India gained Independence in 1947 after a long struggle for freedom from British imperialism. Perhaps because of this, and the lack of historical knowledge and sense, we see all conquests as colonisation.
Historian Harbans Mukhia, an authority on medieval India, describes colonisation as “governance of a land and its people, now on behalf of and primarily for the economic benefits of a community of people inhabiting a far-off land”.
According to him, the Mughals came to India as conquerors but lived in the subcontinent as Indians, not colonisers. They merged their identity as well as that of their group with India and the two became inseparable, giving rise to an enduring culture and history.
He goes on to say Mughals being seen as foreigners was never a point of discussion till quite recently, so well had they integrated and assimilated into the country they had made their own.
There was no reason for it either, since Akbar onwards, all Mughals were born in India with many having Rajput mothers and their “Indianness” was complete.
Babur had invaded India at the behest of Daulat Khan Lodi and won the kingdom of Delhi by defeating the forces of Ibrahim Khan Lodi at Panipat in 1526 AD. Thus he laid the foundation of the Mughal Empire.
Most Mughals contracted marriage alliances with Indian rulers, especially Rajputs. They appointed them to high posts, with the Kachhwaha Rajputs of Amber normally holding the highest military posts in the Mughal army.
It was this sense of a shared identity with the Mughal rulers that led the Indian sepoys who rose up in 1857 against the British East India Company in the first war of Indian Independence, to turn towards the aged, frail and powerless Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar — they coronated him as Emperor of Hindustan and decided to fight under his banner.
Between the 16th and 18th centuries, the Mughal Empire was the richest and most powerful kingdom in the world and as French traveller Francois Bernier who came to India in the 17th century wrote, “Gold and silver come from every quarter of the globe to Hinduostan.”
This is hardly surprising considering that Sher Shah and the Mughals had encouraged trade by developing roads, river transport, sea routes, ports and abolishing many inland tolls and taxes.
Indian handicrafts were developed. There was a thriving export trade in manufactured goods such as cotton cloth, spices, Indigo, woollen and silk cloth, salt etc. Indian merchants trading on their own terms and taking only bullion as payment led Sir Thomas Roe to say, “Europe bleedeth to enrich Asia”.
This trade was traditionally in the hands of the Hindu merchant class who controlled the trade. In fact, Bernier wrote that Hindus possessed “almost exclusively the trade and wealth of the country”. Muslims, on the other hand, mainly held high administrative and military posts.
A very efficient system of administration set up by Akbar facilitated an environment of trade and commerce.
This led the East India Company to seek trade concessions from the Mughal Empire and eventually control and destroy it.
A very interesting painting in the possession of the British Library named “The East Offering Her Riches to Britannia” dated 1778 shows Britannia looking down on a kneeling India who is offering her crown surrounded by rubies and pearls. The advent of the famous drain of wealth from India started with the East India Company not the Delhi Sultanate or the Mughals.
Edmund Burke was the first to use the phrase in the 1780s when he said, India had been “radically and irretrievably ruined” through the Company’s “continual drain” of wealth.
Let us examine India’s economic status prior to its becoming a British colony.
The Cambridge historian Angus Maddison writes in his book, Contours of the world economy, 1–2030 CE: essays in macro-economic history, that while India had the largest economy till 1000 AD (with a GDP share of 28.9 per cent in 1000AD) there was no economic growth. It was during the 1000 -1500 AD that India began to see a economic growth with its highest (20.9 per cent GDP growth rate) being under the Mughals.
In the 18th century, India had overtaken China as the largest economy in the world.
In 1952, India’s GDP was 3.8 per cent. “Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th century, “the brightest jewel in the British Crown” was the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income”, said former prime minister Manmohan Singh.
In 2016, on a PPP-adjusted basis, India’s was 7.2 per cent of the world GDP.
Since its established now that the Mughals did not take away money let’s talk of what they invested in. They invested in infrasturcture, in building great monuments which are a local and tourist draw generating crores of rupees annually. As per figures given by the ministry of culture in Lok Sabha, just the Taj Mahal built by Shah Jahan has an average annual ticket sale of more than Rs 21 crore. (Last year saw a drop in visitors to the Taj Mahal and figures stood at Rs 17.80 crore.)
The Qutub Complex generates more than Rs 10 crore in ticket sales, while Red Fort and Humayun’s Tomb generate around Rs 6 crore each.
A beautiful new style known as Indo-Islamic architecture that imbibed the best of both sensibilities was born.
They invested in local arts and crafts, and encouraged old and created new skill sets in India. As Swapna Liddle, the convenor of INTACH’s Delhi Chapter says, “To my mind the greatest Mughal contribution to India was in the form of patronage to the arts. Whether it was building, artisanal crafts like weaving and metalworking, or fine arts like painting, they set standards of taste and perfection that became an example for others to follow, and brought India the global recognition for high quality handmade goods that it still enjoys.”
Mughal paintings, jewels, arts and crafts are the key possessions of many a western museum and gallery as they were looted in and after 1857. Some can be found in Indian museums too.
Art and literature flourished under the Mughal Empire. While the original work was being produced in the local and court languages, translation from Sanskrit to Persian, too, was taking place.
Akbar encouraged the translation of the Ramayana and the Mahabharat to dispel the ignorance that often led to communal hatred.
Dara Shukoh’s Persian translation of the Upanishads named Sirr-e-Akbar was taken by Bernier to France, where it reached Anquetil Deperron, who translated it into French and Latin.
The Latin version then reached the German philosopher, Schopenhauer, who was greatly influenced by it and called the Persian Upanishad “the solace of his life”. This awakened an interest in Post-Vedic Sanskrit literature among the European Orientalists.
It wasn’t only Mughal emperors who were building structures — Hindu mansabdars and traders were building temples and dharmshalas in many cities, especially Banaras.
Madhuri Desai, in her extremely well-researched book Banaras Reconstructed, writes: “The riverfront ghats bear an uncanny resemblance to the Mughal fortress-palaces that line the Jamuna river in Agra and Delhi.”
It’s dangerous to generalise history especially on communal lines. While economic deprivation for the ordinary Indian existed, as it did in other societies of the world, as Frances W Pritchett, Professor Emerita, Columbia University says, “The impression one gains from looking at social conditions during the Mughal period is of a society moving towards integration of its manifold political regions, social systems and cultural inheritances. The greatness of the Mughals consisted in part at least in the fact that the influence of their court and government permeated society, giving it a new measure of harmony.”
Thus, to say that the Mughals looted India is a falsification of history.
It’s always best to read history to get facts, and not WhatsApp forwards — where people often share false information to suit their own bias.
The buildings on the edge of the image on the left are a set of Mission styled 1920s stores designed by H H Gillingham. Across Seymour is a theatre, which in this 1973 image was known as the Strand Theatre. Across the lane was the Birks Building, demolished in 1975 with the theatre to allow the construction of the Vancouver Centre. The construction of Birks in 1912 had required the demolition of three early office buildings built by Canadian Pacific directors before 1890.
The theatre was opened in August 1920 as the Allen Theater, one of the first super deluxe movie houses in Canada; described in promotional material as ‘Canada’s finest and most modern photoplay theatre’. It cost $300,000 to build and it was completed in only six months. Some reports say that after a year the Allen chain of 50 theatres were bankrupt and theatre was purchased for a nickel on the dollar, reopening as the Strand with 1,950 seats in 1923. Others suggest that the Ontario based Allen family reorganized their operation with US partners, creating the Famous Players brand. The first is more accurate: the Allen family were from Ontario but had moved their operations to Calgary in 1910. They expanded their chain significantly in the late 1910s, often hiring Detroit architect C Howard Crane, (with Kiehler & Schley). This theatre had many modern amenities including built-in cigarette lighters and, in a local touch, featured work by Vancouver sculptor Charles Marega.
A decline in movie attendance, the loss of the rights to show Paramount movies and increased competition in the early 1920s did see the company bankrupt, and they sold to Famous Players in 1923 at a significant loss. Most cinemas were renamed as a Capitol – but not in Vancouver where there was already a Capitol down Seymour Street.
Both the Allen and Strand featured live vaudeville acts before their movies, sometimes supplied by Fanchon and Marco, (Fanchon Simon and her brother Marco Wolff). Even after relaunching with US backers, the cinemas were not immune to outside economic realities. In 1932, the theater went dark for a year due to the depression; (Fanchon and Marco were booked at the Orpheum instead). Ivan Ackery managed the Strand in 1934 and recalled hired the Dumbells, a touring musical-comedy show formed by a group of soldiers from the 3rd Division, to appear before the movies.
Although built as a movie theatre, the stage was large enough to permit use as a regular theatre. In 1940, for example, The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo performed at the Strand. The show featured a cast of 150, including Alicia Markova.
Image source City of Vancouver Archives CVA 447-391
The Mughal Empire was the largest manufacturing and economic power in the world at the end of the 17th century. The famous Taj Mahal, one of the new Seven Wonders of the World, is a prime example of the Mughal wealth.
The British were so impressed by the wealth and power of the Mughal emperors, that the slightly changed word “mughal” entered the English language. The term “mogul” describes an all-powerful ruler of industry such as the music or finance industry.
The rulers of the Mughal Empire owned many of the world’s biggest diamonds, including the famous Koh-i-Noor. Originally weighing 186 carats (37.2 g), the diamond was later re-cut and is now part of the British crown jewels.
The throne of Mughal Emperors, called the Peacock throne, is the best illustration of the prosperity of the Mughal Empire. Made of over 1 tonne of gold (1150 kg) and 230 kg of gems it would be worth over one billion US dollars today.
The famous gemstones such as the Koh-i-Noor (186 carats), the Akbar Shah (95 carats), the Shah (88.77 carats), the Jehangir (83 carats), and the Timur ruby (283 carats) decorated the Peacock throne.
A brief history of the Mughal Empire
The Mughal Empire, known also as the Mogul Empire, ruled most of today’s Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The Mughal rulers were Mongols by ethnicity and Muslims by religion. Most of their subjects were Hindus.
The first Mughal Emperor, Babur, was a descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. They had the wish for conquest in their DNA.
The third Mughal Emperor, Akbar, was one of the best rulers in human history.
Akbar expanded the size of the empire, allowed the freedom of religion, improved human rights, and the education system. The Hindus could get senior positions in the government and military. He also implemented reforms that led to the economic prosperity and stability of the Mughal Empire.
The empire reached its peak under the emperor Aurangzeb, who ruled from 1658 to 1707. The following story shows the importance of the Mughal Empire on a global scale:
When the English pirate Henry Every looted a convoy of Mughal ships, returning from the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, furious emperor Aurangzeb triggered the first global manhunt in the human history to get his revenge.
The Aurangzeb’s descendants were weak rulers who were mere puppets to the British. The British East India Company defeated and exiled the last Mughal ruler Bahadur Shah Zafar in 1858.
The wealth of the Mughal Empire
Around 1700, the GDP of the Mughal Empire had risen to 24% of the world economy surpassing both China and entire Western Europe. The Mughal Empire became the world’s dominant power.
The wealth of the Mughal Empire around the year 1700 would translate to a staggering $21 trillion today.
The Mughals were the world’s leaders in manufacturing at the end of the 17th century, producing 25% of the world’s industrial output.
The Europeans connected the world through sea lanes and the Mughal Empire became integrated into international trade. Through trade, silver from the Spanish Americas poured into the empire. Spices from the Far East traveled through the empire to Europe. The most traded spice, the black pepper, originated from India.
Europe wanted Mughal products, especially cotton and silk textiles. The high-quality cotton fabric from India was much more comfortable to wear than wool or linen. Actually, the English word for the “pyjamas” originated from the Hindi word “pajama”, meaning the “loose trousers”.
Half of the manufacturing power of the Mughal Empire came from the province of Bengal Subah. The province encompassed much of modern Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal and it accounted for 12% of the world’s GDP. Today’s equivalent would be the combined GDPs of Italy, the UK, France, Brazil, and Canada.
Contemporary scholars described the province as a “Paradise of nations”. The people of Bengal Subah had the world’s highest living standards and wages.
The living standards in the Bengal Subah were better than those in Great Britain, which had the highest living standards in Europe.
The plunder of Bengal Subah contributed to the Industrial Revolution in Britain during the 18th century. The money looted from the Bengal was used for industrial investments and vastly increased British wealth.
Conclusion
After the decline of the Mughal Empire and a century of the British oppression and exploitation, India lost much of its global power. However, today India is one of the emerging superpowers of the world and has the world’s fastest-growing economy.
Incoming freshman Elisabeth Shue is thankful for her simpatico new roommate…all due to Honeywell’s computers making college life easier. The commercial labels this as Smith College (in Massachusetts) – did anyone attend there or know if this was this filmed on campus?
In the past two decades a concerted effort has been made by a group of compromised self-proclaimed historians like Rana Safvi and Ramachandra Guha to prove that everything good in India was brought to it by the Muslims and particularly the Mughals. One of the primary claims is that Mughal India was ‘rich’. Historian Saumya Dey in this brilliant article analyzes whether even this claim was true or not.
Those Pious, Grateful Liberals
It has been a while that I have been noticing a trend on social media. Every now and then, I see some pious liberal on Facebook or Twitter thanking the Mughals for making India ‘rich’. As the liberals imagine, Babur and his descendants made our country a veritable land of milk and honey. How tenable is this imagination though? And how right are our liberals in thanking the Mughals in retrospect?
We cannot deny that there was a lot of wealth in Mughal India, as is indicated by the grandeur of Mughal architecture. It sure cost a lot to construct the Red Forts at Agra and Delhi, the Taj Mahal, and the many tombs of the Mughal rulers and nobility. The Mughal dynasty and nobility possessed and flaunted a measure of wealth that inspired legends in contemporary Europe – Europeans talked about the ‘Great Mogul’s’ riches with awe. Indeed, in the English language we still sometimes refer to billionaire industrialists and bankers as ‘Moguls’. The sight of untold amounts of wealth reminds us of the Mughals even today. There is no doubt that the Mughal rulers and nobility lived it up.
However, was Mughal India truly and genuinely ‘rich’? Was there, in other words, general prosperity and economic wellbeing in Mughal India? By any means, just the ruler and the ruling class being wealthy does not make a country ‘rich’. One finds so many instances of Arab, African, or South American dictators amassing vast treasures and living lavishly. But these tyrants ruled desperately poor countries. So, I propose, we ought not to be blinded by the glittering affluence of the Mughal royalty and nobility and hastily term Mughal India ‘rich’. Let us first consider the living standards of the broad masses living in the Mughal realms. Only then, I believe, we shall be in a proper position to decide as to whether Mughal India was ‘rich’ or not.
The ‘Great Divergence’ and Impoverished Artisans
Mughal rule in India coincided with the onset of what many economic historians term the ‘Great Divergence’. What is meant by this is that living standards in Mughal ruled India began to noticeably fall behind those in Northwestern Europe. To put it in plainer language, as Mughal rule was first established and then consolidated over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most Indians seem to have beenquite worse off than the inhabitants of the relatively prosperous parts of Europe. This is indicated by some wage data provided in a research paper authored by Bishnupriya Gupta and Debin Ma. We see that average silver wages for unskilled workers amounted to 3.4 grams per day in southern Englandfrom 1550 to 1599. The comparable figure for India in the same period is only 0.7 grams. One must note that this is exactly the time when the Mughal Empire was striking roots in India. According to Gupta and Ma, the silver wage data “unambiguously” suggests that “the Great Divergence was already well established in the sixteenth century.” India, the two contend, now more resembled “the backward parts of Europe.” Again, the variance between silver wages in England and India remained considerable in the first half of the seventeenth century, when Mughal ‘glory’ was at its apogee. From the year 1600 to 1649, unskilled workers in the south of England earned 4.1 grams of silver wages per day on an average. Their Indian counterparts received only 1.1 grams of the same in this period.
Though I am unable to furnish wage data for skilled workers in Mughal India, it does not look like that they fared a lot better than their unskilled coevals. Going by anecdotal evidence, a lot of them appear to have provided their labor to the ruling class under coercion. In this sense, their situation seems comparable to that of the ‘dependent’ or ‘servile’ peasantry of feudal Europe. It was a common practice for the Mughal monarchs and nobility to have ateliers in their palaces and maintain a number of artisans. The French traveler Francois Bernier writes that “nothing but sheer necessity or blows from a cudgel” made them go on. As about the independent artisans, Bernier’s account suggests that they were quite inadequately compensated for what they made. For example, Bernier writes that the Mughal nobility were likely to “pay for a work of art considerably under its value and according to their own caprice….” An artisan, it seems, could not protest this treatment. If he did, he could suffer physical violence. According to Bernier, the Mughal ‘omrah’ [nobility] did not hesitate to “punish an importunate artist…with the korrah (sic.)”, or the whip. I assume, Bernier must mean “importunate” in demanding a fair price. I must also add that, having been personal physician to prince Dara Shikoh, Bernier must have had the opportunity to observe the ways of the Mughal nobility up close. Due to the princely patronage he enjoyed, he very possibly had access to Emperor Shahjahan’s court. It is, thus, very unlikely that our Frenchman is fibbing or making things up here.
Thus, poorly treated and paid by the rulers and nobility, artisans in Mughal India appear to have generally lived in poverty. As Bernier observes, they could aspire to nothing more than “satisfying the cravings of hunger” and dressing in the “coarsest raiment.” Upward mobility in this section of the population, it seems, was not common. Bernier’s verdict on the lot of the artisans is that they “could never hope to attain to any distinction” or purchase “either office or land….”
Agriculture in Mughal India
How did the great bulk of the Indian population, the peasantry, fare under Mughal rule? Not very well, as we see. A rich mine of information on agriculture, rural relations of production, and the peasantry in the Mughal Empire is Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India. Currently Professor Emeritus at the Department of History, Aligarh Muslim University, this very detailed monograph by him throws considerable light on the sad plight of the peasantry in the Mughal Empire, its terrible oppression, and the ills that plagued the Mughal agrarian administration. Let me, by the way, point out to the reader that this is the same Irfan Habib who had charged at the Kerala Governor, Arif Mohammad Khan, at the Indian History Congress last year when he had spoken in support of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) during his speech. Prior to committing that act so richly becoming of his age and dignity, Prof. Irfan Habib had also, for years, used every possible ruse and casuistry to prevent the construction of a temple on the so called ‘disputed site’ at Ayodhya. Hence, I believe, when a man such as this concedes that agriculture and the peasantry in Mughal India were beset with a few problems, it must really have been so.
Irfan Habib writes that there was extensive trade in agricultural produce in the Mughal Empire.The nomadic banjaras, for example,transported foodgrains in bulk over long distances. These were then sold in marts in different corners of the Empire. This trade in foodgrains was also aided by the abolition of the many varieties of transit dues under Mughal rule. But did the peasantry benefit from this marketization of agricultural produce? No, not quite. There was, it seems, a considerable gap between the “price obtaining in the secondary market and that paid to the peasants.” As it seems, the latter price was much lower. This “margin” was probably caused by the peasants’ “indebtedness, the various cesses, the malpractices in the market and the imposition of monopolies….” The Mughal era Indian peasant, thus, does not appear to have been particularly prosperous, despite all the commercialization of agricultural produce that took place then. Therefore, we see that, while agricultural produce moved in the direction of the urban centers and was marketized, the opposite did not happen to a commensurate degree. Urban manufactures did not find a market in the rural areas, very likely because the peasants were in no position to purchase them. Habib writes that
“the more prosperous zamindars must have sought superior quality cloth, jewelry and weapons fashioned in the towns. But whether the peasants also contributed to such demand to any considerable extent may well be doubted. On the whole, the trade was heavily in one direction – from villages to towns.”
Discussing the living conditions of the general populace, Habib is remarkably candid. He quotes the Dutch traveler Palsaert who visited India in the reign of Jahangir. We see that Palsaert was particularly struck by the misery of the common masses. They, he observed, suffer from a poverty
“great and miserable…[and their life] can be depicted or accurately described only as the home of stark want and the dwelling place of bitter woe.”
Habib discusses the diet and clothing of the rural masses in the light of this remark. He admits that the peasants subsisted only on the coarsest grains. Sometimes, as a matter of fact, they could not afford even these. The peasants of Sind, for instance, writes Habib, survived on the seeds of a wild grass (called dair) “for quite a long period each year.” Just as the diet, the clothing of the rural people was extremely rudimentary, presumably on account of their wretched poverty. Vast numbers of rural men and women, it seems, could afford to cover only the middle of their bodies with a small piece of cloth. Habib mentions this Englishman who lived in India in Jahangir’s reign and observed that their forms would be naked but for “their privities (sic.).” Equally rudimentary and rude were the dwellings of the rural folks. These were fashioned out of bamboo, reeds, or mud.
Famines and periods of scarcity, one gathers from Habib’s account, were rather frequent in the Mughal realms. The “territories around Agra, Bayana and Delhi”, for example, were ravaged by a famine from 1554 to 56. Agra itself, the then capital of the Empire, was left “desolated with only some houses remaining.” “Severe scarcity” was the lot of Gujarat “some time (sic.) during the 1560s.” An “acute famine” broke out around Sirhind “in or about 1572-73.” Again, in 1574-75, there was a “serious famine” in Gujarat. Another great famine affected Gujarat and “most of the Dakhin” from 1630 to 1632. In 1636-37, “famine and scarcity” prevailed in Punjab. Then, a “prolonged period of scarcity” commenced in the North, very likely due to the depredations caused by the war of succession between Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb. It lasted into the first “four or five years” of Aurangzeb’s reign. In 1671, an “acute famine ravaged the territory extending from the west of Banaras to Rajmahal.”
The land revenue levied in the Mughal Empire was very steep. Habib writes that, as per the instructions in the “revenue literature” of Aurangzeb’s reign, as also “the orders passed in certain cases”, the land revenue had to “everywhere amount to half the produce”. It appears that this extraordinarily high revenue demand was motivated “by a formal regard for the Shariat (Muslim law), which prescribes this as the maximum for kharaj(land tax).” Though “strength giving”, or taqavi, loans were advanced to the peasants to encourage cultivation, this very debilitating revenue demand must have generated some rural misery. In comparison, the revenue demand in ancient India was a lot more humane. For instance, the customary royal share of the produce in the Gupta Empire, termed bhaga, was “usually fixed at the rate of one-sixth”.
Why was the revenue demand so high under Mughal rule? This was because it was levied by two sets of people, both invested in exploiting the peasantry to the maximum – the jagirdars and the imperial authorities. All jagirdarsin the Mughal Empire were also mansab, or military rank, holders and were required to maintain a certain number of troopers from the revenues of their land assignments, or jagirs. The tendency of the jagirdars was to “set the revenue demand so high as to secure the greatest military strength of the empire.” It seems that they sought to extract the maximum from the peasants so as to have the financial resources to equip their troopers as best as possible. On the other hand, the imperial authorities’ revenue assessments approximated the surplus produce, “leaving the peasant just the barest minimum needed for subsistence.” Habib candidly admits that “It was this appropriation of the surplus produce that created the great wealth of the Mughal ruling class.” To make matters worse, since the jagirdars were periodically transferred and did not hold a land assignment for more than three or four years, they never followed “a far-sighted policy of agricultural development.” The jagirdar would, thus, resort to “any act of oppression that conferred an immediate benefit upon him.” Frequently, we are told by Habib, “peasants were compelled to sell their women, children and cattle in order to meet the revenue demand.” Another desperate measure that the peasants resorted to was flight – sometimes, they simply abandoned their lands and ran away, unable to bear the revenue burden. This phenomenon was “growing in momentum with the passage of years.” Equally commonly, peasants turned rebellious and defiant, refusing to pay the exorbitant revenue. There were even specific terms used in Mughal administration to describe the villages which “went into rebellion or refused to pay taxes” – these were called mawasor zor talab.
Overall, it ought to be apparent by now, the agrarian economy of the Mughal realms was not really in a flourishing state. As Bernier had observed, the ground was “seldom tilled otherwise than by compulsion.” And this was because a peasant in the Mughal Empire could not
“avoid asking himself this question: ‘Why should I toil for a tyrant who may come to-morrow (sic.) and lay his rapacious hands upon all I possess and value, without leaving me, if such should be his humour, the means to drag on my miserable existence?’”
Commodity Consumption in Mughal India
In the middle of the seventeenth century, when the Mughal Empire presented a glittering façade to the world, a significant development was afoot in Northwestern Europe. Commodity consumption was undergoing a spurt in that part of the world and diffusing through the social body. In simpler language, we see the beginnings over there of what we today term ‘consumerism’. In the Netherlands, for example, ever larger numbers of people were buying pocket watches, better quality furniture, chinaware, and paintings. This was on account of a concomitant rise in household incomes. These phenomena have been documented and examined in detail by Jan de Vries in a very interesting monograph titled The Industrious Revolution.
Do we see anything similar happening in contemporary Mughal ruled India? Like in the Netherlands, was commodity consumption turning into a broad-based phenomenon in our country back then? No, not at all. Kenneth Pomeranz, for example, points out that “there was a significant increase in luxury consumption in Mughal India”, but there was no emergent ““fashion system” with broad participation from many classes….” In simple language, he is saying that commodity consumption in the Mughal Empire was heavily skewed – the purchase of high-end goods was rising, but one does not notice a diversity of classes making their own distinct consumption choices. Pomeranz is thus unsure if one can“speak of rising popular consumption in India as comparable to that in” contemporary China, Japan, and Western Europe. And this was because the broad masses were just too impoverished for that. Disparities in the Mughal Empire, as revealed by the estimates of Pomeranz, were simply monstrous. He writes that in the year 1647 only “445 families received 61.5 percent of all revenues, which were about 50 percent of gross agricultural output….” No doubt, Europeans in India could not help but notice “its extremes of wealth and poverty.”
Conclusion
I shall keep this part very brief and precise – overall, it seems very erroneous to term Mughal India ‘rich’. In terms of living standards, India was already falling behind the better off parts of Europe. Mughal rule was characterized by the ruthless exploitation of the primary producers, namely, the artisans and the peasants. And there is scant evidence of ‘popular consumption’ in Mughal ruled India. Commodity consumption in the Mughal Empire was skewed in favor of the luxuries due to the poverty of the common masses. No, Mughal India was not ‘rich’, only the Mughal royalty and nobility were.
On Amazon’s alternative history thriller, The Man in the High Castle, viewers are taken into a CGI-world of a new Berlin that has grown in scale and grandeur to reflect its place as the center of a Thousand Year Reich that now covers most of the globe.
But rather than springing from the mind of filmmakers, this Nazi super-city is based on real plans conceived by Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer, the “General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital.” The project was started in 1937. A massive scale model was made, sections of Berlin were cleared, and its construction sites may have even initiated the Holocaust.
Hitler was determined this vision of a Nazi dystopia called Welthauptstadt Germania (World Capital Germania) would be finished by 1950. Speer had impressed Hitler with his work on buildings at Nuremberg, which were deliberate reinterpretations of classical architecture into massive, distinctly austere Nazi architecture designed to intimidate and overwhelm.
This aligned with Hitler’s vision to make Welthauptstadt Germania the grandest city of them all by taking the best monuments Europe had to offer and to super-size them. Most of these monuments would be placed along a seven-kilometer (4.3 miles) Boulevard of Splendours to create an overall narrative describing Nazi Germany’s superiority to citizens and visitors alike. At the south end of the boulevard, would sit the Triumphal Arch, designed to dwarf Paris’ Arc de Triomphe, which could fit inside Hitler’s planned arch six times. At the north end, the boulevard would open up into a parade ground featuring a colossal Fuhrer’s Palace, the Reich Chancellery, and the ridiculously massive Grand Hall.
Only a handful of buildings were constructed. Hitler’s Reich Chancellery was one, with its Long Hall twice as long as Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, which inspired it. Unfortunately, it was destroyed in the bombing of Berlin in 1945. Another building was the stadium for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, built five miles from Berlin’s center. It was the largest in Europe, modeled off the Roman Colosseum, but 200 meters longer. After the game’s success, Hitler decided he needed a more massive arena, which, was it planned, would house every Olympic Games hence. It was only partially built.
The rest of Welthauptstadt Germania would be new ring roads, autobahns, tunnels and living areas. The environment would have been hostile to citizens. Traffic lights and tramways would be a thing of the past, forcing pedestrians underground into a system of tunnels just to cross the roads and negotiate the complex roadways.
The architecture would literally and metaphorically oppress its people.
Areas of residential Berlin were marked for development. Speer and his cronies had 60,000 apartments bulldozed and 100,000 Germans became homeless. The real suffering was once again directed at the Jews. There would be no place for them in this new city, so 25,000 apartments were seized from Jews. Evicted, they were sent to ghettos, then concentration camps, while homeless Germans were crammed into their apartments.
The Jews became the laborers. Speer apparently remarked: “The Yids got used to making bricks while in captivity in Egypt.”
Many believe the “Night of Broken Glass” in Nov. 1938 was the beginning of the Holocaust but it started months earlier with Germania’s construction.Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen concentration camps were built near quarries, while Sachsenhausen was built near a brickworks. Speer signed a contract with the SS to have all bricks shipped to Germania’s construction sites. Sachsenhausen was 35 kilometers from Berlin’s center, so canals ferried the quarried stone to the Welthauptstadt Germania construction sites. These brickworks proved the harshest labor in all camps. Literally, tens of thousands were worked to death.
The workforce of 130,000 included not only Jews but POWs. Then in June 1938, police started rounding up tramps, gypsies, homosexuals, and beggars off the streets to make up the labor force.
Hitler’s project was not without its critics. Speer’s number two, Hans Stefan drew a series of caricatures which parodied the overbearing nature of the Germania project in secret. Several drawings poke fun at the ridiculous size of the Grand Hall. One depicts Berlin’s largest building, the Reichstag, being accidentally moved by a crane during construction of the impossibly large Grand Hall.
Stefan does not hold back in criticising the changes to Berlin, which he sees as tampering with German history and culture. Hitler had the Victory Column relocated. Stefan’s response was to show the Goddess Victory, unhappy with Hitler’s decision, escaping via parachute from her fixture at the top of the column.
Construction on Welthauptstadt Germania finally ground to a halt as the Second World War progressed. Speer believed that Nazi victory was imminent and remarked that Allied air strikes on Berlin had helped to level the old city to pave way for Germania. They hadn’t.
Though Hitler committed suicide Albert Speer was luckier. At the Nuremberg Trials he charmed the court, and despite his heavy use of concentration camp labor, he denied knowledge of the Holocaust. Spared execution, he spent the next twenty years in Spandau prison.
Igor's Blog 