With such a secret inscription revealing a Renaissance era murder, it was clear that the value of painting would go up and people involved in the deal start trying to backstab each other. As Julia tries to find out the identity of the 15th century murderer, a similar game starts in her life. Like chess pieces captured in the painting, people associated with her start getting killed. An invisible chess player starts leaving clues around and she has to figure out the identity of the modern killer.
After reading books like Steve Berry’s The Columbus Affair and Daniel Silva’s The Fallen Angel (which features an art restorer), it was quite refreshing to read this book. Most of the historical thrillers I have read tend to be formulaic; this one was different and had multiple layers to it. It takes us to the world of art dealers, auctioneers and people who mint money in that world through nefarious schemes. The dialogue was not off a screenplay, but had depth; the people involved discussed mysteries involving chess, music, art, and fiction at both concrete and abstract levels. It was not an easy read compared to the books I mentioned, but it was worth it. Many thanks to my friend Fëanor for recommending it.
Nehru and Uniform Civil Code
Six Thousand Days: Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister by Amiya Rao and B.G.Rao has a section on the first Prime Minister’s politics regarding the introduction of Uniform Civil Code in India. He had sponsored the Hindu Code Bills because the personal laws of Hindus had to be modified to come in line with modern thought and attitudes. It was also intended especially for, “freeing our people, more especially our women-folk from the outworn customs and shackles which have bound them.”
Even though President Bourgiba of Tunisia and President Ayub of Pakistan had changed Muslim personal law in their countries, Nehru was not willing to do so in India. The book accuses him of conceding that only the Ulema and not the Parliament had the power to make rules for Muslims purely for the vote bank. In a speech Nehru mentioned
“We have passed one or two laws recently and we are considering one … in regard to Hindu marriage and divorce … These are personal ingrained in custom, habit and religion … Now we do not dare to touch the Muslims because they are a minority and we do not want the Hindu majority to do it. These are personal laws and so will remain for the Muslims until they want to change them … We do not wish to create the impression that we are forcing any particular thing in regard to Muslims’ personal laws.”
Thus, even though Article 44 stated that the state shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout India, that was one path Nehru was unwilling to travel.
Writing Historical Fiction(9): David Gillham
David Gillham, the author of City of Women explains how he created the atmosphere of 1943 Berlin.
One way I tried to build the atmosphere of Sigrid’s Berlin was by introducing wartime movies, music, and food into the narrative. Of course, when Sigrid attends the cinema, it not really to watch a movie. She’s looking for a small space of privacy, which is why she favors war movies. These didn’t do very well at the box office in Berlin; the audiences for them were usually sparse. The average Berliner was less interested in seeing propaganda films such as Soldiers of Tomorrow than Heinz Rühmann in escapist fare such as The Gas Man, or Gustaf Gründgens in a lavish eighteenth-century costume drama. For more recent movies that capture either the essence of Berlin or the stunning contradictions of the war years, I’d recommend Cabaret and Europa, Europa.[Guest post by David Gillham: Watch, Listen, Eat]
More on the Venus Figurines
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An exhibition on Ice Age art is going on at the British Museum in London. An article about the event mentions the Venus figurines, which has been discussed on this blog before.
In the first room is a small gathering of little figurines (let’s not call them “Venuses”) – small, nuggety pieces three or four inches high, worked in the round and showing women’s bodies. Made of stone or bone or ivory, some are slender and depict young women in the early stages of pregnancy. Others show older women, weighted with huge, low-slung breasts, wide backsides, tapering legs. The heads are bent in a manner almost demure, or perhaps it’s the infolded attitude of pregnant women. Many actually do show women in the late stages of pregnancy, when one’s body is exaggerated and unrecognisable even to oneself. They are earthy, mute, potent things, and were made with deliberation. Some were apparently intended to be worn as pendants, upside down, so as to be viewed by the wearer. Senior curator and author Jill Cook believes these figures were most likely made for women by women. “The female figures probably had important occult, or shamanic functions influential on family life.” At least one was deliberately smashed and thrown away – a passionate act. Perhaps it failed in some talismanic duty. Whatever the uses of such sculptures, “by looking at its aesthetics, we are looking at the evolution of our minds”. Art is not a hobby; it makes us, and shapes us.[Ice age carvings: strange yet familiar]
In Pragati: What caused the decline of Harappa?
(This was originally published in Pragati)
In The Wonder That Was India, A L Basham presented a dramatic picture of the decline of the Harappan civilisation. According to him, from 3000 BCE, invaders were present in the region. After conquering the outlying villages, they made their move on Mohenjo-daro. The people of Mohenjo-daro fled, but were cut down by the invaders; the skeletons that were discovered proved this invasion. Basham concluded that the Indus cities fell to barbarians “who triumphed not only through greater military prowess, but also because they were equipped with better weapons, and had learnt to make full use of the swift and terror-striking beats of the steppes.” Sir R Mortimer Wheeler claimed these horse riding invaders were none other than Aryans and their war-god Indra destroyed the forts and citadels at Harappa. But Basham was not that certain of the identity of the charioteers; he stated that they could be non-Aryans as well.
From the late 1950s, historians believed that Mohenjo-daro was destroyed due to tectonic shifts in the region. According to one version, tectonic movements blocked the course of lower Indus river which must have caused floods that submerged the city. An opposing and the currently favoured theory suggests that instead of submerging in water, the city was starved of water. This happened because Indus shifted away from Mohenjo-daro, thus disrupting the crop cycle as well as the river-based communication network.
One theory suggests that declining monsoons impacted water availability in Ghaggar-Hakra and that in turn caused the societal changes. Around 4000 years back, a dramatic climate change happened across North Africa, the Middle East, the Tibetan Plateau, southern Europe and North America. In India, during that period, there was an abrupt shift in monsoons, which lasted two centuries. In general, if you observe the patterns of recent years, monsoons have strong years and weak years, but they rarely deviate far away from the mean due to the dynamic feedback systems. It is a self-regulating system, but there have been occasions when the anomaly has lasted for few decades.
But what happened 4,000 years back was truly unusual; it was an anomaly larger than anything the subcontinent had faced since in the last 10,000 years. A paper published recently by Berkelhammer was able to narrow down the exact time frame during which this shift happened and it coincides with the decline of the Harappan civilization. This new study does not depend on indirect proxies (like pollen data), but uses a direct terrestrial climate proxy from the Mawmluh Cave in Cherrapunji and hence was able to show an unprecedented age constraint.
According to the paper, the most dramatic change occurred between 4071 (+/- 18) years and 3888 (+/- 22 years) Before Present (BP) for a period of 183 years. First there was a small rise between 4315 and 4303 years and a more precipitous one between 4071 and 4049 years BP. Once this change — which was earlier onset of monsoons or earlier withdrawal — happened, the monsoons stayed in this state for around 180 years before returning to normal values. Earlier monsoon withdrawal suggests that monsoon, which is tied to ocean-atmosphere dynamics and influences from the land surface, was weakened. For the Ghaggar-Hakra, which was fed by the monsoons, the impact was quite serious as it affected the habitability along its course. The study is quite interesting because it provides precise numbers for the duration and onset time for this climactic event. The previous studies did not have proper age constraints and some of them depended on factors (pollen, sedimentation rates) which could be influenced by external natural and man-made causes
Thus when one study claims that Ghaggar was a monsoon fed river and hence was easily susceptible to the vagaries of declining rainfall, there is another which shows that Sarasvati was a glacier-fed river and climate is not the only cause for changes. A paper in Current Science by K S Valdiya published in January of this year, titled The river Sarasvati was a Himalayan-born river, provides numerous counter arguments. First, the Sarasvati flowed through Western Rajasthan, which is one of the dustiest places on earth. 3500 years of dust storms have altered the landscape so much that the landforms created by the river would not be visible today. Second, the river ran through a region which saw tectonic upheavals and that would have altered the course of the river, like what happened to Indus. Third, the dimensions of paleochannels in the upper reaches of the river show that it was created by a large long-lived system. The paper strongly states that it was not a weakened monsoon, but the deflection of rivers by powerful tectonic activities which caused the decline of the Harappan civilisation along the Ghaggar river. Around 3,750 years Before Present, the Tamasa river joined Yamuna and a millennia later the Sutlej joined Beas. Due to this, the discharge of water in the Ghaggar was reduced and forced the Harappans to migrate elsewhere.
This is a contentious issue among academics; arguments and counter-arguments arrive sooner than you can digest them. While one controversy is over if tectonics or monsoon was responsible for the drying up of the river, there is another one over the climatic conditions during the Mature Harappan period. Some papers claim that Mature Harappan period occurred in a wetter phase and there are several others which show that Harappan urbanism rose in an arid phase. Paleoclimatology is a complicated field and more studies will give clarity to this controversy. But there is one certainty: the decline of the Harappan civilisation was not caused by invading Aryans or non-Aryans.
References:
- Singh, Upinder. A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century. 1st ed. Prentice Hall, 2009.
- Basham, AL The Wonder That Was India;: A Survey of the Culture of the Indian Sub-continent Before the Coming of the Muslims. 21st ed. Evergreen, 1977.
- Danino, Michel. Lost River: On The Trail of the Sarasvati. Penguin Books India, 2010.
- Berkelhammer, M, A Sinha, L Stott, H Cheng, F S R Pausata, and K Yoshimura (2012), An abrupt shift in the Indian monsoon 4000 years ago, in Climates, Landscapes, and Civilizations, Geophys. Monogr. Ser., vol. 198, edited by L. Giosan et al., 75–87, AGU, Washington, D. C., doi:10.1029/2012GM001207.
- Valdiya, KS “The River Saraswati Was a Himalayan-born River.” CURRENT SCIENCE 104, no. 1 (2013): 42–54.
- Giosan, Liviu, Peter D Clift, Mark G Macklin, Dorian Q Fuller, Stefan Constantinescu, Julie A Durcan, Thomas Stevens, et al. “Fluvial Landscapes of the Harappan Civilization.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (May 29, 2012). doi:10.1073/pnas.1112743109.
Indian History Carnival–62: Indo-Europeans, Muchunti Mosque, Joao Da Cruz, Christoph Clavius
- At his blog at Discover, Razib Khan presents his hypothesis for West Asian migration to India
- Giacomo Benedetti has a post on a similar theme of Indo-Iranians, Aryan invasion etc. and writes
I have the impression that the Aryan Invasionism follows the same method as Creationism. The supporters of the Indo-Iranian invasion from the European steppes of Central and South Asia have no sacred text to defend, although sometimes they use the Vedas or the Avesta with biased (often racial) interpretations. They have a sort of preconceived faith, maybe based on a secret, obstinate Eurocentrism: Europeans must be the conquerors of the Indo-European world, and not the conquered or colonized, they must be the origin of the change, not the recipients.So, they already firmly believe that the Indo-Aryans must have arrived there in the 2nd millennium BC, and so we have to find, in one way or another, the facts able to support that dogma. I think that we should rather start from the archaeological facts, and build a theory from there, seeing if we find a harmony with linguistics and textual traditions, and also genetics. Someone could object (with Nietzsche) that there are no facts, only interpretations, particularly in the realm of prehistoric archaeology, but still, there are worse and better interpretations. The evolution and connections of material cultures can give a reliable picture, which can be mirrored by the linguistic and textual tradition.
- One of the oldest mosques in Calicut is called Muchunti Mosque because it may have been found by a person named Muchiyan. But shouldn’t it be Muchanti (junction) mosque.? Calicut Heritage investigates
Sure enough we found an alternative possibility on the streets of faraway Penang in Malyasia. On Pitt Street to be exact, named by the British after the Prime Minister, William Pitt, the Younger. The street is now called Jalan Masjid Kapitan Keling, after a mosque built by a South Indian Captain of a ship. Down the street one finds the Tamil area of Chulia Street, formerly called Muchanti (junction). A little away from this junction on the Penang Road, we come across a notable Malabar monument, in Kampung Malabar (the Malabar colony), named after a faith healer from Calicut named Syed Mustafa Idris Koya. The entire Penang Road is known in Tamil locally as Ezhu Muchanti (the junction of seven roads). Muchanti in Tamil means a junction and perhaps meant the same in 13th century Malayalam, too. Muchunti Palli in Calicut is also situated on a junction where three paths meet. Did Muchanti Palli become Muchunti Palli in due course?
- Maddy revises his earlier tale of Joao Da Cruz or John of the Cross with some new information. If you have not read this story of the Nair boy who went to Lisbon, met King Manuel, converted to Christianity, and became responsible for the conversion of the Paravas in Tuticorin, you should
It was on such a tense day in Tuticorin during 1534, when as usual, a Parava woman went out to sell her home made Paniyarams. As it appears from the texts of Teixeira, a Muslim insulted her and the lady promptly went home and complained to her husband. The enraged man went out and a fight ensured with the Muslim, during which the Muslim cut off an earlobe of the Parava, a great insult indeed for they wore large ornaments on their ears which extended down to their shoulders. So the honor of the entire community was compromised, as Schurhammer reports. The two groups went at each other’s throats and a great many were killed. The Muslims of neighboring towns joined the fracas and the Paravas were systematically decimated (in fact a bounty of 5 fanams per head were initially paid to the mercenaries, but as the heads piled up, this was reduced to one fanam). The Paravas had nowhere to go and were in a dire situation with no hope (A little exaggeration can be seen in these accounts – since the Muslims needed the Parava to eventually go out to sea and continue with their business and pay them the taxes).It was into this mess that the indebted Joa Da Cruz strayed. The Paravas talked to him and explained their desperate plight. Seeing an opportunity to redeem himself, Da Cruz suggested that they convert and get allied to the Portuguese to save themselves. The Paravas, seeing no other alternative, agreed.
- Mughal India blog writes about knowledge circulated during Aurangzeb’s time
Clavius’ work, which responded to and was inspired by Arabic mathematicians and scientists in Latin translation, here a generation after its publication is translated back into Arabic to be read, presumably by elites at the court of Aurangzeb, where the work’s translator and his son were courtiers. This translation demonstrates the complexity of knowledge flows – that they were synchronic as well as diachronic, and also involved a process not just of translation, but of re-translation, re-interpretation and development as they travelled. Furthermore, the inscriptions taken in tandem, one in English made by an East India official, the other in Arabic by a Mughal courtier, open the possibility that already in Aurangzeb’s reign, Mughal elites travelled to Europe perhaps to study. In the case of Mu‘tamid Khan, the translator of this text, he mastered the technical idiom of geometry and mathematics in Latin, and then translated it into an equally complex scholarly language, Arabic. Not an uncommon intellectual feat at the Mughal court, this process of scientific translation remains to be studied in depth. It is also possible that the presence of the Jesuits at Goa had an influence on the production of this translation, but firm evidence remains to be found.
- The next Carnival will be up on March 15th. If you have any blog links, please send it to varnam.blog @gmail.com
Second, Reich agrees that the ANI (West Eurasian, “Ancestral North India”) admixture into the India population exhibits at least two admixture events. There were hints of this in the original 2009 paper, and looking more closely at the South Asian data others have suggested this more explicitly. This seems the best explanation for why non-Brahmin upper castes in South India do exhibit distance on the ANI-ASI cline from lower castes, but without clear connection to many ancestral components with a “northern” affinity present at non-trivial levels in Indo-European speaking groups and South Indian Brahmins (or those groups which have admixed with Brahmins, such as Nairs).
The hypothesis I prefer is that there was an initial wave of West Asian agriculturalists who arrived in the Indian subcontinent <10,000 years B.P., and admixed with the ASI (“Ancestral South Indian”) substrate. Then, there was at least one further substantial demographic wave of West Eurasians, probably bringing the Indo-European languages. This population had more northern affinities (though not exclusively; the Basque vs. non-Basque difference in European seems to be a West Asian element), which explains the subsidiary minor explicitly European-like element found in many upper caste populations, and to a lesser extent Indo-European speaking South Asians generally. Finally, I do suspect that some groups in the Northwest, such as Jatts, were shaped by later migrations.
Islamic Invasions and the Delhi Sultanate: Two American Versions
Last year I audited two courses on World History from two American Universities. The first one was the Making of Modern World from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the second, The Modern World: Global History since 1760 from Princeton University via Coursera. A common area covered in both the courses were the Islamic invasions of India and the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate. The UCSD course by Prof. Matthew Herbst, spent almost an hour on the topic, while that much time was not spent by Prof. Jeremy Adelman of Princeton. While the UCSD lectures are still available online, the Princeton ones have gone offline and so the I have to rely on the course textbook for material. In this post, we will look at how the two professors dealt with the material.
Princeton
How did India look during that period? They were ruled by Rajas, supported by high-caste Brahmins. These Brahmins previously had converted much of uncultivated India into arable land. The Brahmins also did two other things: they built temples and converted indigenous hunter-gatherers to Hinduism. Following that they spread the religion and expanded the agrarian tax base. The relationship between the Raja and the Brahmin was one of quid pro quo. The Brahmins created elaborate genealogies for the kings and the kings besides giving them wealth learned Sanskrit culture and became patrons of arts.
When the Turkish warlords entered India, they introduced their own customs while accepting Indian customs like the caste system. Since they were concerned with promoting their religion, they built grand mosques and libraries. There is mention of both Mahmud of Ghazna and Muhammad Ghuri: the former just led some “expeditions” into North India while the latter led a wave of “invasions.” Much later, when the Delhi Sultanate was established, they strengthened the cultural diversity and tolerance, which were the hallmarks of Indian society. They did not convert their subjects and due to this India never became an Islamic-dominate country.
Also, by the time the Turks arrived, India had experienced many invaders and had assimilated them. The Turks cooperated with the assimilation and thought of themselves as Indians, but they never changed the way they dressed and soon the local started wearing trousers and robes. They had an influence on the language as well: Persian was made the court and administrative language even though the majority of the people they ruled did not speak that language.
According to the authors, Islam did not become a conquering religion in India; they collected jaziya and let people worship as they pleased. The new sultans granted land to the ulema and Sufi saints, like how the Hindu rajas had done to Brahmins.
University of California, San Diego
Prof. Herbst sets the context by talking about the Egyptian Mamluks, who were Central Asian pagans who were captured, sold, converted and eventually ruled Egypt as elites. They were Muslim rulers who were ruling over a Muslim population and even though they were outsiders in terms of language and culture, they were insiders in terms of religion. These outsiders united the people by advocating jihad against the enemies of Islam like the Mongols, Crusaders and Shiites. But when it came to the Delhi Sultanate, they had a different problem: they were a Muslim power ruling a numerically large non-Muslim population with a radically different culture.
He explains the three approaches of Islam in India during this period.
The first was to plunder and leave. According to Prof. Herbst, Mahmud of Ghazni did not lead “expeditions”; this descendent of a Mamluk, led military campaigns for plunder. He attacked cities, sacked temples and wanted to destroy the idolaters of India. The Somnath temple was destroyed and the idols of Shiva were broken and there were two reasons for it. One, the temples had money and it was simple plunder. Second, Hindu temples have representation of God and that if offensive to the invaders because that is forbidden in their religion. Mahmud called it jihad and the Caliph from Baghdad wrote a letter congratulating him for a quarter of century of attacks.
The second approach was to conquer and stay which the Delhi Sultanate did from the 13th to the 16th century. Their goal was to change India from Dar al-Harb to Dar al-Islam and that was a hard task in a land which was holy to another religion. Also the Delhi Sultans were outsiders who ate different food, spoke a different language and had a different style of clothing. The Caliph appreciated the work of the Sultans, but then Indians did not care much for the Caliph. They adopted Persian as the language of the court, but a vast majority of Indians did not speak that language. To build legitimacy in such an atmosphere, they did few things.
They built the Qutub complex using the pillars of destroyed Hindu and Jain temples. Then they also bought the iron pillar and some Asoka edicts there. Then a 240 ft high minar was built. Obviously such a tall minaret was not for the muezzin to call the faithful for prayer, but it was a statement of power to the 100 million non-Muslims. Even though India lay at the geographic fringe of Dar al-Islam, they had to be central in their accomplishments. For this they hired Muslim poets and judges: Ibn Battuta, a North African Muslim, thus found a job a qadi in Delhi and Muslim scholarship and literature started rising from India.
The third approach was the Sufi way. The Sufis, who emphasized a person experience with God and used images of sexuality and drunkenness, challenged the tolerance of the ulema. They were organized into brotherhoods under a sheikh. They ran soup kitchens, asked the followers to develop river like generosity and enjoy worldly pleasures in moderation. They did not want to be seen associated with the administration: there is a story of one of the sheiks leaving through the backdoor when the Sultan visited. When the Sufi sheikhs died, their shrines became places of pilgrimage and very soon there were Muslim places of pilgrimage in a place where there was none. Prof. Herbst ends by talking about Vijayanagara empire, which was established in South India during this period to ward off the Islamic invasions.
The Princeton version has no mention of the plunder or the destruction of temples; they are replaced with euphemisms like “expeditions” or “spilled into” as if they came on a sightseeing trip. Also, in their versions empires like the Mauryas and Guptas which ruled a large portion of India did not exist and it was left to the Brahmins to make the whole country arable. That must have been quite an effort. The UCSD version does not resort to such political correctness. These two interpretations shows how Indian history is shaped and massaged in American Universities. Sometimes you know the historian and are prepared for the bias. When it comes to unknown historians, it is important to read multiple interpretations to understand the history of the historian.
References:
- Making of the Modern World 13, Lecture 3, Lecture 4 at UC San Diego of April, 2012
- Tignor, Robert, Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Aron, Stephen Kotkin, Suzanne Marchand, Gyan Prakash, and Michael Tsin. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World: From 1000 CE to the Present (Third Edition). Third Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
The Astronomical Code of the Rig Veda
Prof. Subhash Kak has put his book The Astronomical Code of the Rig Veda in the public domain (via Michel Danino). From the introduction of the book
My own discovery was triggered by an essay in a popular magazine in November 1992 pointing out the marvelous coincidence that the moon and the sun are nearly of identical size when viewed from the earth. I had an overpowering feeling that the matter of size had something to do with the structure of the R. gveda. Checking the text in my library, I quickly discovered that the number of hymns encoded facts about the passage of the sun and the moon. The next task was to make sure that the correspondence was not just a coincidence, which required a careful sifting of numerical and textual data. I later found a confirmation of these numbers in the structure of the Atharvaveda and the Bhagavadgita.
There are those who argue that human progress can be measured only in terms of scientific progress. To such people the question of the science of the R. gveda is of much importance, for it is the oldest complete book that has come down to mankind.
Scholarly opinion has often swung between two extreme views on the past: one barbaric, the other idyllic. In truth, the past was much more of a complex affair than suggested by either of these labels. The discovery of the astronomical code not only allows us a new look at the rise of early science, it also focuses on the need to find the developmental process at the basis of the hymns[The Astronomical Code of the Rig Veda]
I have not read this book yet, but will do soon. You can download the entire PDF here
Napoleon, New Orleans and British in India
By the 1800s, the British had occupied Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, and Northern Circars with the noble goal of personal enrichment. Large parts of the country still lay outside British control with the Marathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad and Tipu Sultan. There was a nominal Mughal emperor who ruled over a vastly shrunk empire. Once forces under Arthur Wellesley, the man who would defeat Napoleon years later, eliminated Tipu Sultan in 1799, it opened up the path for British supremacy in India. While all of these was happening in India, another geopolitical game was being played in the Western hemisphere involving a Spanish playboy, a French emperor, an enlightened American President who kept slaves and actual slaves who defeated two empires. A fortuitous turn of events changed the history of United States and the colonial European powers shifted their gaze to the East.
When Napoleon evaluated the French position towards the end of the 18th century, it looked terrible. The Egyptian invasion had failed, so had the creation of the Mediterranean empire. The French position in India did not look promising and they had already lost the vast territories of Canada to the British. But much more important was the development in their colony Saint-Domingue — the richest colony in the Western hemisphere — where the slaves had revolted. The Austrians and the Russians formed an alliance to stop France and war was happening in Switzerland and Germany. From these data points he decided what had to be done: France needs to reclaim Saint-Domingue as well as create an empire in United States.
In 1800, Spain controlled a vast amount of territory which included large parts of what is now United States (Florida, Louisiana), Mexico, Central America, Cuba, and the entire Western and North parts of South America. In spite of this, Spain was seen as a weak empire due to misrule by Charles IV, who did not want to govern and was happy to delegate the responsibility to someone else. That someone was Manuel de Godoy who became the Prime Minister mostly because he was the Queen’s lover and thus was able to quickly become powerful and influence the King.
Among all the possessions of Spain, the port of New Orleans, was of special interest to Napoleon. During that period, when the United States did not have highways or railroads to transport goods across the nation, but they had rivers. American agricultural goods like wheat, corn and cattle were transported down Ohio river and the Mississippi to the port of New Orleans. At the port, the goods were moved to bigger ships and taken to the East Coast as well as to other countries across the Atlantic. Even though the port was under Spanish control, they had a relatively peaceful policy towards American shipping. No tariff duties had to be paid to Spain before the goods were moved to larger ships. Napoleon knew that if he controlled New Orleans with his new army, he could choke United States and control its fate.
To realize his vision, Napoleon came up with a three point plan.
- Make peace with Austria and Britain. He had problems with Britain during the Egyptian invasion and if he made peace with them, his fleet could cross the Atlantic without collateral damage.
- Create secret deal with Spain
- Assemble a large expeditionary force with hundreds of ships for the conquest of Saint-Domingue and holding on to New Orleans.
Everything went as planned. He made peace with Austria and Britain. Godoy wanted some property in Tuscany and in return he was willing to give Louisiana to the French. The Third Treaty of San Ildefonso was made in secret exactly as Napoleon wanted. The large force was assembled and Napoleon was ready to execute his vision. The United States under Thomas Jefferson was shocked as the country did not have an army to fight Bonaparte. Even though New Orleans was under the control of Spain, Jefferson was sure that he would not have the same business relation with a French controlled New Orleans.
Two events saved United States. First Thomas Jefferson threatened France that if such an event happened, they would join forces with Britain. This was a particularly bold statement because Britain and United States were fighting a war just more than a decade back. Maybe , he was borrowing the enemy of my enemy concept from Chanakya. Then Jefferson had no other choice; he had an army of 1500 men, an unreliable militia, and a navy which was no match against the French. For the security of the nation, he had to align himself with a bigger power.
Second and probably what sealed the fate of the French invasion were guns, germs, steel and something Jared Diamond would not have written about: slaves. When a 10,000 strong French army, under the leadership of Napoleon’s brother-in-law arrived at Saint-Domingue, the slaves gave them a good fight. Napoleon wanted to establish slavery in the colonies and for the slaves, it was a battle for their future. L’Ouverture, the slave leader, was captured through trickery and sent to France where he died in prison. But soon yellow fever stuck and the French army never recovered from it. Those who survived the machetes fell to the germs. Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc, too died from the disease.
This was unexpected and Napoleon fell into despair. He had to make a critical decision. Should he proceed to the American mainland or does he withdraw back to Europe? Some of his advisors suggested that he go forward with his plans, but he decided to go back to Europe and continue his wars against the British there. If the United States aligned with the British, that would be a formidable power and in case there was such a battle, he could lose his Caribbean possessions.
What was surprising was another decision he made: he decided to sell Louisiana to the United States at a cheap price of 3 cents per acre. He could have returned it back to Spain, but instead he decided to sell it to the country he was coming to build his empire. There were few reasons for this strange decision. First, the secret deal he made with Spain got bogged down over details. Second, Godoy fell out of favor with the Emperor and compared to this fool, Napoleon found the Americans more palatable because New Orleans would make America more powerful and a powerful America would keep the British busy to his favor. Third, he needed money for his wars in Europe.
This turned out to be a blessing for the Americans. This video shows the population growth of United States through that period; with New Orleans secure, the country started moving from the Atlantic border to the West and the future of North America changed.
A decade earlier the British had made a bid to conquer Saint-Domingue, but they were defeated by the slaves and yellow fever. Then they tried to conquer Buenos Aires and that costly expedition failed as well. The retreat of the French, the stability of United States and Wellesley’s growing Indian empire made the British pay more attention to the East and shift the base of their operations. They would still fight the Americans in the War of 1812, but their shift to India paid rich dividends for them. Following the defeat of the Marathas, they had much of India under their control.
References
- Lecture titled “The Lucky Americans” by Prof. Philip D. Zelikow at the University of Virginia
- Lectures by Prof. Michael Parrish at UC San Diego on America and the World
- Keay, John. India: A History. Grove Press, 2001.
- Sivers, Peter von, Charles A. Desnoyers, and George B. Stow. Patterns of World History: Since 1750. 1st ed. Oxford University Press, USA, 2011.
Origins of Indian traditions
Slate has an expanded article based on last year’s discovery of “curry” in Farmana. It has details on the technical advances that made this discovery possible.
Archaeologists have long known how to spot some ancient leftovers. The biggest breakthrough came in the 1960s, when excavators began to drop soil from their sites—particularly from places where food likely was prepared—onto mesh screens. The scientists then washed the earth away with water, leaving behind little bits of stone, animal bones, and tiny seeds of wheat, barley, millets, and beans. This flotation method allowed scientists to piece together a rough picture of an ancient diet. “But spices are absent in macro-botanical record,” says archaeologist Arunima Kashyap at Washington State University Vancouver, who, along with Steve Weber, made the recent proto-curry discovery.*
Examining the human teeth and the residue from the cooking pots, Kashyap spotted the telltale signs of turmeric and ginger, two key ingredients, even today, of a typical curry. This marked the first time researchers had found unmistakable traces of the spices in the Indus civilization. Wanting to be sure, she and Weber took to their kitchens in Vancouver, Washington. “We got traditional recipes, cooked dishes, then examined the residues to see how the structures broke down,” Weber recalls. The results matched what they had unearthed in the field. “Then we knew we had the oldest record of ginger and turmeric.” Dated to between 2500 and 2200 B.C., the finds are the first time either spice has been identified in the Indus. They also found a carbonized clove of garlic, a plant that was used in this era by cooks from Egypt to China.[The Mystery of Curry]
As you read the article you find that our food habits (rice with curry, tandoori chicken), the ingredients used in our food (ginger, turmeric), culture of leaving food for animals and treating cows as sacred animals have not changed in the past four millennia.