Although subtitled “Family Fortunes” and presented as being the story of the Jhaveri business family in Gujarat, Sudev Sheth’s recent history Bankrolling Empire is as much, if not more, about the wider arc of the decline of the Mughal Empire. Whether one is interested in the specific role of finance in the Mughal Empire or the jigsaw puzzle that is Mughal history, one is likely to come away from this well-written and colorful book quite the wiser.
Sheth opens, as is the wont of even academic histories these days, with an episode of drama, when in 1726, one the later Jhaveris, Khushalchand, was beaten and locked up by Sarbuland Khan, the somewhat (literally) out-of-control governor of Mughal Gujarat, all in an effort to extort money for the provincial treasury. It was something of a turning point for the Jhaveris and, Sheth would have it, for the Empire as well.
The first Jhaveri for whom there is much concrete documentation is Shantidas, whose business covered roughly the first half of the 17th century. The family had been based in Ahmedabad; Gujarat, due its ports, was the “primary commercial zone for the Mughals”, and a channel for coveted gems and other luxury goods, a good portion from overseas.
The Jhaveris were first and foremost jewelers. Shantidas’s career coincided with the rules of the emperor Jahangir and his successor Shah Jahan.
Jahangir was accustomed to the luxuries of the court and grew fond of rare jewelry and other precious items. Shantidas established a formidable reputation as a fantastic jeweler and diamond dealer, one with the wealth and knowledge to procure rarities from around the world. Ships carrying such goods docked at the ports of Gujarat, and Shantidas and his agents purchased coveted items to then sell to high-ranking officials and Mughal emperors.
Shantidas first shows up in a firman from 1618, where he was
placed under the protection of the pillar of the state … so that Shnatidas should offer gifts and presents. And every type of jewelry he can procure to the exalted Empire …
which is apparently just what he did for the better part of half a century, thereby becoming one of the wealthiest and most important men in Gujarat. He was known to the East India Company whence some of (rare) the documentation about him derives.
In a letter to the Surat Council dated January 6, 1628, [Nathaniel] Mountney writes that he borrowed 10,000 rupees from Shantidas at 1 percent interest per month and promised to let the powerful jeweler-banker see any tuhfa or rare goods from Europe before other merchants… As a jeweler and merchant catering to the purchasing habits of Mughal elites, it is significant that Shantidas stipulated that he be granted the
exclusive right to buy rare items that the English were selling ahead of competitors. For Shantidas, extending loans to European traders was not only about profiting from interest earned, but was also a strategy to forge commercial relationships that sustained the buying and selling of rare items valued by political elites.
The Jhaveris got involved in politics during the struggle among the various princes to be Shah Jahan successor. They actually bet on the wrong horse: the youngest prince Murad Baksh. The eventual winner, Aurangzeb, seems to have largely overlooked this faux-pas and even repaid the money the family had loaned Murad Baksh.
Their usually comfortable relationship unraveled along with Mughal control of Gujarat in the years and decades following Aurangzeb’s military overextension south into the Deccan, leading to the dramatic scene with which the book opened. Chapter 5 is titled “Expedient extortion”. It’s clear that however rich and powerful the Jhaveris might have been, they were not the Medici.
The Jhaveris are also not the Medici in that they are also far less well documented. Although the Jhaveris appear throughout the book, these appearances are nonetheless rarer than one might expect in a book nominally about them. Instead they serve as more a thread around which to organize a narrative on the topic of the second half of the subtitle: “Political Transformation in Mughal India”, a narrative which centers on political breakdown in 18th-century Gujarat. Sheth hones in on the role of finance in the Mughal rule, something about what there has been much debate; his conclusion that for the early period, up through at least the mid-17th century, the Empire could pay its own bills, thank you very much, and had little need for finance, a situation that however deteriorated with Aurangzeb military excesses and continued apace under his hapless successors:
what we have in Mughal India during this period is a geopolitical pattern of military-logistics overstretch and financial crisis, resulting in frantic grabs of money and resources from bankers as last-ditch efforts to save empire.
The takeaway is that
even at the pinnacle of its rule in the seventeenth century, the Mughal Empire was a military-patrimony held together by regional alliances and tributary relations. To evoke a famous phrase, the Mughal state was more a patchwork quilt rather than a wall-to-wall carpet.
The Jhaveris evoke not just the Medici, but also Bacris in Algiers and the Sassoons in 19th- and early 20th-century India and China. Unlike most of those business families of an early age of empire, the Jhaveris are still at it:
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