5. MILLENNIAL SOVEREIGNTY,TOTAL RELIGION,AND TOTAL POLITICS

Discussions of kingship and sovereignty in early modern India have struggled to fully comprehend and assess the work and life of Akbar (r. 1556–1605), the celebrated and most famous ruler of the Mughal Empire. The Mughal emperor's incomparable energy and imagination had lit up, like never before in the history of Islam, the vast networks and institutions of knowledge and practice that could be deployed in the service of sacred kingship. Rather than demonstrate a local history of Indic kingship, Akbar's intersections with networks and institutions show a history that stretched back centuries and linked South Asia to post‐Mongol Iran and Central Asia, and were the crucibles in which a “millennial science” was cultivated. The implications for studying “millennial science” extend beyond the early modern world and into a consideration of sovereignty in modern South Asia.     

Enlightenment and Empire,Mughals and Marathas: the Religious History of India in the work of East India Company servant,Alexander Dow

This article situates the work of East India Company servant Alexander Dow (1735–1779), principally his writings on the history and future state of India, in contemporary debates about empire, religion and enlightened government. To do so it offers a sustained analysis of his 1772 essay ‘A Dissertation Concerning the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan’, as well as his proposals for the restoration of Bengal, both of which played an influential part in shaping the preoccupations with Mughal history that dominated the contemporary crisis in the Company’s legitimacy. By linking these texts to his earlier work on ‘Hindoo’ religion, it will argue that Dow’s analysis of the relationship between certain religious cultures and their civic qualities was rooted in a deist perspective. It doing so it restores the enlightenment components of Dow’s thought, and their impact on the ideology of empire, in a crucial period of British expansion in India.     

Sovereignty and statelessness in the border enclaves of India and Bangladesh

This article investigates the 198 political enclaves along the northern section of the border between India and Bangladesh. The enclaves are a remnant of the partition of British India in 1947 and are effectively stateless spaces because most are small and located several kilometers within their host country, which has prevented any administrative contact with their home country. Drawing on interviews with current enclave residents, this article describes the creation of the enclaves and analyzes the disputes that prevented their normalization over the past 60 years. The enclaves provide an important site for scrutinizing the connections between bordering practices and sovereignty claims. They also demonstrate both the social benefits the sovereign state system has brought through the establishment of law and order and the devastating consequences it has caused by territorializing those basic social protections. The article concludes that the failure to exchange the enclaves displays the powerful role nationalist homeland narratives play in institutionalizing the concepts of sovereignty and territorial integrity, often at the expense of human rights.     

Muslim Political Theology Before and After Empire: Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl’s Station of Leadership (Manṣab-i Imāmat)*

ABSTRACT

This essay examines an important yet hitherto unexplored early-nineteenth century Indo-Persian work of Muslim political theology Station of Leadership (Man?ab-i Imāmat; also known as Darājāt-i Imāmat), written by the towering and contentious Sunnī thinker and political theorist from Delhi Shāh Mu?ammad Ismā?īl (d. 1831). In this hugely critical though lesser known of Ismā?īl’s texts, he sought to detail a theory and framework of ideal forms of Muslim political orders and leaders. Man?ab-i Imāmat presents a fascinating example of a text of Muslim political theology composed during a moment marked by a crisis of sovereignty as South Asia gradually yet decisively transitioned from Mughal to British rule. In this essay, through a close reading of Man?ab-i Imāmat, I aim to bring into view a vision of Muslim political thought and understanding of sovereignty that exceed and subvert the modern privileging of a territorial conception of the nation-state as the centerpiece of politics. I show that while tethered to an imperial Muslim political theology that assumed Islam’s superiority over and subsumption of other religious identities and traditions, sovereign power for Ismā?īl indexed not territorial sovereignty but the maintenance of Muslim markers of distinction in the public performance of everyday religious life.     

Mobile sovereignty: The case of ‘boat people’ in Australia

State sovereignty, in terms of the organisation and expression of political authority by nation states, is traditionally interpreted as a political container that is being weakened by increasing human and non-human mobilities. However recent research indicates that states are themselves becoming more mobile as executive bodies move and sovereign spaces are tactically reduced and expanded to intercept and control global mobilities. While challenging dichotomous notions of mobility and sovereignty, such research frames the movements of governments, territory and sovereign agents as the tactics of already established states. This paper builds on extant research by drawing on both a mobile ontology and Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty to examine how mobilities constitute modern state sovereignty. To do so I examine Australian sovereignty and the related material and symbolic exclusion of asylum seekers arriving by boat. My analysis finds that mobilities, in terms of material movements and their representation, are essential to the construction of Australian sovereignty and the position of maritime asylum seekers as its outsider and limit identity. Through their mobile interception and management, and their representation as mobile ‘others’, maritime asylum seekers are used to create sovereign borders between specific types of movement; between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ (im)mobilities. I argue that this form of state sovereignty is disarticulated from space and follows populations who construct territories as being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of the Australian state as they move.     

The benevolent proprietor and the property law: A British‐Indian dilemma

British Indian revenue policy determined British‐Indian property law. ft was essential to establish a class of landed proprietors, entitled by law to collect rents from their tenants, from which in turn government could legally assess its revenue demand. Revenue was principally settled with the zamindars, who had had rights to a share in agricultural produce which carried a duty to meet government's revenue demand recognised by the Mughal government. The zamindars were redefined unequivocally as landlords by the British‐Indian property law. Their estates were assigned on the basis of existing records and were composed for the most part of disparate shares in villages. Such estates were essentially not economically viable; the social and domestic circumstances of the zamindars further compromised the management of their estates. Government intended that the landlords should become progressive farmers, but conditions, as much a product of legal enactment as of economic reality, frustrated that aim. The history of the nineteenth century administration of British India illustrates the dilemma of government, and the conflict between conservatism in the rural sphere and the pursuit of progressive policies. The radical reform of the zamindars’ estates, namely the drastic curtailments which took place under the zamindari abolition statutes under the Congress government's programme for land reform, has paradoxically achieved for independent India that which the government of British India struggled throughout a century and a half to achieve: the creation of the progressive proprietor.     

保卫印度：19世纪英国东方外交的全部秘密

印度在英帝国内具有特殊的地位。印度以及通往印度贸易通道的安全因此成为英帝国战略防卫的关键。19世纪英国在东方的全部外交与军事行动几乎都围绕着这一主题。     

两次鸦片战争期间清朝对欧美小国的外交

两次鸦片战争期间,清朝政府将欧美小国与欧美列强“一视同仁”,宁愿让欧美小国享受欧美列强从清朝攫取的除割地赔款之外的种种特权,也不轻易满足欧美小国提出的符合近代国际惯例的一些要求.这样,清朝对欧美小国的外交也不断丧权辱国.究其原因,在于清朝以传统的“天朝上国”思想来指导近代对欧美小国的外交;清朝对欧美小国外交的最主要目的,是为了维护“天朝上国”的体制,而不是保护近代意义上的国家主权.     

From appropriation to conservation: Mughal monuments,colonial tourism and the Dak Bungalow

ABSTRACT

The rise in colonial tourism in the post-uprising decades propelled the need for tourist infrastructure in the Indian Subcontinent. This need was met by appropriating historic monuments and reusing them as tourist rest houses, called Dak Bungalows – a common occurrence in Agra and Delhi, former Mughal capitals and popular tourist destinations. Even as the state established the Archaeological Survey of India to safeguard the Subcontinent’s monuments, the transformation carried out by colonial engineers undermined their historic worth in the absence of guidelines. Critical of the engineers’ undertaking, Viceroy Curzon, took up the challenge of ridding monuments, particularly Mughal monuments, of modern interventions. While being instrumental in providing monuments with statutory protection, Curzon appropriated these monuments to legitimize the colonial state’s authority. This paper examines the seventeenth century Mughal city, Fatehpur Sikri, a popular tourist destination in the nineteenth century, where three historic buildings were appropriated and transformed into Dak Bungalows prior to the building of a new Dak Buangalow at Curzon’s behest. Examining these developments against the backdrop of the colonial state’s post-uprising political dispensation, through the prism of monument conservation and colonial tourism, it argues that all forms of engagement with monuments operated within the colonial framework.     

A jurisprudence of power: Martial law and the Ceylon controversy of 1848–51

The English East India Company has long been regarded as a ‘mere merchant’ that turned into a sovereign only with its eighteenth-century territorial acquisitions in India. Focusing on the first decades of Company rule at St Helena, this article argues instead that the late seventeenth-century Company aspired to become a polity in itself: a self-sustaining global system built upon sound civic institutions and informed by a coherent if composite political ideology. In the end, the Company's early history at St Helena demands a flexible understanding both of the boundaries of the British ‘Atlantic world’ and of the various kinds of political communities beyond the national state instrumental in fashioning early modern empires. Moreover, such a political and intellectual approach to the early Company confounds the trade-to-empire narrative that has long defined its history, insisting on deeper and more complex roots for the ‘Company-State’ and thus for British Empire in India.     

The Courtesan Tale: Female Musicians and Dancers in Mughal Historical Chronicles,c.1556–1748

There are many problems in trying to construct a history of female musicians and dancers in Mughal North India. Such women appear frequently in Mughal writings and apparently played an important role in elite society; there is clearly much we can learn from such sources about gender and class in the empire generally, as well as female performers more specifically. However, what evidence we have is written from the perspective of their male patrons and cast according to long‐standing rhetorical and cultural conventions concerning the fateful roles of music and love in historical events. In this article I examine how Mughal historical chronicles transform named female performers into stereotyped agents of the downfall of noblemen. Using the stories of several historical courtesans, I demonstrate how stock topoi of desire, enslavement, longing, rebellion, danger, fate and above all musical and erotic power, were used to shape all stories of courtesans into tragic cautionary tales. I aim to show that the ‘fictive’ elements of Mughal courtesan tales furthermore reveal important cultural truths about the role and meanings of music in Mughal male society.     

Ideology and British expansion in Bengal, 1757–72

Accounts of the early stages of British expansion in India have tended to emphasise its unplanned and opportunistic character; they have often seen the motors of expansion lying within unstable Indian states or in the need of the East India Company to meet the costs of fast-growing armies. Reviewing the evidence from Bengal between 1757 and 1772, this article argues that a distinctive kind of frontier patriotism generated in the East India Company's Indian settlements constituted an important ideological context for its conquests. Company servants routinely derided Indian rulers as Asiatic despots, or ‘faithless’ Muslims. Their sense of Indian rulers as degenerate and corrupt both fuelled military aggression, and also made some Britons suppose that the East India Company could effect rapid reforms in Bengal, drawing out previously untapped surpluses from the agrarian base. At the same time, the need to forge alliances within the old regime encouraged some Company officials to adopt a more conciliatory tone, and to imagine that viable systems of political order existed within the traditions of the Mughal empire.     

Review Article: Professional,Political, and Mercenary Soldiers

Since the late 1970s, most scholarship on the origins of the Zionist–Palestinian conflict has emphasised the actions and agency of the Palestinian Arabs and Zionists, with a focus on the period before 1914. It is argued in this article, however, that the expectation of and commitment to political independence on both sides, a defining feature of the conflict, did not emerge until 1918, and that the actions of the British government in Palestine during the final year of the First World War drove this fundamental shift. Following Britain's occupation of southern Palestine in December 1917, the British administration undertook an extensive propaganda operation in the country to advertise their backing for Arab nationalism and Zionism. This campaign was part of the British government's wider endeavour to mobilise support for the Allied war effort and British imperial expansion in the Middle East in the new age of nationality. It led, the article contends, to a war for national sovereignty over Palestine between two statist nationalist movements. Rather than emphasise British colonial agency at the expense of that of the Palestinian Arabs and Zionists, the article argues that this development derived from a complex interaction between the three parties within the context of radical changes in international politics.     

Liberal nationalism and the sovereign territorial ideal1

ABSTRACT. Even if most liberals nowadays recognise that liberalism depends on some nationalist justification of popular sovereignty and state boundaries, they still underestimate the consequences of the fact that the sovereign territorial ideal is at the heart of the modern state. Therefore, their normative stance either oscillates between fairness and stability requirements (Kymlicka) or is built on a distinction between self‐rule and self‐determination that contradicts the normative import of the modern idea of the nation (Tamir). However, there exist counter‐traditions that may be helpful in challenging the assumption on behalf of the sovereign territorial state. National cultural autonomy is one of these; it is used here to show how starting from different premises, one may escape the ‘statist assumption’ and work out a political framework which would be fairer to minorities.     

Sovereignty from ‘ground zero’: Power through performance in independent South Sudan

Through a reading of the South Sudanese independence ceremony as a ritual of statehood, I show how state actors in South Sudan declared and performed their claim to sovereignty in the face of extraordinary challenge. Central to their performance was their rendering of a national chronotope and their assertion of what I call rebel sovereignty: their articulation of themselves as both saviours from oppression and legitimate wielders of state power. State actors' equal appeal to local antipathy to centralised power and international norms of statehood, as well as their performative redefinition of international undermining as partnership, demonstrates the necessity of contemporary sovereign performance to define both the content and context of extant political realities. More broadly, the ritual demonstrates the performative basis of sovereignty and the increasing necessity of sovereign aspirants to acknowledge the impossibility of sovereign control and redefine challenges and critiques of this power as they assert it.     

Witchcraft,Statecraft, Mancraft: On the Demonological Foundations of Sovereignty

ABSTRACT

Questions of sovereignty remain central to political theology, yet the role played by demonology in sovereignty’s construction has yet to be closely examined. This article addresses this omission by exploring the relation between the phantasmatic figures of the “sovereign” and the “witch” in the work of Jean Bodin (1530–96). Early modern concepts of “witchcraft” and its prosecution have a constitutive relation to (theo)political sovereignty, modern gender relations, and the birth of the nation-state. Reading Bodin’s work on witchcraft alongside those on sovereignty, tolerance, and the household, I argue that the demonological witch forms a self-consolidating other at the foundation of modern constructions of sovereignty, tolerance, and the (cishetero)normative family – an excess or absence that reinforces and destabilizes gendered, sexual, political, juridical, and religious hierarchies that continue to influence the present. In doing so, I demonstrate that sovereignty rests on a demonological foundation.     

What makes sovereignty a relative concept? Empirical approaches to international society

Sovereignty takes on many forms today. Legalistic and absolute conditions of sovereignty have dominated in theoretical reasoning and its practical applications whereas empirical attributes of statehood and relative sovereignty conceptualisations have generally been neglected. Yet, the quantification of empirical sovereignty would give us a few ways to compare and contrast the different degrees of internal and external sovereignty and demonstrate the ‘differences of being sovereign’ among internationally recognised states, de facto states, autonomous regions, dependent territories and governments-in-exile. All these entities display their internal and external attributes of sovereignty, which results in power (efficiency of governance) or symbols (representation of ideas). This paper highlights the need to pay more attention to the empirical aspects of sovereignty – it has to be complemented with the facts on the ground – and shows how to operationalise the relative concept of sovereignty. Ignoring the empirical aspects of sovereignty, or spurning the time-honoured requirement of recognition, is bound to lead to the emergence of failed states.     

INDIA,THE GREAT DIVERGENCE,AND THE WRECKAGE OF MODERNITY

Research over the last two decades on the economic divergence of Europe and China before the nineteenth century has stimulated much recent scholarship investigating similar diverging paths between Europe and India. Following the lead of Kenneth Pomeranz, this work focuses on the demographic, ecological, and geographical factors in this divergence and argues for the direct comparability of the most economically advanced parts of Europe with such places as Gujarat and Mysore in Mughal India, which showed considerable proto‐industrial development before their relative economic decline and deindustrialization in the nineteenth century. The book under review approaches this topic by deploying a modified Marxian‐Weberian framework and draws on extensive research in Indian and British archives to argue that both Gujarat and Mysore might have embarked on paths of sustained economic growth through natural commercial expansion and deliberate mercantilist statecraft hindered by the East India Company. Despite resurging interest in Marx, much recent work in global economic history highlights the limitations of modernization theories drawn from a long tradition of Western social science indebted to the theories of Marx and Weber.     

Carnem et circenses – consumption of animals and their products in Roman urban and military sites in two regions in the northwestern provinces

This paper investigates the consumption of animals and their products in the northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire. A regional approach was used, comparing two research areas: the northern part of modern Switzerland and the central part of the modern Netherlands. These two regions have different histories, backgrounds and landscapes. Our aim was to find out whether these different histories and backgrounds led to different consumption patterns and to what extent they correspond to Roman-style nutrition. Furthermore, we looked for developments over time in consumption of meat and exploitation of livestock. A data set consisting of over 282,000 fragments of cattle, sheep/goat and pig from 188 samples from military sites, urban centres and vici was collected. Our study identified both differences and similarities in consumption and exploitation patterns. Differences can be explained by the regional character of each research area, while similarities suggest wider economic developments in the Empire and general supply strategies of the Roman army.