7 - Postlude: Bankrollers of Mughal Succession, 1750–1818

Summary

By the late eighteenth century, Mughal power gave way to more pluralistic geopolitics led by the Marathas and representatives of British East India Company authority in India. Chapter 7, a postlude, focuses on how the Gaekwads of Baroda consolidated power in the wake of Mughal dissolution in Gujarat. The political landscape was held together largely by debt relations and novel forms of financial diplomacy. This chapter explores how the Jhaveris, and the analogous Haribhakti family of bankers, became central to post-Mughal political power in Gujarat. The chapter demonstrates how, by the late eighteenth century, the Gaekwads were able to establish and grow their stately influence by relying on a group of elite financiers led by family banking firms. Over time, this led to the accumulation of enormous debt. Such a decisive shift to debt-based sovereignty both enhanced and challenged those in the business of bankrolling the state, and ultimately provided the British East India Company an opportunity to coopt native state formation as a strategy of establishing their colonial hegemony.