Overview

By the 1660s, the mighty Mughal Empire controlled the Indian subcontinent and impressed the world with its strength and opulence. Yet hardly two decades would pass before fortunes would turn, Mughal kings and governors losing influence to rival warlords and foreign powers. How could leaders of one of the most dominant early modern polities lose their grip over empire? Sudev Sheth proposes a new point of departure, focusing on diverse local and hitherto unexplored evidence about a prominent financier family entrenched in bankrolling Mughal elites and their successors. Analyzing how four generations of the Jhaveri family of Gujarat financed politics, he offers a fresh take on the dissolution of the Mughal empire, the birth of princely successor states, and the nature of economic life in the days leading up to the colonial domination of India.

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9781009330268

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Reviews

'How a dynasty of indigenous merchants and bankers in Gujarat made and unmade the fortunes of local rulers. A deeply researched study that lifts the Orientalist curtain which still shrouds the nexus between money and power in premodern Asia.' Francesca Trivellato, author of The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells us about the Making of European Commercial Society 'This delightful book uses the prism of family history to address a longstanding debate in the history of the Mughal empire, that of the evolving role of merchants in sustaining, and later dismantling the regime. Based on remarkable multi-lingual research, it is a major contribution to South Asian history.' Nandini Chatterjee, author of Negotiating Mughal Law 'An important contribution to the study of early modern India. By tracing the activities of several prominent Gujarati banking families across multiple generations, Sudev Sheth resolves a long-standing debate over the Mughal empire's dependency on indigenous financiers, and whether their withdrawal of lending services had led to imperial collapse.' Richard M. Eaton, University of Arizona 'Innovative in its concepts, and creative in its use of a range of historical materials, Bankrolling Empire is a welcome and original attempt to illustrate the transition from the Mughal to the British empire from the hitherto-neglected perspective of the Indian families who financed both. Sheth's work will be of equal interest to students of the Mughal empire and of the growing field of business history in India.' Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor of History, UC Berkeley 'A remarkable account, path-breaking in its detail, of the shifting relations between private finance and political power in 17th & 18th century India: drawing on original sources, ranging across multiple languages, and moving between microscopic and wide-angled perspectives, Sheth traces the fortunes of a family of Jain bankers, revealing how they calculated and conducted their relations with political power during critical times - surviving the decline of Mughal power, the expansion of British control and the ambitions of local rulers, to emerge as a significant industrial house today. Necessary reading - not just for historians of late Mughal India, but for anyone interested in business history and in historical relations between private capital and state power.' Sunil Khilnani, author of The Idea of India 'Sheth employs an intergenerational study of a family of Gujarati financiers to provide original and rich narratives about family business, the relationship between business and politics, and the decline of the Mughal empire. The use of unconventional primary sources, written in eleven Asian and European languages, is extraordinarily impressive.' Geoffrey Jones, Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Harvard Business School 'This book combines deep analysis and wide research in a study of how successive phases of the Mughal, Maratha and early British empires interacted with the entrepreneurial careers of two important Indian capitalist families. It is a pathbreaking contribution to our understanding of global capitalisms in the early modern world.' Sumit Guha, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin 'Following the fortunes of a merchant-banking family in western India across four generations, Bankrolling Empire weaves a rich and exciting narrative of the inter-dependence between merchant capital and state formation in Mughal India. This book is a must read for scholars interested in state-society relations, banking firms and social transformations in early modern South Asia.' Farhat Hasan, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern South Asia, Department of History, University of Delhi; author of State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572–1730. (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Paper, Performance and the State: Social Change and Political Culture in Mughal India (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Author Information

Sudev Sheth is Senior Lecturer in History at the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies at the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches across the School of Arts & Sciences and the Wharton School.

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