Heterogeneous Military Labor Market and the Making of the Gorkhali Empire in the Himalayas

In 1740 the House of Gorkha began to project its imperial ambitions along the Himalayan corridor at the same time when the British were beginning their forays in the region. The Mughal presence to the south of Kathmandu had earlier inhibited ambitious Himalayan rulers from expanding in that direction. But in the eighteenth century as Mughal power receded from the Himalayan foothills, the Gorkhali clan expanded into the vacuum left behind. In the north, as they sought to expand into Tibet, they collided with the Chinese (Qing) regime in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. In the south, competing claims between the Gorkhalis and the British led to an Anglo-Gorkha War (1814-1816). While the Gorkhali expansion on both fronts were thwarted they were nevertheless able to carve out a sovereignty over a large tract of land on the foothills of the Himalayas.

The story of the rise of the House of Gorkha from a family-clan based petty chiefdom into a regional hegemon confronting both the British and the Qing empires will be incomplete without understanding how the Gorkhali rulers brought myriad of social groups into their expanding network for military labor, which were sustained by elaborate grants, patronage and titles. This paper will explore how the military labor market offered both potentials and challenges to the rulers in a region marked by idiosyncratic histories, and by linguistic, cultural, geographic, administrative and economic diversity.

The Gorkhali case is particularly revealing in that while the House of Gorkha drew heavily on the pan-Indic Rajput genealogies for its political legitimacy, the ethnically heterogeneous military labor market operating in its domain reflected a different politico-historical reality of state-making and governance. The paper will show that the different and competing ideas of military labor were informed by the politico-economic imperatives of state-building.