The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15.s1.23

c15.s1.23

Rather than the actual control of vast territories, which anyhow had to be left to all manner of intermediaries, the leading principle of imperial power appears to have been the control of trade routes and the market towns along them. The emphasis on the protection of the roads and the principle that the officer in whose jurisdiction a robbery or theft had been committed had either to recover the stolen goods or pay compensation were obviously dictated by more than a simple concern for public order as an aim in itself.³⁴ The safety of the trade routes clearly was of vital importance to the empire. The remittances of revenue depended on the capacity of long-distance trade and finance for this essential service. The breaking away of provincial administrations and their becoming independent sultanates—as happened to the Delhi Sultanate—may well have been occasioned by severe imbalances in interregional commerce or the rerouting of trade rather than by purely military weakness. Conversely, the Mughal Empire’s cohesion may have had the strength of interregional trade as its mainstay, since the revenue transmitted through the channels of interregional commerce was an important factor in financing this trade. That the Delhi Sultantate, like so many other Indian empires, had a history of repeated break-ups while the Mughal Empire did not would seem to be a tribute to the increased strength of interregional commerce, stimulated by the growth of overseas trade. The weakening of the Mughal Empire may, then, have been caused by the impossibility of controlling the sea lanes and forcing the seaborne trade to use the ports that it favored. The growing concentration on Calcutta in the eighteenth century, corresponding to a rerouting of trade and a falling-off of other trading areas, including the routes to Western and Central Asia, may have had more to do with the declining effectiveness of the empire than its military-administrative weakness.³⁵