Jos Gommans

Warhorse and post-nomadic empire in Asia, c. 1000 1800

Until the nineteenth century the warhorse played a central role in the political organization of the great empires that bordered on the pastoral heartlands of Central Eurasia. Actually, the survival of the often (semi-)nomadic rulers of these frontier-empires hinged on the continued production, trade and use of Central Eurasian warhorses. This forestalled the full sedentarization of these rulers and conditioned the emergence of a post-nomadic political culture and organization in which Central Eurasian institutions like ordo, nökör and yurt continued to provide a forceful paradigm to mobilize, organize and enumerate cavalry armies. But as the specific ecological circumstances created different conditions for the breeding and trade of warhorses, they also gave rise to different interpretations of the nomadic paradigm. This is demonstrated in the case of the Mughal rulers in India and the Manchu-Qing rulers in China, who both shared a common Central Eurasian heritage and ruled the richest sedentary economies of their time. Earlier generations have said that China is unable to defend itself against the mounted soldiers of [the Jin]. The enemy’s strength derives from its cavalry; their ability lies in riding and archery . . . Their lands in Henan and the northern marches are broad in expanse, and there are numerous pastures. In our country there is not fouror five-tenths of the number of pasture. The Danchang and Hengshan horse markets are extremely far from the front, and the convoy-relay depots are spaced irregularly. Therefore our nation does not even have twoor three-tenths as many horses as our enemy, the Jin.

Spatial and Temporal Continuities of Merchant Networks in South Asia and the Indian Ocean (1500-2000)

We believe ourselves to be the most astute men that one can encounter, and the people here surpass us in everything. And there are Moorish merchants worth 400,000 to 500,000 ducats. And they can do better calculations by memory than we can do with the pen. And they mock us, and it seems to me that they are superior to us in countless things, save with sword in hand, which they cannot resist.

Indian Warfare and Afghan Innovation During the Eighteenth Century

In 1757 the English East India Company took its first step towards empire. At Plassey the highly professional European army under Colonel Robert Clive defeated the larger Indian forces under the reigning Bengal Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah. The Company’s victory was partly the result of its more advanced firepower and discipline, partly of its superior skill in diplomacy. Before the advent of the battle the British had successfully seduced the backbone of the army into revolt against the Nawab. Hence, at the time of battle the great body of the Indian army stood aloof watching while the remainder was butchered by the controlled salvoes of the British sepoys. Yet the best troops of the Nawab were not at all present at the battle scene. They were deployed on the Bihar frontier to meet a possible attack of the Afghan invader Abmad Shah Durrani (1747-1773) who had sacked Delhi, Agra and Mathura and had proclaimed himself emperor and shahanshah of India. Apparently, Siraj ud-Daulah considered the Afghan threat more dangerous than the British one and it is only with the benefit of hindsight that we may judge him wrong.’ 1

For the Home and the Body: Dutch and Indian Ways of Early Modern Consumption

For a decade or two, early modern consumption has been back on the scholarly agenda. In the slipstream of Werner Sombart, earlier work was mostly theoretical and highly Eurocentric in nature. In the mid-1990s the massive American project on ‘Culture and Consumption in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ was a game-changer.2 As in almost all projects on the early modern West, however, the industrial revolution looms on the horizon. Hence, as a mere pre-history of the Great Divergence, most of the attention has focused on the experience of early modern Britain. During the past few years, Maxine Berg in particular has contributed significantly to a better understanding of early modern British consumption by emphatically bringing Asian agency into the story. Berg seeks to understand the contribution of Asia in the making of Europe on the basis of European consumption of Asian products. The project, Europe’s Asian Centuries, aimed not only to map but also understand the changing patterns of consumption in the context of a cross-cultural dialogue between Europe and Asia that intensified during the early modern period.3

Arguing with the Heathens: The Further Reformation and the Ethnohistory of Johannes Hoornbeeck (1617–1666)

Johannes Hoornbeeck (1617–1666) was a Dutch Protestant theologian, generally regarded as a member of the so-called Further Reformation in the Netherlands. He wrote a number of theological works in Latin and in Dutch. Most of his works have a polemical character, defending his orthodox protestant stance against a variety of heretical views. In De conversione Indorum et gentilium , based on disputations with students and published posthumously, he enters into a discussion with the ‘heathens’. To this end he carefully combines biblical and classical scholarship and also reflects on the latest ethnographical information collected by both Protestant and Catholic travellers and missionaries. The book is characterised by great erudition and by an openness for other people’s opinions that necessitates the constant appraisal of one’s own point of view. We argue that such an open engagement with heretical views ultimately carries the danger of a sceptical view of one’s own religion.

Book Reviews : DOUGLAS E. STREUSAND, The Formation of the Mughal Empire, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1989, x + 206 pp., notes, index, Rs. 175

made in the interconnected arenas of state action and the economic scenario and looks at the measures taken by each dynasty, from the early Turkish Sultans through the Khaljis to the Tughlaqs. The investigation is detailed and impressive. However, there remains a nagging suspicion that she has remained somewhat overly faithful to Irfan Habib’s argument of the Sultanate marking a radical break with the preceding state-and economic systems particularly in the sphere of tax collection-an argument rendered completely outdated by recent researches. The entire picture of decline in trade, urbanisation and money supply in the centuries preceding the estab-