An anonymous online account that boasts of having over 230,000 YouTube followers, recently tweeted about Marc David Baer’s phenomenal tome on the Ottomans. Persevering as far as page 5, “ZoomerHistorian” disputed the conclusion that Ottomans considered themselves to be the legal continuity of the Roman empire, and that Western Turks were not culturally (or even genetically) much dissimilar to Greeks and Southern Italians. Having satisfied himself that he can differentiate between Italians and Turks just by looking at them, he probed deeper and found out the obvious cause of this clear historical obfuscation: the author is Jewish.
Despite my better instincts, I checked out ZoomerHistorian. His YouTube playlist is full of videos about the “real history” of the Latvian SS, an account of Hitler’s homeless years, and the likes. Clearly there’s a market. He also isn’t the only one. A self-declared online “tribune of the pleb” named Roman Helmet, claimed that the Spanish Armada would have had no problem conquering China in the sixteenth century. Perhaps, the most egregious example of intellectual peasantry is the former Labour MP turned peer, Thangam Debbonaire, who claimed that the statue of Robert Clive in London should be removed, because Clive brutally defeated helpless noble Indians, incidentally finding herself on the same side as another far-right slop account named Aesthetica, whose sole contribution to historical literature has been a whiny substack on how Third World migration ruined his life.
The gatekeepers of the academy having determined that the study of history be viewed through an ideological prism, the inevitable arch–midwit reaction has arrived. Consider Debbonaire, who stated that taking down Clive’s statue would be a good step towards being “honest” about British history and would “make us stronger”. Who’s “we”, and what honesty? Militarily, the man conquered Bengal — then one of the richest provinces under the nominal suzerainty of the Mughals — with around 800 Europeans and 3,000 Indian soldiers. Partly this was because the British-Indian troops were technologically advanced enough to have tarpaulins, a product of the industrialisation, which proved extremely useful in protecting their gunpowder from the damp rain-sogged Bengal weather. Clive also knew exactly when to lead his cavalry against the flanks of the Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah’s army, who, even by the most neutral accounts, was an arrogant ass, not helped in the least on that front by the French who were egging him on.
Curiously, three quarters of Siraj’s army changed sides during the Battle of Plassey. By any measure, Clive should be considered a proverbial great man of history, who changed the course of history in the subcontinent. But that’s one side of the story. Unrecognised in the post-colonial debate is that Clive was financially helped and encouraged by both Hindu bankers against the Muslim Nawab, as well as the most trusted lieutenants of the Nawab himself. A deeper dive into colonial history often shows how many colonial wars were fought between two sides of natives, wherein one side actively courted the Europeans, who were objectively more lawful and often more just. Prominent among Clive’s backers, were the Jagat Seth family, banker to the Nawab; Rai Durlabh, the Nawab’s finance minister; Omichund, a corpulent Sikh Zamindar in Calcutta; and the Brahmin magistrate Nandakumar, who was the keeper of the fort that granted access to Calcutta. All these people risked their lives in supporting Clive.
There was a reason for that as well. Indian feudal lords, after tearing down the last vestiges of the Mughal empire found themselves in a Hobbesian world similar to post-Reformation Europe, without any central authority, where ethnicity or co-religion meant nothing. The merchants in Bengal, then the richest province of the subcontinent, were constantly repressed both by their Muslim nawabs, as well as fellow Hindu raiders from the Maratha kingdom. The old Bengali lullaby, borgi elo deshe is a warning for kids to fall asleep as the borgi (Marathas) will abduct kids from their crib for failure of their parents to pay khajna (war indemnity). The implication about the abducted children is left unsaid. Clive’s governorship brought with it a seemingly small but extremely significant change. Bengalis, for the first time in the history of the subcontinent, observed what “equality under the common law” meant. The idea that aristocrats can be dragged to courts, regardless of their religion or race, and that every religion gets equal protection and no Muslim nawab or Brahmin zamindar can do much to influence that, was a concept philosophically alien to the land. This was Clive’s great contribution to the development of modern India. Incidentally, Lady Debbonaire, far-right slop nazis, and Hindu nationalists in India, are all on the same side of this ethno-deterministic debate, either glorifying or denigrating, what in their mind is a tale of simple one-sided exploitation and conquest. The reality of British imperialism is, of course, more complicated.
One might argue that neutral imperial history is distant and niche. But scrolling through online slop history about Europe is equally depressing, a marriage between “I F-in love science” style trivia hounding, and mid-noughties “creeping shariah” fever. Cultural similarities between the Ottomans and Mediterranean Europeans were obvious, but forgotten is how much political alignment existed as well. Even those who might not be interested in modern authors for fear of ideological revisionism will find this attested to by plenty of primary sources (Byzantine historians such as Sphrantzes and Critobulus) as well as by such nineteenth century Europeans as Franz Babinger, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, and Sir Edward Creasy.
Mehmed the Conqueror was a history nerd, who filled his court with Hungarians and Italians, often angering native Turk nobility. Franz Babinger wrote that when Mehmed entered Hagia Sophia he found an Ottoman fanatic chipping away at the marble floor with an axe. He was so appalled at the mindless and ignorant barbarism, that he personally struck that fanatic down, who was then taken away half-dead by the Janissaries. He proceeded to title himself Kaiser e Rum, considered himself a Trojan avenging Rome fighting the Greeks. Serbians and Romanians fought alongside the Ottomans against the Mongols. Mehmed’s chief diplomat to the Vatican was Mara Branković, his Christian stepmother.
Over time, imperial structures liberalised the Ottomans sufficiently that by the nineteenth century they were scarcely different from any other European colonial empire. In fact, an Armenian merchant, trading between Calcutta and Italy perhaps would not get less of a culture shock dealing with a Turk or a Sicilian, than around northern Europeans, who, in a weird twist of irony, neither the Romans nor the Great Ottomans (Murad to Sulayman) considered very civilised. “His first act of sovereign authority showed that a different spirit to that of the generous Amurath would now wield the Ottoman power”, Sir Edward Creasy wrote describing Mehmed: displaying a very British sense of propriety, fair play, and even personal admiration, towards a great power considered historically adversarial to the home country of the author himself. Online slopists of course possess none of that. They weirdly mirror the same tedious plebeian morality and fanaticism as the “third world savages” they seem to constantly worry about.
I hoped that history as a discipline would flourish outside the stifling confines of an ideological academy but the quality of online accounts from those who claim to be historians attests otherwise. I truly once thought that good history will live outside the academy if you just open it up to social media without any peer review or gatekeeping. I was wrong. Social media didn’t really make it any better, and one look at the online abuse Robert Tombs (the finest living historian of the history of England) received recently on social media is evidence to that. Western higher education is partially to blame. Gatekeeping neutral historians in favour of ideologues resulted in a whole swath of historical study being placed in the hands of those who neither possess the requisite detachment nor the temperament to be good historians.
That said, perhaps the culture warriors and Lady Debbonaire should remember something. Prior to the French revolution, the right of conquest was considered the norm. Migration by the social elite and inter-mixing happened whenever there were ruling class changes, and most of the time, it was for the good. The rest of society went on as usual. In simple terms, who rules didn’t matter much to most people, rather than how they were ruled. History, especially that of colonialism is similar, as in it was a collaborative process.
The creators of online history slop accounts are half-wits: history to them is a mere cudgel
Consider the letter from Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), India’s liberal reformer, who agitated to abolish Sati (widow burning), and was instrumental in bringing western science to India. “The present rulers of India, coming from a distance of many thousand miles to govern a people whose language, literature, manners, customs, and ideas are almost entirely new and strange to them, cannot easily become so intimately acquainted with their real circumstances, as the natives of the country are themselves”, Roy wrote, in an 1823 letter to Lord Amherst, “We should therefore be guilty of a gross dereliction of duty to ourselves, and afford our rulers just ground of complaint at our apathy, did we omit on occasions of importance like the present to supply them with such accurate information as might enable them to devise and adopt measures calculated to be beneficial to the country, and thus second by our local knowledge and experience their declared benevolent intentions for its improvements.”
It is understandable that the creators of online history slop accounts are half-wits: history to them is a mere cudgel. When a peer of the realm sides with them, however unwittingly, it robs the people of the past of their agency. For they were people who for good or bad were instrumental in shaping an order that — like any such order in history — was thematically neutral. If Clive is toppled or removed, Roy’s statue in Bristol will be next. And that will portend a dark world.
