October 11, 2009

Articles of Ransom






James Higham said...


That's an excellent observation. The whole politics of war is other than as presented by the State.

Rumbold said...

What's interesting is how the European model developed differently from the Mughal model. Under the Mughal system, military commanders were given a numerical rank, which denoted the number of cavalry they commanded. These men had to be raised by the commander themselves, by a system of jagirs. A jagir was a temporary grant of land which gave the commander the revenue from that land (usually a handful of villages).

Gracchi said...

James unsure what you mean but I agree few at the time noticed the movement in the power of the state that the change in warfare implied.

Rumbold- that is fascinating. There are tons of questions that I have about that military system- did it incline the empire towards breaking apart because local forces were raised by local commanders, how far did the central administration of the army work? I wonder if anyone has compared articles of war and laws of war and whether there are observable differences based on the different schemes of recruitment. How long were the grants of land and how did they effect stability of tenure?

Really interesting comment which is inspiring me to do some research of my own.

Rumbold said...


The best overview of the Mughal Empire is J. F. Richard's the Mughal Empire, part of the Cambridge series. You can borrow it if you want.

The jagir system eventually broke down, as rank inflation took hold. The Mughal Empire had been able to sustain a system during its period of expansion, but once Mughal conquests slowed, there was an increasing gap between a commander's rank and the jagirs needed to fund it. After that you see a system where Mughal commanders, both civilian and military, begin to establish their own fiefdoms (most notably in Bengal). The system never worked to capacity anyway, and the army was almost certain never more than half its paper strength, particularly after Akbar (who introduced it) died.

There was a minister for war and all armoured troopers had to meet certain imperial standards. Religion/tribe was irrelevant though. The imperial officials determined how much an individual soldier could be paid, but all the money went through commanders, who presumably skimmed some off the top.

Akbar especially had a policy of rotating armies throughout India, so that armies were not allowed to take root in a particular place. This didn’t matter so much for a lot of the great nobles, who were from outside India (Persia, the Turkic tribes, etc.), but officers like the Rajputs had strong roots in India.

Jagirs weren't granted for life (some were though- probably), so, and I might be wrong here, few became hereditary. However, some jagirs were really lands that had been occupied by the Mughals and then reassigned to defeated nobles who swore fealty to the emperor. Thus they were hereditary to start with.