Abstract
Claude Markovits, India and the World: A History of Connections, c. 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 304 pp.
With India and the World, Claude Markovits has made a significant intervention in the global history of South Asia. The book is not only a work of synthesis, but also of original research and interpretation. Organised around six thematic chapters—economy, human circulation, military episodes, intellectual exchange and cultural flows—and a seventh chapter on the 1857 Rebellion and the 1947 Partition as global events, Markovits skilfully weaves together diverse histories and historiographies into a cogent narrative that students of South Asia, both neophytes and old salts, will do well to read. The text compares favourably with existing primers like A Concise History of India by Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf and Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal. Later editions of these texts have sought to situate India in a more global setting and to incorporate some of the recent literature on global history as a method. However, it is perhaps fair to say that the strictly global dimensions of these histories read as something of an afterthought in an otherwise Indo-centric story. For that reason, Markovits’ text is a most welcome addition. Ideally, future editions and reprints will continue to solidify its reputation.
The book succeeds precisely because—while it is framed as a global history of connection—it simultaneously keeps its eye firmly fixed on disparities and divergences not only between India and other parts of the world but also among individual peoples and regions within India. Markovits is well qualified to write this history; his work on the Sindhis (The Global World of Indian Merchants, 2000) anticipated, in many ways, the global-history turn. That book’s peripatetic quality has served Markovits well in his latest endeavour. In India of the World, one also finds the same surehandedness in juggling heterogeneous material that Markovits evinced in his scholarship on Gandhi, circulation and Indian Sepoys on the Western Front.
Suitably for a book of global scope, Markovits lets his narrative eye wander, without losing the reader or getting bogged down in minutiae. An analysis of the 1939 film Gunga Din exhibits Markovits’ chops as a film critic (pp. 176–178). As in his book on Sindhis, Markovits does not privilege maritime connection in this text, but reveals new geographies of overland connection between India and Eurasia. One reads with great interest, for example, that a Russian version of Sakuntala appeared in the 1790s and that Soviet audiences were enthusiastic consumers of Indian cinema. Frequently throughout the book, Markovits divulges new finds from the archives. One memorable instance is his analysis of the tragic fate of Indian indentured labourers from Natal who were hired by Messrs Griffith & Co. in 1907 (p. 71). While imparting insights from new research, Markovits also corrects misconceptions, such as the oft-made assertion that indenture constituted the lion’s share of India’s outward migration.
Although military history often struggles to secure academic respectability, the global history of India cannot be told without it. Thankfully, this book proffers fruitful approaches to the subject beyond the staid genre of campaign histories. While there is a great deal on the overseas operations featuring Indian sepoys, Markovits’ work is not exactly a familiar chronicle. His recounting of the East India Company’s expedition to Manila in 1762 is an excellent illustration (p. 91). The Manila undertaking encourages a rethinking about the Company’s ability in the mid-eighteenth century to deploy Indian military labour overseas as well as the autonomy of Madras vis-à-vis Company administration in Bengal. Markovits’ chapter on military developments also highlights the benefits of bringing business and military history into conversation. As a case in point, Markovits draws attention to the little-known fact that the great beneficiaries of the Abyssinian campaign of 1867–1868 were Parsi contractors, who were privy to leaked information, which allowed them to corner badly needed supplies (p. 98). The irony was that this campaign also served as a springboard for another Parsi, Dadabhai Naoroji, to articulate the beginnings of his version of the drain of wealth thesis in his famous Abyssinian Minute.
The chapter on intellectual thought is equally well-crafted. Markovits’ decision to include Subaltern Studies in this chapter was a wise choice. As he eloquently puts it, Subaltern Studies was ‘the first time, and probably not the last, [when] an academic trend that had been born outside the West acquired a significant foothold in Western academia and gained a sort of global prominence, which is no mean achievement’ (p. 150). Subaltern Studies, for all its flaws, put South Asian historiography firmly on the map of the historical profession, even if it was not solely the product of Indian universities, but was borne out of interactions among Indian scholars living abroad with colleagues in Australia, Europe, India and the United States. One wonders what academic trends of global appeal the Indian academy might yet produce given the fact that Indian universities are experiencing systemic crises that are largely of the central state’s making.
Markovits’ remarks about Subaltern Studies are an invitation to reflect on the future trajectory of South Asian studies. Indeed, any work of synthesis (such as this book) reveals both the dynamism of a particular field and its blind spots. The oversights are arguably most apparent in Markovits’ excellent first chapter on India in the global economy. Among other interventions, by foregrounding the centrality of Indian regional economies the chapter takes India’s economic fate out of a straightforwardly imperial–metropole relationship. The discussion of the feedback loops between American trade in India and the birth of the textile industry in Lowell, Massachusetts, is of special note (p. 27). And while there has been an effort by historians lately to argue, despite Nehruvian rhetoric, that the economy of postcolonial India was not socialist, Markovits makes the crucial qualification that India’s engagement with the world economy was one of ‘controlled participation’, which took the form of ‘bilateral trade and investment agreements with selected countries rather than engagement in a multilateral system’ (p. 40).
Yet this chapter also shows the extent to which, when compared to the chapters on circulation and even military history, the economic history of South Asia has suffered from serious neglect over the past decades. This is particularly the case for the centuries on either side of 1750. In his discussion of the Indian economy in the period 1750–1860, Markovits deploys the standard dialectic of India as a ‘workshop of the world’ that eventually experienced a protracted ‘reversal of fortune’ (pp. 18–29). This is no doubt true in broad terms, but Markovits’ seeming hesitation in referring to India in categorical terms as the world’s workshop (pp. 18–19) suggests that the region’s place in narratives of global economic change in the period 1500–1800 remains poorly understood, perhaps yet another reflection of the South Asian historiography’s relative avoidance of economic themes over the past generation.
Markovits should be congratulated for what he has achieved here. At a time when global history as a discipline increasingly finds itself up against the ropes (which is partially justified thanks to overreach), this book is a masterclass on how to write the histories of connection that check both the provincialism of the specialist and the caricatures of the generalist in equal measure.