The connected worlds of Haji Mustapha (c. 1730–91): A Eurasian cosmopolitan in eighteenth-century Bengal

Abstract

Haji Mustapha (d. 1791), sometimes also referred to by the French name Raymond, or by his pen name ‘Nota Manus’ (‘a known hand’), is best known as the translator and publisher of one of the most celebrated Indo-Persian histories of the eighteenth century, the Seir Mutaqherin, published in Calcutta in 1789–90. Situating Mustapha’s life story within a growing historiography concerned with early modern forms of cosmopolitanism, ‘trans-imperial subjects’ and ‘go-betweens’, this essay presents new evidence about the origins and longer trajectory of Mustapha’s remarkable career. It explores his family background in the trans-imperial networks of merchants and dragomans that connected the French and Ottoman empires in the early modern period. It shows how Mustapha reinvented himself in Bengal as a political informer to the British Empire, cultivating a persona as a Eurasian cosmopolitan who could mediate between European and South Asian political cultures. Treating Mustapha as an interesting political thinker in his own right, the essay examines his adaptationist view of imperial politics and his efforts to conjugate and cross-fertilise the political and intellectual traditions of European and Islamic empires. It also shows how Mustapha’s Eurasian cosmopolitan style struggled to contend with the changing forms of British imperial patriotism.