A trove of 17th century news reports from Mughal India, unearthed in the archives of the British Library, has sent shockwaves through the academic community. These documents, written in Persian and local vernaculars, detail the political machinations, trade disputes, and cultural clashes that mirror the colonial patterns we thought were a product of the East India Company era. UK historians, led by Dr. Alistair Finch of the University of Oxford, are calling for a paradigm shift in how we understand the roots of globalisation and digital sovereignty.
Imagine a world where information spreads via handwritten newsletters, yet the power dynamics are strikingly similar to today's algorithm-driven echo chambers. The reports describe how the Mughal court used state-sponsored couriers to disseminate propaganda, sparking public opinion wars that resemble modern digital disinformation campaigns. One dispatch from 1625 details a tax revolt in Bengal, where local merchants encrypted their correspondence using a precursor to RSA style ciphers: a word-based code that only the initiated could read. This is not just history; it is a blueprint for understanding the user experience of society under asymmetric power structures.
Dr. Finch argues that these findings force us to confront uncomfortable truths about digital sovereignty. The Mughal Empire, with its centralised bureaucracy, attempted to control the flow of information much like today's platform giants. When local rulers resisted, they were labelled as rebels, a narrative that echoes the tech industry's framing of privacy advocates as anti-progress. The real story is more nuanced. The Mughals were not technophobes; they embraced the written word as a tool for empire, but their top-down approach inevitably led to friction. Sound familiar?
The colonial parallels are chilling. The British later co-opted these communication networks, adding their own layer of extraction through the East India Company's mail systems. By the 1800s, news from London took six months to reach Calcutta, yet the British ensured that the narrative remained colonial-friendly. This is the precursor to today's AI ethics debates. We worry about bias in algorithms, but the Mughal papers show that bias is not a bug of technology but a feature of power. The same dynamic applies to quantum computing: the race for quantum supremacy is not just about processing power but about who gets to set the rules for the next generation of information control.
The historians' call for deeper study is a call to action. We must decolonise our understanding of technology. The Mughal reports reveal that the user experience of society was already being designed by those in power, shaping how people perceived their rulers, their economy, and their place in the world. It is a cautionary tale for our own era of surveillance capitalism. The grid we build today will become the foundation for tomorrow's digital sovereignty, and if we fail to learn from the Mughal example, we risk repeating the same mistakes.
As the sun sets on the British Library's exhibition, the message is clear: the future of technology is written in the past. We ignore these news reports at our peril. The algorithms of the 17th century are not so different from the ones we deploy today, and the consequences of getting it wrong are equally dire. The Mughal news reports are not relics; they are warnings.
