial elites of the city.11
It is a more difficult to assert continuity in administrative law
between the sixteenth and seventeenth century registers. The
little we know about Basra in this period indicates that the city
experienced a strong commercial revival, bolstered by the expansion
in the cultivation of cash crops such as rice and dates. In the rural
areas surrounding the city, as well as in agricultural lands around
the surrounding marshes, the seventeenth-century survey points to
agricultural estates in which rice and date trees were cultivated. It
is not clear from the sources available what were the legal
underpinnings
that defined ownership rights in these estates. In other
words, we do not know whether these were developed under a regime
of absolute ownership of land or a regime of entitlement to rents
of the land (as was the case in other parts of the empire where
commercialization took place).12 What is clear, however, is that the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century registers present us with new
classifications of ownership and new categories of owners.
I would like to focus on one category of ownership and one
category of owners as an example.13 The cultivation of trees, in
Basra’s case date trees, was widespread if not highly commercialized
in the sixteenth century. Date trees were taxed in two forms:
under the generalized rubric of gardens, or their product (dates)
were listed as part of the tithe accruing to the state. In the first
case, they were taxed as private property, as ownership of gardens
was accepted under kanun, and in the second, dates were
considered
products of trees planted on what was considered state land
and were taxed accordingly. In both cases, date trees were not listed
as a clear and independent category, but rather subsumed under
the generalized format of Ottoman law on land (tithes, gardens and
other pasture taxes), a format that incorporated elements of Islamic
Hanafi law.
In the seventeenth-century register, a new classification of
ownership appears: ownership of individual date trees by individual
proprietors. Trees, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, were
listed as belonging to certain persons. In the sixteenth-century
register, owners of gardens were listed separately and set aside as
a category outside what was considered state land where state law
applied on issues of rental and transfer (usually covering villages
or territories controlled by tribal groups). These gardens were
bracketed from the purview of kanun and were governed by the legal
precepts of sharia on such issues of rental, transfer and inheritance.
The seventeenth-century cadastral register, however, contained lists
of villages, taxes on products, as well as the amount of date trees
owned by individuals as private property in each village. Thus, the
counting of trees and the counting of owners of trees was a new
development
in the seventeenth-century survey.
 The new category of persons that appears in the seventeenth-century
register is that of women. In marked contrast to the
sixteenth-century survey, women in the later survey were listed as
heads of households and as owners of date trees and rice fields. The
majority of these women were daughters or wives of prominent city
merchants and political elite, a number carrying the last name of
Afrasiyab. However, a substantial number were designated as
daughters
or wives of tribal leaders, indicating that individual ownership
of trees spread beyond the limits of the city’s elite.
What are we to make of these changes? Perhaps the clearest
explanation would attribute this change to the economic and
political
circumstances the Ottomans found themselves in during
the seventeenth century. When Basra was forcibly brought into
the Ottoman fold in 1669, it had had a strong commercial, political
and agrarian/tribal landowning elite. Systems of land use and
entitlementsthat went with it had not been shaped by strong Ottoman
administrative practice in the previous century. Commercial
agricultural
production appears to have been initiated by individuals,
male and female, who regarded the products of land brought under
cultivation as private property. Commercial agricultural
production
was not new to Basra. Before the sixteenth-century Ottoman
conquest, the Basrenes were the primary producers of grains in
the area and they sold the bulk of their produce to the Portuguese
stationed in Hormuz. Presumably, these grains were cultivated on
privately owned land, land that the Ottoman government tried to
register as state land in the sixteenth century. However, by the
seventeenth, commercial production of dates spearheaded the
prosperity
in the area and date trees and groves were privately owned,
often in partnership with others. The Ottomans did not attempt to
change patterns of ownership that had developed over the previous
century. Rather, they imposed a new tax, the divaniye tax, on
agricultural
products and embraced within the purview of kanun the
private and individual ownership of trees, an aspect of ownership
they were not prone to accept in the sixteenth century. Their
compromise
was to acknowledge this development under a separate
classification
in the survey.
However, it is important to situate this change in law in the
context of the debates within the Ottoman judicial establishment
as well as the provincial jurists on the interpretation of regimes
of ownership within the empire. Scholars of the Hanafite school of
law, to which the Ottomans belonged, had debated whether groves
or fields cultivated but not inhabited by peasants should be taxed
as state land or as privately owned land. In the former case, they
were classified as mirî (state) lands and could be taxed as such,
while in the latter case they could be classified as privately owned
lands on which peasants paid the sharia-sanctioned tax, harac.
According to Colin Imber, the consensus among the empire’s official
religious scholars was that while trees could be considered private
property, the land itself was not. It was leased by the state to
individual growers (Imber 1996: 207–16). Yet the sixteenth-century
register of Basra does not list owners of date trees or the amount
of trees owned, but the tax on dates in lump sum. What is striking
in the seventeenth-century register is the listing of owners and the
number of trees or rice fields they owned as a separate category.
Furthermore, in neither the prebendal system nor the farming of
land revenues did the state’s law recognize women as legal claimants,
although in practice women were often tax farmers (Repp 1988).
In contrast, through laws governing inheritance and sale, women
were recognized as legal proprietors in Islamic law. The listing of
women as owners of trees and rice fields offers convincing proof
that the state had accepted that such lands were transferable
through sales and through inheritance according to the sharia law
of inheritance.
To interpret these minor changes in the system of classification
in regimes of property in the seventeenth century, we need to place
them in the context of the political culture at the centre as well as
in the provinces. Historians of the Ottoman empire have viewed
the seventeenth century as one of administrative chaos in which
the state intermittently issued a series of administrative measures
to deal with restive provincial populations. There were no attempts
on the part of the state to transform or challenge the fundamentals
of the legal vision enshrined in the series of provincial laws issued in
the sixteenth century. While historians of the Köprülü era concede
that the period saw a wide-ranging effort to reform the administrative
practices of the state, there have been few works that focus on how
these reforms translated in the provinces of the empire. The study
of two sets of provincial administrative laws for Basra and Crete,
systematically drawn by the Ottomans, shows us for the first time that
the Köprülü’s attempts at reform were framed within the fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century administrative language. However, the Köprülü
appear to have introduced new elements into the definition of legal
categories, elements closer to sharia categories on taxes on property.
Basing her conclusions on the study of the series of laws (kanunamler)
attached to the cadastral survey of Crete in the aftermath of
its conquest in 1669, Molly Greene offers us one of the few examples
of how the Koprulu’s reform agenda worked in the provinces (Greene
2002: 78–140). She finds that Cretans were allowed to register
propertyas harac land, that is to say, land that was transferable and
heritable and subject to classical Islamic taxes, such as the tithe osr.
Greene believes that the Ottomans accepted the claims of
inhabitants
to private ownership and did not attempt to turn the bulk of
the island’s land into state land. This she attributes to the Ottoman
attempts to encourage cultivation and attract Muslim settlers by
using the classical Islamic concept of taxing conquered territories,
a practice the reforming Koprulu viziers seem to have followed.
The Iraqi provinces’ place in the Ottoman empire was somewhat
different. Conquered in the sixteenth century from the Shi’ite Safavids,
Baghdad and Mosul fell back under Safavid control for a brief
period in the first half of the seventeenth century. When they were
re-conquered, with much fanfare, by Murad IV, the Ottomans felt
no compulsion to conduct new surveys. Basra did not fall to the
Safavids in the seventeenth century. Hence, it was never officially
outside the control of the Ottomans. The Afrasiyabs were regarded
as renegade subjects that should be subdued. Yet it was for Basra
that the Ottomans chose to write a set of administrative laws and
conduct a detailed cadastral survey. Like Crete, Basra had been
brought into the Ottoman fold under a reforming vizerial dynasty. In
both cases, the Ottomans engaged in a new effort to survey, record,
and classify taxes. In both cases, they departed from the fifteenth-and
sixteenth-century categories for classifying land taxes and
expanded the category of individual ownership of agricultural land
in an effort to bring it closer to definitions of sharia.
Mimizadeh’s epistle, discussed earlier in this paper, on just
Ottomanrule, demonstrated the potency of the ideology of reform,
dubbed by Mimizadeh as renewal (tajdid), for sectors of the
provincial literati. Yet Mimizadeh’s vision of the reformed state at
the centre of the empire drew not on the exemplars of the classical
Ottoman period such as Suleyman the Lawgiver but rather on
the rulers of the early Islamic state. Invoking the memory of this
classical Islamic period, when the legal prerogatives of the state
on matters of taxation were closer to the definitions of religiously
sanctioned taxes, was the idiom chosen by Mimizadeh to call for
the limits of the state’s rights to taxes. Nowhere, however, does
Mimizadeh challenge the legitimacy of the state’s prerogatives.
His was a call for the new governor of Basra to emulate his early
Islamic predecessors whose legacy the Ottoman state perpetuated.
That Mimizadeh was able to do so was partly the result of the
expectationsthat the Köprülüs, as reforming households, created of
a just rule within the Empire.

The Province of Mosul as Military Frontier

Mosul’s place in the Ottoman empire was somewhat different than
Basra’s. More amenable to Ottoman control than many of the smaller
towns on the eastern frontier of the empire, it became, in the
seventeenth
century, the centre for the recruitment, mobilization and
provisioning of troops for the Ottoman fight against the Safavids
(Khoury 1997). It maintained that position throughout the
eighteenth
century, providing the Ottomans with a more dependable
base than Baghdad, whose tribal populations and urban elite were
less amenable to Ottoman control. By the early eighteenth century,
the business of defending the eastern frontiers of the empire from
Persian invasions as well as from rebellious frontier overlords fell to
a family of private contractors who monopolized the office of
provincial
governors for the next century. The Jalilis recruited armies,
collected funds for their provisioning and were active in the transfer
of goods and capital across the southeastern part of the Empire
during campaigns. That they had the resources to do all that was in
part due to the transformation in the system of tax farming which
allowed them secure access to revenues over a long period of time.
The prebendal system of rural administration was introduced into
Mosul in the sixteenth century and the Ottomans succeeded in
imposing its categories of tenure and regime of ownership on the
local population. By the seventeenth century, most of the important
revenues of the province were farmed out as tax farms to regional
and local elite on a short-term basis. The practice of farming taxes
had a long history in the imperial Islamic empires. Discussed in
the Islamic legal literature under the rubric of iqta’, a category in
which the ruler bestowed on his elite revenues of land in exchange
of service, it had at the time of the Ottomans lost its exclusive
association
with service. By the seventeenth century, a tax farm was
purchased for economic reasons, as an investment, with clear
stipulations
in the contract between the state and its subject that he
would submit late taxes and brings the land into cultivation.
Because the price of the tax farm was set at the market value of
its revenues, taxes turned into commodities accruing to individuals
independent of their administrative abilities. In marked contrast to
the situation in Basra, where the commercialization of agricultural
production took place under a regime of property approximating
private ownership, commercial agricultural production in Mosul took
place under a regime of entitlement to rents from the land through
tax farming.
By 1703, the Ottomans introduced into Mosul a new category of
tax farming which allowed tax farmers further proprietary rights over
their entitlement to rent. The life tax farm, malikane, was presented
by the state as a new reform measure designed to remedy the ills
of the empire. The malikane owners were granted proprietorship
over revenues for the duration of their lives. They were allowed to
transfer their rights to the revenue of the land, their rights being
understood as tasarruf, the right to dispose of revenue. They could
transfer part of their holdings to their male children during their
lifetime, and could pass on the right to their descendents on their
death after obtaining special permission from the state. There were
only two limitations on the right of the malikane holders. The first
was that the state could withdraw its renewal of malikane when the
issue came up at the time of the ascension of a new sultan, or when the
original owner of rent died. The second was that the malikane owner
could not dispossess the peasant from his rights to cultivate the land,
nor could he take possession of that portion of the surplus that went
to the peasant’s sustenance. However, what is remarkable in the new
form of revenue ownership is how much closer it was brought to the
sharia definitions of heritable property, where inheritance of titles
to revenue became regularized and transfer of revenue was legally
recognized. However, ultimate ownership remained with the state,
the peasants rights to subsistence were maintained at the expense
of the owner and women could not legally become owners of such
revenues, something they could do under the provenance of sharia
rules of inheritance.
 By the 1750s, a two-tiered social division within tax-farming
groups in Mosul had emerged. The first tier, four lineage groups who
were divided into several extended households, monopolized both
rural and urban malikane holdings. At their head were the Jalili
households, the main military contractors for the state on the eastern
frontier. They formed a provincial Ottoman aristocracy, copying
the political and organizational culture of the elite households in
Istanbul. The second tier of malikane owners was a group of medium
and small proprietors of rural rents. While many of them held shares
in malikane in partnership with wealthier households, they faced
an ongoing battle trying to secure and maintain access to rural
rents in the face of the predatory acquisitiveness of their wealthier
cohorts. It is from this group of small and medium owners of rural
rents that most of the literature on the legality in sharia terms of
this kind of new tax farm was written.
In 1745, Abdallah ibn Ahmad al-Mosuli, a scholar and member
of this group of owners of rural rents, wrote a legal tract that
encapsulates the ideas of his class (al-Mosuli n.d.).14 He was
concerned that peasants, under pressure from the governor of
Mosul and its largest landowner, were selling their usufruct rights
to his family. In doing so, they were forfeiting their right to the
non-taxable products of their land, in effect becoming sharecroppers
of the malikane owner rather than renters of rights of cultivation
from the state. The state, for this particular scholar, was trustee of
the interest of God’s creatures and as trustee it had guardianship
over land. As guardian, it should set clear limits to the ability
of malikane owners to divest peasants from what was rightfully
theirs. More importantly, it should make it clear to tax farmers
and peasants that the privatization of land rent did not extend
to ownership of land. As a member of a class of small owners of
revenue, he was alarmed that the sale of usufruct rights by the
peasantry was leading to the monopolization of revenue by a limited
elite. Appealing to late medieval interpretations of sharia as well as
to the authority of the venerated Ottoman chief mufti Ebu Suud,
this particular scholar warned against the more deleterious effects
of the privatization of revenue. However, he was not averse to the
concept of life tax farm itself and his treatise makes this clear.
Rather, it is the abuse of the new administrative practice that he
found indefensible in sharia terms.
 The Ottomans sought to revoke the malikane grants to revenue
in the early 1820s in an effort to centralize the tax collection
process.
Local jurists, appealing to legal opinions widely accepted by
the Ottoman jurists, argued that these grants had now become
permanent rights to revenue because they were obtained under a
sale contract with the state. Their arguments were situated within
the parameters of an Ottoman legal culture premised on varied
and local interpretations of the kanun and its relations to sharia.
Neither the concept of the guardianship of the sultan over land
nor the conditional rights of individual proprietors was fixed. The
struggle between the control of the state over the land’s resources
and the individual proprietor’s dominion over such resources often
took the form of a debate over the meaning of property in state
law on the one hand and religious law on the other. As so much of
Ottoman kanun was derived from a particular sharia interpretation
of property, provincial jurists who challenged it did so within the
‘rhetoric and rules of society’. The elastic contours of sharia and
kanun were seriously challenged in the nineteenth century by the
homogenization of Islamic legal practice under the reform of Hanafi
law and state laws.

Debates on Land Reform on the

Frontiers of Empire
The Ottomans did not abandon the concept of the sultan’s
guardianship
over land in the 1858 Land Code that articulated the
modern state law on issues of property and taxation of land. Nor
did they completely forsake the vocabulary used in their earlier
piecemeal attempts at navigating between sharia and kanun in
their negotiations with their landowning subjects. However, they
did rationalize, systemize and regularize all land transactions in
ways that left the language of bargaining implicit in the earlier
debates on issues of land and its taxes. The loss of the language of
bargaining, however, appears to have extended to the debates on
the relationship between sharia and kanun in some of the tracts
written by jurists and legal scholars of the period. Sharia was
now increasingly pitted against kanun, despite the fact that the
Ottomans embarked on an ambitious and highly successful effort
to homogenize the local practices of the courts by making them
adhere to a particularly Ottoman interpretation of Hanafi law.
Perhaps it was this clear subordination of sharia to a single state-sponsored
interpretation that led to this polarization. At any rate,
this particularly Ottoman interpretation of sharia had already had
its detractors in the Iraqi provinces, detractors who no longer
appealedto the same set of historical legal texts that were among the
repertoire of Ottoman jurists.
Historians of Islamic law either focus on the work of earlier
Ottoman jurists or on that of those those jurists writing in the
later nineteenth century, when the land law of 1858 and the homo-genzation
of Hanafi law were in place. However, between the
1770s and the 1840s, a period marked by severe crisis and several
calls to reform on the part of the state and its elite, there were a
number of alternative reform agendas being offered by sectors of
the provincial elite to counter the apparent chaos at the centre. In
the eastern frontier provinces of the empire, these agendas were
coloured by the alternative offered by the puritanical and
fundamentalist’s
movement out of Arabia, the Wahhabi movement that
had threatened the central and southern parts of Iraq in the early
nineteenth century. At the same time, a politicized and activist form
of sufi Islam, the Khalidiyya Naqshabandiya, had made inroads
into the scholarly community of urban Iraq, creating an atmosphere
where the polemics of religious and political reform were discussed
in tandem with reform agendas emanating from the centre.
The work of Abdul al-Aziz bin Muhammad al-Rahbi, a late
eighteenth-century Baghdadi scholar, is perhaps a good, if not
representative,illustration of the polemics of reform (al-Rahbi n.d.). 15
Al-Rahbi wrote a commentary on the eighth-century foundational
text on land taxes, ibn Yusuf’s Kitab al-Kharaj. Unlike his Mosuli
counterparts, he did not appeal to the authority of the Hanafite
jurists of the late medieval and early modern periods, jurists that
the Ottoman establishment accepted. He consciously set out to write
a commentary that was based directly on the source and dismissed
the commentaries of later scholars (al-muta’khirun) as full of
accretionsand based on weak authority (isnad). Al-Rahbi’s text sets
the prerogatives of the sultan to tax within the parameters of the
early Muslim state when the concept of the guardianship of the
sultan over all land had not yet become the norm among legal
scholars. The authority of the sultans to collect taxes was clearly
limited to religiously sanctioned taxes and the state’s prerogative
to impose administrative taxes was curtailed. Spurred perhaps by
the widespread movement emanating from India to render a more
scripturalist reading of foundational texts, and concerned with the
chaotic realities of Ottoman rule in his city, al-Rahbi sought to
reinventthese texts as remedies for the current crisis. 16 His particular
call to a return to the early Islamic texts and the example of early
Islamic rule carried some resonance in the early nineteenth century.
The Wahhabis tried to set up an approximation of the early Islamic
state in Arabia, threatened the sultan’s legitimacy, and proceeded to
wreak havoc in southern and central Iraq (Fattah 1997). While the
large sectors of the Baghdadi and Basrene elite were hostile to their
more extreme doctrines, they were quite attracted to their vision of
a reformed state. A number of scholars in the Iraqi provinces of the
nineteenth century wrote polemical tracts addressing issues raised by
the Wahhabis: issues covering true Islamic practice, the legitimacy
of the state, the legitimacy of rebellion, and the legitimacy of taxes.
It is easy to dismiss al-Rahbi’s text as an exceptional one and
not representative of the kind of debates that circulated in the
provinces and the centre of the empire. However, al-Rahbi’s work
was printed in Istanbul as well as by Muhammad Ali’s Bulaq press
in the nineteenth century. His views might have become part of the
attempts of different sectors of the reforming elite to tackle the issue
of private property in land. However, what distinguishes his views
from that of earlier scholars who tried to negotiate an alternative
interpretation of law within the parameters of a shared vocabulary
was his insistence on a clearer and more scripturalist definition
of taxes. It is remarkable that, as the language and categories of modern
state laws become non-negotiable, so do the interpretations offered
by some expounders of sharia in the Iraqi provinces who insist on
stricter adherence to the classical Islamic definitions of ownership
of property.

Conclusion
The hallmark of the Ottoman imperial enterprise in the early modern
period in its frontier provinces was a negotiated settlement over
the disbursement of resources and the distribution of power. The
legitimacy of the state’s prerogatives over the provinces’ resources
had to be worked and reworked within an accepted set of vocabularies
and rules of engagement. On the issue of taxation and rural property,
these vocabularies drew on a common understanding of kanun and
sharia drawn from a body of work legal scholars developed in the
late medieval and early modern periods. This was an ideology of
rule based on the concept of a universal empire engaged in the
expansion and defense of the territories and the maintenance of an
Islamic order. Jurists and scholars who wrote about administrative
law and sharia accepted this Ottoman vision. While the provincial
interpreters of sharia maintained their independence from the state
and reserved the right to offer dissenting interpretations on points
of administrative law drawn from sharia, they did so without
challenging the overall legitimacy of such laws. The state often
accommodated provincial social realities by granting proprietary
rights to revenue closer to sharia. In all cases, the medium through
which provincial groups expressed their interests was sharia as they
interpreted it. During the last decade of the eighteenth century and
until the 1840s, the legitimacy of the Ottoman state was severely
tested, and the various reform movements inspired by new and
activist interpretation of Islamic dogma found their way into the
Iraqi provinces. It is at this point that appeal to a more scriptural
interpretation of the sources of sharia, or its foundational texts
were presented as viable alternatives to the old order, in which the
boundaries of sharia and kanun were difficult to demarcate. This
is, at least, how al-Rahbi and those inspired by some aspects of
the Wahhabi challenge framed their proposals for reform. The
separation between sharia and kanun was a discursive devise, often
a misrepresentation of a complex and messy reality that represented
the modernizing reforms of the state as a distortion of the true spirit
of the early Islamic state.
How does the administration of the frontier provinces in the Ottoman
empire compare to that of Qing China? In his introductory essay
to a special issue on Manchu colonialism, Peter Perdue stresses the
varied ways in which the Manchus dealt with their newly conquered
frontiers. Manchu policy alternated between compromising with local
elites and adapting imperial administrative prerogatives to local
conditions, and the more intrusive organization of frontier
populations
into banners, and military and administrative units, which
served as vehicles for tying frontier populations to the centre.
However, as with Ottomans, the Manchu relations with their frontier
regions cannot be easily categorized under a single policy. In the
words of Perdue, ‘Local administration was also heavily shaped by
how the expanding empire took over these regions: imperial residents
and small garrisons combined with selective delegation of powers
and allocation of privileges to native elites to tie the regions to the
centre in a different fashion from regular bureaucratic structure of
the interior’ (Perdue 1998: 255–62). That is to some extent true
for the Ottoman eastern frontier, especially in the case of Basra
where mobile populations and a strong commercial elite made the
control of the city more difficult well into the eighteenth century.
The case of Mosul is somewhat different. Regarded by the Ottomans
as one of the most important military outposts of southeastern
Anatolia, and as their main entry into Iraq and eastern Arabia, it
was from the beginning essential that it become a dependable and
more Ottomanized outpost on the frontier. The administrative policy
followed by the Ottomans worked at co-opting, as much as possible,
a wide range of its urban population through a complicated system
of entitlements.
However, beyond drawing these broad strokes in comparing
policies of the Qing and the Ottomans on the frontier, it is more
challenging
to find common categories for comparison. This is especially
the case when we discuss the relationship of state and customary
law in Qing China, and administrative law and sharia in Ottoman
empire. The Ottomans had a great deal of difficulty controlling the
eastern frontier. However, when they finally did so, they based their
hegemony on a tenuous alliance with an urban elite who gradually
reproduced the political organizational culture of the centre. And
it is to these elite that the Ottomans turned for legitimation and
the administration of their provinces. That they were able to do so
can be partially attributed to a shared conception of rule and of law
that had been germinating among the urban elite of the Islamicate
at least as far back as the late medieval period. What the Ottomans
introduced was a systemization of state law at a level that had not
existed in the late medieval period. This aspect of their rule seems
to have been the most contested by provincial jurists.
It is not clear whether the Qing faced a comparable situation
in their frontier provinces in the eighteenth century. However, the
contrast between the Ottomans and the Qing appears to be clearer
when we turn to the relationship between customary law and state
law in the interior of the Qing empire. The Qing seem to have had
a highly effective bureaucratic culture that was reflected in their
administrative practice and their manuals issued on the proper way
to administer the empire. T’ung-tsu Ch’ü, for example, describes
a provincial administration in which the state had well-defined
procedures for the court and for the magistrate to follow in both
criminal and civil cases. Peasants were organized by local magistrates
into households as tax units that were made responsible for
keeping their own records. The magistrate, the most important
representative of the state at the provincial level, appears to have
focused on issues of taxation, crime and matters covered by state
law. He did not involve himself in issues governed by customary law,
such as disputes among the peasantry over land sales, inheritance
and property (Ch’ü 1962). Peter Perdue finds that by the eighteenth
century, the state had become more involved in regularizing
customary law by intervening in disputes among the peasantry
over land — its transfer and its distribution. Officials in the
eighteenth century were active in organizing production in order
to maximize the use of land in the face of an expanding population
(Perdue 1987).
The Ottomans, even in their eastern frontier provinces, present
us with a contrast to this picture during the early modern period.
The existence of sharia, its symbiotic relationship with state law,
and the blurred lines between these two and customary local
practice makes it difficult to view administrative law as a set of
rules independent of their implementation, after much negotiation,
within local conditions. However, such negotiations and adaptations
to local conditions took place within the limits of a legal discourse
shared across the urban centres of the empire. It is important not
to misconstrue sharia as representing the local at the expense of
the centre. It was, rather, often a discursive means used by local
jurists to challenge the legitimacy of particular points of state law,
not its existence. Furthermore, despite the presence of an Ottoman
provincial court system regulated by the state, the judge ruled on
issues covered by sharia (inheritance, marriage, property, sales)
and state law. Jurists, who were often part of the provincial court
system, opined on matters covering state law. In other words, where
the picture that emerges for the Qing is one that distinguishes
clearly between state and customary law (law covering issues of
inheritance, property, and sales), no such distinction appears in the
frontier urban centres of the Ottoman empire. Especially on issues
of taxation and property, both sharia and kanun used a common
vocabulary. It is this common vocabulary that made challenging
the prerogatives of the state a viable option for jurists seeking to
maintain local practice against encroachments of the state.
 Notes
1. For an example of such complications see two essays in this volume:
Melissa Macauley’s ‘A World Made Simple: Law and Property in the
Ottoman and Qing Empires’, and Huri Islamoglu’s ‘Modernities
Compared: State Transformations and Constitutions of Property in
the Qing and Ottoman Empires’. For an enlightening analysis, see
Mundy (1988).
2. There are number of works that address this aspect of Ottoman land
law. The most succinct is Inalcik (1994). For China see, in this volume,
R. B. Wong’s ‘Formal and Informal Mechanisms of Rule and
Economic
Development: The Qing Empire in Comparative Perspective’,
and Perdue (1987).
3. For the Arab provinces, work on the role of the courts is quite varied; this
is a small sample. For Egypt, see Behrens-Abouseif (1994) and Hanna
(1998). For Syria, see Marcus (1989), Doumani (1995) and al Qattan,
(1999). For Anatolia, the works of Suraiya Faroqhi and Ronald Jennings
offer a good description of the working of the court system.
4. Abbas al-Azzawi chronicles, in his multi-volume history, frequent
rebellions among these populations. For how these rebellions affected
the northern province of Mosul, see Khoury (1997).
5. Rogan (1999) discusses the impact of modern administrative laws on
the frontier areas of the trans-Jordan. Doumani (1995) discusses the
impact of the new laws on customary practices in the provincial town
of Nablus.
6. Discussions of Basra are derived from al-Azzawi (n. d.), Khoury (1991)
and Ozbaran (1986).
7. On the musha’shi’in messianic movement, see al-Azzawi (n. d.). See also
Khoury (1991) on the Ottoman’s listing of the Sabaens of Basra.
8. Mufassal defter-i, no 242 for Basra, Iraq Scientific Society, Baghdad.
9. Basra was under what was known as the salyane system, in which
annual taxes were collected in lump sum in the province. See Ozbaran
(1986).
10. Ba¸sbakanlik Osmanli Ars¸ivleri, Maliyeden Mudevver, #5461, year 1101
AH, 1689 CE.
11. Robert Gordon uses the phrases ‘regimes of property’ and ‘regimes of
entitlements’ to denote forms of proprietorship that encompass a
multitude
of rights, often fragmented among several individuals, in which
control by the individual proprietor was circumscribed by the rights
of other property holders. He uses this to describe property, in early
modern England and America. Discussion of forms of property in
the context of the Ottoman empire, is comparable to these forms of
property. See Gordon (1995). For an example of regimes of entitlements
in Mosul, see Khoury (1997).
12. Bas¸bakanlik Osmanli Arsivleri, Maliyeden Mudevver, # 5461.
13. Voll and Levtzion (1987) offer a useful survey of these trends and the
interaction between scholars of Arabia and India. In Baghdad, the
Suwaidi family of scholars were among the leading proponents of
reform both of Hadith studies and of sufi practices. Abdul Rahman
al-Suwaidi, one of the leading scholars of Baghdad in the second half
of the eighteenth century, traced his Naqshabandi silsila to Sirhindi in
India. He was also one of a number of scholars engaged in debating the
founding of a Ja’fari school of legal thinking proposed by Nadir Shah
in the first half of the eighteenth century. I am currently working with
a number of manuscripts by the Suwaidis on these and other issues.
14. Abdallah ibn Ahmad al-Mosuli, ‘Bayan al-ahkam fi al-‘ushr wal kharaj”,
“majmu’at rasa’il fi al-aradi al-amiriyya’, the Hasan Pasha al-Jalili
collection, no. 25/1, Waqf Library of Mosul.
15. Abd al-Aziz bin Muhammad al-Rahbi, ‘Fiqh al-muluk was miftah al-mursad
mursad ala khazinat kitab al-kharaj’, Suleymaniye kutuphanesi, Bagdatli
Vehbi Efendi, #1044.
16. Voll and Levtzion, eds, Eighteenth Century Renewal and Reform
in Islam (New York: Syracuse University Press 1987) offer a useful
survey of these trends and the interaction between scholars of Arabia
and India. In Baghdad, the Suwaidi family of scholars were among
the leading proponents of reform both of Hadith studies and of sufi
practices. Abdul Rahman al-Suwaidi, one of the leading scholars
of the Baghdad in the second half of the eighteenth century traced
his Naqshabandi silsila to Sirhindi in India. He was also one of a number
of scholars engaged in debating the founding of a Ja’fari school of legal
thinking proposed by Nadir Shah in the first half of the eighteenth
century. I am currently working with a number of manuscripts by the
Suwaidi’s on these and other issues.

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———. 1998. ‘Manchu Colonialism’, International History Review 20 (2):
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 3
The Fate of Empires: Rethinking Mughals,
Ottomans and Habsburgs*
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Everyone knows this world will not be ruined by sin
Destruction will come when flattery is spoken in place of truth.
—‘Izzet Molla (1786-1829)

I
There has been a recent spate of writings on empire, for reasons
that are scarcely a mystery; at the heart of the matter lies the end
of the Cold War and the emergence of the unipolar American
system,
as a model and a way of structuring the geopolitical imagination,
if not a concrete reality. A recent collection on ‘lessons of empire’
begins by noting: ‘Empire for a time became a quaintly antiquated
word, banished from the political spectrum with the collapse of
Europe’s colonial rule in Africa and Asia. Now the word has come back’
(Calhoun et al. 2006: 1). Some of this work is unabashedly presentist
in orientation, veering between a very loose use of the term
‘empire’, and a celebration of the American inheritance of the British
mantle and mission civilisatrice. I sense that I am not alone in
believing that we historians have by now spent far too much time
and energy on such ‘Empire Do-It-Yourself Kits’, and have spilt
far too much futile ink whether on Messrs Hardt and Negri (on
the ostensible left-wing of the confederacy of amateurs) or on Niall
Ferguson (on its definite right) (Ferguson 2003; Hardt and Negri
2000). We have surely heard enough of such moral propositions
that the British empire was an altogether excellent affair since
without the Indian troops it recruited, Hitler and his allies could
never have been defeated in the 1940s. 1 Here then is an excellent
redeployment of the justification for Stalin and the gulag, for
without
that equally excellent invention, how could Hitler have been
defeated either?
 The Fate of Empires

My purpose in this admittedly diffuse and rather ambitious essay

is somewhat different. I wish to return the métier of the historian
and the historical sociologist to the centre, and to study three early
modern empires that covered an impressive swathe of more or less
contiguous territory (with a small gap from east to west equivalent
to the width of the Safavid domains), extending from the northern
fringes of Burma in the east to the Atlantic and Morocco in the west
of Eurasia, and in a more general sense had a worldwide coverage
and reach in about 1600. None of these empires has in general been
written into the happy history of modernity, and all of them are
definitely seen as losers in the eighteenth-century redistribution of
cards that characterizes the rise of the second British empire.2 Yet,
as I shall argue below, these empires are very significant in terms
of the diversity of political, institutional and cultural
arrangements
and processes that they embody. For though Mughals, Ottomans
and Habsburgs were rivals who possessed certain characteristics
in common, they were also quite different from one another, both in
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and in terms
of the longer-term trajectories for political institutions that they
produced.
Let us begin with a brief look at a moment when the three
empires saw themselves as locked into a tight inter-imperial grid of
rivalry. I refer here to 1580-81, a moment when the already
complex
contest between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs came to be
transformed into an even more intricate one, and the Mughals too
entered the scene in a substantial way. This was the year when
Philip II came, as a consequence of a complex train of events, to
gain joint control over the Spanish and the Portuguese empires, in
the aftermath of the death of the Portuguese king Dom Sebastião
in North Africa in 1578, and the demise less than two years later
of the aged Dom Henrique. Philip, notoriously, could mobilize not
only legal arguments based on his kinship ties with the Portuguese
House of Avis but the force of his battle-hardened armies as well
as his New World silver to smooth over the transition (Parker
1995). The consequence of this was that the Habsburgs, which is
to say Philip II, his son and his grandson came, for a relatively
brief period of sixty years, to rule over an empire that included
not only a part of the Low Countries and Naples, but also Mexico,
Peru, the Philippines, Brazil, Angola, the lower Zambezi valley and
a part of lowland Sri Lanka (Gruzinski 2004). Global in its reach,
 SanjaySubrahmanyam

this Habsburg world-empire was supposed, in theory, to be ruled

over in the form of two autonomous sections; but the underlying
realities were more complex. In East Asia, as well as the Río de la
Plata, the boundaries between the ‘Portuguese’ and ‘Spanish’
sections
of this empire proved quite permeable. Besides, the events of
the time brought the Ottomans into a situation where— instead
of facing one set of rivals to the southeast (in the Indian Ocean)
and another set in the Mediterranean— they were now notionally
encircled by the extensive resources deployed by the Habsburg
monarchy of the Philips. Thus, the theatres of Ottoman-Habsburg
rivalry in the 1580s included North Africa, the central and eastern
Mediterranean islands and Ethiopia, as much as the Swahili coast,
the Persian Gulf and northern Sumatra.
Besides, within the Muslim world, the more or less unchallenged
supremacy that the Ottomans had enjoyed since the reign in the
1510s of Yavuz Sultan Selim was now under challenge. During the
half-century reign of Sultan Süleyman, ‘the Lawgiver’, the Ottomans
were seen as the lords of the holy cities of the Hijaz (as well as
Jerusalem), the only great Muslim power with a true maritime reach,
and also boasted periodically that they alone possessed territories
in all of the ‘seven climes’ of traditional Islamic geography (Seyyidi
‘Ali Re’is 1999, 1999a: 86-87, 115-16). But this was to change.
The Mughals, descendants of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, who
had emerged in the area of Herat and Kabul in the early sixteenth
century as a petty dynasty that was initially under Safavid tutelage,
began to flex their muscles from the 1560s on-wards and mounted
a series of successful campaigns to consolidate their domains in
northern India. By 1580, the Mughal ruler Akbar (r. 1556-1605)
was seen as a real rival to the Ottoman sultan in terms of his power
and prestige, and it is significant that by about 1600, the Mughals
rather than the Ottomans come to play the role of a model for
some of the fledgling Sultanates that are emerging in Southeast
Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral ( Lombard 1967: 79, passim).
In the early 1580s, Akbar entered into direct diplomatic contact
with the Habsburgs and by the time the first Habsburg-appointed
viceroy, Dom Filipe Mascarenhas, reached Goa in 1581, a Mughal
ambassador was already there to greet him. Not for nothing has
1580-81 been seen then in traditional historiography as a time that
sealed the fate of the world-imperial ambitions of the Ottomans, in
the face of a set of realignments and potential alliances that boded
ill for them in the long term (Subrahmanyam 2005: 42-70).
It is useful here to distinguish a naive ‘political’ and short-term
interpretation of the transition of 1580-81 from the far more
sophisticated view of Fernand Braudel in his classic study of the
Mediterranean in the age of Philip II, even though Braudel has
written, with characteristic flourish, that the transition of 1580-81
(and more generally the years 1578-83) was from the viewpoint
of the Mediterranean the ‘turning point of the century’ (Braudel
1972, ii: 1176-77). While the logic of international politics plays a
role in Braudel’s explanation of the shift from the Mediterranean
to the Atlantic in about 1580, it is underpinned by a sense of the
enormous inertial momentum of the longer-term shifts of economic
balance in Europe that led to the rise in importance of the Low
Countries and England. Thus the plate-tectonics at the level of
a slow-moving substratum of forces is manifested, in his view, at
the level of events in a dramatic political climax, which is at once
a ‘crisis’ and a ‘turning point’. Braudel also briefly introduces a
further thread into the analysis in terms of a purported Ottoman
thrust leading to a resumption of the ‘war for control of the Indian
Ocean’ as a consequence of the 1580-81 transition. In this view
then, the energy earlier focused on the Mediterranean had to be
transferred using a sort of parallelogram law of forces (or what
Braudel himself calls the ‘physics of international relations’) to two
external zones: the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean (Braudel 1972, ii:
1166, 1174-76). Still, it is clear enough that, despite his own very
considerable investment in the study of the sixteenth century, these
rival empires of 1580-81 are, for Braudel, the overall losers of history
and as such probably of lesser consequence in the long term than
the great ‘modern’ commercial empires of the seventeenth century,
namely the British, Dutch and French overseas enterprises. The
Habsburgs and Ottomans after 1600, even if they are not quite
relegated to the ‘dustbin of history’ in this construction, are not
seen as necessarily relevant for the longer history even of political
arrangements on a world scale. In the hands of historians of a
more explicitly Weberian bent of mind than Braudel, such as Niels
Steensgaard, a perfectly neat classification can hence be applied
to the world in about 1600 (Steensgaard 1974): on one side of the
divide, the nascent, forward-looking ‘productive enterprises’ of the
northern Europeans which will eventually produce the modern
world; and on the other side, the increasingly archaic ‘redistributive
enterprises’ of the Habsburgs, Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals (into
which pot one could also presumably throw in the China of the
Ming and Qing for good measure), whose fate it is to be drawn into
modernity only through the relentless latter-day ‘Europeanization
of mankind’.
And yet, the Habsburgs, and even less the Ottomans and Mughals,
were not just some great stinking carcasses by 1600. For one, the
Mughal state was only just emerging into prominence at this time and
it makes little sense to see it as already carrying the odour of
decadence.
The thrust of most recent historiography on the Ottomans
has, for its part, cast enormous doubt on the old paradigms of
Ottoman ‘decline’, which were based on the sour observations of
Venetian observers as well as on internal cyclical theories
deriving
in part from Ibn Khaldun (Fleischer 1983). As Cemal Kafadar
has written, ‘many processes and events dating from the last three
and a half centuries of the Ottoman empire were indiscriminately
lumped together under the rubric of decline. Transformations in all
spheres of life— political, military, institutional, social, economic, and
cultural— were neatly explained in the framework of decline.
Degeneration
of the empire implied that there was no regeneration, vitality
or dynamism, but only occasional respite through despotic discipline
(until the imported vitality of Europeanization arrived)’ (Kafadar
1997-98: 33-34). The case of the Habsburgs is more curious still,
since the paradigm that speaks of a ‘golden age’ followed by an ‘age
of decline’ still remains very much in place, with scarcely a sign of
a full-blooded challenge. Whether one dates such decline to the 1580s
with the ‘imperial overstretch’ of Philip II, or to the great revolts
of the 1640s that deal a body-blow to the ambitions of the Count-Duke
of Olivares, most narrative histories continue to argue as if
the standard rise, consolidation and decline cycle fits the Habsburg
case perfectly well.3 At the same time, we are aware of some quite
uncomfortable facts. The rivalry on a world scale between the Iberians
and their northern European rivals did not quite end in total
triumph for the latter. To be sure, the Dutch (and to a lesser
extent the English) did make major inroads into Portuguese
holdings
in the Indian Ocean between the 1590s and the 1660s. But in
Africa and America, the situation was far more ambiguous. With
the exception of parts of the Caribbean, the Spanish empire in
America remained largely intact at the end of a century of war,
raiding and piracy by the Dutch, French and English. The most
significant successes outside the Caribbean for the newcomers
were in areas where Spanish investments of money and manpower
were quite limited, namely on the Atlantic seaboard of northern
America. Brazil remained intact as a Portuguese colony, despite
Dutch attempts to settle Pernambuco through Johan Maurits of
Nassau and the West-Indische Compagnie. Indeed, Brazil
continued
through the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to
be a powerful and vibrant motor in the Portuguese colonial system,
linked not simply to the metropolis but also to West Africa, in a
South Atlantic trading system that has unfortunately not received
even a fraction of the attention of its North Atlantic counterpart.4 At
this level, the Habsburgs (or even the restored House of Braganza)
were hardly the pushovers that the usual Whig narratives of the
imperial rat-race would have us believe.
To sum up this first section, then: even if we see the seventeenth
century as the period when the Dutch and English emerge into great
prominence as carriers of trans-continental trade, with Amsterdam
and London as important clearing houses for this traffic, it is only by
thinking anachronistically that one can imagine that the Ottomans,
the Mughals and even the Habsburgs can simply be ignored or set
aside as trivial. Yet, the pressing momentum of Whig historiography,
the desire to read the nineteenth century back into the seventeenth
century, and the great teleologies of Marxist and Weberian social-science
reasoning all lead in this direction. Recent historiography
on the British empire still shows few signs of having moved on
these key questions; thus, we learn even quite recently from Cain
and Hopkins that ‘the Ottoman empire and Persia can be placed,
with China, in a distinct category of regions that presented peculiar
obstacles to European expansion in the underdeveloped world. The
failure of societies in these three empires to produce modernising
elites which were both powerful and cooperative limited their
development as independent polities along western lines.’ What
then could be the fate of such places? Hardly a happy one: for ‘the
presence of large, antique, yet still death-defying political structures
meant that indigenous authorities could not be taken over without
promoting internal disorder, incurring massive expense and risking
international conflict’ ( Cain and Hopkins 1993: 397). Stagnation
and suffocation could be the only outcomes, until the cold shower
of westernization could be called on to bring about the necessary
radical and wrenching changes.
 II
Let us pause, even if only briefly, to ask what was in fact ‘antique’
(which carries the subtextual meaning ‘archaic’) about the Mughals,
Ottomans or Habsburgs, and when these polities became so in the
perception of historiography. The Mughals, we may recall, ruled over
northern India from the 1520s to the late 1850s; but two caveats
need to be introduced with respect to this chronology. First, between
the late 1530s and the mid-1550s, there was a hiatus in their rule,
when the Mughal emperor Humayun was forced to withdraw from
northern India on account of the resurgence of the power there of
Afghan warlords. Second, from the late eighteenth century and
more particularly from the 1770s and 1780s, the Mughal emperor
was increasingly reduced to a figurehead, so that it is difficult
to talk of a real ‘Mughal empire’ existing in the first half of the
nineteenth century. With regard to the Ottomans, the chronology
stretches over a far longer period, indeed nearly six centuries.
Still, during the first century or so of its existence, that is to say,
well into the fifteenth century, it is more plausible to speak of an
Ottoman regional polity than a veritable empire. Indeed, as late
as 1512, the Ottoman domains are still quite compact, extending
west to east roughly from Sarajevo to Sivas, and from the Danube
south to the Mediterranean. It is in the sixteenth century that the
far more extensive dimensions that we have written of briefly in
preceding paragraphs actually come to be defined: it is now that
Buda, Oran, Cairo, Mosul, Basra, Mecca and Suakin all fall into
their hands. As for the Habsburgs, they too were quintessentially
an early modern empire. Charles V (or Charles I of Spain) came to
power in Iberia in the 1510s, and the death of the last Habsburg
ruler of Spain, Charles II, coincided neatly with the beginning of
the eighteenth century.
Of these three structures, two— the Ottomans and Habsburgs—
certainly had world-embracing ambitions in the sixteenth century,
of a literal sort that set them apart from the older type of universal
empire. This was also what set them apart from most other states
of the time, a fact noted by none other than Sir Walter Ralegh, in
his vast and unfinished History of the World. Ralegh’s preface to
this work is a curious one, for he tells us that even if he had begun
with the notion of a history of the world, he had ‘lastly purposed
(some few sallies excepted) to confine [his] discourse within this
[...] renowned island of Great Britain’, since it was far better, in
his initial view, to ‘set together [...] the unjointed and scattered
frame of [...] English affairs, than those of the universal’ (Ralegh
1820: i, 1; also Racin 1974). Eventually, even this reflection on
Britain had to be limited to a few asides, for Ralegh was unable to
go chronologically beyond the Romans, whom he left at the end of
his work still ‘flourishing in the middle of the field; having rooted
up, or cut down, all that kept it from the eyes and admiration
of the world’. However, while closing the work, Ralegh does hint
strongly to us how he might have organized that other ‘universal’
history which he abandoned. Such a history would be oriented for
his times above all in terms of the opposition between the Turk
and the Spaniard, for ‘there hath been no state fearful in the east
but that of the Turk’; he counterposes this to the fact that ‘nor in
the west any prince that hath spread his wings far over his nest
but the Spaniard’. Ralegh thus concludes: ‘These two nations,
I say, are at this day the most eminent and to be regarded; the one
seeking to root out the Christian religion altogether— the other the
truth and sincere profession thereof; the one to join all Europe to
Asia— the other the rest of all Europe to Spain’ (Ralegh 1820, vi:
368-69).
The Mughals were a somewhat different order of polity than the
two great rival systems mentioned above. Their ambitions extended
periodically into Central Asia, where they may have entertained
ideas of recovering the ‘ancestral homelands’ (or watan) of their
great ancestor Timur; but beyond that and a few residual border
disputes with the Safavids, their notions of a frontier of expansion
largely seem to have been southwards and eastwards (Foltz 1998:
136-46). To the south, a natural limit presented itself in the sense of
the maritime frontier of the Indian Ocean; and though the Mughals
had almost attained this limit by 1700, there is no sign for example
that they ever considered launching an expedition into Sri Lanka,
let alone into Southeast Asia. To the east, Bengal represented a
very important terrain of expansion between the 1570s and 1660s,
and beyond that areas such as Kuch Bihar, Tippera and Assam
certainly fell within the Mughal ken. Yet again, the Mughals seem
to have set internal limits to their expansion even here, and there
are no real projects to extend the Mughal domains into the region of
Arakan in northern Burma. To this extent, we may see the Mughal
state as an unfinished project in a territorial sense, but also one that
had a proper sense of its limits. We shall seek to explore elsewhere
where such ideas might have come from (Athar Ali 1997).
When does talk of the ‘decline’ of these three empires begin?
Here again, chronology is complex and it becomes even more so if
one looks to the case of China in the early modern period (Atwell
1988; Huang 1981). To begin with, internally generated political
theories within each of these empires carried much anxiety about
the issue of decline, and it was this internal theory that was
opportunisticallyseized upon and at times deliberately misinterpreted
by outside observers. The central elements appear as follows, with
theories of Habsburg and Ottoman decline appearing in the late
sixteenth century and Mughal theories stemming from the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Again, Kafadar has
warned that it will not do to confuse authors who ‘warn of the
possibility of disorder’ with those who see disorder as already
endemic and characteristic of a ‘world-in-decline’. Bearing this in
mind, we may distinguish theories that are broadly cyclical and
predominantly dynastic in orientation within a given zone with
others that are inclined to see domination and hegemony as a
phenomenon that passes from one region of the world to another.
The bulk of theories within the Habsburg and Ottoman context
seem to fall in the first category, and are also accompanied by
‘advice’ or ‘reform’ literature (nasihat or arbitrío), proposing ways
of checking, attenuating, or even reversing processes of decline.
Central ideas involve ‘corruption’, the lack of a proper equilibrium
amongst the elements that hold a polity together, the rise of new
social groups associated with money rather than achievement, a
suspicion of new standards that lay aside ascriptive criteria, and
so on. Yet, these are not blanket cultural criticisms. No Spanish
arbitrista of importance ever recommended abandoning the Catholic
religion, nor suggested that the languorous Mediterranean climate
condemned Iberians to a lazy decadence. The only Mughal writers
who made such arguments about their own polity were those who
did so after the British conquest of India, when they had deeply
internalized a form of ‘cultural cringe’. Rather, typical Mughal
writers of the eighteenth century might argue that a decline had
occurred in the ‘masculinity’ of the Mughals, or that commercially-oriented
social groups had come to hold far too much power in the
polity (Alam 1986: 169-75). These are arguments that very nearly
have the status that astrology does in such societies; rather than
being associated with a fully deterministic science, they imply that
events are impelled by a certain momentum but that they can
also be altered in their course. Yet, these very arguments could
eventually be manipulated by others, notably western European
proponents of the view that the Ottoman empire was the ‘Sick Man
of Europe’, or Protestant propagandists of the ‘Black Legend’, into
fully locked-in arguments, in which the fate of such empires was
inexorably determined, even as the rise to power of the Netherlands
and Britain were also written in stone.
One can thus see a situation in which, by the mid-seventeenth
century, the decline of the Ottomans and the Habsburgs was the
object
of a curious consensus by observers on the inside and outside,
but based in fact on a fundamental incompatibility of the schemes
of presentation. A century later, this came to be the case with the
Mughals as well; when Nadir Shah of Iran humiliated them in his
campaign of 1739-40, Mughal observers ruefully began to look to
why they had ‘declined’; and despite superficial similarities, their
own explanations had little to do with the views of East India
Company officials, who were anxious to show, by the 1750s, that
there were easy pickings to be had in the Indian subcontinent.5
Interestingly, after having proceeded a fair way down the road to
conquest, some of these very same East India Company servants
would discover virtues to Mughal modes of organization that had
escaped them before. Thus, time and again, between 1760 and 1830,
the English in India would declare that they aimed to preserve the
best of Mughal institutions, while ridding themselves of the dross
(which naturally included most of the Islamic character of the
state). The view was therefore that something quite substantial
did exist to be rescued from the Mughal state, a vastly different
notion than that set out by Mustafa Kemal and the Kemalists at
the end of the Ottoman state.
This takes us logically to a consideration of the key elements
in the political and institutional functioning of our three empires.
Here, their histories diverge but in complex ways. Mughals and
Ottomans appear quite similar in respect of some institutions but
dissimilar in respect of others. In certain surprising respects, the
histories of the Habsburgs and Ottomans converge, and that of
the Mughals eventually emerges as quite distinct. Indeed, to give
the central theses of the essay away at this point, there must have
been reasons why the Ottoman and Habsburg empires eventually
fragmented to produce a vast number of smaller— and often deeply
divided— nation-states, while the bulk of the Mughal empire
still holds together in the form of a single nation-state, namely
the Republic of India. My focus here will be on three issues: first,
the management of regional diversity; second, religious and
denominational difference; and third, economic change. These three
are not in fact separate, for a canard has long been floated (and
recently been revived by neo-Kemalist economic historians) that
the Ottoman empire declined economically because of its rigid
adherence to the outmoded legal institutions of Sunni Islam (Kuran
2003; compare Hanna 1998). Again, issues of regional diversity and
religious difference also often come intertwined in the historiography;
it would be difficult indeed to separate the two entirely in the
context, say, of the revolt of the Netherlands from Habsburg rule.
However, it may be useful to look to the institutions in question
in the period of imperial consolidation and then consider their
evolution as time wore on.
The paradox of Habsburg rule lies in the curious contrast in the
treatment of the Atlantic colonies and the European territories.
In the latter, a far greater degree of institutional diversity was
permitted in the sixteenth century; this was implied in the very
process by which different elements that were attached to one
another were treated as ‘kingdoms’. Indeed, such diversity existed
in the interior of the very Iberian holdings of the Habsburgs, so
that the terms of their acquisition of Portugal merely confirm rather
than question the rule. Local and regional institutions and
privileges
were jealously guarded and when they were questioned—
as happened periodically— reactions ranged from grumbling,
and the threat of litigation, to outright revolt, as happened early
in the reign of Charles V with the comuneros, and periodically
thereafter. In other words, the metropolitan heart of Habsburg
rule was characterized by a diversity of fiscal privileges (mercedes
and fueros), special arrangements going back to the Reconquest,
community claims and other institutional exceptions to practically
any ‘absolutist rule’ that we can find. This was to frustrate the
ambitionsof the great validos in their drive to consolidate the power
of their masters, Lerma acting for Philip III and Olivares for
Philip IV (Elliott 1986; Stradling 1988: 172-206). For, as Olivares
wrote secretly to Philip IV as early as 1625: ‘The most important
thing in Your Majesty’s monarchy is for you to become the king
of Spain: by this I mean, Sir, that Your Majesty should not be
content with being king of Portugal, of Aragon, of Valencia, and
count of Barcelona, but should secretly plan and work to reduce
these kingdoms of which Spain is composed to the style and laws of
Castile, with no difference whatsoever’ (cited in Lynch 1981: 105).
But such a plan was eventually to prove beyond the grasp of the
Habsburgs.
In the overseas territories, on the other hand (and here we must
leave aside the problematic status of the Habsburg North African
possessions), the process of conquest was based on the notional
implantation and reproduction of imported institutions.6 We see
this first with the encomienda, brought into the Caribbean, then
into Mexico and then into Peru, on the basis of a model that itself
came from the Estremadura. The decline of this institution brings
others (such as the hacienda) in its place for the control of land
and labour, but everywhere the same linguistic and terminological
grid appears: the repartimiento to organise space, the reducción to
bring populations together, the model city with its traza plan and
its council, the imposing fortified monasteries with their lands, the
Franciscans and Jesuits with their great linguistic and brainwashing
projects, the universities to train creole elites, and so on. As the
Spanish empire wends it majestic and often deeply destructive way
from Hispaniola and Cuba, to Mexico and Central America, to Peru
and Bolivia, and eventually to the Philippines, we are struck by the
degree of orderliness in the midst of the chaos caused by disease and
displacement, the acts of repetition and institutional reproduction,
and the desire for a sameness that appears to deny the diversity
of these territories; for how much did Cuba, the valley of Mexico
and the area of Manila in fact have in common before the Spanish
irruption?
To be sure, the problems of administration in the sixteenth
century almost immediately produced fissure, as the viceroyalty of
New Spain was separated from that of Peru, while the Philippines—
though notionally dependent on Mexico— enjoyed a fair degree of
autonomy. However, against this we must look to the institutions
that produced a constant circulation across these territories, whether
administrative, mercantile, religious or intellectual. Unlike the two
other empires that we shall look at below, the Habsburg empire was
from its inception an explicitly colonial one, one that was based
uncompromisingly on the dual principles of settlement and economic
exploitation. Some rough figures indicate how matters appeared
on the first of these fronts, suggesting a steady increase in the
European population, but also one in the population of mestizos
and mulattos, who would in some cases eventually be absorbed into
the creole elites that began to grumble against the very nature of
colonial rule.
Table 3.1
Table 3,1

Population Statistics for

Population Statistics for Spanish
Spanish America
America
1570 1650

By Racial Olassification
Whites 118,000 65% 000
Nfigros, most izos and mulattos 230,000 1,299,000
Indios 8,927,150 §,405,000
By Region
Mexico 3,S5S,000 3,800,000
Peru 1,58%000 1,600,000
Ooloinbia 825^,000 750,000
Bolivia 737,000 850,000
Chile 620,000 100,000
Central America »P0B 650,000
Antilles SSpSO 614,000
Others 1,292,500 1,545,000
Total 9,275,150 10,359,000
Source: Gespedes del Castillo {1985: 336, .451).

There is surprisingly little in the nature of this Habsburg empire,

as it appears in 1650, that would suggest the eventual fission of
the whole into a series of political entities ranging in size from
Argentina and Mexico to Salvador and Honduras. To the extent
that there is regional diversity, it appears largely determined by
three phenomena: first, the extent of the survival of the descendants
of the pre-Columbian populations (and in some cases, as with the
area that comes to be known as Argentina, the related question of
the pre-1500 population density); second, the diversity of ecologies
and economies, with a predominance of mining in some regions,
of agriculture in others and of unsettled groups in still others; and
third, the nature of the slave trade, the import of African slave
populations and the differential impact of this on areas that range
from Mexico and the Caribbean to Ecuador, Colombia and Bolivia.
This said, the late sixteenth century already sees the first signs of
a particularistic patriotism in different parts of Spanish America:
residents of Mexico often already saw that colony (and city) as
a centre of true majesty unlike any other in America, while the
denizens of Lima came for their part to respond with claims for
their own city, and the colony and viceroyalty it governed.7
Further reinforcing this picture of relatively limited regional
diversity
overseas (in contrast to the surprising tolerance of diversity in
the Habsburg European possessions) is the religious question. Here,
the contrast between Europe and the extra-European colonies is far
less sharp than we have noted above. The empire of the Habsburgs,
it is very nearly a cliché to assert, was born into a crucible of religious
intolerance of a sort that few other early modern empires have
witnessed (the only valid comparisons appear to be with Safavid
Iran and Tokugawa Japan). The voyage of Columbus coincided with
the expulsion of Jews from Spain and, a century later, this policy
of religious homogenization was sealed with the expulsion of the
moriscos, decreed in 1609, and more or less implemented by 1614.
This population of forced converts from Islam to Christianity was
suspected by many of being a ‘fifth column’ for the Ottomans
within the heart of Spain, and their expulsion may have involved
as many as 275,000 to 300,000 people (perhaps 3 to 4 per cent of
a total population of 8.5 million), mostly to North Africa, but also
to the eastern Mediterranean (Ortiz and Vincent 1978). The effects
of this expulsion were quite uneven regionally in Spain, with the
regions most affected being in the south-east, especially Valencia
and Aragon. Whether this expulsion had a massive economic effect
may be doubted but at any rate it is clear that it symbolized the
Habsburg monarchy’s drive to a form of religious homogenization,
of which targets were not only ‘heretics’ (that is, Protestants), but
also the other religions of the book. This remained broadly true of
the American possessions, for even if there were periods when the
population of marranos (or converted Jews) was tolerated in Mexico,
Peru and the Río de la Plata, at other moments they were subjected
to fierce persecution. Some recent historians have gone overboard
in their enthusiasm to defend the record of the Inquisition at the
time of the Habsburgs but the nature of this institution must be
set against what we shall observe in our two other empires.
From the early sixteenth century, the Ottoman domains were
recognized
as a place of refuge for religious groups persecuted in Europe.
This was true of the Jews, latex of the moriscos, but also of a vast
number of groups ranging from the Anabaptists to: a variety of
Protestant
sects. The Ottoman understanding of most of these groups
was that they were 'protected minorities' (dhimmis), which was

equally the case for Armenian and other eastern Orthodox Christian
populations. One authoritative author has written of how the
success
of Ottoman expansion in the sixteenth century in fact meant
a sort of Golden Age for these minority communities: thus, 'the

victory of the Ottoman Empire symbolized, in the sphere of

economics,
a victory of Greeks, Turks, renegade Christians, Armenians,

Ragusans, and Jews over the two-century-old commercial hegemony

of Venice and Genoa' (Stoianovich I960, cited in In.ilcik 1997: 214).
The picture is somewhat different when one looks to the
situation
of rural Christians living under Ottoman rule in the Balkans
and Bast Europe, but there is little doubt that the commercial and
professional classes amongst both Jews and Christians saw the
Ottomans sis their protectors in the Mediterranean. The Ottomans
seem to have internalized this image of themselves too; for this was

surely why the sultan Selim II wrote a reproachful letter to his ally
the French monarch Charley IX after the St Bartholomew Day's
Massacre of 1572, chastising him on his unjustifiable treatment of
religious minorities. On the other hand, the Ottomans did collect
a discriminatory poll tax (cizye or jizya) from their non-Muslim
subjects, which accounted for as much as 8 per cent of the empire's
total revenues; in addition, in the Balkans, the Ottoman state also
levied an additional collective tax on Christian villages for the
poll-tax of fugitives and the dead. But perhaps most important
Was the practice of the devshirme, the 'levy of boys from the

Christian rural population for services at the palace or the

divisions
of the standing army at the Porte', as Halil tnalcik defines it.
This was an adaptation by the Ottomans of the so-called mamluk
institution that had long existed in Muslim states, save that the
Ottomans stretched the definitions beyond what was; in fact legally
permissible. For, usually, these elite slaves (mamluks or kul) were
war-captives, not drawn upon from one's own subject populations,
as the Ottomans did. The result in the Ottoman cfjse was, on the
one hand, the opportunity for some former Christians, after their
alienation from their natal families, 'social death' and rebirth, to
aceulturate into Ottoman elite practices and at time rise up very
high in the administrative and military hierarchies; yet, on the
other hand, the practice was based on force and we must imagine
that it was accompanied by considerable resentment on the part
of the populations that were obliged to give up their male children
in this manner. At any rate, what is also instructive is that while the
Ottomans were eventually imitated in this matter by the Safavids
(especially towards the late sixteenth century), the Mughals for
the most part steered clear of this institution as a pillar of their
state-building (but see Chatterjee 2000).
The Ottoman slave-bureaucracy was in fact the object of a certain
admiration on the part of European observers such as Machiavelli,
who saw it as a meritocracy that contemporary European states
were incapable of producing (Machiavelli 1959: 43-45). It seems
to have functioned in the most efficient fashion in the sixteenth
century, but— as Metin Kunt has shown— its form and content
changed somewhat in the seventeenth century (Kunt 1983). This
was accompanied by changes in the relationship between the
central
and provincial administrations, a theme to which we should
now turn briefly. As we have already seen, the Ottoman state began
from a core in Anatolia and Rumelia and then expanded in fits
and starts, extending further east but also acquiring substantial
territories in Bulgaria and Macedonia by 1389. Expansion then
continued very gradually over the next century and more, over the
Serbian kingdom and Albania, and further east still, to include such
towns as Konya, Kayseri and Amasya. This heartland, which had
been consolidated by 1512, was to become the core for a massive
subsequent expansion that continued into the mid-sixteenth century.
In the early 1530s, economic historians estimate a population for
the Ottoman domains (excluding the Arab provinces) of around
17 million, and perhaps about 25 million for the end of the
sixteenth
century. 8 If this is broadly true, it places the population at
roughly the same level as the Habsburg empire in 1650 (after the loss
of Portugal and its dependent territories), which we may estimate
at somewhat over 20 million.
However, the articulation of this empire in terms of regions was
quite different in relation to the Habsburgs. For one the classic
centralizing fiscal institutions of the Ottomans were to be found
largely in the heartland and the main military routes leading
westward; and this was most notably true of the timar, the
prebendal
assignment on the basis of which the Ottomans drew
 Table 3.2
Table 3.2

Ottoman
Ottoman Population Estimates,
Population Estimates, c.c. 1530
1530
Region Muslims Christians Jews Households Population
Anatolia 1,067 ,355 78. ,783' 559 1 ,146 ,697 |,733 ,485
Rumelia 291 ,593 8S8.,002 12 ,204 1 ,191 ,799 5.,958 ,995
Balkans / Aegean ,24.4 ,958 862.,707 4 ,134 1 ,111.,799 5 ,559:,395
Total 1,603 ,906 1,829.,492 16 ,897 3 ,450 ,29,5 17 ,251 ,875

Source: Barkan 1957.

military manpower (outside the standing army). Rather unlike

the Habsburgs, the broad Ottoman policy was one of compromise
and the maintenance of various forms of ‘customary privilege’ in
external or newly incorporated territories, rather than the insistent
reproduction of the idealized central institutions. In areas such as
North Africa, they announced from early on that their intention
was not to disturb local institutions they instead sought out local
elites with whom they could collaborate. As André Raymond sums
up: ‘It is important to note that where the Ottomans had found
ancient traditions of the state, and strongly constituted
sociopolitical
groups, they frequently made an effort to compromise with
these traditions and these groups, rather than trying to impose their
administrative system in its totality’ (Raymond 1989: 356). The
same was broadly true of other regions, whether Iraq, the Hijaz or
Habesh (though arguably less so in the Balkans); everywhere, the
Ottomans sought to benefit from the possibility of more cash-rich
economies than the somewhat impoverished and sparsely
populated
core of Anatolia, as was the case for most of the territories they
conquered after 1512. Further, even in the sixteenth century, when
the circulation of bureaucrats and officials between the imperial
centre and the provinces was far more regular than it became later,
the Ottoman dependence on local elites remained high. Theirs was
never quite a ‘settler empire’, and there was simply no question of
sending out tens of thousands of colonists from a core to a periphery,
with the possible exception of the timariots sent out into the Balkans
and eastern Europe (who may have numbered 20,000 in the late
fifteenth century), or migrants who went out from Anatolia and
Rumelia to colonize untenanted lands in areas such as northeastern
Bulgaria, Thrace, the Macedonian plains and Thessaly. Where the
Ottoman elite could usually be found was in positions of privilege,
whether in Tunis, Cairo, Budapest or Baghdad but the contrast with
the America of the Habsburgs could scarcely be more stark.
In sum, therefore, even in those territories that the Ottomans
directly ruled(as distinct from tribute-paying lands such as Wallachia
or Moldavia), the; degree :of centralized control that was exercised

varied enormously, whether over political and fiscal institutions

or over religious practices. Even in a sphere such as money and

monetary circulation, the Ottomans permitted an enormous

diversity
of regimes to exist in different parts of the empire, though
the akçe existed as a notional unit of account for fiscal purposes
(Pamuk 2000 : 88-111). Where religion was concerned, to be sure,
tolerance was not general, and the Ottomans, with their attachment
to Sunnism, had a distaste for the Shi'ism they found in eastern
Anatolia or the borderlands with Safavid Iran, which they naturally
associated with the religious heterodoxy (ghuluww) that had given
birth to the Safavid regime of Shah Isma'il in the early sixteenth
century (Babayan 2002 ). Again, with regard to Christians, it is
certain
that conflicts arose, periodically and that instances of forced
conversion (as well as of 'martyrdom' in such contexts) can be
found. However, as Haim Gerber has effectively argued, overall
the dhimmis in the Ottoman empire found that regime to be a
congenial one for many purposes, even preferring it when they had
other options open to them (Gerber 1999; also Jennings 1993 ). This
view of the Ottoman dispensation in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries conflicts with the received wisdom of many post-Ottoman
nationalist historiographies, notably those who see Ottoman rule as
the 'saddest and darkest period' in Balkan history (Jireček 1876 ,

cited in Todorova 1997 : In this construction, argues Maria

183).
Todor va, it is posited that 'on the eve of the Ottoman conquest,
the medieval societies of the Balkans had reached a high degree of
sophistication that made them commensurate with, if not ahead
of, developments in Western Europe'. Ottoman rule then was 'a
calamity of unparalleled consequences because it disrupted the;
natural development of Southeast European societies as a substantial
and creative part of the overall process of European
humanism
and the Renaissance' ( Todorova 1997 : 182-83). The Balkan
elites were; either annihilated physically or driven out, leaving
only the Orthodox church and the village commune to preserve
and defend something of a glorious pre-Ottoman past. On the one
hand, Todorova suggests that, after the Ottoman conquest, 'only
a small part of the Balkan Christian aristocracies were integrated
in the lower echelons of power’ and that, in the vassal territories,
such Christian elites were tolerated to a higher degree though not
properly integrated into the Ottoman world, where elite culture
was ‘produced and consumed exclusively by educated Ottoman,
Arabic and Persian-speaking Muslims’. On the other, she also points
to how ‘the Ottoman period provided a framework for a veritable
flourishing of post-Byzantine Balkan culture’, a long distance indeed
from the view of this period as some form of ‘Dark Age’, a view
promoted by nationalist historiographies in the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
This perception of the Ottomans as ‘bearers of an essentially
alien civilization characterized by a fanatic and militant religion’,
who hence ‘brought about the pastoralization and agrarianization’
of the regions over which they ruled, would certainly find echoes in
a certain form of populist, Hindu nationalist depiction of Mughal
rule in South Asia as well. However, it flies in the face of most
authoritative and scholarly writing on the Mughals, which tends
to portray them as ruling over a complex and plural empire with
a fair degree of ideological flexibility. Like the Ottomans, the
Mughals too were a Sunni Muslim dynasty, though they did have
extended flirtations with Shi‘ism both in the sixteenth and the later
eighteenth centuries. Again, like the Ottomans, their ruling elite
was a composite one, made up of Indian Hindus and Muslims, as
well as Iranians and Central Asians. The substantial presence of
non-Muslims at the highest ranks of the ruling elite does however
set them apart from the Ottomans, and even more so from the
Habsburgs, in whose empire one cannot imagine a non-Christian
coming to occupy the place that was afforded to the Rajputs under
the Mughals. Again, unlike the Ottomans, the place of elite slavery
in the Mughal hierarchy was limited, though slavery as such was
not unknown at the court.
The Mughal bureaucracy was organized around a numerical
principle
of rank, itself derived from the Mongols, and adapted and
refined in the course of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. The core institution here was of the dual mansab rank,
with those who attained a sufficiently high rank being termed
amirs (or grandees, pl. umara). Such a rank entitled the holder to
remuneration, either in terms of cash or in the form of a prebendal
assignment known as the jagir (Khan 1992). These assignments
were intended to circulate, and the mansabdar elite were also
periodically despatched on assignments to different provinces of
the empire. Thus, to take one example from around 1600, a high
mansabdar of Central Asian origin, Sa‘id Khan Chaghatay, on his
return from Bengal and Bihar, was reassigned to the Punjab. Such
transfers also occurred at lower levels in the bureaucracy, even if
some tenacious elements attempted to remain for long periods in
a region where they had built up a support base or clientele. At
the very lowest levels of the hierarchy, one also eventually found
officials who were deemed too petty to merit transfer.
This system coexisted, as many seventeenth century observers
noted, with another, namely one of rooted local magnates called
zamindars, many of whom belonged to families that had already deep
roots before the arrival of the Mughals on the scene (Nurul Hasan
1998). Mughal rule was in effect a compromise with such magnates,
with periodic conflicts breaking out that had to be resolved mainly
through force, or skilful negotiation. These zamindars were also
important local patrons and saw themselves as located, above all,
in a vernacular regional culture, whereas the Mughals, by the late
sixteenth century, had clearly adopted Persian as their idiom of rule
(Alam 1998). Eventually, acculturation into Persian also became a
means for various non-Muslim groups to accede to the Mughal
hierarchy without converting to Islam, a phenomenon that would
have been inconceivable under the Habsburgs (where non-Christians
were concerned) and somewhat difficult under the Ottomans, even
if one can periodically find Jews exercising a powerful influence at
the Ottoman court in about 1600.
The ideological basis of this ‘Mughal compromise’ was articulated
in the late sixteenth century by the statesman and intellectual,
Shaikh Abu’l Fazl, who also presented an argument for ‘peace
towards all’ (sulh-i kull), based on notions of social equilibrium that
themselves derived from an older tradition of Persian and Central
Asian political treatises (akhlaq) (Alam 2004: 61-67). At the heart
of the matter was the vastness and diversity of the empire that the
Mughals aimed to rule over, once they had completed the conquest of
Gujarat and Bengal by the 1570s. By 1600, the Mughals ruled over
a population which cannot have been far from 70 million, and by
the end of the seventeenth century— with population growth and
the southward expansion— may have been closer to 120 million.9 We
can compare this to the populations of the Habsburg and Ottoman
empires in order to gain a sense of the different proportions, although
it is the far higher population density of South Asia (rather than
the size of territories) that accounts for the difference. To imagine
that such an empire could be ruled over by simply using force is
inconceivable; the majority of the population was made up of non-Muslims,
and the institutions that existed in various regions were
also very varied. Only for a brief period in the late thirteenth and
early fourteenth centuries had a state— the Sultanate of Delhi—
had anything like the extensive reach that the Mughals possessed.
When Muslim clerics of that state at the time proposed a forthright
attack on Brahmanical culture, the Sultans baulked, seeing this as
infeasible. Thus, what the Mughals proposed was a compromise,
in which the ruler would take on certain attributes and practices
that appealed to his non-Muslim subjects, while Mughal rule would
then proceed on the basis of a progressive Persianisation of elite
culture, and the incorporation of extensive territories through
recognizably
Mughal fiscal and administrative institutions. This view was
articulated with a fair degree of clarity by the rebel prince Muhammad
Akbar, to his father, the emperor ‘Alamgir, in the 1680s: he
reminded his father that ‘former emperors like Akbar had contracted
an alliance with this race [of Rajputs] and conquered the realm of
Hindustan with their help’ (Sarkar 1989: 69).
However persuasive ideas of balance or equilibrium (i‘tidal) might
have been, eventually Mughal rule was based on trial and error, and
at times was tested by reactions from a subject population that was
made up of an armed peasantry that the Mughals simply did not
have the means to pacify. By the early eighteenth century, powerful
regional magnates emerged, some from within the Mughal hierarchy
and others from within the ranks of the zamindars; together, they set
about dismantling some of the more centralized aspects of Mughal
rule, while still preserving its form and institutions. Even at its
height, the Mughal empire had not functioned as a colonial regime;
and even if resources had flowed to the court (which was usually
located in the empire’s northern Indian heartland), it is difficult to
portray the whole as a core ruling over a series of exploited
peripheries.
However, in the eighteenth century, revenue-flows from regions
such as Bengal, Gujarat and the Deccan first dried to a trickle and
then eventually ceased altogether. It was this weakened Mughal
centre that the English East India Company was able first to
manipulate
and then eventually displace.
 If one compares the Mughals to the Habsburgs and Ottomans,
it becomes clear that, in most respects, they resemble the latter far
more than they do the former. Both are empires that are largely
based on notions of contiguous territorial expansion rather than
the ‘seaborne’ model that the Iberians patented, to be imitated
by the Dutch, English and French. Further, neither the Mughals nor
the Ottomans can be thought to have ruled over ‘colonial empires’
(nationalist Balkan historiography notwithstanding), in the sense
of systematically promoting settler colonies, or basing themselves
on an extractive and exploitative relationship of the type that
existed between Castile and the lands that the Habsburgs ruled
over. Both Ottomans and Mughals promoted a composite elite,
the latter through a form of acculturation douce and the former
through the far more uncompromising mode of the devshirme. Again,
both engaged in extensive compromises with local and regional
elites and permitted a degree of variation that existed within the
Iberian peninsula for the Habsburgs but not outside it. Arguably,
in this respect, the Mughal compromise went deeper but was also
less robust, to the extent that it led to the rise of centrifugal forces
within a century and a half of the establishment of Mughal rule.

III
What impact did these imperial regimes have on the nature of
economic change in the regions that they ruled over? The Habsburg
case is the classic one, for the usual argument is that the nature of
their colonialism benefited neither the colonies nor eventually the
metropolis. To be sure, the problem was considerably exacerbated
by two other factors: the shrinking native populations of the
Americas and the enormous cost that inter-imperial wars placed
on the Habsburgs in the course of the seventeenth century. Yet,
paradoxically, the Habsburg colonies seem in some respect to have
fared better than the metropolis, particularly in the latter half of
the seventeenth century. In the case of Mexico in the seventeenth
century, a turning away from mining to agriculture, and
manufacturing
for the domestic market seems to have taken place as the
colony became somewhat less oriented to its trans-Atlantic links.
Together with subsistence farms and sugar estates, great cattle
ranches emerged using the institution of the hacienda, and developed
new local and regional patterns of economy that were less tied up
with the fate of the port-towns. This new regime was also linked up to
a rise in the proportion of government revenues that were retained in
Mexico for administration and public works rather than remitted to
Spain, described as follows: ‘local self-sufficient economies with their
own urban centre [that] could survive independently of the
transatlantic
trade, dealing with other localities in particular
commodities,
and trading in particular with Mexico City, a market, an
entrepôt, a source of capital, a metropolis’ (Lynch 1981: 230-31).
Clearly, this cannot be generalized to other parts of Spanish America
or indeed to the Philippines. In the case of Peru, despite expansion
in the production of wine and sugar, the dependence on mining
remained substantial. However, one also sees the growth, in the
seventeenth century, of inter-American trade between Mexico and
Venezuela, or Mexico and Peru, which has been linked to a ‘shift
of the Spanish American economy and its mounting
independence
of Spain, the decrease of remittances to the metropolis and
the growth of investment in the colonies themselves’ (Ibid.: 244).
Ironically enough, this situation compares quite favourably with
that in Castile, which has been described as ‘trapped in a vicious
cycle of depression’ that is particularly marked in the latter half
of the seventeenth century.10 Harvest failures in 1665-68 lead to
major inflation in food prices thereafter, and a series of economic
and natural disasters that persisted in the decade from 1677 to 1687
(Ortiz 1962). The population of the region seems to have stagnated
over most of the seventeenth century and there were also periodic
monetary crises, so that even official observers wrote of how, by
1685, ‘the state of the whole kingdom of Castile is utterly wretched,
especially Andalucía, where the aristocracy are without funds, the
middle elements poverty-stricken, artisans reduced to vagrancy or
beggary, and many dying of hunger’ (Lynch 1981: 288).
Even if we take this view to be a somewhat exaggerated one, it
is clear that the Habsburg experience of empire did produce severe
unintended consequences for the metropolis. Ottoman historians
see the empire they study as producing consequences of a quite;
different sort for the territories under Ottoman rule. Thus, writing
of the Ottoman empire as a form of 'welfare state', the doyen of
modern-day Ottoman studies, Halil Ịnalc&#x03B9;k avers that 'mercantilism
was in complete contrast to Ottoman notions of economic

relations'.
Rather, he sees the Ottomans as interested, at one and the
same time, in promoting the notion of 'an economy of plenty' and
intervening extensively to create 'regulations for customs and guild
manufacture, fixing maxima in prices, market inspection on the
quality and measures of goods, monopolies on the manufacture
and gal© of certain necessities'. 11 Yet, it may be argued that in go
doing, he possibly distorts two central features of the comparative
picture. First, inalcik seems inclined to: caricature a contrast between
grasping western 'mercantilists' on the one hand and paternalistic
'easterners' on the other, wherein the dirigiste character of the
Ottoman state over the economy comes to be vastly overstated.
This may partly result from the too-great importance given in this
view to the Ottoman centre, and those parts of the empire (notably
centres such as Istanbul, Bursa and Izmir) where the state had a
relatively strong presence. This is allied in turn to some recent trends
in the studyof the Ottoman economy, which overplay the role of
military supplies and the provision of war-materials in the overall
articulation of the economy. Second, it would seem that this view
also exaggerates the role played by Islam as a determining feature
in the long-term trajectory of the Ottoman economy. Thus, from
this view to one in which Islam, and Muslim institutions regarding
property and capital, determine the long-term 'underdevelopment'
of the areas under Ottoman rule, is but a short distance. One can
also well imagine that the historiography on the 'oppression: of
Christians' could also use this view creatively to assert that in the
absence of Ottoman (that is, Muslim) rule, many parts of East
Europe and the Balkans would in fact have flourished economically
under the aegis of a 'Christian economy'. In reality, the gap between
precept and practice was considerable; and even if the Ottoman state
prohibited the export of gold and silver (to lake but one example),
these metals flowed east to the Safavid and Mughal domains in huge
quantities in the seventeenth century. In a similar vein, economic
changes in Egypt, the Balkans and even Anatolia, cannot always
be read as the consequence of top-down initiatives emanating from
the state; the transformation of international markets, the growing
prospects of commercial agriculture, and regional complementarities
must equally be taken into account.
The dangers of the 'top-down' view can be seen in the manner
in which Central European and Balkan nationalist historiography
has laid the 'underdevelopment' of that region wholly at the door
of the Ottoman state. Thus, in the writings of a major Hungarian
historian of the interwar period, Gyula Szekf&#x0171;, we learn that 'the
Ottomans destroyed the normal development of the Hungarian
state and nation by their three hundred years of war’ and also that
Ottoman rule was ‘the most severe [...] probably the only major
catastrophe of Hungarian history’, which was in turn ‘the cause of all
later misfortunes of Hungary’ (cited in Berend 2003: 22). Central to
this portrayal is the Ottoman fiscal system, in which the tax burden
was not only inordinately high but also linked to a form of ‘command
economy’ in which ‘the peasants had to sell their products to the
Sultan at a low official mandatory price, which amounted to an
extra form of taxation’. 12 Some more balanced, and recent, writings
have moved away from this view, while still maintaining a largely
‘top-down’ perspective. In these views, ‘Ottoman occupation of the
Balkans actually helped to replace the nomadic transhumance way
of life with permanent settlements and agricultural activity’; it is
also suggested that ‘the state encouraged the cultivation of unused
land by granting private ownership, which led to rice cultivation in
the river valleys’.13 However, once again, these positive features are
largely associated with the classic timar system, while the emergence
of the tax-farming (malikane) regime of the seventeenth century
is seen as producing numerous negative side-effects, including an
enormous rise in the tax burden. 14
The case of the Mughal empire contrasts with the two we have
set out above in quite clear terms. First, it is evident that, until
the last quarter of the eighteenth century (and, in some regions,
even beyond), South Asia possessed massive resources in terms
of artisanal manufacture that imports were not able to affect.
Second, much recent work has demonstrated that the seventeenth
century, as well as the first half of the eighteenth century, witnessed
considerable agrarian expansion that accompanied steady population
growth. It was only in the context of the late eighteenth century that
the wars of colonization, together with some devastating famines
(such as in Bengal in the early 1770s) brought about a substantial
change in this picture. Thus, all in all, the centuries of Mughal
rule are centuries of relative prosperity for much of South Asia, if one
excludes moments of crisis such as the great Gujarat famine of the
early 1630s. It is no longer plausible to argue that standards of living
in Mughal India steadily fell behind those in Europe between 1500
and 1800; and, if one must seek a ‘great divergence’ (as Kenneth
Pomeranz has proposed for China and Europe), it must surely lie
in the period after 1780 or 1800 (Pomeranz 2000). Thus, whereas
historians of the Ottoman empire seem largely content to argue that
by 1800, the domains ruled over by the Sublime Porte had— in
relative terms at least— clearly fallen behind their neighbours to
the west, historians of South Asia would be very reluctant to admit
such a claim. And if such a claim is not to be admitted, it is in fact
difficult to lay the blame at the door of Mughal institutions.
This view is at some variance witli the cosy consensus that
existed in the late 1960s, when historians such as Halil Inalcik, Subhi
Labib and Irfan Habib sought to demonstrate how the Ottomans
and the Mughals had produced institutional structures which were
vastly inferior to those of an imagined 'West' (Habib 1969 ; Ịnalc&#x03B9;k
1969; Labib 1969 ). Some of these writers argued from the ideology of
these states, while others — such as Habib — took a more orthodox
Marxist line, suggesting that the nature of class relations in the
Mughal empire was such that a small elite siphoned off the surplus
and used it for wasteful, conspicuous consumption, leaving the bulk
of artisans and peasantry in abject and undifferentiated poverty.
Yet, even at that time, other voices suggested that one might look
at the long-term trajectory of the Mughal empire's economy in quite
different terms. Thus, Tapan Raychaudhuri argued that, by the
later Mughal period, in several regions along the coast [in India]
we find a powerful and rich entrepreneurial class and focal points
of specialized economic activity which were not quantitatively
insignificant in relation to the not very extensive territories which
are our relevant points of reference', meaning Europe. He then
went onto state: 'As some of these territories, Gujarat and Bengal
in particular, long enjoyed the benefits of Mughal peace and the
urban-commercial development that went with it, conditions there
were no more unfavourable to eventual industrialization than in

pre-Meiji Japan. It would not be absurd to argue that in 1800 the

relevant conditions were not more favourable anywhere else outside
certain parts of West Europe and the New World' (Raychaudhuri
1969: 87).
The concealed implications of such an argument are not far
to find. The first, and most obvious of these, is that the imperial
form of state may have actually acted as a check on the economic
transformation of certain regions by tying them willy-nilly to others
that were less dynamic. If we are to take this view seriously, it would
imply that the growing autonomy of the regions from the Mughal
centre in the eighteenth century may in fact have been an organic
process, which their reintegration into the British empire in the
nineteenth century actually checked. In other words, a post-Mughal
scenario of smaller regional states may in fact have favoured some
regions far more than others. The second implication of this view
is that the ‘Mughal peace’ in fact provided the pre-conditions for
such a transformation because, first, the Mughal state was not a
colonial one which extracted massive surpluses from the regions
and transferred them to a metropolitan core; and second, because a
‘powerful and rich entrepreneurial class’ did come to exist in these
regions, benefiting from their centuries-long participation in regional
and oceanic trade.15 Still, the point to make is that Raychaudhuri’s
argument is presented in a counterfactual mode, whereas the long-term
outcome in South Asia was not post-imperial fragmentation
but continued political consolidation.
In contrast, the longer-term outcomes in both the Habsburg
and the Ottoman cases were fragmented polities born in a set of
late imperial and post-imperial moments. The disintegration of
the Ottoman domains was a slow and painful one, which seems to
have endured from the mid-eighteenth century through all of the
century that followed. Central to the arguments of those who
promoted Ottoman disintegration was the unnatural character of
that state and the obvious nature of the ‘primordial identities’ in
the states that emerged from its debris. These were in fact deeply
dubious arguments, but the interesting fact is that they possessed
an enormous purchase, whereas such arguments had a far more
limited place in South Asia. The situation in Spanish America is a
more curious one, since we are aware that Bolívar’s ambitions
explicitly
included a consolidation of the former colonies (visible in
his project for Gran Colombia), rather than their disintegration into
small units (Brading 1991: 603-20). Here, the obvious comparison is
with the United States, where the disbanding of the continental
army in the aftermath of the revolutionary war, and the
subsequent
creation of an imperial state that organized the progressive
colonization in a westward direction was a model that Spanish
America was unable to emulate in the nineteenth century. The
spectacle of a former Spanish America that fragments into bitterly
conflicting ‘nations’ is a particularly curious one from a South Asian
perspective, when so much in the latter region would allow for
arguments concerning ‘primordial’ differences in terms of language,
custom and culture.
 Why then did South Asia, like China, produce a large continental-sized
polity in the twentieth century, which though calling itself a
‘nation-state’ in fact possesses many of the attributes of an imperial
polity? The facile answer is that this was the heritage of the British
empire, but such a response can quite easily be refuted. For one,
in the regions of the world that they ruled in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the British left behind as much division and
fragmentation as consolidation and integration; indeed, arguably
far more of the former than the latter. Second, it is not clear that
it was in Britain’s own imperial interest, or indeed that of the
United States, to have a polity the size of India on the world stage
by the 1940s. The only function that such a polity could play was
as a counter-weight to China in Asia and this was a dubious role
in the circumstances. The hypothesis that I would like to propose
here is that the Mughal empire was in fact a relatively successful
exercise in state building, and that the Republic of India in fact
inherits many of its institutional and other characteristics from
it — as modified by the colonial experience, to be sure. The politics
of elite integration that it practised were far more successful
than the drastic modes of acculturation used by the Habsburgs, or
even the curious ones that the Ottomans deployed. In its dealings
with the regions under its control, it deployed neither the colonial
forms that the Habsburgs favoured (with their consequences in
terms of producing creole resentments), nor the mix of dirigisme
and laissez-faire that led the Ottomans to engage with European
traders in the manner they did.
In contrast, the Ottoman empire appears to us to be more
ambitious
in its programmes in some respects and far less so in others.
The degree of elite circulation by the seventeenth century was quite
limited here and the degree of autonomy of some distant provinces
came to be considerable by the later seventeenth century. Yet, the
Ottoman practice of autonomy was substantively different from the
Mughal practice of incorporating and compromising with local and
regional elites. Rajput nobles and Kayastha and Khattri notables
all spoke Persian at the Mughal court by the early seventeenth
century, while the free-born Christian elites of the Balkans appear
to have shown a relative indifference to high Ottoman culture.16
However, the Ottomans are significant for the degree of openness
of their commercial elite, the treatment of the dhimmi populations,
and their refusal to espouse a model of cultural homogenization
such as the one that the Habsburgs clearly favoured.
Yet, seen through a certain prism, all these empires were the
‘losers’ of the race to modernity and have long been measured
against the success of the British and, more recently, American
examples. Whether this will appear the appropriate yardstick in
the decades to come is, of course, a matter open to debate. What
is certain is that the large neo-imperial polities of India and China
appear today to be the objects of desire and longing for at least
some architects of the European Union, who wish to transform
that entity into a federated polity that possesses some of the most
useful features of empire, without the more questionable ones. In
a weaker vein, the project of the Mercosur seems to look back to
Bolívar’s notions of a federated Spanish America; and it is not the
Trotskyists alone who have argued that the success of the United
States of America in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries
has lain in combining elements of the nation-state with that of the
expansive imperial polity. There have been moments, notably at
the end of World War I (and the final disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian
and Ottoman empires), and at the end of World War II
(with the decolonization of large swathes of Africa and Asia), that
the teleological view of the empire giving birth to the nation-state
has seemed irresistible. Formulae such as the ‘right to national self-determination'
seemed obvious at that time, and the primordial
identities of ethnic groups were accepted quite unquestioningly.
The fall of the Soviet Union gave currency to another brand
of rhetoric, that of globalization, and the end of nation-states
as an international regime, as a part of the working out of the
eschatological concept of the ‘end of history’. However, the idea
that the market would replace politics has had a distressingly short
life. Instead, the twenty-first century has brought back a certain
nostalgia for empire, but in the form of an imagined world driven
and dominated by a single empire, with the hegemonic role that the
British empire barely attributed to itself at the height of its power.
If indeed such a single regime comes to acquire a stable place in the
future, it is difficult to imagine that it can do so without isolated
but increasingly violent acts of opposition by groups of either
disillusioned former satraps, or disempowered would-be imperialists.
This seems almost as inevitable as the view that the continuing
hegemony of Microsoft (on one of whose computer programmes this
essay is, incidentally, written) will produce an underground
culture
of hackers with exaggerated notions of their own heroism.
Here then is where the possibility of imagining a future that bears
a greater resemblance to an inter-imperial grid of competing, large-scale,
political entities that hold each other in partial check, seems a
more attractive— if not a more plausible— scenario. Whether, in
that view, the histories of the Ottomans, Mughals and Habsburgs
in the earlier modern world will still provide substantial food for
thought is of course a mere matter for speculation.

Notes
*
A somewhat modified version of this article appeared as Subrahmanyam
(2006) .

1. This was one of the

ingenious arguments deployed by Ferguson
more

in a debate whose motion

was 'The British Empire was a Force for

Good', at The Royal Geographical Society, London, on 1 June 2004.

The motion, supported by him, was incidentally passed by a popular
vote of the audience.
2. Arguably one of the more balanced views of this process is Bayly
(1989).
3. On imperial overstretch, see Parker (1998).
I. But see the important study by Alencastro (2000); and the earlier
classic by Mauro (1989).
'
3. Thus compare Khwaja Abdul Karim (1970) , with Bolts (1772).
6. On the somewhat anomalous position of the North African
possessions,
Schaub (1999).
see

7. For a discussion of thesfe themes through a series of evocative

biographical
sketches, see Brading (1991).
8. The classic study on this issue remains Barkan (1957). I have calculated
these numbers from Barkan's tables, using his coefficient of five
members
per household; they have, however, frequently been misread by more
recent historians to suggest a population of 12 million in about 1520.
9. I follow the reasoning in Desai (1978), while accepting his lower-bound
estimates of 65 to 70 million. A far higher population of between 107
and 115 million for the Mughal empire in about 1600 is defended by
Habib (1982: 166-67).
10. The contrast is pithily summed up in the phrase 'Spain Frail, America
Sturdy', by BakeWell (1997).
11. Ịnalc&#x03B9;k (1997: 49-52). heavily Ịnalc&#x03B9;k's conception
It is striking how
here; remains influenced by earlier Whig-oriented historians such as
Klaveren (1960).
12. The term 'command economy' is used in Lampe and Jackson (1982).
13. Berend (2003 ; 24). Berend's analysis here depends in fair measure on
Fikret Adanir (1989).
14. For a somewhat different view than the classic Balkan nationalist one,
see McGowan (1981). McGowan stresses the growing importance of
çiftl&#x03B9;k (small estate) formation and a context of demographic decline
in the seventeenth century that is not explained in 'top-down' terms.
Adanir (1989) also draws upon McGowan's work, to argue that the
çift&#x03B9;k should not be understood as 're-feudalization'.
15. For more recent studies of the two regions cited by Raychaudhuri,
see Eaton (1993) and Hasan (2004). For a contrasting study of an ,

interior (rather than a maritime) region, See Singh (1991).

16. Interestingly, Cemal Kafadar differs from many other Ottoman
historians in insisting, that 'many timar-holders were also of non-Turkish
origins, as were members of t he ulema, the ranks of which were
noif closed to those born to, say, Arabic-, Kurdish- or Greek-speaking
families'; see Kafadar (1994 : 619-20).

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 4
Modernities Compared: State
Transformations and Constitutions of
Property in the Qing and Ottoman Empires

Huri Islamoğlu

Modernity has long been the preserve of Europe. Social science

perspectives on modernization that have shaped the categories of
historical analysis since the nineteenth century have excluded the
Ottoman and the Chinese empires from mappings of modernity
(Turner 1978 ). Instead, the two empires are designated as part of
an undifferentiated and ahistorical domain of the East,
characterized
by what it lacks: individual ownership of property, rational
organization of market activity and rational bureaucratic forms of
government. This construct of the East provides a contrast to an
equally abstract domain of the West (including western Europe and
its extensions in the United States) privileged with the presence
of modern forms. This high drama of absences and presences of
idealized properties has been instrumental in legitimating European
domination of the East. The notion of oriental despotism has been
a central feature of that legitimation (Islamoğlu-Inan 1987; Perdue
2004). In Asia, it facilitated the setting up of colonial administrations
that could be identified as rational and bureaucratic, as opposed to
the arbitrary rule of the despot and the constraints that such rule
imposed on social and economic progress. At the same time, once
Asia was frozen in an imagined straitjacket of Oriental Despotism,

any indigenous transformation of statecraft in modern times was

dismissed, either as not conforming to the bureaucratic rational
model (as in the ease of China) or as being a poor and ineffective
aping of the European model (as in the case of the Ottoman empire).
On the whole, Oriental Despotism became a shorthand explanation
for why Asia did not develop.
 Huri Islamoğlu

This article addresses the experiences of modernity of the Ottoman

and Qing émpires in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It
will focus on statecraft or practices of governing or ordering social
reality. More specifically, it will focus on administrative rulings or
law and procedures which ordered and defined property relations
on land. The idea behind this undertaking is to formulate an
understanding
of modernity that is historical and contingent, and that
does not confine modern transformations in the governing of social
reality to the European experience, or treat the experience of non-
European regions as derivative. What is proposed instead is the
idea of a shared experience of modernity, with multiple paths of
modern transformations. The comparison of modern transformations
in statecraft in two non-European regions provides an important
starting point to bring into focus the universality of the experience
of modernity, beyond the narrow confines of western Europe.
Methodologically, this venture calls for setting aside analysis that
has its starting point in ideal types — a checklist of modern
properties
generally associated with the nineteenth-century European
experience in state-building and its colonial extensions. These
properties
have been appropriated and mobilized to support diverse
political and ideological positions. For example, the ideal type of
centralized bureaucratic government has not only been part of the
vocabulary of European domination, it has also been assimilated in
defensive renderings of non-European histories that seek to show
that this form of government existed in Asia long before it did in
Europe.
Contemporary critics of modern statecraft, most recently James
C. Scott, also take the bureaucratic organization of society to be
a defining feature of modernity ( Scott 1998). For Scott, it was
the administrative and legal practices of modern statecraft which
simplified, standardized, uniformized and therefore rationalized
social relations, including property and taxation relations, and
rendered them administratively legible and accessible to state
control. Thus, standardization and uniformization differentiated
modern administration from pre-modern statecraft. The latter
was characterized by an inability to cut through the web of
particularistic
customary practices making up the myriad of property
arrangements and to establish its claims of taxation and
surveillance
over society. In fact, in Scott’s analysis, the binary contrast
between modern and pre-modern statecraft parallels the East/West
 Modernities Compared

dichotomy of modernization theory. The only difference is that, while

for proponents of the modernization perspective, the central state-
building project and its practices of bureaucratization and
rationalization
represent the hallmarks of modern progress to be emulated
and aspired to, for Scott, they spell the harsh reality of the modern
state’s administrative and scientific coercion.
The modernization perspective and Scott’s analysis thus converge
in casting modern statecraft as an ideal type, abstracted from the
historical contexts of power relations. Both analyses focus on the
effects
of this state form on society. For modernization theory,
bureaucratic
penetration accounts for social integration.1 For Scott,
modern forms of statecraft, invasive and controlling, condemn
society to eternal impotence; by contrast, pre-modern state forms,
hitherto characterized as ineffective, allowed room for politics
and negotiations among social groups. The descriptive mode
hypostatizes and renders non-problematic what it identifies as the
brave new world of the modern leviathan, as against the idyllic era
of negotiations or politics that preceded it.
Responding to accounts of idealized absences and presences
rooted in binary perceptions of a hypostatized world history, this
article introduces an understanding of the history of modernity
which Europe and non-Europe shared. In a preliminary way,
this history refers to different strategies of coping with the dual
challenges of competition among political and military formations
and of commercial expansion, both of which were experienced in
varying degrees throughout Eurasia from roughly the fifteenth
century. One institutional response to this dual challenge was
to centralize power in the hands of rulers and bureaucracies.
In European and non-European areas, this response signaled a
tendency towards concentration of coercive and moral authority
so as to maintain social harmony while promoting social and
economic welfare. Fulfillment of these goals depended on raising
revenues, especially in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries,
when intensification of competition among states, as well as the
exigency of resistance to European colonial expansion, resulted in
increased military expenditures. Moreover, central government
expenditures in this later period also had to be expanded to cover
social welfare costs that had previously been the responsibility of
different groups that were part of the ruling coalition. In turn,
the taxation imperative compelled governments to become closely
involved in promoting economic activity, so that state fiscality and
economic growth were inseparable features of the nineteenth-century
historical environments.
These developments always took place in the context of power
relations, external as well as internal. The individual contexts of
power relations where state objectives and legitimation idioms
are formulated and negotiated may appropriately be called state
environments. Statecraft or institutions that order social reality
are part of these environments; the different institutions represent
power fields where social relations are constituted. When viewed
from this perspective, what Scott describes as customary or
untouched by statecraft in pre-modern environments can be seen as
constituted through practices of statecraft, albeit of a different kind.
In contrast to the nineteenth century, the constitutive practices
of early modern statecraft were rooted in power contexts where
central rulers competed and shared power with different groups. In
this framework, statecraft was an art of accommodation, aimed at
distributing taxable resources among members of the ruling bloc.
By contrast, in the nineteenth century, when power was centered
in state bureaucracies, statecraft no longer aimed at distributing
resources. It focused instead on directing resources to the centre, so
as to enable the state to deliver the ‘greatest happiness of greatest
numbers’ in terms of providing security in the form of military
mobilization against internal and external enemies, and also by
securing the economic welfare of the population.
Both early modern and modern practices of statecraft were
domains of negotiation or of politics. For Scott, only a pre-modern
‘local’ society, blessed with a partially ‘blind’ and incapacitated
state, could have politics, that is, continual negotiations of
customary
practice that ordered property relations and other aspects of
life. In a mood recalling the anti-statist civil society perspectives
of the 1990s, Scott relishes the plurality and diversity of political life
in his imagined pre-modern society. This article, refusing to confine
politics to a reified pre-modern domain, will argue that in early
modern state environments, the practice of statecraft represented
the sum total of particularistic settlements negotiated among
different
groups, one of which was made up by the representatives of
the central authority. For instance, in the Ottoman empire during
the sixteenth century, tax regulations for individual provinces were
settlements negotiated between central officials, local officials, and
local groups, including the cultivators. Thus, what was customary
was constituted through negotiations the outcomes of which were
summed up in administrative regulations as well as in the rulings of
provincial courts of law. The legitimation idiom which unified the
diverse particularistic negotiation processes was an understanding
of justice; it rested on the ability of institutions of statecraft to
accommodate the different interests.
By contrast, in the nineteenth century, when power was focused
in the central government to the exclusion of other groups, the
ability
of the central government to mediate among different interests
represented the legitimating idiom of the new state environment.
Such mediation was to be effected through general laws, general
administrative rulings and procedures that stood in contrast to the
particularity of rules and procedures of the early modern
environments.
The challenging of central government, in turn, took the
form of challenging and negotiating the generality of these rules
or institutions that ordered social relations. Because he identifies
‘politics’ with society at a distance from the state, understood as a
multitude of practices of control and surveillance, Scott is unable
to recognize the distinctively modern politics of administration.
Instead, he draws attention to the politically emasculated character
of the administratively constituted modern society. This article does
not view administrative practices as disembodied tools of control or
subjugation. In the lived experience of modern statecraft, law and
attempts at mapping and registering land and property were
constantlychallenged. Such resistance was far from being ineffectual.
The fact that a comprehensive cadastral mapping of imperial
territories
could not be carried out in the nineteenth century Ottoman
context suggests the success of this resistance.
The Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which introduced individual
ownership in land as well as procedures for compiling land and
property registers, all point to the fact that administrative practices
were sites of negotiations. Only slowly did modern administrative
practice, objectified and depersonalized, emerge as the arbitrator
among the different interests in land from which it distanced itself
(Arthurs 1985). At the same time the ability of the central
government
to render its uniform and general rulings acceptable in the
eyes of different social groupings — in other words, its legitimacy —
rested on mediation and arbitration affected through its
administrative
practices. As such, the modern state did not have an existence
separate from the society it sought to control and subject; it was
continually formed and consolidated in the processes and procedures
that were fashioning a rural society of free-holders. In that sense, the
struggle of the central government to obtain legibility and simplicity
in land tenure, as part of its imperatives of taxation and economic
growth, was a prolonged one; the attainment of state objectives
was ultimately contingent on the ability of its agencies to conciliate
different interests and on the power relations between the different
groups and these agencies. Lastly, local or customary practice did
not altogether disappear. Rather, as in the case of regional codes
issued in response to contestations of the Land Code, these practices
were renegotiated and their particularity re-established, this time
in relation to the general precepts of the Code and not simply as
recognitions of the local on its own terms.2
Modernity, as conceived here, is political and therefore
contingent
on historical contexts of power relations both among states
and within individual state environments. Modernity, in this sense,
cannot be confined to an idealized image of the nineteenth-century
European experience of central state-building and the forms of
statecraft
associated with it. First, from the perspective of this article,
the history of modernity is not confined to the moment of European
domination in the nineteenth century; rather it is extended back in
time to include the experiences of early modernity in European and
non-European regions. Nor were modern forms of statecraft
confined
to the kind of bureaucratic practices that seek uniformization
and standardization of social relations. These practices are found
at a specific moment in power configurations in certain regions,
when the balance of power shifts to central bureaucracies. In areas
where such a shift does not occur, other modern forms of governing
emerge. The Chinese experience of state-building initiative at the
local or regional level in the nineteenth and early twentieth century
is a case in point.3 This exercise in historical relativity lends itself
to a problematization of bureaucratization or of rational forms of
government. It also points to future possibilities of governing
modern
society and economy other than those that focus on centralized
state bureaucracies. This consideration has particular relevance
at the opening of the twenty-first century, when the institutions
for steering and regulating economic and social activity that have
been identified with centralized administration seem increasingly
inadequate for the task. In the present-day context of accelerated
social and economic integration on a world scale, regional forms
of governance that transcend the limits of central state
administration
seem to hold promise for a more effective organization of
societal life.
Second, the perception of modernity as historically and politically
contingent underlines its conflicting and problematic character in
Europe and non-Europe alike. It focuses attention on the multiple
processes of modern transformation and not on ‘idealized’ outcomes
abstracted from highly complex historical experiences. Not all of
the regions where these processes of modern transformation were
underway were able to meet the challenges of survival in inter-state
competition and capitalist transformation in the nineteenth
century.
Consider for a moment the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian
empires. These multinational empires collapsed in the early twentieth
century, mainly because of strong nationalist movements, despite
having undergone modern transformations in terms of orderings of
social relations, and as importantly in terms of idioms of rule. This
essay will focus on the Ottoman and Qing cases.

Contingencies of State Centralism

Centralized political power is highly prized in the historiography of
modernity. Responding to allegations by Eurocentric historiography
that modern forms of government were not to be found in Asia,
Ottoman and Chinese historians have stressed the existence of
centralized states long before such a feat was achieved in Europe in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Inalcik 1973; Wong 1997 ).
This perspective often focuses on central institutions such as armies
and bureaucracies. In the case of China, the civil service bureaucracy
and the system of elite education are identified as mechanisms for
integrating local groups into imperial service. Similarly, the Ottoman
devshirme system was a mode of imperial integration through
recruitment of Christian youths from conquered territories, who
were then trained as military and civilian elites to staff the infantry
and the central as well as provincial administrations. During the
sixteenth century, the Ottoman infantry or janissaries provided
an edge to the Ottomans in the competition with the emerging

European states, some of which still relied mainly on cavalry. The

Chinese civil service bureaucracy, spanning the empire, was
important
in
ensuring promoted domestic order that
early
a

commercial
China's
economic prosperity, including expansion and the
development of market networks ( Frank 1998 ).
 This institutional perspective is problematic on a number of
counts. Above all, it has a tendency to abstract institutions from
the specific contexts of power relations that prevailed at the time
of their formation. Hence, institutions identified as representing the
early modern Ottoman or Chinese central states are often
backward
projections of idealized institutional forms associated with
nineteenth-century European administrative states. At the same
time, emphasis on centralization at an early date saddles the
historianwith the problem of having to explain why these empires
could not maintain their lead over Europe in the race toward central
institutions. More often than not, one is compelled to juggle various
decline scenarios. For the Ottomans, the seventeenth century marks
the beginning of such a downward slide, whereas for the Qing it is the
nineteenth century. Hence, the task of the historian becomes one of
explaining the decline of such institutions, including the janissaries,
the system of revenue grants, the devshirme, the imperial civil service
and the examination system, as if these were immutable features
of a ‘golden age’ that could no longer be sustained by the Ottomans
and the Chinese of a later era.4 Finally, insofar as the institutional
locus claims a certain uniqueness for early modern Asian state
formations in terms of their central institutions, it abstracts
them from the larger context of modernity that they shared with
European areas, albeit in forms determined by their specific
historical
circumstances.
To counter the fetishization of imperial state centralization, this
article will focus not on institutions themselves but on the societal
processes which underlay these institutions or rules that ordered
social reality in different historical contexts. Here, statecraft refers
not simply to sets of governing institutions but to the processes
of ordering social relations among different groups or interests
including those of rulers. This approach allows for differentiation
between early modern and modern state environments, but it also
seeks to guard against unilinear, progressivist conceptions of
history. In effect, one finds an entanglement of the early modern
with the modern, as the central rulers or administrations caught up
in military and political competition (internal as well as external)
sought to wrest power from other actors and affect changes in modes
of governing.
In early-modern state contexts, both European and non-European,
centralism involved a series of negotiated settlements shaped by a
distributive ethos. Thus, the different institutions ordering social
relations sought to accommodate the groups competing for control
over resources (agriculture and trade) as well as the producers of
agricultural surpluses through a series of particularistic negotiations.
For the most part, these institutions represented the sum total of
settlements negotiated between the ruler and the different groups.
Such settlements involved relations of reciprocity. For instance,
in return for tax exemptions, groups competing for revenues, as
well as agricultural producers, performed certain tasks, such as
provisioning provincial armies, or providing social services like the
maintenance of infrastructure, or charitable work.5 The position of
the ruler and individuals or groups varied in different contexts of
negotiation as the balance of power between them changed. Despite
claims on the part of rulers to divine sanction, the legitimacy of the
centre, or the authority of the ruler, depended upon the ability to
negotiate settlements. 6
In the Ottoman empire, from its inception in the fourteenth
century, the saga of state-formation was one of continual attempts
at centralizing power in the hands of the ruler and his court. In
this respect, the Ottoman experience shows certain parallels to
early modern European cases of state-making characterized by
incessantstruggles of monarchs against established claims or rights of
feudal bodies, clerics, and municipal governments. In the Ottoman
case, however, the entitlements and obligations of military and
provincial elites, and of a religious establishment that overlapped
with provincial and urban elites, were not expressed in a language
of pre-established legal rights. Until the nineteenth century, the
various claims to sources of revenue (such as taxes on land and
on trade), including claims of the ruler and his court, were
formalizedin a set of rules that represented negotiated settlements
between the ruler and different groups that constituted the ruling
bloc. His role as dispenser of justice allowed the ruler the right
to negotiate these settlements and hence differentiate himself
from the elites with whom he competed for entitlements to tax
revenues. An understanding of justice, cast in terms of the ruler’s
ability to ensure order or freedom from social strife, in turn, was
an idiom of rule or a legitimating discourse which imparted a
coherence
to diverse patterns of negotiation and made it possible for the
ruler to represent the state. In practice, the ruler’s justice
presupposed
measures to accommodate competing power claims within the
ruling bloc. Thus, during the formative centuries of the empire, until
the late sixteenth century, sources of revenue were distributed among
different groups as their revenue grants. These groups included the
military commanders who acted as provincial administrators,
members
of the religious establishment and former rulers in conquered
territories. While the ruler made grants of revenue in return for
contributions of mounted soldiers for cavalry and/or performance
of social services, concern for enlisting the political allegiance of
different groups was paramount in the distribution of revenue
grants. This may explain the apparently arbitrary character of the
exercise of ruler’s justice vis-à-vis elite groups. Above all, justice
involved making provision for individual circumstances in different
areas, as well as for the different types of revenue grants. These
provisions, included in state ordinances and provincial regulations,
responded to individual circumstances and were negotiated with
respect to the power commanded by the parties at different time
periods in different areas.
Because the central government needed more cash to build central
armies to meet intensified inter-state competition on its European
frontiers, and because of the commercial expansion that began in
the sixteenth century (and, with a brief pause, in the seventeenth
century) continued into the eighteenth century, tax-farming came
to be widely adopted as the preferred mode of fiscal extraction.
As such, tax-farming was another moment in the distributionist
mode of imperial integration, at a time when the composition of
the ruling bloc underwent change. Despite its departure from the
earlier system of revenue grants, associated with the zenith of
Ottoman centralism in its golden age, tax-farming did not represent
a rupture with previous forms of governance. It belonged to the
context of power relations imbued with the ethos of distributive
accommodation.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and until the
mid-nineteenth century, the Ottoman central government was
engaged in incessant struggles with tax-farmers over control of tax
revenues. These struggles were worked out in tax-farming contracts
that represented negotiated settlements between the central
government and different groups of tax-farmers. In these settlements,
the central government sought the allegiance of these groups as
well as securing for itself a share in revenues. However, in order to
discipline more powerful groups, including members of the religious
 Modernities Compared 119

establishments (Christian and Muslim), military commanders and

officials, and the provincial elites, the central government in the
late seventeenth century attempted to redirect the assignment
of tax farms away from old elites towards new provincial elites
(Saltzman 1993).
In Qing China, imperial centralism was not mediated by a
system of revenue grants, nor by tax farming. Instead, Qing
officials were engaged in continual negotiations with different
groups of landholders in the different provinces over the amount
of tax that was to be paid to the state. The taxation claim of the
imperial government, as well as multiple claims over land use, were
negotiated in multiple and particularistic settlements embodied in
contracts, in the provisions of the customary law and the statutory
law of individual provinces. As was the case in the Ottoman empire,
the different rulings, representing multiple negotiated settlements,
responded to individual circumstances; they varied over time and
from one locality to another, with conditions of production and
with political and social leverage enjoyed by different parties to
negotiations (Perdue 2004).
The reference point for multiple settlements and particularistic
rulings was the Confucian understanding of domestic order that
formed the legitimating idiom of imperial government. It was rooted
in the shared context of pre-industrial society, where food shortages
were a main cause of social unrest, while the maintenance of social
harmony presupposed the continuity of agricultural production.
Perdue refers to the ideal of Qing administration as being one of
upholding independent peasants, each self-sufficient in his plot and
able to pay taxes in cash to the state (Perdue 2004). The social
reality of the countryside was, however, much more complicated.
Multiple layers of use claims prevailed over a single plot, including
those of ‘owners’ or holders of subsoil rights who paid taxes to
the imperial government, and tenants or holders of topsoil rights
who paid rent to ‘owners’. Nevertheless, state policy remained
committed to the continuity of agricultural production by peasant
cultivators either as tenants or ‘owners’, and to the maintenance of
social harmony. To this end, the central government instituted in
the eighteenth century, a statewide civilian provisioning network
that included a highly developed granary system (Will et al. 1991);
government measures promoted security of tenure, sought to
regulate land markets and return refugees to their lands.7
 Similarly, in the early Ottoman empire, ruler’s justice presupposed
the perpetuation of the subsistence production of peasant
households
which provided the rural as well as the urban populations with
foodstuffs (Islamoglu-Inan 1994). While empire-wide famine relief
was practiced, Ottoman subsistence management emphasized
regulations
that controlled the movement of foodstuffs as well as raw
materials; the aim was to ensure local provisioning through the
formationof regional economies. Moreover, to ensure the continuity of
food production, regulations restricted the alienability or divisibility
of subsistence holdings, limited the freedom of movement of
cultivators, and regulated fallow practices. State rulings included in
provincial regulations, as well as in edicts by the ruler responding to
individual complaints, sought to protect subsistence producers from
extortion by holders of revenue grants. To this end, these rulings
delineated the use rights of producers, as well as their obligations
to different groups of revenue claimants. These obligations included
specifications of the form in which dues were paid (in kind, in labour
or in money), the rates at which they were paid and exemptions from
payments in return for services rendered. Regulations varied from
one locality to another, depending on the conditions of production
and on the political or military status of cultivators; they represented
series of settlements negotiated between the cultivators and the
extractors of their surpluses over long periods of time. Finally,
the different rulings and contracts that regulated actual land use
represented multilayered, shared claims that were negotiated over
land use, including webs of grazing and planting rights on common
lands as well as on individual plots.
In brief, the pattern of negotiated settlements that characterized
the orderings of social relations in the early modern state
environments
of the Ottoman and Qing empires suggests an understanding
of statecraft premised on a reconciliation of particularisms, of
localisms.
This understanding departs from Scott’s view, which situates
negotiative activity or politics in the society, and out of the reach
of the pre-modern state. On this basis, Scott makes the pre-modern
state absolutely ineffectual in terms of its ability to subjugate
societyto its control. But if one asks what the state as a governing
body was able to do in a given context of power relations and what
kinds of orderings of property relations were possible, one sees that
the boundaries of politics or the state’s ability to mediate among
different interests were drawn by power relations existing in a given
historical context. Thus, in the Ottoman and the Qing empires of
the early modern period, the central authority or the ruler sought
to establish its order within those boundaries through a multitude
of particularistic negotiations, so as to achieve a measure of social
harmony.
In the nineteenth century, both the Ottoman and the Qing
imperial
governments were confronted with challenges of domestic
rebellion and of European imperialistic penetration. The Qing
government proved to be more successful in meeting these
challenges
and was able to maintain its territorial integrity, while the
Ottoman government lost significant territories both to rebellion
and in foreign wars. Wong argues that, unlike the developments in
western Europe (and also in the Ottoman empire), in Qing China,
concerns for mobilizing resources and men to meet military and
political challenges did not lead to a centralization of power in a
modern bureaucracy. Instead, for Wong, modern state formation in
Qing China was characterized by an expansion of local government
capacities, by a more formal involvement of local elites in local
affairs
and by a blurring of the distinction between officials and local
elites, so that elites were employed in the staffing of government
bureaus. Modern state-formation in this sense emphasized popular
mobilization and social control, and was part of an attempt to
implement a Confucian agenda for domestic order (Wong 1997). In
this connection, Wong points to the imperial government’s enlisting
of the cooperation of local elites, especially to address social welfare
concerns and, most centrally, those of famine relief. He argues that,
in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, the Qing
did not formulate a new agenda of rule and remained committed
to the Confucian agenda. This should not, however, suggest a
continuity in terms of societal dynamics. One could perhaps talk
about an attempt to recast the Confucian agenda in a new context
of power relations in which localities dominated. Wong points to
the diminished capacities of the central government in addressing
social welfare concerns in the nineteenth century when compared
to the eighteenth century. He also mentions the resistance of local
gentries to the strong official control directed towards extracting
revenue and men. The outcome appears to have been a shift in the
balance of power and a relocation of the state-building initiative in
the localities, with the development of provincial military units and
consultative gentry assemblies. The latter, in the late nineteenth
century, became sites for politics, where the claims of the central
government on the provincial gentries, in the form of revenues, and
of cooperation in the management of subsistence (which involved
provisioning grains during times of famine) were variously met,
resisted, evaded or negotiated. This localization of politics as well
as the military led to an undermining of the capacity of the central
state to rule and to the declaration of independence by provincial
governments in 1911.
By contrast, in the Ottoman empire, the shift to a modern
state formation meant a radical shift in the balance of power to
the central government, consisting of the central army and the
bureaucracy. This new arrangement undermined the distributionist–
accommodative mode of imperial integration premised on the
negotiation of diverse claims over resources. In the nineteenth
century, confronted by domestic rebellion in Egypt and the Balkans
and by wars with Russia, the Ottoman central government sought
to appropriate the tax revenues that had formerly accrued to
military commanders, members of the religious establishments,
and tax-farmers. This involved a dissociation of state power from
the networks of negotiated settlements with divergent interests,
and focusing it instead on the central bureaucracy and the army.
Statecraft no longer sought to accommodate but to subjugate
through coercive means, which included the use of the central
armies, as is evidenced in the case of the abolition of the janissary
corps.8 Statecraft also sought to subjugate through an ordering of
social relations by means of administrative rules and procedures
that cast these relations in general and universal terms. This meant
that rules were no longer summations of negotiations between the
ruler and the different groups or individuals; they did not impart
privilege and or impose obligations on particular individuals or
groups. One such privilege had been exemption from state taxes;
removal of that privilege meant the subjection of tax-farmers and
of religious institutions to the general rule that required the
paymentof state taxes by all subjects.
This implied a much more radical constitution of social reality
through administrative practice than was implied in the earlier
state environment where legitimation concern had impelled rulers
to concentrate on distributive activity and on maintaining social
harmony. Conquest had previously been the primary means of
expanding revenue, but the limits of Ottoman territorial expansion
were reached in the second half of the eighteenth century. If many
European states faced a similar limitation (e. g., after the treaty of
Westphalia in 1648), they compensated for it by colonial ventures
and the building of merchant empires. At the same time, both
the Ottoman and European states resorted to intensive modes of
revenue-raising. This implied a coupling of the revenue concern
with that of increasing the productive capacity of the population, of
land, of industry.9 That is, the central authority would not simply
content itself with appropriating what was previously determined;
also sought to create further wealth to be taxed. In the nineteenth
century, this consciousness of the ‘economy’ on the part of the
Ottoman government is revealed in the kinds of precise
information
demanded from local officials about productivity figures
as well as levels of supply and demand for different products.10
In Qing China, territorial conquests in Central Asia during the
eighteenth century demonstrate a similar concern to increase the
revenues of the imperial government, as do the attempts during
this period to reduce the number of claimants to agrarian surpluses.
Moreover, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Qing China
attempted to improve its productive capacity, even though
existing
power configurations did not allow for a crystallization of the
central bureaucracy or for general and universal practices of ordering
social reality to promote economic growth. Instead, the imperial
state sought to achieve this objective through the negotiative
environments of consultative provincial assemblies (Wong 1997).
In the Ottoman empire, the imperative for a radically new
constitution
of reality resulted in a shift in the self-definition or
legitimation
of central authority. It was no longer a question of the ruler’s
ability to maintain social peace through distributive measures but
rather of the efficacy of its administration and its ability to
deliver
in material terms to its subjects, that is, to ensure the ‘greatest
happiness of greatest number’. Efficacy in this sense was gauged
by the government’s ability to provide for social welfare (which
included maintaining an acceptable level of subsistence) as well as
measures to improve productive capacity. In the earlier period,
the local groups accommodated in particularistic settlements were
expected to monitor rulings designed to maintain the level of
subsistence,
including those relating to the security of land tenure.
With the focusing of power at the centre, famine relief became
the responsibility of the central government. The Qing attempt,
in the eighteenth century, to concentrate power and revenues at
the centre through the introduction of individual ownership had
also coincided with the introduction of the granary system. When
such centralization failed, the central government enlisted the
assistance of local gentries in famine relief. In the Ottoman empire,
a granary system was introduced in the late eighteenth century.
It coincided with the moment when the central government was
seeking to reduce the power of tax-farmers, who previously ran the
granaries (Güran 1998). Similarly, in the early period, other social
welfare provisions such as health, education, and municipal services
in cities, were the responsibility of religious foundations (Ozbek
1999, 2000). When the central bureaucracy sought to eliminate
the foundations and lay claim over the resources they controlled,
the provisioning of the welfare services too devolved on the central
bureaucracy.
In the nineteenth century Ottoman empire, did this
reconstitution
of social reality through administrative practices of the
central government, with the shift from a distributive ethos to one
of state welfarism and productionism, spell erasure of the local? No,
it signalled rather, its reconstitution and insertion into the new state
environment. This is demonstrated in the next section in relation
to compiling cadastral surveys of the land and the formation of
local commissions to undertake this task.
For the modern Ottoman state, the administering of property
entailed constitution of individual freeholds. This meant the
elimination
of multiple claims over use and tax revenues from land,
and established the owner as the sole claimant to title and use.
It also established the central state as the sole claimant to tax
revenues. In fact, constitution of individual freeholds was closely
related to the interrelated features of modernity in the nineteenth
century, namely those of state fiscality and economic growth. In
the productivist perspective of the nineteenth century, as Bentham
succinctly put it, property was entirely the work of law (by which
he meant administration), nothing but a guarantee provided by the
law for individual expectations to derive certain advantages from a
thing which a person was said to possess. In this sense, individual
property created in law provided the individual with a security and
freedom that facilitated his decisions regarding production. It was
instrumental in fulfilling the individual’s expectations in realizing his
or her welfare. To the utilitarian mind, the objective of government
in legislative activity was to deliver the ‘greatest possible happiness
of the community’.11 In the nineteenth century, when concerns for
market expansion (arguably conceived in terms of maximization of
an individual’s expectations) overlapped with concerns for increasing
state revenues, it was evident to political economists and
statesmen
alike that the burden for creating the new economic order
fell upon central administrations (Kanth 1986). The story of how
central administration constituted individual ownership is thus
the story of the constitution of the modern Ottoman state.

Administering Property
Individual ownership or private property is a fetishized institution.
Institutionalist historians, most notably Douglass C. North (1981)
and Erie L. Jones (1988) attribute the development of private
,

property in western Europe to attempts on the part of commercial

groups to reduce transaction costs incumbent on multiple and

overlapping claims that characterized property rights in

preindustrial
society. The result was expansion of commercial activity
and economic growth associated with capitalistic economic
development. Conversely, these authors attribute what they perceive;
to be the 'economic stagnation'
or absence of capitalism in China and

the Ottoman empire to state ownership of land in these societies,

which they believe to have prevented the development of private
ownership and stifled individual initiative in economic activity.
Without going into how this formulation is entangled with the
notion of Oriental Despotism, and leaving aside also the debatable
nature of the assumed correlation between economic growth and
12
private ownership, I would simply like to point to the fact that
this economistic perspective fails to reveal the power relations that
underlay the development of individual ownership in both European
and non-European areas. Central to these power relations has been
the development of centralized states that sought to lay exclusive
claims to tax revenues from land (Islamoğlu 2000).

Law and the Administration of Property

In early modern European and non-European areas, in keeping with
the distributionist-accommodationist objectives of governments,
property rights on land were understood as a bundle of claims that
largely corresponded to the multiple settlements negotiated among
different groups (Maine 1920). These settlements were cast in terms
of rules that were variously formulated by the state or the ruler,
as well as in terms of the rulings of the courts of law. Such rulings
often sought their legitimation in the customary practice of different
localities; in doing so, they sought to accommodate existing multiple
interests and were not exclusive.
In the Ottoman empire, definitions of property rights on land
consisted of a bundle of rights representing claims to land use,
revenues and title. The title to land (rakaba) generally lay with the
ruler (or the treasury). This did not represent a title of ownership
in the modern sense but ability on the part of the ruler, or the
central
government, to distribute rights to revenues from land and,
in so doing, to negotiate with different groups or individuals the
conditions of their allegiance. State ‘ownership’ also served to
definethe boundaries of the heritable use rights that cultivators had
over their plots; by protecting the rights of cultivators, the state
sought to ensure continuity of agricultural production and, therefore,
production for subsistence and for tax payment. State rulings
introduced in provincial regulations and reiterated in numerous
edicts also imposed limits on the divisibility and alienability of use
rights. They also restricted the cultivation of non-grain crops and
the time periods for which lands could be left uncultivated or left
fallow. Given that most taxes were paid in kind, rulings emphasized
the primacy of grain production on state lands.13
These claims were continuously negotiated and redefined,
however.
For instance, depending on the nature of the settlement
negotiated
among the parties, the rights to revenues could rest with a
freeholder (mülk), a pious endowment, or the treasury, while the title
rested with the state or the treasury. This should not suggest that
the claim of the state to title was an absolute one: especially in areas
where there had been strong resistance to the Ottoman conquest,
Ottoman rulers conceded the right to title to former ruling groups.
These groups included members of the religious establishment in the
Muslim region of Anatolia. The rights to revenues from such lands
could be assigned to state officials, and state regulations relating
to subsistence production applied also to these lands.
Similarly, the different categories that defined entitlements to
revenues and to land use did not correspond to an understanding
of ownership in the modern sense. Nor did mülk (freehold) signify
private ownership; instead, it was a category of entitlement to tax
revenues which the grantee held by virtue of an official document
of entitlement from the ruler. In that sense, mülk did not differ
from other types of revenue grants. On the other hand, the holder
of the mülk grant could alienate his right to revenues, transfer it to
his heirs, or con-vert it into mortmain property or vakif. Trees or

buildings onagri-cultural holdings, as well other

as produce, were
also classified as freehold, which, in this case, referred to entitlement
to the fruits of the land. These claims were differentiated from mirǐ
claims (or the 'ownership' claims of the central treasury over the
soil where the trees and buildings stood) and on grain fields. The
cultivators of mirǐ lands had inheritable usufruct rights, which
they held by a deed issued for a fee by the local administrator cum
revenue holder.
What differentiated the bundle of claims that constituted
property
rights on land in Qing China from that in the Ottoman empire
was that in the Qing case the bundle did not include multiple claims
over tax revenues. Instead, it consisted of the imperial government’s
tax demand from the gentry or holders of subsoil rights, the rent
claims of the gentry, the usufruct claims of the holders of topsoil
rights or tenants, and the use claims of subcontractors from holders
of topsoil rights. The first of these claims could be interpreted as a
grand rent paid to the imperial government, in view of the loosely
defined ownership of all lands by the emperor. These multiple claims
were continually renegotiated and were formulated in a
plethora
of contractual settlements issued by the magistrates’ courts,
carrying the official stamp of approval by the imperial government
(Macauley 2001; Perdue 2004). At the same time, these claims
were formulated in official rulings of the emperor which, as was the
case in the Ottoman empire, represented an appropriation or
accommodation of the existing local understandings of property
rights to the vocabulary of official rule. On the other hand, a sense
of Confucian domestic order and its central premise, the concern
for maintaining the security of the tenure, of peasant cultivators
imparted a unity to the maze of negotiated settlements. This was
the idiom of rule that defined the limits of what was possible and
what was not in terms of property settlements on land. To it the
imperial state owed its ability to rule and the gentry its ability to
extract rent.
Melissa Macauley, in her article in this volume, has shown that
in the eighteenth century the attempt of the Qing imperial
government
to redefine the topsoil rights of the gentry as individual
ownership rights, to the exclusion of the multiple claims of
permanent tenancies, failed. The proposed change would also have
eliminated the conditional sales that resulted in confusion about
who at a given point was the ‘owner’ and thus responsible for tax
payment. Through this measure of simplification, the central state
had sought to increase its revenues, or realize its administrative
ideal of creating the individual holders paying taxes in cash to
the state. It met resistance from holders of topsoil rights, as well
as the gentry, for whom conditional sales provided escape-valves
from tax responsibilities. At the same time, the inability of the
imperial
government to institute individual ownership pointed to the
limits of its action in a given context of power relations with given
vocabularies of legitimation.
The Ottoman central government did succeed in introducing
individual ownership, but it did so following bitter struggles waged
especially against the different groups with claims over tax
revenues
from land; at the same time it sought to mediate, through
particularistic concessions, the claims of subsistence producers who
were threatened by the loss of their heritable usufruct rights. This
meant a recasting of power mappings that constituted the state
context and an idiom of rule that increasingly departed from the
understanding of the distributive justice of the ruler and relied
on administrative procedure to mediate the different property
claims.
Though the nineteenth century is aptly described, here too, as
the ‘age of property’ (Forster 1997), the Ottoman environment did
not fall prey to the religion of property that especially raged in
postrevolutionary
France, a region Ottoman administrators watched
closely. This was not due to any innate predisposition against
private
property stemming from state ownership in land, nor to the
lethal effects of state intervention in economic activity. Quite simply,
the Ottoman administrators, in line with the conservative
governments
of Europe, watched with a great deal of trepidation the
disputes
over the introduction of individual/absolute ownership that
raged in the French countryside. Ottoman territories themselves
were not entirely free of such disturbances. The liberal guarantees
included in the reform edict of 1839 had encouraged the provincial
tax-farmers and notables to register their tax-farms (or revenue
grants) as their private property. The decisions reached by
provincial
assemblies, which the reforms introduced, as well as those by
judges in provincial courts of law14 served to buttress this new form
of property. For instance, a decision of the Vidin Council, taken
soon after the issuing of the 1839 edict and referring to the abolition
of corvee impositions, stated that ‘no person could cultivate or
take over another’s land without payment; he will have to pay by
some other means [than corvee]’. This meant that, in the course of
its deliberations, the council had established a single rent, signaled
by the abolition of corvee, while at the same time establishing the
tenancy status of cultivators on lands owned by tax-farmers (Inalcik
1943). In 1851, when the cultivators (‘tenants’, share-croppers) in Vidin
broke into open rebellion, they were voicing their claims vis-à-vis
the tax-farmers by demanding title deeds on land. In other words,
the cultivators had learned to employ the vocabulary of private
ownership.
The rupture in the old order of property resulted in widespread
rebellions throughout the Balkans, in Bulgaria, Bosnia and Albania.
In each case, the rebels were cultivators who also staked their claims
in terms of individual ownership rights. The nascent central
bureaucracy,
attempting to contain rebellion, found itself in the position
of mediating the claims of different groups for absolute ownership;
its capacity to negotiate multiple property claims ultimately was
to differentiate the central bureaucracy from other actors and help
establish its authority over them. Hence, at this historical ‘moment’,
the bureaucratic state took over the constituting of individual
ownership
through its administrative practices, as none of the traditional
propertied interests could claim to do. 15
The drafting of the Land Code of 1858 was a major political
success. It attested to the Ottoman central government’s ability to
establish its claim to mediate among different interests, so as to set
forth a general code that henceforth provided the reference point in
all property matters. By contrast, the French state, throughout the
nineteenth century, failed to pass a rural code in the face of
intransigence
on the part of propertied classes, who saw in such a code an
instrument to strengthen their own hand (Aberdam 1982).
However, the text of the Ottoman Land Code was highly
negotiated,
testifying to the problems encountered in codifying
property
relations. Yet the Code did include a definition of individual
ownership that supplanted earlier definitions of multiple claims
to revenues and to land use. It has been argued that the Code
sought to establish the ownership rights of cultivators at the
expense
of the tax-farmers who came to control large tracts of land,
thus allowing the central state to maintain its justice-dispensing
function (Barkan 1940). But the Code did not explicitly favour any
one group; while it included some measures to restrict alienation of
land, it included others that facilitated exchange. In the Balkans,
where land was controlled by local notables who were also tax-
farmers, and land was worked under sharecropping arrangements,
the Code became an instrument by which the notables established
absolute ownership rights to the detriment of the use-rights of the
cultivator-sharecroppers. In these cases, the central government,
needing political and military support in the face of local resistance
and nationalist aspirations, backed the ownership claims of the
notables. The important point is that the Land Code established
the central state as the agency for the constitution of individual
ownership rights. It was on state lands that the state’s unique
claim to tax revenue was established; it was also on state lands that
individual ownership rights were instituted. This implied a change in
the meaning of mirî or state lands. Prior to the Code, state
ownership
had enabled the ruler to exercise his distributionist justice
by assigning revenues to different groups, to obtain their political
allegiance and to ensure subsistence production. Under the Code,
state ownership took on a character close to absolute ownership,
which could be transferred to individuals by means of sales
contracts
and land registration. Yet the Code represented a
compromise;
alongside the mirî, the Code admitted to the presence of
the categories of vakif, mülk and mawat (vacant), and which were
not subject to the bureaucracy’s universal demands for taxation and
rules of individual ownership. Vakif and mülk categories, in turn,
represented the resistance to bureaucratic authority and the central
government continually countered this resistance by extending its
practices of land registration as well as sales and lease contracts
to non-state lands.
Land Surveys and the Administration
of Property
Law was constitutive of individual ownership, in the sense that it
provided an overall legal framework for social relations. But the
constitution of individual ownership also took place through
registration
and through surveys. The latter represented the compilation
of statistical information on land, ownership and production.
 From the perspective of the fiscal or administrative goals of the
central government, the most desirable situation was to attach
every parcel of taxable property to an individual responsible for
paying tax on it. To this end, the Ottoman government encouraged
registration of property in the name of individuals, who were
designated as individual heads of households. This practice began
as early as 1847. The surveys, which were undertaken in 1859/60,
aimed at ensuring the registration of all lands and properties. In
this sense, these surveys approximated the character of the modern
cadastral survey.
Most significantly, the constitution of individual ownership
meant a change in the categories in terms of which land and
resourceswere recorded. Land surveys had been a central practice of
Ottoman statecraft from the early days of the empire. In keeping
with the distributive logic of state power in the earlier period, the
early tax surveys represented an administrative universe divided
between the military class, or the recipients of revenue grants,
and the taxpayers. The military class appeared in the registers as
holders of power positions; they were not persons but recipients of
taxes. Since they were exempt from taxes, neither their names nor
their numbers were recorded. Taxpayers, on the other hand, were
recorded by their names; the amount of produce collected as taxes
was also entered into the registers. Land was recorded as a category
of taxation, in relation to a tax that fell on the person as well as
the land (resm-i çift). The unit of measurement was the çift, the
area ploughed by a pair of oxen. Çift, however, varied with climatic
and ecological conditions. Its plasticity, in turn, made it amenable
in an environment in which payment of taxes was subject to a
negotiative process.
Earlier surveys were blind to those aspects of social reality that
did not fall within the purview of taxation. They were signifiers of
shifting power positions, transcribed in the continual distribution
and redistribution of resources among different groups in a given
locality. Though the surveys did give information about
population,
production and land, their main purpose was the mapping of
power relations in a given region. At the same time, they bore
witness
to the recognition of the authority of the ruler, since revenue
entitlements were described in the given format of the register and
carried out by means of procedures determined by the centre. The
much-acclaimed tax registers (tahrirs) constituted an important
vocabulary through which the Ottoman understanding of
distributive
justice was articulated.
The nineteenth-century surveys represented a radically
different
state environment. There was no question in the minds of the
nineteenth-century Ottoman bureaucrats that access to information
on population, income, wealth and property was a prerequisite for
realizing the modern aspirations of state taxation and economic
growth. To this end, beginning in the 1830s, the central government
undertook the preparation of statistics, including population
censuses, income registers and cadastral surveys. Clearly, the central
government put a great deal of effort into the preparation of these
surveys. These preparations included pilot projects in selected
districts and the constitution of local commissions to carry out the
collecting and recording of information. That this was an urgent
matter for the central government is attested to by the fact that the
preparation of 18,000 income registers (temettuat defterleri)
compiled
between 1840 and 1845 (Güran 1998; Kaya 2005; Saraçoglu
1998) covering all imperial territories outside of Arab lands was
completed
within a surprisingly short time. There also appears to have
been a continuous effort on the part of the central government to
explain and to justify why new assessments of wealth and income were
necessary. To this end, statements by government officials stressed
the need for assessments on the grounds of complaints about heavy
tax burdens and of inequitable distribution of taxes among
different
regions and individuals. Tax evasions on the part of members
of former ruling groups were considered a primary cause of inequity
in the distribution of tax.16
All such efforts notwithstanding, information recorded in
income
registers was not used in the assessment of taxes. That this
information was at times glaringly defective was probably not lost
on central government officials.17 The problem was that individual
heads of households had been less than candid in declarations of
their wealth. The central government was well aware that muhtars
(village headmen) and imams (prayer leaders), who received and
recorded the declarations of wealth from these individuals, tended
to overlook the inaccurate statements. These deficiencies were
also revealing of power configurations on the level of the village, a
situation the central government set out to remedy in the
preparation
of the subsequent surveys.
 Surveys were not simply repositories of information. Systems
of classification and the categories included in the income
registers
compiled 14 years before the Land Code of 1858, were pivotal
to the constitution of individual ownership. The income registers
did not classify information on different regions on the basis of
holders of revenue grants, as was the case with the earlier registers.
Rather, these registers rested on the assumption that the central
State Was the primary recipient of taxes and the members of the
former military class were themselves subject to state taxes, together
with ordinary households. Instead of separate surveys devoted to
proceeds from different types of revenue grants (timar defterleri,
mukataa defterleri, vakif defterleri), income registers classified
information on the basis of listings of households. In the old surveys,

the unit of recording had been the village whose revenues were
apportioned amongst different revenue grant-holders; payment
of taxes was the collective liability of the village and taxes (other
than the tithe) were equally distributed amongst households on the
basis of negotiated arrangements within the village. In the 1840-45
income registers and the subsequent property and income
surveys
of the nineteenth
century, recording the unit of wag the
individual
household, which was taxed on the basis of its income. The
household was the site of individual ownership and in the process
it was redefined as an 'atomized' unit with responsibilities for
payment
Of taxes and for economic activity. The household became
the pivotal point around which administration could operate. The
income registers included detailed inventories of lands and animals in
the possession of the household, and at the end of each entry there
Was an estimate of household income. It must be emphasized that

not all of what was recorded was taxed. Entries in income registers
also listed items that were not taxed. In this sense, these registers
were not simply tax books, they Were constitutive of the household

as an economic unit.

Above all, the registers recorded all land in the possession of

the household, not just those lands that were cultivated and taxed.
This suggests that land was no longer being treated simply as a tax
category. It was also an asset that yielded income to its possessor.
Income registers recorded lands that were cultivated, left fallow,
or leased out. They also recorded income from land leases and the
cash income accruing from the land for the year before registration
as well as for the year of registration. The abstraction of land from
the context of a negotiative–accommodative system of taxation
becomes manifest in the adoption in the income registers of the
dönüm, an aerial unit of measurement, instead of the çift, a unit
of measurement characterized by its plasticity and therefore by
its negotiability. This was, no doubt, a step in the direction of
standardization and uniformization of the measurement unit,
which was integral to the central government’s effort to simplify
property relations on land. The introduction of the aerial unit of
measurement was important from the point of the objectification
of land as a ‘thing’, as the object of ownership and the object of
exchange in the market.
The dual objectives of modern administration, economic growth
and state fiscality coincided with administrative practices directed
towards augmenting the productive capacity of land and other
resources that were expected to result in increased state revenues.
The Instructions to Property Officials in the Provinces, issued in
January 1857, 18 are indicative of the interest the central government
had in detailed information on land and other productive resources.
These instructions include lists of questions for which the property
officials in the provinces were expected to seek answers, which were
then to be reported to district officials and governors. Property
officialswere also expected to enter these results in registers and
send them to Istanbul each year in February or at the latest in
early March.19 At the outset of the instructions it is stated that
‘the generosity of the ruler dictated that he rendered services for
the progress of agriculture which would benefit the country and
his subjects’. To this end, exact information was to be obtained for
all villages in all districts and sub-districts. These included
measurements of areas of cultivated fields and figures on seed/yield
ratios at a given harvest time.20 For individual farms, it meant
information on the area of each farm in aerial units of measurement,
the area sown and the amount of seed cultivated, the area of land
left fallow, the yields from vineyards and grape presses as well as
the amount of grape produce consumed in the locality of the farm
and the amount exported.
Assessment of the income from land and its yields, inseparable
from an interest in the productive capacity of land, was a primary
objective of these statistics. The Instructions to Property Officials,
in the spirit of market management that was characteristic of the
nineteenth-century political economy, asked for comparative figures.
Thus, the property officials were to note the yearly variations in
production or yields and in prices. The central government wanted
to know how the changes in the supply of a given good were reflected
in its price, and what factors affected its supply or production.
A factor that caused a fall in production was to be countered by
administrative intervention. To this end, property officials were
instructed to enlist the assistance of agricultural officials to combat
diseases that affected the vineyards, which would cause a fall in
state revenues and would harm the vineyard owners. All of these
concerns referred to a domain outside of taxation, to that of the
economic activity of the individual household.
Lastly, the practices of numbering and of classifying data in the
numbers registers were very important to the process of
individuation
of ownership as well as to the exercise of central government
controls. The practice of numbering was initiated in the income
registers of 1840-45 by the affixing of numbers to individual
households. The Regulation for the Surveying of Property and
Population
issued in 1860 21 states that fields, orchards, pasturelands and
vineyards should be recorded in property listings in terms of general
and particular numbers.22 The 1860 registers for which the above
instructions were issued are not yet available to researchers. Thus,
it is not clear what was meant by general and particular numbers
assigned to land or property. But the procedure of numbering
properties
and individual households made possible an administrative
crystallization of the individual householder as holder of property
on the one hand and, on the other hand, of land or property as a
‘thing’ to be owned or exchanged and to be taxed on its income.
Moreover, the recording of land in registers presupposed that
documents of ownership, title deeds (tapu), were shown to the scribes
in charge of recording; in the event that these were not available,
they were to be renewed in the courts. These documents were to
include
the general number of property or land as it was recorded in
the property register, together with descriptions of its borders and
of its shape.23 These descriptions of the registration practices with
multiple registers correlated with each other through systems of
numbering and of tables, represent an ordering of landed property
laid before the eyes of the central administrators and made
accessible
for their intervention. As such, they represent a snapshot of the
Ottoman administrative universe of the nineteenth century.
 The saga of preparing surveys in the nineteenth century was
one of continual struggle between the central government and
the local notables. Hoping to evade state taxes and conscription,
the notables, who more often than not acted in collaboration
with local populations, resisted the demands of the central state
to provide information about the wealth and population of their
households. State measures in the face of such resistance took the
form of sanctions and severe punishment, including three years of
prison in irons;24 there were also exhortations to officials to
persuadethe population to give honest disclosures of their wealth and
property.25
The central government still sought to mediate the interests of
different groups, but now by integrating local elites into the new
administrative framework for the collection and recording of land and
population statistics. The Regulation for the Survey of Property and
Population (1860) stipulated the appointment of commissions at
the different levels of provincial administration, ranging from the
eyalet (district) to the village. These commissions included assessors
who were to be chosen from among respected persons in individual
localities. At the village level, a commission of six members was to
be appointed for a group of six villages, with each village providing
one member. Commissions were expected to meet weekly in the
summer and bi-weekly in the winter on a given day of the week.
They decided on the distribution of taxes among the households
according to their ability to pay, and were also responsible for
reporting to the district council births and deaths, persons who
moved, and buildings constructed without permission. It appears
that these commissions (which in all likelihood were to be chosen
from among respectable persons in the region) stood above the
village administration represented by the muhtar (headman). In
the compiling of income registers, the village headmen had played
a very important role and had shown poor performance from the
point of view of the central government. The Regulation of 1860
stated that village headmen came from lower classes and people
from respectable backgrounds deemed it below their dignity to hold
this position. For reform and restitution to be executed properly,
the Regulation continued, village headmen had to be appointed
by the central government, from among persons who were considered
trustworthy by the local population. To this end, theRegulation
stipulated that scribes26 appointed by the central government
should dismiss the existing village headmen and appoint new ones
from among the trustworthy and respected persons in the village.
Whether or not the appointment of new village headmen by the
government, or the inclusion of locally respected persons in the
commissions, were effective devices in making possible the
collection
of more accurate information, it is not possible to tell.27
We do know that, despite the flurry of administrative activity
in relation to the compilation of property and land registers, the
Ottoman state did not succeed in executing cadastral maps, which
were central to the process of cadastral surveying. Cadastral maps
remain the final achievement of the modern state in constituting
individual ownership on land. They enabled cutting across the maze
of property relations and established administrative controls over
the land, its resources and population. Above all, cadastral maps
draw boundaries and leave no ambiguity as to who owns what.
James Scott states that cadastral maps ‘...are designed to make a
local situation legible to an outsider’ (Scott 1998). This may explain
the remarkable success of cadastral mapping in the colonial contexts
of the nineteenth century where the map provided an outsider-state
with a ‘bird’s eye view’ (Saumarez Smith 2004). In the case of the
non-colonial Ottoman state, its ability to be an outsider, that is,
to abstract itself from the context of power relations within the
empire, was far more limited. As a result, the central government
conceded to local demand in curbing its practices of registering of
wealth and land. It did so because in areas such as the Balkans,
the central government heavily relied on the collaboration of the
notables to contain social unrest, which in the nineteenth century
was increasingly expressed in terms of nationalist aspirations. In the
absence of a reserve army of administrators that could be brought
in from a colonial homeland, the Ottoman state depended on local
notables for instituting the new administrative order, as was the case
in the forming of commissions for the preparation of surveys.
No longer operating in an administrative universe of distributive-
accommodative practices and lacking the home-country
reference
point for its actions that the European colonial states had, the
Ottoman state sought justification for its practices in political
maneuverings. The outcome was a spate of compromises and grand
undertakings that could not be put into practice, as was the case
with the income registers, as well as the numerous amendments to
the Land Code in the form of regional regulations. All of these point
to resistance to administrative practices that sought to simplify, to
clarify and ultimately to define a new ordering of social relations.
Politics triumphed after all, without the legitimating vocabulary of
distributive justice. Yet, by recording land as individual property,
and by registering and numbering land and properties in the names
of individual households, the new regime left its imprint on social
relations in general and property relations in particular. In the end,
perhaps, the legitimacy of this regime came to rest on the execution
of these bureaucratic practices and on the incessant upward and
downward flow of documents.

Conclusion
This essay has tried to cut the Gordian knot of questions surrounding
modern transformation in two regions that are often characterized
as failures or, at best, as outsiders with ambiguous standings in
the enchanted realm of modernity. The Ottomans succeeded in
introducing individual ownership and they did so by means of the
bureaucratic practices of a modern central state. The Qing did
not institute a centralized bureaucratic state in the nineteenth
century. Nor could the Qing introduce individual ownership. Yet,
the creation of a bureaucratic state was not a guarantee for the
survival of the Ottoman imperial entity in interstate competition
which, in the nineteenth century, included economic development.
By contrast, the Qing empire maintained its integrity without
bureaucraticforms of statecraft and despite the fact that the central
government collapsed in the early twentieth century. In this case,
non-central forms of modern statecraft including local consultative
agencies, were able to mobilize the military power and perhaps
the developmental energy needed for survival in the military and
political arenas. These contrasts between central state-building and
state-building initiative at the regional level notwithstanding, both
the Ottoman and Qing contexts witnessed modern transformations.
This essay has illustrated modern transformation in the Ottoman
environment through the ordering of property relations on land. It
has shown that the transformation that occurred was problematic
and contingent. Individual ownership was established by law but was
contested vehemently by the former claimants to revenues and by
holders of diverse use claims; the institution of individual property
through the drawing of cadastral maps was also resisted. Yet, the
legal recognition of individual ownership and the new categories
for cadastral surveying radically altered the very terms in which
property relations on land were negotiated and perceived. That is,
while various landholding groups continued to enjoy the benefits
they derived from land and, in all likelihood, evaded taxation,
they did so in the capacity of landowners with ownership titles or
as tenants on privately owned lands. As such, they submitted to
the categories of individual ownership and to domination by the
central bureaucracy in the form of being subjected to its procedures
regarding lease contracts and registration of property. Moreover,
reforms in landed property rights and administrative reforms
contributed to increases in state revenues that were witnessed in
the final decades of the nineteenth century. Yet such increases could
not keep apace with increases in expenditures and hence could not
prevent the empire from coming to the brink of financial collapse at
the end of the nineteenth century (Pamuk 2008). At the same time,
modern transformation resulted in dramatic changes in property
relations and in the nature of state power, the impact of which
was visible both in the organization of the Ottoman agricultural
economy and in the nature of successor states, especially in the
Balkans (Pallarait 1997), and in Anatolia (Barkan 1937a and 1937e;
Barkan 1938). As significantly, modern transformation implied that
the very self-definition of the state, its idiom of rule, was no longer
that of justice premised on the distribution of claims to revenue
and land use in order to accommodate different interests with the
objective of maintaining social harmony. Instead, the legitimating
principle of the Ottoman state in the nineteenth century was its
ability to administer effectively and equitably; it dispensed justice
not through distribution but through equitable administration of its
demands (most notably taxation demands) from its subjects, and
its services to them. It was represented no longer by the just ruler
but by the generality and uniformity of administrative practice that
imparted to the bureaucrat the role of mediator. The figure of the
bureaucrat came to represent the state, embodied its identity. This
was an identity in keeping with the multinational character of the
empire. It aspired to affect an erasure of all national identities. As
importantly, not beclouded by the romanticism of nationalism,
it was a thoroughly modern (in the Weberian sense) identity. It
was perhaps this identity that survived until the 1980s, but has
since been undermined by radical changes in the context of power
relations rooted in the expansion of market exchange activity, both
international and domestic, so that a search is now underway for new
self-definition of state. This is not very different from the situation
in other world regions that, within their own trajectories of modern
transformation, seem to be engaged in similar searches.

Notes
1. Philip Huang has
pointed to
absence, eighteenth
an in the and
nineteenth
centuries in
China, of bureaucratization and
rationalization,
emphasizing the degree to which this absence affected the ability of the
state to form alliances with divergent groups (elites) to Consolidate its

powers (Huang 1985). In other words, if the Chinese imperial state had
not failed to bureaucratize and affect an integration of society by means
of a modern administrative apparatus, might it have escaped collapse
at the hands of provincial assemblies and the new military troops?
The posing of this counterfactual reveals an understanding of
bureaucratization
formulation, given
as an ideal abstracted from any historical
experience of state-making, whether European non-European.
or

2. Islamoglu (2000) discusses particularization in relation to the generality

of the Land Code of 1858 and the provincial regulations that were
drafted at this time.
3. Against the model of bureaucratization as state-building, Wong
poses popular mobilization and social control as a model of Chinese
state-building. What distinguishes this model is its accommodative,
negotiated character, as evidenced in consultative gentry assemblies in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wong suggests that
this fabric of social relations may have contributed to the preservation
of the imperial unit even after the collapse of the empire (Wong 1997).
4. Representative of seventeenth-century accounts of Ottoman decline is
Koçi Bey's treatise or his 'advice to the sultan' (Koçi Bey 1972). İnalcik
(1974) based his account of Ottoman decline on Koçi Bey's treatise.
Abulhaj argued that the seventeenth-century accounts of decline were
penned by the members of the central administration who were ten
the losing end as a result of institutional changes affected by changes
in power configurations, both internally and externally, especially in
relation to intensification of military and political competition and
the increased cash requirements of the central government to finance
armies (Abulhaj 1991). Linda Darling (1996) and Ariel Saltzman (1993)
provide critiques of the decline thesis.
5. Guery (1984) provides an account of relations of reciprocity in the
context of the French state of the seventeenth century.
6. David Parker (1981) discusses this point in relation to the activities of
French kings in the seventeenth century.
 7. State policy was also instrumental in empowering, alternatively, the
different groups with claims over rents and land use in their struggles
against one another and, at times, against the central government, when
the latter sought, in the eighteenth century, to simplify the multiple
claims to land use or permanent tenancy and to rationalize its taxation
claims (Macauley 2001).
8. Janissaries, who were the former infantry corps, were subsequently
closely affiliated with urban craft guilds and constituted an important
force in urban society.
9. Selcuk Dursun (2001) discusses measures, in the nineteenth century,
by the Ottoman government to protect and to render the population
more productive. Michel Foucault (1991) discusses the population
politics of the modern state in general.
10. The Ottoman interest in political economy is demonstrated by the
translation in 1852 of Jean Baptiste Say’s Economie politique, one of
the most popular political economy texts of the nineteenth century.
11. Bentham presented an impassioned critique of the eighteenth-century
formulations of the Natural Law theory, which posed property as being
natural (see Blackstone). According to Bentham, ‘property and law
are born together, and die together. Before laws were made, there was
no property; take away laws and property ceases’ (Bentham 1931:
113). Then Bentham proceeds to link property to security: ‘law creates
whatever is to be secured’. In this sense, Bentham established a direct
link between property and law as governance.
12. Research undertaken in the 1980s amidst the Thatcherite hysteria
for privatization has shown that it was the existence of a competitive
environment and not private owner ship that was a determinant of
economic efficiency or growth. Peter Perdue discusses this issue in
relation to patent law (Perdue 2004).
13. An important point of difference between the Ottoman and Qing
imperial contexts would be that in Qing China taxes were paid in
cash, while in the Ottoman empire they were mostly paid in kind. This
factor may explain the more intimate involvement of cultivators with
the market in the Qing context, while in the Ottoman case it was the
tax collectors and the holders of revenue grants who were involved in
market transactions (Islamoglu-Inan 1994).
14. The practice of issuing certificates (hüccets) by judges in establishing
property rights was a common one. In the earlier period, this practice
was used to establish the ‘freehold’ (mülk) claims over revenue. Such
freehold claims included the ability to exchange freely and to bequeath
to heirs rights to revenues from land and other taxable resources. In
the nineteenth century, it appears that the practice of establishing
property rights by issuing court certificates was a means of establishing
‘absolute’ ownership claims.
15. I have already referred to the role of the decisions of provincial
councils in the Balkans in the formulation of individual ownership
rights. Ottoman historians know very little about the decisions of
kadi courts on property matters in the nineteenth century; after all
there is no reason why the kadǐs, who were part of provincial power
networks, would not support the property claims of tax farmers and
other Ottoman officials, as did the English magistrates (Arthurs 1985)
and the French jurists (Kelley and Smith 1984), with their close
affiliations
to local propertied groups.
16. 'Taşra Mülkiye ve Mal Memurlarma verilen Talimatdir', 15 Cumade'l-
ula 1273 (11 January 1857), in Düstur, I. Tertib, Vol. 1, 2nd edn,
pp. 555-58. Article 2 addresses the failure of notables to register their
sons in order to exempt them from military service and to pay less tax.

A number of decrees issued by the central state prior to or at the time

of the compilation of the 1844 survey, as well as accounts referring to
a failed attempt at compiling a survey in 1838, point to complaints

about heavy tax burdens on ordinary people and to situations where

notables did not pay taxes.
17. In a number of cases, the tithe payments were recorded as nearly 45
per cent of the total income from a given cultivated area.
18. 'Taşra Mülkiye ve Mal Memurlarma verilen Talimatdir', 15 Cumade'l-
ula 1273 (11 January 1857), in Düstur, I. Tertib, Vol. 1, 2nd edn,
pp. 555-58.
19. Ibid. Article 5 addresses corrupt practices in the process of registration.
Changes in production were to be reported every month to the new
treasury by property officials or mülkiye memurlam.
20. The finance Ministry Register (Maliye Nezareti Defteri) dated 1272
(1856), no. 797 includes an entry of cultivated lands for villages in the
kaza Of Can located in the province (sancak) of Biga. This register, in
Contrast to those of earlier years, contains information on the area of
cultivated lands, the geographic location of fields, quantities of seed
planted and yields for individual crops for the years 1856 and 1857.
The figures given are those of quantities measured in kiles, which are
not monetary values. The format of individual entries in the
register
is as follows: the name of the head of the household, followed by
the numbers of animals he owns, the lands he cultivates (which are
represented in the measurement units of kita and dönüm), the quantity
of seed, cultivated, and yields in kita for individual crops. At the end of
the records for each village, quantities of seed and yields for individual
crops are totalled. I am grateful to my doctoral student Yücel Alp

Kaya for providing me with this information.

21. 'Tahrir-i Emlak ve Nüfus Nizamnamesi'(Regulation for Registry of
Property and Population), 14 Cumade'l-ula 1277 (28 November 1860),
in Düstur, I. Tertib, Vol, 1, 2nd edn, pp. 889-902.
22. Changes in the status of property due to sales and leases as well as
births and deaths were entered in daily registers (yevmiye defterleri)
and were subsequently recorded in the main registers, where each
household was assigned a number. This may suggest a preliminary
step in the direction of proper cadastral surveys.
23. ‘Tahrir-i Emlak ve Nüfus Nizamnamesi’, Fasl-i evvel (first chapter).
Article 12 notes that the property register will include general figures
and description and registration of boundaries (Defter-i emlakde
muharrer umumi rakamlar ve eşkal ve akyise ve hudud tarif ve tahrir
olunacak.)
24. ‘Tahrir-i Emlak ve Nüfus Nizamnamesi’, Fasl-i sani (second chapter);
in the process of recording the population, persons failing to present
birth cerificates were not to be allowed access to courts and their
travel certificates were to be revoked.
25. Mesail-i Muhimme, 58/15.
26. The grand commission at the provincial centers included twenty
two scribes who were members of the ilmiye or scholarly class, four
estimate-makers, and one chairperson (reis), (‘Tahrir-i Emlak ve Nüfus
Nizamnamesi’, Fasl-i Evvel (first chapter)).
27. It is important to note that in the compiling of income surveys, survey
officials were initially appointed from the centre. In the face of local
opposition, this practice was discontinued after 1844. I am thankful
to Professor Tevfik Guran for this information.

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 5
When Strong Men Meet: Recruited Punjabis
and Constrained Colonialism
Rajit K. Mazumder
Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the
ends of the earth!
—Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West, 1889

It should come as no surprise to those partial to the longue duree

that ‘the East’ is once again in focus. History’s inexorable cycle
continues;
some areas seem to be on the ascendant, others on the wane.
Oswald Spengler had perhaps prematurely predicted the ‘decline’
of the West after World War I, but there is less popular doubt
about the present ‘rise’ of ‘Asia’. This perception of contemporary
global political economy has inevitably affected academia,
admirably
reflected in the tone and content of this volume. This essay
analyzes the relationship between colonial India,1 British imperial
policies, the British Indian Army, recruited communities and
recruitingregions. It suggests that even the mighty (and ‘modern’)
British Indian empire had similarities with the Qing and the
Ottoman: imperialism in South Asia was not always an imposition
of ‘westernization’ from the top, but rather the result of negotiation
and compromise with existing social, political, economic, cultural
and intellectual traditions.2 Kipling’s opening line may yet again
have been proven wrong, but it is argued below that the British
were not only forced to concede to the demands of the ‘strong men’
of Punjab but also voluntarily provided concessions to them.
In light of the comparative approach of this volume, it must be
recognized at the outset that the nature of imperialism in India
under the British was fundamentally different from that in Qing
China and Ottoman Turkey and, of course, the Mughal empire.
 Rajit K. Mazumder

British India was a colony of a western ‘great power’, the primary

purpose of which was exploiting India’s vast human and natural
resources for the sole benefit of Britain. The notion of ‘greatest good
for the greatest number’ is, therefore, not applicable to it in the
same way as it is in analyzing the Qing or Ottoman administrations.
Although the British rhetoric in India was predictably that of a
‘civilizing mission’, their policies, in the majority of instances, were
not aimed at benefiting India or its inhabitants.3 Moreover, India
was ruled until 1858 by an alien, private, corporate body, the East
India Company, whose primary incentive was increasing
shareholder
profit. Only after the great upheavals of the Mutiny and
Revolt of 1857 did the Crown take direct control and responsibility,
but this did not change the principal purpose of the state, which
remained meeting imperial prerogatives, not India’s ‘moderniza-
tion’.4 From the latter decades of the nineteenth century, increasingly
powerful anti-colonial and other indigenous groups combined with
international developments5 to force the colonial state into making
concessions. Nonetheless, in the paradigm of this book, it can be
suggested that local dynamics in a non-western region influenced
the nature of British imperialism. The West may well have affected
the East, but it was never completely insulated.6 What we have
inherited, therefore, may more accurately be viewed as a shared,
interconnected, mutually influenced heritage, rather than a strictly
‘western’ or ‘eastern’ one. 7

The British Indian Army and Punjab:8

The Context
The British Indian army was predominantly a ‘native’ army. The
empire in the East was conquered by that army and colonial rule
was enforced by its substantial might. A native force was thus
trained and armed to control less-conciliatory natives and it loyally
served the colonial state right up to Independence. It fought two
World Wars and numerous other campaigns in and outside the
subcontinent. This ‘British’ Indian army also suppressed countless
local infractions, often involving Indians opposed to the colonial
government.
At the same time, the imperial masters of this native force had
to ensure that the army remained loyal. This imperative forced the
colonial state to pursue a more benevolent policy in dealing with
 when Strong Men Meet

militarized men and in militarized regions. Government initiatives

aimed to protect the interests of the recruited groups and to
enhance their local standing. Moreover, the British government had
to tread very cautiously in dealing with mass agitation in the highly
recruited regions.
The contradiction, that colonial rule was ultimately based on the
military might of a ‘western’ government, and that this coercive
power was represented in a ‘native’ army, thus, raises certain
historicalquestions. Why did Indians join an imperial army and serve
it so loyally? How did the colonial state co-opt them to voluntarily
enlist into its regiments? Did the soldiers not affect the state?
These issues concern the nature of colonialism and of
nationalism
in relation to the wider ramifications of the armed forces of
colonial India.9
The army has usually been studied solely in military terms; it
continuesto be perceived to be removed from society and has been (and
still is) kept segregated from it. Most histories of the Indian army
are a history of its development from earliest days, of its constituent
regiments and of its various campaigns. The location of the military
in a wider social context has been somewhat neglected. However,
the armed forces under any political organization — ancient and
medieval kingdoms, imperial states, modern democracies, et al. —
are deeply rooted in civilian society. The troops who form the
fighting
corps are members of that society. Thus, soldiers are social,
economic and political units, both individually and as a group.
The military and military personnel influence society and politics
despite being specifically excluded from the ‘civilian’ sphere. Military
policy is, after all, state policy and steps taken to affect military
men is part of government policy. On the other hand, soldiers are
conscious of their special position as members of a critical
institution
of the state. They realize the many advantages of soldiering
and are aware that these can be withdrawn easily. Therefore, they
respond to specific issues in terms of their affiliation to a corporate
body, too, and not just as individuals. Military men, thus, form an
important ‘vote bank’ in highly recruited regions, and affect politics.
The following analyzes how the Punjab-centric military apparatus
of British India affected provincial politics in British Punjab.
The British only just emerged victors in the two Anglo-Sikh Wars
in 1846 and 1849 and were quick to acknowledge the bravery of the
Sikh army.10 After the annexation of Punjab in 1849, to ensure that
its ‘warlike’ people fought with and not against them, all able-bodied
men of the Sikh army were absorbed into the British Indian army.
The policy of accommodation paid off during the Mutiny of 1857,
when the active support of the nobility and the peasantry of Punjab
enabled the British to hold on to their possessions and win Delhi
back from the rebels. A grateful colonial state repaid its allies by
further opening up the army to their ‘martial races’, investing them
with grants, ‘settling’ land rights in their favour and incorporating
them into the administrative structure.
By 1911, over half the native army came from Punjab. A
significant
amount of funds went into its villages as pay and pensions
of servicemen, and positively affected the militarized peasants
(Mazumder 2003: 7–45). The prospect of facing the imperial Russian
army in Asia led to the establishment of roads, railways, post and
telegraph networks, and the construction of military cantonments to
defend the frontier. The strategic considerations of frontier defence
thus indirectly created the infrastructure which critically assisted
the agricultural boom, since Punjab was the frontier province
(Ibid.: 46–92).
This essay considers the nature of British colonialism in Punjab.
The army affected the British government and not merely in relation
to military policy. The paradox that colonial power was maintained
through a ‘native’ army forced the imperial state to ensure that the
regiments remained loyal. This influenced state policy, particularly
in the recruiting grounds. Therefore, paternalistic and benevolent
policy initiatives were taken by the British government to reinforce
and sustain the loyalty of its soldiers. Furthermore, mass agitation
by recruited groups and/or in highly recruited areas was handled
with unexpected alacrity, concern and tact. On occasions, the
extantgovernment policy on the issues causing grievance was altered,
even reversed (Mazumder 2003: 202–30). The policies of the colonial
state in Punjab highlight the constraints to colonial power through
several surprising concessions, both voluntary and forced, to its
recruited peasantry.
The military significance of the province was a result of the high
recruitment from its ‘martial races’ after 1857 and of the
geographical
situation of Punjab as the frontier of the empire (Mazumder
2003: 7–19). The colonial state’s security was so dependent on
Punjabis that it was forced to initiate measures aimed at pre-empting
any possible causes for disaffection by the recruited peasantry.
The Punjab Alienation of Land Act, ‘political’ revenue assessment
and specific legislative measures aimed at militarized groups need
to be seen in light of state imperatives, too. Government policy
was also influenced by the need to invest the state’s allies with
greater power and privileges, as indicated by canal colonization, the
franchise policy, the efforts of the Soldiers’ Boards and educational
facilities for soldiers’ families.11

Recruited Peasants and the Restraint of

Imperial Power
The following shows how government policy in Punjab was affected
by military considerations and recruited groups. It is not a history
of colonial policies in Punjab but an argument that the nature of
those policies was influenced by the ‘Punjabization’ of the Indian
army. To ensure that rural Punjab remained loyal, the British
government voluntarily sought to favour soldiers, and, more broadly,
the ‘agricultural tribes’. In other instances, mere suspicion that
the recruited peasantry might be aggrieved forced intervention or
concession. Ironically, colonialism in Punjab was constrained by
the very men who provided the physical power of the imperial state
in British India.
Early Administration and ‘Settling’
the Influential
The British annexed the whole of Punjab in 1849. The economic
benefit of controlling the territories west of the Sutlej river was an
additional consideration in extending the boundaries of the empire
to its logical geographical frontier. Henry Lawrence, then Resident 12
at the Sikh Durbar in Lahore, calculated that an annual income of
Rs 7 lakh13 over and above the expenditure would accrue from the
area of the Lahore state alone. 14 Therefore, a very careful policy
towards land revenue was pursued after annexation.
Amongst the first administrative tasks was to ascertain the
way rural society functioned, who owned the land and how
revenue was paid (Punjab Administration Report, 1849–51: 30).15
The state concluded that ‘Punjab is essentially an agricultural
country owned and tilled by landowners’ (Douie 1908: 8) who were
peasant proprietors, or zamindars (Punjab Administration Report,
1854–56: 22). The land was in joint ownership in the ‘village
community system’ that had developed over centuries in ‘tribal
settlements’ (Baden-Powell 1882: 396–99). Land revenue was not
paid by proprietors individually but by co-parcenors, who were
jointly liable for the revenue payments (Punjab Administration
Report, 1854–56: 23).
Under the early British administrators, ‘the political advantages
of maintaining the old framework of society’ was ‘fully recognised’
(Douie 1908: 4). This was the phase of ‘personal rule’ enforced by
isolated district officers keen and willing to ‘perpetuate Punjabi
customs and indigenous institutions’. 16 The settlement system of the
North-Western Provinces was adopted (Douie 1899: 8). The Punjab
government commuted superior rights where they were established
into a percentage of the revenue, and ‘inferior proprietors’ were
allowed ‘the sole management of the estate’ (Douie 1899: 57). As
a reliable record was lacking, it also took the initiative to award
ownership to tenants who could prove that they had been cultivating
for twenty years. It was believed that such proprietors would provide
a stable base for the British administration. Thus, ‘In one stroke
the first settlement produced thousands of new landowners with
the rights and privileges of sale, mortgage and hereditary transfer’
(Barrier 1966a: 5).
The decision to acknowledge Punjab as a land of small zamindars
living in village communities and to award ownership rights to the
peasant proprietor was derived from the compulsions surrounding
annexation in 1849. The Sikhs had been acknowledged by governor-
general Dalhousie to be ‘the most formidable enemy we have yet
encountered in India’ (in Domin 1974: 15) and the British were keen
to ensure that they did not have reason for further discontent. To
keep the demobilized Sikh army from causing trouble it suited the
colonial government to award zamindars the right of ownership
and, by reducing revenue demands, to enable them to take part in
profitable agriculture (Ibid.: 24). The first Punjab Administration
Report was self-congratulatory:
That large bodies of brave men, once so turbulent and formidable …
should lay down their arms, receive their arrears and retire from an
exciting profession to till the ground, without in any place creating
a disturbance, is indicative of the effect which has been produced by
British power, of the manly forbearance which characterizes the Seikhs
[sic], and the satisfaction felt at the justice of the government. (Punjab
Administration Report, 1849–51: 22–23)
 John Lawrence’s17 mistrust of the Sikh nobility also led to a
prejudice
against the aristocracy and to a preference for the peasant
proprietor in central Punjab ( Gilmartin 1988: 23). There was, in
addition, the fact that such peasant proprietors cultivated their
own lands in closely-knit village communities in these districts
(Douie 1899: 67–68). Lawrence’s political acuity led to land rights
being provided to that section of Sikh society which had formed the
Sikh army and had been retained by the British, and which was to
become the ‘flower’ of the Indian army after 1857.
In contrast to the above, it was found that the ‘true village
community’
was a ‘rarity’ in the southwest of Punjab. The right over
land was divided between ‘two distinct classes having separate
proprietary
interests in the soil’ — ‘certain dominant families and clans
enjoying an admitted social superiority over the larger body of men
of very miscellaneous castes’. However, despite the difference in
climatic and tenurial conditions here, ‘the village system [applied
to eastern Punjab] was forcibly engrafted on a form of property
with which it was incompatible’. The large landlords ‘vehemently
contested’ sharing proprietary rights with the cultivating tenant
communities at the first regular settlements18 in Rawalpindi and
Jhelum (Douie 1899: 73–78). However, the Mutiny of 185719
interrupted
the completion of the settlement.
The British were not surprised that the Sikh peasantry should
support them through the upheavals of 1857.20 What could not be
so readily explained was the invaluable assistance volunteered by
tribal chieftains and the large landlords of western and southwestern
Punjab.21
The colonial state’s gratitude towards these superior landowners,
whose right it had been in the process of curtailing, was apparent
in the concessions given to them after 1857. British perceptions of
the dominance of tribal alliance, embodied in Tupper’s22 Punjab
Customary Law, influenced the structure of administration set up
by incorporating the influential elements of rural Punjab. According
to him, forms of political or social bonding as in Europe were absent
and therefore the British had to be extremely careful because,
If you weaken the sense of tribal fellowship the only thing that could be
put in its room would be religion … and here the British Government
could take no part…. [However] the maintenance of the tribe, the village,
and the clan would not impede, but further the sort of progress that is
most wanted in this part of India. The tribe may be utilised without,
 of course, carrying on with it all the incidents of the tribal state of
society…. [Also] everything that a body of men can do better than as
individuals will be better done by coherent tribes than if they have been
suffered to break up…. [Therefore] this expedient codification could be
used to strengthen and improve the forms of society already existing,
and from whose maintenance and amelioration many public benefits
might be anticipated. (Tupper 1881, Vol. I: 19–21)23

This corresponded well with the ‘martial races theory’ that justified
recruiting policy: a kind of fictional conservatism, working ‘with the
grain’ of Indian society. Many indigenous communities —Jats, Jat
Sikhs, Rajputs, Pathans, Gurkhas, Dogras, Marathas included —
had a pre-colonial ‘martial’ self-perception, and this was easily
assimilatedwith nineteenth-century European anthropological wisdom
into the ‘martial races theory’ (also see Omissi 1994: 24).
A more benign attitude towards the big landlords was seen
only after 1857, paralleling the concession in land rights to them.
Peasant proprietors in Punjab ‘proper’ and the great landlords of
the western half of the province were amalgamated into the same
administrative system by the brilliantly astute use of the office of
the zaildar. A zail consisted of two to forty villages and thereby
accommodated the leaders of the smaller, caste-based village
communities
of central and eastern Punjab as well as the clan chieftains
of the west and south-west whose influence spread over vast areas
(Gilmartin 1988: 11–26).
A zaildar was more influential than a simple lambardar (village
headman) because a zail included many villages under it. The
position
was quite important as it extended the influence of the colonial
state right into the villages. Zaildars ‘represent[ed] the chaudhris
of former times’ and were hand-picked by the deputy
commissioner
only after consideration of ‘caste’ or ‘tribe’, local influence
(‘influence is very commonly hereditary in certain families’!),
extent of landholding, services rendered to the state by him or his
family, and, lastly, personal character and ability. They were paid a
certain percentage of the land revenue of the zail. Quite often they
were pensioned native officers. The zaildars and lambardars
togetherformed ‘a very valuable unofficial agency, through which
the Deputy Commissioner and the tahsildar convey the wishes of
Government to the people and secure the carrying out of their own
orders’ (Douie 1908: 84, 125–28). In Gujrat it was reported that
‘The zaildars are very useful in all branches of local administration’
and ‘amply justify themselves’ because of their position as ‘go-
betweens the Government and agricultural community’ (Gujrat
District Gazetteer, 1921: 114).
As mentioned, the British felt a ‘disposition, stronger towards
their close [of settlement operations] than at their beginning, to
concede something to the descendants of the men who had been
stripped of their influence by the Sikhs, while at the same time
maintaining the cultivators…’ (Douie 1899: 78).24 In those cases
where the dispossession of the old landlords was considered to
be ‘complete’, the government granted inams to ameliorate the
situation for their new allies (Douie 1908: 128).25 In ‘contending
claims’, a compromise was worked out by making talukdars (superior
proprietors) of the clan leaders and assigning them a proprietary
fee while the management of the estates was left to the cultivating
communities. In case the ‘former landlord’ and tenants resided in
the same village, the latter were only given title to their separate
holdings, were excluded from rights in the common wastelands and
made ineligible for the post of headman. A grateful government
re-invested the status of those who were ‘descendants of persons
who once exercised political sway or enjoyed a lordship over the
soil’ (Douie 1899: 67).
These ‘tribes’ of West Punjab — the Tiwanas, Noons, Gakhars, 26
Janjuas, Awans, Baluchis, Khattars, Sials, among others — were
the main recruited ‘martial races’ from the region.27 At first sight,
the government policy of investing rights to peasant proprietors in
Punjab ‘proper’ and to landed clan chiefs in the west and
southwest
may seem contradictory. However, it was from the peasant
proprietors (Jats, Jat Sikhs, Rajputs, Gujars, Ahirs, etc.) of the
central and southeastern districts and from the clans of the tribal
leaders in western areas that the British Indian army recruited the
bulk of its soldiers after 1857. In both regions, the state attempted to
entrench itself through the collaboration of those wielding influence
in the countryside. In the aftermath of the Mutiny, the Punjab
government was quick to retract its earlier policy of creating ‘village
communities’ throughout the province. It was then conceded that
the settlement brought from the North-Western Provinces had been
‘sometimes pushed too far [and] after the Mutiny a considerable
change in official opinion is observable…’ (Douie 1899: 57). The
apparently conflicting nature of settlement policy before and after
1857 had the single motive of investing the socially powerful and
also the militarily important with right in land.
Recruited Peasantry and Agrarian Unrest:
Indebtedness, Alienations and State Intervention
Strong customary laws of pre-emption and the poor value of land
had prevented land from becoming a ‘commodity’ during Sikh times
(Barrier 1966a: 5–6). With stability and peace under the British, an
increase in cultivation, a reduced but regular revenue demand, the
creation of road and rail networks, and the extension of irrigation,
the value of land began to increase (Barrier 1966a: 5–6; Calvert
1936: 245–46; Darling 1925: 206–208). Moreover, debt was not
serious for some years after annexation and the creditor remained
simply ‘the petty money-lender, and nothing more; he was hardly
yet a usurer’ (Thorburn 1904: 230).
Much of the following draws on Thorburn’s writings. He had an
essentialist view of the noble (Muslim) peasants being ruined by
rapacious (Hindu bania) traders under the aegis of an unsympathetic
Punjab government — a view based on his early experiences as
settlement officer. It is not a judicious account of developments in
rural moneylending, nor of the role of credit in agricultural
production.However, the very existence and subsequent impact of
Thorburn’s diagnoses are more significant than their validity. When
he began writing, Thorburn was among a minority of junior officers
whose personal experiences in western districts made them question
the smug belief in the benefit of laissez faire policies carried by
much of Punjab’s senior bureaucracy. Thorburn’s importance here
is in his representation of the principles of the ‘Punjab school’ (see
below). More significantly, the power of his arguments eventually
and indirectly led to a rejection of laissez faire and the passage of
the highly interventionist Punjab Alienation of Land Act, 1900.28
To administer the province, it was thought that recourse to a
systematized, codified and easily enforceable legal structure was
necessary. In the beginning, the ‘Punjab school’ of administration
meted simple and direct justice through the office of the district
officer29 and by a brief code made up in 1853 to guide the courts.30
This uniquely informal legal system was soon transformed, and a
‘disposition to look on unlimited power of transfer as an essential
feature of proprietary right and a necessity of economic progress
was strengthened by the assimilation of the law and procedure with
that of the older provinces’, particularly after the introduction of
the Punjab Code of Civil Procedure in 1862 and the establishment
of the Chief Court in 1866 (Douie 1908: 4). The institution of a
lieutenant governorship also made the administration ‘lose its early
simplicity of character’. Further, the limitation for claims was
reduced from twelve to three years, forcing the creditors to the courts
at much shorter intervals. Thorburn claims that this led to a ‘flood
of litigation’ which ‘appreciably embittered the relations between
lenders and borrowers’ (Thorburn 1904: 233–34).
In 1884, Thorburn wrote an unsolicited report to the Punjab
Financial Commissioner on the situation in Dera Ismail Khan
where he was posted at the time. He warned that the government
was failing in its duty to protect the Muslim peasants from Hindu
banias and if the exploitation continued the former could rebel.
Lieutenant Governor Aitchison rejected Thorburn’s thesis and sent
the correspondence to the Government of India, mentioning that
no further debate was required (Barrier 1966a: 19–22).
The persistent Thorburn revised his findings and published it
as Musalmans and Money-lenders in the Punjab in 1886, to force
the Punjab government to come out of its misplaced and ‘persist-
ent optimism’ about the conditions in rural areas.31 The Muslim
peasantry under his jurisdiction had included Pathans, Baluchis,
Muslim Jats, Muslim Rajputs, Awans and Gakhars, among others.
It is significant that he assumes that it would make a difference
to higher authorities if he pointed out that these ‘tribes’ provided
‘the bulk of the Mahomedans serving in the Bengal Army, in the
Punjab Frontier Force, and in the Punjab Constabulary’ (Thorburn
1886: 20–32). He goes on to echo the fear of public discontent ever-
present after 1857 and used the fear of jacquerie to force notice of
his polemics:32
I think that those who best know the peasantry there [in West Punjab],
will agree with me that without some radical changes in the substantive
civil law and its mode of administration, and for certain tracts in the
revenue system, the impatience which now finds expression in the
occasional
murder, mal-treatment or plundering of an obnoxious
moneylender,
or in resistance to the attachment of cattle or grain, or other
necessary of life, will soon grow into widespread disaffection. The fuel will
then be ready for ignition, and a spark — a sympathetic breeze down the
frontier from that hot-bed of Mahomedan fanaticism — Afghanistan —
a famine, the exhortations of an agitator, whether aspiring Mahdi or
 land-law reformer — will kindle such a flame that Government will, in
order to quench it hurriedly and fearfully, pass some Act of Bunniah
spoliation more drastic than the famous Deccan Ryots Act of 1879.
(Thorburn 1886: 40–41)

James Lyall became lieutenant governor when Thorburn’s book

was being circulated in England, and when land transfers doubled
in the first two years of his administration he had to reconsider
his belief that alienations were not politically dangerous (Barrier
1966a: 23). The average number of ‘compulsory’ sales increased from
13,661 over 1878–83 to 20,156 during 1888–93, while the average
area sold increased from 93,000 acres over 1874–78 to 3,38,000 acres
in 1888–93.33
The ‘impatience’ which Thorburn referred to was the recourse
to violent action by aggrieved peasants who resorted to arson,
rioting,
looting of banias’ property, the burning of their books, and even
dacoity.34 The violence led to fear of the disaffection spreading
to those units of the army which recruited in the region (Banerjee
1982: 97). In the eyes of the officials, the loyalty of the moneylenders
was suspect, particularly in the frontier regions (Ibid.: 89). A district
officer’s wife captured the feelings of most of the British officers:
In the Punjaub[sic] the hereditary land-holding classes who compose the
people of the country are ousted by 20,000 to 30,000 moneylenders, all
men of no political weight. The loyalty of the vast majority has been
seriously affected. Their discontent is a greater danger than the fear of
any Russian invasion.35

The Secretary of State for India36 read Musalmans and

Moneylenders
at the time the violence in Punjab was growing, and
questioned
the Government of India regarding alienations and loss of
popular support because of it. Lyall could not ignore the summons
from London and undertook ‘perhaps the most exhaustive study
of land transfer carried out in the Punjab’ (Barrier 1966a: 25).
The revenue secretariat supported Thorburn’s views and was
sympathetic
to his suggestions, and Lyall was forced to acknowledge the
extent and danger of land transfers and the necessity for judicial
intervention (Barrier 1966a: 25; Douie 1908: 5).
The subsequent consultations and political and ideological
positioning between the Punjab government, the Government of
India and between the advocates of paternalism and laissez faire in
both governments, leading, eventually, to the passing of the Punjab
Alienation of Land Act XIII of 1900, are well-recorded.37 Once more,
arguments for strategic considerations of colonial rule were used by
the paternalists in an attempt to convince opponents:
The Punjab lies on the rear of any British army operating in Afghanistan
and on the path of any army invading India from that quarter. A very
large proportion of the flower of the Indian army is recruited from the
Punjab. The spirit and tradition of the fighting races of this part of India
are neither dead nor sleeping. Of no country, at any rate of no part of
India, is the old aphorism more true — ‘so many ruined fortunes, so
many votes for trouble’. Our own title here is one of conquest. Before our
day the tribal lands were won and held by physical force. Remove, even
temporarily, the superintending pressure of British rule, and the
restitution
of lands lost under our system will be sought by violence. I do
not think this will be doubted by anyone who knows what was the
state of the Delhi territory and the North-West Provinces in 1857….
It is of supreme political importance that if British rule should ever be
permanently or temporarily in danger in this part of India, we should
have on our side the great agricultural tribes who still hold the country,
and that they should not be seeking in our downfall or difficulties an
opportunity of recovering their ancestral lands. (C.L. Tupper quoted
in Dewey 1972: 194)38

The significance of the army was also considered critical for

intervention
by Ibbetson, one of the most influential men on the enquiry
commission set up to go into alienations in Punjab:
To secure the contentment of the masses is our first duty in India: in
it lies our safety. As long as they are loyal to and contented with their
rulers, the internal peace of the country is secure, and the professional
agitator powerless. And most of all is the loyalty and contentment of
the sturdy yeomanry from whose ranks we draw our native soldiers, the
safe foundation upon which our rule can rest secure. (Denzil Ibbetson
quoted in Barrier 1966a: 37–38)39

The Punjab Alienation of Land Act was considered ‘reactionary,

almost revolutionary, for in a few clauses it superseded much of the
elaborate legislation of the previous forty years’ (Thorburn 1904:
256). The truth of Thorburn’s statement is borne out in
government
policy because viceroy Curzon was unable to overcome official
uncertainty and resistance in other provinces in getting similar
measures passed (Barrier 1966a: 114–15). The anticipated political
reaction to such intervention in Bombay restrained the Government
of India from similar legislation there. The recruited peasants of
Punjab carried far greater political weight than the Bombay ryot
(peasant), who was simply a ryot, ‘not a soldier’.40
The direct military argument about the proportion of Punjabis
in the army and the broader impact of the Land Alienation Act on
the province’s recruited peasantry, in the context of the localized
jurisdiction of the Act, once again bring forth the special nature of
colonial intervention in the militarily important province.
The Land Alienation Act legally recognized ‘agricultural’ and
‘non-agricultural tribes’ and created a new category, ‘statutory
agriculturists’, who had been landowners or occupancy tenants during
the first regular settlement in their districts, whether belonging to
an ‘agricultural tribe’ or to a commercial or moneylending caste
(Douie 1908: 11). A Punjab Financial Commissioner, writing much
later, thus summarized government perception and policy:
The agricultural tribes are generally distinct, easily defined bodies,
possessing valuable martial qualities which endow them with considerable
political importance. To secure their contentment and prosperity has for
nearly seventy years been the main object of the administration. Their
expropriation by tribes of non-cultivating capitalists would obviously
have proved a grave source of embarrassment…. (Calvert 1936: 214.
Emphasis added)

A district-by-district classification was published. The ‘agricul-

tural tribes’ included: Ahir, Arain, Awan, Baluch, Dogar, Gakhar,
Gujar, Janjua, Jat, Kamboh, Khattar, Khokhar, Labana, Mahton,
Mughal, ‘Musalman Jat’, Pathan, Qureshi, Rajput, Saini, Sial, Syed,
Thakur (Anand 1924: Appendix A).41 The significance of ‘agricultural
tribes’ is that the ones so notified were synonymous with the ‘martial
races’ the army almost exclusively recruited from.42
Members of ‘non-agricultural tribes’ required the deputy
commissioner’s
sanction to purchase land from a member of an ‘agricultural
tribe’, but could sell their land to anyone. The latter could sell land
to any member of his ‘tribe’ or of a ‘tribe’ of the same group in the
same district, or to anyone who was an ‘agriculturist’ in the same
village. It was soon realized that the inclusion of ‘statutory
agriculturists’
did not provide adequate protection against the
moneylender
(as ‘non-agriculturists’, too, could be ‘statutory agriculturists’)
and the category was dropped in an amendment to the Act in 1907
(Douie 1908: 12–13; Barrier 1966b: 171–72). Thereafter, the
permission
to purchase land from ‘agricultural tribes’ became restricted
to members of the ‘tribe’, or of the group to which they belonged.
These restrictions were valid for sales, exchanges, gifts and even
wills. Further, sales to ‘non-agricultural tribes’ were allowed only
if the deputy commissioner considered them advantageous to the
seller and no person of the same group as the seller had come forth
as a purchaser. Sales which would reduce the amount of land held to
less than subsistence levels were disallowed (Douie 1908: 12–13).
Members of ‘non-agricultural tribes’ faced identical
restrictions
on mortgages, too. Moreover, restrictions were put on terms
of usufructuary mortgages for all ‘tribes’, the term was fixed at
a maximum of twenty years, deputy commissioners could revise
the terms of any unauthorized mortgage by a member of an
‘agricultural tribe’, and they had to be consulted if a clause for
conditional
sale was inserted in a contract. Leases were restricted to a
maximum of twenty years with no extension. Finally, members of
‘agricultural tribes’ were forbidden from alienating the produce
of their land for more than two successive harvests without the
deputy commissioner’s permission. Other protective measures
included the exemption of all property, including implements,
dwellings, and cattle and seed, in execution of a decree. It was also
ordered that members of ‘agricultural tribes’ cultivating their own
lands ‘must’ not be arrested during harvests except in emergencies
(Douie 1908: 15–18).
The problem of indebtedness could not be solved simply by
restricting the rights of alienation by moneylenders. The Act was
‘satisfactory’ as a ‘demolition’ of moneylender’s powers but had not
been followed by the ‘construction’ of alternative means of credit
(Thorburn 1904: 256). What it facilitated was the replacement of
the bania by the ‘agriculturist moneylender’ and indebtedness,
and alienations of land, continued to increase after 1900 (Darling
1925; see also Barrier 1966a: 81–85 and Mukherjee 1989). Though
the government realized that alternative sources of credit were
necessary, and the co-operative movement was strongly pushed in
Punjab, it did not take off.
The political compromise involved in the passage of this legislative
measure is brought out in the fact that despite five amendments after
190043 no restrictions were put on the ‘agriculturist moneylenders’
even though indebtedness and land transfers continued to increase
unchecked. It seems that the state had been preoccupied not with
indebtedness or alienations but with the identity of those involved in
the process. Once the ‘outsider’ bania had been restrained, alienation
of land was not a matter of concern because alienations were now
effected by the dominant elements of rural Punjab — and allies of
the ‘paternal’ government. The British were motivated by the need
‘to save themselves and their loyal subjects, the landlords, from the
wrath of the peasantry’ and therefore portrayed themselves as the
‘benefactors’ of the peasantry and the moneylenders as the peasants’
‘main enemy’ (Rai 1984: 16–17; also see Barrier 1966a: 91). The
Punjab government was not principally concerned with the plight
of the peasantry; its primary motivation was the need to eradicate
the major cause for rural unrest — unrest that had the potential
to turn into a deadlier version of the Mutiny of 1857.
Military Districts and ‘Political’ Assessment:
Revenue Demand and Revenue Remissions
Revenue assessment in Punjab was very carefully conducted,
the state being aware of the dangers of excessive demand. In the
first summary settlement after annexation, the land revenue was
decreased by nearly Rs 50 lakh compared to the demand under
Sikh rule ( Thorburn 1904: 183). The government acknowledged,
too, that sometimes assessments had to be altered because of
natural or financial calamities, and that even though this was not
good for ‘the system’, it had to be done: ‘the good of the people
is paramount…. And, viewed by the light of the recent events [of
1857], this policy has proved most fortunate’ (Punjab Administration
Report, 1856–58: 14).
Accordingly, between 1863 and 1870, E. A. Prinsep, Settlement
Commissioner of Punjab, reduced the demand in Amritsar district
from a fourth to a sixth of gross produce, because of previous over-
assessment and a heavy fall in prices after 1853.44 He considered
the old settlement had been too short at ten years, and made his
assessment for twenty, ‘so as to give the country a longer breathing
time, and defer the increase to a progressive arrangement’. 45
Punjab’s financial commissioner, Egerton, disapproved of the
reductions,46 and considered Prinsep’s assessment lower ‘than was
necessary or advisable’.47 Lieutenant Governor Robert Davies
agreed fully with Egerton, and ordered that the term of assessment
be limited to ten years, as any longer would be ‘unnecessary
and imprudent’.48 The governor general in council was, in turn,
‘convinced’ that Davies’ steps were ‘the wisest that could have
followed’, and ‘entirely approved’ the orders. The governor general
noted that the ‘lamentable dilatoriness’ of Prinsep had ‘compelled’
the sanction of ‘an inadequate assessment of six of the richest
districts of the Punjab’ and recommended that ‘under no
circumstances
ought Prinsep to be permitted to resume the office of
settlement commissioner’.49
In the meanwhile, the post-Mutiny policy of military recruiting
by replacing the ‘disloyal’ Purabiyas 50 with Punjabis continued. The
need to ensure that there was no cause for grievance in military
districts forced the commander-in-chief to intervene over Prinsep’s
settlement:
The contentment of the Punjab is perhaps more important to the peace
of India than that of any other Province, but the impending reduction
of the term of Settlement from twenty to ten years is not regarded
without uneasiness as indicating an increased demand.
In the beginning of the year, when I visited Hazara — a frontier mountain
district, which Sir Henry Lawrence often said would be cheaply governed
if it paid nothing and remained quiet, and which has often brought its
clans into the field at our summons — the Chiefs and people evinced
deep disappointment and depression at the increase of assessment from
which they believed their loyal attachment and services would have
protected them.51

The governor general, during a visit to Hazara, asked Davies to

personally
institute an enquiry without delay. 52 Within three weeks,
Davies replied that he had no ‘categorical contradiction’ to offer
the commander-in-chief, but ‘strongly’ objected to the ‘implication
suggested … that there is a reasonable fear of the Sikhs
breaking out into rebellion on account of the term of settlement
being abridged’. A settlement for twenty years ‘would have been
preferable’ if the assessment had been ‘anything at all near the
mark’ but as zamindars felt ‘duty bound to pay the sum required’
no unrest was anticipated.53
The Government of India was apparently not satisfied and
asked the Punjab government to ‘confidentially’ ascertain popular
reactions from the deputy commissioners of the six districts
concerned.54 The local government replied: ‘There is disappointment
no doubt and grumbling, but no serious discontent’.55
 But, later, the Punjab government contradicted this and reported
that in two districts ‘the people regard the shortening of the term
of settlement as a breach of faith’. It claimed the lieutenant
governor
would be ‘the first to recommend a revision’ if that charge
had been reasonable. However, there were ‘other grounds which
make it incumbent upon the Government to accept Mr. Prinsep’s
assessments’. Prinsep’s recommendations had been ‘based upon
principles approved by the Government of the day’. Therefore,
reconsideration of orders already approved by the Government of
India would destroy ‘public confidence in the finality of decisions’
on land revenue. The lieutenant governor was, nevertheless, ‘quite
willing to make concessions on minor points’ and would
immediately
reconsider the higher demand in Gujranwala and Gujrat
districts.56
The position of the Punjab government became dubious
thereafter
when the Government of India pointed out that the governor
general and the secretary of state, in sanctioning Davies’ earlier
orders, had not been aware that Prinsep had ‘solicited instructions’
from the then Punjab government prior to giving his assessment,
and had ‘received definite official authority to make a settlement
for a term of twenty years’.57 This order had been given in all cases
of settlement and though the ‘amount’ of assessment was liable
for revision ‘the term of the settlement would not be altered’. The
matter was ‘much to be regretted’ for the people had been given
‘reasonable grounds for dissatisfaction’. The lieutenant governor
was therefore requested to supersede former orders and to continue
the term of settlement for the twenty years ‘originally conceded’ —
even at the risk of the ‘appearance of a difference of opinion between
the Governments of India and the Punjab’.
The original point — that Prinsep’s settlement had been thought
too low — was ignored in the haste to avoid discontent. Orders
were passed reducing the assessment in Gujranwala and Gujrat
districts to Prinsep’s original proposal, and the term was extended
to twenty years in all six districts.58 The Punjab government then
went further. The ‘progressive jama’59 of Gujrat district would be
taken at the end of ten years as Prinsep had recommended, and not
at once as the government had ordered, and the amount already
collected would be credited in partial payment of the next instal-
lment.60 Only then was the secretary of state satisfied that the
arrangements ‘[were] the best which, under all the circumstances,
could be concluded’ and accorded his approval.61 It is germane to
ask whether the matter might not have ended in 1872, with the
governor general approving Davies’ recommendations and censuring
Prinsep, had not the commander-in-chief intervened in as provincial
a matter as local revenue assessment.
Revenue assessment in Punjab was a political issue and involved
more than just the calculation of the new demand. Until 1885, it
had been ‘established policy’ not to hold settlement operations
simultaneously in more than five districts out of the thirty-one
that made up the province.62 Raising the revenue was a matter of
concern anywhere in the province but became crucial in the military
districts, for the settlement operations were considered ‘harassing’
even by colonial officials. Therefore, confining settlement operations
to five districts was a way of containing potential dissent and
unrest
to a limited area.
Dunlop Smith had had personal experience of Sialkot where
revenue had been increased by 20 per cent between the second regular
settlement of 1863–66 and the ‘current’ one of 1888–95.63 The rise
in prices was the main reason given for the increase. But the
peasants
there had small holdings, averaging only three acres. The other
‘disturbing’ factor was ‘that the district practically contributed one
regiment of Infantry and one of Cavalry to the Indian Army, while
there were in addition close on 1,000 pensioners’. The other five
districts
were ‘all great recruiting centres’, too. Therefore, Dunlop Smith
asked the viceroy whether the government should ‘again encounter
the grave political risk of raising the revenue by the harassing
process
of new settlement operations in this great recruiting ground of
the Punjab, or should the revision of the assessments be postponed
indefinitely or for a fixed term of years, say ten?’64
As explained by the Punjab government in 1906 and noted in
the Batala assessment report of 1910: ‘…it has always been rec-
ognised that in the central Sikh districts political considerations
are of exceptional importance and that leniency of assessment is
essential’.65 The Batala settlement officer even complained that it
was ‘unfair to other tracts that this rich and fertile tahsil should
escape with a demand proportionally much lower than that imposed
elsewhere…’. A policy of leniency for certain districts dated back
at least to Lyall’s governorship and Table 5.1 shows the instance
of Amritsar in 1893.
 The total possible revenue demand for the district was Rs 20 lakh
but only Rs 12.47 lakh were demanded: the question was not how
much was possible but rather how much ‘would be prudent and
politic to take’. Lyall ‘considered that an increase of 32 or at most
33 per cent was the utmost that should be taken’ which is why the
assessment was fixed at the lower figure (Tarn Taran Assessment
Report, 1912: 36).
Table 5.1
Table 5.1

Revenue
Revenue Demand in Amritsar
Demand in Amritsar District,
District, 1893
1893
A. Half net- B. Proposed if of % rise-: on existing
Tahsils assets estimate demand B on A demand

Ajnala 5,00,000 3,07,184 61.4 13.$

Amritsar 9,00,000 5,40,343 60.0 19.S
Tarn Taran 6,00,000 4,00,000 66.6 31.7
Source: Financial Commissioner's Review of the Ajnala Tahsil Assessment Report,
p. 9, in Ajnala Assessment Report, 1893.

In 1914, these considerations were still in force (Table 5.2). The

proposed demand did not even reach the same proportion of the
estimated
net assets as in 1893, and the overall demand for the district
was only 26 per cent above the existing level (Tarn Taran
Assessment
Report, 1912 : 2). Orders had come from the Government of
India that the overall assessment of the Amritsar district was not
to exceed 25 per cent of the existing demand after the assessment
in Amritsar and Tarn Taran tahsils had been completed (Ajnala
Assessment Report, 1913: 34). The settlement officer was,
therefore,
pleased to note that ‘the leniency of the new assessment’ in the
district ‘was generally recognized’ by the people who had ‘certainly
apprehended that a larger enhancement would be taken’ (Amritsar
Settlement Report, 1914 : 34).
Tarn Taran’s reputation as a great military area affected its
revenue settlement. 66
The reasons for justifying lightness of the present assessment were mainly
the political considerations which applied and still apply to all Central
Punjab districts…. But I would urge that there is no tahsil in which
they should have more force than in Tarn Taran, which contributes in
such abundance to the strength of our armed forces. The right policy
is one of moderation, and I have therefore framed my proposals
accordingto the limits laid down by Sir James Lyall twenty years ago.
(Tarn Taran Assessment Report, 1912 : 36)
 Table 5.2 Table 5.2

Revenue Demand in Amritsar District,

District, 1914
Revenue Demand in Amritsar 1914
A. Half net- B. Proposed ff ri.se an existing
Tahsils assets estimate demand B o n. A derrtand

Ajnala 7,25,000 3,17,088 43.7 IS

Amritsar 12,44,000 5,38,644 43.3 29
Tarn Taran 11,74,000 4,00,483 34.1 32
Source: Calculated from Ajnala Assessment Report, 1913: 33; Amritsar Assessment
Report, 1912: 33; Tarn Taran Assessment Report, 1912: 35; and Amritsar
Settlement Report, 1914- 9.

The present demand amounted to about 35 per cent of the

possible
demand, and an increase of about 185 per cent ‘could therefore
be justified’. The settlement officer in Ajnala similarly reported
that the proposed demand could have been ‘doubled’, had not the
Government of India limited enhancement to 25 per cent for the
entire district (Ajnala Assessment Report, 1913 : 34).
Revenue policy could also be used as a means of financial reward
for services — for example, for extraordinary assistance during
World War I. Rawalpindi district ‘stood first’ in recruiting
throughout
British India67 with the Kahuta tahsil sending 21 per cent of
all men of military age to the battlefields.68 Villages in the tahsil
were given revenue remissions of Rs 8,244, the highest amount in
the district, though every tahsil received some benefit.69 The
government
also granted muafis to individuals.70 According to the
lieutenant governor, ‘Two districts of the Punjab — Rawal Pindi
and Jhelum — stood out pre-eminent in all India, and for these, in
addition to other rewards, I obtained sanction to the extension of
their revenue settlements for an extra ten years — a concession
representing £20,000 to £30,000 annually’ (O’Dwyer 1925: 224).
Similarly, Shahpur district sent over 14,000 men to the colours
over the period of the War and the revenue remissions gifted in
the district amounted to Rs 70,000 while muafis were given to
individuals in all tahsils. 71 In Shahpur, the remissions in the districts
were directly proportional to recruitment. Khushab tahsil supplied
6,704 men and received Rs 35,733 in remissions, while Bhalwal
tahsil, with only 2,342 recruits, was granted Rs 7,837. Even within
Khushab tahsil the relation with numbers recruited and revenue
remitted was direct. The Hill Circle had sent over 30 per cent of
men of military age and its villages received Rs 17,369 in revenue
remissions, whereas the Thal Circle ‘did very poorly’ and therefore
was awarded only Rs 1,250.72 This policy was not restricted to the
highly reputed recruiting districts only, for villages in Hissar in
southeast Punjab also received remissions because they had
supplied
men.73
According to a government report, the total land revenue
remissions
for military service amounted to over Rs 15 lakh, divided
thus over the five divisions of the province: Ambala — Rs 3 lakh,
Jullundur — Rs 3.75 lakh, Lahore — Rs 2.5 lakh, Rawalpindi —
Rs 5 lakh, and Multan — Rs 0.75 lakh. Life assignments to the
value of Rs 25,000 had also been made throughout the province
(Leigh 1922: 283).
The settlement operations in Shahpur began in 1911 but were
incomplete when the War began. Acknowledging that its constituent
subdivisions had not been equally generous in providing soldiers, the
government was discriminatory when the settlement was concluded
in 1916. The term of settlement was increased from twenty to thirty
years in the Salt Range and riverain circles which had sent the bulk
of the soldiers, but in the Thal circle, ‘where recruiting was very
poor’, it was reduced to fifteen years. The Mohar circle also had
its term fixed for fifteen years, but because ‘recruiting was good’
there, it was recommended that it be extended to thirty years in
those villages which would not get water from the proposed Sind
Sagar Doab Canal.74
The policy of politically motivated assessment in Amritsar
district
continued into the 1940s. The last Settlement Report noted that
only 23 per cent of the true net assets was taken from landowners
in Tarn Taran. The demand had been tempered by a reduction in
cultivation, a fall in canal water, lack of recent rainfall, and a
population
increase of 35 per cent. In addition, ‘Other levers towards
moderation on which no exact value could be placed were the military
tradition of the tahsil and the inevitable strain of adjustment to a
new rural economy which agrarian legislation was likely to impose’
(Amritsar Settlement Report, 1940: 26).75
The significance of Punjabis in the Indian army affected every
aspect of revenue policy, including considerable financial loss through
deliberately forfeited revenue. According to the Viceroy’s secretary,
‘The content of the Punjab is worth thousands of men and lakhs of
rupees. I believe the prosperity of the country as well as the
stability
of our rule depend more on the quality and quantity of our land
assessment than anything else.’76 The colonial state calculated that
it was more critical to earn less but for longer than risk extracting
the maximum possible and confront likely unrest among the
recruitedpeasantry. The question inevitably emerges: did Punjabi
soldiers represent the strength of the colonial state or its greatest
weakness?
Electoral Policy: Empowering the Allies
The need to have absolute control over strategically important
Punjab was reflected in the delayed introduction of constitutional
developments that had been initiated elsewhere in British India.
The Indian Councils Act of 1861 provided for legislative councils
in the Bombay and Madras presidencies.77 Bengal got its legislature
under the Act in 1863, and the United Provinces in 1866. It was
only in 1897, nearly four decades later, that Punjab was permitted
a circumscribed legislative council of nine members, all nominated
by the lieutenant governor.78
The trend continued with the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909–10.
The Punjab Legislative Council was expanded to 24 members of
whom only five were to be elected. The elected representatives were
increased to eight in 1912 and to 16 in 1916. Punjab had one of
the lowest proportions of elected legislators in all of British India. 79
The official opinion was that want of education and limited
influence
in all-India politics ‘tended to confirm their impression of a
lack of active interest among the people at large in regard to
political
activity’.80
This was not true. The Punjab government itself acknowledged
that the Land Alienation Act had resulted in the ‘quickening’ of the
‘class consciousness’ of the agriculturists, that ‘that Act became at
once a rallying point and a fixed article of faith with them’, and
that ‘we appeared to have here, even before the days of the Reforms
Scheme, the makings of a division which possessed both force and
reality’. 81 This division was the rural-urban split of political interests
and political affiliation. While urban politicians were vocal about
their demands for greater political freedom and while they embraced
nationalism, rural Punjab did not see mass support for nationalism
and was content to support the paternal colonial state. 82
The next landmark was the Montagu-Chelmsford83 reforms of
1919 that finally brought Punjab’s legislature into line with those
of other provinces — with 94 members, only 23 of them nominated.84
The expansion of the size of the Council, and in the number of
elected members to 71 seems substantial, but was designed neither
to foster the development of democratic principles and practices, nor
to be inclusive. The state attempted to empower its traditional allies
and restrict the influence of potential adversaries. The recruited
peasantry and the landed gentry automatically gained franchise
and/or had seats reserved for them, but urban classes had their
rights severely restricted. The rural-urban divide, born with the
Land Alienation Act, came to maturity with the franchise policy and
deeply influenced subsequent politics in Punjab. In proposals to the
Southborough Committee, the Punjab government recommended
that the council should consist of 51 members only — two-thirds
elected, 11 officials, and 6 nominated non-officials. The elected seats
would be divided amongst 15 ‘rural constituencies’, 3 each for the
5 divisions, 5 ‘special Sikh constituencies’, 5 ‘large land-holders’
constituencies’, 2 trade and industry seats, one seat for the Punjab
university and only 6 ‘urban constituencies’.85
If the number and distribution of seats do not clearly reflect the
designs of the colonial state, then the justifications given for the
various constituencies certainly do. The ‘landed gentry
constituencies’
were for ‘a landed aristocracy who, in a country where
feudal traditions are still strong, are the natural and acknowledged
leaders of the people in most of the rural areas’. Most significantly,
‘They invariably reside on their estates and as a class have always
been distinguished for their military traditions and their loyalty
to the British Raj…’. These men were certified to be ‘of character
and intelligence’, whose sons joined the Provincial Civil Service ‘or
the commissioned ranks of the Army’. However, their lack of ‘an
English education’ meant that they required ‘a special constituency
where the electors were for the most part men of their own class’.
(In other words, they would not be able to compete with the urban,
educated classes.) Further, the Punjab government was concerned
that ‘Anything like touting for votes among their social inferiors
would be abhorrent to them’ 86 and thus, their interests as well as
those of their tenants, ‘deserve[d] adequate representation’. Behind
all this reasoning was the real motive: ‘Their representatives will
form a valuable steadying influence in the council chamber where
their practical experience and conservative tendencies should prove a
healthy check to the impatient idealism of the educated middle-class
politician.’87 Conservative and feudal interests with a strong military
tradition were to be bolstered by the ‘modern’ colonial state.
 ‘Interests to be represented in rural constituencies’ were
‘agriculture’, ‘rural trade and industry’, the ‘co-operative interest’,
‘tenants, artisans and menials’ and ‘the military interests’.
Significantly,the Punjab government proposed that no ‘special
representation’ was required for tenants in this ‘country of small
proprietors’ that did not possess a ‘special class of tenants’ as in the
United Provinces. This was incorrect. The cultivating occupancy
of Amritsar district indicates that cultivation under tenants-at-will
increased, particularly from the closing decades of the nineteenth
century to the first two of the twentieth. Moreover, cultivation had
always been undertaken by tenants in western districts dominated
by feudal landlords (Mazumder 2003: 150–61, 179–85). The state
had no intention of empowering tenants, and crudely brushed
aside their legitimate right. No specific representation for artisans
and menials was recommended because their interests were said
to be ‘generally speaking identical with those of the landholders’!
The interests of tenants, artisans and menials would have clashed
with those of zamindars and the state would not risk empowering
these groups — which could become a source of potential challenge
through their opposition to landholders, the government’s main
ally. The ‘military interest’ was said to be ‘of great importance, as
the agricultural community provides practically the whole of the
Punjab contingent in the army. Retired military men would form
an element in the electorate whose intelligence has been sharpened
by contact with the outside world and has moreover been subjected
to the wholesome influence of regular discipline’.88
The rural franchise would be extended to all males above
twenty-one years of age who were ‘not disabled by insanity,
insolvency
or serious criminality’, were British subjects and any of the
following:89

(i) Lambardars. Each of the 33,421 villages would receive a

direct vote through their headmen. The incumbent had the
crucial qualification of being ‘the agent of Government for
certain purposes’. Therefore, all 65,327 lambardars90 would
be eligible to vote. Furthermore, a headman of more than
a single village would be allowed to vote in each village, ‘as
the intention [was] that headmen should vote not in their
individual but in their representative capacity’. Moreover,
there would be no minimum property qualification for
 them because a situation where one was excluded could
not be permitted.91 Approximately 65,000 headmen would
be enfranchised. A lambardar was an integral part of the
colonial state’s infiltration of the Punjab countryside and his
position had to be strengthened, even by exceptional rules,
to ensure that his vote, too, counted in the state’s favour.
(ii) Owners of land paying revenue of an annual amount to be
fixed, and crown tenants holding land under the Punjab
Colonisation of Land Act of 1912, or lessees for a term of not
less than ten years, subject to a similar property qualification.
O’Dwyer recommended a limit of Rs 75 per annum, which
would give a net total of about 60,000 voters.92 Once again,
the bias was in favour of the larger landlords, those almost
certain to support their paternal government.
(iii) All zaildars, sufedposhes,93 and inamdars. These ‘rural
notables’, though selected from the lambardars, were ‘of a
superior class in consideration of their merit, influence and
property’. Although nearly all of the 1,636 zaildars, and the
2,671 sufedposhes and inamdars were already enfranchised
as lambardars, the lieutenant governor wished to form a
special category to include exceptions. These dominant
elements of rural society, invested with additional prestige
by the colonial state, were similarly incorporated into the
electorate for mutual benefit, though only about a hundred
would be additionally enfranchised.
(iv) Those receiving assignments of land revenue. They ‘are an
important class, the grants being generally hereditary and
dating from the time of native rule’. These grants ranged from
many thousands to a few hundred rupees annually, and a
minimum limit of Rs 200 per annum was recommended,
giving an electorate of about 900 in the category.
(v) Non-official members of district boards resident in rural areas.
As they voted for the present Punjab legislative council, there
was no need to disenfranchise them, even though only 200
additional men would be given the vote.
(vi) Honorary magistrates and honorary sub-registrars resident
in rural areas. Again, most would already be voters; it was
desired that ‘the official status in question should qualify
the holder for a vote’. The clause would add only about 60
 to the electorate. Some of these government appointees were
retired military officers.94
(vii-a) ‘Retired and pensioned Indian Military officers above the
rank of Jamadar (i.e. the lowest commissioned rank)’. ‘These
would help to represent the military interest…’. Though
many would qualify as landowners, at least two thousand
would ‘be added to the electoral roll on account of military
rank alone’; this was an ‘underestimate’, as hundreds more
would be eligible once ‘present hostilities’ of the War ceased.
The local government was not in favour of enfranchising
anybody below the rank of jamadar ‘for fear of enfranchising
too large an electorate’.95 The simultaneous desire to keep
the franchise to a ‘manageable’ limit and to include the
important military class into the new scheme was achieved as
the Punjab government gave the vote to the most important
section of pensioned soldiers, retired Indian officers.
(vii-b) In contrast to military pensioners, civil pensioners of a
government
or a local body residing in rural areas, eligible only
if they drew a pension of not less than Rs 500 per annum.
This was a very high limit indeed, enfranchising only about
250 men in the whole province.
(viii) All rural residents paying an income tax, recommended at the
same level as the property qualification in case of landowners.
There were only 5,500 men in all of rural Punjab paying
income tax above Rs 52 per annum.
(ix) All presidents of agricultural co-operative societies registered
under the Co-operative Societies Act. Many of them would
qualify either as headmen or landowners, yet this category
would yield a further 2,000 voters.
(x) All ‘registered’ graduates of an Indian university residing in
rural areas. These numbered about 600 in Punjab.

The electorate by the above qualifications would make a grand

total of 161,610. Only 1 per cent of the rural population of over
18 million would thus be given the right to vote.96 This was surely
not an electorate that would adequately represent the 3.5 million
landowners to whom the government itself wanted to give a voice.
However, it did accommodate sections allied to the state, including
military men.
 Urban franchise was even more limited. All ‘able’ male British
subjects over twenty-one years would be eligible if they belonged
to any of the following categories: 97 (i) all income tax payers — but
no limit was set, as it was for rural income tax payers, as it was
declared that ‘Income-tax payers are as a class essentially an urban
interest’; (ii) registered graduates; (iii) retired military officers and
pensioners, as in rural constituencies; (iv) non-official members of
municipal and notified-area committees; (v) honorary magistrates
and honorary sub-registrars; (vi) presidents of urban co-operative
societies; (vii) owners of immovable property;98 (viii) lambardars
as such and owners of agricultural land situated in urban limits with
same property qualification as in rural areas; (ix) persons paying
direct municipal tax of Rs 50 per annum or more; (x) persons
occupying premises of an estimated annual value of not less than
Rs 120. This way, the urban electorate would consist of a total of
70,060 men, enfranchising only 3 per cent of the two million urban
population.99
The qualification of candidates for rural constituencies also
required state intervention to ensure that urban or nationalist
influence did not seep into the countryside. ‘It seems to His Honour
obvious that some special precautions must be taken to prevent so
far as possible the capture of rural seats by “carpet baggers” with
purely urban interests or by the nominees of a party caucus.’ Lack
of education in rural areas meant that it was the state’s duty to
aid ‘the political education of the rural masses’ by ensuring that
their candidates were men ‘fit to represent them in the reformed
councils’. Therefore, candidates in all constituencies were required
to be above twenty-five years of age, have a voter’s qualification in
that constituency, be literate, and have been resident for three years
in a rural, or one year in an urban, constituency. In addition, in rural
constituencies only, retired civil pensioners, but not military
pensioners,
income tax payers, and graduates would have to have an
additional voter qualification to be considered as a candidate.100
Each of these categories — civil pensioner, income tax payee,
graduate — was likely to have qualified urban people, and the
state precluded any possibility that they might be elected from
rural seats, despite the strict three-year residence requirement.
Military pensioners were, of course, no such threat. Moreover, if
all the above did not ensure that military interests were
adequately
represented in the electorate, it was even incorporated that
‘The six nominated non-official seats would be utilized to represent
the interests of the Army — there are now about 400,000 Punjabis
serving in the Indian Army…’.101
The combined influence of military and rural interests is best
seen in the seats allocated to the Sikhs as a ‘special’ community. The
Chief Khalsa Diwan, the most important social organization of the
Sikhs, had ‘earnestly urged that separate communal representation
be allowed to the Sikh community’, recommending that the council
be made of 75 members of which 50 would be elected, of which Sikhs
should be given 15 seats.102 Moreover, ‘There was a very strong
feeling indeed against amalgamating the Sikhs with the Hindus
or the Muhammadans.’103 The official representative of the Chief
Khalsa Diwan claimed one-third of the seats for his community
on the basis of Sikh representation in the army and in Punjab’s
aristocracy, the community’s educational achievements, and their
influence in the canal colonies. He also complained that the Sikhs
‘had been entirely left out of the consideration’ in the Lucknow
pact104 between the Congress and the Muslim League. 105
Government officers also indicated that the Sikh demand was
valid. The financial commissioner was against communal
representation
as a system except to provide a ‘security’ for Sikh demands
because proportional representation would not give them a ‘fair’
share. ‘The Sikhs on grounds of larger revenue payments, 106 of
military services, and of political and historical importance, claim
one-third of the representation: and perhaps expect one-fourth or
one-fifth’. 107 Another senior official spoke of the ‘strong possibility’ of
the Sikhs receiving another seat, making the total six.108
The Punjab government proposals to the Southborough
Committee
reported that ‘Sir Michael O’Dwyer has already expressed …
his agreement … that the Sikhs should be given communal
representation,
and he does not think this proposal requires further
justification.’ Just such a proposal had been defeated at a recent
meeting of the non-official members of the existing Punjab
Legislative Council but the Punjab government wished to argue the
case for the community. It was stated that the Sikhs were only two
million strong, or 11 per cent of the population, did not form the
majority in any district, ‘and could not hope to secure adequate
representation
save by means of communal electorates’. On the basis of
their population, they were entitled to between three or four seats
of the thirty-four to be elected. The government, however, argued
for more seats:
 But their influential position in the province, which is based partly on
historical and political factors, partly on their military prestige and partly
on their comparatively high educational-level and economic
importance
in the central and colony districts entitles them to a considerably
greater degree of representation than is indicated by numbers alone.
The number of Sikhs in the army is now believed to exceed 80,000 — a
proportion far higher than in the case of any other community — and
the amount which they pay to the State in the form of land revenue
and canal charges is out of all proportion to their numerical strength.
These considerations, in His Honour’s opinion, justify the allocation to
them of as many as 5 special seats.109

The recommendations of the Punjab government have been

enumerated in detail not only because they highlight the means
by which rural and military interests were incorporated into the
‘reform’ of the legislature, but also because these recommendations
remained the basis of future legislative reforms. The Southborough
Committee acknowledged that it had been able ‘to adhere to the
general lines of the schemes which the local governments prepared
for our consideration’ in the case of Punjab, too.110 It made a few
modifications, but none contradicted the principles of the rural-
urban differentiation enunciated by the Punjab government. For the
urban electorate, the only change was the halving of the immovable
property qualification of Rs 10,000 that had been proposed. For
rural franchise, a property qualification of land revenue of Rs 50
per annum was accepted and no changes were made to any other
Punjab government recommendation. It was specified that ‘Separ-
ate electoral rolls will be kept for Muhammadans and Sikhs. All
other electors will be entered in a general roll. No Muhammadan or
Sikh elector will be entered in the roll of the general electorate.’
Of the four seats in the ‘landholders’ constituency’, two would
go to Muslims, one to the Sikhs and one would be chosen by the
‘remainder’ on the landholders’ electoral roll. The only change that
was made to the latter was increasing the value of assignment to
Rs 500 from the Rs 200 per annum that the local government had
proposed. All the proposals recommended for candidature were
accepted in full.
In numerical terms, these recommendations increased the
urban electorate proposed by the local government by only 7,000
(to 77,000) while the rural franchise remained unchanged. The
urban electorate was 7.5 per cent of the urban male population, and
the rural electorate was only 1.6 per cent of the rural male
population,
while the total electorate of 2,37,000 was only 2.2 per cent
of the male population or 1.2 per cent of the total population. 111
The government’s control over the province would not only
remain unchallenged, but would also be strengthened by the
disproportionate inclusion of allies into the electorate behind the
reformed council.
The efforts of the Punjab government in creating a council where
its main allies would be easily accommodated and its potential
opponents limited were successful. In the first council in 1920,
there were 39 landowners, while the second council in 1924 had
31 landowners. ‘The result of the constitution of the electorate and
the constituencies is that the Council is on the whole predominantly
representative of the larger land-owning classes, the legal profession
is also well represented and to some extent overlaps the former
class.’112
The next major political reforms took place as a result of the
second Round Table Conference.113 The Lothian Committee,
set up in December 1931, asked the local governments for their
recommendations and submitted its report in 1932. The Punjab
Provincial Franchise Committee’s recommendations for rural
constituencies included reducing the property qualification for
landowners from Rs 25 to Rs 5 per annum in land revenue;
decreasing the property qualification for tenants from 24 acres
of irrigated or 48 acres of unirrigated land to 6 and 12 acres
respectively;
enfranchising all village servants who paid professions
tax (haisiyat) and all village shopkeepers and artisans who paid
haisiyat at or above the land revenue qualification for landowners.
The total number of non-agricultural tribes given the vote was
6,41,000. This meant a net rural electorate of 24,82,000. For urban
constituencies, the income tax qualification was reduced, which
meant a total of 2,63,000 voters. The total proposed electorate of
27,45,000 was only 11.7 per cent of the population.114
The Lothian Committee was not satisfied with these proposals.
‘It is, however, a most serious defect of the Punjab Government’s
scheme that only about 25 per cent of the electorate will consist of
members of non-agricultural tribes, whereas the non-agricultural
tribes form about half the population of the province.’ There
had been some difficulty in compiling this information and the
Committee only received the data a few days before submitting its
report. It then stated that:
We feel convinced, however, that its significance is such as to necessitate
further consideration of the whole scheme. The Punjab Land Alienation
Act confers great advantages, social and economic, on the members of
the agricultural tribes, and it would not be right to give them in addition
the political predominance they would gain if they formed three-quarters
of the electorate. We recognise that the non-agricultural tribes contain
a considerable element of the depressed classes and landless labourers
who would not obtain the vote under any franchise system based on
property and literacy qualifications, but even so it should be possible to
do more than has hitherto been attempted to correct the discrepancy
between the agricultural and non-agricultural tribes.115

This was not only an acknowledgement of the paternalism of the

Punjab government but also an indictment of that policy. Therefore,
the Lothian Committee recommended that ‘If it is found impossible
to secure a substantial increase in the number of members of
nonagricultural
tribes on the electoral roll, it may be necessary to
consider a reduction in the voting strength of the agricultural tribes.’
It suggested that the land revenue consideration be increased from
Rs 5 to Rs 10 per annum, which would reduce ‘agricultural votes’
by half a million ‘without disturbing the communal proportions
produced by the local government’s scheme’. 116
However, the Lothian Committee did not alter any of the other
principles first embodied in the Punjab government’s proposals
to the Southborough Committee in 1918. The majority favoured
‘retaining special representation for landlords’ even as it asked that
the representation be made ‘increasingly popular’ so that domination
by ‘great landlords’ became ‘correspondingly less’. The abolition of
this group was ‘not fair’ because they were ‘men of position who
exercise[d] an important influence in the countryside’, travelled and
acquired experience beyond their immediate locality, and were ‘well
qualified to speak with authority on matters affecting agriculture
and rural life’. In fact, the committee recommended that the number
of landlord seats be increased in proportion with the increased size
of the provincial legislature.117
The Southborough Committee recommendation that all retired
and pensioned non-commissioned and commissioned military officers
be enfranchised had been accepted for all provincial legislative
councils and approved by the British parliament in 1920. Punjab was
the only province where military men made a significant electorate,
numbering approximately 190,000. Madras had the next highest
at 20,000, many of whom were ‘not independently qualified to
vote’. The army department, however, said that the withdrawal of
the military service qualification for provincial legislatures ‘would
be likely to give rise to resentment in the army. All local governments
and provincial committees agree to its retention, and the majority
of us accept their unanimous recommendation’.118
The more far-reaching recommendations of the Lothian
Committee
concerned the ‘communal award’. The number of seats in
the Punjab legislative council was expanded to 175 but distributed
along communal lines. Thus, the Muslims received 79 seats, the
Sikhs had 32, and the ‘general’ category received 43. The remaining
went to landholders (5), Indian Christians (8), Anglo-Indians
(2), Europeans (1), commerce and industry (1), ‘special’ seats for
university (1), and labour (3).119
By the Government of India Act of 1935, Punjab got a unicameral
legislature, thereafter called the Punjab Legislative Assembly, and
the seats were thus distributed: ‘General’: 8 urban and 34 rural;
Muslims: 9 urban and 75 rural; Sikhs: 2 urban and 29 rural; and
18 ‘special’ seats. The franchise was extended, too. In rural
constituencies,
the right to vote was given to: (i) persons passing a primary
or a higher examination; (ii) literate women, or mothers or wives of
soldiers killed in the War, or wives of voters other than income tax
payers; (iii) income tax payers; (iv) owners, assignees of land or
lessees or tenants of crown land assessed for a minimum land revenue
of Rs 25 per annum; (v) title-holders; (vi) retired military officers
and non-commissioned officers; (vii) public servants in government
pay in local bodies (Yadav 1981: 16–18).120 Thus, no change was
made to the Punjab government’s first recommendations accepted
by the Southborough Committee.
The traditional allies — the landed aristocracy, government
appointees, military men (and their women), and title-holders —
remained on the electoral roll and continued their loyalist politics
through the Punjab Unionist Party (see Mazumder 2003: 247–56).
The opportunities for others, mainly urban, educated, and ‘non-
agricultural tribes’, were not increased in the same proportion as
those for rural Punjab. Despite its criticisms, the Lothian Committee
initiated no substantial changes to either the provisions or the
impact of the earlier recommendations. Its censure of the existing
dominance of the ‘agricultural tribes’ seems hollow, suggesting it
was only paying lip-service to the increased political ambitions of
Indians. Perhaps the special nature of Punjab restricted the award
of greater political freedom, particularly to those who did not belong
to the ‘agricultural tribes’.
Other Paternal Policies
Other concessions also sought to ensure that military districts
provided recruits and that the recruited peasantry remained quietly
prosperous. These measures, specifically targeted at ‘agricultural
tribes’, also strengthened the position of the ex-servicemen in rural
society and, thereby, their appreciation of the benevolence of the
colonial state.
The Support of the Indian Soldiers’ Board
The Indian Soldiers’ Board was established in 1919 with ‘its duties
centre[d] around the home welfare of the Indian soldier, past and
present, and his dependants’ (Indian Soldiers’ Board Report,
1929: 1). Although it was for the benefit of all soldiers of British
India, Punjab naturally had a pre-eminence, reflected in the fact
that its governor was the only head of a province on the Board.121
The Provincial Soldiers’ Boards were directly under the aegis of
the Indian Soldiers’ Board, and had the task of creating District
Soldiers’ Boards. The object was to build up the latter in all the
areas where the army recruited (Indian Soldiers’ Board Report,
1929: 2).
The ‘welfare scheme’ of these boards indicates the advantages to
its members: to maintain as complete as possible a list of serving
and deceased soldiers in the district and of their dependants; to
circulate information regarding educational concessions to their
children; to circulate information regarding employment, training
for civilian vocations and concessions to discharged soldiers; to
communicatewith the absent soldier and his family and pass news from
one to the other;122 ‘to procure legal advice in the case of a law suit
against an absent soldier where there is no male member of his
family capable of protecting his interests’; to assist absent soldiers’
families in times of disease or famine; to investigate applications for
various military charitable funds; and to assist ex-soldiers get their
medals, pensions, arrears, and so on (Indian Soldiers’ Board Report,
1929: 2–3). Treatment and provision of artificial limbs was made
available, as was instruction in suitable trades to add to the means
of livelihood of the disabled.123
In 1926, the Punjab Soldiers’ Board distributed 3,638 medals,
investigated 1,486 pension cases (relief was granted in 285 cases),
perused over 1,100 scholarship claims, secured 1,355
appointments
in government service and disposed of ‘a large number’ of
miscellaneous cases regarding applications for land grants and
revenue remissions (Indian Soldiers’ Board Report, 1926: 2). By
1930, Punjab had active District Soldiers’ Boards in twenty-six of
its twenty-nine districts.
The disproportionate focus on the province that the Indian
Soldiers’ Board maintained is provided in its allocation of funds, too.
In January 1929, it disbursed Rs 12,000 to Punjab. The North-West
Frontier Province, a part of Punjab till 1901, was the next highest
recipient with Rs 4,100. Amongst some of the works undertaken
by the District Soldiers’ Board in Punjab was the construction of a
‘Soldiers’ Home’ in Shahpur, to mitigate accommodation problems
faced by military men from the rural areas of the district during visits
to the town. Rest-houses for pensioners were also built in Mianwali,
Gujranwala, sanctioned for Attock, and proposed for Hissar by
1930. The Jullundur District Soldiers’ Board arranged for free
advisory services from legal practitioners when necessary. In the
North-West Frontier Province, investigations led to the sanctioning
of 56 pensions.124
In 1919, a pension of Rs 5 per month for life, in addition to any
other pensions held, was provided to those totally blinded during
the war. After 1922, it was paid for by the Indian Soldiers’ Board
Fund. By 1926, the market value of the Fund was Rs 11,29,862
(Indian Soldiers’ Board Report, 1926: 4).
The Indian Soldiers’ Board also administered the Indian Army
Benevolent Fund, begun in 1914 from ‘subscription from various
sources’ to ‘afford further assistance, through various official
agencies, to the dependants of combatants and non-combatants
belonging to the Indian Army … who had lost their lives as a
result of the war and also to assist those suffering from disabilities
due to the war’.125 Resources from the surplus funds of the Indian
Soldiers’ Board were invested to form the Indian Army Benevolent
Fund, particularly to alleviate the hardships of those military men
whose ‘distress cannot be attributed to field or foreign service’ and
who are consequently ineligible for any government assistance.
This amounted to a not meagre Rs 5.3 lakh, to which the capital
of Rs 59,100 of the Indian Followers’ Relief Fund was added. The
state was providing not only for those who had served in war or
those who had been injured in active service, but also for those
military men who were not eligible for such assistance because their
regiments had not seen action.
Preferential Employment
The government’s policy was to provide preferential positions to
war veterans:
Instructions have been issued to give, where possible, a preference to
ex-soldiers for vacancies in government employment: lists of men desiring
work have been maintained: district committees have, in many cases,
been formed with the object of assisting soldiers to find work: the help
and co-operation of business firms and Chambers of Commerce has been
freely enlisted and readily and generously given.126

That this was not being pursued satisfactorily is evident from the
curt note from the recruiting officer, Jullundur, to the secretary of
the Punjab Soldiers’ Board, where he alluded to the Punjab
government’s
letter specifying such preference, and alleged that military
men were being deliberately kept out.127 Similar, though official,
correspondence was sent from the Punjab home secretary to the
registrar of the High Court and all heads of departments,
commissioners,
deputy commissioners, and district and sessions judges
to redress ‘in some districts [the] real destitution owing to lack of
employment among families whose only subsistence has been
military
service’.128
The recruiting officer’s letter resulted in the secretary of the
Punjab Soldiers’ Board sending a circular to all those concerned,
requesting details of the number of vacancies that came up in the
last year, how many veterans applied and how many of them were
employed. The police had appointed the highest number, 1,119
out of 2,729 applicants in 1921–22 alone, and there were 2,159 ex-
soldiers already employed in the force.129
The soldiers were not only given special preference in government
employment but were also excluded from involuntary labour. This
was no doubt a social privilege and the policy was not restricted
to British India but applied in princely states, too, where soldiers
lived.130 These exemptions went back to 1891 when the Home
Department exempted soldiers, reservists and pensioners of the
native army from impressment. The state clearly indicated that
military men were not to be treated as ordinary peasants — neither
in its own territory, nor in those of Indian princes.
Protective Legislation
In order to shield soldiers from revenue litigation in their absence,
the Indian Soldiers’ (Litigation) Ordinance was promulgated in May
1915, which later became the Indian Soldiers’ (Litigation) Act. The
object of the Act was: ‘…to safeguard the interests of those soldiers
who are unable to attend their cases. Soldiers are serving the cause
of the State at the cost of considerable personal sacrifice, and it
is but natural that the State should be anxious to safeguard their
interests as best as it can’ (Goswamy 1945: 20–21).
The Act included the compulsory mentioning in any plaint,
application or appeal that a soldier was an ‘adverse party’ in the
proceedings; the suspension and postponement of proceedings to
which an Indian soldier was party if he were unable to attend court
because of active duty; the power to cancel decrees and orders passed
against a soldier serving in war or under special circumstances;
and the power to apply provisions of this Act in Indian states, too
(Goswami 1945: 2–4).
In Rohtak district, ordinances were issued safeguarding soldiers’
interests in civil disputes before the Soldiers’ Litigation Act was
passed.131 However, several disputes ‘of a domestic nature chiefly’
were addressed to the deputy commissioner, who was expected to
provide relief. Out of this arose the Special Branch Office in the
district, ‘a kind of legal and miscellaneous advice Bureau to look
after the interests of absent sepoys’. This office dealt with ‘military
petitions’, ‘verification rolls’, family pension papers, applications for
relief, enquiry into status of dependants of soldiers, ‘distribution of
estate money’ and distribution of relief money. Thus, not only the
Government of India but also deputy commissioners on the spot
were sympathetic to the difficulties faced by soldiers’ families and
took proactive measures to provide succour. These may have been
seen particularly in the context of the World War I, but that conflict
had resulted in an unprecedented situation at home in Punjab,
and the colonial state was keen and quick to proffer support to its
recruited peasantry.
Bureaucratic Connections
Access to various levels of the bureaucracy was yet another way
soldiers’
influence in the villages was strengthened. The appointment of
ex-servicemen as zaildars, tahsildars, and other native members of
civil administration ensured that families with military connections
had easier access to these petty, but locally influential, officials.
However,
the military nexus with Punjab’s civil administration went
all the way up to the Indian Civil Service, too, and this was
particularly
strong until the last decades of the nineteenth century,
when many army officers were appointed to civil positions in the
Punjab government.
One of the salient features of the early civil administration of
Punjab was the high number of military officers that made up the
local government. This was not unexpected on the crucial
northwestern
frontier, but there were military men in interior districts,
too. There was a definite policy towards including military officers;
some of those who had performed well in the Second Anglo-Sikh
War were directly inducted into the early administration.132 By
1855, 13 of the 21 deputy commissioners and 14 of the 17 assistant
commissioners held military ranks (Punjab Administration Report,
1854–56: 119).
In addition to the above, the officers of the Corps of Guides, a
purely military body, had ‘magisterial powers to enable them to be
employed if needful in police duties: indeed, Lieutenant Lumsden
had civil charge of all Peshawur for a year after Lieutenant
Colonel G. Lawrence’s departure, and has since continued in civil
and military charge of Eusufzye [Yusufzai]’ (Punjab
Administration
Report, 1849–51: 40). It was difficult to say whether some of
Punjab’s districts were under a civil or a military administration!
The prevalence of ‘military civilians’ (van den Dungen 1972: 13)
in the bureaucracy reduced over time, but it did not cease totally.
Provincial administration continued to be carried out partly by
men in the Indian Civil Service and ‘partly by men selected from
the Army for civil employment’ and, according to one lieutenant
governor, ‘the administration was all the better for this broad system
of recruitment’ (O’Dwyer 1925: 28).
It is not easy to quantify the import of having military men in
the civil administration in terms of the benefit of it to the recruited
peasantry. The following may be a pointer. The district soldiers’
boards held monthly meetings in the presence of the deputy
commissioner, the commanding officers of units in the locality, and
recruiting officers.133 It was through such interaction that soldiers
and pensioners were able to have their voices heard and grievances
aired to a degree perhaps impossible for the lay peasantry. Military
service not only brought economic benefit; it also enabled relatively
substantial connections with the civil bureaucracy, at all levels,
adding to the social prestige of recruited groups and extending their
influence. Further, while the government may have gained some
hold over rural areas through the native bureaucracy, it had also
enabled access to the state, particularly by those whose brethren
were appointed to these posts.
Education
Education was an expensive undertaking, and additional incomes
from military service may have been one of the reasons why soldiers
were able to invest in the schooling of their children (Mazumder
2003: 42–43). The state was also willing to provide special privileges
to military families: free education up to the high school level was
promised for the children of deceased or disabled soldiers, with the
additional possibility of ‘adequate scholarships’ for college
education
for those qualified.134 Furthermore, subsidized education was
provided for the children of deceased or incapacitated soldiers after
the World War I.135 Moreover, there were army school(s), dating
back to the 1870s, in every cantonment and it was recommended
that their funding ought to be regularized, and be a minimum
proportion
of the Cantonment Fund.136 The King Emperor’s Patriotic
Fund for the building and equipping of the King George’s Royal
Indian Military Schools ‘for the education of the children of Indian
soldiers’ had paid Rs 7,84,874 by 1926 for a school each in Jhelum
and Jullundur, both in Punjab (Indian Soldiers’ Board Report,
1926: 4).
Punjab, the Indian Army and British Colonialism
The above account has covered a lot of ground from the post-
1849 settlement of land rights to electoral reforms in the 1930s.
They indicate the direct and indirect connections between state
directives and military imperatives. The considerable help of the
tribal chieftains of western Punjab during the Mutiny was repaid
by moulding settlement policy to include the state’s new-found
allies, rather than restricting it to peasant proprietors. Zails and
zaildars were used to incorporate both the petty zamindars of
the eastern half of the province and the feudal lords in western
districts. These peasant proprietors and tribal chieftains belonged
to the ‘martial races’ the Indian army exclusively recruited from.
The Punjab government successfully managed to penetrate rural
society through its pragmatic land settlement policy. Its allies, in
turn, provided both rural stability and sufficient recruits. More
direct provisions for soldiers were made by the various soldiers’
boards, in preferential employment for them in government
service,
in legislation protecting them from litigation while on service,
and in providing for the education of their children. Access to all
levels of the bureaucracy and the benefit of preferential grants in
the canal colonies were yet more ways in which servicemen were
made better-off than non-recruited groups.
However, the Punjabization of the army led to the predicament,
previously encountered in 1857, where highly skewed enlistment
restricted to a limited area and specific groups could always fan
another revolt, if sufficient cause for discontent was present:
Northern India, i.e., the Punjab and the United Provinces, is the region
in which a successful rebellion would be fraught with the most serious
consequences. It is the great recruiting ground of the Indian army, and a
revolt of its martial population, which might easily spread to the troops,
would tax the military resources of the Government to the uttermost.
Delhi is the strategic centre of Northern India upon which the railways
from Bombay and Calcutta converge, and from which other lines radiate
to Peshawar, Quetta, and Karachi. To hold Delhi, the Imperial capital,
is to dominate Northern India, and to dominate the latter is to ensure
the submission and tranquillity of less warlike portions of the country,
such as the Dekhan, Bengal and Madras.137

A paramount concern of post-1857 government policy was to

prevent any grievance that could lead to such agitation. This was
among the strategic concerns of the ‘Punjab school’, epitomized
in Thorburn’s stubborn persistence and dedicated polemics, that
became a major catalyst in the passage of the uniquely
interventionist
Land Alienation Act. ‘Political’ revenue assessment in
military districts indicated that economic loss was preferred to
possible disaffection, even as the state tried to pre-empt that very
possibility. The case of Prinsep’s settlement suggests that just
the suspicion of discontent was enough to force the state to take
ameliorative measures, even if it entailed reversing previous policy.
The electoral reforms indirectly highlight the strategic compulsions
of the colonial state, but the underlying paternalism is more easily
discerned. The preferential rural representation in the electorate
and the limited urban franchise was another means of investing
the allies with greater power, even as it extended the state’s
influence.
The success of the Punjab Unionist Party, a staunch ally of
the British, had much to do with the constitution of the electorate,
and its loyalist politics reinforced the reciprocity. 138 Paradoxically,
colonialism had become circumscribed by the Indian army, the
institution that most unambiguously represented the coercive might
of the British Raj.
The great extent to which policy could be adjusted to assuage
disaffection in militarized districts is brought about in the withdrawal
of the Colonisation Bill and reduction of water rates in 1907, and the
passage of the Gurdwaras Act in 1925 (Mazumder 2003: 202–30).
Both reflect the faith of the ‘Punjab school’ in the benefits of
paternalism, their complacent trust in their beneficiaries, and their
disregard for urban political movements. These agitations indicate
that paternalism did not guarantee everlasting, unquestioning
harmony. In 1907 and in 1925, a highly recruited community forced
the imperial governments of the day to compromise, and on its
terms. Colonialism in Punjab was restrained by the very men who
provided the state with its armed forces.

Concluding Remarks
The impact of military expenditure and access to military funds
created a social and economic base on which a particular loyalist
ideology emerged among Punjab’s recruited communities. The
soldier was made to, and did, see that his advantage lay in being
the loyal and obedient servant of an indulgent master. However,
it was not a simple patron–client relationship, for the recruiting
districts were potentially more ‘dangerous’ than the rest of Punjab.
The many layers of interaction the state had, and had to have,
with the military classes show that a militarized province needed
special nurture and extremely careful treatment of its peoples.
This affected the subsequent nature of colonialism in Punjab.
A curiously symbiotic relationship between the state and its
militarized
peasantry emerged that led to a unique colonial experience
for Punjab as well as for the ‘martial’ Punjabis.
The state realized the critical importance of Punjab in its
capability to enforce imperial rule and this coupled with the
improvingzeal of colonial officials to give rise to the ‘Punjab school’
of administration. The ideology of these civil servants was based
on the belief that greater consideration of existing social and other
norms ought to be given when governing the ‘loyal’ province in
order to maintain the mutually beneficial relationship. 139 The
colonial
state nourished rural Punjab through economic and legal
concessions, embodied in the Punjab Alienation of Land Act, the
franchise policy, ‘political’ revenue assessment, canal colonization,
in compromise during agitations by recruited groups, and so on. In
turn, the province continued to provide increasing revenue — and
more recruits.
The reciprocal relationship was not uncomplicated. The
agitations
of 1906–7 and the Akali movement show the precarious balance
between favoured groups and the colonial state (Mazumder 2003:
202–30). However, the state successfully contained discontent as
soon as the Punjab government saw the real nature of the respective
agitations, and compromised. The fact that disaffection did not
spread to the regiments during both instances, and that peace
returned almost immediately after the government accommodated
demands, suggests that opposition to the government was based
on limited grievances over particular, localized issues.
The above analysis highlights the interaction between the army
and certain sections of society that resulted in a unique political
environment in Punjab under colonialism. The colonial military
budget may have been detrimental for the Indian economy as a
whole but military expenditure benefited Punjab and the recruited
Punjabis (Mazumder 2003: 19–46). The ramifications of the
special relationship between militarized peasants and the British
government affected colonialism and politics in Punjab.
In every instance of policy initiative analyzed here — from
revenuesettlement in the 1840s to legislative reforms ninety years
later — the imperial state in India showed that its main concern in
Punjab was to keep the recruited peasantry in good humour. This
raises doubts whether either of the ‘modernization’ or the ‘world
systems’ approach can single-handedly explain diverse modernities.
The periphery here (Punjab) was dictating to the centre (the
Government of India) in policies concerning revenue, law,
legislatures,
employment and education.140 That as significant a pillar
of British economic policy as laissez-faire could be overturned to
placate local groups only points to the validity of the thesis that
every empire, ‘western’ or ‘oriental’, has had to negotiate with its
constituents. Moreover, in every instance of legal intervention seen
in this essay, local, pre-colonial, and non-European modes had to
be accommodated into the ‘western’ legal interventions made. At
times, the new laws either ignored precedents established in Britain
as well as in other provinces in India, or were never instituted
elsewhere in the subcontinent. What evolved in British Punjab was
the result of the interaction of a powerful, global, ‘western’ empire
forced to compromise with dynamic local communities and deep-
rooted, resilient traditions. Mr Kipling was incorrect: ‘East’ and
‘West’ did meet. The result was a hybrid — neither fully ‘western’
nor completely ‘eastern’.
Who is to define what this hybrid represents? How is it to be
analyzed? Can or should we call this process ‘modernization’,
resulting in some kind of ‘modernity’ for the concerned society?
The answers will remain opinions — complicated by the debilitating
contradiction that the language in which we are conducting this
conversation remains one of the abiding legacies of the hegemonic
power of the ‘West’.

Notes
* The following convention was followed in quoting from Government
of India or Government of Punjab files: the relevant government
(GoI or GoP), followed by the department (Revenue and Agriculture,
for example), the proceedings volume (A, B or C), month and date,
file number(s). Thus, the ‘Proceedings of the Government of India in
the Revenue and Agriculture Department, Land Revenue Branch, B
Proceedings, July 1922, nos. 12–14’, is quoted as, ‘GoI, R&A (LR), B,
July 1922, nos. 11–14.’
† While quoting official correspondence, only the title of the
correspondents
has been used, unless the names are relevant. Further, the
correspondents’ designation has been standardized and simplified.
Thus, ‘From J. Wilson-Johnston, Secretary, Department of Home,
Government of Punjab and its Dependencies to Secretary to the
Government of India in the Home Department, 23 February 1915’
 is quoted as ‘Home Secretary, Punjab to Home Secretary, India,
23 February 1915’.

1. ‘India’ in this essay will hereafter refer to ‘British India’, the subcontinent
under British rule: chronologically, 1757–1947; geographically, including
Pakistan and Bangladesh. Post-1947 India will specifically be referred
to as such.
2. Some of the following arguments were first made in my monograph
(Mazumder 2003). I am grateful to the publisher for permission to
include
extracts here.
3. Punjab, the region analyzed in the following, was an exception proving
the rule of an otherwise exploitative regime. Even in Punjab, however,
policies were directed to promote or placate specific groups, and
excluded the majority. See Mazumder (2003).
4. The nature of the state in British India thus changed over time. Its
coercive power also fluctuated with Britain’s industrial strength and
its position in the international economic order. The illogic of positing
such vast entities as ‘the West’ in static, undifferentiated terms becomes
apparent. Moreover, there was a stark contradiction in the fact that
Britain, arguably the world’s most ‘progressive’ democracy of the time,
was simultaneously acquiring its global empire. This contradiction was
eloquently highlighted by the early Indian nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji
(Naoroji 1901).
5. The rise of Germany and the United States as economic and military
rivals, the two World Wars with the intervening Depression, and the
spread of socialist ideologies are just some of the factors.
6. Warren Hastings, governor-general in 1774–85, wished to create an
‘acculturated’ British bureaucracy combining practices and knowledge
of the ‘East’ and the ‘West’. There was a marked difference between
British attitudes toward India and Indians in this phase (dominated
by the ‘Orientalists’) and in the ‘Anglicist’ era that followed. This era
was one of confident superiority, influenced by patronizing Evangelism
and supported by the evergrowing power of industrializing Britain. In
1835, Anglicization resulted in Thomas Macaulay’s famous Minute
on Education, which persuaded the government to promote the
extension of western subjects in the English language, and led to
the replacement of Persian with English as the official language of
governance. Thus, South Asian history also vindicates the notion of a
‘late divergence’ between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’.
7. Indicating that perhaps Hegelian dialectics fits diverse global
‘modernities’, at least in terms of states and state-formation, better
than the Weberian ideal-type of ‘the’ rational state.
 8. Situated in the northwest of British India, Punjab became the favoured
recruiting ground of the British Indian army after 1857. It featured
prominently in the Great Game as it bordered Afghanistan, and its
military significance rose substantially as it became the focus of the
struggle between imperial Britain and Tsarist Russia for influence in
central Asia.
British Punjab was partitioned between India and Pakistan after
independence in 1947. In this essay ‘Punjab’ refers to the undivided
province, unless otherwise mentioned.
British India was made up of many provinces; Punjab was one of
them. The provinces were further subdivided into districts, which were
made up of tahsils, and a few ‘circles’ constituted a tahsil.
9. This essay restricts itself to commenting on the nature of colonialism and
state policies. For a discussion of other issues, see Mazumder (2003).
10. The Sikhs were the erstwhile rulers of Punjab, and made up the
dominant
community in the eastern half of the province. They remain one
of the most intensively recruited communities in the world.
11. For the military influence on canal colonization, see Mazumder
(2003: 64–68). The remaining issues are discussed in the following.
12. A ‘Resident’ was the official representative of the British Government
of India in the court of independent princely states.
13. 1 lakh = 100,000.
14. Henry Lawrence to Secretary to Government of India, with the
Governor-General, 2nd October 1847, Note on the Revenue and the
Resources of the Punjab. Also see, Domin (1974: 15, 24–26). Domin
further argues that revenue and other resources of Punjab were
necessary for the financial health of the colonial state.
15. The title of this report changed over the years, and it became an annual
publication from 1859; to maintain consistency it will hereafter be
referred to as Punjab Administration Report.
16. Barrier 1966a: 3–5. A Punjab officer called it ‘the patriarchal system’
where the people acknowledged the district officer as their ‘ma-baap’
[mother and father]. Thorburn (1886: 116).
17. He was one of the seniormost officials in Punjab in 1857, and viceroy
of India during 1864–69.
18. The first ‘regular’ settlement was made between 1840–60, depending
on when the district came under British rule. Only three districts,
in West Punjab, had their first regular settlement after 1870 (Douie
1908: 12).
19. The Mutiny is one of the most important events in British Indian
history. Begun as a revolt by certain regiments of the native army, it
spread to become a general rebellion to overthrow British supremacy
and re-install the Mughal emperor. Its importance lies in the fact
 that it affected subsequent policy-making, because pre-empting such
a conflagration remained uppermost in colonial considerations.
20. Prudent government policy that had removed any cause for agrarian
discontent was held to be one of the reasons (Thorburn 1886: 52).
Sikh dislike of Hindustani troops, the opportunity to avenge Mughal
atrocities, particularly the murder of the last Guru Gobind Singh,
and the prospect of sacking Delhi, were cited as additional reasons why
the Sikhs sided with the British (Thorburn 1904: 197–98).
21. The following families among others supported the British: the Tiwanas
of Shahpur, the Khokhars and the Janjuas of Jhelum, the Gakhars of
Rawalpindi, the Khattars and the Awans of Attock, the Sials of Jhang,
and the Quereshis of Multan (Griffin and Massy 1910: 180–82, 209–10,
216, 239, 266, 270, 301, 306). This assistance was unanticipated by
the Punjab government, for the Mutiny aimed at re-establishing the
Mughal emperor and all the above-mentioned clans were Muslim.
22. A Punjab government official, Tupper, rose to become Punjab’s
financial
commissioner. Hereafter, financial commissioner = FC.
23. Also see Ibbetson (1916: 5, 10–11, 14–16).
24. For the change in the inclination of Arthur Brandreth, the settlement
officer of Jhelum, from favouring ‘small holders cultivating their own
land’ before 1857 to becoming ‘an adherent of an aristocratic land
policy’ thereafter, see van den Dungen (1972: 32–33). Among other
reasons, small holders were disregarded because Brandreth had come
to believe that ‘In any case they exerted no influence, they were
apathetic and would not help the British in a crisis’.
25. Douie describes an inam as ‘a cash allowance paid to secure the
services
of a man of influence’ (in Douie 1899: iv). Aninamdar (mentioned
later in his essay), was someone who held an inam. The position of
inamdar was similar to that of a zaildar.
26. They were reputed to make ‘capital soldiers and the best light cavalry
in Upper India’ (Ibbetson 1916: 168).
27. See, for example, Annual Class Returns 1919, pp. 364–67: Awans
(26,691), Biluches (4,271), Gakhars (4,888), Khattars (1,362), Syeds
(4,399), Musalman Rajputs (29,441 + 8,360 of Cis-Sutlej Punjab).
Janjuas, Noons and Sials were all Muslim Rajputs. These were purely
Punjabi ‘classes’. The following is the number of men from the ‘classes’
of the peasant proprietors, referred to subsequently: Ahirs (6,061),
Hindu Jats (24,914), Jat Sikhs (56,205), Kambohs (1,057), Labanas
(5,041), Mughals (5,522), ‘Musalman Jats’ (15,827), Gujars (10,001
Muslims + 3,228 Hindus), Hindu Rajputs, excluding Dogras (8,016),
Sainis (2,435). Figures in brackets are Punjabis in the army from
these ‘classes’ on 1 January 1919. There were 29,584 Dogras, 36,573
‘Pathans’, and 1,669 ‘Multani and Derajat Pathans’, too — all of whom
were given land rights. The 1919 figures are obviously exceptional,
 but highlight the contribution of these communities. For numbers in
1925, showing the same trend, see Note 42. For other years, see any
of the Annual Class Returns.
28. For a detailed analysis of the impact of the ideological and intellectual
training of British officers on policy formation in Punjab, see Dewey
1972. For the argument that ‘Practically all the ideas which suggested
that legislation was feasible or desirable were drawn from Punjab and
Indian experience’ of British officers, and the ‘social influence’ of this
local experience, see van den Dungen (1972) (quotation on p. 300). It
is not suggested that military matters were solely responsible for the
shift in policy that culminated in the Land Alienation Act of 1900.
The apprehension that the alienation of land from the ‘martial races’
by the bania was a potential for rebellion was an additional factor
in the reversal in government policy from laissez faire to protective
legislation.
29. ‘The Board [of Administration, for Punjab] desire that substantial
justice should be plainly dealt out to a simple people, unused to the
intricacies of legal proceedings. Their aim is to avoid all technicality,
circumlocution and obscurity; to simplify and abridge every rule,
procedure, and process.’ (Punjab Administration Report, 1849–51: 76)
Moreover, it was expected that ‘the presiding officer should throw his
whole mind into the case, and should thoroughly realize to himself
the position and feelings of both the plaintiff and the defendant, the
credibility of the witnesses, the authenticity of documents, and the
probabilities of the case’ (Ibid.: 79). Also see Thorburn (1886: 75).
30. The code required that Punjab administrators ‘should not only know
something of the European jurisprudence, the Indian Regulations, and
the Oriental system of law, but also that they should have some insight
into the usage of trade, the practice of the land-holding community, the
tenets of the Seikh [sic] sect, the manner of Hill and Frontier tribes’
(Punjab Administration Report, 1851–53: 89. Emphasis added).
31. See Thorburn 1886. The whole book deals with the issue, but of
particular significance is ‘Chapter VIII. Present Condition of the
Musalman Agriculturists of the Western Punjab’, pp. 73–92, which
quotes settlement reports for all the districts to prove that the
government had ignored what the Settlement Officers had been
reporting for at least a decade. The following chapters bring out the
extent of the author’s concern and the direction he hoped government
would move in: ‘IX: Restrictions in Free Trade in Land Necessary’;
‘X: Restrictions on the Free Transfer of Land’; ‘XI: Reform in our
Land Revenue System in Rainless Tracts’; ‘XII: Civil Justice for
Agriculturists’; ‘XIII: Reform in Civil Law and Procedure’.
32. He was factually correct, though. See Notes 27, 42 or any Annual
Return Showing the Class Composition of the Indian Army. Therefore,
 it was not merely rhetoric on Thorburn’s part to outflank official
opponents
— the possibility of unrest spreading from their homes to the
regiments that recruited among these groups was not insignificant.
33. Note on Land Transfer and Agricultural Indebtedness in India, pp. 47,
249, in Government of India, Revenue & Agriculture (Land Revenue),
A, October 1895, Nos. 72–73. Hereafter, Note on Land Transfer.
Also, hereafter: Government of India = GoI; Revenue & Agriculture
Department = R&A.
34. Banerjee 1982: 97; Barrier 1966a: 23–24; Bhatia 1987: 94–96. Three
instances were quoted in confidential government reports: the Mahsud
Waziri raid on Tank in 1881, the Isa Khel affair of 1893, and the Mohmand
raid on Shabkadar in 1897 (Dewey 1972: 9). According to Dewey,
only the second was like a riot, but he agrees that the ‘bureaucracy’s
sensitivity to agrarian unrest’ had ‘increased’ (Ibid.: 9–11).
35. Anne C. Wilson, writing in 1895, quoted in Barrier (1966a: 25. Emphasis
added). While reflecting the stereotypes carried by colonial officials,
it lays the blame on the moneylenders. Thorburn, in contrast, had
the honesty and courage to lay the blame for land transfers on British
government policy. The italicized sentence highlights yet again the
relevance of Punjab’s recruited peasantry on official perceptions, a
reading that eventually affected government policy.
36. After 1858, India was directly administered by the Crown. A member
of the ruling British cabinet was appointed secretary of state for India
[SOSI], and headed the India Office in London. Reporting directly to
the SOSI was the viceroy of India — to whom reported all the
governors
and lt. governors of the Indian provinces.
37. Barrier (1966a) is the most exhaustive study of the history of the Act.
Also see Note on Land Transfer and GoI, R&A (Revenue), A, December
1891, Nos 10–11 for some of the official correspondence relating to
it. The intellectual positioning is more detailed in Dewey (1972), and
experiential influences are studied in van den Dungen (1972).
38. C. L. Tupper, FC, Punjab, 7 September 1896, refuting F. A. Robertson
(one of just three laissez faire proponents among Punjab revenue
officers by this time, who believed that transfers allowed better
agriculturists take over land from inefficient ones). Emphasis added.
Also see ibid.: 192–93.
39. Ibbetson, a Punjab officer (later its lieutenant governor) and a
proponent of state paternalism, was the revenue and agriculture
secretary of India when he made this argument.
40. GoI note [by Ibbetson?] quoted in Barrier (1966a: 115).
41. See, Anand (1924): Appendix A — Notified Tribes.
42. Each of these groups was enumerated in the Annual Class Return,
1925, pp. 96–99: Ahirs (1,922), Arains (915), Awans (9,409), Baluchis
 (430 + 1,827 ‘Hill Baluchis’), Gakhars (1,934), Gujars (2,478 Muslim
+ 423 Hindu), Hindu Jats (5,114), Jat Sikhs (18,017), Kambohs (338),
Khattars (247), Labanas (2,206), Mahtons (486), Mughals (1,967),
‘Musalman Jats’ (2,918), ‘Punjabi Pathans’ (1,360 + 20,750 ‘Pathans’),
Qureshis (426), Hindu Rajputs, excluding Dogras, (1,372), Musalman
Rajputs (15,099 + 2,019 Ranghars), Sainis (808), Syeds (1,223).
Figures in brackets are Punjabis in the army from these ‘classes’ on
1 January 1925. Janjuas and Sials were Muslim Rajputs. Dogras were
Hindu Rajputs and Brahmins, and they numbered 14,307. ‘Thakur’
could mean either Brahmin or Rajput — both recruited ‘classes’. The
classification in the Class Returns, which included the above groups,
did not change after 1914. For the numbers in 1919, see Note 27.
43. After the Act was passed in 1900, the Government of India let it be
amended in the Punjab Legislative Council in 1907, 1919, 1920, 1927
and 1931 (Barrier 1966a: 114).
44. Prinsep’s Settlements: 1092.
45. Prinsep to Secretary to Financial Commissioners, Punjab, 7 June 1871
in Prinsep’s Settlements: 1079.
46. Prinsep had reduced the government’s share from 66% of net assets to
50%, and the revenue demand for Amritsar division was less than this
share. Officiating Secretary to FC, Punjab to Officiating Secretary,
Punjab, 17 August 1871 in Prinsep’s Settlements: 1094. However,
50% of net assets was to become the norm for maximum assessment
hereafter (See Douie 1899: 142–43).
47. Officiating Secretary to FC, Punjab to Officiating Secretary, Punjab,
17 August 1871, in Prinsep’s Settlements: 1098, 1101.
48. ‘Proceedings of the Hon’ble the Lieutenant-Governor, Punjab in the
Department of Agriculture, Revenue and Commerce, No. 879 dated
24 June 1872’, in Prinsep’s Settlements: 1103–104.
49. Secretary to the Government of India to Secretary to Government,
Punjab, 25 September 1872, in Prinsep’s Settlements: 1104–105.
50. Lit. ‘easterners’, a reference to the region from which the Bengal Army
had recruited.
51. A minute by the Commander-in-Chief quoted in No. 303, from
Agriculture, Revenue and Commerce Secretary, India to Secretary to
Government, Punjab, 10 April 1873, in Prinsep’s Settlements: 1105.
52. Agriculture, Revenue and Commerce Secretary, India to Secretary to
Government, Punjab, 10 April 1873, in Prinsep’s Settlements: 1106.
53. Secretary to Government, Punjab to Agriculture, Revenue and
Commerce Secretary, India, 2 May 1873, in Prinsep’s Settlements:
1106.
54. Agriculture, Revenue and Commerce Secretary, India to Secretary to
Government, Punjab, 26 May 1873, in Prinsep’s Settlements: 1108.
55. Secretary to FC, Punjab to Secretary to Government, Punjab,
8 September 1873, in Prinsep’s Settlements: 1109.
56. Paragraph based on Secretary to Government, Punjab to Agriculture,
Revenue and Commerce Secretary, India, 16 September 1873, in
Prinsep’s Settlements: 1119–20, 1122–23.
57. Paragraph based on Secretary to Government of India to Secretary to
Government, Punjab, 29 October 1873 in Prinsep’s Settlements: 1124.
Italics in original. In its defence, the Punjab government explained
that Col. Lake’s letter of 27 July 1865 to Prinsep was not available
to them and had only emerged accidentally in a vernacular darkhast
[petition] which had come up for inspection in 1872. No reference to
the letter was available in government correspondence, as Lake had
sent the letter on the verbal orders of the then Lieutenant,
Governor.
Secretary to FC, Punjab to Secretary to Government, Punjab,
24 December 1873, in Prinsep’s Settlements: 1124–26.
58. Secretary to Government, Punjab to Secretary to FC, Punjab,
7 November 1873, in Prinsep’s Settlements: 1123.
59. ‘Jama’- revenue demand.
60. Secretary to FC, Punjab to the Commissioner and Superintendent,
Rawalpindi Division, 6 January 1874, in Prinsep’s Settlements:
1126–27.
61. Secretary of State for India to the Governor-General in Council,
30 July 1874, in Prinsep’s Settlements: 1127.
62. Paragraph based on Dunlop Smith, Note, p. 2, Morley Collection,
Vol. 12. Dunlop Smith was private secretary to viceroy Minto; Morley
was SOSI.
63. DunlopSmith, Note: 3–4.
64. This question came up at the time of the 1906–7 disturbances in both
rural and urban Punjab (see Mazumder 2003: 203–13) but the military
angle is clearly evident.
65. Paragraph 6 of Punjab Government letter No. 20 R. I., 21 January
1906, quoted in Batala Assessment Report 1910: 41. Emphasis
added.
66. The disproportionately high increase there, compared to the other two
tahsils, was because of the extension of canal irrigation over the two
assessments, which similarly increased the estimate of assets.
67. The History of the Great War, Rawalpindi District, p. 1, in Punjab
District War Histories. Hereafter, Rawalpindi War History.
68. Rawalpindi War History: 4.
69. Appendix VI, List of Villages in the Rawalpindi District Where
the Remission of Revenue Have Been Granted, in Rawalpindi War
History.
70. Muafi = remission of revenue. The title of the list is telling: Appendix
VII, List of Muafis proposed for wounded soldiers with small holdings,
 war widows or war orphans or parents who have induced sons to enter
the army for Rawalpindi District, in Rawalpindi War History.
71. War Services of the Shahpur District, p. 15, Appendix III: Statement of
Village Remissions and Appendix IV: Life Muafis, in Punjab District
War Histories. Hereafter, Shahpur War Services.
72. Shahpur War Services: 16 and Appendix III.
73. Hissar officers were ‘surprised’ to find 2,400 men in service at the
beginning of the War, and Hissar received Rs 6,996 in remissions.
Hissar’s War Work: The Effort of a Punjab District, pp. 1, 7 and
Appendix II: List of Villages Granted Remission, in Punjab District
War Histories.
74. Shahpur War Services: 51.
75. Probably anticipating the roll-back in favours to rural Punjab through
legislative measures forced by the compulsions of World War II.
See Talbot (1988: 143–54).
76. DunlopSmith, Note: 4. Emphasis added.
77. British India had a complicated administrative hierarchy. It consisted
of three major ‘presidencies’ — Bengal, Bombay, Madras — each
ruled by a governor. Governors reported to the governor-general of
India (also called viceroy from 1858). Presidencies were divided into
provinces under the charge of a lieutenant-governor, who reported to
the governor of his presidency. However, there were certain provinces,
like Punjab, that were ruled by a governor who reported directly to
the viceroy, and did not come under any presidency. The governor of
a presidency was superior in rank to the governor of a province.
78. Yadav (1981: 3–4); Punjab Government Memorandum to Indian
Statutory Commission: 2. The Indian Statutory Commission, better
known as the Simon Commission, was set up in 1927; its Punjab
committee met in 1928.
79. The proportion of elected to total strength was 53% in Bengal,
48% in Bombay and Madras, 42% in UP, and only 19% in Punjab.
(See Yadav 1981: 20, footnote 6.)
80. Punjab Government Memorandum to Indian Statutory Commission: 3.
81. Ibid.
82. ‘As a result of the [Punjab Alienation of Land] Act the Punjab
landowners, the finest body of peasantry in the East, who but for it
would now be largely a landless discontented proletariat … have been
staunchly loyal to the British Government’ (O’Dwyer 1925: 39). For
specific instances of such loyalty, see Mazumder (2003: 230–57).
83. Montagu was secretary of state for India; Chelmsford the viceroy in
India.
84. The other legislatures in British India received the following number
of seats: Madras, 120; Bombay and Sind, 113; Bengal, 127; the United
Provinces, 120; Bihar and Orissa, 100; Central Provinces and Berar, 72;
 Assam, 54. Report of the Franchise Committee, 1918–19: 24, 34, 41,
49, 64, 72, 78. It was also known as the Southborough Committee
after its president.
85. Evidence Taken Before the Reforms Committee (Franchise), Volume
I: 147, [hereafter, Report of the Franchise Committee 1919, Evidence
Vol. I ].
86. The same argument was used to favour the selection of zaildars by
district commissioners rather than their election by lambardars.
87. Report of the Franchise Committee 1919, Evidence Vol. I: 149–50.
88. Ibid. 151.
89. All the following categories (i) to (x) are taken from Report of the
Franchise Committee 1919, Evidence Vol. I: 151–53.
90. Villages usually had two lambardars though one could sometimes be
headman of more than one village.
91. A property qualification of a minimum land revenue of Rs 25 per
annum would exclude over 38,000 lambardars while one of Rs 50
per annum would exclude over 50,000. It was admitted that, ‘The
urban politician will no doubt criticize the inclusion in the electorate
of some 65,000 voters who can be represented with some plausibility as
owing their votes to an official appointment’ (Report of the Franchise
Committee 1919, Evidence Vol. I: 151). However, the state was willing
to face the ire of the urban politician if it could ensure that its rural
allies were adequately represented in the electorate.
92. Average land revenue payments were between Rs 10 to Rs 12 per
annum. Only 8.5% of landholders and crown tenants paid revenue in
excess of Rs 25 per annum. The non-official members of the Punjab
Legislative Council therefore wanted the limit to be Rs 20 per annum,
but this would give over 4,00,000 voters, which was too large a number
for O’Dwyer (Report of the Franchise Committee 1919, Evidence
Vol. I: 151–52).
93. A ‘yeoman grantee’ in canal colonies, with an allotment of 50–150
acres.
94. H. D. Craik’s evidence in Report of the Franchise Committee 1919,
Evidence Vol. I: 208. He was Acting Secretary, Government of Punjab
[hereafter, GoP].
95. Ibid.:208.
96. Report of the Franchise Committee 1919, Evidence Vol. I: 153.
97. Urban voting qualifications (i) to (x) are taken from ibid.
98. The Provincial Franchise Committee recommended a value of
Rs 20,000, which would give about 10,000 voters, half of whom would
qualify through the income tax category. However, O’Dwyer felt that
this was too high a qualification and proposed a limit of Rs 10,000
that would give a net electorate of 20,000.
99. Report of the Franchise Committee 1919, Evidence Vol. I: 153–54.
100. Ibid.: 154.
101. They would also look after the interests of the European and
Anglo-Indian communities, Indian Christians and the ‘more backward
and inarticulate classes, such as village menials’. The remaining
11 official nominations would represent the main government
departments. Ibid.: 150.
102. Written Statement by the Chief Khalsa Diwan, in ibid.: 221–22. Of
the 35 remaining elected seats, 30 would go to ‘non-Sikh Indians’,
one each for the University, the Punjab Chamber of Commerce, one
each for a ‘landlord and chiefs’ seat for the three communities. Sixteen
of the 25 nominated seats would be for officials and nine for non-
officials.
103. Evidence of Sewaram Singh, representing the Chief Khalsa Diwan in
Report of the Franchise Committee, Evidence Vol. I: 223.
104. The Congress had accepted Muslim League demand for separate
representation, and, in Punjab, agreed to sharing 50% of the seats
with the League. Sikh demands had been completely ignored. See
Tuteja 1981: 128–29.
105. He claimed that Sikhs supplied a third of Punjab’s and a fifth of India’s
military recruits, and that half the Punjab aristocracy was Sikh. They
were, with 3% literacy, the most literate community in Punjab; the
Hindus and Muslims only had 1% literacy each. In addition, there
were over 250 Sikh educational institutions including two colleges.
The Sargodha Colony alone had 33,000 Sikhs, who formed a high
proportion of the population in other colonies, too (Sewaram Singh’s
evidence, Report of the Franchise Committee 1919, Evidence Vol. I:
223). This was not hyperbole and underlines the military, economic
and social significance of the community in Punjab.
106. By 1930, the Sikhs paid 26.3% of total land revenue, while they
constituted only 17.5% of the total of landlords and crown tenants
in Punjab. In contrast, the Muslims made up 52% of all landlords
and colony tenants and paid 50% of land revenue, while the Hindus
constituted 30% and contributed only 23.2% of total land revenue.
Calculated from Memorandum Submitted by Local Governments and
Provincial Franchise Committees: 24, Vol. III of the Report of the
Indian Franchise Committee, 1932.
107. Evidence of H. J. Maynard, FC, Punjab in Report of the Franchise
Committee 1919, Evidence Vol. I: 212–13. He employed almost
identical indicators of Sikh importance that Sewaram Singh had used!
(Note 105 above.)
108. Craik’s evidence in Report of the Franchise Committee 1919, Evidence
Vol. I: 207.
109. Paragraph and quotation from Report of the Franchise Committee
1919, Evidence Vol. I: 147–48.
110. Report of the Franchise Committee, 1919: 2–3. It had not done so for
all the provinces. Rest of paragraph based on ibid.: 53–56.
111. Ibid.: 59.
112. Punjab Government Memorandum to Indian Statutory Commission:
18, 57–58. There were 24 lawyers in the first and 31 in the second
Council. Some of them were landowners, as well.
113. Three such conferences were held between 1930 and 1932 to bring
about a compromise between the Indian National Congress, the Muslim
League, the princely states and the harried British Government of
India.
114. Report of the Indian Franchise Committee, 1932: 65–66.
115. Ibid.: 68. Also see Memorandum Submitted to the Franchise Committee
by Pandit Nanak Chand, M. L. C. in ibid.: 75. Nanak Chand, a
member
of the Provincial Franchise Committee, complained against the
‘arbitrary division of the Punjab population’ into agricultural and
non-agricultural tribes based on a person’s birth, and that ‘it becomes
a source of political grievance when the Franchise is to be determined
by a person’s property qualifications’. He also alleged that the Land
Alienation Act ‘has created privileged castes which seek to rule the
Punjab to their own exclusive advantage...’.
116. Report of the Indian Franchise Committee, 1932: 68. The limit was
raised to Rs 25 per annum when the Government of India Act of 1935
came into operation (Yadav 1981: 18).
117. ‘Report of the Indian Franchise Committee, 1932’: 136–37.
118. Ibid.: 141–42.
119. For details of the communal award and its impact on Punjab politics,
see Rai (1984: 178–211). Seats from ibid.: 182.
120. Similarly, no significant alteration or admissions were made to the
qualification for urban franchise. The property limit for immovable
property was reduced to Rs 4,000 and more, all others remained
unchanged, and the qualifications for rural voters were applicable to
urban areas, too.
121. The others were: the Law, Finance and Revenue members of the
Viceroy’s Executive Council, the Army Secretary, India, the Adjutant-
General in India, and the Financial Adviser, Military Finance (Indian
Soldiers’ Board Report, 1929: 1).
122. Postcards with the address of the regiments printed on them were
issued free at depots and post-offices accepted them free of charge
(A Brief Account of the Work of the Indian Soldiers’ Board [1919]: 7
Hereafter, Brief Account of Indian Soldiers’ Board).
123. Ibid.: 5.
124. Paragraph based on Indian Soldiers’ Board Report, 1929: 3–6;
1930: 4.
125. Paragraph based on No. 1132, GoI, Army, 10 September 1927, enclosed
with GoP, Home-Military, B, November 1927, No. 31. Emphasis
added.
126. Brief Account of Indian Soldiers’ Board: 4.
127. Recruiting Officer, Jullundur to Secretary, Punjab Soldiers’ Board,
2 August 1922. GoP, Home-Military, C, 1923, No. 301.
128. Home Secretary, Punjab to Registrar, High Court of Judicature,
Lahore, and All Departmental Heads, Commissioners, DCs, and
District and Sessions Judges, 16 October 1924. GoP, Home-Military,
B, 1927, No. 89.
129. Inspector General of Police to Secretary, Punjab Soldiers’ Board,
4 December 1922. GoP, Home-Military, C, 1923, No. 301.
130. Paragraph based on GoP, Home-Military, A, September 1906,
Nos 19–21 and GoP, Home-Military, A, May 1907, Nos 1–3.
131. Paragraph based on War History of the Rohtak District: 37–41, in
Punjab District War Histories.
132. General van Cortland who had been in the Khalsa army was ‘taken
by Lord Dalhousie into the British service on the same pay that he
enjoyed in the Sikh army … and is now the Deputy Commissioner of
Dera Ghazee Khan’. Further, Lieutenants Young and Pearse ‘were
rewarded with an Assistant Commissionership’ for their distinguished
service (Edwardes 1851: 732). Edwardes, one of the most important
figures in the Second Anglo-Sikh War, was made the Deputy
Commissioner
of Bannu, a critical frontier district.
133. See, for example, Indian Soldiers’ Board Report, 1931: 2.
134. Speech of Lieutenant-Governor, Gurgaon Recruiting Durbar,
18 January 1919, GoP, Home-Military, B, July 1919, No. 266.
135. Primary education was made free and fees were ‘greatly reduced’ in
secondary schools. Brief Account of Indian Soldiers’ Board: 5.
136. Report of the Cantonment Reform Committee, October 1921: 22.
137. The Army in India Committee Report, 1912, Vol. 1-A, Minority
Report: 18. It did mention that Punjab’s present importance was
equivalent to that which ‘Oudh [had] to the army of 1857’. Ibid.: 11.
Oudh (or Awadh) had seen some of the severest fighting during the
upheavals of 1857.
138. See Mazumder 2003: 247–56.
139. Their brand of bureaucracy was not appreciated by British officials
in other provinces. In 1907, Viceroy Minto reversed some of the
Punjab government’s policies and criticized its administrative style
(Ibid.: 203–13).
140. Indicating that Ronald Robinson’s thesis of ‘informal’ empire may be
applicable in particular instances.
 References
Primary Sources
Private Papers
Morley Collection: Papers of John, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn as
Secretary of State for India from 1905 to 1910 and from March to May
1911. IOR/MSS/Eur/D 573.
Unpublished Government Records, Punjab
Proceedings of the Government of Punjab in the Home Department,
Military Branch, 1890–1930.
Ajnala Assessment Report, 1893.
Ajnala Assessment Report, 1913.
Batala Assessment Report, 1910.
Tarn Taran Assessment Report, 1912.
[Princep’s Settlements] Mr. E. Prinsep’s Settlements, 1863–1870 —
Principles of Assessment and term of Settlement in Selections from the
Records of the Financial Commissioner, Punjab .
[Dunlop Smith, Note] Dunlop Smith, J. R., Note on Land Assessment
in the Punjab, enclosed with Minto to Morley, 3 July 1907, Morley
Collection.

Unpublished Government Records, India

[Annual Class Returns] Annual Return Showing the Class Composition
of the Indian Army, Imperial Service Troops, Military Police, and
Militia , 1910–40.
Proceedings of the Government of India in the Department of Home,
Political Branch, 1905–30.
Proceedings of the Government of India in the Military/Army Department,
1875–1930.
Proceedings of the Government of India in the Revenue and Agricultural
Department, 1880–1905.
Published Government Records, Punjab
Amritsar Settlement Report, 1914.
Amritsar Settlement Report, 1940.
Gujrat District Gazetteer, 1921.
Punjab Administration Reports , 1849–1939.
Published Government Records, India
The Army in India [Nicholson] Committee Report, 1912.
Indian Soldiers’ Board Report, 1919 –34.
[Punjab Government Memorandum to Indian Stautory Commission] Indian
Statutory [Simon] Commission. Volume X. Memorandum Submitted by the
Government of the Punjab to the Indian Statutory Commission, 1929.
Report of the Cantonment Reforms Committee, 1921.
Report of the Franchise [Southborough] Committee, 1918–19.
Report of the Indian Franchise [Lothian] Committee, 1932.
Government Publications
A Brief Account of the Work of the Indian Soldiers’ Board [1919].
Baden-Powell, B. H. 1882. A Manual of the Land Revenue Systems and
Land Tenures of British India . Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent
of Government Printing.
Douie, J. M. 1899. Punjab Settlement Manual. Lahore: The ‘Civil and
Military Gazette’ Press.
Douie, J. M. 1908. Punjab Land Administration Manual. Lahore: The ‘Civil
and Military Gazette’ Press.
Griffin, Lepel H. and Col. Charles Francis Massey. 1910.Chiefs and Families
of Note in the Punjab, Vol. II , revised edn. Lahore: The ‘Civil and
Military
Gazette’ Press.
Leigh, M. S. 1922. The Punjab and the War. Lahore: Superintendent of
Government Printing, Punjab.
Punjab District War Histories.
Tupper, C. L. 1881. Punjab Customary Law , 3 vols. Lahore: Office of the
Superintendent of Government Printing.

Secondary Literature
Anand, Nihal Chand. 1924. The Punjab Alienation of Land Act, XIII of
1900. Lahore: Amrit Electric Press.
Banerjee, Himadri. 1982. Agrarian Society of the Punjab (1849–1901).
New Delhi: Manohar.
Barrier, N. G. 1966a. The Punjab Alienation of Land Bill of 1900. Program
in Comparative Studies on Southern Asia, Monograph and Occasional
Papers Series, No. 2. Durham: Duke University.
———. 1966b. ‘Punjab Politics and the Disturbances of 1907’. Ph.D. Thesis.
Durham: Duke University.
Bhatia, Shyamala. 1987. Social Change and Politics in Punjab, 1898–1910.
New Delhi: Enkay Publishers.
Calvert, H. 1936. The Wealth and Welfare of the Punjab, 2nd edn. Lahore:
The Civil and Military Gazette Ltd.
Darling, M. L. 1925. The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt. London:
Oxford University Press.
Dewey, Clive J. 1972. ‘The Official Mind and the Problem of Agricultural
Indebtedness in India, 1870–1910’. Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge.
Domin, Dolores. 1974. ‘Some Aspects of British Land Policy in Panjab after
Its Annexation in 1849.’ (Punjab Past and Present : April 1974).
Edwardes, H. B. 1851. A Year on the Punjab Frontier, in 1848–49, Vol. II .
London: Richard Bentley.
Gilmartin , David. 1988. Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of
Pakistan . Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goswamy, B. L. 1945. The Indian Soldiers (Litigation) Act (Act IV of 1925).
Lahore: Starlight Publishing Co.
Ibbetson, Denzil. Reprint 1916. Punjab Castes . Lahore: Superintendent of
Government Printing, Punjab.
Mazumder, Rajit K. 2003. The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab.
Delhi: Permanent Black.
Mukherjee, Mridula. 1989. ‘Rural Indebtedness in Colonial Punjab.’ Punjab
Past and Present (April 1989).
Naoroji, Dadabhai. 1901. Poverty and Un-British Rule in India . London.
O’Dwyer, Michael. 1925. India as I Knew It 1885–1925. London: Constable
& Co.
Omissi, David. 1994. The Sepoy and the Raj . London: Macmillan.
Rai, Satya M. 1984. Legislative Politics and the Freedom Movement in the
Punjab. New Delhi: Indian Council for Historical Research.
Talbot, Ian. 1988. Punjab and the Raj, 1849–1947. New Delhi: Manohar.
Thorburn, S. S. Reprint 1983 [1886]. Musalmans and Money-lenders in the
Punjab. Delhi: Mittal Publications.
———. 1904. The Punjab in Peace and War. London: William Blackwood
& Son.
Tuteja, K. L. 1981. ‘The Sikhs and the Nehru Report.’ ( Punjab Past and
Present, April 1981).
van den Dungen, P. H. M. 1972. The Punjab Tradition: Influence and
Authority
in Nineteenth Century India . London: George Allen & Unwin.
Yadav, Kripal C. 1981. Elections in the Punjab, 1920–47. Monograph Series
No. 16. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of
Asia and Africa.
 6
Administering the City, Policing Commerce
Peter J. Carroll

In June 1906, writing from the Jiangsu provincial capital Suzhou,1

the recently installed governor Chen Kuilong reported to the Court
on the current state of modern policing in the city, i.e., within the
city wall. He noted that three years had elapsed since Suzhou had
initiated an intra muros police force (jingcha, xunjing) in response
to the late 1902 imperial edict that had prescribed the creation of
police in provincial capital cities throughout the empire according
to the Japanese and European-derived model established in the Zhili
province by viceroy Yuan Shikai. Despite the passage of time and
some progress, Governor Chen frankly admitted that the force still
exhibited a variety of shortcomings. Many of the new Japanese-style
sentry-boxes marking city streets were not in order. Badges and
insignia were in short supply. Some individual constables failed to
meet minimum standards for physical condition. These problems,
while troubling since they detracted from the majesty and readiness
of the force, were largely attributable to dearth of funds, the signal
problem that plagued the development of police systems and the
myriad other reform initiatives undertaken during the New Policies
Period (1901–1911).2
There was, unfortunately, also a more general substantive failing:
cumulative problems were such that the police, ‘an institution
intended to protect the people had, instead, ended up aggravating
them’. Chen explained that this predicament was partly due to
lack of discipline within the force; the commanders were not
sufficiently
familiar with their constables and thus failed to quell abuses.
On a similar note, he suggested that the problematic relations
between Suzhou’s people and its police essentially stemmed from
misunderstanding: ‘since the police and people are not familiar
with one another ... when the people have a pressing problem,
the police do not understand’ (Chen 1912: juan 7, 4b–5a. GX32.
run4.16/7 June 1906).3
 Peter J. Carroll

Governor Chen’s paternalistic assumption that the interests and

reform policies of the state bureaucracy and its new administrative
arm, the police, were coeval with those of ‘the people’, an
undifferentiated
but, in the light of recent troubles, hardly inert mass,
clearly deserves some interrogation. On the one hand, there was
likely much truth to Chen’s contention that three years was, as yet,
an insufficient span of time for Suzhou’s ‘people’ and their new
guardians, the police, to become accustomed to one another. The
speed and ambition of the state’s promotion of the police as an
instrument of social control gave both the constables and the
public little time to establish a comfortable modus vivendi. Since
its inception, the nascent police system had enforced an ever-
changing array of novel regulations regarding street circulation and
sanitation, the conduct of commerce, the licensing and taxing of
brothels, teahouses, theatres, and all other commercial properties,
and assorted other matters. Indeed, in addition to these duties and
core functions such as apprehending suspected malefactors, settling
disputes and patrolling streets, Suzhou late Qing police were also
responsible for the maintenance of population registers, repairs to
the city’s one macadam carriage-road, the inspection and licensing of
buildings, the administration of a workhouse for homeless indigents
and other poor-relief activities, enforcement of hygienic standards
regarding food and public toilets, and censorship. Dressed in neat
blue European-style tunics, wearing the regulation straw hat for
government office runners, carrying a nightstick and sporting a
belt buckle with ‘Good Luck’ inscribed in English, the force was
unusual in appearance and training (‘Soochow: In line; the police’).
Furthermore, by 1906, the police, originally numbering 423 in 1903,
had increased to 700 men, who were divided among 12 stations
located throughout the city. (By 1910, one year before the Xinhai
Revolution which ended Qing rule, the force had grown to 1,189 men,
who patrolled a population of several hundred thousand people.)
On account of its size, functions and scattered deployment, the
force projected a ubiquity unprecedented for imperial state agents
in the city.
The large and growing numbers of police and their increasing
intervention in quotidian matters, especially around the use of streets
and other public space for commerce, somewhat belied Chen’s claim
that the populace’s resentment of them was due to lack of
familiarity.
If anything, it seems that mutual misunderstanding between
 Administering the City, Policing Commerce

Suzhou residents and the city police was based not on lack of contact,
but on just the opposite. The population and the state officials
were sufficiently familiar with the police and their actions, to the
point of being variously dissatisfied and distrustful of their character
and capacity to both shape and safeguard a nascent urban order.
The shifting arrangements for urban security provide another
index to the fraught relationship between the business community
and local authorities over control of the city. This essay focuses on
merchant concerns regarding the inadequacy of police protection for
commercial needs, the deleterious effect of state security on economic
life and shop owners’ demands for better treatment. The vexed
relationship between the forces of order and those of economy also
highlights a growing division between elite merchants, the intended
beneficiaries of many urban reforms, and low status business people,
such as street vendors and food mongers, who found themselves and
their commerce targeted by new policing regulations.
The public currency and significance of the business community’s
concerns regarding policing were evident in actions such as the
1906 creation of a police advisory guild (Susheng jingwu gonghui),
composed of leading merchants, under the aegis of the local self-
government movement. The group was intended to ensure that
the nascent police force responded to business concerns regarding
security and that its actions facilitated economic exchange and
development (Zhang H. 1999: 165). The police, for their part, also
in 1906, initiated regular two-hour bi-monthly meetings with
merchants
and gentry at the city’s Xuanmiao guan Daoist Temple to
assess the effect of policing on business and other broad ‘public’
concerns (Zhang K. et al. 1991: 701. GX32.7/Sept.–Oct. 1906). The
dominance by businessmen of the ranks of a police advisory body
and the alacrity with which the police liaised with the merchant
community may seem relatively unremarkable, yet both actions
attest to the central roles that the two groups played in realizing
a broadly shared vision of economically vibrant, urbanist modern
development.
At the same time, the degree and constancy of dissatisfaction
with urban policing and safety on the part of businessmen and other
civil groups bespoke the existence of many tensions among state and
civil authorities over the explicit development, aim and control of
the police. In particular, during the late Qing and early Republic,
Suzhou businessmen critiqued current forces as inadequate and
as often acting against what local merchants saw as urban policing’s
raison d’être, facilitating and fostering commerce. Confrontations
over the methods and aims of urban security thus reveal a more
general contest between state and business institutions for control
over the direction of economic and political power.
To paraphrase Frederic Wakeman, the creation of policing
systems
represented a fundamental increase in both the Qing state’s
ambition and its capacity to intervene in the lives of its people—
though the former often outstripped the latter (Wakeman 1991;
Wakeman 1995). To centralizing-minded officials, the police were a
force whereby social order and public service functions were safely
within the hands of professionally trained state agents (as opposed to
the military forces previously responsible for urban policing). Thus
the police offered a system for effectively combating the creeping
influence and stridence of networks of business and gentry elites
who increasingly sought an active role in provincial and local affairs
despite the wholesale lack of representative government. 4
In Shanghai, where police in the Chinese-administered portion
of the city were partly under merchant control, the police provided
business interests with a mechanism for achieving a rare degree of
autonomy in local governance, though these functions remained
under the steady and sometimes intrusive ‘supervision’ of Qing
officialdom. In Suzhou, the police force was firmly controlled by the
provincial and county officials seated within the city, though the
unusually activist local Chamber of Commerce and other business
groups prominently negotiated with the authorities to influence the
use and function of the police, especially regarding the regulation of
streets as arteries of transport and prime sites of commerce. Indeed,
a good deal of the conflict arising from the development and function
of police regulation in Suzhou may have stemmed from the fact that
the city’s business community had coalesced into several powerful
groups: the Chamber of Commerce (founded in 1905), the Citizen’s
Communes (an association of city planning/street improvement
groups, founded in 1908) and the Chamber of Commerce’s own
militia, the shangtuan (founded in 1907, reorganized in 1912). All
of these actively supported and remonstrated with police officials
in defense of ostensibly collective (yet often nakedly partisan)
commercial
or greater civic interests.
 The Advent of Modern Policing
The promotion of foreign models of modern policing was part of
an increasing late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century turn
by maverick state officials, industrial entrepreneurs and political-
economic writers to focus on urban structure and reform as a means
to stimulate economic expansion and to order society for advantage
in the Social Darwinist military, economic and political competition
against imperialist powers. Indeed, modern police, with their
multiple
administrative duties, were de facto municipal governments and
their establishment marks an important shift from urban county-
level government and institutions to municipal ones. Given that late
Qing police in Suzhou and other cities emphasized increased
circulation
of goods and the improvement of roads for the purpose of
industrial
and greater economic development as one of their prime
functions, the police represented a decided urbanist reorientation
in the state’s vision of ideal political–economic structure. From the
initial 1902 blueprint regulations promulgated by the Court and
the later national and local emendations, it is clear that the police
were an intensely urban organization in several senses. Unsurprisingly,
during the Qing, police systems were initially deployed in Beijing,
provincial capitals and main trading cities, where population size and
strategic importance made the need to resolve the plethora of
social
ills particularly acute. Officials hoped that the improvements in
capital and key commercial cities would provide successful models of
new techniques of social control and organization that would then
be emulated in other cities and the countryside. As Qing
commentators
glumly noted, this incremental deployment and consequent
reliance on symbolism was mainly due to financial strictures. Yet,
there was also a logical imperative propelling this method of
developing
policing: as conceptualized by leading reformist officials,
the police were an expressly urban force — and not merely by virtue
of their location. They were deployed not so much to maintain urban
social order as to change it through the reordering of urban space
for the combined purposes of local, provincial and greater imperial
political–economic development. As such, the police were conceived
as a disciplinary instrument whose primary functions included
instructing the population in the correct uses and ordering of the
cityscape.
 Before the advent of modern ‘police’, anti-crime and civil-order
patrols in Suzhou had been carried out by an amalgam of professional
forces: (1) a small official constabulary run along military lines;
(2) army soldiers, who guarded and collected internal transit taxes
(lijin) on goods at the 6 city gates and 17 canal-based tax stations,
and who, along with the several units stationed outside the city,
provided a defense and emergency public order force; and (3) a
state baojia bureau, which ostensibly administered the Qing
systemof mutual supervision groups — which, by the late nineteenth
century, had fallen into desuetude in Suzhou if not in most other
cities — but was actually dedicated to sponsoring urban patrols of
army forces. Even as they supported the creation of police, earnest
officials continued to emphasize, right until the end of the dynasty,
the reinvigoration of baojia as something of a political ideal.5
According to the basic Qing system, ten family units were grouped
together as a pai unit and made responsible for mutual supervision.
Ten of these pai groupings (i.e., 100 families) were joined together to
constitute a jia, with ten jia combined to make a bao of 1,000 families.
Misconduct or disputes within each grouping were to be reported
to leaders, chosen from among the heads of member households,
who would either settle the conflict or report it to the head of the
next higher administrative level. At the end of each month, each
bao head was required to submit a guarantee to the authorities
that all male members of the group were acting properly. Ideally,
the population would thus be self-policing with only the most
intractable,
violent, or criminal infractions or disputes coming to the
attention of authorities.
Qing officials themselves had found this ideal impractical and
reorganized the state’s baojia apparatus to supply a professional
patrol force; unfortunately, by the late 1890s, the population in
Suzhou and many other parts of Jiangsu found this and all other
state arrangements for public security woefully inadequate. As
newspapers and other contemporary writings attest, late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century Jiangsu, and Suzhou in particular, was
mired in a crisis of lawlessness due to marked increases in banditry
and violence. For example, describing the scene in 1896, the Shanghai
daily Shenbao commented, ‘The hoodlums in Suzhou city including
“female hooligans, heretofore unknown” [sic] exceed those of other
places. The gangs are legion, and they are shamelessly bold’ (‘Heshi
shuangge/Crane market divided by frost’); (‘Wuyuan qiusheng/
Suzhou gardens autumn voices’). This predicament was popularly
attributed to the corruption and collapse of the state’s capacity to
project coercive force. While the actual dimensions of social
violence
are difficult, if not impossible, to gauge, the sense of crisis
and resultant anxiety, being immediately palpable in contemporary
commentary, are not. It may be that this increase in violence was
such that it overwhelmed the capacity of relatively well
functioning
but limited mechanisms of public order. Nonetheless, the
inadequacy
of state measures to order society was widely perceived as
resulting from a vacuum in state power. Discredited by the recent,
ignominious 1895 defeat by Japan, military forces were described
as being ineffective guardians of national defense or domestic social
order. In fact, demobilized soldiers turned to banditry and active
soldiers operating from army encampments were popularly identified
as the source of much of the current outbreak of violence and theft.
As for baojia as organized by contemporary provincial bureaux, as
one editorial in Shenbao succinctly put it, ‘it exists in name only’.
(E.g., ‘Zhao yong buruo lianbing shuo/Raising braves not equal
to drilling troops’; ‘Lun Zhongguo yingyong bu zushi/On the
undependability of Chinese banner troops’; ‘Lun jinri daofei zhi
duo/On the recent numbers of bandits’; ‘Yu ke lun baojia tuanlian/
Discussing baojia and militia’).
Boding ill for urban policing reform, contemporary analysts
attributedthe crisis of violence and crime, in part at least, to state
attempts to improve security. During the latter 1890s, old-style
banner troops were often disbanded in the interest of military
reform. Yet, even troops recently trained in foreign methods at
great expense were on occasion demobilized out of concern for
economy.
As a result, the equation between soldiers and disorder was
not limited to impoverished retrograde military units, but could,
in light of contemporary experience, be applied to modernized
forces as well. During these years, mass demobilization of soldiers
produced sporadic uprisings, such as the 6,000-strong rebellion
outside Shanghai in May 1897, as well as a swell in banditry
throughout
Jiangnan (Cunningham 1899: 58–68). This instability provoked
a raft of anxieties regarding the latent potential for urban disorder,
and acute concerns regarding the integrity of commerce and
industry,
concerns that prompted the provincial government’s 1903
decision to create a Suzhou city police force. These same
perceptions
of disorder likely affected both official and public opinion
(which seems to have been somewhat accurate) that the city’s police
were an inferior, undisciplined corps incapable of redressing the
continuing
crisis of banditry, and that they were, moreover, ominously
suspect in light of their presumably intimate associations with
thieves, the discarded baojia, and soldiers.
In contrast to the general disparagement of baojia and the army
as mechanisms of public order, western-style policing, at least as
practiced in the Shanghai foreign concessions, had acquired a
popular
reputation for being extremely effective in preventing and solving
crimes. In the ebullient opinion of one 1899 newspaper editorial,
western policing in Shanghai, with its combination of police,
detectives
and undercover cops, had proven so potent that ‘in the foreign
concessions there is no case that is not immediately solved; there is
no place for them [criminals] to hide’ (‘Lun zujie baotan yi yan jia
yuesu/Foreign concession detectives enforce order’).
Such spirited descriptions in the press and elsewhere, of the
existing
mechanisms of social order as moribund or inferior to western
police administration greatly exaggerated their decrepitude and
ineffectiveness. Certainly, to those unfortunate enough to be caught
in the web of Qing justice, the ‘empty’ and ‘ineffective’ baojia and
constabulary were terrifyingly real and potentially lethal. Perusing
Suzhou local items in newspapers from the latter half of the 1890s
is a bracingly visceral experience. The press seems divided between
stories of gruesome murders, rapes, and violent robberies and a
seemingly endless trove of accounts detailing the apprehensions
of ‘infamous cruel bandits’, which are inevitably followed by news
of their spectacular deaths by beheading (or the occasional
strangulation)
at the public execution ground in the north of the city. One
feels covered in blood. More than a century later, Suzhou’s baojia
and constabulary seem sufficiently competent, if not fearsomely
efficient, at delivering suspected malefactors over to the dynasty’s
stern justice as dispensed by county magistrates, provincial
governors, jail wardens and bailiffs. Nonetheless, newspaper reports
and editorial pieces attest to a dual crisis in the actual prevalence
and public perception of violence and crime in Suzhou as running
rampant due to the impotence of state institutions. Among all of
these protests, the voice of businessmen was particularly acute in
calling upon the state to discard or reform unsatisfactory, suspect
security bodies like the baojia and soldiery in order to safeguard
commerce.
 Deficiencies of the New Police
In the fall of 1904, Viceroy Duanfang was asked to respond to
allegations
separately forwarded to the Court that public order in
Suzhou continued to be mired in chaos, a situation that revealed
the new police force as ineffective. Maintaining that ‘the people have
never known such a period of peace and tranquility’, he
nonetheless
admitted that ‘catching and jailing criminals has had no effect;
thieves are everywhere’. The city, he conceded, had recently endured
some 300 known robberies, while the number of those who did not
report crimes for fear of retribution made a true total impossible
to compute. Especially troubling for local commerce, the banks and
pawnshops which lent capital to local enterprises had been
targeted
in a flurry of robberies, though Duanfang disputed that the
reported figure of more than 50 was actually only slightly more
than 30. Neither the number and target of robberies nor the
reluctance
of crime victims to contact the authorities endorsed the
effectiveness
of the new police force. On this note, the details of the
report were even more troubling. The Viceroy reported that the
mastermind behind the pawnshop robberies, a local army soldier,
was now in custody. The origin of disorder in the local army camps
was no surprise, for Duanfang alleged (perhaps with a fair amount
of accuracy) that recently ‘salt smugglers, the desperate poor’ and
‘hoodlums’ (i.e., members of secret societies) had all infiltrated the
army camps so that it was difficult to differentiate between soldiers
and thieves — if there was, indeed, a difference (Duanfang 1918:
juan 4, 8a–11a, 22. GX30.7/Aug 1904, GX30.8/Aug 1904). Such
allegations were hardly novel. The affinity and easy familiarity
between men of violence, such as between thieves and soldiers, had
long been identified as a nexus of crime in statecraft writings and
passed into general cultural stereotype. Despite a series of reforms
and demobilizations designed to cull criminal elements from local
military units to improve discipline and combat readiness, army
units were, regardless of the merits, popularly perceived as dens of
iniquity. This infamy proved especially troubling with regard to the
character and quality of the new police, which included hundreds
of soldiers from local army encampments.
Provincial officials staffed the new police units with soldiers
chosen from among the baojia patrols and local army units. As
a result, in their reports to the Court, provincial officials readily
admitted that for its first years, Suzhou’s police were ‘police’ in
name only. They had yet to discard the practices of the earlier
baojia patrols and were ill-trained, if not completely ignorant of
the crime fighting methods and regulatory duties of modern police
work.6 ‘And can the untrained people stop thieves? How can
officers who have not studied regulate people?’ Governor Chen
wrote, admitting to a host of inadequacies and tensions (Guoli
gugong bowuyuan 1973–75, Vol. 22: 714–15. GX31.12.24/18 Jan
1906). Yet, even after the founding of a police academy in 1905 to
train new constables, the need for more troops moved provincial
officials in August 1906 to convert several hundred soldiers to police
(Chen 1912: juan 7, 32a-32b. GX32.6.24/13 Aug 1906).
Whether this growing, uneasily hybrid academy trained/army
soldier constabulary force was more successful in fighting crime is
not terribly clear. Nonetheless, it is clear that the police continued to
be viewed as inadequate at meeting public safety needs: throughout
1907 and 1908, business leaders were particularly unconstrained in
criticizing the Suzhou force as inferior to its Nanjing and Shanghai
counterparts for continuing to rely on questionable elements like
former baojia and soldiers. (Local officials did not dispute the
crisis and issued permits to businessmen in the northern section
of the city to carry knives and guns to protect themselves and
their merchandise.) (Zhang K. et al. 1991: 705–707; GX34.2.19/21
March 1908). These travails took place in the context of an
upsurge claimed by both the state and media in the perennial crisis
of Jiangnan banditry, which had prompted officials to deploy
more forceful tactics. The Chamber of Commerce warned that the
recently completed railway link to Shanghai, which had long been
desired by the business establishment, had provoked undesirable
side-effects. Railroad mechanics, porters, and others toiling in the
newly created transport jobs were quickly branded ‘workers by
day and thieves by night’, thus joining established menaces, such
as disbanded soldiers, members of the notorious Green Gang and
local idlers. These groups, along with local military units, which
despite their role in policing the city were assumed to be in league
with brigands, were blamed for a new rash of robbery and violence
(Ibid.: 701–702. Late GX32/1906). According to media analysis,
the current wave of ‘bandit and thieving chaos’ was due partly to the
effectiveness of military campaigns against robbers and smugglers
in the adjacent Zhejiang province, which had caused them to move
into Jiangsu (‘Lun zhifei buyi zhufu/On the difficulty of managing
bandit control’). This latter attribution of the local security crisis to
Qing public safety countermeasures resonated with analyses of the
later 1890s instability. This pattern of unintended consequences
spoke badly of the state’s capacity to secure lives and property, even
when these were its explicit aims.
These dissatisfactions underlay merchant leaders’ analysis of
the debilitating effects that police malfeasance and incompetence
wrought on the city’s civic and commercial life. For instance, in
responding to a 1907 incident involving the beating of a group of
students and teachers by the police, ‘which has insulted the
educational
community and made businessmen wary’, the Chamber
of Commerce wrote to the governor that the only area in which
Suzhou was relatively deficient, compared to other cities, was
its police. The reason: ‘Since the police officers and constables
alike come from old [unreformed] army units [sic, they had been
successively reorganized since the loss to Japan] they are extremely
crude and violent. Everything relies on the efforts of officials to
control them in order to avoid such incidents.’ The situation was
so dire that the same petitioners excoriated the provincial police
authority (Xunjing zongju) and requested that it cease oversight
of the city police because its attempts to reform itself had come to
naught. Reiterating a common refrain, the businessmen emphasized
that the military background of most police made them corrupt
beyond redemption (Zhang K. et al. 1991: 703–705. GX33.4/May
1907, GX33.4.30/10 June 1907).
Dissatisfied with the capacity of police and army forces to
safeguard
commerce, business leaders had already made their own bid
to reform urban security by forming a physical fitness association,
tiyuhui, in 1906. Modelled after foreign merchant militia and their
Chinese imitators in Shanghai and elsewhere, the Suzhou
association
enlisted shop assistants and a few business owners to practice
calisthenics and military manoeuvres during their off-time for the
purpose of patrolling the city centre Guanqian street business
district.
(An increasing number of professional militiamen would be hired
and added to the force over time.) The initiative required and duly
received state approval. Not only were precedents for such
associations
well-established, but business financial and personnel support
for urban militia dovetailed with other state security measures.
The governor had recently announced a solicitation of funds from
merchants to increase the number of police and distribute permanent
police substations along major commercial streets as well as
smaller
alleys. Indeed, both government and merchant leaders glowingly
described the association as an adjutant to state security forces, yet
tiyuhui leaders also intended their militia to serve as a rebuke to
official incompetence and malevolence. Although usually tacit, the
association’s cooperation, over the years, with state policing efforts
would also contain an undercurrent of rivalry over the direction of
public safety and city leadership.
This remonstrance was heard. Bowing to merchant and popular
criticisms of the police, city officials, in 1907, enlisted the tiyuhui to
augment, if not replace, the police in enforcing the Court-mandated
closure of public opium dens at the end of the sixth month of the
lunar calendar. The operation was the keystone of the Qing
strategy
for the gradual prohibition of opium and was anticipated to be
controversial and unpopular. (Correctly so, yet the measure was
enforced with some strictness.) In addition, the police force largely
consisted of Green Standard soldiers, many of whom were from other
areas and therefore unable to communicate easily with local people.
As such, officials deemed it prudent to entrust the job to locals so
as to not further tarnish the relationship between state security
forces and the city populace.7 It seems unclear whether local officials
necessarily considered the tiyuhui morally superior to the soldiery
and police and thus more reliable in combating vice, but this claim
constituted a prominent aspect of the Chamber of Commerce’s self-
perception and public presentation. This deployment of the tiyuhui
in support of Qing opium policy augured future attempts by the
local administration (especially after the 1911 Revolution) to deploy
the association as a regular adjutant to state police forces.8

Policing the Street: Protecting or

Harming Commerce?
Contemporary observers remarked that, from the very beginning of
police administration in Suzhou, the focus of their energies and their
most tangible results were in the area of street order. To a large
extent, this pattern was common to the many new forces founded
in response to the 1902 imperial edict. After all, the street was the
prime site and focus of policing, as envisioned by the regulations
originally promoted by the Court. As the main conduit of urban
social life, streets were naturally the principal venue for general
surveillance
and anti-crime activities, as well as the focus of an array
of initiatives to reform urban space. In the wake of these changes,
previous patterns of urban use commanded decreasing legitimacy,
in the light of the intensifying influence of modernist urban ideals
regarding the promotion of street circulation as a means of economic
development.9 In many ways, these activities merely extended recent
local experience: the connections between policing, road order and
economic development were particularly resonant as Suzhou’s first
experiment with modern policing.
In the wake of China’s defeat by Japan in 1895, Suzhou was opened
to Japan and other imperial powers as a treaty port. Concerned
that the Japanese might not be satisfied with their isolated
concessionlocated on paddy land beyond the southern city wall and
encroach upon the city, Viceroy Zhang Zhidong and a formidable
co-hort of modernizing officials oversaw the building of a carriage
road outside the southern and western portions of the city wall
for the dual purposes of maintaining sovereignty over the city and
promoting economic development. Local authorities, dissatisfied
with the street’s lack of administration and concerned that the
road, outside the normal range of baojia patrols, had become a
haven for thieves and bandits whose notorious activities hindered
the street’s prime purpose as an industrial/commercial zone,
established
a western-style police force of some 40 Chinese constables
under the leadership of a Mr Olsen — a Norwegian who
providedtraining in European policing techniques and whose foreign
identity served as extra insurance against Japanese attempts to
take over the street. By late 1904, in the wake of the 1903 creation
of the much larger Qing-led force within the city wall, Olsen’s
leadership had been radically curtailed by the governor, who
hoped to invest more policing powers in Chinese hands and be
rid of the foreign police chief. Olsen benefitted from the fact that
his senior Chinese superintendent had embezzled a large sum and
disappeared, leaving the force without senior Chinese leaders. He
thus held on to his position until the fall of 1909, when the
governor
announced that policing would now be placed entirely in Qing
hands. The specific policies of this force, which continued as a
separate
entity until it was subsumed by the city force in 1910, are not
very clear. Nonetheless, within the first year, local officials were
impressed with both the efficiency and effect of the foreign-modelled
force’s policing (‘Caiju jiefei/Trimming bureaucracy to cut fees’;
Cao et al. 1933: 54: 20b-22a; A. W. Cross to Robert Bredon,
Semiofficial
Maritime Customs Reports 1907–1909, No. 2 Archives,
20 February 1908, Fall 1909, Nanjing, 679 (1) 32205; Yu 1911).
Increased
security and attention to street circulation had engendered
a commercial boom along the road.
The new police force’s emphasis on creating a novel street
order can, therefore, be seen as having helped extend the spatial
and commercial order of the carriage road to the rest of the city
itself. This was controversial and particularly difficult. Unlike the
macadam road beyond the city wall, city streets were extremely
narrow and crooked. Reordering an unreconstructed cityscape
along the lines of a modern improved carriage-road involved a
large expenditure of regulatory power and occasional brute force
in removing streetside peddler stands, enforcing new sanitation
codes and directing the circulation of urban traffic. Many sources
note that upon its 1903 founding the nascent intra muros police
force achieved dramatic and immediate results by carrying out
frequent campaigns to disallow or regulate street stalls, which sold
all manner of goods, in order to end the ‘blockage’ of roads caused
by traditional modes of street commerce — which accounted for a
sizable percentage, if not the bulk, of business activity within the
city. (While not discounting real improvements in the flow of street
traffic, it is worth asking what exactly these policies were
promoting.Streets were so narrow and unstable that they prevented
the passage of animal-drawn vehicles or rickshaws, none of which
were allowed within the city.) The effects of this new mode of street
regulation were so marked that, in a 1906 report, the Japanese
consul approvingly reported, ‘Recently, due to the strict prohibition
by the city police, the open air stalls that previously took up both
sides of the streets have been reduced so that there is now twice
as much road space as before’ (Shirasu 1907: 4).
According to the urbanist notions guiding the police regulation of
street order, increased capacity for the flow of goods would provoke
an increase in consumption. People therefore had to be instructed
that many of the more common uses of the street, such as sleeping,
conversing and threshing grain, were no longer considered proper.
Certain businessmen also found that their commercial claims to the
street were curtailed. Successive attempts to relocate small-scale
street merchants, especially vegetable mongers, into special markets
away from the street, and to remove gates, stands, awnings, signs
and any other objects extending from shop-fronts into the street’s
police-defined circulation corridor had varying, often temporary,
effects. Such initiatives were denounced as invasive and rigorously
contested. For instance, 1907 regulations that removed vegetable
stands from their established spots and relocated them to state-
dictated centralized locations prompted a riot in which sellers and
their supporters lobbed fruits, vegetables, meat, and fish while
storming a police station (Carroll 2006: 85–90). Street regulation
became a regular flashpoint between sectors of the business
communityand the police.
This regulation, carried out in the name of promoting street
circulation, sanitation and commerce, was embraced and further
promoted by city merchant mandarins, who were endeavouring to
encourage ‘enlightened’ modes of commerce. As the heads of native
banks, textile factories, and major stores, which were sometimes
in competition with street merchants, many commercial leaders
complained that street ‘blockages’ prevented the circulation of
goods and materials and detracted from the business of large,
capital-intensive, fixed shop-front enterprises. It soon became clear
that police regulation in support of increasing street circulation
promoted some commercial activities and harmed others, thus
truly ‘aggravating the people’. This partiality begged the question
as to whether police street regulation was truly for the promotion
of commerce and protection of goods and capital, or was merely
for the benefit of a few, or even, perhaps, antithetical to the needs
of business.
For instance, in a 1909 letter informing the Chamber of Commerce
of a new campaign to remove commercial blockages from the street,
the police bureau wrote, ‘Honorable merchants from the substantial
commercial houses thoroughly understand just principles and have
not usurped authority as in the past [by blocking the street with
signs, stalls and other commercial implements placed in front of
their store-fronts], however small-scale businessmen and ignorant,
obstinate people consider only their private interest and do not
consider the public good. Recently, this attitude has resurfaced
and railings, signs, and other objects are being put into the road’,
with food establishments being the worst offenders. The Chamber
of Commerce later reported back to the police that it had urged
member proprietors to follow the new order and informed them that
police enforcement would be strict (Zhang K. et al. 1991: 695, 696.
Xuantong1/1909). As it was indeed. Having issued several orders —
all blithely ignored — to the shops in the southeast quarter of the
city to remove shop stalls illegally occupying the street, the police
were angered when they arrived to inspect the area and found the
situation
unchanged. Feeling provoked, they threatened the proprietor
of a shop which was blocking a good portion of the street; they told
him to take the offending stall down by nightfall or face prison. The
neighbouring shop owners, indignant at what they viewed as
mistreatment by the police, immediately closed their shops and struck
in protest. According to a newspaper account, the large numbers of
bystanders on the street at the time all complained that the police
were ‘arbitrary, unreasonable, and brutish in their actions. They
maintain an enormous gulf with businessmen, thus this incident’
(‘Xunjing yu chai guilan bashi zhi fengchao/Police demolish stall
market strike controversy’). While the police’s actions may have been
judged excessive by bystanders and shop owners, it is unclear if the
witnesses on the street shared the merchants’ sense that, in addition
to being imperious, the constables had un-rightfully transgressed
accepted means of doing commerce. Yet, to the merchants who fell
afoul of police regulations — who were, more often than not, small-
scale sellers and the ‘ignorant and obstinate’, who often sold
common,low status goods such as food or small items capable of being
peddled — the police ordering of the street proved to be an attack
on commerce. As such, it seemed to contravene one of the police
force’s raison d’être.
Few commodities possessed meaner status than nightsoil (human
waste collected and sold as fertilizer), though not many other
industrieswere either as necessary — Suzhou had no sewerage — or
as reliably remunerative. After the creation of the police, nightsoil
businesses (which held state-issued franchises to collect human waste
from specific areas of the city) and their workers faced an
unprecedented
increase in regulation: citing health and traffic concerns,
the police required the carriers, who collected waste from household
commodes and public latrines into large buckets carried on shoulder
poles, and the barges on which the combined nightsoil was shipped
out of the city to complete their business and remove their cargo at
increasingly early hours of the morning. In addition, the nightsoil
companies were required to maintain higher standards of
sanitation
at the public latrines by washing them down twice a day.
Infractions detected by the police received fines. Originally
resistant
— the companies cited precedent and complained that
they could not complete their collection by the increasingly early
deadlines of 10, 9, and 8 a.m. — the nightsoil operations quickly
conformed (by necessity) to the police force’s active enforcement.
As the regulations and police enforcement grew more stringent,
unsurprisingly, confrontations, sometimes violent, would break out
between police and morning nightsoil collectors accused of tardy
collection, spilling their cargo on the street, or various other
infractions.
These confrontations began to be reported to the Chamber
of Commerce and in the press. In one particularly egregious incident,
a nightsoil collector in his sixties was brutally beaten by a
policeman
and arrested. Allegedly, injuries from the incident left him,
for a certain time at least, unable to move, let alone resume work.
In its letter of complaint requesting that the Chamber of Commerce
intervene with the police, the nightsoil business guild asked, ‘Since
the police were originally established for the purpose of protecting
businessmen, how can there be such lawless incidents as audaciously
bullying ignorant people on a busy street?’ (Zhang K. et al. 1991:
687, 688. GX33.1/Dec. 1906 – Jan. 1907).
In addition to raising concerns regarding basic decency, this
resonant question touched upon the fraught relationship between
the Suzhou police force, perceived as and here proven violent,
and the citizenry they protected. Could such lawless incidents be
legitimate to the exercise of power by the modern police and, by
extension, the modernizing state? As a confrontation between the
state and its citizens, this incident shows that the police, though
powerful and violent, were not perceived as inviolable. The nightsoil
company heads invoked new (police?) regulations on behalf of
the injured nightsoil carrier and sought either monetary damages
or hard labour for the violent constable as compensation for the
beating. The final outcome of the case is unclear, though the few
extant documents suggest that an official investigation produced
reports, which provoked an exchange of letters, which then led to
some unknown juncture or conclusion. Nonetheless, the fact that
the nightsoil companies sought damages from the police raises
interesting questions regarding the relative power of police constable,
citizen, and the business community, as well as the extent and effect
of contesting the operation of modern police in the city.
 More particularly, and perhaps more immediately troubling for
the nightsoil guild heads lodging their complaint with the Chamber
of Commerce, was the question whether such ‘regulation’ conformed
to the police’s basic function to protect merchants, their goods and
commerce as a whole. If so, it seemed improper that one of the
city’s most essential and highly remunerative industries should
suffer at the hands of those dedicated to improving the commercial
order. What these men may or may not have realized was that
police ordering of the urban environment, like the greater regime
of modernist urban development, tended to favour business deemed
modern and progressive. As such, in practice, the police offered
seemingly little protection to nightsoil carriers or small merchants
as a whole.10 This bias did not, however, convince large-scale
businessmen
that the police and, by extension, the state could be trusted
to act as a reliable guardian of commercial interests.

The State Attack on Businessmen

On March 27, 1912, a large group of soldiers from units permanently
assigned to urban defense and policing were unsuccessful in forcibly
gaining free admission to the evening opera at the Daguan Chunxian
Theatre along the horse-road beyond the city’s northwestern Chang
Gate. Angered at the management’s refusal, a good number stormed
in during the performance. The arrival of M.P.s, who attempted
to deter them, only stoked the intruders’ rage. In the ensuing
brawl, arms were brandished and shots fired, spreading the panic
from inside the theatre out into the street, and, shortly thereafter,
throughout the Chang Gate horse-road corridor, Suzhou’s premier
shopping and entertainment district. Word of the altercation
quickly spread back to the army barracks and brought hundreds
of soldiers from different units to the scene, where they joined the
melee and set to assaulting pedestrians and relieving them of their
clothes, money and other valuables. The bulk of the soldiers’ ire,
however, was directed toward the area’s shops, native banks, hotels
and brothels, which the rioters pillaged and burned. From 9 p.m.,
when the riot began, until 5 a.m. the next morning, when it finally
petered out, the night was punctuated by almost constant gunfire.
Civilians, a mix of night-time revellers, merchants, brothel and bar
staff, and residents were forced to make the difficult decision of
when and how to flee, or, if particularly unlucky, how to face the
marauding mob of soldiers, who violently entered some houses and
shops a half dozen times or more. By dawn, several hundred
businesses within a 3–4 li radius had been looted or destroyed.
Seven people, including a teenage boy shop assistant shot while
attempting to escape, a prostitute, and a girl toddler, among others,
had lost their lives. Also, an uncertain number of women had been
raped. Chang Gate stayed shut and most area businesses remained
shuttered for several days. By the end of the following week, some
200 soldiers had not yet returned to camp. Generally believed to
be perpetrators of violence, they became subject to arrest and
execution (Ma and Su 2004: 609–10; ‘Suzhou bingbian jinghao’
(Shocking report on Suzhou soldiers’ mutiny); Suzhoushi dang’an
guan 1986: 114–15, 124).
The damage immediately became an affaire d’état and media
sensation. The haphazard violence against city residents and, as
some perceived, the pointed fury against the business community
highlighted the inability of government forces to secure the city
and encourage commerce. Disillusionment, in Suzhou and elsewhere,
with the state was exacerbated by the fact that police units had been
deployed in the area, but they had refused to intervene in the light
of the number and ferocity of the marauding soldiers. Area business
militia (shangtuan, former tiyuhui) had similarly neglected to quell
the gathering violence, though they redeemed themselves in the
immediate aftermath. Noting that they had been betrayed by the
military and police, the business community took matters into its
own hands. The Chamber of Commerce dispatched the shangtuan
to police the area and seek out rioters who remained at large. 11
Their efforts were supported by a variety of contributors, including
the official Shanghai Armory (Shanghai zhizaoju), which sent five
Gatling guns, ammunition and other supplies to help the shangtuan
keep the peace. In the wake of the riot, city officials were so eager to
restore normalcy that within a few days they ordered all businesses
to re-open and threatened to fine those that did not. In the light
of the damage suffered by various enterprises and the complete
failure of the police to act, this directive seemed not only punitive,
but shameless. One Shenbao commentator noted with understated
incredulity, ‘The state cannot protect people’s lives or property,
yet it will impose fines if businesses do not operate. How this could
be a policy for recovery, I don’t know’ (‘Ziyou tan: wu bugan zhi/
Free talk: I don’t dare to believe’). Within days of the riot, the
business community had assessed the damage and demanded
restitution from the state. Some 499 business claimed more than
500,000 yuan worth of damage (actually, more than 700,000 yuan
by one tally), and by August the state had paid a couple of hundred
thousand yuan in compensation — but this remuneration did little
to improve the standing of state security forces among Suzhou
merchants (Suzhoushi dang’an guan 1986: 124–25, 135–47). On a
national level, similar outrages in Beijing and Tianjin during the
first months of the new Republic highlighted concerns that urban
policing needs should be met by specially trained police forces, not
soldiers (‘Yangbing weiyan/Warning re: training of soldiers’). In
Suzhou, the conflagration additionally underscored the popular
lack of satisfaction with the quality and effectiveness of the police
force and reinforced the notion that perhaps only merchant militia
could be entrusted with guarding commercial property and
economic
interests.
The recriminations of the Chang Gate incident were revived a
year later in August 1913. In response to an upsurge of banditry
along city and suburban canals, the provincial government
dispatchedsoldiers on anti-crime manoeuvres with city police. Harsh
words between the forces of order led to a violent clash on Guanqian
Street, the main central city shopping street, and caused the entire
market to shut down for prudence’s sake and in protest. The
disorder
did not end there. That same day, a contretemps between
soldiers and businessmen provoked a commercial strike on the Xu
Gate horse-road. Assessing the damage, the Chamber of Commerce
caustically noted that as Suzhou businessmen had recently been
left bereft on far too many occasions, the police and military force
amongst them made them feel anxious and ‘battered by storm winds’
(Ma and Su 2004: 322–24, 18–19 Aug. 1913). Rather, it seemed that
other guardians might better protect the people — both the general
urban populace and, more particularly, the city’s merchants.

Conclusion
The establishment of a novel, modern police force was intended to
serve as an instrument for transforming urban infrastructure, society
and economy in pursuit of the New Policies vision of Qing imperial
rejuvenation and transformation. In Suzhou, the police force’s many
practical achievements were strikingly counterbalanced by the
popular suspicion that the police could not be trusted to safeguard
the public weal. This dissatisfaction was particularly pronounced
among businessmen, who criticized the police and the military
for being hostile towards merchant interests and the conduct of
commerce. The Chamber of Commerce thus called out for police
reform and promoted the shangtuan as a special adjutant to and
trusted substitute for the police. Indeed, due to financial strictures
and manpower shortages, the police would, over the next two and
a half decades, delegate special responsibilities for business district
security to the shangtuan, which effectively became a key component
of the urban police force while remaining ambiguously autonomous
of the state. The tensions between Suzhou business interests and the
police highlighted the more general competition between the state
and business elites for urban supremacy, a contest that extended
beyond the late Qing to throughout the Republican period and
ended only with the consolidation of economic and political power
in the hands of the CCP in the early 1950s.

Notes
1. The city was also the seat for a prefecture and three counties. As with
many Ottoman cities, the city did not have juridical status as a coherent
political entity and thus did not have a municipal government. Urban
infrastructure, security and various other services were provided by
the provincial- and county-level administrations and a variety of civil
society groups. Suzhou affairs were also overseen by a viceroy seated
in Nanjing.
2. The ‘New Policies’ period refers to the last decade of Qing rule, when a
host of political, administrative, educational, legal and other initiatives
were promoted by central and provincial authorities in the wake of
an imperial edict of Guangxu [GX] 26.12.10/29 Jan. 1901 requesting
reform measures. Note: Dates, if originally calculated according to the
Chinese lunar calendar, are given as such in year–month–day format,
followed by the Gregorian calendar equivalent. Thus, the above date is
the 10th day of the 12th lunar month of the 26th year of the Guangxu
reign.
3. Traditional butterfly-bound Chinese books are divided into ‘juan’,
which can variously correspond to chapter, section, and volume. Pages
numbers are given in terms of the verso (a) or recto (b) side of the
numbered
page.
4. This function became even more pressing after the Court bowed to
popular pressure in 1908 and announced a schedule of successive political
 reforms leading to the promulgation of a constitution, which included
provincial, city, town and village ‘local self-government’—narrowly
understood by the Court and many officials as granting rights of
consultation
and limited self-regulation instead of a full sharing of power.
Indeed, as local business and gentry leaders were being trained to take
on limited self-regulation of education, public works and other areas,
the Suzhou police assumed responsibility for several public welfare
initiatives theretofore under gentry control.
5. The police did not replace baojia, which continued to exist nominally
to the end of the dynasty, was reinvigorated during the Republic, and
effectively continued, though on a variant Japanese model, during the
first decades of the PRC.
6. This stopgap plan contradicted the principle that the adoption of
modern policing signalled a fundamental disavowal of military forces
as the state’s prime means of domestic social control. As the 1902 set
of centrally recommended police regulations noted, it was essential
to distinguish between the military, which was to be used for defense
against foreign enemies, and the police, which deployed a novel set
of security and investigatory techniques for keeping domestic peace,
especially in densely settled cities. In addition, during the first decade
of the twentieth century, the police increasingly assumed an exclusive
prerogative over weaponry and coercive force, signalling a reorientation
of state policy away from the proliferation and importance of elite-led
citizen militia (tuanlian) as an augmentation of state military power
in response to the mid-nineteenth century Nian and Taiping
rebellions.
Consolidation of domestic security in state hands was now a
fundamental, if elusive, state objective. The Court forwarded Yuan’s
regulations with an accompanying edict to each province, making them
the template for police reform throughout the empire (Yuan 1987,
Vol. 2: 604. GX28.7.5/8 Aug.1902).
7. This calculation seems wise, as the den closure particularly affected the
mass of the urban poor, whose relations with the police were markedly
antagonistic. As elsewhere, lower-class people bore the brunt of police
violence and had rioted against successive new urbanist economic
and sanitation measures. Poor people generally could not afford to
purchase their own pipe and other equipment necessary for the private
consumption of opium, which remained available to those of means—
including, according to contemporary rumour, not a few Chamber of
Commerce worthies and officials—through licensed opium shops. As
a result, lower-class people constituted the vast majority of those who
died from withdrawal (A. W. Bredon to Robert Cross, Semi-official
Maritime Customs report, 20 Sept. 1907, No. 2 Archive, Nanjing, 679 (1)
32204; Cheng 1990: 224; Zhang K. et al. 1991: 702–03. GX33.1.27/11
March 1907, GX33.4/1907).
 8. Kristin Stapleton’s work on urban reform in Chengdu, in which she
describes the introduction of new style policing as relatively rancour-
free, provides an interesting counterpoint to the experience of Suzhou.
Stapleton argues that the Chengdu police quickly secured the goodwill
and acceptance of the general population. While certainly not devoid
of social tensions, such as upper-class resentment of the authority and
official state position of the new police, whom many viewed as their social
and intellectual inferiors, the deployment of police in Chengdu seems
to have been largely placid, with relatively little initial contestation
of the goals and methods of policing. In both cities, however, the
advent of muscular urbanist reform promoted by state and business
actors alike increased ambitions for police administration. In Suzhou,
these ambitions engendered a fair amount of social conflict, especially
during the Republican period. To some extent, this may be due to
the particularities of Suzhou: the differences between the ambitions
and capabilities of late Qing Jiangsu and Sichuan administrators
(Chengdu seems to have been blessed or cursed, depending on your
attitude toward state regulatory capabilities, with more conscientious
and gifted planners), the high level of Suzhou social violence and
resultant public anxieties, the police administration’s activist stance
towards street regulation, and the role of the city’s powerful Chamber
of Commerce (Stapleton 2000).
9. Starting in the late 1890s, principles of urbanist street order, which
emphasized the importance of roads as a vector of economic
development,
and thus at the crux of nation-building, became an explicit topic
of theoretical and policy discussion in Jiangsu provincial and national
circles. For instance, in their reports on conditions in Japan, the US
and Europe, the commissioners sent abroad to study constitutions in
1905–06 identified road administration as one of the signal achievements
of foreign governments in recent decades, the lack of which left China
in a precarious condition. The commissioners identified modernist road
administration as one of the most important tasks of government to
enhance urban sanitation and economic growth. In addition, they
argued that improved transport would alter the balance of power: under
local self-regulation, local authorities and community figures would
gain greater responsibility and autonomy for local goverance, yet
modern
roads would assure that the central state preserved the power to
supervise local conditions.
10. Regulation of nightsoil operations became a protracted point of
contention
between police and the Chamber of Commerce. During the 1920s
and 1930s, police vigilance against ‘bandits’, communist and otherwise,
made nightsoil carriers particularly vulnerable to suspicion and arrest.
The fortunes and power of nightsoil rackets began to wane by the mid-
1930s, as city authorities and the merchant establishment considered
 nightsoil as an important but irredeemably backward business unsuited
to the modernist aspirations of the commercial establishment.
11. The tiyuhui had been reorganized and renamed in 1911, when the militia
stood in the breach and helped police the entire city when local military
units decamped in a campaign to bring Nanjing to the side of the
revolution.

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Ma Min and Zu Su, eds. 2004. Suzhou shanghui dang’an congbian, di’erji, 1912
nian–1919 nian (Archival documents on the Suzhou Chamber of
Commerce,
second collection 1912–1919). Wuchang: Huazhong shifan daxue
chubanshe.
North-China Herald. 1903. Shanghai.
Reynolds, Douglas R. 1993. China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and
Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Semi-official Maritime Customs Reports. 1907–1909. No. 2 National
Archives
of China, Nanjing, China.
Shenbao (Shanghai journal). 1895–1912. Shanghai.
Shibao (The Eastern Times). 1910. Shanghai.
Shirasu Tadashi. 1907. ‘Zai Soshu teikoku ryojikan kankatsu kuikinai jijo’
(Conditions within the sphere of jurisdiction of the Japanese consulate
in Suzhou). In Gaimusho Tsushokyoku (ed.), Shinkoku jijo (Conditions
in the Qing Empire), Vol. 2. Tokyo: Gaimusho Tsushokyoku.
Stapleton, Kristin . 1997. ‘ County Administration in Late-Qing Sichuan:
Conflicting Models of Rural Policing.’ Journal of Asian Studies 18 (1):
100–32.
———. 2000. Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895–1937 .
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Suzhoushi dang’an guan, ed. 1986. ‘ Suzhou Changmen bingbian dang’an
shiliao xuanji’ (Selected archival materials re: the Suzhou Chang Gate
Soldiers’ Mutiny), Xinhai geming shi congkan, 6 ji (Collectanea of
Xinhai Revolution History, Collection 6), pp. 106–75. Beijing: Zhonghua
shuju.
Wakeman, Frederic Jr. 1991. ‘ Models of Historical Change: The Chinese
State and Society, 1839–1989.’ In Kenneth Lieberthal, Joyce Kallgren,
Roderick MacFarquhar and Frederic Wakeman Jr. (eds), Perspectives
on Modern China: Four Anniversaries, pp. 68–102. Armonk, NY: M. E.
Sharpe.
———. 1995. Policing Shanghai, 1927–37. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Wang Jiajian. 1984. Qingmo Minchu woguo jingcha zhidu xiandaihua de
licheng (The modernization of our nation’s police system in the late
Qing and early Republic). Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan.
Wang Shuhuai. 1984. Zhongguo xiandaihua de quyu yanjiu: Jiangsu sheng,
1860–1916 (Regional research on Chinese modernization: Jiangsu
province, 1860–1916). Taibei : Zhongyang yanjiuyuan Jindaishi
yanjiusuo.
Yu Zhen, ed. 1911. Wumen congzheng lu (Record of Suzhou Administration).
Jiangning: Shangyang yinshua guanchang.
Yuan Shikai. 1987. Yuan Shikai zouyi (Yuan Shikai’s Memorials). 3 vols.
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Huazhong shifang daxue chubanshe.

Newspaper Articles
‘ Caiju jiefei’ (Trimming bureaucracy to cut fees). Shenbao GX25.9.8/
12 Oct. 1899, 2.
‘Heshi shuangge’ (Crane market divided by frost). Shenbao GX22.11.6/
10 Dec. 1896, 2.
‘Lun jinri daofei zhi duo’ (On the recent numbers of bandits). Shenbao
GX25.7.18/23 Aug. 1899, 1.
‘Lun Zhongguo yingyong bu zushi’ (On the undependability of Chinese
banner troops). Shenbao GX25.12.19/18 Jan. 1900, 1.
‘Soochow: In line; the police.’ North-China Herald 4 June 1903, 1090.
‘Suzhou bingbian jinghao’ (Shocking report on Suzhou soldiers’ mutiny).
Three articles published over three consecutive days. Shenbao 29 Feb.
1912, 2; 30 March 1912, 2; 31 March 1912, 2.
‘Wuyuan qiusheng’ (Suzhou gardens autumn voices). Shenbao GX22.10.1/
5 Nov. 1896, 2.
‘Xunjing yu chai guilan bashi zhi fengchao’ (Police demolish stall market
strike controversy). Shibao Xuantong 1.12.19/29 Jan. 1910.
‘Yangbing weiyan’ (Warning re: training of soldiers). Shenbao 10 April
1912, 1.
‘Yu ke lun baojia tuanlian’ (Discussing baojia and militia). Shenbao
GX25.7.10/15 Aug. 1899, 1.
‘Zhzo yong buruo lianbing shuo’ (Raising braves not equal to drilling
troops). Shenbao GX21.7.18/6 Sept. 1895, 1.
‘Ziyou tan: wu bugan zhi’ (Free talk: I don’t dare to believe). Shenbao
1 April 1912, 3:2.
 7
Formal and Informal Mechanisms of Rule and
Economic Development: The Qing Empire
in Comparative Perspective
R. Bin Wong

Two Problems: A Theoretical Prologue

The creation of stable political systems and economic development
share certain important abstract characteristics. Both depend, at
least in part, on different parties satisfying the expectations of others.
Effective rule requires officials to strike understandings with elites
and common people about the acceptable parameters of their
relationships.
When these exist, peace and order are more likely; without
such understandings, the likelihood for conflict rises. Turning to
economics, commercial expansion depends in part on people
believing
that those with whom they buy and sell will honour their
agreements.
If people fear that agreements are likely to be broken, they
will not easily enter into them; the number of transactions taking
place will be correspondingly fewer and commercial expansion
therefore limited.
It often seems as if the most important way in which mutual
expectations are stipulated and enforced in most societies today is
through the force of law. Regulations and legal mechanisms are
formal
means through which people specify both political and economic
relationships. Many influential theories about modern state formation
and economic development give pride of place to the
development
of formal rule-governed mechanisms. Think only of the role of
Weberian bureaucracies in many accounts of historical change and
the stress on property rights in the new institutional economics, and
one can quickly recall the key role that formal enforceable rules play
in explaining political and economic change. What we see, of course,
is the identification of modern states and economic growth with
institutional features discerned in European history. This comes
 R. Bin Wong

as little surprise since the empirical basis for social theory comes from
the western past, but it does create serious problems when we consider
what kinds of state transformation and economic change we expect
to observe elsewhere. 1
By ‘formal’ mechanisms, I refer to procedures and organizations
using clear rules to address specific issues. More ‘formal’
mechanisms
tend to stipulate particular actions to be taken given certain
conditions. A contract in a system with well developed courts, for
instance, is an instrument that affirms obligations and intent; it
is also used to seek remedies for what are deemed violations of its
promises. ‘Formal’ mechanisms are often created by governments,
but not exclusively so.
Social groups can create instruments with some of the same
features. Indeed, local levels of political authority often develop, at
least in part, out of group formations that have become more formal.
‘Informal’ mechanisms are practices that have fewer explicit topic-
specific rules. They rely on both oral and written sources of custom
and local practices. This article addresses a series of questions about
formal and informal mechanisms. How do these mechanisms relate
to each other in the realms of political and economic activities?
What is the relative importance of each in Qing China and early
modern Europe? When do formal and informal mechanisms compete
and when do they complement each other? How does this ratio
change over time and what do substitutions between them tell us
about larger issues?2
Modern European state formation was generally about the
growing capacities of certain territorial rulers to consolidate their
control over a number of smaller polities. This process was, in large
measure, achieved through the creation of new bureaucracies and the
stipulation of new relationships in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries between rulers and their elites, who were often organized as
corporate groups (aristocracies, urban elites and clerical leaders), and
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries between rulers and a
broader range of people who were increasingly conceived of as
individual ‘citizens’. The use of law and other formal procedures
were basic to the extension of state power. Similarly, state-enforced
institutional arrangements were important for reducing transaction
costs in economic activities; formal property rights regimes were key
components of these changes. Because formal mechanisms are salient
 Formal and Informal Mechanisms of Rule and Economic Development

for both political and economic changes, we are ill-prepared for

thinking about non-European situations where informal mechanisms
play a far larger role.
The problem is twofold. First, we have to analyze the range of
political and economic activities for which informal mechanisms are
employed — how do we evaluate their successes and limitations?
Second, we have to think about how political and economic changes
are conditioned by the existence of informal mechanisms — are we
to expect a gradual displacement to more closely resemble European
practices, or some hybrid formations of native and western
practices,
or yet some other possibility? The payoff for grasping political
and economic change in the context of both formal and informal
mechanisms should be a richer kind of social theory, grounded more
widely in different historical experiences.

The Qing Political Construction of Social

Order: The Roles of Law
One of the challenges in sorting through the relations between formal
and informal mechanisms is our frequent assumption that formal
mechanisms have functions defined by their operations in European
settings or that the European experience is both desirable and
typical. Deviations from these norms then become problems,
mistakes
or obstacles to the set of historical changes that we expect.
In order to avoid this difficulty it may be helpful to approach more
openly the contexts within which a particular formal mechanism
takes on its roles and meanings. Consider for a moment the subject
of law.
The stereotype of Chinese people as non-litigious has taken a
beating in recent years, owing to a number of marvelous studies
that show the use of courts by common people in order to press any
number of issues. At the same time as we have a clearer appreciation
for the presence of law in local society and its use by common people,
there remain important issues to clarify about the significance of
law. In European state-making narratives, the provision of law
was a key element in the consolidation of centralizing power —
kings sought to replace more local courts with king’s law as the
proper jurisdiction for adjudicating disputes. The king’s law was
as much a sign of his authority as of his ability to raise ever larger
amounts of taxes. It was centralizing states that synthesized and
codified legal practices in a more uniform and consistent manner;
much of this process depended on recognizing customary practices
and making them the basis for law. To create centralizing states,
European monarchs turned to lawyers as skilled men who could serve
their state-making projects of bureaucratic expansion. Moreover,
the relationship between officials on the one hand and elites and
common people on the other was often articulated in terms of legal
relationships — for instance, contracts were often drawn up to specify
agreements between a territorial ruler and urban elites over an
exchange of taxes for some set of rights — the ideas of rights, liberties
and representation were conveyed by legal principles. In China,
however,
there is little sign of customs or formal legal relationships
playing such important roles; the provision of law and justice was not
enmeshed in a constellation of political ideas or institutions similar
to those of Europe. Law does not appear to be as central to defining
the relationships between the ruler and his elites and commoner
subjects, as it was in Europe. Before considering Chinese law
directly,
let me briefly sketch the ways in which Chinese officials did
engage elites and common people.
As important means to secure social stability within a Neo-
Confucian agenda for rule, officials and elites began, in the twelfth
century, to promote a number of local institutions, including
granaries,
village compacts and schools. The relative importance of
officials and elites to the creation and maintenance of these
institutions
fluctuated over time. In general, periods of strong state
initiative were marked by larger official efforts to foster institutions
of local order. There was also an important spatial variation to
official and elite efforts. As the abundant eighteenth-century
evidence clearly shows, officials played less of a role in richer
parts of the empire where elites were expected to shoulder these
responsibilities and more of a role in poorer, often peripheral, parts
of particular provinces and the empire as a whole. The state’s
capacity to reach into society depended on elites acting in concert
to implement a Neo-Confucian agenda of local rule. The structural
complementarity of officials and elites as the actors promoting
these institutions of local order problematizes efforts to consider
European categories of ‘public sphere’ and ‘civil society’ as frames
of reference for Qing China (Wong 1993; Wong 1997: 105–26). This
complementarity doesn’t mean, of course, that official and elite
preferences and goals were always the same. Elites constructed
realms of activity beyond this agenda. For their parts, officials
perceived
a continuum of activities ranging from those the state
promotedto those it restricted; between the extremes lay an area of
shifting size, within which were found activities pursued by elites
and common people that officials could usually tolerate.
Law fails to fit neatly within this Neo-Confucian framework for
local order, for two sets of reasons. First, in Qing-dynasty China,
the state’s statutory law focused much concern on regulating social
practices through the threat of punishment. Penal law directly
complemented moral exhortations to live in ways deemed proper by
a Confucian social logic. When people failed to honour Confucian
expectations of acceptable behavior, they were to be punished
according to the severity of the crime, defined in part by the
relationship
between the perpetrator and the victim in a Confucian
social order. Punishments aimed to put back in balance a moral
social order. Only officials had the authority to use violence and
torture, not elites.
Second, as many commentators on Chinese law observe, officials
expected much dispute-resolution to take place informally without
matters reaching the county magistrate and his court. Among those
disputes that did reach the court, many were still settled through
mediation rather than by court verdict. Were law part of the
Neo-Confucian agenda for creating local social order like granaries,
schools and village compacts, we might expect officials to rely more
on informal mechanisms of mediation in economically richer and
socially more complex situations. At first glance, it seems that
Philip Huang’s suggestion — of Qing law working in simpler social
situations, more innocent of commercialization and social change
than was typical of many parts of the eighteenth-century empire —
might support such a set of possibilities ( Huang 1996: 139–70).
But that turns out to be false; we don’t clearly find informal elite
activities solving the problems intended to be addressed in courts
in economically prosperous areas. Law was not conceived as an
instrument of social order in the same manner as various local Neo-
Confucian institutions. There was a sharper conceptual gap between
officials and their law on the one hand and elites and their informal
mediation on the other than obtained for Neo-Confucian institutions
of local order. Statutory law and principles of mediation distinguished
official and elite roles from each other in a way not found among
principles for Neo-Confucian institutions of local order. As a
consequence, it is more difficult, in many ways, to assess the range
of formal and informal adjudication mechanisms in Qing China than
it is to recognize a basic continuum between formal and informal
institutions of local social order. Not surprisingly, therefore, analysts
disagree on how best to characterize the nature of Qing law.
Philip Huang, for instance, has proposed fundamental distinctions
between magistrates’ decisions according to formal law and the
informal mediation within communities and by elites according to
informal conceptions of justice. He further suggests that formal law
and informal mediation meet in a ‘third realm’ distinct from either
of the other two. As part of an effort to paint stark contrasts, Huang
creates a series of ‘paradoxes’ between ‘representation’ (by which
he means the categories of law which don’t include clear definitions
of property or civil disputes) and ‘practice’, which includes
adjudication of both property issues and other disputes, especially
regarding marriage related matters and loans. He ends up endorsing
what he calls ‘Weber’s tentatively paradoxical formulations’.
Combining Weberian categories in an unusual way, Huang states,
‘The Qing legal and political systems can be seen as a combination of
patrimonial-substantive representations with bureaucratic-rational
practices’ ( Huang 1996: 236). His interpretation moves from the
construction of ‘paradoxes’, that is, phenomena that cannot be
easily explained within western categories, to their resolution by a
redeployment of Weberian theoretical categories. Several Chinese
and Japanese scholars have taken issue with Huang’s interpretation.
Liang Zhiping’s study of Qing customary law rejects the ‘third
realm’ as unclearly defined and empirically inapplicable to the
Qing dynasty (Liang 1996). In contrast to Huang’s insistence that
magistrates made decisions according to state law, Shiga Shuzo
has shown ways in which magistrates used principles of
mediation
to achieve settlements acceptable to both parties (Shiga 1996).
Liang stresses the ways in which customary law regarding property
transactions, marriage disputes and loans all develop out of
popular
practices. The development of this kind of law is part of the
broader dynamics of social and economic change. For Liang,
customary law and statutory law are linked in ways that make
any simple conceptual division between them empirically false. He
further agrees with Shiga Shuzo that magistrate decisions are much
more connected to informal mediation than Huang believes. Shiga
explains how the magistrate’s decision was less a judgement than
a mediated settlement because he had to persuade both sides to
accept the court’s decision.
The sharpness of the debate between Huang, Liang and Shiga
derives in part from competing understandings of the relative
importance
of formal state law and informal principles of mediation to the
adjudication of disputes. A partial resolution to the debate may come
through a recognition that both formal and informal mechanisms
were present in varying degrees in different legal decisions. This is
not an issue of choosing between the two perspectives as substitutes,
but rather of seeing that both were potentially present in any given
decision and could in fact complement rather than substitute for each
other. Beyond the magistrate’s proceedings themselves, the themes
stressed by Liang and Shiga support a vision of complementary
functions
of formal and informal adjudication that make sharp divides
between the state and social actors, a divide in part created by law
in European history, seem foreign to the Qing situation.
Important differences between the Qing and Europe have been
recently exposed by Jerome Bourgon (Bourgon 1999). He explains
the very different relationship between customs and law in Chinese
history, compared to that found in Europe, where state-makers
gained control over local areas by recognizing and codifying popular
customs and making them the basis of law. The weakness of would-
be state-makers made it imperative for them to accept local customs
as the basis of law in a manner that was simply not the case for the
Chinese. To the contrary, ‘customs’ were the object of control and
correctionby officials. Customs, thus, never had the autonomy from
state intervention in Chinese history that they enjoyed for the
centuries
preceding state-making initiatives in European history.
The efforts by the state to fix customs were not, of course, always
successful. Melissa Macauley has shown just how intractable the
problem
of land property transmission was during the eighteenth century
in the southeastern province of Fujian, where parties frequently
disputed
the conditions under which the use of a piece of land could be
re-acquired by the party who had previously parted with such use for
some sum of money. Officials aimed to simplify the conditions
governingthese land transfers and to reduce the number of ambiguous
situations in which it made sense to parties to bring suit in order
to seek advantage (Macauley 1998: 228–78). What matters for my
argument here is less the success or failure of state efforts than the
presumed role of the state to straighten out ‘customary practices’ in
a manner it deems sensible and proper. While there certainly could
be conflict between state aspirations and popular practices, the logic
is one in which state efforts aim to guide and standardize through
active interaction with popular practices. The results were expected
to be ones where officials and elites could play complementary roles
because their perspectives on issues would be similar, if not the same.
This is quite different from European customary law, where we find
the active co-optation of custom into law and the substitution of
local practices by governmental principles. The dynamics are
significantly
different.
The Chinese state’s effort to systematize and regularize customary
practices into law has a partial parallel to the state’s efforts to manage
popular religious practices. Beyond a set of deities that the state
insisted on receiving recognition, officials were eager to co-opt deities
enjoying popular belief as part of an officially approved pantheon. At
the same time, officials were vigilant in circumscribing the worship
of deities deemed dangerous for their ability to incite people to
mobilize
and potentially oppose the established order. In between the
cooptation of some popular deities and the periodic prohibition of a
handful of others, there existed a largely untamed landscape of other
popular religious figures whose worship the state tolerated as long as
such activities did not openly collide with official visions of proper
beliefs. Similarly, perhaps, some practices became customary law,
while a few others were decried and outlawed; at the same time, many
others existed in a realm of activities that were neither supported
nor prohibited.
Creating customary law and linking it to statutory law was part
of a larger state effort to order society by molding social practices,
but people had their own private uses for the law. As Melissa
Macauley and Madeleine Yue’s works have shown, people, including
officials, used litigation as a means to advance their interests at
the expense of others (Macauley 1998; Yue 1995). In so doing, they
subverted the purposes to which law was put by officials. From
the vantage point of contemporary Euro-American
understandings
of law, it isn’t surprising that people would seek to use the law
instrumentally to serve their own purposes; nor is it shocking to
discover that powerful people are able to use the law in ways that
poor people cannot. In our interest-based societies, the pursuit of
individual or group interests is assumed and the law is understood to
be one vehicle through which this can be accomplished. Indeed, we
imagine formal legal mechanisms to be intended to mediate among
interests and, through this process, for social order to be maintained.
Our ability to make this assumption develops out of a tradition in
which much of law was historically directly about interests, about
their specification and protection. Elites were anxious to protect
their ‘liberties’ and ‘freedoms’ that were under attack by
centralizing
monarchs’ and negotiated to protect them; a legal dimension to
the framing of relations between monarchs, and their elites was, not
surprisingly, going to focus on these interests. What is difficult for
us to accept, both because of what European history teaches us and
how our contemporary lives are structured, is that the use of the law
to negotiate public and private interests, between people as well as
with the state is only one way in which law can be conceived.
In Europe, there was a general trend of the king’s law displacing
courts and law at lower levels; in addition, there was an increasing
incorporation of custom into law. The net result of these processes was
the substitution of more formal institutions for less formal ones, most
of which recognized ‘interests’ as basic. In Qing China, in contrast,
there was statutory law promulgated by the imperial government
that was joined for non-criminal issues by local custom and
practices, to provide guidelines for magistrates to render decisions.
Imperial law doesn’t seek to displace some other sources of law but to
complement and anchor efforts at mediation and dispute resolution
through local customs. Different kinds of state transformations follow
from the dynamics typical of these Chinese and European situations for
law. When we turn to issues of economic change, issues of interest are
prominent in both China and Europe, but the importance of law
and other formal institutions compared to informal social institutions
appears to differ.

Facilitating Economic Development:

Formal and Informal Mechanisms
The new institutional economics stresses property rights because it
envisions the specification of enforceable property rights to be the basic
means to create growth. Transaction costs can be reduced, thereby
allowing more efficient use of resources on ever-larger scales.
Enforceable
property rights presume a state with not only a well-articulated
set of laws but also the infrastructural capacity to make people obey
them. The basic achievement of secure property rights is to reduce
risks encountered when entering into contracts with people one
doesn’t know well. The new institutional economics often makes it
seem as if formal property rights regimes are the only way risks
can be reduced and hence transactions increased. But historically,
in medieval Europe as well as in late imperial China, it turns out
that trust between individuals could be achieved through informal
networks that promoted common standards and expectations of
credible and acceptable behaviour.
In the Qing dynasty, both kinship groups and native place
associations provided opportunities for individuals to forge
connections
in which expectations were reinforced by networks of social
relations. Whenever some commercial venture came to require more
than just a few people, individuals often turned to relatives outside
the immediate family to find additional personnel. Kinship networks
provided a considerable pool of people for whom social bases of
accountability existed quite separately from those of state law. Kin
could be trusted with commodities in long-distance trade because
they were tied to each other by more than the specific transactions
themselves, and thus would have fewer incentives to cheat than
people without such ties would have. But kinship networks could
not on their own create a large enough pool of people within which
a merchant and his relatives might find people with whom to do
business. To increase the numbers of commercial relations that
could be entered into with a higher degree of trust than would
otherwise exist in the absence of effective formal state institutions,
the Chinese relied upon native place associations. These
associations,
located in different cities where people from the same locale
could expect to make contacts with people from their home areas,
performed a variety of social as well as economic functions. In
some cases, there was an overlap between occupation and native
place association; sometimes a native place association might
include several discrete occupations. Beyond these occupational
functions, native place associations were information nodes for new
immigrants. Such associations could help immigrants in making the
transition to a new environment, thus making possible migrations
that would otherwise be far more difficult. For the purposes of this
essay, the most relevant activities of native place associations to
look at are those related to economic activities, production, trade
and finding work.3
 Dealing with kinsmen and people from the same native place
helped reduce risk in many commercial transactions, but merchants
in the Qing empire, like those in other places, still found it necessary
to deal with people who were neither relatives nor members of the
same native place associations. In these situations especially, they
faced the problems of assuring performance by others as written in
contracts. Usually, contracts stipulated a middleman, often from the
same guild or native place association, who guaranteed a person’s
meeting contractual obligations. Beyond these kinds of guarantees,
a merchant could reduce the likelihood of contractual problems by
dealing with merchants with reputations for honesty. Not
surprisingly,
therefore, merchants were counselled by writers of merchant
handbooks to develop good reputations. Being known as honest,
fair and trustworthy was a sound strategy for increasing business
(Lufrano 1997).
What is striking about the general range of mechanisms
employed
by Chinese merchants to reduce risks in commercial
transactions
is the absence of state adjudication and enforcement. This
is quite distinct from saying the Chinese didn’t use contracts. We
are learning about many social and spiritual arenas as well as
economicones in which the Chinese, even when dealing with close kin,
used contracts (Hansen 1995). What we don’t see is frequent court
litigation over contracts regarding long-distance trade. From a
European perspective,this seems counter-intuitive, for just as we
expect state-formation to be accompanied by the imposition of
increasingamounts of rule-governed behaviour, we expect economic
change to depend on legally specified and enforced property rights
and contract law. Informal mechanisms lacking state-enacted
legal procedures were adequate in China to facilitate tremendous
expansion of long-distance trade. A combination of occupational
guilds, native place associations and contracts with middleman
guarantors made an increasing number of transactions possible
without
frequent recourse to courts. To the surprise of those looking at
the Chinese situation from a European perspective, recent
scholarship
has shown us a considerable number of legal disputes centred on
property exchanges and transmissions as well as others concerning
loans. If these latter sorts of economic matters became subjects of
litigation, why not the merchants’ commercial transactions?
Here is a possible explanation. First, parties to trading
transactions
had many incentives to honour their commitments. Sometimes
this was because their commercial commitments were with people
with whom they expected to do business again. Even if not, their
reputation for fair business could be associated with their guild or
native place ties; failure to sustain honest practices may have
jeopardized
their position in these voluntary associations. In short,
people intending to do repeated business transactions had strong
incentives to act in a manner to promote such activity — they didn’t
need a county magistrate and the state’s formal law to encourage
them to honour their contracts. In contrast, people who entered legal
cases regarding land transmissions or loans were not people seeking
to resolve activities that they performed on a routine or repeated
basis, but rather people troubled by an unusual if not, for them,
unique situation. Their self-interest lay in achieving justice in the
specific situation for which a lawsuit had been started. Moreover, it
was easier for courts to gather information on, and judge the merit
of, local disputes. Cases that would have emerged from long-distance
trade would have been more difficult to adjudicate because the
court would likely need information from parties located in widely
separate places.
A second reason for the modest state role in commercial disputes
in the Qing dynasty is revealed when we consider more carefully the
relationship between customary commercial practices and the state
in both the Qing dynasty and early modern Europe. Both European
and Chinese merchants developed customary practices to promote
their commercial activities. A larger difference concerns the ways in
which these activities were related to officials. In European cases,
the development of commercial law and the adjudication by
merchants
of their own disputes was done on the basis of legal authority,
authority that merchants themselves often had a major hand in
creating.
Analytically, the provision of law by merchants themselves, and
later by governments, was a process of substitution made plausible
because political authorities had initially recognized the capacity of
merchants to engage in legal activities regarding commerce. In China,
there was no such relationship between government leaders and
merchants, no similar logic of authority and, consequently, it would not
prove as easy conceptually to create a substitution at a later point
in time.
The Qing state expected the rules of lineages and merchant groups
to follow the same general Confucian precepts that officials used
in their principles and practices of governing. From the vantage point
of the state, merchant-group regulation of business activity
complemented
the activities undertaken by officials, or those undertaken by
elites or lineages to promote policies designed to assure social order.
From the merchant’s point of view, officials were often to be avoided
for fear that engaging officials with their commercial problems could
provide officials with the pretext to extract funds from them. So,
Chinese merchants had both incentives to solve their own
problems
and a reluctance to engage officials. From a broader perspective,
nevertheless, officials recognized the importance of merchant
capacities to manage their own disputes, and could consider such
efforts as part of the larger project of officials and elites to create
and sustain social order.
Despite the reluctance smaller merchants appear to have had in
turning to officials for adjudicating their disputes, the eighteenth-
century state did not prey upon commercial wealth to the same degree
as was often the case in early modern Europe. Perhaps European
merchants could expect their states to create stronger property
rights regimes because these states themselves were so interested
in extracting revenues from these merchants. Commercial revenues
were less important to the Qing state, at least before 1850. The state
used voluntary merchant organizations as vehicles through which it
collected routine levies and extraordinary taxes. From the official
point of view, this taxation function was part of a larger expectation
that merchants would help maintain social order (S. Mann 1987).
Officials lacked the infrastructural capacity to regulate merchants
more closely. The lack of an intrusive state meant that merchants
had fewer incentives to delineate their sphere of authority more
sharply from the state. The likelihood of legal or other forms of self-
definition and protection were lower than they were in European
settings. Qing officials could expect to use merchant organizations
to raise taxes and keep social order, extending their capacity to rule
through informal mechanisms, at the same time as these mechanisms
facilitated economic growth without a large government role.
Europeans developed formal mechanisms for promoting economic
expansion. In part, governments did so for self-interested reasons.
In order to make increasingly large claims on merchants, European
states either sought to establish government monopolies from which
they received rents, or they sought to more clearly delineate and
minimize risk in trade transactions, in order to have an ever-growing
base to tax. As Douglass North has repeatedly stressed, the different
choices had larger implications for the possibilities of economic growth
of different European states. Spain did more poorly than England
because it relied on rent-seeking rather than property-rights
specification.
Quite separate from these formal institutional developments
that favoured economic growth were informal mechanisms that
facilitated long-distance trade. Among the most famous were those
of the Italian city-states in the sixteenth century that guaranteed
both personal and group reliability of merchants. Some substitutions
of formal for informal institutions occurred in the succeeding three
centuries, but even in the nineteenth century the family networks
utilized by the Rothschilds clearly mattered to their commercial
expansion. The differences between the ranges of formal and informal
institutions in Chinese and European commercial situations can thus
be easily exaggerated. Closing the gap further, research on Chinese
law has pointed out that the Chinese had a much more developed
property-rights regime than we had previously imagined. These
important
correctives to earlier, more stark, contrasts encourage us to
specify more precisely what, if any, important differences remain
betweenthe use of law in the Chinese and European cases of
commercial
expansion.

Substitution and Complementarity of

Formal and Informal Institutions
The differences I’ve been sketching in this article concern the
differences
between substitutability and the complementarity of formal
and informal mechanisms. In the former case, which more clearly
describes European possibilities, some formal and informal
mechanisms
are developed independently of each other. While certainly
there are connections between them, it is the ability to move back
and forth between them and to change the relative reliance on
either of them as conditions change that marks European cases.
Moreover, there is a general shift, for many activities, from informal
mechanisms to formal institutions, which is an even more important
feature of substitutability. At the same time, there usually are sharp
distinctions between what is formal and what is informal so that
the shift from informal to formal is clearly part of the state-making
process for many activities as well as part of the development of
capitalism as an economic system.
 The Chinese case of complementarity between formal and
informal
mechanisms helps us understand how the Chinese empire
was ordered and how its economy could grow despite the absence of
the kinds of structures we expect in the European case. While
distinctions
between the formal and informal institutions can, in
principle,
be easily drawn, the historical relationships between them
deserve more careful analysis. I pose, as a hypothesis, the possibility
that there is a complementarity of formal and informal institutions in
late imperial China where a substitutability between the same is more
common in early modern Europe. Substitutability assumes a prior
complementarity, but creates possibilities for greater flexibility and
change because one kind of mechanism can more completely displace
the other for particular purposes. In particular, formal mechanisms
create common standards and norms, as well as support their
implementation, while informal practices sustain greater degrees of
diversity. The shift from less formal to more formal institutions
in Europe is commonly associated with the centralizing of
government
power and authority by a larger territorial state at the expense
of a multitude of smaller political units. Compared to an agrarian
empire, we see how the European processes of centralization worked
on a limited spatial scale. It is far more difficult to imagine moving
from informal to formal mechanisms on an empire-wide basis. On
this spatial scale, it is the complementary use of both formal and
informal practices that creates the possibilities for rule. Certainly
‘indirect’ in key ways, imperial rule also included crucial ‘direct’
official impacts on the local social order.

Political Campaigns and Formal and

Informal Mechanisms of Rule
Formal institutions of rule, such as law and rule-governed
bureaucracies,
allow the effective emergence of routine government.
Departures from routine procedures in the contemporary world of-
tenrequire suspension of certain laws and the redefinition of certain
bureaucratic powers. Yet, in ordinary times, present-day
governments
conventionally have far greater powers and authorities than
the governments of two or three centuries ago. The paradigmatic
European cases define this process of modern state-making. In a
range of European cases we see, among other phenomena, the
substitution
of various informal and often local mechanisms of rule
by formal and spatially extensive institutions of rule, including
both law and bureaucracy. On the other hand, the Qing state had
an impressive bureaucracy, vertically integrated across some five
levels of administration, with functionally specific bureaucracies for
particular activities spanning a territory as vast as Europe and its
many independent states. Large compendia of administrative rules
and regulations framed Chinese official decision making on complex
and diverse topics ranging from funeral customs to taxation and
public works. Yet the reach of the Chinese state was quite modest,
given the vast extent of the empire. There were constraints of
premodern technologies of communication and transportation, and
the organizational limitations of bureaucratic decision-making and
implementation. To meet these limitations, the eighteenth-century
state depended greatly on Confucian elites to shoulder part of the
burden of creating and sustaining institutions of local social order
that made up the Neo-Confucian agenda of rule already discussed
briefly above. The complementary nature of official and elite efforts
meant that the institutions they created were neither simply
formal
nor informal; rather, they spanned a continuum between formal
and informal. The same quality of transcending a binary contrast
of formal institutions and informal mechanisms applies as well to
political campaigns in the Qing dynasty.
The implementation of the Neo-Confucian agenda for social
order depended on campaign-like mobilizations of resources and
manpower. Our image of the activist nature of eighteenth-century
emperors rests at least in part upon the implementation of campaign-
like initiatives in civilian government. These campaigns mobilized
men and resources across the divide between formal and informal
institutions of rule, in ways that once again show the assumption of
complementarity among formal and informal bases of rule. Consider
briefly two arenas, those of surveillance and subsistence security,
in which campaigns alert us to some important characteristics of
the eighteenth-century Qing state.
While routine surveillance of people could not keep track of all
their activities, the emperor could mount massive official efforts to
root out extraordinary dangers. The Qianlong emperor may have
been especially likely to anticipate trouble because he was sensitive
to indications that Manchu authority was not being properly
respected. We know that he was certainly determined to affirm the
distinctiveness of Manchu rule (Crossley 1997: 122–30). His anxieties
erupted in a 1768 scare that sorcerers were stealing people’s spirits
by cutting off their queues, a symbol of Manchu authority. The
Qianlong emperor set in motion an elaborate effort to search out
and arrest those believed responsible for this activity. To do so,
he mobilized his officials to make extraordinary efforts to identify
possible problems. In the end, the scare was nothing more than a scare
and the campaign to find the perpetrators became awkward, since
no perpetrators were found, and it was difficult to admit that such
individuals did not exist (Kuhn 1990). Other state campaigns had
somewhat different results. A second example of campaigns comes
from food supply management issues. The granary system depended
for its expansion on periodic campaigns to mobilize and store
additional amounts of grain. These succeeded between the late
seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries in amassing hundreds
upon hundreds of tons of grain. The challenge of creating routine
maintenance and supervision proved, in some ways, more difficult
than mobilizing men and resources for campaigns to establish
granaries and subsequent campaigns to augment their reserves.
Nevertheless, the government made great efforts, through the first
half of the eighteenth century, to expand its routine use of granary
capacities. Serious questioning of the system, especially in 1748,
was later followed by renewed efforts to expand stocks in many
provinces. These campaigns succeeded in ways the routine use of
granary reserves did not, because as the system expanded in scale,
its routine use became increasingly complex. By the end of the
eighteenth century, both the Jiaqing emperor and many officials
believed that the granary system was too complex; community
granaries
in particular were left more fully in elite hands without official
oversight. Institutional fragility led to more permanent decline; no
more large-scale campaigns were mounted to rebuild reserves across
the empire (Will and Wong 1991). Nineteenth-century campaigns
had other more familiar concerns: foreign threats and domestic
rebellions.
Campaign initiatives of the Qing state often required the
mobilization
of extraordinary revenues. But unlike seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century European state-builders who sought to routinize
initially extraordinary sources of taxation, the Qing state preferred
to maintain a low statutory rate of land taxation; in addition, there
were various land surtaxes and other taxes on an as-needed basis,
which, before the mid-nineteenth century, did not become a constant
basis. Many specific institutions of local order, including granaries,
schools and the baojia system of household registration for mutual
surveillance were created through intensive efforts but unlikely to
be sustained at a high level of effectiveness for more than a few
decades without infusions of resources and organizational energy.
The combination of civilian campaigns and fragile institutions
creates superficially contradictory images of an aggressive and
interventionist state on the one hand and a weak and ineffective,
even barely present, state on the other. Both images have their
foundation in realities that vary both spatially and temporally
across the empire. In general, the eighteenth-century state was more
activist toward local social order than its nineteenth-century
successor;
state efforts were more salient in the peripheries of provinces,
regions and the empire than in economic and political cores. But
even when eighteenth-century officials embarked on major
campaigns
to promote domestic social order, they recognized a tension
between increased official efforts and reliance upon local elites and
communities to be more self-regulating and self-sustaining. The
Yongzheng emperor’s expansion of official interventions led to
some routinization of expanded official responsibilities in the early
Qianlong reign, but, by the 1760s and 1770s, officials were more likely
to rely upon elites and communities to manage local institutions
on their own. To recognize a continuum of complementary efforts
doesn’t mean there weren’t competing and changing ideas about
how the division was to be made.
The bursts of government energy that made sharply visible the
presence of official activities to large numbers of people were often
prompted by imperial decisions. The ability of eighteenth-century
emperors to invoke large-scale bureaucratic responses to their
directives evokes for outside observers images of autocracy and
despotism. But we should note, as well, the limited duration of these
intensive government-led campaigns and the uneven
institutionalized
results they produced — uneven by design as much as by
default. Neither the emperor nor his officials generally favoured
expanding the government’s tax base beyond what was deemed
minimally necessary. The limited temporal duration of political
campaigns
and of much of the financing associated with them means
that the abilities and intentions for what some observers have
conceived
as despotic behavior were less present than we might expect.
At the same time, the repeated mounting of political campaigns for
a wide variety of purposes means that images of a lumbering and
ineffective state, distant from the people and largely irrelevant to
them, also fail to focus on the full range of activities undertaken
by the government.
The crucial importance of political campaigns to the Qing
dynasty’s strategies of government undermines two additional
binary
contrasts. First, there is a contrast between ‘arbitrary’ power
and ‘infrastructural’ power as alternative forms of political power
(M. Mann 1986). We tend to think of the capacity of rulers to
exercisetheir personal whims to be the opposite of bureaucratically
organized power-generating rule-governed operations. But what the
example of the Qing state suggests is a far more complementary
relationship between the two forms of power. The eighteenth-
century government bureaucracy responds to a range of initiatives,
those prompted by the emperor being among the most important.
For their parts, the Qing emperors increased and improved the
structures through which they could amass information from
officials
and deliberate on appropriate policy choices across a wide
range of subjects. Imperial capacities for effective intervention
depended crucially on expanding bureaucratic infrastructures. Such
interventions were ‘arbitrary’, in the sense that they were not simple
outcomes of law-like rules, but they were not often ‘arbitrary’ in
the sense of being taken on whim and without careful reasoning.
A second binary between ‘extraordinary’ and ‘routine’ operations
is also undermined by Qing state activities. Chinese bureaucratic
infrastructures expanded in the eighteenth century, but these
capacities
were not utilized in the same manner from year to year. Many
activities, including some of those associated with water control and
food supply management, were too infrequent to be labelled annual
or ‘routine’, and yet they took place more commonly than seems to
fit the conventional meaning of ‘extraordinary’. The repeated use
of political campaigns and their different institutional outcomes
fall along a continuum, with routine and extraordinary as simply
the two distant endpoints.
By the late nineteenth century, there were important social and
economic changes, resulting in part from engagement with
westerners.
One of the key features of these changes was an elaboration
of new social networks and associational forms. These changed the
relationships between informal and formal mechanisms of control.
Where previously there had been a complementary relationship,
there were increasing efforts, beginning with late nineteenth-century
elites, to demarcate a separate space for social actors and to redefine
more explicitly the relationship they enjoyed with the state. But this
was not a set of changes that officials were anxious to support. In
general, they remained in favour of elites and their informal
activities
extending the reach of the state.
Consider briefly an example from the late Qing campaign to
suppress
opium. The state’s strategy for suppressing opium depended
fundamentally on mobilizing gentry elites to share in this
project
of recreating a social order morally reinvigorated by the
eradication of the opium blight. In pursuit of this end, the
government
promoted the founding of anti-opium societies to be headed
by gentry leaders. Gentry elites had been entrusted with the Neo-
Confucian agenda for local order in earlier centuries; they were now
called upon to combat a threat to social order as great as any
peacetime
danger the empire had ever experienced. By the late nineteenth
century, gentry elites had come to play more formal roles in politics
and social life. The formation of assemblies and various new societies
marked the greater participation of elites in politics, and a contest
between elites and the state over the definition of elite roles in governing.
The government wanted to mobilize elite support for promoting
social order, without sanctioning a more formal political role with
enhanced and specified powers.4 Thus, a set of government
regulations
on opium suppression with regard to anti-opium societies
states: ‘Such society shall be purely for the anti-opium smoking, and
the society shall not discuss any other matter, such as political questions
bearing on topical affairs or local administration, or any similar
matter’ (International Opium Commission 1909, Vol. 2: 81). Another
set of regulations called on all local officials to ‘instruct reputable
gentry and merchants in their jurisdictions to organize Anti-Opium
Associations and to publish pamphlets and magazines in simple
language to exhort people to break off opium smoking. These
publications should not interfere with politics or subjects outside
of their province’ (Ibid.: 85). From the government’s point of view,
these anti-opium associations were an extension of government
capacity and commitments to eradicate opium use. Indeed, a 1906
edict granted anti-opium societies ‘full authority to enter any place
for examination and placed at their disposal officers to enforce their
demands for admittance or to make arrests where ordered by such
committees’ (Ibid.: 115).
 Political campaigns depended on a combination of formal and
informal mechanisms of rule. Late imperial Chinese patterns of rule
depended more generally on both formal and informal mechanisms.
There was certainly variation across space and changes over time
regarding the particular constellations of formal and informal
mechanisms
deployed with respect to specific situations. Moreover, there
were clearly disagreements among officials and elites regarding their
respective roles, as well as their uses of formal and informal means
to pursue competing goals and interests. The framework offered
in this essay could be elaborated on another occasion to consider
those contests more closely and to look at other examples. I will
conclude this essay by looking briefly at twentieth-century China
and suggesting some implications of the approach I have employed
for considering the Ottoman empire.

Concluding Speculations
The relationship between formal and informal mechanisms of
social
order have changed in twentieth-century China, in part due
to foreign-induced processes. But the persistence of the earlier
logic — of formal and informal mechanisms as complements along
a continuum rather than as substitutes separated by demarcated
spaces more typical of western social scenarios — means that the
trajectory of twentieth-century Chinese political change has been
subject
to two vectors. The western vector has been been well studied,
the Chinese less so. But for the actual trajectory to be plotted, both
vectors need to be recovered and their mutual influence explored.
As for economic matters, late imperial economic expansion
dependedin large measure on informal mechanisms, with formal
mechanisms
complementing them in ways conducive to expanding and
sustaining an agrarian empire. In the first half of the twentieth
century, new formal mechanisms were proclaimed and economic
expansion was due in part to new processes and institutional
practices imported from the West; but the uncertain connections
between these new mechanisms and earlier indigenous ones created
a confused situation in which the degree of integration between
countryside and city and among different regions may well have
been less than had existed in late imperial times. The post-1949 state
created a political economy in which few of the informal
mechanisms
of the late empire or formal mechanisms of the Republic were
retained. Since 1978, a new effort to construct formal and informal
mechanisms for economic growth has been undertaken, but this time
there isn’t the same degree of complementarity between formal and
informal mechanisms — accusations of corruption related to the use
of guanxi, or connections instead of activities conducted according
to formal rules, have marred development possibilities.
Considering both the political and economic themes in this paper,
there are few reasons to anticipate that the relationship between
formal and informal mechanisms for creating social order and
promotingeconomic expansion will be the same in the Ottoman empire
as those in the Qing empire. But we might hypothesize that
informal
mechanisms have to be more important the larger the spatial
scale of a polity, especially before the mid-nineteenth century, when
the technologies of communication and transportation began to
make it easier for states to reach more broadly and deeply into
society.
Sorting out how informal and formal mechanisms are related
to each other could prove a fruitful approach to examining the
Ottoman experience, if my sketch of such an approach for the Qing
dynasty has some merit. We could compare the spatial and functional
dimensions of formal bureaucracy, contrasting patterns of official
recruitment, relations with local elites and capacities for different
kinds of action. We might also consider the ways in which informal
mechanisms created by local customs become more structured,
with the nature of the relationships between these mechanisms and
formal government rule being a crucial nexus. Such an approach
might succeed in identifying both the common challenges faced by
large-scale empires such as the Ottoman and Qing empires, and
the distinctive capacities developed to address these challenges.
How states in each empire responded to the opportunities and
difficulties
offered by commercial expansion and broader economic
changes might alert us to ways in which their longer-run political
trajectories differed. Of course, many other factors not part of the
approach I’m outlining certainly matter to comparisons of empire,
including the contextual differences that define quite distinctive
sets of political challenges, such as the Ottomans facing European
powers, and the Manchus facing both sedentary Chinese and a
range of Inner Asian peoples.
Whatever we learn from comparing these two agrarian empires
with each other, the Qing case already suggests possible implications
for social theory. The standard story of how formal and informal
are increasingly demarcated from each other, with the substitution
of one for the other regarding particular activities, seems
particularly
powerful for explaining changes in European, and later in
American, history. The Qing case suggests that formal and informal
mechanisms can be complements rather than substitutes and exist
along a continuum rather than in two distinctly demarcated spheres.
Accommodating the greater variety of possible relationships
betweenformal and informal mechanisms seems a desirable
development,
if social theory is to escape the limits of its European past
and make good on its aspirations to account for patterns of historical
change on a global scale.

Notes
1. A second set of problems about which I’ll say little here concerns the
many misunderstandings of the European past that derive from the
stylized
view offered by typical social theories.
2. For a direct comparison of the patterns of Chinese and European
political and economic change, see Wong (1997).
3. One of the striking features of Chinese native place associations was the
degree to which they represented different spatial scales of ‘native’; in
general, the further away the migrant place or the smaller its size, the
larger the spatial catchment area of the native place association. This
suggests some effort to create networks of some minimal size in order
to be useful.
4. Interpreting the growing formalization of political and social roles for
elites in late Qing China has been the subject of some debate. Some
scholars see a process of political and social change parallel to the
European development of a ‘public sphere’. I have argued for crucial
differences
between the Chinese and European cases (Wong 1993). The
nature of official and elite efforts to suppress opium conform to those
distinctions between European cases, where an effort is made to demarcate
rights and claims as elites wage battle to limit state penetration, and a
Chinese situation, in which elites and officials share a common agenda
for social order despite conflict and competition over defining their
specific
roles.

References
Bourgon, Jerome. 1999. ‘La coutume et le droit en Chine a la fin de l’empire.’
Annales HSS 5: 1073–107.
Crossley, Pamela Kyle. 1997. The Manchus . Cambridge, MA : Blackwell
Publishers.
Hansen, Valerie. 1995. Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How
Ordinary People Used Contracts 600–1400. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Huang, Philip. 1996. Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
International Opium Commission. 1909. Report of the International Opium
Commission, Shanghai, China. February 1 to February 26, 1909. London:
P. S. King and Son.
Kuhn, Philip . 1990. Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Liang Zhiping. 1996. Qingdai xiguan fa: shehui yu guojia (Qing dynasty
Customary law: society and state) Beijing: Zhongguo zhengfa daxue
chubanshe.
Lufrano, Richard. 1997. Honorable Merchants: Commerce and Self-
cultivation in Late Imperial China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press.
Macauley, Melissa. 1998. Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters
in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power: A History of Power from
the Beginning to A.D. 1760. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mann, Susan. 1987. Local Merchants and the Chinese Bureaucracy,
1750–1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Shiga Shuzo. 1996. ‘Shindai no minji saiban ni tsuite’ (On civil adjudication
in the Qing dynasty).’ Chu–goku shakai to bunka 12: 226–52.
Will, Pierre-Etienne and R. Bin Wong. 1991. Nourish the People: The
State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650–1850. Ann Arbor:
University
of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies.
Wong, R. Bin. 1993. ‘ Great Expectations: The “Public Sphere” and the
Search for Modern Times in Chinese History.’ Chu–gokushi gaku 3:
7–50.
———. 1997. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of
European Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Yue, Madeleine. 1995. ‘Communities and Communication: A Study of the
Case of Yang Naiwu, 1873–77.’ Late Imperial China 16 (1): 79–119.
 8
Heaven and the Administration of Things:
Some Remarks on Law in the Tanzimat Era
Şerif Mardin

Introduction
How Muslims — and in that connection — Ottoman Muslims make
sense of the pattern of values which frame their everyday life, and how
they learn to play the game of socializing is often explained in terms of
their religious beliefs or ritual practices. Often, the regulatory
mechanisms
of Islam are seen as extensions of commands originating in
the text of the Qur’an. These general explanations about Islamic
societies, in which religion is given a justified prominence, rarely
go on to look at the infinitely complex finer meshes which together
make up what we may call Islamic culture. At that level, we
encounter a sophisticated world of juridical practices, differentiated
spheres setting the field for the performance of hermeneutical skills
and an interpretation between the elaboration of an understanding
of Islamic values and the language of the Qur’an. The gap between
the invocation of Islam as an explanatory key and the specificity of
the processes it subsumes is a void which even the best intentioned
anthropologists have had difficulty filling, primarily because of the
limitation of the use of language as a different type of tool in their
own society — let alone the linguistic insufficiency of many of these
scholars (Gerber 1994: 26–29, 50–54).
Islamic society allows Doctors of Islamic Law to bring in their own
original interpretation of the law in specific instances, something
Max Weber, despite — or maybe because — of his legal background,
never understood. This is a second level at which modern western
scholars of Islam encounter difficulties which traditional Islamists
of an orientalistic background never had to face. But the most
remarkable misconstruction of Islam appears when an expert on Islam
attempts to describe Ottoman society. In such endevaours, the fact
that the Ottoman state used the training of Doctor of Islamic Law
 Şerif Mardin

for the very purpose of administration, and that the magistrates felt
themselves to be an intrinsic part of the mechanism of the state,
is a characteristic which is seldom retrieved. The idea is that the
judicial everywhere is a faint copy of the western judiciary.
I attempt here to underscore all of these elements. But I believe
that for Turks of today the most important aspect of my theme is
the fact that the centralizing — also secularizing — drive of the
Ottoman reform movement known as the Tanzimat (1839–1876)
not only disrupted the pyramid of the employment of the Ulama
(Doctor of Islamic Law) but also dismissed an extraordinarily
complex
culture, in the absence of which all modern Turkish secular
culture has suffered, from the grossness of which it is only slowly
recovering.
In 1962, I published a book the first set of Ottoman literati
on

to have promoted aconstitutional-representative system in the

Ottoman empire ( Mardin 1962 ). The group was formed in the mid-
18608 and declared it would bear the name of Türkistanm erbab-i
şebabi (Young Ottomans), an echo of tliesBarlier 'Young Italy' and
'Young France'. The oppositional activities; of the Young Ottomans
lasted not more than a decade. Nevertheless, when the first Ottoman
constitution was proclaimed in 1876, this document was due as
much to Young Ottoman ideas as to the more pragmatic views of
a military junta, which had gone on to dethrone the reigning Sultan

Abüdulaziz (1861-1876) in the months preceding the proclamation

of the constitution. 1 The move on the part of the military
conspirators
was also the outcome of the even more down-to-earth aim of

deflecting an impending European military intervention.

Representative government was an innovation for the Ottomans;
the idea that the subjects of the sultan had a collective
representative
voice to be heard was not (Watt 1998, 2000). But the specific
form of vox populi as embodied in representative institutions
importedfrom the West altogether raised important foundational
issues of sovereignty and legitimation for Ottoman Muslims. For
many centuries in the Ottoman empire, the core of the discourse of
legitimate rule had been the sultan’s role as a provider of justice.
Justice, in the most abstract sense, was the criterion for deciding
whether the sultan’s rule was legitimate ( Tezcan 1996). That
there was another foundation of Ottoman government linked to its
praxis, namely the acceptance of force as an aspect of legitimated
authority, can be seen to constitute the reverse of this coin, but
 Heaven and the Administration of Things

that is another story which shall not be covered here. But 'justice
as an essential requirement of rulership' ( Tezcan 1996 : 104), which

we may draw out of the political writings of the sixteenth-century

Doctor of Islamic Law Kmahzade, one of the most widely used

Ottoman 'mirror for princes', is only a very general statement of the
workings of Ottoman justice. What the maxim meant in practice can
only be retrieved by focusing on its staffing by the ulama and their
making up a hierarchical body with a semi-autonomous position
once: they had been appointed by the sultan. In this hierarchy of
men of religion, a, central place was occupied by the justice of the

peace (kadi). The characteristic of the position of the kadi was that
it combined an administrative ag well as a, judicial function. The
kadi was also the head of air administrative unit. He was the channel
for relations between I lie Ottoman state and its subjects, he was
responsible for the proclamation of sultanic ordinances (ferman),
he oversaw matters regarding military mobilisation, he followed the
application of ordinances in the smaller towns and villages under
their jurisdiction, he supervised the imams (prayer leaders] assigned
to quarters of towns, he followed the .activities of guilds, he oversaw
the exploit0ftion of minerals, and he was in charge of land surveys
(Arik 1997 : 25-31). Even though the magistrate was classified in a
category separate from that of 'men of the pen' (i.e., bureaucrats
attached to the centre) and the military, the Ottoman ulama were,
nevertheless, part of the body of official structure.
The Ottoman reform movement, which owed much of its impetus
to the Ottoman officials’ alarm at defeats by western armies, was
initiated by reformist sultans in the late eighteenth and early
nine-teenth
century. The movement thereafter acquired a more cogent
rationale in what is known as the reform charter of 1839. The sequel
to the reform movement, which now took a definitely imitative,
western-oriented character, is known as the Tanzimat.
It may be said without much exaggeration that, from then on,
the higher officials gradually established de facto control of Ottoman
government even though monarchs like Sultan Abülaziz did show
their frustration by engaging in episodic feats of capriciousness.
The somewhat unusual stance adopted by the Young Ottomans
toward the Tanzimat was a protest against the new role of officials.
Such an attitude allowed them to remain legitimists with regard to
the monarchy, even though constitutionalists in their demand for
a parliament.Their primary targets were the implementers of the
policy of reform, to whom they imputed ineptitude and
authoritarianism.
They also advocated the grounding of democratic
institutions on Islamic cultural foundations rather than what they
saw as a mechanical, vapid imitation of the West. Charles Mismer, a
positivist and a secretary of the reforming Grand Vizier Fuad Pas¸a,
was already, at that time, advising reformists to incorporate Islam
into their scheme but was not heard by his employers (Georgeon
1995: 126–57).
The Young Ottomans’ proposal to recapture and reintegrate
elements of Islam into the new reformed Turkey is difficult to
appraise
critically, since it was both a sympathetic gesture to the Muslim
population from which they expected support as well as a carefully
argued thesis about the richness of the Islam as a religion and a
culture. There were also a number of Doctors of Islamic Law who
supported them, for reasons to be discussed below.
The Young Ottomans’ ideas of representation seem to have
involved
two basic elements: on the one hand, they saw it as a means
to integrate into the empire the non-Muslims who were in the process
of constructing their own separatism and nationalisms; on the other,
there was a sincere endorsement of liberalism as a more progressive
and human approach to government than reform from the top down.
They also shared many elements of liberal romanticism.
The Young Ottomans’ attack on ‘command’ reform was not in
itself uncommon. The well-ordered police state, as it appeared in the
reform of Prussia and Peter the Great, had already found critics in
western Europe. But what is remarkable is that, among Ottoman
conservatives opposed to the reformist movement but who also
supported the Young Ottomans, the Young Ottoman critique was
transformed into a more pointed censure of bureaucracy as such.
It was the unchecked growth of the bureaucratic structure and
practice that the more traditionalist allies of the Young Ottomans,
i.e., religious leaders, saw as the real enemy of the people.
A careful reading of the Young Ottoman themes allows us to
separate two distinct groups whose members attacked the imperial
administration. On the one hand figured those who berated those
higher officials who had consolidated their position and filled their
pockets once they had taken the lead in the reform movement. The
Young Ottomans bitterly criticized what they saw as these leaders’
policy of compromise, which encouraged, they stated, the then
current image of the Ottoman empire as the ‘sick man of Europe’.
The Young Ottomans, having themselves emerged from the lower
ranks of officialdom, seem to have had enough inside information
to make a case against what they saw as the sluggishness of the
reformists.
The Doctors of Islamic Law who supported them targeted
the bureaucracy more clearly; their bias is understandable if one
remembers that traditionally the judges, i.e., the ulama2 also
assumed the functions of administrators and that these functions of
the magistrates had been gradually shorn since the introduction
of reform.
The institutional status of the ulama had progressively declined
since the earliest inception of reform. In the past, they had filled
positions as magistrates, jurists, professors, historians, agents of
government, librarians, astrologers and, often, members of mystic
(sufi) orders which were not only centres of reunion for religious
discussion
but also crossroads of political networks. At one time, the
head of the hierarchy of ulama had been a powerful figure, bridging
religious and secular politics. During the Tanzimat, most of the
positions normally staffed by the ulama were gradually filled by
Secular employees of the state. Probably more important was the
fact that the structure and function of many of these positions had
also changed. The kadi, who had performed administrative tasks as
well as judicial functions saw the administrative pendant of their
authority taken over by new men, when administrative positions
became Secularized and were gradually filled by the professional
administrators who, after 1859, were trained in a special collegey, the
School of Administration, with a primarily secular curriculum. The
ulama, who taught from an existing stock of Islamic knowledge in
Islamic educational institutions, were displaced by school teachers,
who brought in a new stock of knowledge to a set of newly established
Tanzimat schools and by hommes de lettres of a new type, who wrote
for an increasingly influential press read by many officials. There
exists, in fact, an extraordinarily interesting manuscript written by
a member of the Naqshbandi 'mystic' order 3 who was close to the
Young Ottomans but who expressed a critique of the bureaucracy
much more trenchant than theirs, calling its members 'parasites'
of a new type, and Setting out an ideal of Islamic government led,
by the ulama, an ideal which had hardly been expressed with such
force in the past ( Kaplan 1976 : 275-86).
What was happening to the ulama as a result of the changes
initiated by the era of reforms was the destruction of an equilibrium
which, despite many ups and downs, had characterized the Ottoman
ruling class. In fact, the entire pre-reform Ottoman system may be
characterized, as that of a tug-of-war between the military, 'the men
of the pen', i.e., staffers of the bureaus of the place, and the ulama. In
this tripartite equilibrium, the men of the pen were the group where
secular statutes of limited coverage originated, mostly directed to the
maintenance of patterns of taxation and other local usages in the
territories
conquered by the Ottomans. The new reformist legislation
constraining, limiting and eroding the power of the local religious
magistrate, the kadi, was clearly a triumph of the 'men of the pen'.
The power of these 'clerks' had been on the rise since the eighteenth
4
century and it was in their ranks that the reform movement had
taken shape. Clearly, this tripartite equilibrium was now being
shattered,
since the elite corps of the Ottomans, the janissaries, had
been destroyed in 1826, and the clerks had found the field clear of
any impediment for their further rise.
Competition for status, protests flaring up because one’s
profession
and career is endangered, and resentment because one’s
controlling
position in a system is under attack are situations, which,
as students of society, we encounter everyday. But there is more
than meets the eye in the case of ulama dissatisfaction in the wake
of the reform of the Tanzimat.
In the years that had followed the inauguration of reform, much
had, indeed, changed even in the less visible cultural underpinnings

of the Ottoman judiciary. At one level, these changes amounted,

to what may broadly be described as the structural centralization
and the secularization of the judicial system, which clearly worked
counter to the interest of the magistrates. But: the changes were also

accompanied by the deep erosion of the discourse that had set the
principles of ideation within which the earlier political system and
its kadis operated. These reformist strategies, related to thought
patterns and stocks of knowledge, gradually dislodged a more tacit
foundation of political legitimation and a judicial culture, a
transformation
that may have been as important as changes in the
position
and status of the ulama and, particularly the kadi. This essay
argues that this happened at a number of levels: the kadi lost his
preponderant role in society, Islamic law and its specific character
gradually faded away, the magistrate's decision-making practice
was replaced by a more western-oriented 'rational' practice, and
his ability to operate on multiple levels of reality also became less
relevant.
The contrast between the earlier mental universe of the Doctors of
Islamic Law in their role as magistrates and their new diminished role
was, indeed, stark. Earlier, the foundation of law, which reappeared
in practice as principles of justice, reposed on an interpretation of
the sources of Islamic revelation, yet the scope of this practice was
enlarged by an unstated annex, namely, the methodology which
underlay the magistrate’s ‘praxis’, and, in addition, by the parallel,
often unorthodox, universe of Islamic mysticism which allowed
Doctors of Islamic Law to work with multiple levels of reality. This
aspect of the turn of events for the Ulama, namely the disappearance
of a world of ideation together with their loss of status, is one which
a simple description of changes in the judicial structure during the
Tanzimat does not capture. In Habermassian language, my focus
could be described as that of ‘knowledge constitutive interests’ of
two groups clashing in a ‘modernist’ encounter. This approach may
incidentally reveal a new way of looking at the history of social
strata in Turkey (Habermas 1973: 313).

Structural Changes
During the Tanzimat, the most important structural changes
which affected the magistrates emerged from the work of the many
committees of officials where the new principles of reform were
elaborated by decree. While this was not a complete innovation
of Islamic or Ottoman policy, from the 1830s onward the issue of
ruling by decree was enforced in an unprecedented way.
As the reform proceeded, the prestigeof the ulama suffered (they
were accused of widespread corruption) and their dual roles as
administrators and judges came under attack. In 1837, what were
then described as 'administrative cases' were taken over by the
newly created Supreme Court of Judicial Ordinances: (Meclis-i
Vâlâ-yi Ahkâm-i Adliye). From then on to 1855, this body took
upon itselfthe regulation of the structure of the judiciary itself. In
1855, amuch stricter regularization of the career of magistrates
was enacted. A further framing of religious courts occurred later in

1859 (pin 1992: 24). In 1838, an edict usually described in Turkish

i lie first modern
sources as
penal code, setting I lie
responsibility
of all officials as well as magistrates in their personal conduct
(bribery, influence peddling, etc.) was adopted by the Sultan’s
administration (Ceza Kanunnâme-i Humâyunu). Berkes has called
this a first step towards establishing a separate public law in the
Ottoman empire, a law which invaded part of the area that had
been the province of judicial decisions ( Berkes 1978: 173) and a
new frame that, by definition, made public employees of those to
whom it applied.
In Ottoman practice, Islamic law did not recognize a firm
boundary
between
private: public and
imperial
were used by courts as well
law. Collection of edicts
as compendia on Islamic law and fetva
(opinions of jurisconsults), and, in particular, imperial edicts such
as kanunname5, firmans 6 adaletname (Ịnalcik 1967: 49-145) and
,

yasakname were considered to be part of the 'at. Now, a

boundary
şeri
began to be established between public and private law since the
earlier extensive interpretation of Ottoman 'religious' and 'statute'
law was transformed into two increasingly distinct, spheres.
In 1840, the edict of 1837 concerning administrative matters
was expanded to cover local administration. New, local, partly
representative administrative councils (Meclis-i Muhassilin) were
established. In 1858, the power of Islamic courts to try criminal cases
became a dead letter (Cin 1992:19). Between 1846 and 1858, the
regime of state lands was gradually changed, leading to the issuing
of the Imperial Land Law of 1858 (Arazi Kanunnâme-i Humâyunu).
Cases pertaining to state land were now severed from the purview
of şer’i courts.
In 1855,, the French Commercial Code was adopted as the
Commercial
Code for cases on
Land, and, 1864, in a Commercial Code of the

Sea was adopted (Cin 1992: 23). The exponential growth of decrees,
which either directly or tangentially affected the judiciary, continued
between 1840 and 1865. In 1867, administrative courts operating
independently of şer'i courts were established (Ibid.: 24). In 1868,
a Supreme Court of Cassation (Divan-i Adliye) was

established
specificallyAhkâm-i, by
to take up all cases not
şeri'at, i.e.,covered the
marriage, inheritance, (and cases specifically mentioned as şer'i, such
as adultery). The Court was empowered in civil disputes between

non-Muslims in commercial cases.

The new reform edicts were not anymore rulings which could be
checked in şer’i compilations or notebooks consulted by the Ulama;
they were printed in the series of the Ottoman Official journal
published since 1831. The texts were now to be found in the bound
volumes of state documents establishing the Law of the Land. 7
The administration of judges had been a practice in which the
actions of the sultan’s subjects were weighed according to
established
— if flexible — norms. Following the adoption of the Code for
the Administration of Provinces of 1864 (Shaw 1992: 33–49, 41), a
shift took place in the administrative function itself. It now consisted
in the redrawing of socio-economic structures: the creation of new
consultative committees, the expansion of a new secular system,
the introduction of measures of public health and the publication
of ‘official’ local journals. Finally, the establishment of the School of
Political Science in 1859 to train administrators (Mekteb-i Mülkiye-i
Şahâne) rounded the process begun in the 1830s.
The elimination of the administrative functions of the magistrate
involved more complex issues than is first visible. In the earlier
situation, the magistrate's administrative power placed him in a

position
where he could
legitimately balance the interests of local groups.
Baber Johansen provides the example of a müftü (jurisconsult)
who took up this role. But there may be more to this than the
magistrate's power. Further analysis may uncover that a
legitimation
for this role of the
magistrate Aristotle, went back to in the
sense that what the kadi was using was 'distributive justice', i.e.,

measuring various parties' contributions to total solidarity and

8
working for the equipoise of society. The Tanzimat model, which
relegated the magistrate to settle disputes rather than think of the
constitution of society, was not only demotion but an erosion of
basic Ottoman political theory. The new officials of the Tanzimat
were determining the equipoise of society with what some may
as a somewhat thin legitimation, but Ihe real point is that the

concept of law as justice and justice as the; justification of political

authority and power was disappearing.
Figh
In the new system of secular codes of law which was taking over,

injury was done tofiqh (often described as the 'methodology' of

Islamic law), since a new methodology, that of western legal
rationality
was infiltrating the judicial process. But more Was afoot: the

disappearance of fiqh erased the earlier organic bond between law

and justice or law as justice. Fiqh can be better understood if seen as
'not the name of a particular discipline or objective system but only
the nameof a process or activity of understanding and deducing'
(Rahman 1979: 114). Ideally, this activity demands an immersion
in the original sources of Islam: the Qur'an, the example of the

Prophet (Sunna) and the Apostolic tradition, in order to formulate

a solution to a legal problem. In the Ottoman empire, the extent to
which various collections of enacted imperial edicts figured among
the sources consulted by the kadi did somewhat secularize this
inspirational source and ethical frame. It also had been established
that certain compilations of jurisconsults were to be preferred to
others (Cin 1992: 14). The number of parallel sources from different
Schools of law enormously increased the source material available
tp judges, but, in any case, it was justice not the expansion of the
function of the state that was expected to emerge from this
process,
and justice was thereby closely connected to the everyday of
Ottoman society.
What 'justice' meant was thexuler's responsibility for combatting
misrule and misgovernment, for taking the side of the oppressed
and protecting the life and property of his subjects. While this
was primarily an ideal that stood behind the Ottoman practice of

justice, it was also a capstone of Ottoman political theory (Ịnalcik

1967: 49—53). There was an addendum to this fremiss which gives
us a more precise picture of the system:

The doctrine of siyasa ... is the fundamental doctrine of Islamic public

law which defines the position of the political authority vis-à-vis the
shari’a and which grants him the right to take such administrative steps
as he deems to be in the public interest provided no substantive
principle
of shari’a is thereby flagrantly infringed. One important aspect of
this prerogative of the sovereign is his power to define the jurisdiction
of his courts, in the sense that he may set limits to the sphere of their
competence. It was on this ground, of course, that the public lawyers
had recognized the validity of the ‘etza-shari’a’ tribunals of medieval
times, which had exercised jurisdiction in matters withdrawn from the
competence of shari’a courts. (Coulson 1964: 172)

But what unnerved western observers more than this absence

of a separation of powers was the supposedly random workings
of the judicial system, an issue that has been taken up by Max
Weber with his formula of Kadi-justice (Turner 1974 ; Schluchter
1996: 160-78). For western observers and advisors to the men of
the Tanzimat, who unsuccessfully tried to discover a rationale in
the Ottoman system of law, the existing situation, differing as it
did from the ‘rational’ interpretation of law, pointed to oriental
wrong-headedness. Yet, if they had studied the Ottoman system
more carefully, they would also have made two discoveries which,
without assuaging their fears, would have at least led to more
understanding.
The first would have been the organic link between law
and the eliciting of justice which was so fundamental in Ottoman
juridical thought. In Islam, justice as best expressed by Ghazzali
(d. 1111) is an emanation to mortals of the name of God as ‘the
Just’. Consequently:
Justice is not one virtue but the ‘whole of the virtues’. It is the perfection
of all virtues consisting of the ‘state of balance’, equilibrium and
moderation
in the conduct of personal and public affairs. Above all it is an
attribute of fairness (‘insâf) which urges man to pursue that which may
be described as the ‘path of justice’. (Khadduri 2002: 109)
We may characterize Islamic derivation of human virtues from
God's absolute virtue which I emphasize as a spirit of justice
pervading
the universe and looking for a locus on which to fix itself.
Aristotle was deeply committed to finding such a locus for justice
which he pinpointed in 'founding a community to achieve a
common
project' (MacIntyre 1984: 151). This the fulcrum of the
was

Ottoman theory of government as described by the sixteenth-

century Ottoman political theorist Kmalizâde, who also saw justice
as the fulcrum of sultanic legitimacy. In a passage the intent of

which may be misunderstood, because it refers too directly to the

solution of the nineteenth century western ghost, the 'question
sociale', an Ottoman Greek sympathetic to the complexity of fiqh
has underlined the way in which the ethical-idealistic aspects of the
Qur'an established a necessarily more humane approach to relations
between the haves and the have-nots (Sava Pasa 1955: 225).
In, fiqh the literature of rules (furu') began with the major topics
of purity, prayer, alms, fasting and pilgrimage along with 'loosely
connected' topics of law, such as family law, mercantile law, law
relating,to agency, landownership, compensation for injury, penalty
and judicial procedure. But the practical side of justice was in tight
integration with the plasticity of everyday life, another element
that did not fit in easily with the new regulative understanding
of law:
 The topics and concepts of the law were closely allied to life experience
or could be made so by systematic explanatory thought. But a work of
furu’ was never a set of rules goveming practice in the way the
regulations
and statutes do. In a given city, at one time, different jurists
produced different works, reflecting different concerns, intended to
influence certainly, but also to provoke thought and delight. The
actual realization of the law depended always on personal and local
factors: the custom of a family or quarter, the tradition of a city or
a region, the specific rules and practices of a judge, a governor or a
sultan. The pluralistic and exploratory aspect of the law had a varied
and unpredictable relationship to the necessary single and pragmatic
actuality. (Calder: 325)

But we may go further in the investigation of the kadi's practiced

method of adjudication by referring to an item which has often
been invoked recently in studies of the scope of justice, that of the
central virtue of phronesis. Phronesis is the Aristotelian point where
practical intelligence is connected with moral virtue. In Book 6 of
the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle analyzes an approach to truth
he calls phronesis, i.e., a form of reasoning yielding a type of ethical
knowhow in which what is universal and what is particular are
codetermined (Bernstein 1983 : 146). Aristotle contrasts phronesis with
what he describes as the intellectual virtues, in particular, episteme
and techne (Ibid.).

Aristotle characterizes all of these virtues (and not just episteme) as being
related to “truth” (aletheia). Episteme, scientific knowledge, is
knowledge
of what is universal of what exists invariably and takes the form,
the telos and the way in which episteme is learned and taught differs
from phronesis, the form of reason appropriate topraxis which deals with
what is variable and always involves a mediation between the universal
and the particular that requires deliberation and choice.

So that
In ethical knowhow there can be no prior knowledge of the means by
which we realize the end in a particular situation. For the end itself is
only concretely specified in deliberating about the means appropriate
to a particular situation. (Bernstein 1983: 147)

What the judge uses in the case of Islam, in addition to Islamic

sources, is phronesis; that type of knowledge is the very core of
Ottoman–Islamic knowledge as used in the judicial or political sphere.
 one of the first Islamic philosophers to elaborate a

Fârâbi,metaphysical system,
complex in his
(Risalah, Treatise on Reason
fi'l-Aql) specifically referred to the 'reason which is generally
predicated of the virtuous in common parlance' as that which
Aristotle called phronesis and made it the leading, form of reason
(Fakhry 1983 : 1'21). Phronesis, however, had a very specifically
Islamic form and entered through the interstices of fiqh, such as
the principle of Istihsan, which covered the magistrates' right to
9
disregard the postulate of analogical reasoning (kiyas), and which
used a number of correlative guidelines, such as express statements
(nass), established unanimous Muslim opinion (icma), necessity
(zaruret), derived legal analogy (gizli kiyas), established use (örf)
and useful purpose (maslahat) (Coulson 1964: 9-71: Saban 1996:
178-94). The categories which the âlim (scholar) uses as a, testing
agent for his act of judgement is one where his analysis as well as
his evaluation of the meaning of his pronouncement are so to
—

speak —

interfused with his evaluation of the meaning of Qur'anic

suras and the vocabulary used in the treatment of the Sunna of
the Prophet. This fusion requires a profound study of the language
of Islam and Arabic.
What one observes here is a special reading of the Word (of the
Qur’an) as a treasure out of which one can draw patterns of the
universe but also representations of the physical and the social
world. This hermeneutic element was sought as among the qualities
required from learned and sensitive ulama (Coulson 1964: 55; Olson
1996: 165). It was also a practice which merged with theories that
related to tasavvuf (Schimmel 1975: 25). Any interpretation of
the work of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, a Turkish Islamic reformer
(1876–1960), which does not rely on this hermeneutic vantage point
to understand his ideas, is bound to remain superficial (Mardin
1989: 207). The language of the new statutes, with its matter-of-
fact, regulative approach completely erased the sophistication
of the magistrates’ approach to language (Haydar Efendi n.d.:
22–25; Saban 1996: 311–91). Such language, therefore, propelled
the statutes into another, self-referential, secular world of analysis.
The point is that the Muslim judges’ attitude was not, as western
secular observers thought, random, but structured by a theory of
knowledge that Cartesianism, the theory of knowledge underlying
reformist thought, was in the process of erasing.
Mystics
A further level of the operation of justice may be found in the
mystics’ conception of justice. Among them, God’s attributes are not
described in theological terms like Will or Wisdom, ‘nor indeed in
anthropomorphic terms, but in highly abstract and poetic symbols
like Light, Beauty and Love’ (Khadduri 2002: 71). The mystics’ view
of law and justice, which would appear to navigate in the celestial
realms of an ethereal sphere, does, however, have an interesting
practical importance in the history of Turkish modernization. In
modern Turkey, a whole school of persons trained in the religious
law or persons with deep religious beliefs (Başgil 1998; Mardin 1946)
have made the remarkable leap from teaching the to
becoming
şeri’at
recognized experts in the Swiss Civil Code adopted by Turkey
as the only legitimate civil code after 1926. This was a singular
modernizing achievement of the Turkish Republic. Although much
had been changed already since the beginning of the nineteenth
century which the Republic took over, the change of venue by these
erstwhile teachers of şeri’at was a real wager.
For many years, I pondered over the rationalization that these
men could have used for such a daring Step. A possible explanation
of this transformation does exists however, if one remembers that
many of them were suffused with the culture of mysticism as part
of their fund of 'tacit' knowledge. 'Justice' is an earthly emanation
of a quality of God; Islamic law, derived from revelation, is a
terrestrial form of this principle. But the sublunary world consists
of degrees of distance from its extramundane inspiration. In this
sense, Islamic law is a 'first degree' emanation from God but there
are other degrees of emanation of the principle of justice and thus

present no difficulty for a learned ălim. This is one of the ways in

which Islam could be used by sophisticated jurists to legitimize
change at a time when Islam was still thought of as a rich cultural
receptacle.
In short, the rationale of the cohort of university professors I have
mentioned above is explainable in. terms the concept of multiple
layers of reality deeply embedded in Islamic mysticism. Victoria
Holbrook, in a book about the Mevlevi poet Şeyh Galib, has, in
her infallibly elegant style, brought out how this view connects
with our subject. In her comments on Şeyh Galib, Holbrook points
out that
 Referring to the prophetic saying as “spiritual [esoteric] law” (Ser’i mâni)
the poet presumably intended to make a distinction between modes
of divine law, between the spiritual and the historically determined
(exoteric) Şeri’at, the basics, in a general sense for all application of
Muslim Law. (Holbrook 1994:100)

And explaining the more general theory, she states,

The cosmogony that Galib inherited may be described as an ontological
rather than a temporal narrative. It described an order in progression of
being, rather than an order of the events of time. He did not see things
developing organically, like a butterfly from a cocoon, or as parts of a
machine made up of simultaneous parts. Empirically observable causality
is belied by an originary relationship between God’s self (zat) divine
names (esma) or attributes (evsat) and each “site of manifestation”
(mazhar) that they require. Plurality emerges through the requirements
of the divine qualities (= attributes) contrary to what appearances may
lead us to believe. (Holbrook 1994: 88–89)

Conclusion
From the writings of Ahmet Cevdet Paşa, himself a prominent âlim,
we know that the Ottoman ulama, with positions at the centre of
the state, were in a state of decline in his time (Ahmet Cevdet Paşa
1967: 6-7). Presumably, not many in the entire hierarchy eould take

advantage of the subtleties of fiqh (Neumann 2000 : 54). My own

purpose here, however, has been to investigate the type of resources
available to the ulama in an ideal Islamic setting. The moral I
draw from the materials I have gathered is that the complexity
of Islamic Ottoman culture demanded from would be modernizers
replacement by a similarly complex, many-tiered culture. This was
a task the Ottoman modernizers of the Tanzimat did not
—

or,
because of the immense task of administrative centralizing reform,
could not take into account. Rather than a lack of will, it was
—

the complexity of western culture, also a product of centuries of accumulation,

which forced modernizers to skim only its surface. The
Young Ottomans' proposal to use the foundation of Islamic culture
in a synthesis with western representative institutions was not
pradticeable because of the problem of fitting the western principle
of representation with its Ottoman antecedent, namely the Sultan's
distribution of justice.
 This confusion is one which is still at the bottom of the present
Islamists’ debate in Turkey, as to whether democracy is a system
that can cohere within an Islamic society. The Turkish secular
intellectuals’
use of Foucault or Baudrillard as a prop for ad hoc socio-
logizing about contemporary Turkey is even wider off the mark.
The issue of the superficiality of modern Turkish secular culture
and the problems raised by the cultural foundations of knowledge
is one which opens up many new avenues of research.

Notes
1. Karal, 'Abdülaziz.'
2. Heyd and Kuran, 'Ilmiyye.'
3. Algar, 'Nakshbandiyya.'
4. Since the establishment, of a special bureau for international
correspondence
(AmedîOdasl, e. 1789) Gökbilgin, 'Amedci.' .

5 Ịnalcik, 'Kanunname.'
6. Heyd, 'Ferman.'
7. Düstur, 1862 -1884.
8. 'The polis is a compound which requires men who are well-born (of good
Stock) and hence capable of assuming the responsibilities of free
citizens;
it requires also men who are wealthy; it requires also men who are
good. It requires all these things, in a certain proportion, a proportion
which cannot be decided by abstract reasoning alone, but finally only
by perception of the fact in each individual case' (Jaffa 1981 : 114).
9. The main canonical sources being the Qur'an, the Traditions of the
Prophet collective assent (veina) (Coulson 1964 : 1-20, 40-1, 78-9) and
,

Kiyas (analogical reasoning) (Rahman 1979 : 9-71).

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 9
A World Made Simple: Law and Property
in the Ottoman and Qing Empires
Melissa Macauley
When a student of Qing history (1644–1912) first turns to the study
of Ottoman history, the similarities between the two empires seem
startling: the centrality of military conquest in shaping the empire;
the relatively free rein given to guilds and local custom; capitulations
and extraterritoriality; and the steppe traditions in governance.
Even the Euro-American discourses, over the years, about the two
empires seem comparable: the now-discredited theories of ‘oriental
despotism’ seem to have given way to preoccupations with the
extent
to which ‘civil society’ flourished in the realm. 1 Societies once
viewed as ‘changeless’ or ‘stagnant’ are now viewed as dynamic,
marked by genuinely fundamental transformations.
When one turns to the realm of law and administration, the range
of possibilities for fruitful comparison appears limitless. The
differences,
of course, are quite pronounced (nothing in China was
comparable to the all-encompassing Seriat, Islamic law, for example).
But both legal orders shared real similarities. Ottoman and Qing
courts often served as unique sites of legal redress for women and,
consequently, the contestation of local male authority. Both legal
orders, moreover, were powerfully dominated by the written word.
In both China and the Ottoman empire, various forms of legal
documentation assumed immense juridical power to define criminal
personalities, resolve disputes, and establish legal ‘facts’.2 This is
characteristic of most formal legal systems, of course. Nevertheless, it
is perhaps more central to the legal orders of extremely large empires
in which officials have no intention of directly controlling daily life
and a paper trail is essential to bureaucratic governance.
The purpose of this paper is to explore comparatively one legal
dynamic in what is commonly called state building. Clifford Geertz
has argued that ‘law is … a distinctive manner of imagining the
 MelissaMacauley

real’ (Geertz 1983: 182–84). When state authorities seek to impose

a codified social order, they have already perceived a social reality
that they believe exists, and anticipate a social reality they wish to
create. This is a common characteristic of the legislation enacted
by state builders in a variety of historical contexts. In early modern
Europe, new codes and procedures were part of a state-building
process that was designed to ‘crush diversity and flexibility in society
so that the way might be made smooth for the uniform rules of
the state’ (Strauss 1986: 24, 289). State building was predicated,
in part, on state ‘simplifications’, central state efforts to legislate
uniformity out of the chaotic and ever-fluid customary practices of
local communities in order to ‘manipulate property from the center’.
One ultimate end of state simplifications was the creation of an
individuated
system of freehold land tenure that was more easily taxed
(Scott 1998: 35).
I specifically compare the Ottoman Land Law of 1858 and a series
of eighteenth-century Chinese efforts to regulate land tenure on the
southeast coast. Both represented efforts to eradicate multiplicity
in tenure and minimize ambiguities in land transactions. Both were
clearly efforts at simplification in order to facilitate central state
extraction
of local surpluses and to encourage rural stability. But the
Ottoman law was part of a conscious, European-style state-building
effort. Often characterized as a ‘failure’ by historians of the Ottoman
empire (it did not succeed in all of its goals), the Land Law was
nonetheless
part of an ultimately successful, sustained series of efforts
(often hit or miss) of legal secularization and simplification that
culminated
in the evolution of the modern Turkish state. The Chinese
effort was more an instance of legal simplification without the state-
building dimension. The motivations were the same: facilitating
taxation and guaranteeing social stability. But the continued
commitment
to indirect rule and limited administration guaranteed
that the pre-twentieth-century Qing would not make the leap from
a state vision on paper to a human reality on the land. The Qing
efforts at simplifications are thus more similar to the ‘constructions
of customary law’ one associates with colonial rulership. After 1902,
the Qing did embark on a state-building enterprise. This essay
concludes with some observations about the role law plays not only
in attempting to simplify the property regime but also in
transforming
the human personality.
 A World Made Simple

Property and the State in

Eighteenth-century Fujian3
Fujian is a province on the commercialized southeast coast of China.
The Manchus had conquered China and established the Qing
dynasty in 1644. But much of the Qing civil administration in the
region
continued to rely heavily on the military throughout the
eighteenth century. This reflected what appears to have been a higher
level of social violence there than in other regions (more lineage
warfare; a tendency to beat clerks collecting taxes; one of the highest
murder rates in the empire; and the highest level of certain types
of abusive litigation). Civil administrators themselves felt
overwhelmed
with what they believe to have been the peculiarly
truculent
ungovernability of Fujian and the southeast coastal region in
general.
In the sphere of judicial administration, officials were
particularly
concerned with high litigation backlogs in local, prefectural and
provincial government offices. They attributed these backlogs to the
incitations of litigation masters (illicit legal facilitators) and to the
fluid, ever-negotiable, popular notions of property in the region that
had slowly developed after the fifteenth century. Officials felt that
these property notions led not only to increased litigation, but also to
confusion in the tax liability. In the eighteenth century, Fujian
provincial
authorities and the imperial government in Beijing addressed
these problems by passing laws to render the property regime ‘harder’,
more absolute and less fluid. These efforts were met with popular
disdain (in the moments when people were aware of the statutes at
all). In fact, in spite of intermittent efforts over the course of thirty-
five years, these laws did not have any effect on customary practices
on the southeast coast.
Land contracts in Qing Fujian can be divided into two broad
categories:
contracts for ostensibly permanent sales of property
(duanqi) and the far more common huoqi or ‘living contracts’. Living
contracts were usually conditional sales (dian) that involved fixed
time schedules and guarantees of eventual redemption. Peasants
wrote up contracts governing the details of the sale: identifying the
land, determining the price, deciding how many years actual control
would be enjoyed by the conditional buyer, and clarifying that the
seller had the right of redemption.
 By the sixteenth century, most conditional sales in Fujian
conferred
upon the conditional seller the right to demand extra payment
should the value of the land increase during the period covered by
the conditional transaction. Judging from several series of contracts
governing the same transaction, the process of ‘seeking increased
value’ progressed in three successive increments. A peasant who had
conditionally sold land could demand extra value payments up to
three times. The third stage was considered the final stage and the
land was supposed to become permanently alienated thereafter.
Nevertheless, it was not at all uncommon for peasants to continue
to demand extra payments even after this third stage of increments.
In fact, a whole array of additional practices and sets of transactional
vocabularies were deployed to guarantee that a household would
never actually lose some socially-recognized claim to land
ostensibly
‘alienated’ by contractual language. Legally, the contract was
binding, but it was customarily acceptable to renegotiate the terms,
even in circumstances in which the contracts had all along been flatly
stating: ‘after the seller seeks increased value, let it be the option
of the buyer to control the property forever. The seller henceforth
ought never to redeem it’ (Yang 1988: 275). 4 There was enormous
customary flexibility protecting the right, eventually, to redeem family
land. Customary practice in Fujian made it difficult to lose familial
claim to land conditionally sold but never redeemed because of
financial distress. Having studied almost four thousand Fujian land
contracts, Chinese historian Yang Guozhen fondly repeats a popular
aphorism which aptly characterizes the nature of land transactions
in the region: ‘land is sold, but it is never alienated; it is alienated,
but it never dies’ (Ibid.: 279). Japanese scholar Niida Noboru quotes
another popular expression, ‘With one sale come one thousand
blessings, never to continue on to redemption’ (Niida 1960: 377).5
Aside from the complexities of conditional sales, the complexity
of property notions on the southeast coast can also be seen in the
system of multiple land ownership. The practices of ‘two masters
to a field’ (yitian liangzhu) and ‘three masters to a field’ (yitian
sanzhu) contributed to the development of permanent tenancy on
the southeast coast and were the subject of anxious consideration
by imperial authorities. These were systems of land ownership in
which taxpaying original owners held subsoil rights while renting
to tenants holding topsoil or surface rights. The landlords, in turn,
occasionally rented their subsoil rights to a third party who would
become responsible for the tax in exchange for a share of the rent.
Tenants were also known to rent their own topsoil rights to third
parties who cultivated the land in exchange for rent (Perdue 1987;
Rawski 1972).
Qing authorities strongly believed that the indeterminacies of
conditional sales and multiple landownership complicated the
collection of taxes and led to higher levels of disputation in the region.
For example, in 1741, the provincial administrative commissioner for
Fujian, Zhang Sichang, memorialized to the emperor on the problem
the ‘evil practice’ of multiple land ownership posed for both national
land-tax collection and Fujian’s ‘onerous’ problem with litigation.
He theorized that split ownership in Fujian had originally developed
out of a tradition of land reclamation in which tenants were hired
to clear and till wasteland. Property owners continued to rent the
land to successive generations of the original tenants until tenant
households came to view their tenancy as a permanent right. ‘These
wicked tenants,’ he continued, ‘at first seemed imbued with heavenly
goodness.’ But they eventually began to renege on their rents, sending
their outraged landlords to the official courts: ‘Consequently, those
property owners who completely rely on rents to pay the land tax
lodge a legal complaint. They state that those who enjoy production
without a tax owe them the rent needed to pay the tax.’
Throughout
the memorial, Commissioner Zhang indicated that he believed
that ‘one master to a field’ was the only legitimate system of tenure;
that master was the subsoil-owning taxpayer (Zhupi zouzhe.falü.
qita, QL 6.11.10).
The connection Qing officials made between the fluidity of the
property regime in Fujian and the litigation rates in the region was
not misplaced. Of the twenty-seven categories of civil disputes in the
Danshui and Xinzhu county archives (Taiwan prefecture in Fujian
province), conditional sales constituted the sixth largest category
in terms of caseload (Dai 1953: 6–7). Moreover, contracts governing
conditional sales and conferring topsoil rights in Fujian commonly
contained clauses stipulating that the parties should ‘never again’
take recourse to formal litigation to resolve issues addressed by the
contracts (Niida 1960: 213–14, 462–63; Yang 1988: 277). One cannot
claim that conditional sales and multiple landownership were the
primary causes of litigation in Fujian (in fact, the ‘causes’ of
litigation
in southeast coastal China were simply routine disputes over
land, inheritance, marriage and debts); nevertheless, they contributed
significantly to the caseload. Similarly, disputes over tax liability
were not uncommon. But the palpable decline of Fujian as a land
tax contributor to government revenues from a ‘medium revenue’ to
a ‘low revenue’ producer had multiple causes (Niida 1960: 213–14;
Wang 1973: 79–83, 98–101). It did not primarily stem from property
disputes in the region.
Qing officials in Fujian and Beijing nonetheless attempted to
regulate customary property transactions to address judicial and
fiscal
problems. Much of this regulation involved some standardization,
individuation and ‘hardening’ of the property regime in Fujian.6 More
significantly, in 1765, the Fujian Provincial Administration
Commission
reviewed provincial attempts during the previous thirty-five
years to outlaw the two-masters-to-the-field system and other
problems
they felt exacerbated the problems of social violence, litigation
and tax collection. In 1730, determined to ‘protect (or “integritize”)
the people’s property (quan min ye)’, they had promulgated the
first provincial substatute outlawing the ‘evil practice’ of
distinguishing
between topsoil and subsoil rights. They also advised local
district officials to reject litigation concerning ‘seeking increased
value increments’ and redemption of conditional sales. Finally,
these provincial officials called for tablets to be carved
proclaiming
that if tenant households owed rent, then it should be the option
of the landlord to contract another tenancy (Fujian shengli 1964,
Vol. III: 445–46).
In 1762, the provincial government renewed the proscription of
these practices and called for new tablets to be carved in order to
remind the population of its intentions. Two years later, the
governor’soffice issued circulars throughout the province, calling on
local officials not only to erect tablets but ‘to personally explain
the substatutes prohibiting these practices clearly’ (Fujian shengli
1964, Vol. III: 446). Significantly, the governor did not also call upon
officials to recruit local elites to help propagandize in the anti-
multiple-landownership campaign. Occasional references to ‘gentry
and local bullies’ (shenshi tuhao) as frequent offenders in these
customs indicate that the provincial government did not feel it
could rely on local elites to help enforce these regulations.
Like the Fujian provincial government, authorities in the imperial
capital at Beijing also tried to regulate these practices. The Qing
began to promulgate laws concerning expirations of customary sales.
A new substitute, added to the Qing Code in 1753, required that
contracts specifically explain whether the transaction would allow
a redemption or whether it was a permanent sale. ‘If it is a contract
for a sale, the contract must clearly explain that “this is an absolute
sale and redemption is never to be made”’ (Duli cunyi chong kan ben
1970, 95: 07). Contracts routinely included such language. But, as
we have seen, in social practice such contracts were always open to
renegotiation. Officials were obviously calling not only for linguistic
clarity but an absoluteness and inevitability that did not exist in the
common practice of conditional sales.
Finally, the most extraordinary part of the law concerned the
time frame for redemption of conditionally transacted land. It said
that redemption could be made up to thirty years after a conditional
sale had been contracted. It went on to state: ‘If the conditional sale
is beyond thirty years, then although the contract does not have the
expression “absolute sale” and is in fact a contract stipulating the
possibility
of redemption, then decide that it is an alienated property. It will
no longer be permitted to be redeemed’ (Duli cunyi chong kan ben 1970,
95: 07; emphasis mine). This was a law that demanded what no
southeast
coastal farmer would ever willingly do: forego claim to inherited
land that had not been redeemed after a governmentally determined
passage of time.
Other, similar substatutes were appended to the Code and to other
regulatory compendia in the mid-eighteenth century. They included
permission for conditional buyers to take full ownership of any land
that had not been redeemed after the passage of time specified in the
contract. Regulations also prohibited the redemption of any land sold
when the contract governing the sale stated that the land was ‘alien-
ated’.7 These laws worked against the interests of the conditional
sellers
and were antithetical to customary sentiment. As we have seen,
Fujian contracts often stipulated alienation without depriving sellers
of some residual claim to own the land. On the southeast coast, at
least, actual, permanent alienation of the land was quite difficult
to achieve.
Given their contradiction of local sentiment and practice, and in
the absence of state-building efforts to force into practice a more
individuated, less negotiable vision of property, these provincial efforts
had no palpable effect in the region. For one thing, there was active
resistance to the efforts. By 1765, Fujian officials were yet again
setting
up tablets ‘prohibiting these practices forever’. Apparently, the
tablets that had been set up in 1762 ‘had been altered and destroyed,
rendering the country people lacking in respect and awe and making
it impossible to completely eradicate the accumulated practices’
(Fujian shengli 1964, Vol. III: 446). It goes without saying that
passive
resistance — in which peasants continued to transact
property
as they saw fit — doomed the legislation entirely. One Chinese
legal scholar who considered one of these laws at the turn of the
twentieth century, Xue Yunsheng, commented that officials and
local people alike ‘do not even know that this substatute exists’ (Duli
cunyi chong kan ben 1970, 95: 07).
The Qing were not opposed to conditional sales per se; conditional
sales were perfectly legal. But officials sought to regulate those
practices
relating to conditional sales that gave these transactions their
fluidity and negotiability, the very attributes they identified with
litigation
and tax evasion. For similar reasons, officials tried to outlaw
multiple landownership. These official efforts evinced less
ambiguous,
more absolute conceptions of property. Alienated land meant
alienated land. An expired conditional sale should work to the benefit
of the conditional owner, not the seller. Multiple landownership was
wrong. It should be abolished.
Customary practice favoured ambiguity, multiplicity and
negotiability.
Property transactions were rarely absolutely final. The claim
of a peasant to inherited land was not automatically negated by
contractual
language stipulating alienation. In trying to eradicate the
indeterminacies of these transactions, these Qing prohibitions struck
at the heart of customary practice. Nevertheless, such practices
prevailed because the Qing state lacked not the will or intention, but
the administrative reach to transform the southeast coast into a tax-
friendly, litigation-abjuring, ‘integritized’ property regime.

Legal Simplifications and the Half-hearted

Hegemonic State
What one sees in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Fujian is
provincial and central government alike grappling with the
convergence
of high-volume litigation, tax evasion, and violence on the
judicial processes of the region. The ponderous task of reconciling
statutory law with social practice resulted in some interesting
imperial tendencies toward the creation of harder notions of
property.
This suggests an inclination toward one element of European-
style state building. But significant differences underscore the Qing
preference for fiscal frugality and indirect rule in most matters of
judicial administration.
James Scott has recently depicted early modern European state
efforts to standardize and control local custom as state ‘simplifications'.
These were efforts to legislate uniformity in the chaotic cusomary
practices of local communities. Simplifications involved
standardizations
of customary property transactions, measurements,
citizenries and vocabularies of space. They involved the individuation
of property in order to clarify the tax liability. The modernizing state
engaged in simplifications in order to create a state-controlled ‘simplified
and uniform property regime’ that could manipulate property
from the centre.
The modernizing, extractive state could never have adapted to the
multifarious property relations and land-tenuring systems of
customary
practice. Statutory law and taxation would literally have had to
be adapted to these practices as they varied from village to village
and region to region. Instead, states measured, codified and
simplified
land tenure, ‘perfecting the legal structure of individual, freehold
tenure’. Law courts, legal specialists, cadastral surveys, intrusive
bureaucracies
and the standardizations of the modern state reduced the
‘chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to
something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its
observations’(Scott 1998: 11–52). 8 Simplifying legislation nevertheless
requires the direct application of state power to take effect.
Chinese officials were engaging in state simplifications. Provincial
and central government substatutes were designed to eradicate from
customary practice the very elements that made property ownership
and transactions adaptive, open ended and responsive to claims by
original landowners: namely, multiple landownership, efforts to obtain
increased value increments, and conditional sales of land that were never
redeemed or were redeemed years later than the time frame specified
in contracts. But these laws were not designed so much to eradicate
customary practice as to eliminate those elements that made taxation
more difficult and led to more litigation than officials were willing to
manage. The core of customary practices, the constitutive elements of
‘living’ sales, would continue in a codified system of ‘customary
practice’
approved by the state.
Nevertheless, these simplifications were not accompanied by the
expansion of the bureaucratic apparatus one sees in early modern
European state building. This is not to suggest that there was necessarily
anything ‘wrong’ with the state administration in the eighteenth
century. Indeed, indirect rule and limited formal governance were
the preferred form of administration in China. Moreover, the state
matched administrative reach with administrative need in any number
of other enterprises, notably the maintenance of the system of
granaries
(Will and Wong 1991). But the success of these simplifying legal
measures, especially the eradication of multiple landownership, was
predicated on the coercive capacities of the state, the ability of the state
to transform the manner in which property was customarily
transacted.
In fact, virtually every solution proposed by Qing officials
to address all of the legal problems besetting Fujian — lineage
warfare,
abusive litigation as a form of revenge, high homicide rates,
and so on — would have required a stronger and larger official
apparatus and a greater monopoly of state power in the region.
If these Chinese simplifications cannot be subsumed under a
rubricof state building, then how does one understand eighteenth-
century efforts to regulate these customary practices? Scholarship
on colonial and postcolonial governmental attempts to ‘construct’
customary law in sub-Saharan Africa is helpful in this regard. What
one sees in this literature are state simplifications and
standardization
of customary practice in a political, judicial and fiscal context
of ‘indirect rule’.
In sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya and Tanzania, for example),
customary
practices relating to landed property transactions were similar
to those in Fujian in one general sense. As Sara Berry has described,
property law was a ‘social process’, transactions were ‘subject to
multiple meanings, and exchange was open-ended and
multidimensional
rather than single-stranded and definitive’ (Berry 1993: 13).
These processes were apparently exacerbated by the cash-cropping
that had accelerated under colonial rule.
Berkeley anthropologist Elizabeth Colson long ago identified
‘customary law’ as a ‘construction’ of the colonial state in Africa.
This was not to assert that colonial and postcolonial states ‘created’
a set of customary practices which they then crystallized into law.
Rather, colonial codes recorded common official understandings of
what they took customary practice to be at one moment in time and
incorporated these practices into an official set of laws that would
serve as legal precedents in adjudicating disputes. The problem was
that the actual conditions of colonialism and the resulting cash-
cropping tended to make sub-Saharan customary practice even more
fluid and dynamic. ‘Customary law’ as projected by the colonial (and
postcolonial) governments did not necessarily reflect popular
opinions
about land tenure, property and kinship rights at any other given
time (Colson 1971).
Continuing in this line of analysis, Sally Falk Moore noted that
colonial
administrators presumed that the application of ‘customary
law’ was an ‘effective and cheap’ way of maintaining social order. But
these colonial governments deemed ‘customary law’ to be static, a
set of popular practices that could be frozen, recorded and used to
adjudicate the property disputes that had increased with the
development
of cash-cropping under colonial conditions (Moore 1986).
Berry herself demonstrates that colonial constructions did not
actually
transform the dynamics of local politics and customary practices
in places like Kenya or Tanzania. She shows that the limited reach
of judicial administrations and ‘indirect rule’ of the colonial powers
limited their ability to regulate the customary practices of local areas.
Working with limited funds and numbers of administrators, ‘colonial
governors elaborated the principles and institutions for
formalizing
indirect rule, and tried to govern according to those principles
and rules. [But] they rarely exercised enough effective control to
accomplishexactly what they set out to do.’ And so, as we saw in the case of
Fujian, the basic character of the customary practices of property
transactions
remained the same: dynamic, fluid, continually negotiable,
subject
to multiple claims and linked to access to social networks (Berry
1993: 25, 120, 180).
The efforts of eighteenth-century Fujian and Beijing officials to
regulate, standardize and ‘simplify’ property ownership and
transactions
in Fujian (and other regions of South China) were similar to efforts
of colonial powers in sub-Saharan Africa. Regulations were passed
in China to make property conceptions less fluid, more absolute, more
individuated (by person or household) and therefore less subject
to contestation. But the administrative challenges of ‘small
government’
rendered state rule indirect, unable to enforce a different form
of property regime. Regulations concerning property transactions
were actively or passively resisted and thus rendered irrelevant.
The purpose of all these efforts had been to maintain the social
order and extract local resources more efficiently. But it would take
more than government regulation to force people to change the
way they thought about their own property. What was needed was
the application of direct, state power to transform state visions of
individuated, non-negotiable conceptions of property into a reality in
local arenas. But the Qing state was not interested in the
construction
and intrusion of a coercive state apparatus in the quotidian
property
transactions of Chinese farmers. It was inclined to ‘simplify’ and
regulate that seemingly chaotic world, but it was not willing to pay
the price, in all its dimensions, of expanding bureaucratic power. In
this sense, simplifications do not necessarily inaugurate the state-
building enterprise, as Scott suggests. But the state-building enterprise
brings them to completion.

State Simplifications in the Ottoman

Land Law of 1858
It is ironic that modern Europeans should have depicted the Ottoman
and Qing empires as ‘oriental despotisms’. When these two
governments
eventually embarked on the state-building enterprise, the
centralized, all-encompassing bureaucratic power they sought to
emulate was that of the modern European nation-state. In this
section, I turn to one example of Ottoman state simplification as a
fundamentally important step in the long-term effort to
transform
the political economy of the empire. The Ottoman government
was clearly responding to domestic concerns, many of which
were exacerbated by international pressures. Unlike the case of
eighteenth-century Fujian, however, these Ottoman efforts were part
of a conscious, European-style, state-building project and were
specifically
designed to address, in part, the challenge of European
expansion. State building is understood as the expansion of the reach
of central governmental power to transform the property regime,
extract surplus production and enhance revenues. 9 In China, one
does not see this type of concerted effort (certainly not in the legal
realm) until the turn of the twentieth century.
The Ottoman Land Law was promulgated as part of a larger
reform project of centralization and Europeanization called the
Tanzimat Reforms (1839–1876). These reform efforts themselves
unfolded within the context of profound historical transformations
in the latter centuries of Ottoman rule. Institutionally, Ottoman
rule underwent extensive decentralization. For example, until the
seventeenth century, the Ottoman government had been served by
the sipahis, cavalrymen who were assigned responsibility for vast
tracts of land (timars) and therein acted as quasi-bureaucratic
intermediaries between the peasants and the state. They collected
taxes and provided the sultan with military service. This system
was undermined by a number of developments, including the
decline of cavalry in modern warfare and the ascendance of a tax-
farming elite (mültezim). These armed tax-farmers used their
officially
sanctioned positions to hoard surplus wealth and control
local territories (Faroqhi 1994: 537–38; Issawi 1966: 71–72; Shafir
1989: 31). Other forces in decentralization included the increasing
autonomy of a variety of local notables, whose prominence was based
on local military power and extensive landholding. The state also
lost control over state-owned lands that were turned into fictive
waqfs. Waqfs were ‘pious foundations’ or estates that were exempt
from taxation. The proceeds from these estates were supposed to
go to charitable causes, but fraudulent estates were established
merely to evade taxation and state control. They also tended to
be less productive than other forms of tenure (Davison 1963: 257;
Faroqhi 1994: 565–68; Owen 1981: 12–15).
Economically, sectors of the Ottoman economy had been
incorporatedinto the European-system of trade by the nineteenth
century. Exports of raw materials increased, stimulating the
production
of such cash crops as cotton, silk, fruit, wool and cereals.
Imports of European-manufactured goods like textiles also swelled
in the nineteenth century. These long-term commercial changes
exacerbated inflation and led to the shifting of partial control of
the economy to foreign capitalists (Islamoglu-Inan 1987: 1–24; Owen
1981; Quataert 1994: 761–65). The challenges posed by European
capitalism and colonial expansion cast a newer, more disturbing
light on the decentralizing state structure and inclined the Ottomans
to embark on a concerted programme of fundamental reform.
The context of the promulgation of the Land Law of 1858 was
thus quite different from that of the eighteenth-century Chinese
efforts. As Donald Quataert has commented, the Tanzimat reforms
constituted a programme dedicated to ‘recentralization and
Westernization
of government structures and the formation of a more
powerful and expanded state apparatus. This reorganizing state
eliminated or weakened its domestic rivals — urban guilds, tribes,
and provincial notables — while maintaining its place in the new
world order’ (Quataert 1994: 762). Although this programme only
reached fruition after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey,
the Ottomans clearly were engaged in the state-building
enterprise.
This was quite different from the rather routine administrative
effort in China merely to address problems they believed impinged
on fiscal rationality and social harmony. The Chinese government in
the eighteenth century had not been subjected to the international
pressures the Ottomans felt in the nineteenth century and was not
inclined to pursue fundamental political reforms.
The larger goals of the Land Law included ‘the centralization of
authority in the central government’, the promotion of ‘the fiscal health
of the imperial treasury’, and the ‘maintenance of rural stability’.
More specifically, Ottoman legislators wanted to reassert the
traditional
state ‘ownership’ of vast tracts of land that had slipped out
of state control with the decline of the timar system (Davison 1963:
99; Quataert 1994: 857–58; Shafir 1989: 33; Sluglett and Farouk-
Sluglett 1984: 413). The law was intended to promote greater
stability of tenure and thereby stimulate greater agricultural
production.Greater agricultural production would theoretically lead
to increased government revenues through taxation.
In classic state-building fashion, to achieve these ends, the law
engaged in legal simplifications and constructions. The first act of
legal construction in a code is to establish categories of land
ownership
as the state needs to understand them for the purposes at hand.
The categories established in the Land Law of 1858 were: first,
mülk land (land held in absolute freehold ownership). It was
supposedto be regulated by Islamic law and not by civil statutes. The
second category, the category with which the government was most
concerned, was mirî land. In mirî land, absolute ownership belonged
to the state but the usufruct rights were held by the individual.
Usufruct rights in this instance were a form of heritable leasehold
ownership in which the state leased land to the individual. The final
three categories were waqf land (‘pious foundations’ for charitable
purposes); matruka land (land dedicated to some local common
purpose (e.g., village threshing floors); and mawat land (dead or
unreclaimed land) (Corps de droit ottoman 1905–1906: Art. 1;
Warriner 1966: 73).
In a report on land tenure written in 1944, Doreen Warriner
commented that these distinct legal categories did not seem particularly
relevant to the actual practice of land tenure (at least in Palestine,
Trans-Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq). Mülk and mirî lands were
the two most common forms of land ownership; in practice they
tended to be the same thing. Mirî holders, theoretically tenants of the
state, were in fact ‘in the same position as mülk holders’, since they
paid no rent to the state and their heirs could directly inherit the
land. They could also sell this land. Moreover, she notes, in spite
of the fact that leasehold tenancies were the most common form
of land tenure, this ‘land law’ did not even concern itself with the
relations between landlord and tenant. Warriner concluded that
the Ottoman state established these limited categories for no reason
other than to collect revenue. ‘The real purpose of the code was to
tax every piece of land, and therefore to establish clearly the title to
it by registering its legal owner as a mirî owner. The state’s claim
to ownership really only meant that the state did not recognize
ownership unless the title were registered and the land therefore
taxable’ (Warriner 1966: 73).10
Warriner believed she was struggling with the incongruities of the
legal categorizations of the Ottoman Land Law. She was actually
dealing with the incongruities of the legal categorizations of state
building in general. That these legal categories did not necessarily
fit actual tenurial practices is somewhat immaterial. One assumes
that the landholding patterns across the entire, vast Ottoman empire
in the nineteenth century must have been far more complicated
and diverse than these five categories suggest. The purpose of the
legal categories of the Land Law was not to describe actual social
practice (as Warriner sought to do), but to set up categories that
would enable the state to proceed with the project at hand: the
individuation of title on mirî lands. The project was essentially
legal simplification in the tenurial system over which the state had
jurisdiction, state lands.
The Land Law was encouraging a system of freehold marked by
transferable title. It governed ‘possessors of state land’ and ‘pos-
sessors by title deed’. Any transfer of title without government
authorization was null and void (Corps de droit ottoman 1905–1906:
Arts 8, 36, 59; Sluglett and Farouk-Sluglett 1984: 413).11 The law
mandated that individuals, and not communal organizations,
possess government-issued title deeds in order to have legal use of
state land. The state sought firm, direct control over Ottoman
cultivators
and to eradicate the sway of the local notables. Clarifying
mirî ownership through title deeds issued to individual cultivators
ensured stability of tenure. It clarified who had rights to
cultivate
state land, who had the responsibility to keep it cultivated
(the law’s only restriction on owners’ usufruct was that they could
not allow the land to lie fallow for more than five years), and who
was obliged to pay taxes. It also embarked on a centrally important
(and extremely difficult) enterprise in legal simplification in land
tenure: it carried out a census.
Individuation of the property regime is a key component of
modern
state building on legal foundations and can be seen in other
parts of the Ottoman Land Law. The law was opposed to any form
of collective ownership. As Article 8 of the law stated: ‘The whole
land of a village or town cannot be granted in its entirety to all of
the inhabitants nor to one or two persons chosen from among them.
Separate pieces are granted to each inhabitant and a title is given
to each showing the right of possession’ (Warriner 1966: 73–74).
Like the eighteenth-century Chinese government, the Ottomans
were attempting to eradicate an entire category of customary
practice: mushaa (‘shared ownership’), a communal style of
ownership
common in some parts of the ‘Fertile Crescent’ (‘Greater Syria’)
among poorer villages and certain Arab communities. In this system,
individuals participated fully in communal ownership. But if an
individual died or left the village, rights to communal land reverted
to the village. The Ottoman government felt that communal
ownership
discouraged the sorts of investments and improvements in
agriculture that were necessary to increased production (Owen 1981:
258; Warriner 1966: 76–77). 12 I presume it also contributed to a lack
of clarity in the tax liability. The state, nonetheless, was obviously
trying to encourage an individuated property regime for the larger
purposes of encouraging production and enhancing taxation.
There has been quite a bit of scholarly debate about the
unintended consequences of this law. Many scholars claim it simply
encouraged the further aggrandizement of large landowners because
wealthy, educated people understood the benefits of registration.
Conversely, most common cultivators were said to fear the
government’s
intentions, preferring instead to register titles in the names
of locally powerful people, transforming themselves into
sharecroppers
or simple labourers ( Davison 1963: 99–100; Lewis 1961:
117; Shafir 1989: 34–35; Warriner 1966: 76).13 Quataert challenges
this assessment by drawing attention to regional studies that ‘dem-
onstrate widespread registration by small cultivators and their
eagerness to use the system to their own advantage’. In Lebanon
from 1866 to 1914, there were 4,614 acts of transfer for 2,291
landholdings.
The region around Damascus in the 1870s demonstrated
‘similar peasant use of the new method of land registration’ (Quataert
1994: 859, 885). Quataert thus shows that there was some congruence
of interest between common cultivators and Ottoman land reform.
Generalizations like the ones he tries to counter with empirical
evidence
often stem from the tendency of scholars to project a certain
benighted innocence onto the peasant classes, assuming that they
are not capable of discerning when their economic interests (in this
case, property claims) are at stake.
Nevertheless, there was obviously widespread resistance to the
Land Law of 1858. Large, landed estates endured; wealthy people
gained title to more land; mushaa endured in some regions; the
census
was not perfect; and so on. Many scholars of Ottoman history
appear to consider such resistance evidence of the ‘failure’ of the
law itself (and of the larger reform efforts of late Ottoman rule).
But successful resistance to the laws of reformers should not be
interpreted as a sign of failure. It is a sign of the state moving into
social realms it had previously avoided. It elicits resistance. In the
Ottoman case, some people responded positively to state intrusions
(those thousands of cultivators claiming title to mirî land); most
local people invariably resisted. There were powerful social forces
in Ottoman society that stood to lose power under the early state-
building efforts of the empire: Islamic mufti (opposed to the entire
programme of legal secularization inaugurated by the Tanzimat
reforms), as well as the powerful notables. And common people
held fast to their various social practices, impervious to state
mandates
until literally forced to change. State building, with its legal
simplifications and the accompanying need for a newer, more
intrusive administrative style, took generations to build. Indeed,
amendments to the Land Law of 1858, with the same simplifying
tendencies, were promulgated in 1867, 1910, 1911 and 1913
(Lewis 1961: 452).14 The experience of the Ottoman empire seems
similar in this sense to that of early modern Europe. The idea that a
series of fundamentally transformative legal simplifications would
actually succeed in one generation does not seem very realistic. In
fact, it is historically unprecedented. 15

Conclusion: European Cultural

Hegemony Made Simple
Less than a century after the promulgation of this law, Turkey was
a modern, secular state. The fact that the Ottoman empire had to
be overthrown does not seem particularly relevant to a historian of
modern China. Successful modern state building in China involved
the destruction of two systems of governance, the Qing dynasty
(1912) and the Republic of China (1949). In the China field, at least,
many scholars are now convinced that the ultimately successful
project of state building under the communist People’s Republic
of China was predicated on the earlier efforts of the late Qing and
the Republic. Similarly, the individuated, simplified property regime
of a late nineteenth-century country like Germany would not have
become possible had it not been for the efforts of the German
principalities
of the Holy Roman Empire in the fourteenth through
sixteenth centuries. Those German princes used Roman law as a
sort of legally sophisticated detour around Christian canon law and
the multiplicity of feudal legal authorities (Strauss 1986). Turkey
continued in the European and Ottoman tradition of
predicating
state-building on legal simplifications and attempting to
develop
a rule of law. There is a simplifying, state building continuum
that links the Land Law of 1858, the promulgation of the Civil
Code in 1926, the compulsory adoption of surnames in 1934, and
the gradual development of a more Europeanized system of law
in Turkey.16
This essay has compared examples of state simplifications of land
in the Qing and Ottoman contexts. In both cases, simplifications
of land tenure are part of a process whereby the state legal
authorities
imagine new legal realities and seek to create them. The
Ottoman effort has to be understood in the context of state
building.
The Qing campaigns demonstrate, contra Scott, that state
simplifications
are not necessarily the project of modern state building.
But they are central to how certain systems of indirect rule (like
colonial governance) nonetheless engage in, what they view to be, a
perfection of ‘customary law’. Such a perfection, in fact, is designed
to facilitate state extraction of local surpluses but it does not, in the
long run, actually have a significant social impact. Whatever the
many inadequacies of the Land Law of 1858, the larger project of
legal reform in Turkey generally worked because state building in
Turkey ultimately worked. The eighteenth-century efforts of the
Qing disappeared from official consciousness because these legal
simplifications were not part of a long-term, sustained effort to
transform the legal universe of Chinese customary practice.
 By 1902, the Chinese were also reforming their legal system with
a Europeanizing and state-building agenda similar to the Ottoman–
Turkish one. In many areas of codification, the remarkable legists of
the Republican era (1912–49) built on late Qing legal innovations
(1898–1911). There were, once again, important differences in the
two reform efforts. For example, some of the cosmological elements
of Chinese law may have been eliminated from the Code, but this
was nothing like the arduous process of secularization in Ottoman
and Turkish law (Berkes 1964). Moreover, Chinese reformers
did not have to contend with the multiplicity of legal systems in
the Ottoman empire.
But there were noteworthy similarities in the larger legal reform
efforts of Turkey and China under the late Qing and Republic
(1912–49). Both projects were predicated on the transformation
or creation of auxiliary institutions: police forces, prisons and
European-style faculties of law (indeed, entirely new educational
systems were required for the training of judges, lawyers and
citizenries).17 Legal reformers in both countries were galvanized by
the desire to regain legal sovereignty that had been undermined
by European capitulatory and extraterritorial rights. But eventually,
Turkish and Chinese reform elites also joined a cosmopolitan,
global elite that embraced Enlightenment values and sought to
establish what they viewed as ‘modern’ (not necessarily ‘western’)
legal systems.
This latter development explains some of the extraordinary
similarities in legal reform in the modern Ottoman empire, Turkey
and China. Reform elites turned not only to European legal values
in a general sense (appreciation of equality, political rights and
secularization
of civil governance, among others) but they also proceeded
on common paths in legal reform and codification by studying
the very same continental European law codes. At various times
and in codifying various branches of law, Chinese, Ottoman and
Turkish legal reformers consulted the same codes of Germany, Italy,
Switzerland and France, among others (Cheng 1930: 117–20; Versan
1984: 249; Zhou 1960: 25).18 French advisers to these governments
also seemed to predominate. For a sense of the global impact of
some of these individuals, note the case of Jean Escarra, who was
the French legal adviser to the Chinese government from 1921 to
1924, 1926 to 1928, and 1934 to 1936, and who also served in the
292 Melissa Macauley

same capacity in Egypt from 1949 to 1950, and in Ethiopia in 1954

(Hulsewé and van der Valk 1956: 304–10).19 After 1789, French co-
dification was characterized by statism and ‘rampant rationalism’.
That is to say, it was animated by the idea that history could be
abolished by the institution of new statutes. Through ‘reasoning
from basic premises established by thinkers of the secular natural
law … one could derive a legal system that would meet the needs
of a new society’ (Merryman 1994: 450).20
I have not been able to determine whether Turkish reform was
also guided by the highly influential Euro-American ‘sociological
school of jurisprudence’. But secondary sources suggest that
Ottoman and Turkish reformers articulated the intellectual spirit of
that school. And sociological jurisprudence, particularly its Anglo-
American pragmatic version, was very influential in China in the
early twentieth century. One tenet of this system of jurisprudence
was, to quote Roscoe Pound (as half the modern lawyers in Repub-
lican China seemed to do): ‘Law must be stable, but it cannot stand
still.’ Efficacious law codes were understood to be simultaneously
rooted in tradition and social realities, while, at the same time,
adapted by the socially scientific legist to suit the new needs of a
modern era. Modern codifiers influenced by the sociological school
believed that law was both ‘found’ and ‘made’, and the basis for
legal authority was the modernizing social ends that law served.21
The sociological school, in fact, was the perfect intellectual vehicle
for disseminating the codifying traditions of modern, European
nation-states to places like China and the Ottoman empire. It con-
ceptually suited their natural inclination to reform legal traditions
fundamentally but still retain some form of cultural ‘essence’. That
is to say, one could radically transform one’s society and, yet, still
claim to be building on a true ‘Chinese’ or ‘Turkish’ foundation.
The legal simplifications and state building of early modern
Europe had, in fact, a truly global dimension in the modern era.
The cultural hegemony of European law has inclined much of the
world toward a simplified property regime which, after all, also
sanctifies private property and unencumbered trade (even more
so now that communist societies worldwide are crumbling. Col-
lectivist practices nonetheless do endure in both China and Turkey).
The legal reformers of the Ottoman empire, Turkey and China
embarked on a modernist European enterprise of expanding the
tremendous power of the central state. They sought to use the
power of codified law to transfigure their governments, their political
economies, their cultures, really each individual person. The extent
to which modern laws were intended to Europeanize the human
personality is quite striking. In the 1920s in Turkey, turbans and
fezzes were prohibited, drinking alcohol was sanctioned, the Roman
alphabet was adopted and so on. In both China and Turkey, the
entire practice of marriage was reformulated in law — and resisted in
practice — and the legal stature of women was elevated (Bernhardt
1999; Civil Code of the Republic of China 1931: Arts 972–1058; Ono
1989; Örücü 1996). Esin Örücü believes that the entire Turkish
legal system was transformed in the 1920s by an ‘élite dirigeante’;
it was a ‘prime example of social engineering through law’ (1996: 94).
The increasing uniformity of world culture — from political economy
to personal appearance — can be attributed to many things of course
(the ravages of popular consumer culture, for example). But there
is a long, interrelated history here that begins with state building
and ends with the codified conformity of the modern world.

Notes
1. Haim Gerber argues that Ottoman law fostered autonomous guilds and
a civil society that served as a precedent for modern Turkish democracy
(1994: 113–26). The literature on ‘civil society’ in China is extensive.
See, for example, the symposium volume ‘Public Sphere/Civil Society
in China?’ Modern China.
2. On the power of legal documentation, see Gerber (1994: 79–112);
Messick (1993); and Macauley (1998). On litigation as a challenge to
male authority, see Macauley (1998: 146–66; 189–94) and Seng (1994:
252–81).
3. The following analysis of property in China is adapted in part from
material in Macauley (1998: 228–48), with permission of Stanford
University Press. (Copyright 1998 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University.)
4. When conflicts over these contracts were taken to court, the Qing
officials relied on the literal language of the contract.
5. The literature on living sales is extensive. For pioneering works in
European languages, see Hoang (1921) and Kroker (1959).
6. In 1760, for example, the provincial governor attempted to impose a
state-mandated uniformity in the language, form, and validation of
contracts (Fujian shengli 1964, Vol. III: 442–43).
 7. Board of Revenue regulation cited in Zheng (1988: 207–208). The efforts
in Fujian were not unique. Across South China, eighteenth-century
officials were calling for harder property notions. In 1743, for example,
the governor of Hubei requested a law stipulating that if a contract
stated land was to be alienated, it was alienated and could not be
redeemed. A law to this effect was promulgated in 1753 in response
to a similar request by an official in Zhejiang province (Duli cunyi
chong kan ben 1970, 95: 07 and Zhupi zouzhe falü.qita, QL 8.11.22).
8. European state building was obviously more complex than the process
of simplification and standardization. And, of course, it was not merely
the state itself that determined the individuated property regime of
liberal, bourgeois democracies.
9. On state building, see Tilly (1990 and 1975). In this essay I do not
address the war-making element of state building so central to Tilly’s
formulations (and to the imperial enterprise of both the Qing and the
Ottomans).
10. Davison also critiques the law for not addressing other types of tenure
(1963: 99).
11. SeealsoCorps de droit ottoman 1905–1906: Arts 17, 31 (stating that
no one could build a new building on state land without permission
of the officials), and 37.
12. Owen suspects that mushaa was probably a ‘useful mechanism for
facilitating the colonization of newly secured land’ and, hence, had
its uses to the state enterprise of expanding agricultural cultivation.
13. Peasants feared a government ploy to identify military recruits or
impose higher taxes.
14. The Land Distribution Law of 1945 redistributed state and foundation
lands as well as huge estates. This seems to have been part of the
longer process of creating a small, freeholding property regime.
15. For an example of European resistance to the legal regime of early
modern state builders, see Strauss (1986).
16. The adoption of surnames is a classic state simplification. It enables
the state to identify its citizens (and their line of descent) and
accurately maintain tax rolls, conscription lists, and property deeds
(Scott 1998).
17. In 1933, 37.6% of Chinese university students were enrolled in faculties of
law (statistics culled from Escarra 1936: 372–83). In 1895, there were
almost
three times as many law students as medical students in Ottoman
higher education (S. Shaw and E. K. Shaw 1977: Table 2.3).
18. Japanese codes were also influential in China up till 1928.
19. Similarly, the French adviser to the Chinese government in 1916,
Georges Padoux, had earlier served the Thai government in the same
 capacity (Escarra 1936: 133). But prior to 1921, Japanese advisers
predominated in China.
20. I should add that Jean Escarra’s own writings seemed to reflect the
ideas of the sociological school of jurisprudence described below.
21. The sociological school itself evolved from earlier Historical (‘found’)
and Analytical (‘made’) schools of jurisprudence. For a general
discussion of the sociological school, see Pound (1959). For the
sociological school in China, see Macauley (forthcoming).

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 10
A History of Caste in South Asia: From
Pre-colonial Polity to Biopolitical State
Ananya Vajpeyi

Part I
Introduction
Indian history as a discipline stands at an interesting juncture at
the present moment. After yielding a large body of work over the past
quarter-century, postcolonialism and subaltern studies have reached
a saturation point as theoretical frameworks, historiographical
methods and ideological templates. The accidental coincidence of
sixty years of Indian independence since 1947, and 150 years since
the Great Rebellion of 1857, made 2007 a year of anniversarial
excess,
with historians of South Asia from around the world wanting
to say something momentous about what are increasingly billed
as the first (unsuccessful) and second (successful) moments of India’s
struggle for independence from British rule. Meanwhile, there has
been a small but growing trend among historians of the British
empire to defend its depredations in India in the name of cultural
contact, productive encounter, romantic love, benign modernization
and globalization avant la lettre. Postcolonialists and subaltern-
ists now find themselves challenged by a style of revisionist history
that seeks to justify colonialism and imperialism by uncovering the
so-called ‘human’ flip side of the economic, political, military and
cultural impositions of West upon East. In a global intellectual and
ideological climate of conservatism and reaction, it is no surprise
that Indian history too, has become the site for a contest between
the resurgent Right and a Left in retreat.
A key intervention in what has suddenly — and, it is to be hoped,
temporarily — become a rather acrimonious field, stands to be made
by pre-modernists and early modernists. What did the state look
like in India over the two centuries between the ascension of the last
 AnanyaVajpeyi

Great Mughal, Aurangzeb (r. 1657/8–1707), and the establishment

of the rule of Queen Victoria in 1857? What was the state of
literary
production in the subcontinent on the eve of the arrival of
European languages? What was going on in the arts and sciences?
What was the world, which was neither lost nor destroyed, but
decidedly
and irrevocably altered by the coming of white people with
their friendly and not-so-friendly motives? How was it that India
escaped the genocides that befell the native peoples of the Americas,
and the deadly subjugation that benighted Africa, and yet things
were never quite the same again for South Asians, once the East
India Company and the missionaries had turned their covetous or
Christian gaze, and the prows of their ships, eastwards? Like other
historians of pre-colonial India, I too am interested in the
continuities
and disruptions that marked the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, a period of profound cultural churning, and of the power
struggle between Europeans and South Asians, that changed both
parties in ways that shape and affect our lives to the present day.
Moreover, I am keen to situate my findings and analyses in a
comparative
context that would clarify the parallels between the
experiences
of India and of other important Asian regions in the same
period: Turkey, China and Persia, all of which shared a certain
historical
predicament.
Shivaji the Sudra King
The particular history I want to elaborate begins in the seventeenth
century in Maharashtra. Maharashtra is the linguistic-cultural
provenance
of the Marathi language, corresponding to a large state
in contemporary western India, with its capital in Mumbai. This
region has a sustained history of popular movements, religious
sects, state formations, legal discourses and literary production
centred on the theme of caste, from at least the twelfth century. Caste
has long been recognized in Marathi culture for its propensity to
internally differentiate and hierarchically arrange Hindu society
and to act, for better or for worse, as an organizing principle for
the social identity, ritual status, economic privilege and political
power of different groups. Simultaneously, the struggle against
the humiliation of the lowest caste, the Sudra, has been a long one in
Maharashtra. Starting with the radical works of the Marathi saint-
poets of medieval times, this tradition of questioning and contesting
 A History of Caste in South Asia

caste hierarchy and caste oppression has continued right into the
twentieth century.1
Sometime around 1650, a warlord in Maharashtra began his
dramatic
ascent to political power. This man, by the name of Shivaji,
came from a family of chieftains who served local kings big and
small, while his father, Shahji, also served, for a time, the Mughal
emperor in distant Delhi. Like his forefathers, Shivaji was responsible
for raising and managing seasonal armies, defending camps in thinly-
populated outposts of whichever kingdom he happened to be serving,
and collecting revenue for his royal paymasters. Shivaji, however,
had other plans. He spent some twenty-five years building forts of
his own in hilly and coastal terrain, annexing new territories that no
one save himself could properly map (leave aside control), securing
the loyalty of the ordinary people of Maharashtra through his
exploits, consolidating a fast-moving and recklessly brave personal
militia, and freeing himself, sometimes gradually and sometimes
through outright conflict, from the yoke of other rulers. By the year
1674, at the age of forty-four, Shivaji was thus ready to become
king (Vajpeyi 2005).
Kingship may have seemed to him to be the next logical step, but
king of what kingdom? And king in whose eyes? What lands would
he declare to be under his rule, and who would recognize his rule as
legitimate? To answer or indeed pre-empt these questions, Shivaji
decided to perform a royal consecration, an investiture ceremony
that would confirm his kingship in full public view, with all of the
apparatus of religion, ritual and political pageantry, to uphold his
claim to royalty. In June 1674 Shivaji was joined, in Raigarh in
western Maharashtra (just southwest of the city of Pune), by his
personal pundit Gagabhatta, a Brahmin from Banaras, a town
on the banks of the river Ganges not far from the Mughal seat of
power, Delhi. Gagabhatta came from a Marathi-speaking family
of Sanskrit scholars and, thanks to his own writings as well as the
writings of his father and uncle, was recognized all over northern
and central India as an authority on matters of law, dharma,
and hermeneutics, mimamsa. Recently, Gagabhatta’s intellectual
milieu in seventeenth century Banaras has been reconstructed and
described in the greatest detail in the work of Sheldon Pollock
( Pollock 2000; 2001a; 2001b; 2002). On payment of a very large
fee, Gagabhatta wrote for Shivaji the text of a coronation ritual,
a personal eulogy in poetic form, and the programme for how
ceremonies were to be conducted over the course of seven days of
prayers, rituals, feasting and celebration in the high summer of
1674, between 29 May and 6 June.
Shivaji, however, had many rivals in Maratha country. Other
local warlords, some of them from distinguished families with serious
political aspirations of their own, questioned Shivaji’s claim to royal
power. Who was he to be king over them? Did he not come from
a family of uncertain pedigree? It was well known that Shivaji’s
father and grandfather were powerful, but hardly aristocratic.
Shivaji therefore hurriedly sent an emissary to the Rajput kingdom
of Mewar, and had the Sisodia family there, that ruled from the
magnificent city of Udaipur, agree to the notion that he, Shivaji,
was descended from one of their own ancestors. In other words,
Shivaji’s emissary returned to Raigarh with a genealogy that linked
Shivaji to the Sisodia Rajputs, a clan of chieftains both actually
powerful as well as universally recognized as being highborn.
Gagabhatta of course, as a juridical authority on matters of both
birth and kingship, instantly ratified this genealogy, discovered in
so timely a fashion! The genealogy proved, as it were, that Shivaji
was a Rajput. What did this mean? ‘Rajput’, literally, means ‘son
of a king’, and is the name for a number of powerful clans that in
the late medieval period controlled large parts of northwest India,
called, eponymously, Rajputana, today Rajasthan. The Rajputs
often worked under Mughal overlordship, but no one, including
the Mughals themselves, denied that they were kings in their own
right, and of aristocratic stature.
To declare Shivaji a Rajput was to say, effectively, that he was
a Ksatriya, a member of the second highest caste in the traditional
Hindu scheme of four castes, below the Brahmin caste but above all
others and, most importantly, in the caste that is appropriate for
kings. Gagabhatta had to transform Shivaji from a local warlord,
of which there were many in Maharashtra at the time, into a
Ksatriya king, of which there could be only one. Gaga performed
all the rituals proper to Ksatriya status. He invested Shivaji with
a sacred thread and remarried him to his many wives by reciting
mantras that are permitted only at high-caste weddings. Finally,
he wrote a special ritual of royal consecration, endowing Shivaji
with a throne, a crown and, above all, a gorgeous canopy, called a
chatra (literally umbrella), thereby anointing him Chatrapati Shivaji
Maharaj (Shivaji, King with the Royal Canopy), and ruler over
all his dominions.
In far Delhi, an imperial city, Aurangzeb was called Alamgir
(Ruler of the World); in humble Raigarh, Shivaji was called
Chatrapati, signifying a new centre of power to rival Mughal
authority,with a claim of Ksatriya kingship the likes of which had not
been seen anywhere on the subcontinent for a long, long time. The
Mughal emperor was the most powerful monarch in the civilized
world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, controlling the
most land, population and wealth at a time when several important
dynasts ruled simultaneously in Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Iran and
the various capitals of imperial Europe, Eurasia and East Asia.
Shivaji’s challenge to the last of the Great Mughals, then, was no
mean accomplishment for a man of uncertain, indeed fictive lineage
who spent most of his short life of fifty years on horseback and who
never built a city, a palace, a temple or even so much as a library
in his own name.
I want to return us, however, to the figure of Gagabhatta (or Gaga),
the pundit who made Shivaji not just king but a Ksatriya king,
with all of the right trappings of ritually ordained kingship. What
is so striking, actually, is not the spectacular birth of a king, which
was the rebirth of a low-caste man as a high-caste ruler that Gaga
managed to pull off in full view of thousands of spectators. That
was no doubt a feat of, what shall we call it, pre-modern public
relations
and event management, not to mention social engineering, not
to mention what could be described as ‘entrepreneurial kingship’,
on the part of this winning team of Shivaji and Gagabhatta. But
what is even more remarkable, for our purposes, is the fact that
in his scholarly career, which was long and distinguished, Gaga in
fact wrote entire works about the lowliness of the low-caste, the
Sudra, and about how a Sudra is, precisely on account of low birth,
prevented from access to the knowledge of sacred texts and the
exercise of any kind of social or political power.
Gagabhatta, personal ritualist, poet and priest to Shivaji, was
also a legal expert on the subject of the Sudra, the lowest of the four
castes of traditional Hindu caste society. I titled my dissertation
Politics of Complicity, Poetics of Contempt: A History of the Sudra
in Maharashtra, 1650–1950 CE, to try and capture, among other
themes, the shocking contradiction between Gaga’s academic and
political careers, wherein he functioned simultaneously as the
scholarly authority on Sudra subjectivity, with all of its attendant
disempowerment, and the kingmaker, in the pay of the most
important Sudra monarch of India’s early modern period. I read
Gaga’s Sanskrit works as well as the oeuvre of his father, uncle and
other Banaras scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
in some detail, to see how they theorized and elaborated their ideas
of social inequality, ritual hierarchy and political power, especially
centred on the person of the Sudra. I call this set of texts, which has
never been explored systematically in the South Asian scholarship
up until now, the ‘Sudra Archive’, a corpus limited in time and
space and serving the extraordinary function of reiterating the rules
of Dharma at the very moment of their utter breakdown.
This clash of abstract normative theory and on-the-ground politics,
which illustrates the centrality of caste categories to pre-modern
South Asia, was going on, I hasten to underline, before the colonial
powers began to cast a greedy glance on our part of the world. At
this point the colonial state was not even a threatening speck in
the eyes of either Shivaji or Aurangzeb, one an upwardly-mobile
Sudra, the other a pious Sunni Muslim, who between them controlled
the greater part of what would, two centuries later, become the
jewel in the crown of the British empire. Shivaji had some European
ambassadors and observers at his royal consecration, who have
recorded for us the splendid scenes before them; but what they
witnessed was the enactment of social identities, political power
and ideologies of state that had very little reference to the presence
or gaze of foreigners.
Gagabhatta was not one of those hundreds of Brahmins who
would, throughout the latter part of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, interpret and translate Sanskrit texts and advocate their
values to white masters, thereby reinventing and confirming
tradition
for the consumption of the colonial state. Gaga was, rather,
located squarely within the intellectual, social and political world
of Indian pre-modernity, where caste was not a matter of trying
to define and essentialize India to Europeans but, instead, a key
factor in the pragmatics of identity and power framed in terms
understood by all the actors, rulers and ruled, who inhabited and
constituted this world. The salience of caste was such that
without
the Rajput genealogy and without Gaga’s machinations in
transforming him from a Sudra into a Ksatriya, it is not clear that
Shivaji could have become Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, founder
of the Maratha dynasties, in that crystalline moment in early
June 1674.
From Caste Disputes to Jotiba Phule
In the centuries that followed Shivaji’s short but remarkable life —
he lived from 1630 to 1680 — his Sudra kingship functioned as
an important symbol, in Maharashtra, of the possibilities for self-
fashioning and self-transcendence within the limits of caste society.
Indeed, Thomas Blom Hansen calls the figure of Shivaji ‘the master
signifier’ of Maharashtra’s history; in some sense, he has served as
a symbolic resource far outside his region, throughout the Indian
subcontinent, over the past 350 years (Hansen 2001: 20). During his
lifetime, Gagabhatta was repeatedly called upon to adjudicate legal
disputes between various caste groups, wherein groups perceived as
lowly demanded better ritual status and recognition of such status
from Brahmin authorities, whereas rival groups asserted that caste
was not a matter of negotiation and flux, and those who were low
down on the social ladder should know their place and remain there.
The disputes continued throughout the late seventeenth, eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, even as the law underwent radical
changes, ultimately transitioning from a patchwork of local legal
regimes, some Hindu, some Muslim, some other, into a more-or-less
uniform Anglo-Indian system of law. What I would like to stress,
again, is that caste disputes preceded, persisted into and through,
and finally continued even beyond the period when India
increasingly
fell under the unified Anglo-Indian legal system used by
the colonial state. This continuity of dispute over the categories
and classifications of caste is something that we can trace, and
I have tried to outline in my work, through the legal archive of
Maharashtra, recorded in Sanskrit, Marathi and English over the
course of three centuries. I have kept to the thread of cases in which
the precedent of Shivaji and of his caste, the Marathas, is cited,
and/or the cases that Gagabhatta personally presided over, but in
fact many different themes of disputation and negotiation could be
traced, to show the deeper, pre-colonial history of social categories
in South Asia.2
By the mid-nineteenth century, the example of Shivaji was so
well established in Maharashtra that the social reformer Jotiba
Phule (1827–90), a man belonging to the humble mali or cultivator
caste, wrote an entire ballad about the life of Shivaji, describing
him as a son of the soil, a ruler dear to ordinary folk and king of
the Sudras (Phule 1869). Phule, was educated in a Christian school,
wrote and spoke in English in addition to Marathi and was exposed
to the modern ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity. For him,
Shivaji embodied an early attempt to realize egalitarian values in
Maharashtra’s political history. As a Sudra who became a monarch,
Shivaji represented, to Phule, a perfect example of how low-caste
people could take their destiny into their own hands and stake
their claim to the realms of ritual prestige, social power and political
participation. Phule can be described as an early democrat. Shivaji’s
caste mobility, his success in making himself into a Ksatriya and
a king, thereby defeating the forces of orthodoxy that would have
resisted his rise to royalty, gave Phule a powerful literary and
historical symbol to work with and to deploy in his polemics against
the upper-caste monopoly of all kinds of power in South Asia. In
my book (under preparation) I read Phule’s ballad on Shivaji at
some length, building on the pioneering work of the British historian
Rosalind O’Hanlon (O’Hanlon 1985).
Ambedkar and the Sudra
But the real modernist capture of Shivaji as ‘master signifier’
came from the man whom Phule inspired, and who in turn changed
the very terms of both the theory and the practice of caste in late
colonial India: Dr B. R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar (1891–1956), a
Maharashtrian like Shivaji and Phule before him, was the founder
of the Dalit Movement, a leader of India’s anti-imperial Nationalist
struggle, free India’s first law minister, the principal architect of
the Constitution of the Republic of India, and, in his final years, the
proponent of a new sect of Buddhism. Born into the Untouchable
mahar caste, Ambedkar made sure that Untouchability, perhaps
the single worst feature of the caste system that had adhered
to Hindu society for well over two millennia, was both removed
from practice as well as rendered illegal and unconstitutional in
postcolonial India. It was this one man who ensured, together and
often in conflict with Mahatma Gandhi, that even members of the
lowest castes and former-Untouchables, in other words Sudras as
well as Dalits, could enter into the framework of equal citizenship
in democratic India. He also wrote special provisions into the Indian
Constitution to recognize the historical injustice against low castes
and Untouchables, and to compensate for centuries of oppression
with the help of reservations in various sectors of employment,
education, government service and so on.3 It is only now, a good half-
century after his death, that we are beginning to understand properly
the full extent of Ambedkar’s contribution in revolutionizing the
language of politics in modern India, changing the default from the
language of caste to the language of citizenship.
On the eve of India’s independence from British rule in 1947,
Ambedkar wrote a book titled Who were the Shudras? (Ambedkar
1946). This work attacks the category of the Sudra from every
conceivable disciplinary and historical vantage, until Ambedkar
succeeds in deconstructing it entirely. He has no patience for
inequality. He cannot condone it in the name of history, religion,
ritual, law, science, culture or indeed any system for the regulation
and amelioration of collective human life. For Ambedkar, while
Dharma rests on the pillar of social inequality, the ethical society
must be founded on the idea of equality. Hindu society is, according to
Ambedkar, irremediably non-egalitarian. Again and again,
throughout
its history, under different names and in different guises, in
service of diverse ideologies but under the spell of the same
iniquitous
values, it throws up its Brahmins and its Sudras, the oppressors
and the oppressed. Sometimes these oppressed are altogether
outcaste,
ground down, crushed — that is the literal meaning of the
word ‘Dalit’.
In Ambedkar’s telling, Shivaji’s story is a part of this narrative
of persistent inequality: he is deserving of his power but unable
to attain it without the help of a Brahmin, the conniving and
unprincipled Gagabhatta, or without the entitlement that attaches
to Ksatriya status. In a truly modern India, the attainments of
a person like Shivaji would be freed from the thrall of both his
previously low and subsequently high caste. Modernity is to be
caste-blind; it is to create a society that allows equal opportunities
to all citizens. For Ambedkar, the Shivaji story is important not for
the account of what he did but rather as a cautionary tale, showing
us exactly what it ought not be necessary for a leader of men to
do, once India embraces equal citizenship, democracy, fraternity
and freedom.
Thus, Ambedkar’s interpretation of Shivaji’s Sudra kingship or
of his belated and contrived entry into Ksatriya status in order to
attain royalty is very different from Phule’s; in fact, it is opposed
to Phule’s interpretation. For Phule, Gagabhatta was a practical
man, and his services to Shivaji were not so much a matter of
complicity
as of compliance. For Ambedkar, Gaga was not the revisionist
he ought to have been — he did not change theory to fit history;
rather, he changed the status of Shivaji to preserve kingship as an
upper-caste, Ksatriya prerogative. Moreover, in Ambedkar’s
extraordinary
work of deconstruction, the Sudra literally disappears
from both past and present — the Sudra is neither this or that
person, nor this or that group, nor this or that race. Instead, the
Sudra is the concrete trace, in history, of all the most regressive
and violent traits of Hindu society and, more broadly, South Asian
culture. It is the Achilles’ heel of Indic civilization that will, one
day, take down the entire edifice and force us to rebuild India
from the ground up, as a place at once real and metaphorical that
accommodates both the strong and the weak, and allows each one
the opportunity to become his or her own best self.
The Constitution of India (1950), written under Ambedkar’s
stewardship as the chairman of the Drafting Committee, could
have been the charter of this India — new, free and equal. But in
fact Ambedkar himself lost faith in the idea of ever transforming a
country composed largely of Hindus and of many others who were
not Hindu but nevertheless shared Hindu social ideologies and
cultural practices, and who did not show strong signs of resistance,
protest or dissent. Even Muslims and Christians in India practice
caste. Towards the very end of his life, in the late 1950s, Ambedkar
converted to Buddhism, taking with him many thousands of Dalits
and founding, in the process, a new sect that came to be called
Ambedkarite Buddhism. To embrace Buddhism was to abandon
all hope of reforming Hinduism and caste-based Hindu society; it
was to repeat the Buddha’s own gesture, made 2500 years ago, of
rejecting the world of power and its pathologies, and retreating into
a dispassionate contemplation of the relentless flux of identities,
relationships and perceptions that constitutes human experience.
Ambedkar’s Buddhist turn can be read as a rather unexpected
denouement, perhaps something of an anti-climax, to his otherwise
decidedly worldly struggle with the pragmatics of social hierarchy
and political power. Ambedkar wanted to achieve what he called,
in the title of his essay, ‘The Annihilation of Caste’ ( Ambedkar
1991). But in the end, he left caste society, because caste society
never left him, as indeed it never left India.
The Many Lives of Caste
Perhaps it is appropriate to take stock of the period I have tried
very quickly to cover thus far; 1650 to 1950 is, we must admit, a
long time. Luckily for us, the story of caste in this period, which
spans 300 years from the precolonial, through the colonial, into
the postcolonial phase of Indian history, is for one thing located in
Maharashtra, and for another book-ended by two extraordinarily
charismatic figures, Shivaji and Ambedkar, both of whom give to
a historian a great deal of material to work with. I have also read
(though I have not discussed here) a number of texts in Sanskrit,
Marathi and English, all of which address in some genre or other
the broad theme of the category of the Sudra and, in particular,
the person of Shivaji as a Sudra king. In my work, I spend the
most time setting up and then opening up what I earlier called the
Sudra Archive, a body of ritual and legal texts in Sanskrit written
by Gagabhatta and his relatives and colleagues, which elaborate
in painful detail the Brahminical conception of Sudra identity,
rights, rituals, privileges, prohibitions, professions, etc. This corpus
of texts was produced in a small number during a limited period,
from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, most of
them composed by Banaras scholars.
In a sense, all these Sanskrit texts raise the very question that
Ambedkar resurrected in 1946: Who is a Sudra? It is important to
take note of this moment of civilizational attention to the problem
of low-caste subjectivity — attention that is entextualized in a
limited body of works in Sanskrit, many of which have survived
into the present. According to the dominant position in South
Asianist scholarship at the moment, caste had very little meaning
before the exoticizing and essentializing gaze of the ‘ethnographic
state’ created by the British in order to rule India, or, at least, little
meaning that historians can reasonably hope to recapture and
reconstruct.
All the more reason, then, for us to be alert to the textual
archive as well as the historical record on the Sudra available to us
from, say, the seventeenth century.
On the contrary, I have tried to show that caste was exceedingly
pertinent in a number of spheres of pre-modern life: scholarly debate,
legal activity, political conflict, state formation and all manner of
literary and cultural representation. This is best illustrated via
the history of Maharashtra over the last three and half centuries,
because Maharashtra has not only a polyvalent figure of authority
like Shivaji, who acts as a metonym for the history of caste, religion
and many other themes in his region, but also a radical leader like
Ambedkar, who was both a masterful historian and a debunker
of the forms of social inequality that had been cemented through
history. Both Shivaji and Ambedkar are important cultural symbols
in Maharashtra and beyond, and as such they mobilize communities
of identity and affect, sometimes positive, sometimes negative.
However, I must note that similar narratives await elaboration
from other parts of central and southern India in the same period.
Kingship in the late medieval period was more often than not the
prerogative of men of low or ill-defined caste, from tribal, pastoral
or nomadic backgrounds, who nonetheless seized power and created
a multitude of small to medium states all over peninsular India just
prior to the arrival of the British, French and Portuguese on Indian
shores, and the disintegration of the Mughal empire in the north.

Part II
Ambedkar and Caste in Modernity
I want to turn now, once more, to Ambedkar. Ambedkar was not
just a politician. He was also a scholar and a lawyer. He had a Ph.D.
from Columbia University at a time when men from Untouchable
communities were seldom even literate, leave aside educated, and
then he had his legal degree and license to practice from Gray’s Inn
in London. Incidentally, his principal contemporaries in India’s
nationalist movement, Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah, were all
lawyers
as well, and all educated in England. Like Gandhi and Nehru,
Ambedkar was well read, deeply immersed in Indian history and
extraordinarily prolific in terms of his own scholarly, polemical and
religious writings. (At present there are fourteen volumes of his
collected works, including a massive tome called The Buddha and His
Dhamma, first published posthumously in 1957, that tries to re-tell
the Buddha’s sermons for a modern audience.) Clearly Ambedkar
was engaged, until his very dying breath, in the act of reinventing
India’s long past, thereby acknowledging it to be, at every moment,
present. Central to this grappling with the presence of the past
in the present was, for radical Ambedkar as for devoutly Hindu
Gandhi and progressive socialist Nehru, the problem of caste. For
no matter how it changes, from a set of orthodox ritual categories
to a set of post-Enlightenment political categories, from pre-modern
polities to first the colonial and then the postcolonial state, from
religious community to secular society, it appears that at no point
in South Asian history does caste simply go away.
In the tenth mandala of the Rg Veda, the genesis of caste society
is described like so, as the four orders of men arise from the body
of the Primordial Being, Purusa:
With uncounted heads
Uncounted eyes and
Uncounted feet
He moves
As all of Creation.
Verily is He uncountable
Beyond the grasp
Of the hands of men.

From his mouth came forth

The men of learning
And of his arms
Were warriors made
From his thighs came
The trading people
And his feet gave birth
To servants.4

In the Preamble to the Constitution of India, the genesis of society

is laid out as follows, as the body of equal citizens arises from the
will of the people:
WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA having solemnly resolved to constitute
India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC
REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens:
JUSTICE, social, economic and political;
LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship;
EQUALITY of status and of opportunity;
and to promote among them all
FRATERNITY, assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity
and integrity of the Nation;
IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY this twenty-sixth day of
November 1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO
OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION.
 I am comparing these two very different fragments of what are,
each in its own way, foundational texts of India’s sense of its own
history and historicity, each in its own way a sacred text, an article
of faith, because I want to illustrate, dramatically, as it were, how
two absolutely opposed visions of social order — one radically
hierarchical,
one fundamentally egalitarian; one ancient, one modern —
can and do coexist in the very same culture and drive, with equal
force if in opposite directions, the nation’s advance into the future.
The standing body of anthropomorphic but supernatural Purusa
is the icon of hierarchical society — Brahmins at the head, Sudras
at the feet — while in the sovereign secular democratic republic
of India the principles governing the relations between people are
those of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity.
With his unparalleled sense of history, Ambedkar grasped, at
once, the reality of both these imagined communities, as well as
their weird simultaneity in the ever-present past of India. In fact,
we could say that Ambedkar was himself, as the chairman of the
Drafting Committee of the Constitution, the author of one of these
visions, one that subsequently was adopted by the entire nation,
which is today, in 2008, one plus billion strong. The more abiding
truth, however, is that even the Constitution of India, utopian as it
may be, must remain attentive to caste and address it in a proactive
fashion, which is does through the complicated legal and political
apparatuses of reservation/affirmative action. The Constitution must
recognize what it names the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled
Tribes, categories that rehabilitate former Untouchables and make
them eligible for special protections and provisions. All the political
will in the world cannot simply dismiss and undo, at the stroke
of the midnight hour, as Nehru said on 15 August 1947, centuries
of differentiation, hierarchy, othering and oppression. To make a
truly equal society is, to paraphrase Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the ever-
unfinished labour of democracy (Mehta 2003: ix–x).

Caste and Biopolitics

In August 2007, India completed sixty years of independence from
British rule. In today’s India, political parties contest elections
on a caste platform; voters constitute themselves into caste blocs;
reservations are a burning issue in public debate over the distribution
and redistribution of goods and resources in society; caste is firmly
integrated into the new knowledge economy, the marriage market
and higher education; and state and corporate institutions are
much more openly concerned with caste than they were, say, at
the moment of the nation’s founding six decades ago. In other
words, caste has become, along with religion and class of course,
one of the organizing vectors of contemporary Indian social and
political life. It is one of the mainstays of identity politics in India,
the way race and ethnicity are in Europe or in the United States.
Caste may not govern what people eat, how they dress, how they
speak, how they carry themselves, how they perform rituals, how
they worship and how they spell their last names, as it did two
generations ago. But, paradoxically, caste does govern, very often,
whom they vote for, whom they marry, how much they study and
what work they end up doing. In other words, caste has a fully
entrenched presence and a role to play in politics, in electoral
democracy, in social reproduction and in the spheres of education
and employment.
It is in light of this salience of caste to both the life of the people and
the operations of the state that I want to begin talking about caste
as the form taken, in India, by what is elsewhere called ‘biopolitics’.
Biopolitics, a term given to us by Michel Foucault and most recently
used by Giorgio Agamben, seeks to capture how a population is
constituted, classified, categorized, managed, manipulated and
sometimesmurdered by the apparatuses of governmentality. Taken
literally, biopolitics is the politics of life, bios — life in the sense
not of biological life but, rather, human life in its peculiar capacity
to organize itself in ever more complex ways into abstract patterns
that are displayed to a much lesser extent by other species of natural
beings. If bios is the conglomeration of humans into a political
collective, then biopolitics is the full array of institutions and
activities entailed by the challenge of governing such a collective.
Foucault is concerned with a particular subset of biopolitical
practices and with the institutions associated with what he calls
‘biopower’, arising in eighteenth-century Europe: the prison, the
penal colony, the asylum, the hospital and so on, as also demography,
eugenics, criminal psychiatry, public hygiene and urban sanitation.
The idea I am advancing is that biopolitics in South Asia cannot be
understood absent caste. Whether in pre-modernity or in modernity,
whether through Dharma or through democracy, for better or for
worse, caste shapes the very bios, the political life of the human
collective in India, permeating institutions, driving practices and
giving governmentality the specific form that it has in our part of
the world. In its present-day avatar, caste has moved away from
its traditional aspects related to religion, ritual, and corporeal
practices;
it has become, instead, that which provides the grid for the
organization of the political life of Indians, Hindus and non-Hindus,
giving them a template for politics that shares many features with
race as it operates in the West.
Ambedkar, the Colonial State and Biopolitics
My principal claim is that caste in all of its meanings today is in the
main biopolitical; it is about the organization of the political life of
Indian citizens; it is also about the management of populations that
exist as political entities, through a complex network of political
parties, electoral democracy, identity politics, legal, juridical and
legislative enactments, endogamy, group reproduction, and public
and private institutions. Furthermore, it was Ambedkar, through his
direct or indirect authorship of the Constitution of India, especially
in its dimensions that deal with Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes,
reservations and other sorts of caste-based compensatory justice,
who formalized the transformation of caste into biopolitics proper
for the modern postcolonial Indian state. Ambedkar of course had
no access to either this term or this concept, but rendering caste
biopolitical was the principal contribution of his lifelong intervention
in the politics and historiography of caste in late colonial as well as
early postcolonial India. In my work, I focus on Ambedkar’s study
of the meanings of caste in India’s past, and in particular on his
book-length engagement with the category of the Sudra through
history. For future research, I am interested in what Ambedkar did
to change the discourse on caste and to transform the meaning of the
categories of inequality, domination and violence from a traditional
context of hierarchy and differentiation into the language of modern
politics and equal citizenship, and more, biopolitics.
It should be noted, though, that, before Ambedkar’s Constitution,
the British in India had ushered the discourse of caste into its first
biopolitical moment, linking caste to morbidity, mortality, birth
and longevity. They had done so through what Nicholas Dirks has
called the ‘ethnographic state’, with all of its apparatuses and
disciplines
of colonial governmentality, including the census, ethnology,
linguistics, military recruitment, population studies, demographic
statistics, the history of religion, Indology, and proto-Race Science
(Dirks 2001). 5This is precisely the kind of biopolitics that Foucault
explores in Europe; for Britain, it unfolds in the colonies, first and
foremost India. But Ambedkar debunks all of these Orientalist,
Indological and pseudo-scientific discourses of caste invented by
the colonial state, in his book Who were the Sudras? He wrests the
idea of caste back from the realm of nature, natural — biological —
life, whereby it attaches to people in the shape of their skull, the
length of their nose, the colour of their skin and the texture of their
hair, and places it squarely back in the realm of culture, cultural —
political — life, expressed through higher order relations of hierarchy
or equality between people and groups. The Census of India, too,
stopped recording caste-related data in any direct fashion after
the Census of 1931, a good decade and half before Independence.
In time, I hope to flesh out how biopolitics changes, in India, from
what it means under colonialism to what it comes to mean, post-
Ambedkar, covering the distance from the ethnographic state to
the biopolitical state.
If we return to the ‘Purusa Sukta’, the cosmogonic hymn to
Purusa in the Rg Veda cited earlier, we can see now that the vision
of a fourfold hierarchy that is articulated there is also a vision of
bios, of collective human life that is always already political, even at
the very moment of the creation of the world or of the emergence
of the world from the body of the Cosmic Being, Purusa. Society
is extruded from Purusa’s supernatural body in its hierarchical
form — there is no prior stage, as it were, of the pre-social, or the
purely natural life of human beings without any sense of social order
and social relations, whether equal or unequal. There they are, at the
originary moment, at the beginning of the world as we know it —
Brahmin, Ksatriya, Vaisya, Sudra: scholar, warrior, trader and
servant. Ambedkar recognized that when the very foundational
myths of a culture are about political and not about biological life,
that when a culture always, from its earliest texts of cosmogony,
presupposes a hierarchical bios, then it is imperative to address
inequality, to write into the new text, the foundational text of
nationhood,the Constitution of the Republic, the instruments for the
acknowledgement and the redress of historical injustice.
Caste and Necropolitics
I am also interested in what Giorgio Agamben and Achille
Mbembe call ‘necropolitics’ or ‘thanatopolitics’, the politics not of
life but of death (Mbembe 2003). Mbembe defines ‘necropolitics’
as ‘...contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of
death...’ (Ibid.: 39), and is concerned with forms of sovereignty
that are about ‘the generalized instrumentalization of human
existence and the material destruction of bodies and populations’
(Ibid.: 13; emphasis in the original). I have begun to think about
extreme violence against Dalits in contemporary India as being
necropolitical. The violence against Dalits, which very often takes
shockingly brutal forms — and I have in mind here what Arjun
Appadurai has described as ‘ethnocidal violence’ — is precisely
about the ‘instrumentalization of human existence and the material
destruction of bodies and populations...’ (Appadurai 1998; 1997).
Caste violence in India results in news reports about the burning
of Dalit homes and villages, the rape of Dalit women, the lynching
and murder, sometimes by mobs in full public view, of Dalit men
or women who may have tried to, say, marry outside their caste,
extra-judicial killings of Dalits, the illegal detention and torture of
Dalits in prisons, and other forms of brutality that combine deadly
bodily harm to the targetted person with a symbolic message of
threat, hate and hostility to the community as a whole. Entire
families and villages are punished for what upper-caste aggressors
see as the transgressions of Dalit individuals. Middle and upper-
caste landowning groups maintain private militias to terrorize Dalit
tenant farmers and landless agricultural labour into working under
conditions resembling slavery and feudalism. Often, even the so-
called Other Backward Castes, the OBCs, former Sudras, turn on
Dalits. This kind of extreme to fatal injury wreaked on Dalits is
common in states like Bihar and Haryana. India’s infamous ‘caste
wars’, especially those we witness nowadays in North India, may
be identified as necropolitical.

Conclusion
My purpose in this article has been to suggest the importance of
developing a robust theory of biopolitics as the proper idiom in which
to talk about the inequality, domination and violence we see in the
context of caste in India. Whether we are interested in a philology
of oppression in South Asian pre-modernity, or in the translation
and historicization of necropolitics and biopolitics in contemporary
India, caste remains relevant in South Asia before, through and
beyond the colonial moment. Caste is particular to South Asian
cultures, and it responds to colonialism in particular ways. It ought
to be comparable, then, to distinctive cultural phenomena in other
parts of Asia that similarly preceded and survived colonial rule,
but only by becoming radically redefined under the conditions of
modernity.

Notes
1. Versions of this article were presented during invited lectures I gave
at the Columbia University South Asia Seminar and the Fordham
University Law School Global Law Seminar in New York in January and
February 2007. I thank the organizers and audiences of both lectures.
In this article I draw on research presented in my doctoral dissertation
(Vajpeyi 2004).
2. The work of the legal historian Donald R. Davis, Jr. is instructive in
this regard.
3. Reservations are, roughly, affirmative action in US terminology.
4. ‘Purusa Sukta’ is Sanskrit for ‘Hymn to Purusa’, and occurs in the tenth
chapter (‘Mandala’) of the Rg Veda: 10: 90(1–16). Verses 1 and 12 are
cited above. A reliable edition of the Rg Veda is Doniger O’Falherty
(1981).
5. Dirks builds on the seminal contribution of Bernard Cohn to our
understanding of the colonial state in India; Dirks’ colleagues have
also touched upon this subject. See especially Appadurai (1993) and
Chatterjee (2006).

Glossary
Key Indic Terms
Ksatriya (Sanskrit): Second highest of the four castes of traditional Hindu
caste society; the warrior caste; the caste proper to rulers.
Rajput (All North Indian languages): Literally, ‘son of a king’; a warrior
caste found in many parts of India, but especially in Rajasthan; in
medieval times, the caste most likely to constitute the service nobility
under the Mughals.
Sudra (Sanskrit): The lowest of the four castes of traditional Hindu caste
society, the others being, in descending order, Brahmin, Ksatriya and
Vaisya.
Chatra (Sanskrit): Umbrella; canopy used as royal insignia.
Chatrapati (Sanskrit): ‘Lord of the Umbrella’ or ‘Ruler with the Royal
Canopy’; royal title of Shivaji and subsequently his descendants in the
Maratha dynasties.
Alamgir (Persian): Literally, ‘Ruler of the World’; title taken by the Mughal
emperor Aurangzeb (d. 1707).
Dharma (Sanskrit): Law/religion/normative system/totality of natural and
social order. Dharma also connotes righteous action.
Mimamsa (Sanskrit): Science of Vedic hermeneutics, a central discipline
in Sanskrit knowledge systems.
Mali (Marathi): Cultivator/gardener; name of a Sudra caste in Maharashtra.
Mahar (Marathi): Formerly, Untouchable, now Dalit caste in Maharashtra,
a caste to which Ambedkar belonged.
Dalit (Marathi): Literally, ‘ground down’, ‘crushed’, ‘oppressed’; a person
below the lowest caste, an outcaste, an Untouchable.
The four castes: Brahmin, Ksatriya, Vaisya, Sudra (in descending order
in the social hierarchy).
Untouchable/outcaste: Someone below the lowest of the four castes, or
outside the caste system altogether; in modern terminology, Dalit.
The constitutional vocabulary is: Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled
Tribe (ST).
Rg Veda (Sanskrit): The first of four Vedas, the earliest compositions in
Sanskrit to be found on the Indian subcontinent, containing hymns,
myths, mantras and a variety of other genres of text, conventionally
dated to ca. 1500 BCE. The Vedas supposedly have no author.
Purusa (Sanskrit): Cosmic Being; Primordial Man.
Important Dates
Dr B. R. Ambedkar: 1891–1956; Ambedkar’s book: Who were the Sudras?
1946; Ambedkar’s book: The Buddha and his Dhamma : 1957.
Aurangzeb: 1618–1707; Aurangzeb’s rule: 1657/58–1707.
Constitution of India: 26 January 1950 (whereby 26 January became
India’s Republic Day).
Gagabhatta (different dates are available in the literature): 1620–1685/
1640–1700.
India’s independence: 15 August 1947; Pakistan’s founding: 14 August 1947.
Jotiba Phule: 1827–1890; Phule’s ballad on the life of Shivaji: 1869.
Shivaji: 1630–1680; Shivaji’s royal consecration: 1674.

References
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 Index
Abdülaziz 256–57 Anatolia 68, 70n3, 89, 90–91, 97,
Abulhaj, R. 140n4 126, 139
Adanir, Eikret 104n14 Andalucía 96
Afghanistan 157, 159, 191n8 Anglo-Sikh Wars 149, 184,
Afghans 80 201n132
Afrasiyab dynasty 56, 58, 60 Angola 75
Africa 74, 75–76, 78–79, 85–87, 90, Annales 25
102, 103n6, 282–83, 300 Anxi 33, 35
agriculture 2–4, 10, 37, 41, 50, Appadurai, Arjun 316
55–60, 62–63, 86, 92, 95–98, Arabia 65–66, 68, 71n13, 71n16
117, 119–20, 123, 126–27, Arabic 23, 53, 92, 132, 288
129–31, 133–35, 142n20, 151– Aragon 85, 87
53, 155–61, 163, 168–69, 171, Arain 160, 194n42
177–78, 192n20, 192n24, 193n31, Arakan 81
275–76, 284–89, 294n12, 316 Argentina 86
Agamben, Giorgio 313, 315–16 Aristotle 263, 265–67, 270n8
Agmon, Iris 14 Armenians 88
Asia 74, 102, 109, 115–16, 147,
Ahir 155, 160, 192n27, 194n42
150
Aitchison 157
Assam 81, 197n84
Ajnala 167
Atlantic Ocean 75, 77, 79, 84, 95
Akali movement 188
Attock 181
Akarl, Engin 12 Aurangzeb 300, 303–304
Akbar, Muhammad 76, 94 Austro-Hungarian empire 102,
Aksan, Virginia 32 115
Albania 89, 129 Avis, House of 75
Alder, Ken 4 Awadh 201n137
‘Alamgir 94 Awan 155, 157, 160, 192n27,
Amasya 89 194n42
Ambala 168
Ambedkar, B. R. 16, 306–10, 312, Baghdad 53, 60, 61, 65–66, 71n13,
314–15 71n16, 91
America 70n11, 74, 78–79, 86–87, Balkans 41, 88, 90–92, 95, 97–98,
91, 95–96, 100, 102, 238–39, 101, 104n14, 122, 129–30, 137,
253, 273, 292, 300 139, 142n15
Amritsar 162, 165–68, 171, Baluch 155, 157, 160, 194n42
195n46 Banaras 301, 304, 309
Amsterdam 79 banditry 210–12, 214, 217, 224
Anabaptists 88 Bangladesh 190n1
 Shared Histories of Modernity

bania (Hindu trader) 156–58, British empire 6, 8, 9, 13, 16, 32,

161–62, 193n28 75, 77, 79, 82, 100–102, 103n1,
Bannu 201n132 147–89, 191n8, 191n19, 299,
baojia 11–12, 210–14, 217, 226 n5, 304, 307, 309–10, 314, 315
248 British Indian Army 147–48,
Barcelona 85 149–50, 153, 155, 159, 165, 168,
Barkey, Karen 47 175, 181–82, 186–87, 191n8
Barkul 35 British Indian Army 9, 186-187
Basra 48–49, 52–62, 66, 68, 70n6, Buda 80
80 Budapest 91
Batur Hungtaiji 27 Buddhism 306, 308
Baudrillard, Jean 270 Buddhism, Lamaist 27, 30–31,
begs 41 33–34
Beijing 28, 41, 42, 209, 224, 275, Bulaq press 66
278, 283 Bulgaria 89–90, 129
Bengal 81, 93–94, 98–99, 169, 186, bullion 55
197n77, 197n79, 197n84 bureaucracy 2, 4, 7, 10–11, 14, 15,
Bengal Army 157, 195n50 40, 49, 68–69, 89–90, 92–93,
Bentham, J. 124, 141n11 110–16, 121–22, 124, 129–30,
Berar , 197n84 132, 134, 138–39, 140n1, 140n3,
Berkes, Niyazi 262 183, 185–88, 190n6, 201n139,
Berry, Sara 282–83 206, 231, 234, 245–46, 249, 252,
Bey, Koçi 140n4 257–61, 273, 281, 284
Bhalwal 167 Burma 75, 81
Biga 142n20 Bursa 97
Bihar 93, 197n84, 316 Byzantine empire 6, 23, 43n6, 51
biopolitics 313–16
biopower 313 Cain, P. J. 79
Bolívar 100, 102 Cairo 80, 91
Bolivia 85–86 Calcutta 186
Bombay 160, 169, 186, 197n77, Canton trade system 33
197n79, 197n84 Caribbean Sea 85–86, 78
Bosnia 129 Carroll, Peter 11–12
boundaries 7, 10–11, 15, 31–32, 37, Cartesianism 267
43n5, 54, 136–37 caste 16, 300–17
Bourgon, Jerome 237 Castile 85, 95–96
Braganza, House of 79 Catholicism 82, 85, 87
Brahmin caste 301–302, 304–305, Central Asia 8, 11, 38, 81, 92–93,
307, 309, 312, 315 123
Brandreth, Arthur 192n24 Central Provinces 197n84
Braudel, Fernand 77 Ch’ü, T’ung-tsu 68–69
Brazil 75, 79 Chamber of Commerce, Suzhou
Brewer, John 4 208, 214–16, 219–23, 225, 226n7,
Britain 3, 4, 33, 74, 81, 83, 189 227n8, 227n10
 Index

Chand, Nanak 200n115 Crossley, Pamela 23, 26

Chang Gate, Suzhou 222–24 Cuba 85
Charles I (of Spain) 80 Cultural Revolution 34
Charles II 80 Curzon 159
Charles IX (of France) 88 customary practices 49, 51, 53, 56,
Charles V 80, 84 68, 69, 70n5, 90, 110, 112–14,
Chen Kuilong 205–206, 214 119, 125, 156, 234, 236–39, 242,
Chengdu 227n8 275–76, 280–83, 288, 290
China 2–3, 6, 7, 11–12, 13–16, 21,
25, 28, 30, 33–35, 37–41, 47, 49, Daguan chunxian Theatre 222
67, 78–79, 82, 98, 101–102, 109, Dalai Lama 31, 33–34
114–16, 119, 123–25, 127–28, Dalai Lama, Fifth 27
140n1, 231–53, 273–86, 288, Dalai Lama, Sixth 28
290–93, 300 Dalhousie 152
China, People’s Republic of 6, 13, Dalits 306–307, 316
34, 41, 226n5, 290 Damascus 288–89
Chinese Communist Party 225 Danube River 80
China, Republic of 8, 207–208, dates 56–59
224–25, 226n5, 251, 290–92 Davies, Robert 162–65
Christianity 81, 85, 87–88, 91–93, Davis, Donald R., Jr. 317n2
97, 101, 115, 119, 179, 190n6, Davison, Roderic 294n10
199n101, 290, 300, 306, 308 Deccan 94
Christianity, Armenian 88
deities 238
Christianity, Orthodox 88, 91 Dekhan 186
Citizen’s Communes, Suzhou 208 Delhi 150, 159, 186, 301, 303
Delhi, Sultanate of 94
civil society 234, 273, 293n1
Dera Ismail Khan 157
‘clash of civilizations’ school 6
despotism 8, 14, 22, 25, 38, 109,
Cohn, Bernard 317n5
248
Cold War 74
devshirme system 115–16
colonization 21
Dirks, Nicholas 314–15, 317n5
Colson, Elizabeth 282-83
disease 85
Columbia 86 Dogar 160
Columbia University 310 Dogras 154, 192n27, 194n42
Columbus, Christopher 87 Dom Henrique 75
commercial expansion 231, 252 Dom Sebastião 75
commercialization 57, 62, 235 Domin, Dolores 191n14
Confucianism 1, 2, 41, 119, 121, Douie, J. M. 192n25
127 Duanfang 213
contracts 232, 241–42, 275–76, Dutch 77–79, 95
278–80, 293n4
Cooper, Fred 12, 17n3 East Asia 76, 303
Craik, H. D. 198n94 East India Company 83, 94, 148,
Crete 52, 59–60 300
Economie politique by Jean Baptiste Gagabhatta 301–309
Say 141n10 Gakhar 155, 157, 160, 192 n27,
Ecuador 86 194n42
Edwardes, H. B. 201n132 Galdan 27–28, 30
Egerton 162 Galib, ªeyh 268–69
Egypt 70n3, 97, 122, 292 Gandhi, Mahatma 306, 310
England 4, 51, 70n11, 77, 79, 81, Ganges river 301
95, 142n15, 158, 244, 292, 305, Gansu corridor 33
310 Ganzhou 33
Enlightenment 16, 291, 311 Geertz, Clifford 273–74
Escarra, Jean 291–92, 295n20 Genoa 88
Estremadura 85 Gerber, Haim 91, 293n1
Ethiopia 76, 292 Germany 23, 190n5, 290, 291
Euphrates River 54 ‘ghazi’ thesis 22–23
Eurasia 303 Ghazzali 265
Europe 1–4, 6–7, 13–14, 21, 37–39,
Goa 76
74, 77–79, 81, 83–84, 87–91, gold 97
97–99, 101, 109–12, 114–18,
Gordon, Robert 70n11
121–23, 125, 137, 154, 179,
Gran, Peter 3
193n30, 205–206, 227 n9,
granaries 119, 121–24, 234–35,
232–34, 237–47, 253, 253n2,
247, 282
253n4, 256, 258, 273–74, 284–85,
280–81, 290–92, 294 n8, 294n15, Gray’s Inn, London 310
300, 303–304, 313, 315 Great Game 191n8
European Union 102 Great Wall 33, 35
executions 212, 223 Greeks 23, 88
extraterritoriality 273 Green Gang 214
Green Standard soldiers 216
Fârâbi 267 Greene, Molly 60
Faroqhi, Suraiya 2 Guanqian business district, Suzhou
Fazl, Shaikh Abu’l 93 215, 224
Ferguson, Niall 74, 103n1 guanxi (connections) 252
Fýqh (Islamic jurisprudence) 16, Guha, Ranajit 3-4
263–67, 269 Gujar 155, 160, 192n27, 194n42
Fletcher, Joseph 6, 33 Gujarat 93–94, 98–99
foreign concessions (China) 212 Gujranwala 164, 181
Foucault, Michel 141n9, 270, 313, Gujrat 154, 164
315 Gurkhas 154
France 4, 47, 77, 79, 95, 128–29, Gush Khan 27–30
140n5, 140n6, 262, 291–92,
310 Habermas, Jürgen 261
frontiers 21, 25–26 Habesh 90
Fujian 237, 275–80, 282–83 Habib, Irfan 99
Habsburg empire 12, 40, 75–80, Imin Kwaja 36
82–87, 89–96, 101–103 imperial formation 5, 26, 39–40
Han Chinese 23, 27, 32, 41 imperial formation, Qing 29
Hanafi school 50–51, 58–59, 64–65 Ýnalcýk, Halil 88, 96–97, 99,
Hansen, Thomas Blom 305 103n11, 140n4
Hardt, Michael 74 inamdar 172, 192n25
Haryana 316 income registers (temettuat
Hasan, Hussein bin (see Mimizadeh) defterleri) 132–33, 135, 143n27
Hastings, Warren 190n6 India 3, 6, 8, 9, 13, 16, 32, 55, 66,
Hazara 163 71n13, 71n16, 74, 80, 82–84,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 92, 94, 98–99, 101–102, 147–89,
190n7 299–317
Henru 312 India, Republic of 101, 306, 312,
Herder 23 315
Hijaz 76, 90 Indian Army Benevolent Fund
Hill Circle 167 181–82
Hinduism 92, 94, 156–57, 175, Indian Followers’ Relief Fund 182
199n105–106, 300, 303, 305–308,
Indian Ocean 54–55, 76–78, 81
310, 314 Indian Soldiers’ Board 180–81
Hispaniola 85
industrial revolution 2, 21
Hissar 168, 181, 197n73
industrialization 4, 21, 99
History of the World by Sir Walter
Ralegh 80–81 industry 211
Hitler, Adolf 74 inheritance 51–52, 57, 59, 62, 69
Ho Ping-ti 23 Inquisition 87
Holbrook, Victoria 268–69 iqta’ 61-62
Holy Roman Empire 290 Iran 6, 43n6, 83, 87, 91–92, 303
Honduras 86 Iraq 7-8, 48–50, 52–53, 60, 65–68,
Hong Kong 42 90, 286
Hopkins, A. G. 79 Irbil 53
Hormuz 58 irrigation 156
Huang, Philip 140n1, 235–37 Islam 8, 22–23, 27, 35, 41, 49–53,
Hubei 294n7 55, 59–61, 64–68, 76, 83, 84,
Humayun 80 87–88, 91–94, 97, 119, 126, 157,
Hunary 97–98 175–76, 179, 192n21, 199n105–106,
Hung Taiji 36 255–70, 286, 289, 304–305,
308
Ibbetson, Denzil 159, 194n39 Islamağglu 9 11 , 15
—

Iberia 80, 82, 84, 95 Isma'il 91

Ibn Khaldun 78 Israel 16
ibn Yusuf 65 Istanbul 51 63 66 97 134
, , , ,

imam (prayer leader) 132, 257 Italy 244 , 291

Imber, Colin 59 Izmir 97
Jalili family 61, 63 Khattar 155, 160, 192n27, 194n42
janissaries 56, 115–16, 122, 141n8, Khattri 101
260 Khokhar 160
Janjua 155, 160, 192n27, 194n42 Khoshots (Mongols) 27–30
Japan 42, 87, 99, 205, 211, 215, 217, Khoury, Dina 7–8
226n5, 227n9, 294n18, 294n19 Khushab 167
jasaks (Mongol banner commanders) Kiakhta 33
29–30, 36, 37 Kýnalýzâde 257, 265
Jat Sikhs 154–55, 157, 160, 192n27, kinship networks 13, 240–41, 244
194n42 Kipling, Rudyard 147, 189
Jebzongdanba Hutukhtu 33 Kirkuk 53
Jerusalem 76 Kitab al-Kharaj by ibn Yusuf 65
Jews 87–88, 93 Kokand, Khan of 33
Jhang 192n21 Konya 89
Jhelum 153, 167, 185, 192n21, Köprülü 52, 59-61
192n24 Korea 13
Jiangnan 211, 214 Ksatriya caste 302–304, 306–308,
Jiangsu 205–25
315
Jiaqing emperor 247 Kuch Bihar 81
Jinnah 310
Kumbum monastery 27
Johansen, Baber 17n4, 263
Kunt, Metin 89
Jones, Eric L. 125
Jullundur 168, 182, 185 Kurds 53
Jullundur District Soldiers’ Board
181 Labana 160, 192n27, 194n42
Labib, Subhi 99
kadý 14, 257, 259–60, 263–64, 266 Lahore 151, 168
Kafadar, Cemal 23, 78, 82, lambardar (village headman)
104n16 154–55, 171–72, 174, 198n86,
Kahuta 167 198n91
Kamboh 160, 192n27, 194n42 land administration 10, 15–16,
Kangxi emperor 28, 30, 35, 38 29–31, 50–52, 57–64, 66, 69,
kanun (state law) 8, 49–53, 57–58, 85, 98, 104n14, 113–14, 119–20,
64, 66–67, 69 123–31, 133–35, 137–39, 151–53,
Karachi 186 155, 158–60, 141n7, 143n22,
Kashgar 42 161–62, 164–65, 168–69, 171,
Kayastha 101 179, 186, 188, 192n24, 192n27,
Kayseri 89 237, 239–40, 242, 262, 265,
Kazakhs 27 274–93, 316
Kemal, Mustafa 83 land surveys 9–10, 30, 57–58,
Kenya 282–83 60, 113, 124, 130–34, 136–39,
Keyder, Caglar 4 142n16, 142n19, 142n20
Khalsa Diwan 175 Latsan Khan 28
law 8, 13–16, 21, 47–53, 55–57, Mardin, Şerif 14
59–60, 62–69, 71n13, 113–14, Marx, Karl 2, 4
117–20, 128–30, 134–35, 137, Marxism 79, 99
156–57, 186, 193n30, 231–53, Mascarenhas, Dom Filipe 76
255–70, 273–93, 305 matruka (land dedicated to some
Lawrence, G. 184 local common purpose) 286
Lawrence, Henry 151, 163 Maurits, Johan 79
Lawrence, John 153, 191n17 mawat (dead or unreclaimed land)
Lebanon 286, 288 130, 286
Lerma 84 Mazumder, Rajit 9
Lhasa 27–28, 34, 42 Mbembe, Achille 315–16
Liang Zhiping 236–37 McGowan, Bruce 104n14
lijin (internal transit taxes) 210 Mecca 80
Lima 87 Mediterranean Sea 76–77, 80, 82,
livestock 35, 131, 133, 161, 87–88
142n20 Mehta, Pratap Bhanu 312
Lobzang Danjin 29–32 mercantilism 96–97
London 79 merchants 2, 13, 33, 37, 54, 56,
Lothian Committee 177–80 58, 207–208, 215–16, 218–20,
Low Countries 75, 77 222–25, 227n10, 240–44, 250,
Lucknow pact 175 265
Lumsden 184 Mewar 302
Lyall, James 158, 165–66 Mexico 75, 85–87, 95–96
Mexico City 96
Macaulay, Thomas 190n6 Mianwalil 181
Macauley, Melissa 15, 127, 237–38 Microsoft 102–103
Macedonia 89–90 Middle East 41
Machiavelli 6, 89 military organization 8, 11–12, 15,
Madras 169, 179, 186, 197 n77, 35–39, 67–68, 88–90, 94, 97,
197n79, 197n84 100, 111–12, 115–22, 131, 133,
mahar caste 306 136, 140n4, 141n8, 142n16, 147–
,51
Maharashtra 300–302, 305–306, 153–55, 158–59, 160, 163,
309–310 165–71, 173, 175–76, 179–88,
Mahton 160, 194n42 191n8, 194n35, 199n105, 208,
mali caste 305 210–16, 222–24, 228n11, 257,
malikane (life tax farm) 62–64, 98 260, 284–85, 294n13, 301
mamluk 88 militia 208, 215–16, 223–24,
Manchuria 23, 25, 36, 41 226n6
Manchus 23, 28, 32, 34, 38, 40–41, Millward, James 6
67–68, 246–47, 252, 275 Mimizadeh 48–49, 60–61
Manila 85 Ming dynasty 28, 78
Mao Zedong 34 mining 86, 95–96
Maratha 154, 302, 305 Minto 201n139
mirî (state lands) 59, 127, 130, Nanjing 214, 225n1
286–87, 289 Naoroji, Dadabhai 190n4
Mismer, Charles 258 Naples 75
modernization 188 Naqshabandiya 65, 71n13, 71n16,
modernization theory 1 259
Mohar Circle 168 nationalism 39–42, 115, 130, 139,
Moldavia 91 149, 169, 174, 258, 306
Molla, ‘Izzet 74 native place associations 240–41,
monasteries 31, 33–34 253n3
money 91, 96, 119–20 necropolitics 315–16
Mongolia 12, 25, 41 negotiation 7–12, 14, 16, 17n4,
Mongols 23, 27, 29–34, 36, 41, 92 46–48, 53, 66, 69, 111–14, 116–
,22
Mongols, Khalkhas 30 125–27, 129, 134, 137–39,
Mongols, Zunghar 27–28 140n3, 208, 289, 305
monopolies 243 Negri, Antonio 74
Montagu-Chelmsford reforms
Nehru 310
169–70, 197n83 Neo-Confucianism 22–23, 234–35,
Moore, Sally Falk 283
242–43, 246, 250
Morley-Minto reforms 169
Netherlands 83–84
Morocco 75
New Policies Period (1901–1911)
Mosul 48, 50, 52–54, 60–63, 65, 68,
205, 224
70n4, 70n11, 80
al-Mosuli, Abdallah ibn Ahmad 63
Nian Gengyao 29–33
muafi (remission of revenue) 167 Nian rebellion 226n6
müftü (jurisconsult) 263–64, 289 nightsoil 220–22, 227n10
Mughal empire 2–3, 5–8, 11–16, Niida Noboru 276
40, 75–76, 78–84, 89, 92–101, Ningxia 35
103, 147, 160, 191n19, 192n27, nomads 23, 32, 36–38, 43n3, 43n5,
194n42, 299–303, 310 54–55, 92, 98, 310
Muhammad Ali 66 Noons 155, 192n27
muhtar (village headman) 132, 136 North, Douglass C. 125, 243–44
mülk (freehold) 126, 130, 141n14, North-West Frontier Province
286–87 181
Multan 168, 192n21 Nursi, Bediüzzaman Said 267
Mumbai 300
Muntafiq tribe 54 O’Brien, Patrick 4
Murad IV 60 O’Dwyer, Michael 175, 198n98
musha’shi’in 54–55 O’Hanlon, Rosalind 306
mushaa (shared ownership) 288–89, Olivares, Count-Duke of 78, 84–85
294n12 Olsen 217–18
Muslim League 175, 200n113 opium 216, 226n7, 250
Opium War 33
Nablus 70n5 Oran 80
Nadir Shah 71n13, 71n16, 83 Ordos 35
Oriental Despotism 6, 109, 125, population registers (China) 206
273, 284 Portugal 54–55, 58, 84–85, 89,
Orissa 197n84 310
Örücü, Esin 293 Portuguese empire 75–76, 78–79
Ottoman empire 2–3, 5–16, 21–23, postcolonialism 299
26, 32, 37–40, 43n3, 43n6, Pound, Roscoe 292
47–69, 75–80, 82–84, 87–103, Prinsep, E. A. 162–65, 186–87,
109–10, 112–13, 115–40, 140 n4, 195n46, 196n57
147–48, 225n1, 252, 255–70, Protestants 83, 87–88
273–74, 284–93, 303 Prussia 258
Oudh 201n137 public sphere 234, 253n4
Owen, Roger 294n12 Pune 301
Punjab 9, 93, 147, 149–89, 190n3,
Padoux, Georges 294n19 191n8, 191n10, 197n79
Pakistan 12, 190n1, 191n7 Punjab Legislative Assembly 179
Palestine 286 Punjab Provincial Franchise
Panchen Lama 27, 33 Committee
177, 200n115
parliament, British 179 Punjab Soldiers’ Board 181–82
Paşa, Ahmet Cevdet 269 Punjab Unionist Party 179, 187
Paşa, Fuad 258 Purabiyas 163
Pathan 154, 157, 160, 192n27, Purusa 311–12, 315
194n42
Perdue, Peter C. 7, 15, 67–69, 119, Qianlong emperor 246–48
141n12 Qing empire 2 , 5 , 7 , 8 , 11–15,
Pernambuco 79 21–23, 25–26, 28–30, 32–40, 42,
Persia 8, 11, 49, 53, 54, 61, 79, 67–69, 78, 110, 115–16, 119–24,
92–94, 101, 190n6, 300 127, 128, 138, 147–48, 205–25,
Persian Gulf 54–55, 76 231–53, 273–86, 288, 290–93
Peru 75, 85, 87, 96 Qinghai 25, 27, 29–33, 37, 42
Peshawur 184, 186 Quataert, Donald 285, 288–89
Peter the Great 258 Quetta 186
Philip II 75–78 Qur’an 255, 264, 267, 270n9
Philip III 84 Qureshi 160, 194n42
Philip IV 84–85
Philippines 75, 85, 96 Ragusans 88
phronesis 266–67 al-Rahbi, Abdul al-Aziz bin
Phule, Jotiba 305–308 Muhammad 65–67
Phule, Jotirao 16 Raigarh 301, 303
police forces 11–12, 205–25, 291 Rajasthan 302
police, India 182 Rajput 92, 94, 101, 154– 55, 157,
Pollock, Sheldon 301 160, 192n27, 194n42, 302, 304
Pomeranz, Kenneth 98 Rajputana 302
population movement 37, 41–42, Ralegh, Sir Walter 80–81
43n5–6, 85–87, 90, 120 Rawalpindi 153, 167–68, 192n21
Raychaudhuri, Tapan 3, 99–100 sharia (religious law) 8, 47–53, 57,
Raymond, André 90 59–60, 62–69, 264
Rechtstaat 6 Shatt-al-Arab 54
Renaissance 6 Shenbao 210–11, 223
Rg Veda 311, 315 Shi’i Islam 53–55, 60, 91, 92
Río de la Plata 76, 87 Shiga Shuzo 236–37
Robertson, F. A. 194n38 Shivaji 16, 301–10
Robinson, Ronald 201n140 Sial 155, 160, 192n27, 194n42
Rohtak 183 Sialkot 165
Roman empire 40, 81 Siberia 27
Romanovs 26, 40 Sichuan 31, 42, 227n8
Rome 290 Sikhs 150, 152–56, 163, 165, 175–76,
Rothschilds 244 179, 191n10, 194n42, 199n105–106,
Rumelia 89–90 201n132
Russia 6, 122, 150, 158, 191n8 silver 75, 97
Russian empire 32, 33, 43n3 Sind 197n84
Sind Sagar Doab Canal 168
Sa‘id Khan Chaghatay 93
Singh, Chetan 3
Sabaen 55
‘Sinicization’ 23, 26
Safavid empire 48, 53–55, 60–61,
sipahis 284–85
75, 78, 81, 87, 89, 91, 97, 303
Saini 160, 194n42 Sisodia family 302
Salars 27 Sivas 80
Salt Range 168 Skinner, G. William 25
Salvador 86 slave trade 86
salyane system 70n9 slavery 88, 92
Salzman, Ariel 39 Smith, Dunlop 196n62
Sarajevo 80 smuggling 213
Sargodha Colony 199n105 social harmony 10–12, 93, 111, 119,
Say, Jean Baptiste 141n10 121–23, 139
School of Administration (Ottoman) South Asia 92, 94, 98–101, 147,
259 299–317
School of Political Science Southborough Committee 170,
(Ottoman) 263 175–76, 178–79, 197n84
Scott, James C. 46, 110–13, 120, Southeast Asia 76, 81
137, 281, 284, 290 Soviet Union 102
Selim II 88 Spain 23, 79, 81, 82, 84–87, 96,
Serbia 89 244
Shahji 301 Spanish empire 75–76, 78, 85–87,
Shahpur 167–68, 181, 192n21 100, 102
Shanghai 208, 211–12, 214–15 Spengler, Oswald 147
Shanghai Armory 223 Sri Lanka 75, 81
shangtuan (Chamber of Commerce Stalin, Joseph 74
militia, Suzhou) 208, 223, 225 Stapleton, Kristin 227n8
Steensgaard, Niels 77 141n13, 141n14, 142n15–17,
steppe traditions 6, 273 151–52, 156, 162–69, 173–74,
Suakin 80 176–77, 179, 188, 199n106,
subaltern studies 3–4, 299 206, 210, 233, 243, 247–48,
Sublime Porte 99 260, 274–75, 277–78, 280–81,
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 3, 8, 12–13 284–88
Sudra caste 300, 303–307, 309, 312, Thailand 294n19
314–16 Thakur 160, 194n42
sufedposhe (yeoman grantee) 172 Thal Circle 167–68
sufi Islam 65, 259 thanatopolitics 315–16
Süleyman 53 The Prince 6
Süleyman the Lawgiver 60, 76 Thessaly 90
Suleyman the Magnificent 54 Thompson, E. P. 51
Sumatra 76 Thorburn, S. S. 156–59, 186,
Sunni Islam 53–55, 84, 91–92, 304 193n31, 193n32, 194n35
Supreme Court of Judicial Thrace 90
Ordinances
(Ottoman) 261 Tianjin 224
Tibet 25, 27–31, 33–34, 42
Sutlej River 151
Suud, Ebu 63 Tigris River 54
al-Suwaidi, Abdul Rahman 71n16, Tilly, Charles 21, 46, 294n9
71n13 timar (tracts of land) 37, 284, 286
Suwaidi family 71n13, 71n16 Timur 81
Suzhou (Inner Asia) 35 Tippera 81
Suzhou 11, 205–25 Tiwanas 155
Swahili 76 tiyuhui (physical fitness association)
215–16, 223, 228n11
Switzerland 268, 291
Todorova, Maria 91–92
Syed 160, 192n27, 194n42
Tokugawa 87
Syria 54, 70n3, 286, 288
trade 5, 10, 31, 32, 53–55, 96–98,
Szekfû, Gyula 97–98
100, 117–18, 125, 206, 208–209,
211, 215, 218–20, 241–42, 244,
tahrirs (tax registers) 131–32
285
Taiping rebellion 226n6 tradesmen 11
Taiwan 12, 13, 28, 42, 277 Trans-Jordan 70n5, 286
talukdars (superior proprietors) Treatise on Reason (Risalah fi’l-Aql)
155 by Fârâbi 267
Tang dynasty 34, 38 tribute 91
Tanzania 282–83 Trotskyists 102
Tanzimat reforms 8, 25, 256–70, Tsewang Rabdan 34–35
284–85, 289 tuanlian (citizen militia) 226n6
Tarn Taran 166, 168 Tungus 23
taxes 8–10, 15, 21, 30, 39, 43 n5, Tunis 91
49–52, 55–69, 88–91, 94, 96, Tupper, C. L. 153–54, 192n22,
98, 111–14, 117–36, 139, 141 n7, 194n38
Turfan 34–36, 42 women 58–59, 62
Turkestan 27, 34–35, 37 Wong, R. Bin 13-14, 37, 121,
Turkey, Republic of 285–86, 270, 140n3
274, 289–93, 293n1, 300, 303 Woodside, Alexander 13
Turkic states 6 world system theory 1, 188
Turks 23, 81, 88, 256 World War I 147–48, 167–68, 183,
185
Udaipur 302 World War II 148, 190n5, 197n75
Uighurs 38
Ulama (Doctor of Islamic Law) Xihai 27
255–62, 267, 269 Xin Guazhou 36
United Provinces 100–102, 109, Xinhai Revolution 206, 216
169, 171, 186, 190n5, 197n84, Xining, Qinghai province 27
227n9 Xinjiang 25, 36–37, 39–42
United States 313 Xu Gate horse-road, Suzhou 224
Urumqi, Xinjiang 27 Xuanmiao guan (temple) 207
Xue Yunsheng 280
Vaisya 315
Vajpeyi, Ananya 16 Yang Guozhen 276
Yavuz Sultan Selim 76
vakf 127, 130
Yinti 28
Valencia 85, 87
Yongzheng emperor 28–29, 35–36,
248
Venezuela 96 Young Ottomans 256–59, 269
Venice 78, 88 Yuan Shikai 205, 226n6
Victoria 300 Yue Zhongqi 35–36
Vidin 128–29 Yue, Madeleine 238
Vietnam 13 Yunnan 31
von Cortland 201n132 yurts 37
Yusufzai 184
Wahhabi movement 65–67
Wakeman, Frederic 208 zalidar 154–55, 172, 184, 186,
Wallachia 91 198n86
Walzer, Michael 40 Zambezi valley 75
waqfs (pious foundations) 285–86 zamindars 93–94, 152, 163, 171,
Warriner, Doreen 286–87 186
Weber, Max 14, 77, 79, 139, 190n7, Zhang Sichang 277
231, 236, 255, 264 Zhang Zhidong 217
West Bank 16 Zhejiang 214–15, 294n7
West-Indische Compagnie 79 Zhili 205
Wilson, Anne C. 194n35 Zunghars 29–30, 33–36