Mysore’s Pre-colonial Potentialities for Capitalist Development and Industrialization

Abstract

This paper enquires into Mysore’s potentialities for a proto-capitalist development and a sort of industrialization during the reigns of Haidar ‘Ali (r. 1761–82) and Tipu Sultan (r. 1782–99)—the first Muslim rulers of the sultanate of Mysore. During the second half of the eighteenth century, these two autocrats were not only among the most powerful modernizers of South India but also of the subcontinent and Asia as a whole. The threat posed by the growing power of the British East India Company lubricated the wheels of political, fiscal, and military reforms and fuelled profound efforts at centralization. In conjunction with the already existing advances in commerce, artisanry, and incipient capitalist relations of production, the changes that were set in motion suggest that Mysore found itself in an interim stage and historical conjuncture with multiple prospects of socio-economic developments, as well as the potential scope for a transition towards a type of industrial capitalism.

Tipu and the Turks: An Islamicate Embassy in the Age of British Expansion

“…Nevertheless, it is precisely the novelty of these ambitions that has led recent scholarship to examine the place of Mysore in the historical evolution of global capitalism. 74 It was also the fact that Tipu was mirroring the monopolistic practices of his European rivals that led a Company servant to claim that the monarch was seeking to create "factories in the Turkish dominions" with the intention "that no Europeans shall [trade] therein." 75 For all the transitional trends reflected in the Mysore-Ottoman embassy, in South Asia itself this period ultimately culminated in the formation of a colonial diplomatic order.…”