The Raw Forces of History
APOCALYPTIC HORSEMEN, CONQUERORS, USURPERS
The sequel of these treatises will show how important it is to a correct knowledge, not only of Asiatic history, but also of the human race at large, to possess clear views respecting the manners and institutions of the nomad tribes. It was among them that the greatest revolutions in the history of mankind, which not only determined the fate of Asia, but shook Europe and Africa to the core, had their origin. It would almost appear to have been the design of Providence to continue these nations in a state more true to nature, and nearer in some degrees to their original condition, in order to renovate by their means (as history proves to have been often the case) the more civilized races of the world, which had prepared, by degeneracy and luxury, the way for their own destruction.
—Arnold Herrmann Ludwig Heeren (1760–1842), Ideen über Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel der vornehmsten Völker der Alten Welt1 [Historical Researches into the Politics, Intercourse and Trade of the Principal Nations of Antiquity]
This is how Arnold Herrmann Ludwig Heeren, one of the last European historians working within the intellectual framework of Enlightenment historiography, highlights the significance of his own detailed analysis of a nomadic way of life and its political consequences. Writing in 1793, at exactly the same time that an unprecedented revolution was unfolding in France, the professor in provincial Göttingen reverts to an older concept of “revolution,” in some ways outdated in the early 1790s, but keeping alive the idea that “premodern” history was by no means a tale of immobility and unchanging tradition.
TRIBAL ASIA: ATTILA AND THE CONSEQUENCES
One of the enduring geopolitical conflicts of the nineteenth century was the “Great Game,” a cold war fought between the era’s two most aggressive empires, the British and the Russian, in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the Himalayas. The British were seeking to protect their sea route to India and to surround their colonial crown jewel with a cordon of dependent buffer states from Iran to Tibet. In pursuing their economic interests in China following its forced opening in 1842, they needed as large an area as possible in which to develop. The tsarist empire, for its part, extended its hegemony through colonial conquests in Islamic Central Asia. Towards the end of the century it had opened up Siberia through railroads and made a start on the pénétration pacifique of Manchuria, the three northeastern provinces of China. In all these imperial maneuvers, the continental center of Asia was little more than a chessboard, its people the unwilling pawns of the imperial powers. Only the Afghans refused to be pushed around. In the long run, they could neither be ruled directly nor reliably controlled through indirect means.
The Anglo-Russian conflict in Asia was finally settled in 1907 when the two powers agreed to carve out separate spheres of interest. A restructuring of alliances within Europe, together with Japan’s rise to great power status, sealed by its stunning victory over Russia at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, had made this inevitable. All this did little to change Central Asia’s passive role. On the contrary, the end of the Great Game eliminated the last possibilities for playing one side off against the other. Central Asia found itself more firmly than ever in the grip of the empires. Having long figured in the daydreams of geopolitical strategists, Asia’s “heartland” only regained a measure of autonomy following the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the emergence of new states in the Islamic regions of Central Asia.2 Yet the last great empire in Asia, the Chinese, emerged strengthened from the global crisis of 1990/91. It continues to control vast swathes of Central Asia: Tibet, East Turkestan (Xinjiang), and parts of historical Mongolia. Peripheral powers like Iran and Turkey are also stepping up their influence in the region. China’s response has been to push the ambitious project of a new Silk Road in collaboration with the European Union.3
Central Asia’s former significance for the politics and worldview of Europe can hardly be inferred from today’s radically altered situation. For many centuries, European dreams about Central Asia had taken the form of nightmares. Ever since Attila and his Huns, the mere thought of Central Asian horsemen thundering down from the steppes had filled with dread all those living on Europe’s eastern marches. Hegel spoke in this connection of the “elemental-historical” (das Elementarhistorische): as if spilling out of a black hole, wave upon wave of seemingly prehistoric barbarian hordes would periodically intervene in the history of states to vastly destructive—and transformative—effect.4 As late as 1700, only a few Europeans dared to predict that the danger from the East had been banished once and for all.5 Time and again, it was recalled that once-mighty empires had been overwhelmed by steppeland warriors: the West Roman Empire, the Caliphate of Baghdad, the Russian principalities, Byzantium, the Song dynasty in China, and later the Ming dynasty as well.6
With the takeover of China by the Manchus, who in 1629 had breached the Great Wall from the forested regions to the north and in November 1644 installed their own dynasty on the Dragon Throne, the series of North and Central Asian conquests had by no means come to an end.7 Around 1710, Afghan tribal warriors began to move against the Muslim empires. In 1722 they destroyed the empire of the Safavid dynasty, plunging much of Iran into chaos. The Iranian emperor Nadir Shah, whose power rested on support from Iranian and Turkoman tribal warriors, sacked Delhi in 1739. In doing so, he delivered the death blow to the Mughal Empire, which only a few decades before had been basking in its very own Indian summer. In 1747 and again from 1759 to 1761, Afghans pushed into northern India. These invasions unloosed several hundred thousand roving tribal horsemen. Some groups established their own states while others, penetrating as far as southern India, annexed land for themselves, entering into a parasitic relationship with the local populace as a tax-collecting military elite.8 Until well into the 1790s, the threat of Afghan attack loomed large over northern India, although the British and their Indian allies mostly succeeded in staving it off. A crucial episode was the war launched in 1774 against the Rohilla Afghans by the EIC and the Nawab of Oudh, Shuja ud-Daula.9 Around the same time, the tribally based religious movement of Wahhabism had grown strong enough in Arabia to achieve the unprecedented feat of rallying the Arabs against their Ottoman overlords. In 1773 the Wahhabis took the city of Riyadh, and later the sacred sites of Islam, to establish themselves as the primary religious and political force in the Arabian Peninsula.10 It was not until 1818 that Egyptian troops in the pay of the sultan were at last able to bring down the first Wahhabi state.
This revival of tribal dynamism was far from being the prevalent trend in Asia as a whole. None other than the Manchurian Qing dynasty, which itself hailed from the fringes of the Chinese Empire, finally succeeded through a combination of inclusion and destruction in neutralizing the restless Mongolian tribes, their old rivals and allies. The danger of a renewed Mongol assault on Europe invoked by Leibniz in 1699 was banished for good in 1757 with the virtual genocide of the Dzungar people, the last surviving independent federation of Mongolian tribes.11 In Asia, too, the historical force of the steppe peoples appeared to have been broken once and for all. The Marquis de Condorcet, a well-informed mathematician and philosopher, pondered the prospect of “a new invasion of Asia by the Tartars” only to conclude that it was unrealistic.12 Shortly after the Sino-Manchu extermination of the Dzungars, nomadic pastoralists began being driven from their traditional rangelands on the steppe frontiers of the tsarist empire.13 The pinch grip of Russian and Sino-Manchurian military control and agricultural colonization showed that even a preindustrial imperialism was capable of breaking the political spine of the Central Asian mounted nomads.
At the same time, tribal breakouts in the Indo-Afghan region recalled the ongoing virulence of a mobile warrior force that had always been metaphorically characterized by Europeans as a “deluge” or “swarm.” Even the normally unflappable Alexander von Humboldt, the very opposite of a hysterical demagogue and Asiaphobe, condemned Genghis Khan’s Mongols as a “pestilential gust of wind.”14 Volney, in a grotesque vision of turmoil and destruction, spoke of ants and locusts inflicting doom on the civilized world.15 And Edward Gibbon, never one to miss a chance for irony and unexpected historical justice, joined in the usual talk of aggressive Northern invaders and Asian hordes while pointing out that during the Fourth Crusade the victimized—although not entirely innocent—Christian citizens of Byzantium might be forgiven for thinking that the Latin crusaders and their Venetian accomplices, with all their greed and “savage fanaticism,” were an especially voracious force of nature.16 Marveling at the enormous number of warriors mobilized during the period of the Crusades, he too conjured up “the image of locusts.”17
When eighteenth-century European historians attached signal importance to the motif of barbarian invasion, they did so for reasons that partly reflected contemporary concerns. Up to the time when they were writing, or at least until shortly before it, Asia had been racked by considerable turmoil, and this turmoil had serious repercussions for Europe and its colonies. The European system of states had only recently achieved such a degree of stability that a flamboyant conqueror and rule-breaker such as Charles XII of Sweden was almost doomed to failure. In 1731, Voltaire devoted his first full-scale historiographical monograph to the rise and fall of that reckless imitator of Alexander the Great, advising the crowned heads of Europe that peaceful rule would be worth far more than any amount of military glory.18 The importance of conquest and coercion in establishing empires throughout Asia became all the more apparent when seen in the light of the pacification of Europe, itself far more a utopian goal than a reality. Conquests seemed to flow naturally from the mobility of a nomadic way of life. Among the tribes of the Asian steppes, remarked August Ferdinand Lueder, a senior public servant in the Duchy of Brunswick, “the military campaign is nothing but a perpetuation of everyday life.”19 The chronic, seething restlessness of herding societies was practically the counterprinciple to European stability, “since the Tatar tribes who live there [in North Asia] roam freely, and their Khans’ residences remain unattached to any one place.”20 Sir William Temple pursued this line of argument furthest in his essay Of Heroic Virtue (1692). He identified a region of the world lying north of the Caspian and Black Seas, and bordered to the west and east by the Danube and Oxus Rivers, respectively, as the engine room of historical dynamism since ancient times, and he followed ancient cosmographers in calling this region “Scythia.”21 Temple also asserted that conquests, as a rule, move from north to south, the only exception being the expansion of the early Islamic Arabs.22
In eighteenth-century thought, we find very few value judgments contrasting a civilized Europe with the “Asiatic hordes” surging at its gates. Such dichotomizing simplifications only became commonplace in the nineteenth century, when Ranke, for example, formulated the historical principle that the “civilized world” (Culturwelt) finds itself incessantly attacked and endangered by outsiders. In his Weltgeschichte (History of the World), Ranke by no means ignores the Huns and Mongols, but unlike Edward Gibbon a century earlier, he makes no attempt to understand their internal dynamics. In Ranke’s view, societies existing beyond the religiously and socially regulated pale of “civilization” have always shown “a barbaric hostility towards the civilized world.” Consequently, their interventions in history have typically taken the form of “inundation.”23 Mechanical metaphors of pressure and counterpressure pile up, as when Ranke, nearing the end of his work, arrives at a fundamental principle of ancient and medieval history: “Thus the brute force of Asia poured destructively into Europe. Fortunately it met with resistance.”24 The “struggle of the various systems of nations” that determines the course of world history is regarded solely from the perspective of “universal development,” which in the post-classical world has found expression only among the Germanic and Latin peoples.25 They are the standard-bearers of civilization in Ranke’s day, so it is only fitting that they should now “rule the world.”26 Ranke was quite prepared to grant the barbarians a modicum of historical justice. He recognized, for instance, that the state-building achievements of Attila the Hun were superior to those of his West Roman opponents. For Ranke, however, the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains is yet another “struggle of the ideal opposition” between civilization and barbarism.27
By contrast, Ignaz Aurelius Fessler, known in his lifetime above all as a theorist of Freemasonry and author of a history of Hungary, treated such attacks on the “civilized world” with far greater understanding in his brilliantly written history of the Huns under Attila (1794). In this work, which observed all the aesthetic strictures concerning historiographical presentation that had been introduced into Germany since Schiller, Fessler took issue with a stereotype that had held sway since the earliest Roman reports: that of the Huns’ untamed, animalistic savagery.28 Attila, he argued, was an eminently intelligent and rational ruler. He had lifted his culturally debased people out of a subsistence existence by setting them a new, lofty goal of honor and renown. The excesses of the Hunnic conquests were caused by marauding soldiers running amok; in no way did they reflect the national character of the Huns, nor were they the result of deliberate policy. Ultimately, Attila and his warriors were motivated, not by an atavistic yearning to rape and pillage, but by a long-standing, entirely understandable hatred for the Romans:
National pride was conjoined with courage, and henceforth the sword became, in the hands of the Huns, the terrible instrument of revenge against a people that cursed them as barbarians simply because, more honest, more just and freer than the Romans, they abhorred the chains of vice and tyranny.29
The great Scottish historian William Robertson had earlier warned of playing off the “European” Germans against the “Asiatic” Huns: they had all been savage barbarians, they had all known the freedom of nomads, and there were no fundamental differences in social organization between the two.30 Edward Gibbon, while unwilling to gloss over the Huns’ cruelty, still paid tribute to Attila’s qualities as a clever strategist and good religious legislator, pointing out that slaves were better treated by the Huns than by Romans.31 The Iranist John Richardson, one of the founders of comparative linguistics, admired Attila for having shattered “the chains of Roman servitude.”32 Three decades before, Montesquieu had praised Attila as “one of the greatest monarchs history has ever known.”33 Montesquieu was not concerned with Attila’s alleged “barbarism” and the morality or immorality of his deeds, rating him instead as a calculating statesman and strategist no different from the “civilized” monarchs of his time.34
Typically for his age, Ranke adopted the perspective of “civilized” Europe and showed scant interest in examining the causes and dynamics of the uncivilized and chaotic world beyond. All that interested him about Asian history was its impact on Europe; only their brute hostility towards culture made the uncultured people of the East worth studying. In 1824 Isaac Jacob Schmidt, an expert on Central Asia, was already lamenting that Europeans only ever perceived the consequences of Asiatic breakouts, not their root causes. That had not always been the case.35 Two broad schools of thought can be discerned in the eighteenth century. One proposed that historical change in the Eurasian continent, or even in general, results from mass migrations and other such large-scale demographic phenomena; from this perspective, conquests appear as a temporary intensification of mobile normality.36 The other school inquired into the specific causes of “barbarian invasions” in history. Not everyone made things so simple for themselves as Volney, who with uncharacteristic shallowness ascribed the nomads’ aggressiveness to greed and envy.37 Charles de Peyssonnel, a learned French consul in Smyrna (İzmir), analyzed the interdependence of imperial border policy and “barbarian” behavior. Rejecting the simple opposition of offensive barbarians and defensive civilizations, he anticipated many of the findings of modern research by showing how their mutual influences cut across borders.38 And Edward Gibbon developed an elaborate political sociology of nomadism, to be discussed in the next chapter.
A CONTINENT OF REVOLUTIONS
Not only Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, but many other eighteenth-century European authors repeatedly applied the concept of revolution to events in Asia. The term was used to refer to political upheavals of all kinds.39 These were so general a phenomenon that Gottfried Achenwall, a political scientist avant la lettre, could decree: “The history of constitutional changes or revolutions in a kingdom or republic should be the first item on the agenda for the historical study of any polity.”40 In 1792 Heeren’s senior colleague at the University of Göttingen, the historian Johann Christoph Gatterer, declared world history itself to be “the history of major events, of revolutions.”41 In the year of the French Revolution, however, Anquetil-Duperron was already warning historians against adopting a notion of revolution too narrowly fixated on events, advising them to study longer processes and historical constants as well.42 He could have cited Edward Gibbon, who, in the preface to the first volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), defined his topic as “the memorable series of revolutions which, in the course of about thirteen centuries, gradually undermined, and at length destroyed, the solid fabric of Roman greatness.”43 Among these revolutions were the rise of Christianity and the emergence of feudalism in Western Europe.
A number of events in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Asia were portrayed in European texts as “revolutions”:
In the eighteenth century there was, however, nothing quite so dramatic and violent as the conquest of China by the Manchus in 1644 and the pacification of the Middle Kingdom in the following years. The memory of the “Great Revolution” in China was kept alive by Pater Martin Martini’s De bello tartarico (1654), quickly translated into seven European languages: a thrilling piece of eyewitness reporting and, along with François Bernier’s account of Aurangzeb’s rise to the position of grand mughal, one of the most impressive historical works of the seventeenth century.44 Travel collections seldom failed to include this hair-raising cavalcade of horrors.
European observers asked what these modern “revolutions” in Asia had in common and how they related to the systemic crises facing Europe around the same time—a question that still preoccupies researchers today.45 They appeared to involve greater bloodshed than similar upheavals in Europe as well as those in Asiatic antiquity. When it was not simply a matter of palace revolutions (as was typical for the Ottoman Empire), internal crises often coincided with invasions from outside. For that reason, the various overthrows had an almost therapeutic, purgative effect. As a comparison between the Manchu conquest of China and the contemporaneous Puritan revolution in England showed, widespread tumult in Asia tended not to do away with the old political system but to rebuild it on the same foundations.46 The most spectacular “revolution” in eighteenth-century Asia proved an exception to the rule: the gradual rise to power of the British in India from 1757 onwards.47 Whether speaking in praise or blame, commentators sensed that this development broke with the eternal cycle of Asiatic politics. Edmund Burke remarked that Arabs, Tatars (i.e., Mughals), and Persians had bloodily invaded India and then quickly assimilated, whereas the British turned everything upside down: “The Tartar invasion was mischievous; but it is our protection that destroys India.”48
Thomas Maurice, on the other hand, looked to the future in striking the more positive tone of imperial apologetics. In his Modern History of Hindostan (1802–10), he charted the rise and fall of the Mughal dynasty from an unsympathetic distance: Asian history, particularly under Islamic influence, was nothing but a “dark and dreadful” litany of “perfidy, spoliation and murder.” What a contrast strikes the reflective mind when, having beheld such horrors, it “contemplates the blessings enjoyed under a government immutably founded on the adamantine basis of virtue and liberty, possessing the noblest code of equity, and irradiated by the beams of the purest religion.”49 With that, the historical mission of the new overlords was set out: India had been freed from itself by British colonialism and blessed with the strict but just rule of law.
TIMUR: STATESMAN AND MONSTER
From the nineteenth century, at the latest, Genghis Khan, the early thirteenth-century founder of the Mongol world empire, and Timur (Tamerlaine), who from 1380 until his death in 1405 subjected most of western Asia to his rule, pushed through to India, and prepared for an assault on China, were seen as the twin paragons of Asiatic destructiveness and bloodlust.
Was Genghis Khan really, as Baron de Tott contended, “the Madman who overran Asia to enslave the world he had laid waste?”50 The authors of the Algemeine Welthistorie (General World History) found that, on the contrary, Genghis may “rightly be considered the greatest prince ever to have occupied the Oriental throne.”51 Although cruel and ruthless, he had also shown immense courage, wisdom, and judgment. He had introduced the principle of promotion by merit into his army, and on questions of religion he was no primitive idol-worshiper but practically a deist in the Enlightenment mold.52 Edward Gibbon viewed Genghis as a lawgiver who had guided his people wisely and well. “A singular conformity may be found,” we read in one of Gibbon’s priceless footnotes, “between the religious laws of Zingis Khan and of Mr. Locke.”53
Timur exerted a more powerful hold on the eighteenth-century imagination than Genghis Khan, about whom far less was known. It did much to help their posthumous fame in Europe that both rulers had campaigned against Christendom’s archenemy, Islam. Centuries later, that had not yet been forgotten.54 The earliest humanists had been Timur’s near-contemporaries and left behind a flattering portrait of the conqueror. They saw him as an ambitious self-made man who had compelled luck (fortuna) onto his side and combined personal charisma with the utmost rationality in his ruthless exploitation of whatever means lay at hand. In an age without heroes, a figure had arisen whose military exploits had equaled or even bettered those of Alexander the Great.55 Christopher Marlowe was almost alone in placing the main emphasis on the ruler’s brutality and bloodthirstiness in his drama Tamburlaine the Great, first performed in 1587 and published three years later.
By the eighteenth century, freshly translated Persian and Arab sources were available, allowing oriental perspectives on the conqueror to flow into European literature. As the historical perspective lengthened, Timur also came to be seen as the ancestor of the Mughal dynasty. Although his own empire did not survive him, his direct descendant Babur succeeded in carving out a Muslim imperium in South Asia.56 In 1697 Barthélemi d’Herbelot painted a dignified, unrhetorical portrait of Timur in his Bibliothèque Orientale. Writing with the sober objectivity that was his hallmark, he insists that reports of the conqueror’s cruelty had been overstated in Europe.57 Although d’Herbelot confined himself to biographies of princes and potentates, readers could still find a brief structural analysis of the Mongol empire in the fourth volume of his work. This allowed them to draw analogies to how the Timurid empire was organized and administered.58
Evaluations of Timur were shaped both by value judgments suggested in the sources and by present-day interpretive needs. Until Jean-Baptiste d’Anville characterized him in 1772 as “the scourge of Asia,”59 Timur was almost universally held up as the very model of a benevolent and beneficent ruler. From the perspective of the early Enlightenment, what spoke in his favor was that he owed his ascent to world domination solely to his personal abilities. Neither inheriting nor usurping kingship and lacking a teacher like Aristotle, he was the maker of his own fortune (l’artisan de sa fortune) and as such could be excused the occasional outburst of brutality.60 Timur’s charisma fascinated eighteenth-century authors: his leadership psychology, his capacity to inspire loyality and enthusiasm among his followers, his unerring decisiveness, but also his artfulness and cunning.61 His constructive legacy seemed to outweigh the devastation his armies left in their wake.62 As a lawgiver, too, he proved a wise statesman and uniter of nations.63
The only dissenting voices were those of Enlightment radicals like Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, who refused to worship at the shrine of the conqueror and saw military heroes as nothing more than contemptible mass murderers.64 But here, too, Timur was not condemned for anything specifically “Asiatic” in his character. He corresponded instead to a type of leader bound to neither time nor place: the “conqueror.” At bottom, his mistakes, sins, and crimes were no different from those of an Alexander, the warlord with whom he was most often compared. As late as 1783, it was still said of him that ambition, “the infirmity of noble minds,” was his only flaw; whenever he committed what looked like an atrocity, his hand had always been forced by his enemies’ treachery.65 This largely ahistorical image of the constructive statesman survived well into the nineteenth century.66 But it could come into conflict with the political correctness of the age. In 1810 a British admirer of Timur found himself faced with the difficulty of appearing to praise Napoleon (in many respects Timur’s modern-day counterpart) alongside his hero—and thought better of it.67
A critical view of Timur does not begin, as one might suspect, with Voltaire, whose interest in the conqueror was spurred by reading Cantemir’s history of the Ottoman Empire. Voltaire places him in the usual gallery of great revolutionaries and wreckers, seeing that, unlike Alexander, who at least founded cities wherever he went, Timur’s legacy was almost wholly destructive. At the same time, he questions some of the reports of Timur’s more outrageous atrocities and believes him to have been no more hot-tempered than Alexander, the only European military leader (in Voltaire’s eyes) ever to have made an impact on Asia. He even regards Timur—the biggest compliment—as a tolerant deist, with no trace of “superstition” and “believing in a single God, just as the Chinese literati do.”68 Timur’s story is no longer a moral tale of virtue or vice but a case study in historical dynamics.
It was Joseph de Guignes, writing around the same time, who brought out Timur’s darker qualities more strongly than any other author since the demonizing Christopher Marlowe. In his monumental Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mogols et des autres Tartares Occidentaux (1756–58), based on source studies in several Asiatic languages, De Guignes dispenses with the reductive character portrait of Timur that was typical of his time. He never utters an explicit judgment. The investigation of historical causes for which he was renowned (and which earned him the admiration of Gibbon, its greatest master among Enlightenment historians69) also proved of no use to him here: for how could an appeal to causality possibly explain the meteoric rise to world domination of this “vagrant and outlaw,” this near-nobody from the windswept steppelands of Central Asia?70
In retelling the story of Timur’s life, de Guignes reels off a grim catalogue of mass executions, destroyed cities, and devastated landscapes. He can barely conceal his bewilderment at the phenomenon of the nomad emperor who did everything for his troops and spared his opponents nothing. Where the older tradition admired—with some justification—the purposeful rationality with which Timur, in this view the most modern of the medieval monarchs, had implemented his plans, de Guignes applies the normative criterion of reasonableness to his rule. While Timur’s rise until 1380 may have conformed to the usual pattern by which rulers build up a regional power base, his attack on Iran the following year signalled that his ambition now knew no bounds: “Tamerlan lacked a rational motive in starting this war; the dream of universal monarchy was the only guiding star of his actions.”71 De Guignes is clearly horrified to perceive an untrammeled, all-consuming violence at work in Timur’s later actions, impelled by the vision of a world where peace was to be secured by crushing all resistance.72 Needless to say, the period’s leading historian of Asia makes no mention of “Asiatic cruelty.” De Guignes was writing during an interlude in the history of ideas. While he no longer joined older historians in penning panegyrics for princes, he was also not yet infected by the emerging mindset of East-West antagonism. His lucid description of Timurid power politics squares up to Hegel’s “elemental-historical” with great directness and honesty.
Edward Gibbon, who devotes almost a whole, brilliantly researched chapter to Timur, found rich possibilities for paradox in this contradictory situation. His Timur is at once an unscrupulous mass murderer and a cultivated chessplayer who befriended scholars,73 fortune’s favorite and the victim of his own success: “after devoting fifty years to the attainment of empire, the only happy period of his life were the two months in which he ceased to exercise his power.”74 Timur appeared in Asia at a time of chaos and at first seemed to promise a return to order. Far from being a barbaric force of nature, he was a statesman with a keen sense of what was needed. But the means outweighed the ends, “whole nations were crushed under the footsteps of the reformer,” and his conquests were never followed by reconstruction.75 Gibbon’s Timur, who on balance did far more harm than good, is finely portrayed, yet one cannot help feeling that de Guignes’s sparse documentation does more justice than Gibbon’s elegant reasoning to the excessiveness of a man who not only talked about ruling the world but made a concerted effort to do so. Sir John Malcolm was still following Gibbon’s interpretation in his History of Persia (1815). His Timur is likewise no Asiatic monster but rather a misguided genius who offers proof that empires cannot be founded on violence and charisma alone.76 With Timur—and this is also how Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall defines his place in history—the era of open borders and world-conquering cavalry comes to an end in Eurasia. The post-Timurid future belongs to territorial states.77
NADIR SHAH: COMET OF WAR AND PATRIOT
A century and a half after his death, he was still sending shivers down people’s spines. In 1894 George Nathaniel Curzon, later viceroy of India and British foreign secretary, saw him and Genghis Khan as “the most terrible phenomena by which humanity has ever been scourged.”78 What was so horrifying about Nadir Shah, “this notorious eighteenth-century ravager of the countryside, who leapt straight from the dust to the throne”?79 Nadir was one of the last permanently mobile rulers in history, a nomad who spent most of his time on the warpath with his army and held court from his military camp.80 Born in 1688 in the Iranian province of Khorasan to simple parents from the Turkmeni tribe of the Afshars, he never denied his humble origins. Throughout his entire career, which he modeled from an early stage on Timur’s romantic example, he proudly proclaimed himself a “son of the sword.”81 In the situation of political turmoil following the invasion of Iran by the Ghilzai Afghans, which began in 1709 with the taking of Kandahar and ended in 1722 with the conquest of Isfahan and the fall of the Safavid dynasty, new opportunities were opening up to warlords. The Afghans proved incapable of providing stable government in Iran and protecting the land from Ottoman and Russian depredations. Nadir, a man of the lawless frontier, inexorably built up his power base by either eliminating rivals or winning them over to his side. In 1726 he entered the service of the Safavid pretender and self-nominated shah Tahmasp II, receiving the name by which he first became known in Europe, Tahmasp Quli Khan. It was largely thanks to Nadir that in 1729 the Afghans were driven out and the Safavid dynasty restored, albeit as a shadow of its former self.
Nadir now turned against Iran’s internal enemies. He attacked the Ottomans in Baghdad and the Russians in Azerbaijan, correcting the borders in Iran’s favor. In 1732 he launched a coup to replace the weak shah Tahmasp with his son Abbas (III), only eight years old at the time; it came as no surprise when Nadir took on the regency. In March 1736 the warlord had himself crowned shah and proclaimed a new Afsharid dynasty. Anyone even suspected of opposing the regime was shown no mercy. In 1737 Nadir began his long-planned Indian campaign. His brutal sack of Delhi and massacre of tens of thousands of citizens in March and April 1739 were its tragic high points.82 The figure of 225,000 fatalities was regularly cited in the contemporary European literature.83 Nadir also confiscated the Mughal emperor’s famous Peacock Throne and Koh-i-Noor diamond (which in 1849 was to end up in Queen Victoria’s possession).84 Uninterested in extending his scepter over large parts of India, Nadir returned to Iran and spent the next years expanding and securing Iran’s borders on the Persian Gulf and in Mesopotamia, all the while ruthlessly plundering his own subjects. Revolts against his tax-collectors became ever more frequent and were suppressed with ever-greater savagery as Nadir, increasingly described as insane, gave free rein to his sadistic impulses. An English traveler was surprised that the Persians, unlike other Muslims, left their ears uncovered by turbans or other headwear: the reason was that anyone whose ears had not been cut off was proud to display theirs intact.85 Finally, Nadir adopted Timur’s practice of stacking the skulls of his victims into towers; in Nadir’s case, however, the heads were those of his own people. On the night of July 1, 1747, the tyrant was assassinated in his tent by Iranian conspirators. Nadir had long since loosened his ties to his Iranian power base and there was a strong feeling that he relied too much on Afghan and Uzbek forces.
Along with the Kangxi emperor, whose renown had been spread by the Jesuits even before his death in 1722, Nadir Shah was for mid-eighteenth-century Europeans the best-known personality in recent Asiatic history, at any rate east of the Ottoman Empire. His rise and fall were followed with keen interest. They were cited as an example of how instructive an engagement with current events in faraway countries could be.86 Thanks to the great travel reports of Chardin, Tavernier, Kaempfer, and others, interest in Safavid Iran had never waned.87 When the dynasty was toppled by Afghan horsemen from the wild and mountainous north, the news was sure to attract attention. In contemplating such a sad spectacle, Voltaire felt reminded of the fate of Germany in the Thirty Years’ War, France during the Fronde, or Russia when laid waste by the Mongols.88
Newspaper correspondents in Istanbul and Moscow ensured that European readers were kept informed of events as they unfolded.89 A detailed account and analysis of the Iranian troubles appeared in 1728: the Histoire de la dernière revolution de Perse by the Jesuit father Tadeusz Juda Krusínski, who had experienced events from 1707 to 1725 at close hand; in 1722 he made a narrow escape from Isfahan as it was being starved into submission by Afghan besiegers.90 Krusínski’s evidently somewhat-rambling Latin report was translated into French before being tidied up by another Jesuit, Jean-Antoine du Certeau, and recast as a thrilling narrative. The Ottoman government had such a strong interest in the Iranian “revolution” that it had the text translated into Turkish and this version then translated back into Latin.91
Krusínski (or Certeau) opens the work with a long investigation into the demise of the Safavids. This had already begun around the middle of the previous century, allowing the Afghans to gain a foothold in Iran. Until then, the Afghans had been all but unknown even in Asia. Described as ugly, dirty, and coarse, their favorite pastime was to steal from strangers and each other.92 On the other hand, they treated their captives and slaves far better than was usually the case in Asia. They had been lucky enough to find a leader of genius, Mir Vais, to direct their martial energies to a worthwhile goal. Krunsínski now plays skillfully with the narrative expectations of his readers. Surely they would immediately recall Timur and think that Iran had been overwhelmed “by a terrible flood of barbarians”?93 Not a bit of it: the decadent Safavids had been overthrown by a relatively small troop of tactically superior mountain warriors. The parallels to the small number of Manchus who had conquered Ming China in 1644 were obvious. Krusínski, who completed his manuscript in 1725, thought he had observed the new rulers in Iran quickly assimilating and acclimatizing to their surroundings. Recently, they had even started pursuing a policy of reconciliation with the native elite. The Iranian Revolution, in his view, could serve as a shining light to the rest of Asia, which had succumbed to stagnation and decadence.94 The barbarian invasion took on a providential meaning, civilizing the intruders while at the same time reviving a once-great civilization that had grown enfeebled and enervated.
Nadir’s rise as a “comet of war” and “the most daring soldier of the age”95 gave the lie to Krusínski’s prognosis. There were other lessons to be learned from Nadir. He first came to public attention in Europe following his 1732 coup and his attack on the Ottoman Empire.96 Soon there was so much news about him that by 1738 the industrious David Fassmann could publish a 770-page volume on the Herkunft, Leben und Thaten des Persianischen Monarchens Schach Nadyr (Origins, Life and Deeds of the Persian Monarch Shah Nader), padded out with elaborate setpieces from Iranian history.97 Nadir appears here as the virtuous, divinely ordained savior of his nation, an Iranian messiah who chastened his “barbarous” enemies, “the Turks, Mongols [Mughals] and Afghans,” and restored Iran to great power status. One of the secrets to his success was Westernization: the introduction of European-style military discipline was what first gave Nadir’s troops the upper hand over their opponents.98 Apparently there were even rumors swirling around Europe between 1734 and 1736 that Nadir was of French, German, or Dutch descent.99
James Fraser told the hero’s tale of Nadir’s rise from social banditry à la Robin Hood to supreme command in his History of Nadir Shah (1742). Much of it was based on information received orally from William Cockell, a representative of the EIC in Iran whom Fraser, likewise employed by the EIC, had met in India.100 Fraser and Cockell’s Nadir is a charismatic leader who presented himself as a servant of the state and benefactor of his people, but whose chief concern was to ensure that his troops remained ever loyal and ready for battle. The Indian campaign was also launched mainly to acquire fame and booty.101 Fraser provides an unvarnished account of the outrages committed during the sack of Delhi. He gives a figure of 120,000 slain citizens as well as precise statistics about the loot carted away from India: enormous quantities of gemstones, gold, and silver, one thousand elephants, seven thousand horses, ten thousand camels, one hundred eunuchs, three hundred masons, one hundred stonemasons, and so on.102 A character sketch of Nadir Shah, taken directly from Cockell, has him emerging from this bloodbath with his heroic stature practically undiminished. He is depicted as a military leader who shared the privations of his men, a harsh but fair judge, blessed with a perfect memory, and skilled at pursuing several objectives at once103—in short, a born genius who disrupted the routine course of history and sent a salutary shock through a moribund Orient. Nadir bears more than a little resemblance to Cromwell here, and his characterization also anticipates a good many features of that later conqueror, Napoleon. The shah’s admirers remained long undismayed by their idol’s misdeeds. The opinion was even heard that Nadir had done the global economy a favor by returning the grand mughal’s hoarded treasures to circulation.104 His attitude of indifferent pragmatism towards religion and his mistrust of its official representatives also won him the approval of Enlightenment freethinkers.
Nadir’s European reputation darkened only after his death. Comparisons with Alexander the Great, by no means an uncontroversial hero in Enlightenment Europe, fell ever less frequently in the Iranian usurper’s favor.105 While the English merchant Jonas Hanway, unlike William Cockell, may not have known Nadir personally, he was able to witness the devastating effects of his rule on Iran when he traveled there in 1743/44. He reported extensively on what he saw, denouncing the shah as “a monster of cruelty and oppression” and “[a] scourge of the eastern world.”106 Hanway took pains not to explain the descent of the shah’s regime into boundless greed and bloody tyranny solely with recourse to psychology (such as the perversion of heroic passions). He detected a certain logic in Nadir’s system of rule. The military machine, corrupted by the spoils of victory in India, had become an unstoppable juggernaut. Nadir’s original charisma had been eaten away by his distrust and the constant need to control and spy on his own people. In the end, his indisputable virtues as a general and strategist, including his caution, were not enough to make him a wise legislator and administrator.107
Hanway’s relatively nuanced portrait depicted Iran’s tragedy without mystifying its causes. With the passage of time, however, the image was simplified. The temper tantrums that seized Nadir towards the end of his life, recalling the worst of the Roman emperors, were remembered in the Persian chronicle of Mirza Mahdi, the shah’s former court historian. The Danish king commissioned the young William Jones to translate this work, which Carsten Niebuhr had acquired in manuscript in Shiraz in 1765 and brought back with him to Denmark.108 Not least on the basis of this chronicle, Nadir Shah became stylized as an archetypal monster. Crime and terror, wrote Jones, accompanied him wherever he went.109 The Göttingen professor Christoph Meiners, ever fond of pronouncing judgment from on high, relished the primitive criminality of the regime and indulged in his own violent fantasies:
Shah Nadir and his generals constantly roved around the countryside with hordes of savage warriors whose sole entertainment was robbery, mutilation and murder, and who filled with blood and destruction all the provinces, cities and villages they visited.… The tigerish Turkoman hordes never spawned a more vicious monster than Shah Nadir.110
In addition, many Christian authors could warm to Nadir’s claim to have been God’s punishing rod111 and so draw providential meaning from his monstrosity. The Jesuit Joseph Tieffenthaler found that Delhi, this Babylon of iniquity, richly deserved the treatment it had received at Nadir’s hands:
It [the city of Delhi] was a cesspit of vice, fornication and filth. It was therefore visited with the fire of war, just as burning sulfur rained down on Sodom and Gomorrah, so that the hellfire of wickedness might be doused in rivers of blood. And for this God had need of Nader Shah to unleash His wrath at the sinners of Delhi.112
The evangelical Charles Grant, one of the top EIC officials in the 1790s, regarded all the Muslim conquerors of India up to Nadir Shah as tools of divine retribution against the dissolute Hindus.113
The lengthy critical apprisal of Nadir Shah offered by Sir John Malcolm in his History of Persia (1815) stands at odds with his demonization as a raving Asiatic monster. Malcolm, who was partially familiar with the Iranian sources, saw Nadir much as Gibbon had seen Attila the Hun: as a king who had used excessively harsh means to revive his ailing fatherland. The difference was that, whereas Attila had been a barbarian wounded in his pride, Nadir had liberated a civilized people from the worst barbarian regime of the eighteenth century.114 Malcolm believed reports of the atrocities committed during the sack of Delhi to have been greatly exaggerated115 and tended to forgive the arbitrary (mis)rule of the shah’s last years; a good deal could be explained by mental illness. In Malcolm, the immediate shock of travelers such as Hanway and Otter (who traversed Iran in 1738) can barely be felt anymore.116 The extent to which he ignores their testimony on violence and anarchy in the country is astonishing. Nadir’s towering achievement was to have freed Iran from the Afghan yoke and rekindled a sense of national pride, and the esteem in which his compatriots hold him to this day is the best proof of his historical stature.117 Malcolm, a general by profession, is full of admiration for Nadir’s military skills, which put him on a par with the great European commanders of the modern age. Returning in some respects to the judgments of Nadir’s European contemporaries, he draws the line between civilization and barbarism not between “us” and the monstrous Nadir but between Persians and the barbarians of Asia—that is, the Afghans and even (albeit to a lesser extent) the decadent Indians of the Mughal court. As an agent of modernization and national renewal, Nadir emancipated himself from his Asiatic background and broke through the eternal cycle of oriental politics. Having conquered parts of Afghanistan, he renounced taking bloody revenge and made the Afghans his loyal vassals. So far as the Indian campaign is concerned, the conduct of his conquering troops struck Malcolm as relatively mild by the standards of Asian history.118
Malcolm’s encomium was not enough to offset Nadir’s vilification.119 But it was still influential as the verdict of the most respected nineteenth-century British historian of Iran. Malcolm spoke from the elevated platform of an all-conquering British Empire. In the year of Waterloo, he saw Nadir less as an oriental Napoleon than as the forerunner of British heroism on the field of battle. How could he have possibly condemned the conqueror? The British were successful in India because they too introduced their native troops to strict military discipline; their campaigns were also no walks in the park; they too had usurped leadership roles in Asia and heedlessly toppled long-established ancien régimes the length and breadth of the subcontinent, much to Edmund Burke’s protestation. From an Asiatic viewpoint—and often in the social context of the British Isles as well—the generals and administrators of the EIC were no less “comets of war” and parvenus than Nadir Shah. It was therefore only fitting that Nadir should be revered as a charismatic renewer rather than reviled as an “elemental-historical” demon who came from nowhere to blaze across the oriental firmament. To be sure, he lacked the very quality on which the British plumed themselves the most: the ability to stabilize their conquests by founding something like a raj. This benign assessment by a contemporary imperialist rings true in an ironic way: by plunging India into chaos, Nadir Shah, more than any other single individual, paved the way for Britain’s ascendancy over the subcontinent.120
HAIDAR ALI: TYRANT AND ENLIGHTENED REFORMER
The British indeed had every reason to be thankful to Nadir, whose destruction of Mughal rule had greatly facilitated their own later triumphal march through the subcontinent. When that march got underway in 1757 with Robert Clive’s victory at the Battle of Plassey, Nadir Shah was long gone but by no means forgotten. As late as 1770, Sir William Jones remarked that events of the Nadir Shah years had not yet cooled down (“perdu leur degré de chaleur”).121
It was easy for the British to praise someone who had never opposed them on the battlefield. The same could not be said of the Indian powers in the second half of the eighteenth century. A series of new splinter states had emerged following the rapid collapse of Mughal supremacy. In clear contrast to the political stability of China and Japan, or even the heartlands of the Ottoman Empire, South Asia was a laboratory of new state formations. The breakdown of imperial authority released forces that, following the death of the emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, could no longer be contained by a higher power.122 These included the Sikhs in the Punjab, who evolved over the course of the eighteenth century from a religious community into a fully fledged political state, and above all the Marathas in the South Indian Deccan. In the mid-seventeenth century Shivaji, one of the great state-builders of the early modern period, had forged a new political elite from members of the warrior and Brahmin administrative castes, building up a new Hindu rebel state within the Islamic Mughal Empire.123 When the unitary state he had founded collapsed, the Marathas entered into looser, constantly shifting configurations that defied the categories of European political theory. Commentators resorted to analogy instead: some were reminded of feudal vassalage, others felt they were witnessing something akin to a federation of Germanic tribes. Yet the best-informed were forced to concede that the Marathi system was unique and incomparable: a “barbarian” but nonetheless remarkably successful form of organization, at least for a time.124 The Marathas went on to become the EIC’s most formidable military adversaries. In 1803 they suffered decisive defeat; in 1818 the remnants of their state were absorbed by the British.
None of the Indian regional states attracted greater interest in Europe than Mysore under its leaders Haidar Ali and his son Tipu Sultan.125 Between 1767 and 1799, the British and Mysore went to war against each other four times. In 1767–69 Haidar threatened the British colonial metropolis of Madras and was able to negotiate peace on favorable terms. In the Second Anglo-Mysore War (1780–84), Mysore, now allied with France, inflicted several defeats on the British and took a large number of British prisoners. In 1784 Mysore stood at the peak of its power as the strongest state in southern India. Five years later, Tipu Sultan attacked the raja of Travancore, an EIC ally. The British responded to the provocation by launching a massive counterattack in early 1790. It took them until 1792 to secure victory in this third war. Saddled with high war damages, Tipu forfeited a large amount of territory and was forced to hand over two of his sons to the EIC as security for keeping the terms of the peace. When a tiny French auxiliary force turned up in Mysore in 1799, the governor-general, Lord Wellesley—the most aggressive of the British empire-builders in India—interpreted this as a welcome casus belli and proceeded to destroy the sultanate. Tipu himself was killed while defending his capital, Seringapatam.
Unlike in the case of Nadir Shah, where Europeans played the passive role of onlookers to the unfolding drama, the conflict with Mysore unleashed a torrent of British war propaganda. The Third and especially the Fourth Mysore War, waged with great brutality on both sides, were presented to the public as a struggle between the forces of good and the dark powers of oriental despotism. In eyewitness reports and contemporary historical accounts, on stage and in iconography, Haidar and Tipu were depicted as the archenemies, not just of the freedom-loving British, but of their own people as well. Whereas earlier English wars in India had been largely unideological affairs conducted with a less-than-clean conscience with regard to their legitimacy, the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War occasioned no such qualms. The destruction of the sultanate was praised as a glorious national deed: not as a conquest (which is what it was in the first instance) but as a blow struck against Muslim tyranny on behalf of the oppressed citizens of Mysore. Tipu’s death was hailed as a triumph of justice.126
In the early 1790s, Mysore was for the British something like public enemy number two after revolutionary France. Haidar Ali’s negative image as a bloodthirsty tyrant crystallized following his death in 1782, when reports emerged of the degrading and cruel treatment suffered by British captives of the Second Mysore War.127 Britons had endured the greatest imaginable indignity at his hands: they had been forced to convert to Islam.128 This was countered by a more positive image of Haidar. While he was still alive, one of his earliest biographers, Maistre de la Tour, extolled him as the greatest conqueror India had seen since Nadir Shah, whom he far excelled in the extent of his genius and his civilized conduct.129 Writing with pronounced antipathy toward the English, the French eyewitness depicts Haidar’s life and conditions at court. In his opinion, it was not Haidar who was tyrannizing India but the same EIC that accused him of tyranny.130
This view was promptly contested by Francis Robson, who had spent twenty years in India and claimed to have been present at most of the encounters between the British and Mysore. Still, Robson abstained from the kind of overblown rhetoric that would come to dominate anti-Tipu propaganda a few years later. He underscores Haidar’s cruelty (while acknowledging it to have been no greater than that of other Indian potentates) yet cannot avoid paying him a certain grudging respect: after Haidar had gained supremacy over a number of regional rajas between 1761 and 1763 and then driven out his more powerful neighbors, the Marathas, in the following years,131 peace and moderate prosperity finally returned to the land. Without his domestic reconstruction policy, Haidar would have been unable to build up an elite army in so short a time.132 Robson also shows some sympathy for the sultan’s ultimate aim of “ridding the Indian subcontinent of all Europeans.”133
Colonel William Fullarton, who stood close to Edmund Burke and his critical view of British expansion in India, portrays Haidar Ali in an even more positive light. He praises the military apparatus the sultan built up on European guidelines and with European (especially French) assistance, and he depicts how Haidar, showing all the ambition and tenacity of a Peter the Great, transformed his land into a model state during the period of peace between 1769 and 1780:
Under his masterly control, they [his countries] attained a perfection never heard of under any Indian sovereign; the husbandman and the manufacturer prospered in every part of his dominions; cultivation increased, new manufactures were established, and wealth flowed into the kingdom.134
Haidar clamped down on sloppy practices and corruption, concerned himself with the smallest details, constantly toured his realm carrying out inspections and had documents read to him (he was illiterate), and always made himself available to his people.135 Put differently, while Haidar was much like Nadir Shah in being a military strongman who had usurped his way to power, he was more than that: he was an effective reformer and brilliant civil administrator to boot. Fullarton repeats several stories already found in Maistre de la Tour, and it is unclear whether his testimony is based on firsthand observation. What is remarkable is that here, for the first time since the Mughal emperor Akbar, an Indian ruler is presented in a way that brings him closer to the model of European enlightened absolutism than that of oriental despotism.
In 1801 the topic was taken up in Halle by Matthias Christian Sprengel, the tireless disseminator of news from overseas; we have met him before as the son-in-law and colleague of Johann Reinhold Forster. Ten years earlier he had already published an extensive history of the Marathas, based largely on British official publications. What interested him in the Marathas was their dramatic rise from a “barbarous tribe of mountain-dwelling bandits” to the strongest political counterweight to the British in India.136 The available sources did not yet allow him to paint a picture of Maharashtri society. But he was able to name the conditions for the Marathas’ success: the visionary foundational achievement of Shivaji; the systematic attention they paid to cavalry and their perfection of tactics for mounted warfare; the lessons they learned from European mercenaries and from their archenemies, the Mughals; their development of plunder as a way of life; and finally their disdain for pomp and luxury and their attachment to their traditional customs.
Whereas the Marathas represented the raw forces of history as a collective, the same forces were embodied in a single individual in Haidar. Mysore’s fate “provide[s] us with a fitting image of a typical Indian revolution, showing how a small and insignificant province can quickly advance to become a mighty nation.”137 Like Nadir Shah, Haidar began as a “brigand” or simple troop leader in the service of his lord, whom he ousted in a 1761 coup and permitted to remain on the throne a little longer as a puppet. Unlike Nadir, however, the warlord turned out to be a canny legislator who achieved great success, not least by recognizing the importance of economic growth.138 If limits were nonetheless placed on his expansionary policies, then this was not due to any shortcomings on Haidar’s part but rather to the aggressiveness and ill will of his more powerful neighbors, the Marathas and the British. In contrast to the British and French authors who wrote about Mysore, Sprengel stood at a remove from colonial controversies and international rivalries. So far as his British sources allowed him, he tried to tell Mysore’s history from the inside, from Haidar and Tipu’s perspective, without polemical exaggeration. Tipu comes off second best when compared to his father: megalomania and a militant Islamism that alienated many of his Hindu subjects ultimately undermined his position.139
A decade after the catastrophe of Seringapatam, the history of Mysore under Haidar and Tipu found its definitive historian in Colonel Mark Wilks, who had lived for seven years in Mysore and devoted himself to in-depth studies of Marathi and Persian manuscripts as well as inscriptions, coins, and other sources.140 Wilks avoids the braggadocio of the triumphant victor. Schooled in the Olympian tones of Edward Gibbon, he looks back with nostalgia on the rise and fall of the Muslim state. His portrait of Haidar Ali, while not downplaying his brutality and duplicity, leaves no doubt in readers’ minds that the British as well as most other Indian princes were his equals in both. Wilks is incomparably better informed than Sprengel, writing half a world away in his Halle study, and Haidar’s leadership qualities shine through in his report: Haidar was a second, purified Nadir Shah, a patriotic commander-in-chief who waged war more in defense than in offense, a bandit who transformed himself into a promoter of agriculture, trade, and industry. The only thing that was “elemental-historical” about Haidar now was his nondynastic background. His modern, European-inspired policies made him an example of an overwhelmingly successful state-builder. He could have become the Peter the Great of all India if only, as James Mill argued in 1817, he had not come up against a nation that was superior to every Indian power in statecraft, warfare, and understanding.141 Whereas even Malcolm’s skills as a historian were not sufficient to dispel Nadir’s reputation as a bloodthirsty monster, British propaganda had to take great pains, conversely, to impugn the good name of Haidar and Tipu. Haidar, in particular, was ill suited to confirming the customary clichés about the barbarism of Asiatic politics. This is precisely what made him suspect and dangerous: a native modernizer who—in a manner similar to Muhammad Ali Pasha decades later in Egypt—threatened to deprive the European civilizing mission of its cherished assumptions and pretexts.
THE MODERNIZATION OF POLITICAL VULCANISM
Anyone who reads the reports sent from China to Europe by the Jesuit missionaries during the first four decades of the seventeenth century, and then again from around 1690 to 1760, would gain the impression of a timeless and unchanging order. This image was not characteristic for Asia as a whole and the European perception of Asia in general. On the contrary, Asia looked more like a continent perennially racked by political turmoil or “revolutions,” in the language of the time. Even China was not spared their harrowing touch. Between the Manchu conquest of Peking in 1644 and the final pacification of the kingdom around four decades later, China was the setting for events that dwarfed the violence of the English Revolution, inviting comparison with the Thirty Years’ War. All this was well known in Europe.
Once again, as so often in Asian history, the raw forces of history seemed to erupt with explosive force, releasing a tidal wave of primordial, quasi-natural violence that threatened to inundate the centers of civilization. European authors paid a great deal of attention to the opposition between steppeland and farmland, herding societies and agrarian societies, mobility and stability—with good reason, for there can be no doubt that this is one of the fundamental contrasts of world history. But in European texts of the early modern period, matters are not so clear-cut as they would become in the polarizing intellectual climate of the nineteenth century. Authors do not simply take the part of “civilization” against “barbarism.” This can be seen in their ambivalent appraisal of the two great medieval empire-builders, Genghis Khan and Timur. Up to a respected early nineteenth-century historian like Sir John Malcolm, both are not yet crudely stereotyped as paragons of “Asiatic cruelty.” Their legislative achievements are praised no less than the extraordinary rationality of their policies.
In eighteenth-century Asia, the meteoric rise to power of usurpers and warlords drew an interest similar to that of such comparable European figures as Wallenstein, Cromwell, and later Napoleon Bonaparte. They proved that the Asian political volcano was not yet extinct. Nadir Shah of Iran was an international celebrity, potentially a world-historical individual in the Hegelian sense, a Peter the Great in the making. European observers followed his career with almost journalistic interest. What went wrong? The degeneration of Nadir Shah’s rule into one of the worst tyrannies in recent Asian history provided a well-documented lesson in moral corruption and the destructive automatism of unbridled military ambition.
Sultan Haidar Ali of Mysore was a far less monstrous figure; he was also not a national leader but one of the more important Indian princes. Haidar was regarded with such fascination in Europe—not just in Great Britain, where imperial interests were at stake—because he seemed to embody a historical principle that had no precedent in Asia: the purposefully modernizing state-builder, the polar opposite of the old-fashioned and decadent “oriental despot.” Haidar was the first Asian political leader who seemed to understand that the European invaders had to be beaten at their own game. This made him and his less forward-thinking son, Tipu Sultan, particularly dangerous enemies for Great Britain. The Mysore experiment came to an abrupt end, yet Haidar Ali never completely lost the respect of his former adversaries. In him, the explosive political force of the “elemental-historical” was refined into the ability to create a new state from the rubble of shattered empires. Almost imperceptibly at first, the storms of war unleashed by Timur or Nadir Shah made way for the quieter resistance of Asiatic reform.