UNIT 2 HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE

PRE-COLONIAL PERIOD -
MEDIEVAL
Structure
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Colonial Perception
2.3
2 -4
A Critique of Colonial Approach
Major Trends
I
2.4.1 The Nationalists
2.42 Marxist Historiography
2.4.3 A Critique of Marxist Approach
2.4.4 Revisionists
2.5
2.6
New Trends
Summary
1
1

I
2.7 Exercises
2.8 Suggested Readings

2.1 INTRODUCTION
The pursuit of economic history is a relatively new entrant among professional
historians in India. Till the 1950s,it was scarcely regarded as an independent discipline
by professional historians, the field being more or less a monopoly of economists by
disposition. Among professional historians, the economy at best had a marginal
presence, the greatest weightage being reserved for explaining political or dynastic
changes. In such traditional works, the economic sphere was limited to the description
of commercial and agricultural products of India in order to highlight what was at
best understood to be the material culture of the people. The economy -the material
foundations of society, and the ability or otherwise of a society to produce, consume
and distribute its resources and assets among various groups of people positioned
in asymmetrical relations with each other- did not constitute an autonomous objective
of historical analysis.

There was however an exception, and that came from the colonial attempts to
understand the nature of the pre-colonial Indian economy in order to highlight the
achievementsof British rule in India. The earliest serious explorations in this direction
were made by W.H. Moreland, who in his books India at the Death ofAkbar: An
Economic Study (1920), From Akbar to Aurangzeb: A Study in Indian Economic
Histoty (1923), and Agrarian System OfMoslem India (1929), attempted to give
a connected account of 'economic movements which affected India' under the De1;hi
Sultans and the Mughals. For Moreland the objective of economic history was to
'show how the people spent their incomes, and the sources h m which those incomes
were derived'. While he provided enormous details about the bases of economic
production and distribution in the Indian economy, and for the 'increase in the
efficiency of marketing agencies' under the influence of European commerce in the
17h century, he, as a colonial historian, emphasised the 'intensification of economic Historiographyof the
parasitism' which was simultaneouslydestroying 'her productive energies'. This was Pr~ColonialPeriod -
Medieval
because of the stranglehold exercised by a ruling class 'accustomed to extremes of
luxury and display', who were 'impelled by the strongest motive to grasp for
themselves the largest possible share of each producer's income', which 'brought
about a marked and cumulative reaction on productive industry'.

2.3 A CRITIQUE OF COLONIAL APPROACH

While Indian historians largely discountenanced such a pessimistic view of the
medieval Indian economy, the first serious attempt to counter such a negative
prognosis was made from the 1960s by Irfan Habib. Of his many writings on the
economy of medieval India, his Agrarian System of MughaI India (1963, reprinted
1999), and 'Potentialities of Capitialistic Development in the Economy of Mughal
India1(1969) may be considered two of the most path-breaking ones. Habib's
researches demonstrated that Moreland's views about the backwardness af the
medieval Indian economy were not tenable. He showed the existence of private and
alienable forms of private property in land, which coexisted with the rights of the
state to a share in the produce, and with the rights of occupancy tenants beneath.
Furthermore, as the medieval Indian economy expanded, it developed an integrated
money economy, serviced by trader-bankers using remarkably sophisticated systems
of double-entry book-keeping. This was matched by a remarkable expansion in
city life, supported by a huge population of specialist artisans organised into
workshops who produced for the court and for export both through European
companies and directly to south-east and west Asia. Apart from the export of luxury
items, India's foreign trade consisted of both handicrafts and food grains: for example,
large quantities of rice were exported from Bengal and from the Malabar coast.

Since the 1960s, writings on the medieval Indian economy have substantially
confirmed these features. In fact, there is an ovenvhehing consensusthat the medieval
Indian economy witnessed substantial growth. The macro-view of the Indian economy
at the turn of the 17h century may be summarized as follows:
1) a high degree of commercialisation, so that most producers produced in part
for a market, and some, probably along the coast, produced primarily for the
market;
2) a trimetallic monetary system backed up by elaborate (nationwide) networks
of sophisticated financial institutions (for example, the hundi);
3) a number of primate cities, an interwoven network of supply lines to the cities,
and a substantially large percentage, almost 15%, living in such places;
1

4) a system of land tenure based on private ownership and reasonably brisk market
in land and in rights over land;
5 ) a high labour to land ratio, and the concentration of cultivation in lands of high
intrinsic fertility which in turn made possible high yields per acre;
6) a political system in which the elite depended on a series of cash-valorized
prebendalised holdings, the incomes from which either consumed in urban areas
or hypothecated in advance to a class of specialised rural bankers/moneylenders
who farmed these prebends by advancing money to the elite; and
7) specialised communities of merchants, each engaged in a distinctive branch of
trading or double-ended money ventures with local economies as well as with
the European trading Companies.
15
Historiography, Environment
and Economy
2.4 MAJOR TRENDS
Nevertheless, despite large areas of agreement on the features of the medieval Indian
economy, historians have differed on the more problematical issues like: what caused
this growth?, what was the general direction and nature of this?, and whether this
process was actually severely undermined in the 18hcentury, or was it more of a
reorientation under rapidly changing macro-circumstancesrather then decline? Such
considerations have resulted in historical reconstructions of the medieval Indian
economy and centre around three core issues: periodisation; trends and characteristics
of the medieval Indian economy; and the impact of Europe on India, first in the
realm of trade and then in the increasing marginalisation of the Indian economy
under the sweep of European (specifically, British) imperialism from the mid-1 8h
century.
These concerns have led to the historiographical division of the medieval Indian
economic history in the past fifty years in four distinct clusters. One cluster, based
exclusively on official Persian records has revolved around the political-economy,
especially the fiscality of the medieval state, from the 13thto the 17Ihcenturies,
where it is strongly argued that the medieval Indian economy was a distinct departure.
The second cluster, which relies on the European-language archives (particularly
the Portuguese, Dutch and the English) has focussed on the patterns of India's
overseas trade and the nature of European commercial enterprise in India between
the 15Ihand the 18&centuries, arguing again for a distinctiveness in the interface
between Europe and India in the early-modem period. The third cluster has been
explorations in regional economic history based on the vernacular-language archival
materials, particularly in western India, where the focus has been overwhelmingly
on the relationship between the state and the regional economies. The fourth cluster
concerns itself with the break up of the Mughal imperial economy and the transition
to a colonial economy in the 18thcentury. Its dominant concerns have been nature
and incidence of the tax burden imposed by the new regime and the increasing
retardation of the Indian economy under the new dispensation.
Broadly speaking, the principal approaches, which historians have adopted in their
respective quests to understand the medieval economy, can be clubbed under three
'schools'. The first analytical paradigm, which has been of the longest duration, can
be broadly called the nationalist; the second influential approach has been by
historians who have adopted a Marxist framework, and the third is the 'revisionist'
approach, which is of a more recent origin and also the one which has received the
greatest criticism by the nationalist/Marxist historians.
2.4.1 The Nationalists
The nationalist interpretation, which emerged in the 19Ihcentury as a critique of
colonial/irnperialistconstructionsof a stagnant, unchanging 'East', is mainly concerned
with establishing the pan-Indian unified nature of the medieval Indian economy,
flourishing under the three-cornered stimuli of political stability provided by the
medieval Indian, particularly the Mughal, state; the rich natural resources of the
country, and the productivity of the Indian producers. These, it is argued gave India
a unique position and made it the fulcrum of economic transactions in the medieval
and early-modern periods. The nationalist 'school' places great emphasis upon the
unified (i.e., composite) and dynamic nature of the medieval Indian economy, and
sees its demise in the debilitating impact of colonial rule. In other words, had colonial
exploitation not intervened when it did, India would have transited into an economic Historhgdphy of the
powerhouse. Pre-Colonial Period -
Medieval
2.4.2 Marxist Historiography
Marxist historiography, which has reached considerable finesse and depth in the
last fifty-odd years, does not speak with one voice in its interpretationofthe medieval
economy. There are some whose views border very closely to the nationalist position.
For these historians, the levels achieved by the manufacturing sectors in 16thand
17Ihcenturies India were enough to ensure that the economy was poised on the
verge of an industrial revolution, till it was destroyed by an industrialising Britain.
Such simplistic and unitary views ofthe medieval Indian economy are not shared by
other historians of the same analytical dispensation. It is instead argued that the
economic history of medieval India is an important chapter in the larger story of the
exploitation of the Indian producers by a doubly-despotic system: that of a political-
landed aristocracy eombination and a usurious merchant capital, both ofwhich sapped
the vitality of the Indian producers by appropriating greater and greater portions of
the surplus produced by them and then dissipating this enormous wealth in largely
unproductive purposes. Thus, while the consumption fund of the medieval ruling
classes increased enormously, this was achieved at the expense of the productive
potential ofthe economy - a typical case of killing the goose that laid the golden
egg. Therefore all the indices, which others have seen as symptoms of economic
vitality, these historians view as transitory, bereft of all possibilities of achieving an
economic breakthrough. The arrival of colonialism in the 1 81hcentury meant that it
began preying on an economy already paralysed by its own internal stasis, and
added to the misery of the producers both absolutely and in relative terms by
introducing certain novelties, such as the new land-tax systems and the drain of
wealth through the one-sided transfer of tribute.

In other words, while the nationalist vision of the medieval Indian economy is growth
in the midst of a stable equilibrium, one influentialvariant ofthe Marxian fiamework
sees it more as a fractured process where the fruits of economic growth were
unevenly distributed among a parasitical ruling class in the form of revenue assignments,
and the rest was siphoned away by a form of merchant-capital which existed only
as an appendage of the revenue appropriating system. In this version of historical
analysis, the prime mover of the economy was not the forces of the productive
systems but the way in which surplus was collected by the state and distributed
within the ruling class, and commercial growth, which occurred in the medieval
economy was, typically of a forced nature. This argument, proposed in the 1960s is
still adhered to with very little modifications by an influential group of historians.

Despite the major differences in the way nationalist and Marxist historiographies
have interpreted the dynamics of the medieval economy, there are certain areas
where they share certain commonly grounded assumptions. The first such ground is
their almost complete agreement on the centralised nature of the medieval Indian
state and of its being the hub of economic transactions. The second area of
convergence is that the medieval economy was an expanding economy: cash usage
had increased, as had the volume and complexitiesof commercialtransactions, The
third commonly shared position of the two schools is that the decline ofthe Mughal
empire in the early 18&century was a deep disjuncture characterised, among other
things, by chaos and anarchy leading inexorably to a deep-seated economic
regression
Historiography,Envimnment This preoccupation with the centrality of the state can be seen in the 'forced
and Economy commercialisation' thesis. An argument, which was specificallydeveloped in order
to understand economic retardation in the colonial context, has been pushed
backwards to explain growth in the medieval Indian economy largely as a fallout of
the fiscal requirements of the medieval Indian state. Since, it is argued, that the
medieval state managed to extract more than 40 percent of the agricultural produce
as revenue, paid overwhelmingly in cash, this constituted 'an incredibly high
proportion' of a consumption fund in a predominantly subsistence economy. The
accumulated wealth wqs circulated by the ruling class by conspicuous consumption,
which thereby stimulated exchange, monetisation, markets, and a cash-nexus.
However, the nature of this commercial growth was of an enforced kind since the .
extraction of revenue occurred through the use of non-economic coercion, mainly 1
by the use of political compulsions. Two consequences followed. First, merchant
capital would never develop an independent basis for it was entirely, almost
parasitically, dependent on the vagaries of ruling class consumption. Secondly, the
high burden of taxation served simultaneouslyto cripple the possibilities of growth
in the cultivation of superior kinds of crops, and created extensive impoverishment
in the countryside. One significant fallout of this highly exploitative system was that
the possibilities of structural growth, that is, a qualitative transformation in the
economic system to higher ( capitalistic ) level was prevented. Merchant capital,
which had such an enormous presence in the economy would atrophy with the decline
of the Mughal empire. Paradoxically, it is here that some of the findings begin to
come perilously close to the arguments proposed by Moreland in the 1920s, some
of which were summarised in the beginning of this essay.

In 1982 the publication of Cambridge Economic History of India (CEHI), volume 1

especially was a benchmark, It summarised and synthesised an anterior generation
of researchers along the nationalisth4arxistframeworks, and was thus a convenient
point to begin looking afresh and to think ahead. In fact, many of the specific themes
that constitute the teaching of Indian economic history still continue to be based
quite extensively on that volume. I refer here to issues like the relationship between
the state and the economy,the question of agricultural and non-agricultural production,
the structure and dynamics of internal trading, the growth and spread of a money-
using economy, and the changing networks and profiles of international trade and
the impact on the medie\ &iIndian cconomy,

2.4.3 A Critique of Marxist Approach

While historians recognise the importance of CEHIvolume, some of its assumptions
and findingshave beep critiqued in the following manner.

First, the c~onologic~1 markers which guided this volume are no longer acceptable.
The early medieval ecbnomy, that is India fiom the 8&to the 12" centuries is dismissed
~ pages, and the medieval is rather conventionally started in 1206.
precisely i n i three
It also ends in 1750, but has practically nothing to offer as a discussion on the i
developments in the Indian economy during the period of Mughaf decline. This '
critiq~ehas arisen because historians have now seriously rethought the bounding
edgesbf what is constructed as medieval both backwards and forward, and the
problem of continuities between the early medieval to the medieva!, and between
the IaW medieval to the early-colonial are now so deeply entrenched in historiography,
and the unstated problematic in the chronological schema adopted by CEHI I is
bhgkcreasingly seen as inadequate.
 Secondly, the CEHI I privileges the state and the expense of every other institution Historiographyof the
of social grouping that existed in medieval India. Every aspect of the Indian economy Pre-Colonial Period -
in these crucial centuries is seen as an extension of the luxury consumption and fiscal Medied
I
organisation among the elite, depending in the last instance on the ability of the state
of systematically extracting between 40 and 45 per cent of gross agricultural produce.
l
Critics have pointed out that quite apart from the fact that the evidence of such high
degrees of extraction are questioned in the same volume by the evidence available
from South India, this monocausal explanation is at surprising variance from the
evidence being thrown up from regional records from Maharashtra, Rajasthan and
Bengal. Also, the so-called extractive efficiency of the state gets substantially diluted
if one looks at the significant fiscal leakages which occurred between what was
collected and what was actually transmitted as tribute to the imperial centre. Local
fees paid to landed-magnates, to holders of privileged tenures in the form of large
grants ofrevenue-free lands which over time became patrimonial holdings, and the
huge explosion of marketing-centres in rural India surely cannot be explained any
more by this one variable.

Third, the large picture that one gets from the CEHI 1 about the overall context of
the medieval Indian economy in the six centuries which this volume encompasses is
one of stasis. A certain degree of stratification and conflict in society is recognised,
but this is posited within a surprising degree ofchangelessness in the larger context.
In the long centuries between the 13fhand the 1 8 ~the, CEHI I identifies two phases
or cycles of state formation, one in the 13thand 14thcenturies, the second in the
16thand 17thcenturies. Both the cycles were determined by the ability of the state
to refine its tax- assignment systems, which, in both instances, fell regressively on
society and subverted superior cultivation, while it simultaneously increased the
distance between the rich and poor in the countryside. Stasis is implicit in this
explanation because it ascribes one single motor to explain the same sort of change
over six centuries: in other words, the more India changed the more it remained the
same. Critics therefore point out that overall, one leaves the CEHI I with this
inescapable impression of a country trapped in an increasingly atrophying agricultural
economy in which all other activities were irredeemably peripheral.

2.4.4 Revisionists
Such criticisms of the regressive characterisation ofthe medieval economy in CEHI 1
have been made by historians who have been dubbed as 'revisionists'. A major
milestone in revisionist history-writing of the publication, in 1983 of Chris Bayly's
Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars which spearheaded a fresh look at the problematic
of state-society intersections in late pre-colonial India. More recently, individual
historians who have increasingly beg* questioning the state-dominated explanation
of medieval India's economy have based their arguments on Persian-language
sources, records contained in the regional (vernacular) archives, and the evidence
contained in European-language sources (particularly, the Dutch and the English
colonial records) in order to construct a rich and variegated social and economic
history of India.

The revisionist viewpoint disagrees with and critiques the more domindnt
historiographical schools on three specific counts. The first is its disagreement with
the effectiveness of the centralised state in medieval India. The second area of
disagreement is over the dynamics of the commercial processes in medieval India.
The pird point of difference is that of the so-called subservience} parasitism of
merchant capital.At the level of the polity, instead of seeing the medieval state as an
iistoriogra~Q,Env-ent effectively centralised one, attention is drawn by some historians, basing themselves
rnd &ammy on Persian sources, to the medieval state being a more negotiated arrangementwith
dominant landed groups in the countryside and vulnerable to internal pressures from
its nobles. Some examples of these vulnerabilities are the inability of the medieval
state, even under the Mughals, to affect parity between assessment of revenue (the
jama) and what was actually collected (the hasil), or its failureto prevent transmission
losses of up to 25 per cent of its revenue from the countryside. Attention is also
drawn to the more structural inability of the medieval Indian empires to engineer a
set of enduring systems to bridge chasms between a powerful land-based rural elite
(the zamindars) scattered even in the heartland of the empire as well as all over the
country. Mawasat and zor-talab (perennially refractory areas) thus existed cheek
by jowl with sir-i-hasil (revenue paying) lands causing immense problems for the
fiscal health of the state and severely undermined its military efficiency.

The arguments questioning the predominantly overarching role of the state are
buttressed by a more differentiated view of the economy. Instead of commercial
growth being an enforced offshoot of ruling class ostentation, the new view is that
the economy enjoyed a relative autonomy manifest in the growth of small country
towns and fixed marketing centres. Specially dynamic components of the economy
are identified in the proliferation of marketing networks in the countryside, and the
expansion of non-agricultural production spearheaded by artisans and funded by
merchant groups busy provisioning a burgeoning export economy of the subcontinent.
Particularly important in this conception are the roles being ascribed to the landed
gentry, who instead of being a class of rural exploiters are now being seen as playing
a more proactive role in the economy by financing agricultural reclamation, providing
vital agricultural inputs to stimulate production and encouraging exchange by
establishing markets in their domains. A further suggestion is that the agrarian revolts
at the end of the 1 7 ~ :century
'~ and their successes were not so much the desperate
reactions of an impoverished peasantry but indicated the prosperity of these rural
gentries
The argument about the parasitic nature of commercial life in medieval India has
also been effectively undermined by historians exploring the nature of the maritime
trade of India, particularly in the 17" and 18" centuries. There are ~~GClfiCally
some important areas where a considerable refinement has taken place. One has
been the almost complete rejection of the notion, proposed in the 1950s, that the
Indian merchant was a mere pedlar and that India's trade was overwhelmingly in
luxury goods. The consensus, instead, is of a trade comprising a diverse range of
commodities, including luxuries, being conducted by a whole range of merchants
starting from merchant-princes at the top to petty itinerant vyaparis at the village
level. These constituted the cornerstone of the 'Asian trade revolution' occurring in
the 16'hand 17' centuries, a process which has been recently redefined as being
composed of two parts: 'the phenomenal expansion in the volume and value of
Euro-Asian trade', and 'a major diversification in the composition and the origin of
the Asian cargo entering this trade'. Another area of refinement has been a new
understanding of the relationship between the Indian merchant and the medieval
Indian polity. The Indian Ocean was part of an elaborate commercial network with
the Atlantic and the Pacific, and it was the increasing Europeanisationof early modem
trade that set the tone and the hture of India's commercial life in this period. In its
long engagement with this commerce, the liidian side provided goods and the services,
but under conditions of demand which were mediated by the global networks of
European commerce. The profits were significant from the Indian point of view, and
much wealth, mainly in the form of silver-bullion, flowed into India through this
i
channel. From the perspective of understanding the economic history of India, these
developments were extremelysignificant.Indian commercial life and merchant capital
was deployed in the service of wider networks of connections whose impulses were
determined as much as from Africa, South-eastAsia and Europe as they were fiom
---
EEkiegrqrLyofthe
a

Agra and Delhi.

Far from being mute spectators to the caprices of the medieval ruling class, the
merchants are now seen as conscious makers of their own destinies. Merchant-
princes exercised considerable influence in the polity, and some indeed became

rt
grandees of the empire. Others who did not enjoy, or desire, such a proximate
relationship with the state nevertheless undertook a 'portfolio' of investments,
which included state-finance through contracting for revenue farms (ijara) and in
moving the imperial tribute from the provinces to the central government. This latter
role was vital in maintaining the fiscal health of the medieval state, a fact which the
state could ignore or interfere with only at its own risk and peril. Furthermore, the
minting of coins and the movement of bullion was the exclusive preserve of a
specialized body of merchants, the sarrafs. The state seldom tried to or could
interfere in this area.

Significant also has been the newly emerging emphasis in historical reconstructions
of the medieval economy on the role of merchants and traders in the 'intermediate'
(as distinct from the imperial centre and the village) layers of the Indian economy.
This has emerged in order to contextualize the growing importance of internal and
trans- regional trade in basic raw materials, foodstuffs, and capital goods carried in
vast quantities through the interior by small merchants and itinerant (banjara)
caravans. Banjara networks facilitated and exchange economy of surprising densities
stretching over great distances. For instance, much of the cotton woven by the
large textile industry on the south-east coast came from Maharashtra and Berar; the
whole interior of the southern peninsula was dependent for salt on supplies brought
fiom the sea; and the poorer people of the rice-growing riverine systems of the
k
southeast ate not the expensive crops which they produced, but millets and dry
grains carried fiom the interior. Such complex networks could arise only because of
the internal dynamism of the countryside. One such dynamic was the existence of
various non-peasant groups who lived in the villages to perform various rituals,
commercial and administrative functions. In addition, large town-based merchants
also had their agents who either resided there, or came periodically to purchase
directly fiom the peasant at the time of the harvest. In addition, the villages also had
substantial numbers of people who were either craft producers, traders or engaged
in providing various ancillary services to the village folk.

2.5 NEW TRENDS

Analyses of the medieval Indian economy have also been significantly reoriented in
the recent past by using inputs from social anthropology and by broadening the
concept of economic exchanges as involving a whole set of micro-transactions of a
social and cultural nature. Amajor input in this respect has been 'ethno-history', an
approach adopted by many historians fiom north America while studyingprecolonial
India. The end purpose of ethno-history has been to deconstruct southAsian traditions
and to reconstruct the past more in keeping with the values and understandings of
the historical agents who lived it. One important shift ethno-history has brought
about has been its attempt to see Indian history not as a prisoner of immutable
categories (like caste, village community, or thejajmani system), but in terms of
key institutions through which regional social and economic constellations can be
Historioppby, more meaningfully pursued. 'Little kingdom', 'watan', 'lineage group', 'temple',
and Economy 'sect', 'gift', and 'honour' are seen as some of key institutions governing power,
status, socio-economictransactions, entitlements, commercial exchange and wealth
in India's rich and varied countryside. The significance of these institutions is that, if
the relationships covered by these are explored, it becomes clear that we are dealing
with a society whose articulations were much more complex and potentially dynamic
than the concepts of immutable tradition or monolithic class structures. Another
area where ethno-history has had a major presence is that it has drawn attention to
the close relationship between community forms and structures and the imperatives
of the material contexts in which they were situated. In other words, attention is
now being increasingly focussed on the more non-formal communitarian-institutions
as regulators of economic life for large groups of people.

This important input has led to many historians, particularly those studying the histories
of south India and western India, emphasising the formation and role of community
institutions in the economy and their eventuaidissolution of transformation in the
midst of macro-level economic changes. They show how these community-oriented
institutions allowed members access to scarce resources, allowed them to maximise
opportunities under sometimes trying conditions and helped in the allocation and
redistribution of scarce resources among members of a community. Studies in other
areas, in north India, Bemgal, Hyderabad have also shown how during the late 17th
and 18" centuries these regions saw the rise o f ' great households' straddling the
worlds of commerce and politics; literate-gentries like the 'vakils/dubashes' who
were critical in the growing interface between European and the Indian commercial
lives; mirasi peasants actively pursuing new opportunitiesin commercial agriculture
in the south and the western parts of India; and commercial zarnindars whose growing
fortunes were based on the accumulation of wealth drawn from privileged rights
previously held under ruler's and/or community prerogative.

How are these perspectives beginning to reorient the processes of understanding

the nature of the pre-colonial Indian economy?

There is in the first instance a growing rethinking on the nature of the relations of
production in the economy. The existence of privileged social groups in the countryside
as well as rich peasants situated cheek by jowl with the poor, landless and the
menials means that the circuits of investable capital and its intervention in the labour
process could proceed autonomously, that is, independent of the macro-level
transference of tribute Erom the regions to the imperial centre. Production responded
to shifting market and price conjunctures, and this has been shown to have occurred
in commodities as diverse as cotton in westem India and rice in Bengal. A substantial
section of the rural workforce was composed of artisans or engaged in pastoralism
and/or in the exploitation of forests and jungles. A high density of cattle in pre-
colonial India testifies to the existenceof pastoralism and its centralityin the rhythms
of agricultural production. Such specialized workforce meant the relative autonomy
of an exchange sector in the village itself. It also meant that cultivationtended to be
concentrated on high-quality lands, capable of being soil-replenishingin its techniques
and strongly supported by high levels of animal fertilisation. As a result, per acre
yields were perhaps substantially higher than those generally achieved in the later
19"-century.

From this the move,into the question of markets and marketisation is a natural one.
Far from being the accidental outcome of the circuits of high-end consumption of
tribute, one needs to look at markets in medieval and early modem India in a bottoms-
up approach. Markets grew, as is commonly known, as did towns and cities with Historiography of the
the vast contingents of soldiers, courtiers, 'priests, merchants and artisans. Large Pre-Colonial Period -
Indian cities (likeAgraand Delhi) exuded substantiallyhigh levels of economic energies Medieval
sui generis, thus radiating commercial impulses for up to 100 kilometres into the
surrounding countryside; but smaller towns, perhaps performing a greater
commerciallyaggregative rale than the 'primate' cities of the Empire, could easily
be indistinguishable from its surrounding countryside. On the whole, one of the
principle thrust areas of the new approaches to Indian economic history is to locate
marketisation and circulation in a multitude of productive and commercial functions
below the level of the large city and their concentration in centres scattered over a
wide variety of intermediate townships (qasbasJ and in the larger villages (dehat or
gaon). These together comprised a web of interconnectedproduction centres dotting
the face of the country across interwoven trade routes, which gave rise to a rurban
(muffussil)economy that incorporated in it the village and the intermediate qasba
economies into a composite whole.

Then there is the question ~fmonetisation and cash-nexus in the medieval Indian
economy, The* is a surprising unanimity of opinion that the economy of south Asia
witnessed t h exponential
~ increase in the volume and velocity of money transactions
in these centuries. The question is: how does one explain such an increase? The
standard answer so far has been that the monetisation was a result of greater
systematisationof tax- gathering apparatus of the medieval state and its increasing
propensity to collect revenue in cash. Attention is also drawn to the proliferation of
mints md their centralisation as an example of this phenomenon. On the whole, such
developments indicate the growing ability of the medieval state system to organise
the circulation of large amounts of money; they do not explain the genesis of
monetisation in the economy. Even a cursory look at the monetary history of the
Delhi Sultanate shows how the developmentof the medieval state need not necessarily
have corresponded with a greater availability of money. The period between the
10a and 12th centuries were marked by a severe monetary contraction both in
India and in the Persian Gulf. In India, this was a period marked by intense plundering
raids which digorged the hoarded treasures of northern India into the Islamic world,
Plundering raids in the thirteenth century continued to operate as a significant factor
behind the expansion of money use in the Sultanate's economy as did agrarian taxation
and the growth of town centres. The thirteenth century expansion was again setback
towards the end of the fourteenth century when there is strong evidence of extensive
debasement of coinage, and in the fifteenth century when north India seems to have
been facing a severe crisis of precious metals, mainly silver. The period between the
16mand eighteenth centuries was marked by a remafkable stability in the availability
of metallic currency. The crucial fact remains that India did not have natural sources
of precious metals, particularly silver and the exportexpansion which India witnessed
in the 1 7 ~ 0and
: ~ 1gthcenturies in the direction of India's foreign trade first towards
the Iberian peninsula and then towards northern Europe was the principle pump
through which increasing quantities of that precious metal flowed into the bloodstream
of the Indian economy. Centralisationand intrusive fiscality of the later medieval
state was dependent on this prior economic expansion, andnot the other way round

Finally, economic historians have posited the idea of a conjunctureture

in late sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries in order to explain the huge expansion as well as the
possibilities of crisis in the I n d i a economy. The conjuncture W e e n intrusive
centralism of the Mughal state and the steady growth of the long-distance maritime
trade running from the Mediterranean to East Africa to China and Japan was the
Historiography, Environment
and ~eonomy
binding agent in the 17thcentluy nexus between the dynamic Indian economy and
the north European trading companies. Such binding agents, paradoxically, both
expanded and weakened the sinews of the medieval Indian economy for two reasons:
a) most indigenous traders in each exporting region assumed a position subordinate
to the servants of the East India Companies; and b) in place of the older structure of
a free trade flowing through overlapping markets centres through a series of port-
entrepots of India to the Mediterranean, the East India companies substituted a
centrally administered channel for the exchange of goods and treasures. In effect,
the most expanding and profitable portions of India's export trade were blocked-
off from the independent Indian merchant. In effect, the commercial strength of the
medieval Indian economy may have also been the source of its greatest weakness.
2.6 SUMMARY 1
The colonial historians defended the colonial policies and colonial rule in general by
underlining the backwardness of Lndia's pre-colonial economy.The first serious attack
on colonial historiography was provided in the early 1960s by Marxist historians,
particularly by IrfanHabib. His writings shatteredthe existing myth of a 'stagnant' pre-
colonial tndian economy. Instead he highlightedthe presence of a vibrant economic life
in the pre-colonial period based on high levels of commercialisationof agriculture and
money economy.The Marxist approach to study the medieval economy is largely 'state
centric7.The 'revisionists' challenged their approach. They emphasized that 'regions'
too played an equally dominant role. Recent studies on medieval economic history
have broadened the base M e r and tried to integrate ethno-history with it.
2.7 EXERCISES ,
1) Discuss major approaches to study the medieval Indian economy.
2) Discuss Marxist approach to study the medieval Indian economy.
3) Provide a critique of the Marxist historiography.
4) E m i n e the new emerging trends to study the medieval Indian economy.
5) Give a brief account of the revisionist approach to studying the pre-colonial
economy.
2.8 SUGGESTED READINGS
Alan, Muzaffar (1986), The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh
and the Punjab 1707-48, New Delhi.
Appadorai, A. (1936), Economic Condition in Southern India, (1000- 1500),
Vol. 2, Madras.
Banga, Indu (ed.) (1 991), The City in Indian History: Urban Demography, Society
and Politics, New Delhi.
Bayly, C. A. (1983), Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in
the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870, Cambridge.
Bhadani, B.L. (1999), Peasants, Artisans and Entrepreneurs, Rawat
Publications, Jaipur.
Chandra, Satish (1982), Medieval India: Society, the Jagirdari Crisis and the Historiography of the
Village,Macmillan, Delhi. Pre-Colonial Period -
Medieval
Chandra, Satish and Dilbagh Singh (1972), 'Structure and Stratification of Village
Society in Eastern ~ajastkan,'Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 33rd
Session, Muzaffarpur.
Chaudhury, Tapan, Irfan Habib (ed) (1982), The Cambridge Economic History
of India, Vol. I: c. 1200 - c. 1750, Delhi.
Datta, Rajat (2000), Society, Economy and the Market: Commercialisation in
Rural Bengal, 1760-1800, Manohar, Delhi.
Frykenberg, Robert Eric (ed.) (1992), Land Tenure and Peasant in South Asia,
OUP, Delhi.
Frykenburg, Robert Eric (ed.) (1 969), Land Control and Social Structure in
Indian History, Reprint, 1979, New Delhi.
Fukazawa, Hiroshi (199 I), The Medieval Deccan: Peasants, Social Systems
and States 16-18th Centuries, OUP, Delhi.
Grover, B.R. (1963), 'Nature of Land Rights in Mughal India', Indian Economic
and Social History Review, Vol. 1.
Habib, Irfan (1963), The Agrarian System ofMughal India 1556-1 707,2nd
revised edition, OUP, Delhi, 1999.
Habib, Irfan (1 9 9 9 , Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception,
Tulika, Delhi.
Habib, Mohammad (1952), Introduction to Elliot &d Dowson's History of India
as Told by its own Historians, Vol. 11, Aligarh.
Hasan, S. Nurul(1973), Thoughs on Agrarian Relations in Mughal India, New
Delhi.
Karashima, Noboru (1992), Towards a New Formations: South Indian Society
Under Vi~ayanagara Rule, OUP, Delhi.
Kulkarni, A.R. (1969), Marathas in the Age of Shivaji, Bombay.
Kulkarni, A.R. (199 1-92)' 'The Indian Village with Special Reference to Medieval
Deccan (Maratha Country),' Proceedings of the IndianfHistory Congress, 52nd
Session, New Delhi.
Ludden, David (1989), Peasant History in South India, Delhi.
Moosvi, Shireen (1987), The Economy of the Mughal Empire c. 1595: A
Statistical Study, OUP, Delhi.
Moreland, W.H. (1920), India at the Death ofAkbar, London.
Moreland, W.H. (1923), From Akbar to Aurangzeb, London.
Moreland, W.H. (1929), Agrarian System of Moslem India, London
Ramaswamy, Vijaya (1 985), Textiles and Weavers in Medieval South India,
OUP, Delhi.
Richards, J.F. (1 9 7 9 , Mughal Administration in Golconda, OUP, Oxford.
Siddiqi, Noman Ahmad (1970), Land Revenue Administration Under the
Mughals, Bombay.
Hfibri%ra~h~,
Envirmment Singh, Chetan, ( 1 99 I), Region and Empire: Panjab in the Seventeenth
and Economy Century, OUP,Delhi.
Singh, Dilbagh ( 1 9901, The State, Landlords and Peasants: Rajasthan in the
18th Century, Manohar, Delhi.
Singh, Dlibagh, (1976), 'Caste and the Structure o f Village Society in Eastern
Rajasthan during the Eighteenth Century,' Indian Historical Review, Vol. 11, No. 2.
Stein, Burton ( 1 980), Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India,
Delhi.
Subbrayalu, Y ( 1 973), Political Geography of the Chola Country, Madras.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (ed.) (1994), Money and the Market in India 1100 -
1700, Delhi.
Trivedi, K.K. (1998),Agra: Economic and Political Profile of a Mughal Suba
1580-1707, Pune.