What if I told you your history teacher is teaching history wrong? Oh, your teacher loves to talk about the Moogles and their wealth and their power and their Taj Mahals and their variously colored forts. Wait, are you only watching this because your teacher is making you?
Teachers! I hate them so much! Alright, there's no way your teacher previews all these videos.
They Google something, they find it on YouTube, and they're like, here, let's watch this. So let's talk about something else. I'll pick a topic at random. I don't know, um... Star Wars.
Please tell me you've seen Star Wars. You haven't seen Star Wars. Generation Z. I expected so much from you. You were the chosen one. Fine.
Go watch all nine episodes of Star Wars and Rogue One. I'll wait. Right? So great. Ewoks.
Anyways, you see how this big, powerful empire that's rich enough to rule over everything that they see, and they built some cool architecture, but ended up being mean to the locals until a small group of rebels rose up using their ancient religion to unite them and ended up taking down the evil emperor. Yeah, that's... it's a metaphor.
The empire was the Mughal Empire, and the rebels was the Maratha Empire. What if I told you your teacher spends all their time talking about the empire and never talks about the rebellion that brought the empire to its knees? Today's illustrative example? The Maratha Empire! What up, I'm Ben Freeman from FreemanPedia.com where I try to translate AP World History Modern to people like you all over the world.
And as I'm trying to find materials and maps and videos and stuff to help you learn the curriculum what the College Board expects you to know in Sometimes I find holes where things aren't always there and that's where we here at illustrative example Step in to fill those holes and help you understand things that you'll need to know for the exam in May Oh, but this week is different. This week is a special request. Don't worry. It's still an illustrative example I mean, that's the title of the show that would just be weird But it's for a greater project called discovery of India So me and nine other youtubers have gotten together and taken a different example from Indian history and made a video about it Ours is about the Maratha Empire.
They even made this fancy video graphic Nice. So we have to be on our best behavior today. India's watching. Namaste India.
But it's way too early for me to be throwing words like Peshawar or Chhatrapati at you. Let's get some context. Ah, contextualization.
It's that special moment at the beginning of an essay where you take whatever topic you're trying to discuss, whether it's a DBQ or an LEQ, and you try to put it in the context, the greater scheme of history, or at least the greater scheme of that era or the topic you're talking about. It's the Star Wars crawl. It's that... thing at the beginning of Star Wars where they have that those yellow words go flying through space but the point is to kind of what you're about to see to put that into context of the greater scheme of the Star Wars story.
That's context and that's what you need to be doing in your essays. Okay, one minute on the clock. Today's the day. I can feel it.
I'm doing it today. This is part of a ten part series. I can't mess this up.
A lot of people are seeing me for the first time. I can't look like an idiot like all my other videos. Don't go watch them. because that's a bad example.
This is the one. Today's the day. AP World History's second period spans from 1450 to 1750. And within that time period there are two units. Unit 3 is all about the land-based empires. These are the land-based empires that will come to shape the modern world that kind of arise after the fall of the mon...
Mongol Khanates. College Board doesn't really give you a solid number of how many land-based empires you should know, but I will. There's nine. Songhai, Aztec, Inca, Tokugawa, Manchu, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Russia.
These empires are massive and have a huge impact on these regions well into the 21st century. Unit 4 is all about transoceanic interactions. That's a big fancy word for maritime empires, which is a big fancy word for water-based empires.
This is your Portuguese, your Spanish, your British, your Dutch, your French. But later in Unit 4 there's a subsection. called 4.6 Challenges to State Power. And this section is all about the groups that rose up and stood up to these empires, whether from foreign intervention or from within their own empire.
If you're looking at all these empires, maritime and land-based, the richest of them all was the Mughal Empire. Think the Delhi Sultanate on steroids. Roughly 25% of Earth's economy went through the Mughal Empire, way more than even all of Europe's combined. And am I talking like medieval Europe?
I'm talking like Louis XIV, Versailles Europe. Yeah, that wealthy. Anyways.
Even the great Mughal Empire, who ruled most of the subcontinent of India, was not immune to local resistance. Not only were they not immune, they were finally brought down and had to run into Afghanistan. Whose resistance was powerful enough to bring down the largest economy on the planet? It was none other than the Marathi-speaking Hindu people of Western India known as the Marathan Empire.
The Marathan Empire would go on to take Delhi and rule over a majority of India until the Marathas themselves ended up losing to the British East India Company in 1818, but that's the next period. Did I do it? Ugh, what's the point? You try to make a video to help kids pass some stupid exam their parents are making them take in May, and you can't even do context in under a minute. And then India had to see that.
Sorry. I should apologize to India. Dear India, on behalf of my and the entire staff here at Freemanpedia, and the writers, cast, and crew at A Lesser of Examples, I'd like to formally apologize for being such an epic failure. It's a simple task in contextualization.
It's only worth a point on an essay, and yet I, Ben Freeman, continually botch the one-minute countdown in these videos. and have brought great shame to my colleagues, family, community, and staff. In the future, I will work harder to keep my contextualizations under a minute and not waste everyone's time. Sincerely, Benjamin A. Freeman."But seriously, keep it short and put it into the greater scheme of world history. Enough context, let's go to the example. The Maratha Empire spanned from 1674 to 1818. Check out that flag! Enough of the tyranny of rectangles. Finally, a deep saffron swallow-tailed flag. Love it. But the College Board doesn't care. about flag shape... yet. No, they want you to know the Marathas in the context of their conflict with the great Moogle Empire. You know the Moogles, right? They're mentioned in the College Board CED like 11 times. Meanwhile, our heroes the Marathas are only mentioned once in an illustrative example. Quick Moogle recap. The Moogles were from Central Asia and were founded when Babur, who was descended on his dad's side from Tamerlane and on his mom's side by Genghis Khan. That's like your mom being Ronda Rouseley and your dad being Mike Tyson. You're just like the ultimate warrior. Anyways, he moves into northern India and establishes the Mughal dynasty which will rule for over 300 years But I'm not here to talk about the Mughals and how powerful they were and how they were super wealthy and they made this And they made this and they made this but like the Delhi Sultanate They were Islamic ruling over a Hindu majority and for most of their existence They're pretty tolerant to the Hindus who live in India until their sixth Emperor Arangzeb His nickname was the conqueror of worlds He ended up extending the Empire to its greatest size and he brought in an annual revenue of roughly 450 million dollars in today's money. That's 10 times what Louis XIV brought in. That's 10 times the sun came. Not impressed? Under Aurangzeb's reign, the Mughal Empire was the largest economy on earth and the largest manufacturer on earth. So how does that involve our heroes, the Marathas? Well, remember how Aurangzeb had expanded the Mughal borders to the largest they'd ever been? Well, part of that was the Marathi homeland in West India. And living in Aurangzeb's Mughal Empire is very different than his predecessors. His great-granddad was Akbar the Great, perhaps the most religiously tolerant ruler in the early modern period. Aurangzeb was no Akbar. Aurangzeb brought back the Jizya head tax on non-Muslims. He demolished Hindu temples. He even executed the ninth Sikh guru. That's 10% of the gurus. He prohibited music, he prohibited alcohol, he prohibited gambling. And he wasn't a total monster. I mean, there are people who will point out that most of these critiques came from his enemies, so maybe they're a bit over the top. He did fund some Hindu temples and oppose bigotry against the Shia and Hindus in But dude killed the 9th Sikh guru for not converting to Islam. Not cool. Anyway, so you should have some sort of picture of what life is like as a Hindu like the Marathas were living in the Mughal Empire of Aurangzeb. So who were the Marathas? The Marathas were a Hindu warrior caste from West India. They'd even been used by the Mughals for years as warriors helping the Mughal Empire. But later, as we'll see, the Marathas end up turning against the Mughal Empire. And it's that conflict that the College Board wants us to focus on in this illustrative example. The Mughal-Maratha Wars began as Aurangzeb moved into to Maratha territory around Bijapur, and it was on. The small Maratha warrior group was led by Shivaji, and they quickly took control of three forts and united all the Marathi warriors to their cause, and Aurangzeb had met his match. That expansion that he was so proud of came to a screeching halt when he ran into the Marathis. One of the largest clashes between the great Mughal Empire and the small Marathis ended with Shivaji and his son turning themselves in as part of a peace treaty. So what do you think Aurangzeb would do? Hindus revolting against his power? He'll probably let them go. Wrong, he locks them. up in prison and throws away the key and that's where they died and the Marathi resistance was over. That would be a terrible story if it ended that way. Why would we even be talking about it? That would just be any number of groups that the Mughals beat, took their leaders in prison and just got rid of them and then they became Mughals. In reality, they both broke out of prison, went back to the Marathis and then Shivaji is crowned Chhatrapati. That's a fun word. You never see two H's together, right? Chhatrapati. Chhatrapati. It just means ruler but it's a cool word so I figured I'd bring it up. The Mughals did not give up. They keep fighting, keep fighting, keep fighting for decades trying to get the the Deccan Plateau away from the Marathi. These two empires are going to fight back and forth for 20 years with land exchanging hands. Sometimes it's Marathi, sometimes it's Mughal. This wasn't simply an insurgency either. It's not like the Marathas were just sitting around waiting for the Mughals to attack them. They actually went into Mughal territory and started taking land away from them as the Mughals and Aurangzeb were invading them in the south. The Marathis actually took the most prosperous city in all of the Mughal empire twice, the port city of Sarat. The cost of the Mughal empire was devastating. Over 20 years, Aurangzeb is going to lose about 20% of his military trying to... to get to the Marathis. And that roughly equates to about 100,000 men a year. And it's not just that. While on campaign, Aurangzeb actually went to the fight. And he doesn't travel lightly. If you're the Mughal emperor, you roll pretty deep. He travels with a half a million people, 50,000 camels, 30,000 elephants, and all of that had to be fed and watered. This entourage drained the countryside of resources, causing a huge famine and allowing the conditions for the bubonic plague to return. Probably the most historically significant casualty of the Maratha-Mughal wars was a was a wrong Zeb himself. He was actually out on campaign against the Marathas when he died at the age of 88. After his death, the Mughals get continuously worse and worse and worse and lose more and more and more to the Marathas. They even lose arguably the most important city in the entire Mughal Empire, Delhi, to the Marathas. And the Mughals will continue to have emperors. If you look at a list of emperors, it's not like it's a wrong Zeb and stop. There are continuously emperors going down that list. But officially, those emperors served underneath the Marathas. So why have you never heard of the Marathas? Well, taking down the Mughal Empire is no small feat. But, like everywhere else in Asia in the 1700s, the Marathas had to deal with the arrival of the Europeans. And if we're in India, that means the British. In fact, one British official said the following about India in the 1700s. India contains no more than two great powers, British and Maratha, and every other state acknowledges- the influence of one or the other. Every inch that we will recede will be occupied by them."That's pretty bold.
British are about to take over all of India and they're like, it's us and the Marathas. And just like Charles Metcalf just said, the clash was epic. They fight three wars, a lot of it actually between the Maratha Navy and the British Navy.
We didn't get into this talking about the Mughals. The Mughals aren't really known for their naval power, but the Marathas are. And so you can see here the Maratha ships fighting the British ships.
This was an epic Indian Ocean transfer of power. But it's after these Anglo-Maratha Wars that India is effectively under control of the British East India Trading Company. And so after 1818 it was said that British rule in India had become British rule of India. But the Marathas don't go away.
If you look at their legacy into the 20th century, as the Indians are fighting for independence against the British, both violently and then later not, non-violently, a lot of them look to the Marathas as the prototype for how to gain your independence against an invading empire. So whenever your teacher is talking about internal and external challenges to power in units 3 and 4 in the early modern period from 1450 to 1750, don't forget about the small rebellion that took down the largest most powerful empire in the world, the Marathas. Alright, with such an epic example of a small rebellion taking down a large empire, you would expect that there are a ton of examples from past AP world history exams for us to look at. So let's check it out. No, there's none.
You'd think there'd be, but there's not. It's too new of an example. This is, these illustrative examples aren't required, so you're not going to see it brought up by name, but even in the reports of the chief reader and some prime examples that they give to us teachers, you don't see them at all. They don't really show up, but they are an example of resistance to these land-based and maritime-based. They actually fought both of them, which kind of makes them two for one, but you're not.
not going to find them in past examples, so let me know why I included this. Alright, thanks for watching this special edition of Illustrative Examples as we are part of this greater scheme of these ten YouTubers each taking a topic in their own way. For us it's the Marathas, but you can see from this list here there are many others to choose from as a part of the Discovery of India series.
Once again, I'm Ben Freeman from Freemanpedia.com. Thanks for watching. If you have any comments or anything you'd like to say, please write them below.
I do go back and check these and respond. However, I am I am a real teacher, so I'm kind of busy teaching. So if you have anything you want me to add or suggestions for ways to make this better, et cetera, et cetera, please put that down there or hit subscribe.
That would be kind of helpful to me as well. So go check out these other YouTubers and see what they're talking about in Indian history. Otherwise, good luck on the test in May and I will see you next time.