Episode 154: The Nature of Empire: Power, Ecology and Knowledge

[00:00:00] Ben Wright: This is 15 Minute History, a podcast for educators, students, and anyone interested in history featuring the minds and voices of the University of Texas a Austin.

The environment has been perceived, valued, and manipulated by humans since prehistoric times, but during the last Millennium Empire has brought something new into the mix, the organization of local knowledge and practices into bureaucratic and military systems that centralized power and indeed funded it.

To put it more simply, if we want to understand the modern world, we need to look at how political power and those who resist it, interact with the environment. We’re joined today by Sumit Guha, a UT professor of history focused on demography and agriculture. Professor Guha is the author of Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400 to 1900, which looks at how the mogul and British empires transformed the landscape of the Indian subcontinent and indeed how they transformed environmental knowledge itself.

It’s a fascinating journey over 500 years that raises plenty of questions for today as humans grapple with climate change, extreme weather, and the loss of wilderness. Professor Guha, welcome to 15 Minute History. Thank you very much, Ben. Your research covers 500 years of of, of the history of the subcontinent, starting in around 1400, ending in around 1900.

Can you give us a lay of the landscape as to when your story begins into when it ends?

[00:01:41] Sumit Guha: I chose this 400 year, 500 year period because it marks the first, uh, true globalization. Of this planet. It’s the first true globalization in the sense that the fixed and regular links between across the Atlantic and the Pacific are for the first time permanent and secure.

One of the important things that happens is that, you know, 1492, of course, Columbus in the service of Spain, uh, discovers a feasible sea route across the Atlantic, and, uh, a few years later. You have Ferdinand Mcg Ellen, who actually is sail around the entire world or his expedition sales. He himself is killed or root.

So with this, what you get is a true globalization, which, uh, establishes permanent links, which transfers human beings and animals and plants, and also pests and diseases right around the entire world.

[00:02:45] Ben Wright: How is this different from the Silk Road? Of the medieval period?

[00:02:50] Sumit Guha: Well, it’s the Silk Road. Um, it’s mainly moving valuable commodities goods with high value relative to their bulk.

So, you know, silk is of course a classic item, but you have many other things like jade and um, of course gold and silver. But, um, it’s also only intermittently present. It’s not a permanent route. Hmm. It periodically falls into decay and. By the time the silk root, uh, roads begin to be established, um, human beings have spread the domesticated crops and animals across the whole of Asia, the whole, across the whole of eia.

Uh, one of the classic examples being the horse.

[00:03:33] Ben Wright: So. You are looking specifically at two Empires, the Mogul Empire and then the British Empire. Tell us a little bit about, uh, the moguls and who they were and how they end up in the subcontinent.

[00:03:46] Sumit Guha: So the mogul is actually the Indianized term for the Mongol who had founded a great empire, essentially on a small core population, maybe not more than a million or so tribes, people.

But in which every adult male was trained as a horseman. So the Mongols then create the largest empire of the old world, which at its peak stretches from northern Burma and includes Vietnam and across as far west as Hungary. And then they break up into different, still very large regional kingdoms and a descendant of.

Two of the great most fearsome horse warriors of the early, well, 13 hundreds. 14 hundreds. Um, one is Chin Khan. Mm-hmm. And the second is Thur. A known in, in the West as Tamer Lane, Thur de la. A descendant of both these men is, uh, is, is in the rules attached small kingdom called Fergana. He is then expelled by another wave of horse warriors, in this case, the berg.

And so he decides to invade India and actually defeats them in 1526 and establishes the mogul empire in North India. So this is why I took you back to the evolution of the horse,

[00:05:09] Ben Wright: right? So we’re in 1526. Yes. Henry VII is on the throne in England. Yes. Uh, the Moul Empire is getting going in India.

[00:05:17] Sumit Guha: Yes.

[00:05:17] Ben Wright: One of the themes of your book is how both the British Empire and and the Moult Empire, um, organized the environment and how they, um.

How they try to harness the environment, how they try to collect data about the environment. Yes. Aggregate knowledge. Uh, does this period start in 1526? Uh, or is this, is this happening before the moguls as well? I. Oh, it’s

[00:05:39] Sumit Guha: happening earlier. Uh, there’s a, there’s a sort of conscious molding of the environment by carrying what, and this is where Alfred Crosby, who was here at the University of Texas, I think he coined the term Port Manto.

Port Manto. Um, it was, it species, but basically it was a whole parcel of animals and plants that humans consciously transferred. And which then proceeded to drastically change the environments where they found themselves. So for example, when the Spanish came to the Americas, they brought a kind of, uh, a whole biota, a whole array of, uh, animals and plants, which then draw upon the environment and modify it.

[00:06:26] Ben Wright: And this is sort of. Coming on top of what’s already there. Well, it displaces it. And this is happening in the Indian subcontinent as well, with the Americans,

[00:06:35] Sumit Guha: well, not so intensively because most of the Portman, the, the, the sort of array of animals and plants already existed. What about the British? Well, that’s, that comes a bit later, but yeah, the British actually often, uh, bring, uh, try to bring the new world cultivars because they find all the usual ones are available already.

Wheat, barley, rye. So they introduce corn, and corn fits into the agricultural schedule of Indian farmers, and it’s quickly adopted.

[00:07:03] Ben Wright: What about cotton?

[00:07:04] Sumit Guha: Cotton’s already there? Cotton is probably domesticated in India.

[00:07:08] Ben Wright: I mentioned cotton because I, I know the, the, the British have an interest in cotton cultivation as a alternative to the Americas.

[00:07:14] Sumit Guha: Yes, but it never succeeds. No, it’s because the, well, you see a different variety. Um, a genetically distinct variety of cotton is, uh, found in the Americas, the British at, at, in the 19th century. The distinction between the two types of cottons is not, you know, the genetic distinction and the fact that they cannot be interbred was not understood.

[00:07:34] Ben Wright: So I feel like our conversation, Sumit, is doing a couple of things. One is we’re taking a very long dur look. Yes, we are looking, we’re talking about. Thousands of years, hundreds of years for sure. Mm-hmm. We’re not looking at, you know, the, the British diplomacy during World War I or No. Or something that takes, you look at it in 10 years.

And then the other thing we’re doing is we’re taking a a, um, we are looking at human history and the history of empathy through the lens of the environment. Yes. How have these two lenses. Worked in your research and what do you think the benefit is for, for, um, for people wanting to understand more about history, to use, use a longer lens and to use an environmental lens,

[00:08:16] Sumit Guha: uh, the longer lens, you know, as, um, I mean it’s, uh, to me quite obvious because there is otherwise a danger of encountering a phenomenon.

And declaring it to be the first time that something has happened.

[00:08:29] Ben Wright: Hmm.

[00:08:30] Sumit Guha: Which is, uh, presents it as something radically novel or unusual. Uh, whereas in fact, a better understanding of why it, uh, arose earlier and did not persist is also worth looking at because there are, it is obvious that, for instance, uh, the.

Whole modern revolution in energy sources, which, uh, began with the combustion of coal. It’s clear that that’s not sustainable. So consequently, it’s worth looking at the longer processes whereby these, these technologies and capacities are for planetary modification originated,

[00:09:08] Ben Wright: right.

[00:09:09] Sumit Guha: The other element is that carbon dioxide percent is increasing because there’s an observatory on nar lower.

In, in Hawaii, which, uh, has been keeping records since 1958. So in a sense, the. Technology for knowing the world and the pragmatics of managing the world actually increase side by side. But the more important thing is that learning the composition of the atmosphere is a part of the process of knowing the earth.

Hmm. And knowing the earth is not uniform across all regimes. Uh, so for instance, um, simpler societies have neither a need nor a capacity to know what the shape of the earth is or how to traverse it,

[00:09:54] Ben Wright: right?

[00:09:54] Sumit Guha: So one of the things that empires try to do is to actually map their domains.

[00:10:00] Ben Wright: Hmm.

[00:10:01] Sumit Guha: And at this point, there are two kinds of mapping that become relevant.

One is the sacred geography, which relates often to the great pilgrimage centers in the Western Christian world. For example, there was Jerusalem. Yes, which for a long time was also thought to be at the center of the world. And you have this whole medieval traditional map, the, the maps of the world, which show it as such geography.

But alongside that is what I’ve called a pragmatic geography. And the pragmatic geography is a simple geography which determines what, what plants will grow in a particular place, where the water is going to run when it. Uh, rains heavily during the wet season, uh, and how you get from one place to another.

Pragmatic geography intersects with the sacred, the cosmological geography in the sense that if you want to, let’s say, make a pilgrimage to Mecca or to Jerusalem, you find a sailor or a captain or a guide who is going to take you there. You do not consult a map, you know, the sort of sacred map or a sacred cosm.

What empires try to do is to recenter pragmatic geography and enlarge it. Because that’s how they will seek to govern the information that kingdoms and empires gather in the process of building or constructing. This apparatus of rule is also the information from which, and the changing ecologies of the region can be understood.

[00:11:31] Ben Wright: We’re talking about Empire as a sort of data compilation endeavor. Yes. Um, what are the uses of this imperial

[00:11:39] Sumit Guha: knowledge? Well, the first thing is that, um, you know, to get some sense of, um, taxable capacity, which was always a central concern. So, for instance, uh, even before the moguls, but certainly with the moguls, there are, uh, valuations of villages and lands in terms of their tax yield.

The MUS did not necessarily know exactly where these were located. It’s only with the British that the idea of locating where exactly these villages are relative to each other. So I have this metaphor. That there is the imperial gaze, which at least by the time Ochen Khan reaches out to the ends of the earth, there’s the imperial reach, which is the furthest area that you could possibly send, uh, you know, a squadron of, uh, horsemen and collect some taxes or carry off some enslaved people.

And finally there’s the grasp, which is the area over which you can actually impose some kind of regular administration and tax collection. Empires are differentiated in their gaze, reach and grasp. A significant difference between the British and the moguls is that the moguls have a considerable grasp by way of tax assessments with by way of listings or villages.

They have a considerable understanding of the major roots as itineraries. If you march for six days from this place to that place, uh, you will arrive at the city of X. The British, uh, developed the idea of a theater light and the application of the compass. So they’re able for the first time to map and measure fields and then to class them to assess them according to fertility.

[00:13:24] Ben Wright: So is this knowledge creation and knowledge collection, is it operating in any way that isn’t purely extractive, whether it’s taxation or resources?

[00:13:34] Sumit Guha: It is extractive in the sense that it is about. Taxation, but it’s also used, the apparatus of report is also used, uh, to estimate production. So in 18 77, 78, there’s a really terrible famine in Southern and Western India.

Uh, the famine commission of 1880 castigates, the government of India for knowing that taxable fields, but not knowing what the production was. Hmm. And so you could have, you know, you could have an impending famine, uh, but you wouldn’t know about it. And then from the 1880s, the government of India having been castigated by the, the British Parliament and the ministry then begins to try and push more, a more productive agriculture.

Coming back to your question, it begins as an apparatus for the distribution of taxation. But from the 1870s and 1880s, with this whole concept of enlightened empire, you get a move towards the productive use of what were originally extractive statistics.

[00:14:36] Ben Wright: We’ve talked about knowledge formation in the contestation, and then conquest of large areas over long periods.

Yes. What role do they have in the unmaking of Empire?

[00:14:47] Sumit Guha: In the process of shaping the landscape, there is also a process of changing the environment, uh, for the purposes of resistance and evasion. So the cultivation of horny belts and forests, the fortification of villages, even the cultivation of crops which are off the ground before the tax collectors can get round to it.

All of these are modes of evasion and resistance, and these also then change the landscape.

[00:15:16] Ben Wright: Well, professor Guha, thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:15:20] Sumit Guha: Thank you.

[00:15:22] Ben Wright: 15 Minute History is produced at the University of Texas at Austin in partnership with not even past and hemispheres in the College of Liberal Arts.

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