HISTORY

POLITICS AND THE STATE PART1

The friends of God defeated their opponents….the Musallmans wreaked their vengeance on the infidels,killing 15000 of them,making them food of beasts ,..God also bestowed on his friends such a bounty as was unimaginable,including five hundred thousand slaves,beautifull men and women(sultan Mahmoud’s minister Al utbi)

Preindustrial Organizations and the  state

With rise of cities ,organized religion and states headed by hereditary rulers the stage was set for heads of these organizations to manipulate and create narratives. These narratives generally served the interest of their organizations and in many cases the people heading these organizations also.

   The most frequent narrative by kings was the need for warfare  and get the status of an emperor or conqueror of the world.War often  took place between two brothers claiming the throne.In these fruitless wars thousands of soldiers on both side died for nothing. The productivity of land was static during most of preindustrial age. The revenue by taxation for warfare as well as maintaining a standing  army could increase by only conquering new lands. So this was another motive for the king to start an invasion.For nomadic tribes there was a difference in living standards between settled agriculturalists and themselves. This gradient served as a motive to invade settled kingdoms especially during times of drought and food insufficiency. Even today nations struggle to stop illegal migrations in their country and often fail to do so in spite of modern army and technology. In ancient times kingdoms were unable therefore to stop sustained armed migrations. The fall of Roman Empire to Germanic tribes, the repeated invasions by Turks and mongols in India and mongol invasion of China are examples.

    There was a difference however in how the general population suffered during wars between kingdoms which had cultural homogeneity and those without it including  when nomadic invasions took place.The invasion of Huns in India is an example.The Huns were a nomadic tribe and they poured into India from the northwest around 300AD and continued for two hundred years. They burnt and looted all cities in their path ,destroyed Buddhist monasteries ,killed most adult males in a city and took females for enjoyment.The India king Yashodharma led a coalition and defeated the last Huna king Mihiragula and killed him.

Ancient religions and the state

It is said that religion allowed the state to be viable. Religion guides individual behaviour through indoctrination of habits. Whereas in a tribe order maintainance is easy as everybody is under watch in a geographical state this is not possible. Religion by its concept of sins and punishment enables humans to be morally restrained. Law and order maintenance becomes possible now. 

   Religion also served to restrain the power of unruly kings. The Jewish religion proclaimed the kingdom of God as their basic principle. The king was a given the duty to rule for the benefit of the population had to follow certain humanitarian acts to get religious sanction for his ruling. 

However over a period of time the religious organizations themselves acted as a deep state. The papal power in Christian Europe at one time maintained. its own army.By its religious orders it could excommunicate kings. The church carried out innumerable inquisitions and burnt alive so called witches and heretics. In India a caste system had developed where different occupational groups could not intermarry. According to Mancur  olson it represented a form of labour union where discipline was maintained by preventing migration outside the caste by forbidding marriage outside one’s own caste.When Fa hien visited India in 399AD he found untouchables living outside cites and handling dead animal carcasses, cleaning toilets and not being allowed to come near  higher castes.They were forbidden from using the water of same wells as higher castes. They were excluded from all social and religious activities.

    The worst occured however when    Islam came to Persia ,India and Central Asia. The Abrahamic religions believe in one God . Their followers unlike Indic religions do not consider other religions equal . 

   The Islamic invasions created untold problems for the population of India.They were different from earlier wars between kingdoms or invasion from foreign land and nomadic tribes. Now there was religious persecution .breaking of temples and idols and mass killing of adult men and slavery of women and children. Muhammad Bin Qasim is supposed to be the first conqueror of Sindh. In his invasion around 716 AD of Multan he killed the adult population of the city after they had surrendered to him Children and women numbering 20000 were taken as slaves to Baghdad. The magnificent sun temple was looted and priests were massacared. The same occured over next many centuries when the historic somnath temple in gujrat was looted in 1126 AD by Mahmood of Ghazni ,a Turkish ruler. He broke the jyotirlinga,massacared the pilgrims and looted the temple,Another despicable act was the destruction of Nalanda university ,perhaps the largest of its kind of those times. Here Buddhist monks taught philosophy ,religion ,mathematics,. This structure was burnt and all the monks were massacared by Turkish ruler Bakhtiar khilji in 1193AD. Emperor Aurangzeb who ruled india from 1658 to 1707 AD was a religious fanatic. During his time probably the temples of Ram in Ayodhya,krishna in Mathura and Viswanath temple in Kashi were demolished and mosques built over them.After Aurangzeb the Mughal empire became weak as rebellions by Indians broke out especially with Marathas and sikhs becoming militarily very powerful and decimating the empire from all sides.

Trade and colonial state

With rise of printing in Europe the knowledge of astronomy,navigation,shipbuilding increased vastly. This enabled Spain and Portugal  kingdoms to send explorers for discovering trade routes to India. The land trade with Asia was halted as land routes were blocked by ottoman Turks. Vasco da gama discovered sea route to India in 1497AD  while Columbus discovered a new continent of America in 1492AD. Trade in a foreign country requires good relation to be maintained with the local population and elite. The surest means of securing uninterrupted trade is to capture political power in that country. That is what happened in America after Columbus as Spain and Portugal used their gunpowder to subjugate the native kingdoms. However they also used slaves to run plantation and gold mines. The slaves were either local Americans or captured slaves from Africa who had been shipped to America.

  The other countries of Europe followed the lead of Spain and Portugal. The most successful were the British,followed by French,Dutch and Italians. The proliferation of trade meant profits which could be taxed by governments and used for financing wars . The european  nations were  constantly warring for territory and this required money.Morever national wars are extremely emotional to the population. A national leader will cite past history to claim territories lost to neighbours. Wars are justified in order to corect past injustices and territory. A vulnerable leader can start a war and regain his legitimacy.After the end of colonialism most European countries do not fight wars for territory and have relinquished their colonies. The annexation of Siberia by Russia and Texas and California by USA has however remained. However the newly independent countries especially China are apt to wage wars for territory. Russia has laid claim to territories in Ukraine which have predominantly a Russian majority .

Industrial Revolution and capitalist state

The Industrial Revolution occured in Britain in eighteenth century.The increased need to increase volume of craft produced goods was the principal motive as trade had increased purchasing power of the population of these nations. Thus arose steam power and this was used to mass produce cotton textiles initially. Goods were now manufactured in centralized factories and craftsmen soon lost out to them as the cost of mass produced goods was much less. Now a new class of businessmen had risen and they were the capitalist class ,the owner of capital,principally factories but all capital goods including ships and rail networks.The capitalist class has served as a new deep state and used collaboration with the government whenever required to advance their interests. During the Industrial Revolution many craftsmen and farmers lost their livelihoods. The Luddites took to breaking machines to protect their livelihood. The state however crushed them ruthlessly. With rise in population in Europe due to a demographic dividend the working age population rose. Many of them could not find jobs and risked their lives to go to faraway colonies to explore for gold or land forfarming

  The emigration of Europeans for farming land to America was catastrophic for the native Americans. The colonial deep state used force to remove natives from their land and in many cases massacared them. The colonial deep state in Africa used force to capture African land rich in industrial minerals. The Asian states served as areas where plantations of sugar,indigo and tea were established and forced labour used. But the greatest harm that capitalist deep state did to colonies was that instead of industrial  revolution and factories coming to colonies they were completely bypassed. The European states applied high tariffs on goods exported by Indian artisans. It banned many types of activity in India like shipbuilding. It allowed factory produced textiles in Britain to flood India without any duties. These actions ensured that India could not develop any industries.It remained a source of raw materials and market for British goods. But as GDP of India fell the Indians could not even purchase goods imported from Britain. The population became abjectly poor and famines occured repeatedly. It is said that in Bengal famine of 1770 ten million people died of starvation.Before the Industrial Revolution the share of India in world GDP was 28%. When the British left India in 1947 the share was less than 2%.

    

Ack: capitalism- a short history,Empires of cotton : A global history