How the Mughals created a business empire: A new book takes a look at medieval Indian commerce
A new book on Indian business under the Mughal empire provides a timely reminder that the fate of nations is decided as much by accounts books as war and conquest
Guru Nanak seems like an unlikely starting point for a book on trade and commerce in India during the Mughal period. The founder of Sikhism is among the many figures of history that author Jagjeet Lally deploys to bring us a fascinating glimpse of the daily rhythms of religious and commercial life in this era, from the time that Babur set up the Mughal dynasty to its ignominious end by the middle of the 18th century. The cast of characters who act as our eyes into the past is equally intriguing: failed merchants, court munshis, foreign diplomats and Jain traders, whose accounts of their travails have been expertly deployed for insights into a world where the sacred and the commercial were inseparably entwined.
Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar isn’t an academic treatise or a tedious chronicle. Lally, an associate professor of the history of early modern and colonial India at University College, London, possesses the adventurer’s keen eye and the wayfarer’s leisurely tone. Portions of the book unfold like a mystery novel. The final chapter, provocatively titled Twilight, opens with a scene worthy of a thriller: “Shahjahanabad. 14 January 1757. A conqueror is but a few days’ march from the imperial court. The Mughal emperor’s envoy has returned from the enemy’s encampment at Sirhind…." It’s a narrative gambit that pulls readers into the drama of decline.
History is here, too. The establishment of the Mughal empire under Babur, a descendant of Timur on his paternal side and Chinggis Khan on the maternal side, is captured with pithy eloquence. But there are other books for the dynastic details. What distinguishes Lally’s work is how he draws the connections between the Mughal court, the aspirants to the throne, and the world of business. While the court was ostensibly above the vulgar realm of buying and selling, “the reality of seizing and holding on to power" necessitated dealings with bankers and merchants. Power, as Lally demonstrates, flowed as much through ledgers as through lances.
The author also answers fundamental questions with clarity. How were Indian merchants of that era different from the East India Company or the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, which were the primary engines driving European states toward affluence and power in the 17th and 18th centuries? Drawn to the East by the lure of the region’s riches, European companies weaponised trade, maintaining and using well-equipped armies in that quest.
Some of the issues addressed in the book resonate powerfully even today. Why, for instance, have Indian families historically hesitated to bring outsiders into their businesses, preferring to restrict ownership to relations of blood and marriage? Lally offers a straightforward explanation: “Keeping things in the family was a means of preserving secrets (skills, practices, the state of the accounts), all of which helped stave off competition." Sadly, this insularity is also one reason why we lack the archival documentation that might have offered a richer perspective on those times.
Lally attempts to fill these gaps by interpreting and reimagining whatever fragmentary accounts survive. There is the failed trader Banarsidas, whose Ardhakathanak written in 1641 is the earliest example of an Indian merchant’s life story, offering granular details of business in north India under Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan. Counterpointing that narrative is the story of the successful businessman Mulla Abdul Ghafur, the prince of 17th century Gujarati merchants, whose fortune, which included a fleet of 17 ships, was estimated at ₹8.5 million in 1718.
Many such fragments—statements of accounts, legal documents and travel narratives—are expertly woven together to construct a picture of everyday lives, of markets (the bazaar of the title) like the famed Chandni Chowk, and ports (the bandar of the title) like Surat. Added to this heady mix is the role of the badshahs themselves, each of whom brought a distinct governance model to stimulate commercial activities.
The book lingers deliberately on Akbar not merely for his military conquests but for his administrative acumen, perhaps his greatest claim to fame. As a ruler he was both fair and shrewd, as evident in how he replaced his predecessors’ system of princely appanage with one of revenue-yielding estates (jagirs) for the kingdom’s elite. Significantly, he ensured that their number and, vitally, their diversity kept growing, so that none of them, including close family, ever built the kind of financial and military resources that would allow them to challenge his authority.
In placing Lally’s work within the landscape of scholarship on Mughal India, one thinks inevitably of Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s work on early modern Indian Ocean history. His collaboration with Muzaffar Alam, particularly in Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics, has transformed our understanding of the Mughal empire by recovering the voices embedded in Persian texts, letters, memoirs and chronicles that provide a glimpse into the texture of lived experience rather than merely the architecture of power. Where Subrahmanyam and Alam work primarily with elite literary sources, Lally’s achievement lies in his ability to animate the ordinary participants in this economy: the artisans, middlemen and small traders who formed the connective tissue of commercial life.
There’s also William Dalrymple’s work on the Mughal period, particularly The Last Mughal and White Mughals, which are more narrative-driven, centered on individual lives and dramatic historical moments. Dalrymple excels at recreating the sensory texture of Mughal Delhi, the “street life of the Mughal capital". But where Dalrymple’s strength lies in storytelling and the recovery of forgotten archives, Lally’s lies in synthesis: his ability to connect the macro-level political economy with the diurnal rotation of the ordinary lives of a shopkeeper in Chandni Chowk or a weaver in Surat.
A word here about the yeoman service rendered by Gurcharan Das, under whose editorial guidance Penguin Random House India’s The Story of Indian Business series has delivered multiple volumes combining academic rigour with engaging storytelling. The series aims to trace the arc of commerce in India from the earliest times, “mining great ideas in business and economics that have shaped commerce in the bazaars and high seas of the Indian Ocean." These books aren’t merely important for students of business history but for anyone interested in understanding the deep historical currents that have shaped contemporary India. Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar is a fine addition, demonstrating how scholarly depth and narrative verve need not be mutually exclusive.
There are minor irritants for the impatient reader. Lally reminds us too insistently of what’s coming next, a tick that, in a text of barely 200 pages, feels like the anxious politician who keeps promising that good times are coming. There’s no reason for this authorial insecurity. The book delivers handsomely on its promises. Its brevity, in fact, is both a virtue and source of mild dissatisfaction. One wishes the many strands of thought were dealt with at greater length. The book touches, for instance, on how religion was not spared the march of commercialisation, with preachers adopting the language of the bazaar, resulting in the emergence of a “marketplace for popular piety", an observation that deserves fuller exploration.
But these are quibbles. In its masterly retelling of what Lally memorably terms “the hum and thrum of commerce," in its skilful references to external events like climatic changes and global forces, and in its connecting the macro-political economy with the texture of ordinary lives, Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar is a rare piece of scholarship that is both eminently readable and deeply informative. It’s a book that reminds us that empires are made not just through conquest but also through contracts, not just through edicts but through the patient accumulation of copper, silver and gold.
In an age when we’re increasingly aware of how economics shapes politics, Lally’s work serves as a reminder that it was ever thus and that the fate of nations has always been written as much in account books as in battle plans.
Sundeep Khanna is author of Azim Premji: The Man Beyond the Billions and Cryptostorm: How India Became Ground Zero of a Financial Revolution.
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