The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15.s1.41

c15.s1.41

It took, of course, a considerable time before the policy could be fully effective. For some time, the company still had its own frontier areas, such as the semi-independent Oudh kingdom, where British merchants and even official personnel, together with their Indian partners, continued to dabble profitably in trade and land control in the traditional way.⁴⁷ But compared with the Mughal system, the new dispensation was an unprecedented departure from tradition. Where the Mughals had been forced to involve themselves in local affairs and conflicts to the point of submergence, the English could extricate themselves from them and could even pay the price of leaving a possible surplus in the hands of the landholders. Such a step the Mughals would never have been able to take, not because of indiscriminate greed, but because the undrained surplus would have strengthened the forces of dissension and aggravated the pervasive problem of the inner frontier. The English, on the other hand, could afford to do this, since theirs was not an exclusively agrarian empire but a worldwide trading network with its power center safely outside India and soon to be backed by the industrial revolution.