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1’he implied government policy may have costs with consequences for the
growth of the economy. Also would farmers increase output when prices
remain fixed? The supply response behaviour is not modelled or estimated,
just assumed.
This lack of modelling of supply responses and dynamic growth processes,
leads one to be skeptical of an important conclusion of the book, namely,
’either a monetarist approach to increasing agricultural output needs to be
accompanied by protective measures for the poor-in particular by food
subsidies or income transfers--or a structuralist approach must be pursued
to stimulate agricultural output without reliance on price instruments.’ One
does not know really whether the two alternatives are feasible and which one
of them is preferable. When one accounts fully for the impact on government
budget of the implied policies, the dichotomy between the structuralist and
what the authors call ’monetarist’ view might be greatly reduced.
This little book is clearly written and the authors use considerable ingenuity
in specifying alternative scenarios for policy analysis to address interesting
questions.
KIRIT S. PARIKH
Indira Gandhi Institute of
Development Research
Bombay

SHIREEN MOOSVI, The Economy of the Mughal Empire, c. 1595: A Statistical

Study, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1987, pp. xi + 442, Rs. 195.

The voluminous book under review is the work of a major historian of the
leading school in studies of pre-colonial Indian history. In it, the author
(who is Reader in History at the Aligarh Muslim University) sets out ’to
make estimates of the size of agricultural production, the distribution of
surplus among various classes, the total value of external trade, price and
wage structure, and the size of population in India’, in about 1595. Her
source base, while doing so, comprises fundamentally the Persian A’inha-yi

Muqaddas-i Sahi, wntten m a period from roughly 1588 to 1595 by Š~

Abü’l Fazl c Allämi (1551-1602), at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar,’
a work which is generally known as the A’in-i Akbari. Besides this, the
author has limited recourse to other documentary material, principally the
English Factories in India, and other published English Company documenta-
tion, as also some European travel accounts, particularly that of the
Dutchman Francisco Pelsaert (1595-1630).
The book is divided in eight sections, and seventeen chapters. Of these,
only Chapters 15 and 16 (respectively on ’Money, Price Changes and Credit’,
and ’Foreign Trade and the Internal Economy’) are not fundamentally

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dependent on the A’in-i Akbari. Thus, any review of Dr. Moosvi’s work
must centre on her understanding of Abu’1 Fazl and his writings.
Though the significance of this source was recognised years ago, the first
systematic attempt to generate population, agricultural yield and other
estimates from it was in this journal (Vol. IX, no. 1, 1972) by Ashok V.
Desai. There then followed a debate between Desai, Moosvi and Alan
Heston, which closed with Desai having (what appeared then to be) the last
word, in 1978 (Vol. XV, no. 1). In that paper, Desai revised his initial
position somewhat, but came to conclusions which are of some interest in
the present context. First, he concluded that agricultural yields had indeed
declined between 1595 and the late nineteenth century, for otherwise it
would be impossible to understand how peasants in Mughal times paid even
as much as a half or three-quarters of gross produce (these estimates are
Irfan Habib’s) as tax. Desai also concluded that the population of Mughal
India in about 1600 probably lay in a range from 6.48 to 9.48 crores,
preferring however the lower number. And finally and significantly, he
warned against ’erect[ing] on such ostensibly unreliable figures [of yield] ...
an immense edifice of deductions’.
It is almost a decade since those words were written, and Dr. Moosvi has
spent this time working hard on these figures, as this book testifies. It is
curious though that this time has not been spent on unearthing fresh docu-
mentary material, but in doing precisely what Desai had argued against
namely ’further statistical processing of the data in the A’in [and] ...

analogies with different times and circumstances.’ To begin with, Dr. Moosvi
has retained her axiom (which is, curiously enough, presented as a conclusion)
that yieldsper acre in northern India remained the same for major food
crops between 1540-45 and 1870; she has used this further to derive popula-
tion estimates rather higher than those of Desai. Moreover, she has extended
her Mughal India population estimates to all of India by using a simple
.multiplicative factor derivative from the late nineteenth century, again a
procedure against which Desai had warned. In sum then, the reader of this
book will probably require to make constant comparisons with the ’end-point’
cf the earlier debate, and may well find several of Desai’s conclusions more
appealing. Certainly, his population estimate is the more convincing, and is
supported by subsequent work on the eighteenth century (Frank Perlin,
Christopher Bayly, and Andr6 Wink) which argues that far from being a
’Dark Age’ (as the Aligarh School is wont to characterise it), there was
considerable expansion of population and cultivation in that period. The
narrower the gap between the 1600 and the 1800 population estimates, the
more difficult it is to reconcile with the evidence in these writings; something
must give, and I believe it has to be Dr. Moosvi’s (and Professor Habib’s)
1600 population figure of over 140 million.
The present reviewer found it necessary to ask three sets of questions
while reading this book: first, how good or comprehensive a source is the

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A’fn for the purposes Dr. Moosvi requires; second, how large is the edifice
of assumptions she has to construct to arrive at estimates; third, what
hypotheses are these estimates being used to test. The author is somewhat
sanguine in assuming that the chronicler was a person with access to ’state
papers [whose] ... statistical data were, naturally supplied by government
departments’ (p. 4). This presupposes that the Mughal state was cast in the
mould of a colonial bureaucracy, and that the A’in is some sort of a gazetteer.
This seems incongruous and somewhat anachronistic, both from internal
evidence and from what other sources tell us. For, as regards the reach of the
Mughal state, Francisco Pelsaert (on whom Dr. Moosvi otherwise depends a
good deal) has written, ’it should be known that men only consider him [the
Emperor Jahangir] the king of the plains or marching routes ... [and for the
rest] only know their own rajas, of whom there are many, and from olden
times hold their lands in a multitude of small territories.’ Such an overarching
dispensation is unlikely to have produced centralised statistics of good
quality, and we see this for ourselves from Dr. Moosvi’s own calculations.
On page 47, a comparison is made of the jamc (land revenue claim) per unit
of ard~f (taxable land) in ten dastur circles in what is today UP. This varies
from 11.2 dams per bigha to as much as 64.71 däms. A large variation of this
sort is neither explicable through a variation in crop mix nor indeed through
different crop rates. We are left therefore with three possible explanations,
(i) aro~i was differently conceived in different regions, (ii) it was measured
very poorly indeed in some regions, (iii) or that jamc was not calculated using
the crop rates. If this is true of the Gangetic valley itself, how much faith can
one repose in Abu’1 Fazl’s figures for other parts of the empire that had been
more recently conquered?
Or take prices as they are shown in the A’in. In a 1982 Leiden Ph. D. thesis
(’De VOC in Gujarat en Hindustan, 1620-1660’), H.W. van Santen has
pointed to the fact that the prices in the A’in seem far lower than market
prices as they appear in other sources. He suggested that the positioning of
the chapter on prices in thea’fn after that on the royal kitchen was significant,
and quotes a passage (A’in, Blochmann edition, p. 60) to the effect that ’the
Mir Bakdwal (head of the kitchen) and the writer determine the price of
every eatable, which becomes of a fixed value ...’; thus, what we have are
‘court prices’ and not market prices.
This brings us to the second issue, namely the edifice of assumptions
which has been erected on these, already somewhat problematic, figures.
These assumptions are of the following type. To ’correct’ ar£zi figures (and
’cleanse’ them of cultivable and uncultivable waste components), Dr. Moosvi
uses the ratio of cultivable waste to cultivated land as measured in 1909-10
in the same areas. Her ostensible reason is thus stated: ’the strip of cultivable
waste shifts outwards as the circle of cultivation expands: as it shifts, its area
too should expand since the outer circumference becomes larger’! (pp.
44-5). This statement is not only logically incorrect, but not germane to the

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issue; the accompanying comparison of changes in the ratio. of cultivable

waste to gross cultivation between 1909-10 and 1946-47 only serves to
further obscure the real issue.
The chapters on money, prices and foreign trade also throw up problems
of another sort. Here, Dr. Moosvi, for linguistic reasons, has access to very
limited source material, since both the Dutch and the Portuguese records
even the published corpus-fall outside her ken. So, the English Factories in
India, Tomé Pires, and Pelsaert must bear an edifice of intuitions and
assumptions which they seem altogether too fragile to bear. One of
Dr. Moosvi’s exercises, for example, is aimed at deriving an ’estimate’ of
total textile exports from Mughal India in 1595. The number that is arrived
at (and which may well be seized upon by outsiders to the field who do not
have the patience to see how it is derived) is of Rs. 1,75,00,000 (p. 388). But
in order to arrive at this number, Dr. Moosvi has been forced to make the
following assumptions, none of which any historian of trade would be willing
to venture: (i) that cotton textiles formed three-fourths of all exports,
(ii) that bullion re-exports from India were valued annually at Rs. 30,00,000,
(iii) that horse imports comprised 21,000 Turki and 1,000 Persian animals
each year, (iv) that thP remaining items of imports, other than bullion and
horses, comprise 10 per cent of the total, (v) that imports of gold were
one-fortieth those of silver, by weight. These assumptions have no clear
justification. In the last instance (the relative importance of gold and silver),
the best extant discussion is that of Vitorino Magalhaes Godinho, and it is
-

(even by his own admission) highly tentative. Pierre Chaunu concluded,

rather boldly, from this discussion that Portuguese exports to Asia in the
sixteenth century as a whole of gold and silver were approximately in the
ratio of 1:40 by weight. Now, Dr. Moosvi wishes to equate Portuguese
exports to Asia with imports into Mughal India, and to take an approximate
ratio for the sixteenth century as a whole as true of any year in that century.
Similarly, some serious objections are bound to be raised by monetary
historians to Dr. Moosvi’s estimates of total mint output of silver coinage in
Mughal India in the period. From a single statement by English factors at
Surat that the mint there could in 1634 produce 8,000 coins a day, she
concludes that one can take actual Surat mint production in the years 1634 to
1637 as 4 x 365 x 8000. And since Surat coins of this period unearthed in
UP treasure troves number 46, Dr. Moosvi concludes that each coin in the
treasure trove equals 2,53,913 coins actually produced. Of course, other
statements can be found in the English and Dutch records of the period which
give very different estimates of the daily output of the Surat mint; as Frank
Perlin has pointed out, the nature of the technology was sufficiently flexible to
allow for wide variations. Moreover, one can question the assumption that
troves in UP represent a random sample of mint production in India spatially
and temporally, and that a sample of 4,500 coins is statistically significant from
a population which (according to Dr. Moosvi) was of some 10 crore coins.

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Other problematic assumptions can be pointed out: arbitrary values are

assigned to the savings propensity of different groups of mansabdars, and to
their pattern of expenditure; it is assumed that in the economy, only cavalry-
men, mansabdars, and the Imperial Household save. This renders question-
able both the expenditure and savings figures in the book. This section also
contains several typographical errors which do not make the reader’s task
easier: no units are stated in Tables 12.4 and 12.5, the column for savings in
Table 12.4 should add up to 14,98,38,048 and not 82,98,38,048 and so on.
Before concluding, we may ask what hypotheses these figures are used to
test. This is where the reader will find that our three sets of questions are in
fact interlinked. For, the author’s vision of the A’in and its statistics pre-
supposes a certain structure of the Mughal state, and once this structure is
taken as given, many of the assumptions are forced on the author in order to
justify the vision of the structure. Thus, the conclusions are those which one
has come to expect from the Aligarh School-namely, the sterility of trade,
the wholly extractive nature of the state, the rigid periodisation of economic
expansion and contraction, as well as the simplistic characterisation of the
causes thereof. Now, since these are conclusions which derive very largely
from the backward extrapolation of nineteenth and twentieth century data,
and numbers intuitively assigned by the author, the present reviewer was left
to conclude that there was very little difference between the axioms on
which the study is based, and its conclusions. This is mainly because the
’Aligarh paradigm’ has so large a set of ’core’ propositions (those which are
by definition impregnable to the act of falsification using data). In sum then,
it is to be hoped that the publication of this book will provide the occasion for
a lively debate on how studies of the pre-colonial Indian economy are to

escape this dilemma. At least one part of the answer lies in the search for
new sources (whether in the archives of Rajasthan and Maharashtra, or
those of Europe), but this in itself may not be adequate unless new questions
and frameworks are found within which to understand the evidence that is
unearthed.

SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
University of Pennsylvania

K.S. SINGH, Tribal Society in India: An Anthropo-historical Perspective,

Manohar, New Delhi, 1985, Rs. 175.
That there are not many thinking administrators today is almost a truism and
the few exceptions to the rule demand notice. Dr. K. Suresh Singh is one
such exceptional bureaucrat who investigates, thinks about and writes on
the tribal situation in India, in general, and Jharkhand, in particular. Starting
with his pioneering work on the ulgun led by Birsa Munda, Dr. Singh has

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