Mysore's Mediations

Tipu Sultan (r. 1782–99), ruler of Mysore, carved out one of the most powerful polities in India as the Mughal Empire fragmented. For historians, doubtless the most important legacy of his reign was the deft challenge it posed to British colonial expansion. Tipu is today also recalled, among other things, for his military innovations (“Tipu's rockets,” for example, being important precursors to the famed British Congreve missiles) and his idiosyncratic obsession with tigers for royal iconography (and so a memorable moniker for the sultan, “Tiger of Mysore”). Beginning with the reign of Tipu's father, Haidar ‘Ali, the relatively compact polity of Mysore had also begun making unusually ambitious efforts to shore up its transregional ties.Footnote ¹⁵ Famously, thus, an “Indomania” that swept pre-Revolutionary Paris with the arrival there of a suite of Tipu's envoys in 1788. In France to propose an alliance against the British, the stir this embassy created among local glitterati was vividly commemorated in print, watercolour, and even porcelain. A particularly arresting French gouache depicted a powdered, bewigged crowd at Saint-Cloud, swirling excitedly around Tipu's turban-draped, cummerbund-clad delegates.Footnote ¹⁶ Later, Tipu also reached out to Napoleon after the general's invasion of Ottoman Egypt. Farther afield, he even indirectly captured the fascination of a new-born United States.Footnote ¹⁷

But among historians of South Asia, it was an embassy that Tipu sent to the Turks which has so far excited the most attention. Two years before his envoys reached the Bourbon court, a remarkable number of some nine hundred of Tipu's servants travelled from India to the Ottoman court of Emperor ‘Abdülhamid I (r. 1774–89). Much as matters stood with Mysore's French connections, this delegation to Istanbul sought to solicit support for the regime's protracted conflicts against the British.Footnote ¹⁸ That diplomatic goal, however, proved quixotic. The Ottomans were themselves experiencing serious strains and upheavals at the time, owing both to rebellions within their domains and wars with adversaries abroad. Weathering as they were “generations of crisis,” as Christopher Neumann put it in his survey of Ottoman diplomacy, the empire was ultimately in no position to commit to promises of an alliance with far-off Mysore.Footnote ¹⁹ Nevertheless, the embassy remains important in South Asian historiography. In the main, this is because it heralded, in quite striking fashion at that, a very new phase in regional political culture. With the decline of the Mughal Empire, which had previously served as the main source for provincial claims to political legitimacy in India, regional crowns like Mysore now began betraying a “marked change” in more regularly reaching out to powers in the wider Islamicate world.Footnote ²⁰ As British colonial expansion accelerated in the second half of the eighteenth century, so did this trend.Footnote ²¹

Previous histories of Tipu's embassy to the Turks have relied on several sets of sources, most of them either of Indian or European provenance. To begin, there exist materials from Mysore itself, which include Tipu's letters of instruction to his main representatives (wakīls). Many of these letters were translated and published by an English East India Company servant as early as 1811.Footnote ²² There exist, also, scattered reports on the embassy in French and British imperial archives.Footnote ²³ Arguably the most significant source, however, has been the Indo-Persian text Waqā’i‘-yi Manāzil-i Rūm (Account of the journey to Rum). Written by a scribe embedded within the embassy, this narrative account was meant to serve as an official chronicle of sorts. But though an eyewitness report, it has its limitations as a historical source. As the editor of its modern recension himself complained, the text's language is “extremely careless.” Its syntax is “defective.” The prose is at times recondite to the point of illegibility, due in part to its use of “archaic words and forms of spelling,” and in part because of its haphazard recruitment of loanwords from “Portuguese, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, and Hindi.”Footnote ²⁴ The patient scholar can perhaps overcome such philological problems, some of which in turn doubtless owe to the peculiar creolisation that Persian underwent in peninsular India. Yet an issue which more seriously mitigates a thorough reconstruction based on this text alone is the incompleteness of its narrative. The text only covers the first leg of the embassy's travels. Beginning on the Malabar Coast, it ends abruptly once the envoys reach Ottoman Iraq.Footnote ²⁵

What happened next? For firsthand answers to that question, we have to turn to the Ottoman Archives, whose paper trail picks up almost exactly where the Waqā’i‘ ends, and whose records feature at the heart of this essay. To date, only two scholars, Turkish historians Hikmet Bayur and İsmail Uzunçarşılı, have made any use of these sources.Footnote ²⁶ They, however, were chiefly interested in the royal letters that were exchanged between Mysore and the Ottomans, and so neglected a larger clutch of administrative documents containing details regarding the embassy's movements through Turkish domains, its stay of nearly a year at the Ottoman capital, and the fêtes and formalities which punctuated the visit. To be sure, the Indian historian N. R. Farooqi had already alerted scholars to the value of Ottoman sources for the study of South Asia, whereas the Pakistani scholar Riazul Islam had painstakingly catalogued numerous instances of diplomatic exchange between the Mughals and Ottomans.Footnote ²⁷ Focused as both those scholars were on the classical era of the Islamicate empires, neither however ventured any remarks on how connections between the subcontinent and the Middle East changed with “the manifest weakening of Mughal power by about 1750.” For as Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have averred, transformations which arrived with Mughal decline and British colonialism did not simply spell the end of earlier transregional ties. To the contrary, those political changes had paradoxical yet powerful “consequences in terms of a growing place of the Ottomans in South Asia.”Footnote ²⁸ We shall be returning to this theme of imperial change presently. But first, a little more on the collection at hand.

In all, there exist some two dozen Ottoman documents on Tipu's emissaries, ranging from brief rescripts to detailed imperial orders (see the appendix, below, for a select list). Together, the sources span reports of the arrival of the embassy in Ottoman domains, its circulations through Iraq, Anatolia, and elsewhere, and its reception and sojourn in Istanbul. There may exist other documents still, as current indexes contain numerous errors stemming from an apparent confusion over Indic terms. “Tipu” is rendered as “Petyo” in some of the catalogue entries. His capital, Srirangapatnam, is sometime given as “Patam” (itself a corruption of the abbreviated “Patan”). Evidently more accustomed to encountering European plenipotentiaries in the Porte's papers, in one index entry on the embassy, archivists have also muddled two regions that were under Ottoman influence, thereby mistaking Baghdad (Bağdat) for Moldavia (Boğdan). It may be added that the documents are strewn across different collections within the Ottoman Archives. They include its epistolary collections (“Name Defteri”);Footnote ²⁹ records of internal and external affairs (“Cevdet Dahiliye”; “Cevdet Hariciye”); a major collection of executive commands (“Hatt-ı Hümayun”); and the sultanic collections of the then-emperor regnant (“Ali Emîrî Tasnifi I. Abdülhamid”). For a closer look at its contents, in the next section I recapitulate from the collection on the Mysore embassy some key moments, gleaning it selectively, not exhaustively, towards a narrative reconstruction.

Between the Kaveri and the Bosphorus

The first agent from Mysore to leave an impression on the Porte's papers was not a member of the embassy itself. Rather it was one ‘Usman Khan, a messenger from Mysore who reached Istanbul in March 1785 with another Indian official.Footnote ³⁰ Sent in advance to convey word of Tipu's plans to pursue diplomatic contact, a pithy imperial record on ‘Usman Khan noted that he and his companion were assisted in their travels through Ottoman territories by Baghdad's governor (Vali), Süleyman Paşa. The itinerary they took to Istanbul was identical to the one their compatriots would follow the next year. After a maritime journey from the western seaboard of India to the Persian Gulf, they transitioned to an overland caravan route which took them through Mesopotamia and Anatolia. On arriving in Istanbul, ‘Usman Khan and his companion were given a state subvention to defray their living costs (the stipend included money to visit a hammam, baths perhaps much needed after the journey of over four thousand miles).Footnote ³¹ As we shall see below, in many ways the experiences of these messengers prefigured, in miniature, the more elaborate welcome that Ottoman statesmen accorded to the official embassy.

Setting sail from the port of Tadri on the Malabar Coast in March 1786, that large body of Tipu's subjects reached Basra in the Gulf in August of that year. Once it made landfall in Iraq, Istanbul again delegated responsibility for receiving the party to the Iraqi governor: “with a pomp and dignity,” the pasha was instructed, “befitting our state.”Footnote ³² Despite its mammoth size, or indeed because of it, the embassy was not acephalous, of course. There was a clear sense of hierarchy implied in the exchanges between the governor's office and the Indian ambassadors. Süleyman Paşa primarily dealt with a handful of officials like Saiyid Ghulam ‘Ali Khan and Shah Nurullah Khan, two figures whom Tipu himself had designated as his lead wakīls. Indeed, Tipu had also apparently played a part in stipulating for the embassy some specific chains of command. In a letter to one of the wakīls in February 1786, for instance, the ruler had listed and ranked several groups that were meant to constitute a corps of 501 persons within the embassy. This particular cadre of Mysore's agents had military officials (jauqdār) at the top, but also “various other servants” (shāgird-pesha wa-ghairu-hu) below, as for example sweepers (khāk-rob), gofers (har-kāra), torch-bearers (mish‘al-chī), artillerymen (golan-dāz), scribes (munshī), and translators (do-bhāshī).Footnote ³³

Given its size, it may be worth adding here that the embassy must have also reflected something of Mysore's multi-confessional makeup, and so surely included many unaccounted-for non-Muslims. It also included a few women, at least on the return journey.Footnote ³⁴ Yet the plethora of personnel also meant that the chief wakīls found it increasingly difficult to impose discipline on the large travelling body. During the stopover in Iraq, which lasted nearly a year, the most prominent theme became the embassy's dwindling numbers, a haemorrhage that owed both to desertions and to the shipwreck of one of the embassy's vessels in the Indian Ocean. The embassy's scribe frequently alluded to the problems caused by the insubordination and attrition of its staff, whereas from a rather cursory Ottoman headcount, which clearly did not factor in the many servants and factotums of the embassy, we find that by the time the Indians left Baghdad for Istanbul, their number had dropped to 330.Footnote ³⁵

Even so, it is evident from Ottoman sources that the imperial state took it upon itself to welcome the envoys with sundry forms of assistance. From Iraq onwards, the host government supplied the visitors with funds, foodstuffs, and logistical support. All of this, in turn, was driven by a stated desire to adhere to specified protocols of diplomatic conduct. In orders sent to Baghdad, Istanbul indeed insisted on these points. Terms the Porte repeatedly invoked with reference to the embassy were mihman-nevazi, mihmandarlık, or mihmandari, all expressions for “hospitality,” but which served here as concepts for diplomatic cordiality.Footnote ³⁶ Tipu was himself a stickler for such niceties, and had given firm instructions to his wakīls to address notables in the Ottoman Empire with “complete respect” (ba-kamāl-i ‘ajīr wa ilhāh) and as “supplicants and solicitors” (multajī wa mustad‘ī).Footnote ³⁷ Besides seeing to it that their basic needs were met with regular grants of rations, Ottoman authorities made other arrangements for the visitors. We know from the Waqā’i, for example, that the Indians were eager to visit, for purposes of pilgrimage (ziyārat), different sacred sites in and around the Gulf.Footnote ³⁸ In this regard, the most coveted destinations were the great shrine cities of Najaf and Karabala. Dated to May 1787, an Ottoman rescript illustrates how the wheels of the provincial government were made to turn to organise a pilgrimage caravan for the ambassadors to south-central Iraq, and how this too was regarded as a matter of diplomatic procedure:

It is not clear why the embassy's stay in Iraq lasted as long as it did. Authorities in Baghdad may have had to wait for further word from Istanbul, or perhaps the fraying of order within the embassy itself caused the hold-up. Another reason was perhaps a central objective of the diplomatic mission itself, which, as historians have already noted, was to develop closer commercial relations with the Gulf.Footnote ⁴⁰ From the Ottoman side, we learn besides that the embassy had presented a formal invitation for a Turkish trading settlement to be established at Mysore.Footnote ⁴¹ In any event, come July 1787, preparations were finally put in place for the journey from Iraq to Istanbul. On the way to the capital, the consular convoy made stops in Ottoman towns and cities like Mosul, Mardin, Diyarbakır, and Çankırı. Two months later, it reached the Istanbul suburb of Üsküdar on the eastern banks of the Bosphorus. One Ottoman source tells us that the Porte received the party with a substantial stipend of 20,000 kuruş, as well as daily supplies of staples like salt, bread, and beef. Moreover, the imperial bureaucracy busied itself with other kinds of “organization and management,” such as supplying pack animals to porter the embassy's luggage to a villa that it was assigned in Üsküdar.Footnote ⁴² Another month passed before the embassy met with the Grand Vizier.Footnote ⁴³ Finally, in December, the main wakīls were granted an audience with the emperor.

The envoys then settled to winter in Istanbul. But at this stage, their already trying experiences of travel took a turn for the worse. Many from the embassy died. The primary and most proximate cause for the fatalities was a plague epidemic that tore through Istanbul. Yet disease was compounded by the fact that the visitors reportedly found it difficult to adjust to the regional cold climate. “India falls among the tropical countries (bilad-ı harrıdan), while the lands of Rum belong to the temperate climes (ekalim-i mu‘tedileden),” one document at the Porte noted.Footnote ⁴⁴ A record which more suggestively expanded on how diplomacy required sensitivity to such issues of cross-cultural accommodation was dated to January 1788 (Figure 1). It was an inventory of the foods that were provided to the embassy by the Porte. The source revealed that the Ottomans sought to accommodate the visitors by disbursing to them spices more common in Indian than Turkish cuisine. Besides basics like oil, sugar, candles, soap, starch (for laundry), beans, onions, vinegar, salt, milk, and meat, the list therefore also included more expensive and exotic items like ginger, cloves, cardamom, and saffron. And yet, the same document reported multiple deaths in the embassy since its arrival in Ottoman territories. As a result, annotations on the inventory reveal, the Porte also had to reduce the rations it had reserved for the embassy.Footnote ⁴⁵

Figure 1 An Ottoman inventory of foods that were provisioned to the Mysore embassy. The document also mentions multiple deaths among the visiting envoys. Source: OA, C.HR. 82/4063, courtesy of Osmanlı Arşivi.

Matters began to improve with the spring thaw, which also brought a flurry of further activity at the imperial chancery. The Porte decided that the Indians could now benefit from a change of scenery and accommodation, because “from want of harmony to this region's climate and food and drinks and flora, some of them have fallen ill, while some have succumbed to disease and died.” It was proposed that the visitors be relocated to a house by the sea, with the hope that the air there might prove convalescing.Footnote ⁴⁶ From the records that survive, it cannot be determined if the visitors were in fact granted a seaside villa. What was certainly arranged for, however, was a banquet in the suburb of Kağıdhane, a feast—ziyafet—to acclaim “the splendor and glory” of both the Mysore and Ottoman crowns. For that event, the hosts moreover organised entertainments focused on martial sports and prepared practice ranges for javelin, archery, shooting, and artillery, so that “they [the Indians] can offer a display of their skills.” In the meantime, the British ambassador at Istanbul was summoned to supply additional information on Tipu and his kingdom.Footnote ⁴⁷ With the feast, arrangements were also made for the Indians to be ferried through the Bosphorus on an imperial galleon for a sightseeing tour.Footnote ⁴⁸ For that purpose, it was ordered that the visitors be given a handy map (harita) of the imperial capital (see Figure 2 for a near-contemporary example).Footnote ⁴⁹

All of this culminated with another round of visits to the imperial court, where permission was finally granted for the ambassadors to take leave of the royal presence.Footnote ⁵⁰ The journey back took them through a different route, by way of the Mediterranean and Red Seas. After a stopover in Mecca in the Ottoman Hijaz region for another round of pilgrimage, this time the hajj, what remained of the original embassy at last crossed the western Indian Ocean to return to Mysore.

Figure 2 Detail from an 1801 Ottoman map, showing Istanbul (Kostantiniye) and the European (Rumeli) regions of the empire. The Mysore embassy's sojourn in the Turkish capital was marked by some ups and downs. Source: OA, HRT.h. 18, courtesy of Osmanlı Arşivi.

In Between Go-Betweens

In terms of the general historical trends that are reflected in this collection of documents, two points bear emphasis. First, the archive affords an important view of how embassies were practically and materially organised in Islamicate Eurasia. The administrative perspectives it offers are particularly valuable when examined alongside the narrative and epistolary sources that have been used by earlier studies. Second, though these are the records of an Islamicate embassy, it is important to bear in mind that the historical undertaking itself was powerfully motivated by the exigencies of British imperial expansion. As such it is also indicative of a transitional or in-between moment in the imperial histories of both India and Eurasia. Below I treat each of these issues in turn, with reference to broader institutional and bureaucratic, as well as imperial and inter-imperial contexts. Throughout, I emphasise the dynamics of both continuity and rupture.

Consider, firstly, the matter of material history. For scholars interested in the logistical aspects of Islamicate diplomacy, these records provide an almost unrivalled set of sources. How did embassies travel? What kinds of room and board were envoys offered? Insofar as answers to these questions are forthcoming from accounts from before the nineteenth century, they are scattered across numerous instances of exchanges between the Mughals, Ottomans, and Safavids. But not one of those earlier examples involved more than a few envoys carrying letters from one royal court to another. By contrast, Tipu's embassy stands out both because of its size and the immense distances it traversed across the Indian Ocean and the Eurasian landmass. Combined with the Waqā’i‘, as well as documents from Srirangapatnam itself, the records in question also allow for a study of how embassies were assembled with a clear sense of internal rank and stratification, further research regarding which may force us to qualify a historiography that has tended to represent Islamicate diplomatic ventures as exclusively “ad hoc” undertakings.Footnote ⁵¹ This collection is moreover truly bilateral in scope. No other example of an Islamicate embassy from before the Mysore-Ottoman exchange offers such depth and breadth of empirical evidence from both sides of an interstate exchange.

The collection also lends itself to a study of the cultural-symbolic aspects of Islamicate diplomacy. What role did language play? What ritual formalities structured elite interactions? Again, historians will find here much evidence of continuity with past traditions. So, while this collection is primarily in Turkish, the main mediating language between the embassy and the Porte remained that lingua franca of early modern Muslim elites—Persian.Footnote ⁵² Meanwhile, as in Mughal-Ottoman courtly encounters in the past, extensive forms of gift-giving were also observed between Mysore and the Turks. Tipu personally oversaw the purchase of several elephants and precious stones for the Ottoman emperor.Footnote ⁵³ As it happened, most of these gifts were lost during the shipwreck of the Mysore vessel at the Gulf. But in taking note of that accident, an Ottoman chronicler still made the telling observation, “it is customary in interstate relations to give gifts (beyn-ed-düvel hedaya irsali mutad olup).”Footnote ⁵⁴ With respect to ceremonials of sociability like feasts, historians have paid relatively little attention to how formalities surrounding food and drink might have had implications for diplomatic conduct.Footnote ⁵⁵ But the little evidence we have at hand would seem to suggest that ambassadorial comportment crucially hinged on what Norbert Elias, in the context of European history, called “courtly manners.” Back in the 1650s, for instance, an Ottoman ambassador was roundly rebuked as an “ox” and an “ignorant Bosnian” for his uncouth behaviour at dinner with a Mughal counterpart.Footnote ⁵⁶ As for the martial sports in which the envoys participated, Tipu himself had instructed that the embassy's sentries be kept regularly drilled.Footnote ⁵⁷

Notwithstanding the persistence of past patterns, however, the Mysore embassy was also illustrative of important inflection points. Mughal imperial decline, or what ‘Abdülhamid in his letter to Tipu described as “the weakening of the House of Timur,” supplied one backdrop for change.Footnote ⁵⁸ But so did British expansion, regarding which Tipu complained bitterly to the Ottomans. In analysing these themes, some historians have put forward rather anachronistic views of Mysore as a bastion of quasi-nationalistic anti-colonialism.Footnote ⁵⁹ For the same reason, they have argued that Tipu's “foreign policy” was motivated by the need to be regarded as an “equal” of monarchs beyond India, including the Ottomans.Footnote ⁶⁰ Careful research has contended, however, that such views are not altogether tenable, and that Tipu actually referred to the Ottoman ruler in entirely deferential terms.Footnote ⁶¹ Elsewhere, Cemil Aydin has argued that this embassy was something of a last gasp in the history of lateral connections between premodern Muslim polities.Footnote ⁶² In Aydin's reading, the Mysore-Ottoman embassy served as the foil for another argument, which sought to stress how the Turkish empire only began to exploit its presumptive role as a pan-Islamist caliphate in the late nineteenth century. True, pan-Islamism was a modern response to the mature phase of European imperialism. But to reduce Tipu's embassy to a hoary prelapsarian past is also to ignore its startlingly novel features.

To repeat, then, ours is an archive from a liminal era. As such, it is best explored not only for what it reveals regarding early modern trends, but also for how it presaged developments more usually associated with modernity. Take, for example, the question of Mysore's place amid early modern Islamicate empires. Kate Brittlebank has already shown that Tipu's “search for legitimacy”—in the Ottoman world as elsewhere—was crucially driven by the fact that the Mughals, succumbing to British pressure, refused to grant Mysore formal investiture in 1783.Footnote ⁶³ Of course, this did not in turn mean that the Ottoman imperial caliphate suddenly replaced the Mughals as a source for regional legitimacy in South Asia. Well into the nineteenth century, denizens of Delhi continued to invoke an old imperial title for the Mughal capital—the Abode of the Caliphate (dār al-khilāfat). They even did so while travelling through Ottoman domains.Footnote ⁶⁴ And yet, the formal titles with which Tipu festooned his letters to the Ottoman ruler still served as foretokens of the political language of the pan-Islamist era, when the seat of the Turkish emperor acquired near-totemic significance for South Asia's Muslims.Footnote ⁶⁵ Tipu addressed the Ottoman sultan in the most exalted terms: “Caliph, Chosen of God,” “Sultan over Land and Sea,” “Caliph of God the Sultan of Rum,” and so on.Footnote ⁶⁶ For his part, the emperor made no effort to respond in kind to this rhetoric. Far from implying political parity, in his letters ‘Abdülhamid instead appeared to place Tipu as a definite subordinate of the Mughals.

These trends of tradition and transition were also apparent in the intricate itineraries taken by the embassy, which included frequent detours to sacred sites of both minor and major significance around the Middle East. Pilgrimage, particularly the hajj, had long served as a crucial axis of political communications across Islamicate Eurasia.Footnote ⁶⁷ The last major exchange of ambassadors between the Mughals and Ottomans in the 1740s was entirely routed through the caravan and maritime routes of the Meccan pilgrimage, with each set of envoys dutifully stopping in Arabia before making their way to Istanbul and Delhi, respectively.Footnote ⁶⁸ Tipu himself had initially intended to send his ambassadors to Istanbul by way of the Hijaz. They only took to the Gulf route after narrowly missing the sailing season to the Red Sea.Footnote ⁶⁹ It turns out, though, that Tipu's envoys also had entirely new political aspirations in mind in visiting the pilgrimage sites of Iraq. To enhance the visibility and legitimacy of the relatively new regime, Mysore had sought to extend official patronage to the pilgrimage centres of Najaf and Karabala. In pursuing this ambition, Tipu might have been following the lead of Awadh, another Indian state which emerged from under the Mughal carapace in the eighteenth century. Like Awadh, Mysore sought also to fund the construction of a canal to supply fresh water to the Iraqi shrine cities.Footnote ⁷⁰

Yet Islamicate imperatives now also jostled against European influences, and Mysore's diplomatic strategies were clearly absorbing the ways of the European polities in India. A major objective of the embassy, as noted above, was to establish commercial connections with the Gulf. This may not appear especially novel at first glance, but on closer inspection it becomes clear that Tipu's proposed trading settlement was to be modelled on that core institution of European corporate trade, the fortified warehouse or “factory.”Footnote ⁷¹ Tipu sought to build a similar commercial-cum-military establishment in Ottoman Basra.Footnote ⁷² In seeking to construct such a warehouse, a place where Mysore could store merchandise, which, claimed Tipu, would otherwise spoil in India's tropical climate, the monarch also gave assurance to the Ottomans that he would garrison that establishment with his own men, raise taxes from adjacent areas to pay for its upkeep, and hand over to the imperial treasury all remaining revenue.Footnote ⁷³ English factories in Mughal India operated almost exactly on these lines before they became nerve centres of colonial expansion. Ultimately, neither an Indian factory in Iraq nor an Ottoman one in India came to pass. 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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. In fact, the same year as Tipu's ambassadors began their journey home from Istanbul, the British also began to assert for their agents in India far greater powers, leading to certain seismic shifts in regional norms of diplomatic engagement. Under the Mughals, English ambassadors usually appeared at Indian courts as little more than humble merchant-supplicants, pleading for trading privileges, hat in hand.Footnote ⁷⁶ Although the Company's envoys had rights by charter to act as agents of the English monarch, Mughal imperial ideology clearly also ranked that European crown below Islamicate empires like the Ottomans.Footnote ⁷⁷ However, such asymmetries began to transform in about 1789, when growing military supremacy gave the Company's Governor-General the gumption to assert that Indian kingdoms should regard British agents as “representatives of a government at least equal in power and dignity to their own.”Footnote ⁷⁸ But of course, what was achieved in both the medium and long terms was not diplomatic parity at all, but rather a regime of colonial treaty-driven obligations that had inequality written into its very name: the so-called subsidiary alliance system. The rise of colonial relations of treaty and tribute in turn eventuated a broader imperial transition, “from Mughal-centered to Company-centered diplomacy.”Footnote ⁷⁹

The most conspicuous consequence of this shift was that many regional states were compelled to host a diplomatic representative from the Company state. The British “resident” thenceforward also became an embodiment of indirect colonial rule, his proverbial whisper the thunder of any nawab's durbar. As Michael Fisher notes, the advent of the Company's residency system in this period led not only to the gradual obsolescence of Islamicate protocols of diplomacy, but also to the erosion of the powers of South Asian wakīls. Persistent military hostilities meant that Mysore never had to admit into its realms a Company resident. However, following the turning point of the third Anglo-Mysore war—which in 1792 resulted in Tipu incurring heavy territorial losses to the British—what was striking was the very real mockery that was made of the peace negotiations pursued by Mysore's “vakeel.” On arriving at the Company's camp, this “ambassador” from Tipu's side was “little respected,” nay “openly insulted,” and “sent back to his master, without being permitted to enter.” All this occurred, no less, to the “general satisfaction” of the British and their Indian allies.Footnote ⁸⁰ A diplomatic order determined by such colonial condescension only gained ground in subsequent years. With British conquests dramatically speeding up under Governor-General Richard Wellesley (1798–1805), residencies proliferated across South Asia. Diplomatic rituals also began to transform, becoming oriented towards ceremonials implying indigenous subordination to the colonial state.Footnote ⁸¹

Growing European influence was not unique to India, however, and we may thus conclude this section by noting parallel changes in Ottoman diplomacy. Around the same time as they received the Indian embassy, the Ottomans had also begun their own tortuous transitions to new diplomatic institutions and practices. These changes were partly thrust upon an increasingly weak empire, but they were also the product of conscious state-led reforms. Both effectively began under ‘Abdülhamid, during whose reign European powers first began pondering the infamous “Eastern question”—the diplomatic problem posed by a declining Ottoman Empire—which in the nineteenth century would metastasise into “the Sick Man of Europe.” The Eastern question was first raised in the wake of a 1774 Russo-Ottoman treaty, which one historian has described as the “single most humiliating treaty the Ottomans had signed yet.”Footnote ⁸² But even as setbacks like these were pushing the Ottomans into an uncertain future, ‘Abdülhamid still appeared to cling to certain established forms of diplomatic discourse. In his letters to Tipu, and in the vaunting language characteristic of classical Islamicate epistolography, the emperor made much of ongoing Ottoman preparations for war against Russia. “I have amassed an army so large,” wrote the sultan, “it can reach the stars.”Footnote ⁸³ But ‘Abdülhamid died a little over a month after granting a farewell audience to Tipu's envoys. And with him passed some of the older ways of Ottoman diplomacy.

His successor, Selim III (r. 1789–1807), ushered in the New Order (Nizam-ı Cedid), systemic bureaucratic reforms that brought to Ottoman diplomacy distant but definite echoes of changes then underway in the subcontinent. The Porte thus also began to establish its first resident embassies. Beginning in London in 1793, other Ottoman consulates then opened in quick succession in Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. This “Europeanisation” of the Turkish diplomatic corps, as it has been described, was not just reflected in the capitals in which the embassies were placed, but also by the transformed contexts of Ottoman relations with European powers. Put simply, Europeanisation meant heightened European influence. Unsurprisingly, Western powers now also began to shift their diplomatic posture towards the Turks. For instance, contemporary Anglo-Ottoman relations may not have been troubled by direct colonial conquests, at least not of the kind which carried the Company in India “from trade to dominion,” as a well-worn historiographical formulation has it. But as one recent study has noted, it was nevertheless during this period that the office of the British ambassador in Istanbul, which for the previous two centuries had focused on commercial questions revolving around the English Levant Company, took on a more explicitly political role. That transformation was confirmed when the British crown assumed direct oversight of that ambassadorial post in 1808.Footnote ⁸⁴ By the mid-nineteenth century, these developments would culminate with the Ottoman Empire's own diplomatic recognition of a “British India.”Footnote ⁸⁵

From Sultanic Libraries to Colonial Archives: An Afterword

With attention to a little-known archive concerning a well-known example of Islamicate diplomacy, this essay examined a pregnant moment of political change in both South Asia and Islamicate Eurasia. It argued that when studied alongside sources already familiar from received historiography, the Ottoman administrative documents on the 1786–89 embassy from Mysore allow for enquiries into an array of important themes in Islamicate diplomatic history. The collection can thus be consulted to investigate issues of bureaucracy and materiality. It allows for scales of analysis ranging from the microhistorical to the transregional. But above all, as I sought to show, the sources can be studied to advance our understanding of a crucial era of change in global imperial history. As South Asia and the Middle East alike experienced fundamental axial shifts from “early modernity” to “modernity,” looming above it all was the fact that Islamicate polities, as indeed the linkages between them, increasingly came under the dominance of European imperial demands. This occurred both because of direct conquests (in what became British India) and indirect influence (in the Ottoman Empire).

But by way of a conclusion, let me shift focus to two vignettes from a decade after Tipu's ambassadors returned from Istanbul to Srirangapatnam. The first concerns another round of exchanges that took place between Mysore and the Ottomans; the second involves the fate of Tipu's royal library after his final defeat by the Company. Taken together, both may be read as a denouement to the themes I have highlighted in this essay regarding empire, diplomacy, and the historical sources we use to study them.

In early 1799, it was the turn of the Ottomans to contact Mysore. At the urging of the British ambassador in Istanbul, but spurred also by knowledge that Mysore was engaging in communications with the French in Egypt, Selim wrote to press Tipu to make peace with the British. “May God not let it come to pass,” the emperor warned with reference to Napoleon's military adventures in the eastern Mediterranean, “but imagine, should a full [French] invasion occur through the Suez, they shall take all of India into their hands. Facing no opposition, they shall take that country's wealth and put to the sword all of its Muslims.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In warning Tipu thus, the Ottomans perhaps knew well that they were asking him, unfairly, to choose between two rival European powers, both of which were then extending their imperial frontiers.Footnote ⁸⁷ In his reply to the Ottomans, Tipu politely refused to accede to the British. But as one of the first historians to study the exchanges between Mysore and the Ottomans observed, “Whether the letter of Selim III or the response from Tipu, each may be read as the cry of an Eastern monarch against the colonialism of the great Western powers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Mere months after receiving the Ottoman letter, Tipu and his army again went to war with the Company. In May 1799, Srirangapatnam fell to the British. Tipu himself was slain in battle.Footnote ⁸⁹ As the British ransacked his capital, much treasure was of course taken and shipped off to the metropole. This included Tipu's iconic hand-cranked automaton of a tiger mauling a Redcoat, today on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum. But a trove that was of equal interest to the victors was Tipu's library, which had not only books but also the sultan's royal papers, including his letters to the Ottomans. The British scattered this library to different collections. It contributed immensely, for instance, to the Persian riches of the British Library, a corpus that remains important to historians of South Asia today. Yet like the act of military conquest itself, the colonial state's expropriation of the sultan's library was of course also an exercise of power. By arrogating the library of a major rival in India, the British indeed even began the project of reimagining India itself. As Joshua Ehrlich has cogently argued, the plunder of Tipu's library played a central if surprising role in the ideological invention of “British India.”Footnote ⁹⁰

Arriving at the closing year of the eighteenth century, these two sets of events could certainly be regarded as discrete inaugural moments to the colonial politics that would go on to define the modern age of empires. But Tipu's embassy to the Ottomans posed not only a direct challenge to the emergence of those later colonial configurations. It did so with direct reference to the connections that once prevailed across the early modern Islamicate world. The 1786–89 embassy from Mysore to the Ottomans therefore remains an important example of an intermediate moment in the evolution of diplomacy across the subcontinent and Islamicate Eurasia. Its archives should therefore be studied not simply for how they gestured to emergent historical horizons, but also for how they remained rooted in patterns from a deeper past.