MacDougall’s book deals with naval resistance to the European powers by the different groups (Calicut, Marathas, and the Mysoreans) on the west coast of India in the early modern era, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries. The book is divided into three parts. Part I includes the early Indian naval resistance serves as a historical background. Chapter one “Calicut: The City of Spice” shows how the Indians in this famous city under the rule of Zamorin and the command of the four Kunjali (a position similar to a naval commander) fought against the Portuguese with guerrilla or irregular-style warfare during the early 16th century prior to the rise of the Mughal empire. The clash was also a process of technological borrowing and adaptation for both parties, as the Indians copied the hull and stern shapes of the Portuguese and the latter developed oared vessels for coastal fighting. In chapter two, “Surat: Home of the Gujarat Sea Trade”, MacDougall discusses the collaboration of the Mughals under Jahangir (r. 1605-27), Shah Jahan (r. 1628-58), and Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707) with the English (the EIC or English Indian Company) and to a lesser extent against the Portuguese, and Aurangzeb’s alliance with the Siddis (descendants of Arab slaves traders) of Janjira against the Marathas.
Part II “The Saffron Banner: Irregular Naval Warfare against an Emergent Britain” contains three chapters (three, four, and five). Chapter three “Bombay: A Poor Little Island” covers the building of a navy by the founder of the Maratha empire Shivaji and his clashes with the now Bombay-based EIC, especially the one in 1679. Chapter four “Alibag: Fleet Base of the Maratha Northern Command” demonstrates how the Maratha navy was organized and financed, including both the weakness and strength of the Maratha navy, with the former to the effect that it was a land-based empire and a brown-water (vis-a-vis a blue-water) navy supported by land tax and manned by inexperienced crew. Other aspects discussed are the building a naval base at Alibag under the command of Kanhoji Angre who was appointed by the third ruler of the Marathas Rajaram (r. 1690-1700), the hostilities between the Marathas and the British from the 1690s on, and the defeat of the combined Anglo-Portuguese naval force at the hand of the Marathas in 1721). Chapter five “London: From Where India Came to be Governed” challenges the EIC’s perception and labelling of the Angre family, particularly Kanhoji Angre, the naval commander of the Marathas (or the “Maratha Admiral” as the British called him) as “pirates”. Through providing detailed evidence, MacDougall shows convincingly that it was the “completely spurious version” (or virtually zero degrees of accuracy) and deliberate distortion of the affairs in India by the EIC that led to the erroneous labelling of the Maratha navy, and therefore supports his conclusion that “[t]he Angres were not only committed to the Maratha state but were fully accepted as one of its most important functionaries, thereby making them legitimate organs of the state”. This is the most original and powerful chapter of the whole book, as it deals a heavy blow to the contemporary British colonial distortion and modern Eurocentric viewpoint. Chapter six “Vijaydurg: The Strongest Place in All India” discusses the fortifying of Vijaydurg (250 miles south of Bombay) by the Marathas and their war with the British (and the Dutch) from 1717 to 1782 at Vijaydurg and other fortresses such as Subarnadurg (60 miles south of Bombay), as well as the animosity between the difference branches of the Angre family (with some allying with the EIC) which led eventually to the destruction of the much-feared Maratha navy. Also in this chapter, MacDougall employs the translated Marathi source to discuss the strength of the Maratha navy (122-124).
Part III is entitled “The Tiger of Mysore: A Conventional Navy to Oppose British Dominance” and has two chapters. Chapter seven “Jamalabad: Main Fleet Base of the Mysore Navy” deals with the building of naval bases, fortresses and warships in Mysore (especially at Jamalabad or Mangalore) under Haidar Ali (r. 1761-82) and his son Tipu Sultan (r. 1782-99), and Tipu’s modernization project of “creating a fiscal-military state underpinned by expansion of trade” (151-153), while chapter eight “Fort Louis, Isle de France: The Grand Arsenal” shows Tipu Sultan’s attempts at obtaining help from the French on Mauritius against the British, his defeat at the latter’s hands, and an analysis of the factors behind his defeat.
In his brief concluding remarks (192-195), MacDougall compares the different outcomes of India’s and China’s engaging with the European maritime powers. He points out that “the divided nature of governance in India” led to the earlier conquest of India by Europeans while the unity of the Qing Dynasty allowed it to resist the Europeans by the early 19th century. This indeed urges scholars to think comparatively about the factors behind the different fates of the rest of the world facing the onslaughts of European expansive powers. The political fragmentation and the centrifugal tendency of different Indian polities and their willingness to ally with European powers really put Indians second only to the American Indians and the tribal groups in the Philippines. The rest of archipelagic Southeast Asia (modern Indonesia and Malaysia), mainland Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia all held longer against European encroachments.
To comment on this book, on the positive side, MacDougall probably is one of the few experienced scholars to write this book. From his doctoral thesis (entitled “Reforming the Civil Departments of the Navy, 1832-34”) to several monographs on British naval history published from the 1980s, and being a founder member of Navy Dockyards, he has accumulated rich expertise in the naval history of the British empire. MacDougall’s book under review, as the author claims with justification, “represents the first published account to describe and analyse how the British and other Europeans powers were opposed at sea by the indigenous natives of India during the initial period of European settlement and colonization”. Indeed, before MacDougall, there are monographs either on the British navy in India (Charles Rathbone Low, History of the Indian Navy: 1613-1863 [London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1877]) or the Mughal navy (Atul Chandra Roy’s A History of Mughal Navy and Naval Warfares published in 1972). In addition, other than some discussions on the resistance to European encroachment on the India’s west coast, including that of the Marathas (B.K. Apte’s A History of the Maratha Navy and Merchant Ships [Bombay: State Board for Literature and Culture, 1973]), a comprehensive treatment such as what MacDougall has done had not existed before.
In addition to MacDougall’s valuable addition to the literature on global naval history, his approach is also a very important one. Though as one in the Worlds of the East India Company series, this book under review decentres the EIC and puts Indians in the spotlight by highlighting the latter’s resistance. This anti-Eurocentric approach is mostly welcome, precious, and commendable. MacDougall (pp. 13-14, 43-44, 72-75) has convincingly argued against the “piracy” label imposed by the British on the Indian maritime activities, claiming passionately, repeatedly, and emphatically these Indian states were legitimate, and the Marathas had the right to issue passports (dashtak). For example, chapter Five is to refute the English propaganda’s distortion of Kanhoji’s identity as a pirate, with the purpose of not only establishing the historical agency of Maratha’s navy but also disputing the British imperial morality—their distortion of the nature of the Maratha navy into piracy was for the “home consumption” in order to justify their military action against the Indian opponents. Though MacDougall is not the first to resurrect Kanhoji Angre’s navy as the legal organ of the Maratha state, his discussion does reinforce Kanhoji’s legitimacy in resisting and fighting against European, especially English navy. Moreover, MacDougall’s sympathetic tone towards to Asian states (43-44, 85-89) rather than the European counterparts, his demonstration of the potency and victory of the Marathas as shown in their demand for sashtak (72-78) all contribute to his anti-Eurocentric stand. One, however, needs to point out, chapter eight falls a bit short of this goal because it reads like a drama with the French and the British being the main actors while Tipu Sultan on the backstage, or like a chess game with the two European powers as the chess masters whereas the Marathas as only pawns. If the Indians in the previous chapters are at the front and centre, in chapter eight the Mysoreans are simply small supporting actors. Many more details on the modernizing efforts of Mysore would have strengthened the chapter in particular and the book as a whole.
In terms of other negative aspects, this book has many shortcomings and weaknesses. Though MacDougall’s approach is clear, but he fails to present an overarching argument to guide his book, and his deep leg in the conventional or old naval (and military) history (dealing only with battle/campaign, tactics, strategies, commanders, equipment, etc. without engaging with broad historical issues, questions, controversies, debates, theories, etc.) has prevented him from going beyond it and engaging with the New Military History (and the major debates such as “military revolution”) which has been popular from the 1980s. MacDougall’s book is a much more conventional example of old than a new military history, because it has completely ignored the issues and debates generated in the New Military History literature on the early modern in general and on India in particular (e.g., Kaushik Roy, War, Culture and Society in Early Modern South Asia, 1740-1849 [Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011]). Failing this, though still useful for comparative purposes, MacDougall’s book loses some appeal to the increasingly expanding cohort of scholars practicing the New Military History.
MacDougall also fails to include a historiographical section to show the reader in detail what has been done so far by scholars within and without India. As a result, the readers, especially these who have no prior knowledge about Indian naval history, is left in darkness. For example, in his Introduction the Part III of the book (135-138), MacDougall states his rationale to write on Mysore’s resistance to the British is Western scholars’ ignorance of the naval power of Mysore. Since much Indian scholarship is published in English, one wonders how much scholars (including Indian nationalist scholarship) have engaged with this topic. In terms of sources, MacDougall employs mainly the ones in English (and some are primary), but he seldom uses sources in other languages such as French, and this cuts more the originality of the book.
Regarding documentation style, MacDougall’s book is not up to the standard. The titles of the books and journal cited in the footnotes are not italicized; the bibliography although alphabetically arranged does not start with the last names of the authors, creating some difficulties for readers to look through; some sources cited in the text (e.g., 29n20, Roy [1972]) are not found in the bibliography, while some sources are not given complete bibliographical information when they are first cited in the footnotes (e.g., 96n31 & 33; 147n33). Illustrations are not referenced in the text, leaving the reader wonders, for example, if Figure 6.2 is the map of Manaji Angre’s flagship deposited at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (122-123). There are also inconsistencies: “Bhosale Shivaji” and “Shivaji Bhosale” (ix, 41 and 50). A more critical problem is the absence of sources for 14 (out of 19) illustrations and all maps, which any serious academic works would avoid. There are typos too: the starting year of Rajaram’s reign should be 1690, not 1680 (61); the book by Kaushik Roy was published in 2011 and not 2013. All these could have been avoided if the author, the editorial board of the series, or the editor of the book have been more careful.
To conclude, MacDougall’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on the early modern naval history but could have engaged with works on the New Military History school, plunged deeper into sources and been more careful and meticulous.
