Gunpowder Empires and the Garrison State: Modernity, Hybridity, and the Political Economy of Colonial India, Circa 1750-1860

Abstract

n 1844 the Mofussilite, an upcountry newspaper in India that was especially popular with army offi cers and civilians, printed an essay in which was repeated a report from the London Times lamenting the failure of Anglo-Indian society to take adequate notice of recent fi nancial and commercial reverses in Britain. According to the Times, this was no mere oversight on the part of British expatriates in India; instead it was taken as proof that the Raj had yet to break free from what it termed its politico-military phase. 1 This juxtaposi- tion of a modern commercial society against a military empire draws attention to a paradox that underlies all efforts at understanding the nature and origins of colonial rule in India; namely, how could a commercial operation like the East India Company, which was so linked to the beginnings of precocious capitalism, not to mention the rise of Western dominance, become so deeply and apparently perpetually embroiled in costly warfare and continue to do so despite—or perhaps because of—the growth of modern industrial society in Britain? 2 The tension identifi ed by the Times also exposes the need to work through and move beyond the long-standing and exaggerated distinction that historians have drawn between maritime (read European and modern) empires and land-based (read Asian and premodern) empires, a differentiation that lies at the heart of the military revolution theory. The fact that Britain's Indian Empire was seen as being somehow out of step with metropolitan agendas illustrates the shortcomings of the conventional view that ties British expansion to seaborne commercial imperatives. While the distinction between sea-based and land-based empires may have had some currency in the early modern era, a time when British expansion was undoubtedly tied to naval power and driven by the search for overseas markets, the situation had grown more complex by the nineteenth century. By then, the British in India were very much a land-based empire, their focus having shifted from naval to military power, and their revenues were in- creasingly dependent on exploiting agrarian production and securing at least the tacit coop- eration of large magnates rather than expanding trade networks and striking alliances with local capitalists. In other words, the nineteenth-century Raj was very much a hybrid regime,