Tipu and the Tabur

This article examines connections and influences between Muslim polities across the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth century through the legacy of an embassy sent by Tipu Sultan of Mysore to the Ottoman Empire in 1787. It argues that the soldiers who came with the embassy offered Ottoman elites a new model of performativity and military labor. This helped inspire one of the most important transformations in the history of the Ottoman state: the Nizam-ı Cedid reforms of Selim III. Tipu's men offered a Muslim, Persianate example of a trained infantry army or tabur. That example was attractive not only because it seemed militarily effective, but also because it offered a convincing performance and a new model of military labor, and it came in a familiar cultural register. To show this, the article traces the very earliest history of the new Nizam-ı Cedid infantry army, paying particular attention to the role of the sometime grand vizier, Koca Yusuf Pasha. It also situates the tabur war in the larger literatures on global military history and cultural exchange. Ultimately this account suggests that even military reform, often seen as quintessentially “Europeanizing,” can also be understood as the product of connections between Islamic polities.