A Return to the Past: India, Europe, and the Early Modern Roots of International Relations

We may be prone to think of our era, the 20th and 21st century, as the bedrock of the mechanisms that govern our lives. Indeed, many solutions and inventions that changed the world, and profoundly affect it, were introduced in the last several decades (the internet and smartphones are clear examples). However, there are many other solutions that were in place, even if in somewhat different forms, much earlier. Some curious instances of this come from 18th century India.

One of the interesting features of early modern India was the existence of holymen-mercenaries (no, this is not a comparison to the present, just the beginning of a story). Groups of Hindu holymen, sometimes counted in thousands, would offer their military services to various rulers. Like other soldiers of fortune, they would also often switch loyalties.

In 1786, two such mercenary commanders, Anup Giri and Umrao Giri, clashed with their master, the Maratha noble Mahadji Shinde, and fled with their holymen force to the nearby kingdom of Awadh. From there, they began to attack Shinde’s territories.

The British, whose conquest of India was in its nascent phase, were aware that this was both an opportunity and a risk. At this time, Shinde was one of the most powerful men in northern India and thus a rival of the East India Company, though they were not at war as of 1786. And so, when the mercenaries that had served Shinde began to weaken their former master with frequent attacks, this was a gain for the British.

However, the mercenaries took shelter in Awadh – and Awadh was by that time already a British protectorate. This means that Mahadji Shinde expected the British to rein in the rebellious mercenaries. The letters of a British diplomat at the Awadh court to his superior are filled with careful considerations on this subject. Was it better to keep the mercenaries as a useful, indirect weapon against Shinde but risk war with him? Or was it better to expel them and rid the British of the risk of war? Or perhaps it was possible to move them further into the Awadh territory, so that they wouldn’t trouble Shinde with cross-border attacks, but to keep them in case they would be needed for a future war?

It is striking how much that situation, and such musings, resemble the mechanisms of international relations as we know them today.

First of all, there were already permanent diplomats stationed at royal courts (such as the British court in Awadh). The word “embassy,” earlier meaning a deputation from one court to another, in time began to denote the permanent office of an envoy.

Second, diplomacy was already connected to issues such as border control. In this case, Awadh allowed the disgruntled mercenaries into their territories, and then allowed them to continuously cross back to conduct their strikes against Shinde.

Third, the envoys of the 18th century were quite immersed in a torrent of daily news – not quite as much as we are, with breaking news on our phones every minute – but much closer to the intensity of our times than we may have imagined. They gathered intelligence and wrote letters that summed up their findings nearly every day. This is how we know about this particular story at all.

Fourth, the dividing line between diplomacy and espionage was already fuzzy: envoys were, in fact, also spies, as they are now (although this particular story does not indicate this). And therefore diplomacy was not a black-and-white game, but rather a form of constant maneuvering across a spectrum of gray. For instance, the mercenaries attacked from Awadh, while Awadh was formally not British territory, but rather a realm where British influence had taken root. Thus, the East India Company could theoretically use Awadh’s territory against its rival and claim not to be responsible. We could say that what the British did in this case was a proxy war, not so different from the hybrid conflicts of today.

A second major point here is that these similarities between modern and early modern mechanisms of international relations were also as true for India as they were for Europe.

War by proxy was hardly a European “invention.” For instance, similarly to how the British shielded the rebel mercenaries, Shinde gave shelter to the raja of Varanasi, who had been an enemy of the British. Diplomacy as such was also hardly a European invention. The British East India Company began to install permanent envoys at Indian courts from 1764, but some Indian kingdoms had already begun to keep their diplomats at each other’s courts before then. We can imagine that while the British envoy in Awadh kept wondering if it was worth it to keep the disgruntled mercenaries within the realm, Shinde’s diplomats at the same court were likely protesting and pushing for the expulsion of the holymen-warriors from Awadh.

Already in the first half of the 18th century, before the arrival of permanent British envoys at Indian courts, the ruler of Hyderabad observed that the diplomatic representatives of other South Asian states in his capital grew to such a number that a separate locality, he decreed, had to be allotted to them. This probably could be regarded as an early modern precedent of a diplomatic district. Thus, while later India indeed borrowed many solutions and technologies from Europe, or had them imposed, in this case the office of a permanent envoy was a solution that India worked out separately.

However, here, as in other fields, it was certainly the Europeans that introduced more strict administration, control, and discipline. This happened in diplomacy as well as such areas as warfare.

For instance, the envoys of the Maratha kingdom (the Vakils), even though they had preceded the British, were in fact men for hire (like the aforementioned mercenaries). They were not officials of the court that dispatched them: they were private entrepreneurs employed for an unspecified period to represent the interests of a state. They could thus represent more than one kingdom at the same time: an envoy in Delhi, Hingane, represented the interests of both the Maratha kingdom and the Jaipur kingdom, even though in 1787, these states went to war with each other. One of the main British advantages of the period was that their envoys, the “residents,” were their permanent officials. Similarly, the British East India Company hired many Indian merchants, making them its own officials, and relied on its own, professional soldiers, not the mercenaries, whose loyalty could be shaky.

Similarly, border control was stricter under European rule. Yes, the British protectorate of Awadh admitted those disgruntled mercenaries, but that was because the East India Company wanted it to happen. In other cases, when Hindu pilgrims from Mahadji Shinde’s territory wanted to visit religious places in Awadh, they had to apply for passports to the British Resident at Shinde’s court. Imagine this: In 18th century India, there already existed a form of passports, and applications for them.

Similarly, until the 18th century in India, postal services were offered by a various private companies; in the 19th century, at the height of British rule in India, the colonial government formed a single public postal system. In many ways, when it comes to comparisons between Europe and India in the early modern period, the main European advantage was greater organization, monopolization, and strict rules that were more permanently and widely applied than in the Indian kingdoms.

The disgruntled holymen-mercenaries continued to pester Mahadji Shinde for months before the situation was solved in a way unforeseen by the British envoy: the  holymen-mercenaries switched their loyalty back, returning to the fold of their former commander. But even then, the British did not clash with Shinde. They just kept watching his every step, weakening him indirectly when they felt it was necessary but not risky, and promising him friendship when they wanted to avoid conflict, until he eventually died in 1794. This is something you sometimes can do, regardless of the times you live in and the mechanisms prevalent in that period: You wait your rival out.