Finer on the Mughals

I seem to have read this before; at any rate I underlined it. But it comes on with force only after I’ve seen it on the ground:

To Europeans, Mughal India was by far the most glamorous of the four great Asian powers dealt with in this book,* and remains so today. What so attracts them is its art and literature and architecture, the gorgeous colourfulness of its courts, the exquisite inlay and fretwork and mosaics in the palaces and shrines and mosques, and not least the fascinating characters of its emperors, whose every deed and happening was recorded in their own private diaries or by the court diarists. But rarely has there been such a contrast between a rich and gorgeous artistic culture and a threadbare political culture. It is impossible not to approach it with a depressing sense of déjà vu. Not one single institutional feature in it is original. All the main components—the royal autocracy, the ambiguities of legitimate title, the contestable rules of succession, the service nobility, their payment of land-revenues, the feudalistic mode of raising the army, the combination of legislative judicial and administrative powers in a single officer, and so forth—are features we have met many times before.

Likewise with the shortcomings of this empire: it was riddled with corruption, especially in the courts. The ruling and extracting classes were the tiniest fraction of the total population, but between one-third and one-half of the total GNP of the 100 million population was engrossed by the imperial court and the 8,000 or so mansadbars—61 percent of the take going ot a mere 655 of these. Extraction on such a scale could only be secured by coercion…

That is, of course, Samuel E. Finer in what remains the best book of the millennium so far: The History of Government, at 1256 (Oxford Paperback ed. 1999—but I only read it in this millennium).

*Tokugawa Japan, 1600-1745; China under the Ch’ing, 1680-1780; The Classical Age of the Ottoman Empire, c. 1566; and the Mughals, 1526-1712.