What did Bernier actually say? Profiling the Mughal empire

Abstract

Bernier's text Travels in the Mughal Empire; A.D. 1656-1708 was a primary source for certain European writers from Montesquieu to Marx for their representation and characterisation of oriental despotism. The distinctive features of oriental despotism in their eyes were absolutist and tyrannical monarchs who ruled over polities that lacked a hereditary nobility and private property in land. In this paper I have attempted to demonstrate that, when read closely, Bernier's text discloses particulars that can be shown to yield a quite different patterning. The Mughal empire of the 17th and 18th centuries, the period I am discussing, was characterised by a devolutionary distribution of authority among multiple lesser sovereignties, by a complex hierarchy of land tenure and appropriation of product, by a developed system of commerce, and by a tolerance and coexistence of pluralistic subcultures. The contours of the empire seem to conform to a model of what I have previously conceptualised in my writings as the 'galactic polity'. The current trend in theorising about post-colonial societies is that the representation of pre-colonial societies at the time of contact as oriental despotisms was a proto-colonial and colonial construction which served as a reason and justification for political intervention, conquest and exploitation. That was so. But I want to emphasise that the stereotypical image of oriental despotism also importantly served as a polemic for an internal political debate and advocacy in France as a warning against and attack on the alleged absolutist ambitions of French monarchy and a defense of feudal nobility as a break on such tendencies. Montesquieu in particular exemplifies this posture. Bernier's formulaic gloss on the Mughal empire, despite what he actually reports, is one kind of tendentious representation. My own reading of Bernier's text is no doubt informed by my present day intellectual and political concerns.