The Eighteen Century

UNIT 1 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN in Indian History

INDIAN HISTORY*
Structure
1.1 Introduction
1.2 The Eighteenth Century: Salient Features
1.3 The 18th Century Debate
1.4 The Mughal Empire, Its Decline and the Genesis of the Eighteenth Century
1.5 The Process of Regionalization
1.6 How ‘Mughal’ were these Regimes?
1.7 The Economy of the Eighteenth Century
1.8 The Indian Economy in the Late Eighteenth Century: The Emerging Differences
1.9 Summary
1.10 Glossary
1.11 Exercises
1.12 Suggested Readings

1.1 INTRODUCTION
For the people of India, the eighteenth century appeared as an age of dissolving certainties.
Never in its history had the Mughal Empire appeared so vulnerable. Its citadels were
being buffeted by Afghan marauders (Nadir Shah, 1739 and Ahmad Shah Abdali,
1748-1767), Maratha adventurers (the Peshwas) and various warrior-peasant groups
(Jats, Rohillas, and the Sikhs), while its military-bureaucratic apparatus (the
mansabdari system), which had been its pride and mainstay stood by helplessly. The
fiscal system had also broken down, thereby threatening the life-styles of a genteel,
highly urbane class of people and their dependants. The empire was bankrupt and all
semblance of political governance and fiscal probity had apparently disappeared. And
this was not all. The worst possible ignominies had been heaped on the house of
Timur: two emperors, Ahmad Shah (1748-1754) and Shah Alam II (1759-1816) were
blinded, and another, Alamgir II (1754-1759) was assassinated by nobles engaged in
bitter factional feuds.
The speed with which this happened was bewildering. In 1700 the Mughal Empire
under Aurungzeb was at its territorial zenith. Yet by the 1730s of the century many of
its core areas had been fragmented into numerous regional polities. While some of
these, like the Nawabi of Awadh or the Nizamat in Bengal, took roots as ‘successor’
regimes, others, like the Marathas or the Jats, emerged on the basis of their sustained
and often violent opposition to the Mughal empire. A further thirty years down, the
political fortunes of India were clearly moving in a different direction. A European
power, the British East India Company, had succeeded in conquering much of eastern
India and had begun to exercise a decisive influence on the state of affairs in other
parts of the subcontinent. On the basis of these successful political ventures, the
Company was slowly but inexorably creating the bases of an early-colonial system of
rule. No wonder, contemporaries amazed at the intensity of the disturbances around
them thought that this was an age when their world was being turned upside down.
Given the nature of these changes, the eighteenth century has attracted the attention of a
number of modern historians and has gradually emerged as the hub of a lively debate.
Because of this, the historiography of this century has seen some very innovative advances.
While interpretations differ sharply on many aspects, there are a few areas of unanimity.
The older interpretation that the decline of the Mughal Empire was a result of Aurungzeb’s
religious bigotry has been comprehensively rejected. If Aurungzeb faced opposition from
the Marathas, the Jats and some Rajput clans, he was equally troubled by recalcitrant

*Prof. Rajat Datta, Center for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 11
Historiography and Economy Muslim nobles and officials who were instrumental in leading the factional struggles in the
imperial court, and powerful Rajput ruling houses continued to be loyal to the empire.
The earlier stereotype that this was a century of moral decadence and cultural decay has
also been rejected. Attention is now drawn to the robust and dynamic cultural life of the
regional states, many of whom carried the legacies of high Mughal culture and blended
these with the rich cultural heritage of the regions. Lucknow and Hyderabad had emerged
as centres of literary and cultural patronage thus becoming the hubs of remarkable cultural
efflorescence. Eighteenth century Banaras emerged as a great centre of banking and
commerce in north India and combined this with its unique position as a centre of religion,
education and pilgrimage. In Bengal, Nadia was the centre of Sanskrit learning and Dayabhaga
that of Hindu law, and Bishnupur became the place where elaborate regional architectural
and musical styles grew and flourished. In the south, Tanjore, under the patronage of its
Maratha rulers, became a vibrant centre in the fields of religion, music and dance.
Thus historians now view the decline of the Mughal Empire and its aftermath not as a
result of religious bigotry or the weakness of individual rulers but as a structural process:
as a systemic rather than the personal failure of an individual. But sharp differences
nevertheless remain about the causes and nature of this systemic failure. Opinions are
divided between those who view the decline as a result of an economic crisis engendered
by an over-exploitative ruling class and those who see the entire process as a process of
local resurgence fuelled by a long-term process of economic growth. There are also
differing interpretations of the changing relationships between state and society, the patterns
and processes of economic growth, and the consequences of the tussle between the
empire and the localities over the distribution of the fruits of this growth.
But the eighteenth century was not limited to the decline of the Mughal Empire and the
consolidation of regional state systems. Much more fundamental changes were occurring
in the subcontinent from the middle of the century, and these have understandably attracted
the attention of a large number of historians with widely discordant voices. The areas of
debate are centred around, first, the reasons of the transition of the Company from a
commercial to a political entity; secondly, the roots of colonialism in India, whether it was
a purely exogenous process, or did it have local, that is, indigenous roots; and thirdly, what
was the nature of its social and economic impact. Implicated in these are questions of
continuities and changes and the relative position and importance of each in the new
colonial order.

1.2 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: SALIENT

FEATURES
In order to understand the broad processes at work, and to make sense of the immense
range of issues thrown up by the differing points of view, it is worth keeping in mind the
following salient features of this century.
First, the eighteenth century witnessed two transitions. One occurred with the parcellisation
of the Mughal Empire into regional, and even sub-regional, political entities. The genesis of
this transition lay in the crisis of the empire and its subsequent disintegration. While this
mainly involved the redistribution of political power among regional social groups, the
other transition went much deeper. This occurred towards the middle of the century and
was unleashed by the political ascendancy of the British East India Company after the
battles of Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1763). Involved in this were some new developments,
the most important being the transformation of an overseas trading organization, the East
India Company, into a ruling power in India, and the use of this political supremacy for
military and commercial purposes.
Second, in order to fathom its full implications historians are beginning to look upon the
eighteenth century as a ‘long’ century. Recent interpretations tend to see the political
dynamics of this century beginning to unfold in the 1680s amidst the fragmentation of the
Mughal Empire. By the 1720s the aftershocks of the disintegration had been absorbed by
12 the stable regional polities which had emerged in most parts. From the 1750s major political
realignments had started occurring under the growing hegemony of the Company. This The Eighteen Century
process continued till the 1820s by which time all major indigenous regimes had been in Indian History
either annexed or had become subsidiary allies of the Company. Thus in terms of its
political significance the eighteenth century encompassed the last two decades of the
seventeenth and the first three decades of the nineteenth centuries. From the economic
perspective too a ‘long’ view is a worthwhile one. There is now substantial evidence to
show that political regeneration in the provinces was accompanied by regional economic
reorientation. While some places declined, economic growth occurred in other areas and
this was spearheaded by local landed and commercial classes; and compared to a prevalent
view which stresses economic dislocation from the middle of the century, recent research
shows that despite the pressures being imposed on indigenous structures by the ascendancy
of the Company, prospects of economic growth were not abruptly closed. Even in Bengal,
where the Company’s regime was at its most intrusive, commercial and agricultural
expansion continued though in somewhat modified forms. Such was the situation till first
two decades of the nineteenth century, when by all accounts the slow growth of the
eighteenth century was coming to an end.
A third meaningful perspective, which has been of a recent vintage, is to see the relationship
between the Indian economy and the global economy. The Indian Ocean was part of an
elaborate commercial network with the Atlantic and the Pacific, and it was the increasing
Europeanisation of early modern trade that set the tone and the future of India’s commercial
life in the eighteenth century. In its long engagement with this commerce, the Indian side had
always 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 flowed into India through this channel. From the perspective
of understanding the eighteenth century, these developments are significant. A substantial
part of the problem of continuity between the Mughal and post-Mughal and from there to the
early-colonial can be understood if one remembers that 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-east Asia and Europe as they were from Agra
and Delhi. The early-colonial intervention deepened this incorporation. One instance
of this was transformation in the networks of the intra-Asian trade in the middle of
the eighteenth century when the earlier linkages between India and west Asia were
now redirected towards east and south-east Asia under the directions of British
commerce. Since the eighteenth century was period of global economic expansion
(compared to the seventeenth century which is commonly recognized a period of
crisis), and since India’s overseas trade also increased phenomenally in this period,
any view which sees the eighteenth century only as a period of economic disjuncture
or crisis is a questionable one.

1.3 THE 18TH CENTURY DEBATE

Given the rapidity and the significance of the changes which occurred in the 18th century,
it is natural that there are differing interpretations of almost every issue involved. Broadly,
the debate follows the traditional division of this century into two halves and the protagonists
of different points of view can be divided into two broad groups. For the period up to 1750
one can divide them into those who hold an empire-centric view and those who hold a
region-centric view. For the period after 1750, the views can be held to broadly conform to
the Indianist and Europeansist positions. In other words, for the first half of the 18th
century, there are historians whose view of the 18th century is based on the centrality of
the Mughal Empire and its institutions in the workings of the society and economy of the
country. In this view the decline had catastrophic results. While the extreme edge of this
view would interpret the decline as one of political chaos and anarchy, recent interpretations
see it more in terms of a structural collapse but with very little positive emerging from the
rubble. The regional formations, which succeeded the empire, are ascribed with little potential
for improving their performances beyond the levels already achieved as Mughal provinces,
whereas oppositional movements like the Jats, Sikhs and Marathas are considered nothing
more than predatory-formations with very little positive to speak for them. 13
Historiography and Economy In contrast are those who view the developments from the perspective of the provinces
and localities. Instead of giving the empire a superordinate role, as is done in the empire-
centric perspective, the region-centric approach focuses on how social groups inhabiting
different areas of the empire became active agents in determining the course of the political
and economic trajectories for their own ends. At one level, the structures of Mughal
provincial government was fundamentally transformed which led to the creation of
autonomous kingdoms in Bengal, Awadh and Hyderabad. At another level there arose
those polities, like the Marathas and Sikhs, whose genesis lay in opposition to the Mughals,
but who, ironically, created political systems within the imperial domains which also made
use of many of the administrative methods of the Mughals. All these modified provincial
authorities gave the erstwhile Mughal grandees new opportunities to deepen their hold on
power in the regions, and in addition, their clients and family members were also able to
amass large bundles of proprietary rights and rights to farm revenue from the state which
in course of time became hereditary estates. A process of commercial growth in the
regions underpinned all this.
For the post-1750 situation, the Europeanist explanation gives primacy of place to the
ascendancy of a triumphant, expansionist Europe (especially Britain) defeating an India in
chaos and disarray. This is by far the most dominant view amongst Indian nationalist and
Marxist historians, and provides the foremost historical perspective on the roots of India’s
economic backwardness. The nationalist view overwhelmingly has been to see the anarchy
in eighteenth century India as a momentary but catastrophic lapse in an otherwise unfolding
saga of nation building in India’s history which allowed a foreign power to conquer and to
colonise the country. While the more traditional Marxist view was to see the rise of British
rule as a necessary evil as it ended much of the ‘feudal’ disintegration of society in the
eighteenth century, more recent variants see it as a system relentlessly driven by the
search for profits, commodities and markets, with no ‘progressive’ aspects to its credit.
But some common assumptions are embedded in both historiographical perspectives as
far as the eighteenth century is concerned. The first is the assumption shared by both that
order and stability could exist only in large, pan-Indian political structures; and since this
disappeared in the eighteenth century, it was a period of chaos, anarchy and decline. The
second commonly shared ground is that of discontinuity. Both see British rule as a
fundamental disjuncture: a completely foreign and alien system of domination, totally
removed from the traditions of Indian governance or culture.
On the other hand, the Indianist perspective tries to adopt a more differentiated perspective
of this transition to colonialism. The rise of the British power is seen not as a one-sided
process of conquest and subjugation, but also as a result of Europe’s (especially Britain’s)
deep engagement with India over a long period. Instead of a forced grafting of a foreign
regime on Indian soil, the emphasis is on the way in which conditions in Indian society
determined the emergence and form of British India. In this argument, the shape of British
rule in India was determined as much by the metropolitan interests as it was by Indian
agency. Instead of seeing the eighteenth century as a period of unchecked anarchy, the
Indianist perspective devotes great attention to the political stability imparted by the
‘successor’ states of the Mughal Empire. Instead of seeing a picture of economic regression
in the disintegration of the empire, the Indianist view is that India’s commercial and military
sophistication continued in the eighteenth century and the Company used this to its advantage.
While there was strong indigenous resistance to this intrusion, Indian agency was a vital
ingredient in ensuring the ultimate success of British rule in India. British rule was based
on Indian norms of governance, modes of agro-commercial management and the skills of
its human resources, but it successfully modified these for its own purposes. Thus in the
Indianist view, the eighteenth century was not a century of ruptures, but a century of
deep continuities in which past institutions and structures continued albeit in substantially
redeployed forms in the midst of vastly expanding commercial opportunities. Those
subscribing to this view are often infelicitously referred to as the ‘Cambridge School’
as many of the protagonsists are situated in North America and a number of Indian
historians also share this perspective. However, together they constitute what is
14 commonly referred to as ‘revisionist’ historians.
 The Eighteen Century
1.4 THE MUGHAL EMPIRE, ITS DECLINE AND THE in Indian History
GENESIS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Much has been written about the decline of the Mughal Empire. As stated earlier, theories
of moral turpitude, weak rulers and communal policies need not be taken seriously as they
are empirically unsustainable. Later Mughal emperors, for example Farrukh Siyar, tried in
their own way to stem the rot. There is no evidence to suggest that these emperors
abdicated their responsibilities, but events were moving too fast for a single person to
handle. The other theories focus on a rapidly disintegrating structure, a severe crisis in the
Empire’s fiscal and jagirdari systems, which severely compromised the institutions of
governance. This has been written about extensively and Irfan Habib’s arguments have
been the most influential. For Habib, while the capacity of the economy to expand was
self-limiting, there was an unrestrained tendency of the Mughal fiscal system to appropriate
greater and greater amounts of the peasants’ surplus. This sparked off a tri-polar
confrontation between the imperial ruling class, the hereditary land holding classes (the
zamindars) and peasants, which soon went beyond the capacity of the system to contain
or control. Satish Chandra provided important reason when he explained the empire’s
demise in the inability of state functionaries to ensure the desired efficiency of the
assignment (jagir) system, thus leading to intense factional struggles. In a similar vein
Athar Ali saw the crisis as a result of a growing shortage of jagirs and the inability of the
system to accommodate the growing number of aspirants to the assignment system in the
aftermath of Aurungzeb’s Deccan campaigns. However, an important corrective to this
was provided by John Richards who showed that be-jagiri (jagir-less) wasn’t a problem
in the Deccan as it was not a deficit area, but it was the larger failure to devise a viable
system of accommodating local elites in the Deccan which was proving to be the Empire’s
major drawback in the Deccan. In this view, the crisis arose because of an imperfect
imperial consolidation, visible in the failure of the state to effectively incorporate the local
agrarian elite, thereby creating deep fissures in the empire.
An interesting argument made by Marshall Hodgson is that the three Islamic empires –
the Ottoman, the Safavid and the Mughal – were successful not because of their adherence
to a single formal religion, but because of their successful control over the deployment of
gunpowder, and the reason why they atrophied or failed ultimately was because of their
inability to keep up with the changing technologies of warfare that were happening in the
western hemisphere. Can this be applied to the Indian case? Recently, Iqtidar Alam Khan
has drawn our attention to the simultaneous correspondence between gunpowder,
centralization and resistance: while access to muskets, cannons and gunpowder strengthened
the sinews of imperial power, these were simultaneously used by its more powerful subjects
to arm themselves and to resist the intrusion of the state. It was logistically impossible to
prevent such crucial technology from percolating downwards. Therefore, any notion of
the state’s exclusive control over firepower as a prescription of its success tends to break
down as zamindars, chaudhuris, and dominant-peasant groups controlled large numbers
of armed militia. The Marathas, the Sikhs and the Jats used muskets, as did most other
rural-magnates. One must also remember that these people enjoyed various traditional
rights and perquisites because of their social/caste standing in the countryside. This made
them capable of drawing additional human resources to augment their military strength
if necessary, which they did regularly. Though the Mughal army controlled a great
amount of military hardware, as a collectivity the local magnates were always a
serious military threat, especially considering their strategic location in the countryside.
By the eighteenth century the terms of reference between the state and rural magnates,
as far as military technology was concerned had equalized because of the concerted
upsurge in the countryside. Stewart Gordon has shown how the Marathas were
successful in tapping into a vast and heterogeneous military labour market, including
the one being provided by Europeans, in the eighteenth century.
Therefore, in order to understand the process of Mughal decline one has to take both a
long-term view and a conjunctural view. The long-term view is that the Mughal Empire
provided a number of institutions ostensibly to centralize power, but unfortunately those led 15
Historiography and Economy to periodic crises in institutional and fiscal arrangements of the empire, which the Mughals
were unable to sort out effectively. Some examples of this are the inability of the state to
affect parity between assessment of revenue (the jama) and what was actually collected
(the hasil), or its failure to prevent transmission losses of up to 20 percent of its revenue
from the countryside. There was also the more structural inability of the empire between
a set of enduring systems between the agrarian elite and the state. Both existed in a state
of perennial contradiction. Of course, there were instances of rapprochements between
the two. For example, there was the so-called Rajput policy of Akbar; but even this did not
cover the whole of Rajputana or the entire grid of Rajput clans, nor was it able to contain
a potent source of political friction. This was further aggravated by the inability of the state
to strike out workable (consensual) arrangements with a myriad of small zamindars
scattered even in the heartland of the empire as well as all over the country, and this
accentuated problems. Mawasat and zor-talab (perennially refractory areas) thus existed
cheek by jowl with sir-i hasil lands. These were the long-term structural problems.
The conjunctural problem assumed the form of the Deccan crisis, and the sustained
oppositional movements of the Jats and the Mewatis in the north India, particularly in the
Ganga-Yamuna Doab, and of the Sikhs in the Punjab. Other places, like eastern India,
where great commercial advances had taken place in the seventeenth century, there was
the difficulty of getting adequate tribute as zamindars had been able to use a slack revenue
system to their advantage. Though this did not cause political instability, it accentuated the
financial problems of the empire. This was accompanied by the convergent crisis in two
other Asiatic empires which disrupted the established and highly profitable commercial linkages
between India and west Asia. In fact in one influential explanation of the economic problems
being faced by the great Mughal port of Surat is ascribed to the crisis of these empires.
The conjunctural crises intensified the long-term conflicts between the imperial imperative
and the local imperative and brought the empire to its knees.
What is being suggested here is that to understand the endogenous processes of
centralization, decentralization, and crisis in the Mughal Empire, the constantly changing
and negotiated relationship between the centre and the localities, and the perpetual tensions
between the imperial ruling class and the local magnates, have to be kept in mind. These
relationships were never fixed at the dictates of the state; they were constantly changing
and unfolding. The analysis of the Mughal Empire as an establishment of negotiated
political relationships means that there was greater flux in its interstices, and this fluidity
allowed for a greater constellation of social groups in different parts of the empire and this
explains the various social configurations in different parts of the empire. Studying the
empire in terms of the fluidity of the relationship between the centre and the provinces
allows us to understand articulation between the regions and the centre. The more the
empire tried to centralize, the gainers were the regional groups, which latched on to this
process of centralization and benefited from it. As the empire generated enormous wealth
through its revenue mechanisms, the tussle between its maximization and the attempts to
retaining larger and larger proportions of this wealth in the localities grew stronger.

1.5 THE PROCESS OF REGIONALIZATION

If one adopts a region-centric perspective, alternative versions of the empire and its collapse
begin to emerge. Even in the Persian language sources, there are possibilities of reading
more decentralized and vulnerable versions of the empire. For example, Andre Wink’s
advances the notion of fitna to argue that the system was constantly being subverted from
within, and that there were forces of factionalism and centrifugalism constantly pulling
away from the centre. Stephen Blake’s description of the Mughal system as a ‘patrimonial-
bureaucratic’ edifice is another such variant reading. What this means is that the Mughals
were always walking a tightrope while attempting to balance an elaborately personalized
style of rule (the patrimonial) with a highly militarized and centralized vision of the empire.
This created a peculiar contradiction, and as M.N. Pearson has argued, the Mughals failed
to bridge the gap between a paternalistic, highly personalized form of government and its
16 military aspirations; that while trying to be militarily effective it was not able to carve out a
system of rule based on an autonomous military-bureaucratic system. Muzaffar Alam also The Eighteen Century
shows how the imperial process was continuously being subverted by the aims and in Indian History
aspirations of the local gentry constantly attempting to consolidate themselves at the expense
of the imperial ruling class.
What we now see is a whole range of pressures pulling away from the Mughal state:
these ranged from factions at the centre to the independent consolidation of the local
and regional elite. The nature of the elite was not the same everywhere. While in
Awadh such people belonged to the upper echelons of the social system (the ashraf),
elsewhere they could include more ‘subaltern’ elements like the Jat peasantry in the
Punjab or the Sadgop zamindaris on the fringes of the settled zones in Bengal. Merchants
and bankers played a crucial role in underwriting them for a consideration. It is this
diversity which appears as a striking feature of the newly constituted regional elite in
the eighteenth, thus giving us a picture of a system buffeted by multi-polar tensions.
The crisis now can be seen as the one created by resurgent aspirations of groups below
composed of what C.A. Bayly has described as ‘many types of military, merchant and
political entrepreneurs’ all coming together to ‘capitalise on the buoyant trade and
production of the Mughal realm’. This resurgence did not mean a decline; it meant the
social displacement at the top combined with the replacement of some institutions and
the reconstitution of others.
The basic point is that seeds of change germinated within the Mughal institutions themselves.
Paradoxically, the institutions of centralization generated their own counter-tendencies.
Much of the process of regionalization can be explained by the consolidation of the imperial
elite who took advantage of the disintegrating jagirdari-mansabdari complex for their
own purposes. Similar tendencies were at work in the zamindari system too. While the
Mughals sought to make the zamindars work as intermediaries in their land revenue
administration, these local elites, highly armed and ruling over substantial domains like
petty kings, generated alternative, localized, sub-imperialisms. Also recent researches,
particularly in the Mughal provinces of Awadh and Bengal, have done much to revise the
older views of zamindars as a class of rural exploiters. On the contrary, they were active
agents in local economies as financiers, entrepreneurs and consumers. They financed
agricultural reclamation, set up markets and traded, and consumed in cash. Their retainers
became a sub-elite between them and the peasants, as they were usually given prebends,
which they used to extend small zones of high-value consumption in the countryside. They
thus rose in rebellion to defend the fruits of their prosperity from the intrusive pressures of
state fiscalism. These in turn were used by the provincial satraps to enhance their powers
vis-à-vis the centre. In Awadh, the provincial subahdar enhanced his power by using
such agrarian disturbances as a bargaining counter against the centre. In Bengal, the
subahdar used the pressing financial needs of the empire and the recalcitrance of some
local zamindars to augment his power base.
Recent studies of the political processes in eighteenth century have indicated the growth
of three types of regimes. First, there were those that replicated the former imperial
structures. Ruling these ‘successor’ states that nominal Mughal governorships: the nawabs
of the Deccan, Awadh, and Bengal who tended to perpetuate Mughal forms and practices.
The second types of regimes were the polities whose origins were independent of the
Mughal Empire. These were the Maratha, the Jat and the Sikh regimes, whose crystallization
established new systems, thus representing a real and persistent danger to the Mughal
Empire. The third political complex was extremely significant. This comprised many local
principalities of Muslim, Hindu or tribal origin located in the frontiers of the semi-autonomous
states. As burgeoning Jat zamindars began to push them out of the Ganga-Yamuna Doab,
Rajput clans began establishing petty- kingdoms from Gujarat in the west to Awadh in the
north through a process of conquest, migration and settlement. In Rohilkhand and Bhopal,
Afghan chiefdoms were established by an innovative combination of conquest, revenue-
farming and trading with the northwest frontier. Agricultural colonization, revenue farming
and commercial dealings were also instrumental in the consolidation of the Banaras Raj
and the great zamindari households of Burdwan or Qasimbazar in Bengal. On the northeast
frontier of India Mughal expansion was stopped in the 1680s by the Ahom dynasty that 17
Historiography and Economy maintained an independent Assam under a Hindu tradition of kingship until the British
annexed it in the early nineteenth century.
In the south, while the really great royalist concentration occurred only from the 1760s in
Mysore, the situation before that, as David Ludden shows, was characterised by petty
kingdoms being formed by the Telugu-speaking nayakas, who had been subordinate to
Vijayanagar and had established their autonomy on its downfall, or from palayakkarans
(poligars) who managed to carve out small domains from the territory of the nayakas,
based on temples and a highly militarised population. On the Malabar coast, the situation
was an uneasy alliance between the coastal kingdoms and the land-owning households
held together by a mutual sharing of profits from trade, land and labour. An intrusive
monarchical system was introduced in this region only after the invasion by the aggressive
Mysore state under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan.

1.6 HOW ‘MUGHAL’ WERE THESE REGIMES?

Recent studies of regional government and administration have shown that the political
changes in north India in the first half of the eighteenth century denoted no sudden deviation
from the established Mughal pattern of politics in the regions. Some of the developments
which led to the transformation of the Mughal provinces of Bengal, Hyderabad and Awadh
into virtually autonomous kingdoms can be traced back to the end of Aurangzeb’s reign
and together represented a long-term process of change towards a regional fragmentation
of power. The rulers of successor states who were nominal Mughal governors, the Nawabs
of the Deccan, Awadh, and Bengal, naturally transplanted many of the cultural idioms of
the imperial court to their new capitals. These regimes tended to utilise Mughal forms and
practices of governance. Even the Nawabs of Arcot, whose rule was propped-up by the
support they could garner from the English, was introducing Mughal principles of
administration for the first time in this region. The Marathas, who claimed sovereign
rights for themselves in their territories, nevertheless collected revenue on Mughal principles,
even if they used different names for their officials. Although the Sikhs developed distinct
community institutions like the khalsa, which were strongly opposed to Mughal claims,
they still collected revenue on Mughal principles and alienated large blocks of land in
Mughal-style jagirs. Persian remained the official language of diplomacy, of high-level
administration, and of high culture in each of these regimes.
Yet there were major differences. Though these regimes replicated Mughal institutions in
their own territories they were not regionalised prototypes of Mughal rule. They used
Mughal norms but only to a very limited extent and in highly redeployed forms. There
were many specific differences.
First, though many of the larger provincial regimes (the nawabis) were established by
Mughal grandees, they were highly suspicious of that very institution on whose back they
had ridden to power, namely, the jagirdari system. Each of the subahdars (governors)
therefore either broke with its essentials, or modified it enormously to suit his designs. In
Bengal, Murshid Quli Khan resumed all imperial jagirs and transferred the holders to
Orissa. In Awadh, the structure of the jagirdari system was maintained, but large
jagirdaris were broken-up and reallocated among smaller assignees and the nawabs
maintained close control over jagirdari officials (the amils, revenue collectors). In
Hyderabad the power of jagirdars were curtailed by the appointment of officials like the
daftardars (record keepers) and taaluqdars who were directly under the control of the
Nawab himself. Secondly, the Mughal practice of separating the executive and fiscal
powers of different office-holders in the provinces was henceforth broken. Murshid Quli
Khan appropriated the dual functions of the diwan and subahdar, as did Asaf Jah in the
Deccan, while in Awadh, Burhan-ul Mulk combined the high offices of subahdari and
faujdari (commandant).
The second major difference lay in the sphere of fiscal management, and this was
ubiquitously widespread notwithstanding the difference in the size of the regime. While
the central financial prop of these regimes was the assessment and collection of the
18
land-tax in cash, the management and its execution was given over to revenue-farmers
(ijaradari) in preference to paid officials or landed intermediaries. The practice of ijaradari, The Eighteen Century
thoroughly disapproved by the Mughals, exploded all over India in the eighteenth century. in Indian History
The ambits of tax-farms were extended beyond mal (land-revenue) to include sair
(non-agricultural) taxes as well as various types of public offices and positions. Though
the conventional view of historians has been to see ijaradari as a ruinous expedient, the
evidence on which this view is based is far from conclusive. In Rajasthan, where Dilbagh
Singh has extensively studied the spread of this system, an ijara contract was reckoned
not on the assessed revenue (jama, which was often unrealistic) but on the basis of the
actual collections (hasil) of the previous five to seven years. This would provide an
in-built check on rack-renting though there were bound to be loopholes in the system.
Studies of Awadh and Banaras have shown that ijaradari raised revenue and ensured a
higher return for the state while minimizing its administrative overheads. It also provided
the scope for a diverse range of people to become implicated in the interstices of the
state’s fiscal system. Successful zamindars could extend their holdings by farming extra
land and people with money developed a stake in agrarian management, either by taking
on farms themselves or, as was the more common practice, by advancing money to those
who did. Revenue farming seems to have expanded in a big way in the Coromandel from
the middle of the century, with the ‘landed and military gentry’ taking the lead in bidding
for such farms.
This introduces the third element of difference between the Mughal system and the new
ones. In all the regional polities, irrespective of their size or geographical location, there
developed an extremely close nexus between the state and people with money at their
disposal. According to Karen Leonard, the period of imperial decline coincided with the
increasing involvement of banking firms in revenue collection at regional and local levels.
This involvement increased in the first half of the eighteenth century. By 1750 bankers
were the ones who controlled access to the actual collection of land revenue, through
provision of credit or cash. They provided the funds that enabled people to become tax
farmers and had their own agents into the countryside to collect from the land given to
them as security or mortgage. Throughout India the richest merchants and bankers were
gaining a stake in the new political order, and in several of the smaller eighteenth-century
states trader-bankers had become the key political group by the 1760s. In the larger
states, like Bengal, individual merchants were given monopoly rights over commodities
like salt and saltpetre and wielded political authority in the saltpetre districts. Why did this
reorientation occur? Stable regional centres began to attract banking capital. Bankers
migrated from the Mughal core to places like Farrukabad, Lucknow, Murshidabad, Patna
and Banaras where they began extending credit to rulers and ijaradars (revenue farmers)
and guaranteed the remittance of revenue from where it was collected by bill of exchange
to the ruler’s capital or wherever else it was needed. In areas characterised by political
instability like Gujarat, Rajasthan or the western Deccan, merchants quickly found
alternative avenues of investment and patronage. The vulnerability of the Mughals against
the Marathas led merchants and bankers to migrate from Surat to other cities. Many
shifted to Poona, the capital of the Peshwas and to other cities, like Baroda, in the Maratha
Confederacy. Credit transactions were quickly extended to the European companies,
particularly to the English, who were emerging as major players in the regional politics of
this period.
The fourth area of difference was the gradual but steady insinuation of the European,
especially British, element in the fabric of Indian political life. This was an important
development, whose implications have constituted one of the principal concerns of the
Indianist reading of the eighteenth century. Instead of being a great disjuncture, the logic
of the events of the middle of the eighteenth century can only be understood as part of a
long pre-history of the interface between Europe and India. Though based primarily in
commercial transactions, Indian rulers were no strangers to the skills of the Europeans in
land warfare as well as at sea. Numerous Europeans were employed in the artillery wing
and in the armouries of Mughal armies. During the eighteenth century the situation began
to change as many of the larger regional polities began developing massed infantry drilled
and armed in the European fashion with European technical and logistical expertise, and 19
Historiography and Economy Europeans, as P.J. Marshall, says, began to ‘infiltrate regimes that were willing to hire
services for cash’.
Its full manifestation occurred in the 1740s. As the tussle between the Nawab of Carnotic
Anwaruddin Khan and his son Muhammad Ali Wallajah, on the one hand, and the Deccani
Navaiyitis, a major administrative family led by Chanda Sahib, flared up in 1740s, the British
and the French became drawn into the politics of regional state formation. The British
supported the Wallajah of Arcot, the French propped up Chanda Sahib. British troops were
also hired out to the Wallajah to enable him to consolidate his control over the southern
Poligars and even in an abortive attempt to procure for him the very rich lands of Tanjore.
Chanda Sahib was defeated and killed in 1752. By 1763, British naval supremacy and financial
clout had become virtually unassailable in the Carnatic. In return for their services, the
British were rewarded with leases of revenue from enormously productive tracts of land
(called ‘subsidies’) and allowed to station their military garrisons in the lands of the Nawab.
Equally significant was another dimension of this relationship. British personnel in Madras
privately loaned enormous sums of money to the Nawab: money which was borrowed in
turn from Indian and European investors, thereby giving rise to, what Bayly describes as ‘a
paradox typical of eighteenth-century India’ in which ‘indigenous capital penetrated into the
emerging Muslim state system through the good offices of British speculators’.

1.7 THE ECONOMY OF THE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY
Two problems have engaged much of the debate on the economy of eighteenth century
India. The first is the economic context in which such diverse patterns of regionalization
took place, or whether the processes of regionalization were symptoms of economic
expansion, crisis or stasis? The second concerns the state of the economy in the early-
colonial transition.
The creation of post-Mughal polities wasn’t always a smooth process. From the descriptions
contained in contemporary literature, the impression one gets is that of a serious breakdown,
anarchy and economic uncertainty. But some of it appears to be exaggerated. The transitions
in Bengal and Awadh were largely peaceful, though serious disruptions occurred in the
Punjab and the eastern Deccan. Most serious accusations were levied against the Marathas.
Their armies ravaged the rich commercial province of Gujarat in the early parts of the
century, followed by plundering raids into eastern India in the 1740s and Rajasthan in the
late eighteenth century. But whether these, and other instances of temporary dislocations
were enough to cause a serious reversal from the levels of prosperity in the seventeenth
century is a debatable issue. As Stewart Gordon’s study of Malwa shows, once conquest
had been completed and Maratha rule was secure, effective administration and a regulated
revenue demand on Mughal principles was installed. Agriculture was encouraged and
trade revived. The domains of leaders like Sindhia, the Gaekwads or the Bhonsles supported
powerful armies sustained by effectively administered revenue systems by the late eighteenth
century. Elsewhere too the situation was mixed. Punjab was clearly beginning to recover
from its travails in the late eighteenth century, whereas Rajasthan, whose economic problems
began at that time, was thriving during the process of the Empire’s disintegration. Stable
regimes had also been formed in Rohilkhand, Farrukhabad and in Banaras. Expansionism
was ingrained in many of these regimes. Awadh managed to usurp vast territories from
the Afghans of Rohilkhand. In the south, Mysore under the Sultans annexed most of the
Malabar coast, and Arcot spread along the south-eastern coast to grab the domains of the
southern Nayakas. Such a differentiated process of political formation does not support
notions of the decline of the Mughal Empire as an unmitigated economic disaster.
Emergence of New Town Centres
Given the absence of concrete indicators of growth, it is very difficult to clinch an argument
either way, but some broad parameters can be considered. Though the economy continued
to be predominantly agricultural, the levels of urban growth seemed to have expanded not
20 declined in the eighteenth century. Contemporaries lamented the decline of Shahjahanabad,
while other cities, like Sirhind in the Punjab definitely suffered. Mathura which was considered The Eighteen Century
a prosperous and populous city till the middle of the eighteenth century suffered a major blow in Indian History
after it was sacked by Abdali’s forces in 1756; yet further down the Yamuna, the great
imperial city of Agra was still considered by many in the 1760s to be the richest city in the
Mughal empire, not having been plundered by either the Afghans or the Marathas. On the
other hand, there is evidence to show that smaller places like Ballabhgarh, Bharatpur and
Kumbher were growing, and existing trading centres like Hathras or Panipat actually expanded.
Even if north India presents a mixed picture of urban existence, it is impossible to find
urban contraction in other parts. Contemporary observers talked eloquently of the increase
in Calcutta’s population and importance, and while Calcutta’s case may be dismissed as a
colonial enclave, Dhaka had about 450,000 people living within its environs in 1765 and
continued to be as thickly populated later on. In 1756, Murshidabad was declared as ‘one
of the richest cities in the world’; and in 1764 it was described, by no less a person than
Clive himself, as ‘[a city] as extensive, populous, and rich as the city of London, with this
great difference that there are individuals in the first possessing infinitely greater property
than in the last named city’. In addition to these premier places, Bengal also had cities
which were positioned at medium levels of consumption. Towns such as Bhagwangola,
Azimganj, Katwa, Kalna, Chinsura and Chittagong were swiftly becoming intermediate
centres of consumption, trade and habitation in the eighteenth century.
In western India, the partial decline of Surat was more than offset by the rise of Bombay.
There also appears to have been no demonstrable correlation between political turbulence
and urban contraction in central India. In Malwa, Maratha depredations in the 1720s had
not prevented a pattern of urban growth along an axis different from the previously established
Mughal sarkar towns. By the 1760s Ujjain expanded as Sindhia’s capital and Indore
became the base for the Holkar’s, and by all accounts this city grew into a large and
prosperous trading centre in the last decades of the century. Poona became the new outlet
for Chanderi silk during its rapid growth from a small town to the capital of the Marathas.
Burhanpur which had earlier served as an entrepot for trade along the Agra-Surat axis
now shifted its hinterland to include Pune and Nagpur and Lucknow and Allahabad in the
east. In the south, where the decline of the Empire had only a tangential resonance, towns
continued to grow. Madras expanded at a phenomenal pace, and under the new regime
Hyderabad witnessed remarkable growth, both as a place of elite residence and as a node
of great commercial importance. While the decline of the Empire seems to have had an
initially disturbing effect on some centres on the Coromandel, places like Masulipatnam,
Nagapatnam and Devanapatnam quickly recovered under the political stability provided
initially by Nayakas of Ginji and later by the better-developed regional kingdom of Tanjore.
Therefore, the eighteenth century may actually have witnessed a net accretion as far as
town life, and presumably an urban-economy, are concerned.
Expansion of Overseas Trade
The other indication of India’s economic vitality was the considerable expansion of its
overseas trade. In the early 18th century there were disruptions with the damage to the
great port of Surat caused by the Maratha invasions and by the crisis in west Asia.
Anglo-French conflicts caused temporary setbacks in the Carnatic, but despite this India’s
overseas trade with Europe increased steadily. Om Prakash has recently shown that while
the exports by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) from Gujarat suffered a steady
decline between 1700 and 1750, these were counterbalanced by the enormous expansion
of exports from Bengal between 1700 and 1752. These fell subsequently, but hovered at
an average of about 2 million florins a year till 1785, which was still substantially higher
than the value of exports at any point of time in the seventeenth century. While the Dutch
ascendancy had certainly ended by the middle of the century, English trade was undergoing
its most phenomenal expansion: expanding from £ 1.15 million in 1698-1700, to £ 1.92
million in 1738-40, £ 2.1 million in 1758-60 and £ 5.8 million in 1777-79. The pride of place
had now shifted to Bengal. Some historians believe that prior to the British conquest of
Bengal, the component of Bengal’s export trade under European control was secondary
compared to the trade with Asian markets, but there is very little evidence to substantiate 21
Historiography and Economy such a claim. On the contrary, contemporary estimates of bullion imported into pre-Plassey
Bengal show that of the annual importation worth Rs. 10 million, the share of bullion from
Asia seldom exceeded Rs.2 million. India’s trade was structurally linked to Europe much
before the fact of colonization, and the major fall-out of this linkage was an unprecedented
export-expansion accompanied by massive injections of bullion into the Indian economy.
On an average, the Dutch pumped in 4.69 million florins worth of bullion in the Indian
economy between 1700 and 1760. The English East Company brought in a total of £ 8.72
million worth of bullion into India between 1701 and 1721; this had gone up to £ 12.9 million
between 1733 and 1756. The victory at Plassey introduced changes to the structure of this
trade, but as will be discussed below, these were temporary closures.
The economic implications of such a massive expansion in trade have yet to be worked out
for the eighteenth-century as a whole, but they are likely to have been positive. At a
subcontinental level, Om Prakash visualizes the impact to have generated expansions in
‘income, output and employment’. In Bengal alone he estimates that full-time employment
opportunities in the artisanal sector increased at least by 10 per cent by the middle of the
century. Though he discounts any inflationary impact of this massive influx of bullion, a
rise in prices of commodities like rice and sugar is suggested in the prices of provisions
listed in the purchases made by the English company around Calcutta. This would suggest
that increases in money supply occasioned by larger and larger amounts of silver-bullion
being pumped into the economy might have led to a simultaneous rise in both output and
prices in the province. It seems Bengal wasn’t an isolated instance as Prasannan
Parthasarathi has recently detected a similar tendency on the Coromandel coast from the
1720s.
The important point is that bullion was flowing to recharge provincial economies. While
substantial amounts of this were being sent to the imperial centre as tribute, most of it
tended to stick in the provinces. Early Company observers estimated that such injections
of bullion had resulted in a net accretion of at least 25 crores rupees (£ 25 million) to the
Bengal’s monetary reserves by the middle of the century. Provincial reorganization could
thus occur in the midst of expanding regional economies. This would explain why the
hallmark of the eighteenth century ‘regional centralization’ was an increase in the
assessment (jama) in the provinces and the propensity of the state to collect revenue
in cash.
An overwhelming consensus among historians in India is the view that political turmoil of
the eighteenth century had disrupted networks of trade, particularly along the east-west
and Agra-Surat axes. While some disruption cannot be ruled out, what is not clear is the
extent or the depth of its adverse impact. Extremely fragmentary evidence about rising
rates of insurance in the eighteenth century have been provided by Irfan Habib to show an
increasing vulnerability of trade in this region, but this does not clinch the issue. Revenues
showed no signs of declining. From Rs. 460,000 in 1571-72, Surat’s revenue had increased
to Rs. 700,000 lakhs in 1721. Cambay’s revenue had gone up from Rs. 120,000 in 1719 to
Rs.285, 000 lakhs in 1755, while Broach’s revenue, which was 45,000 rupees in 1714,
stood at Rs. 50,000 in 1726; it hovered around Rs.25, 000 between 1750-60, but had
jumped to a phenomenal Rs. 400, 000 by the 1780s. Disruptions in western and central
India had largely subsided by the 1720s, and according to Sumit Guha that trade increased
in the Maratha territories from about that time, and commodity circulation and credit flows
significantly affected village production and consumption. Elsewhere too, trade doesn’t
seem to have been critically disrupted. As Jos Gommans has showns, the Afghans developed
the route to central Asia via Multan and Shikarpur. This supplied India with huge numbers
of horses and the caravans of Indian merchants passed westward through their territory.
Taking an overview of the economy at the middle of the century, there is no ground to
believe that the regionalization had diluted the tenuous commercial integration of the previous
century. The Mughal highways operated with minimal disruption, and disruption in one
area tended to be compensated by integration in another. Banjaras (transporters of grain)
continued to ply their trade between Banaras and the Deccan through Mirzapur throughout
the century, thus suggesting integrated circuits of long-distance trade even in cheap bulk
22
commodities and foodgrains. For all the alleged problems caused by the Marathas,
remittance networks through bills of exchange (hundis) between western India, Malwa, The Eighteen Century
Rajasthan and Upper India seems to have held up well. Hundi dealers also dominated the in Indian History
complex network of remittances of tribute within the Marartha territories themselves, as
they did with the revenues flowing out of eastern India. Credit could still be extended and
money remitted over long distances. Bengal’s rice and sugar were being traded for textiles
from the Coromandel coast, cowrie shells from the Maldives, and for money from the Red
Sea. Regional specialization in textile production seems to have intensified in this century,
with the lower end of the market increasingly being catered from small, largely rurban,
production centres. Production was increasingly getting tied to advance contracts. Raw
materials, seed or the money were advanced to weavers and cultivators by the rich and
neighbours or by the agents of merchants, who received the crops or textiles as finished
products in repayment.
What was the situation in the countryside? In the absence of any sustained technological
improvement to enhance productivity, higher output could only have arisen by expanding
the area under cultivation, or by intensive marketing, or by devising newer devices to
control agricultural labour. The eighteenth century shows the existence of all three, either
separately or in various combinations. While the Punjab was undergoing a phase of
contraction, and the surroundings of Delhi and Agra were suffering sharp vicissitudes,
agricultural reclamation on an extensive scale seems to have been underway in the Deccan
and in territories controlled by the Marathas. Rajasthan saw fairly impressive agricultural
growth in the first half of the century. Prices rose faster than the level of revenue demand
providing the incentive for increasing the area under cultivation and for growing more
valuable crops. Both, grain taken by the state as taxation and cash crops were traded out
of the province in large quantities. In Bengal, Richard Eaton has identified a marked extension
of cultivation in response to the eastward shift of the course of the Ganges delta, which
created favourable conditions for opening up new rice growing lands, whose produce
went to feed the growing city of Calcutta and textile manufacturing districts of the west.
In Awadh and Allahabad evidence of increasing prosperity in both country and towns is
adduced in the higher revenue yields and the creation of new market centres extending
even as far to the east as Bihar.
Reclamation was being organized by many agencies, ranging from the state to the
landed-magnates, revenue-farmers and merchants. New market centres – peths, bazaars,
and ganjs – were being established, or old ones were being reorganized under new owners
on an extensive scale in Maharashtra, Awadh, Bihar and Bengal. Particularly important
seems to have been the proliferation of village level markets, the haat, as these allowed
exchange networks to percolate right up to the village level. Sharecropping seems to have
expanded in a big way. In the Maratha Deccan, the term used for sharecropping was
vatekari, whereas in eastern India, sharecroppers were known adhiar or bargadar.
Client-labour was in widespread usage in Awadh and eastern India, while agrarian servitude
and bondage was on the rise in areas of expanding irrigated agriculture in south India.
Such a situation leaves very little scope for doubt about indigenous eighteenth-century
regimes witnessing significant measures of economic growth. While data for demographic
growth are scarce, there is little ambiguity about the extension of cultivation, or expansion
of trade in these regimes. On the whole, therefore, the situation would support the recent
‘revisionist’ view that the process of the imperial fragmentation had very little to do with
the economies of the localities, except in some core regions. The regional economies
continued to be buoyant. Pan-Indian networks of trade thrived in the changed political
scenario and in some cases may even have expanded, and areas of growth seem to have
adequately compensated for areas of decline.
The period after 1757 is usually seen a major watershed in the Indian economy. A recent
reassessment of the Company’s rule in eighteenth century Bengal by P.J. Marshall finds
that in the Company’s scheme of political dominance, the primary imperatives were (a) to
ensure that their trading privileges were reformulated in terms of absolute rights, (b) to
convert limited territorial grants into its outright property, (c) to maximise what it obtained
from grants of revenue, and (d) to maintain armed forces at a level which would guarantee
23
its security. Yet, its initial optimism and grandiose self-perceptions were considerably tempered
Historiography and Economy ‘by caution in using these powers, which inclined the British to non-intervention and to
conserve Indian states as they understood them’. In addition, there were ‘severe practical
restrictions on what a foreign regime, even with a monopoly of overt force, could achieve
in conditions in which had only limited contact with the mass of the population’.
In order to understand the role of the Company in determining the fate of the late
eighteenth-century Indian economy, one must put its ascendancy in proper context. The
decline of the Mughal Empire facilitated the Company’s bid for power; it did not cause it.
The old idea that there was complete chaos after the collapse of the empire now stands
sufficiently revised. Some chaos there was, but it was geographically limited and was
offset by the growth of stable and commercially viable regimes at different levels. The
Company’s success lay in battening on to such processes for commercial benefit and in
using the rhetoric of chaos to augment its military presence and utility among the contenders
of local dominance. They did this with consummate skill in south India in the 1740s and
that experience was to serve them well throughout the century. In fact, most of the
commercial concessions which the Company later used for political capital (like the firman
of 1717 in Bengal) were consciously granted by the Mughals or their subahdars in the
provinces; and the growth of fortified settlements in the east, south and western parts of
India occurred in the full gaze of the empire, then at the zenith of its power. This meant
that the Company’s commercial and military interests were inseparably linked from an
early stage of its existence, and that its enterprise in India was geared to ensuring that it
was maintained at an optimum level. Therefore the transition to early-colonialism was
underpinned by the success already achieved by the Company in ensuring the compliance
from its indigenous political and commercial collaborators to the furtherance of its military-
fiscal requirements. Conquest was the great facilitator of the transition, not its creator.
One has also to keep the territorial dimension of the early British Empire in mind in order
to understand the economic implications of its rule. The British Empire unfolded over a
period of a hundred years, and, like its predecessor, grew through a process of conquest,
collaboration and co-option of indigenous systems into a gradually evolving pan-Indian
framework of rule. Out of a possible 4.2 million square kilometres of territory, the Company
had managed to control only about 388,500 square kilometres between 1757 and 1792,
most of it located in northern and eastern India. Between 1798 and 1805, Richard Wellesley
added another 50,000 square kilometres of territory per year to the British Empire between
1798 and 1805, thus inaugurating, what C.A. Bayly has termed, ‘the harder edge of British
empire-building’ in India. This occurred under unprecedented demands being placed on
Great Britain for resources during the Napoleonic Wars, and was characterized by ‘a new
single-mindedness of the power and dignity of the state, the morality of conquest and
British racial superiority’. It also brought to an end the rampant opportunism of the Empire
under Clive, of the cautious protectionism, which had characterized Hastings’ governorship,
and the defensive pragmatism of Cornwallis’ tenure. 3.42 million square kilometres of
India still lay outside the ambit of the Company’s control at the turn of the century, and it
wasn’t before 1815 that the big push to swallow a large part of it began. With 2.56 million
square kilometres under its belt by 1856, the job of imperial expansion had been successfully
completed, though forty per cent of India still lay outside its direct ambit.
But this view of the Company as a relatively loose structure and its initial vulnerabilities cuts no ice
with most historians in India. For them, this regime ‘of blue-blooded European ancestry’ was
different for three reasons: first, it was driven by a relentless urge to maximize revenue; secondly,
it reversed the established patterns of trading between India and Europe; and thirdly, it introduced
the drain of wealth – the one-way flow of tribute – from India to Britain. The economic impact
of such a cohesive system of exploitation was deleterious: impoverishing, deflationary and ruinous
to both craft-production and agriculture. Let us examine these issues individually. Naturally, most
of the discussion of this would centre on Bengal, which was the primary centre of the Company’s
rule in the eighteenth century as well as its principal financial pump.
On the question of revenue maximization, the evidence from Bengal, which was the initial
laboratory of the Company’s fiscal experiment, shows that on an average, 40 to 45 per
cent of the agricultural output was collected as land revenue. The demand was also raised.
24
With 1755 as base equal to 100, the index of the amount assessed stood at 135 in 1770, 155
in 1778 and 168 in 1783, but had dropped to 156.01 in 1790. The amount of revenue The Eighteen Century
collected also went up but not significantly enough to constitute a radical departure from in Indian History
existing practices. The Company’s collections seldom exceeded 85 percent of the
assessment, which compares well with situation under the Nawabs who were successful
in collecting anything between 90 per cent and 65 per cent of their assessments. The
collection was made exclusively in cash, significantly furthering the process of monetisation
in the province. But one aspect of the Company’s financial behaviour constituted a radical
break from the past. During periods of price slumps, the Mughal revenue officials often
accepted payment of revenue in kind in order to reduce the real burden on the peasantry.
That element of flexibility was now dispensed with. The Company insisted on all revenue
being paid in cash, irrespective of the nature of the agricultural season. This tended to
have serious consequences on the poorer cultivators during harvest failures.
Given the fact that collections were made exclusively in cash, the question of maximization
of revenue would depend on whether or not the tax-burden had increased in real terms,
and this would be a factor of the prevailing state of prices. The consensual view of this
period is that the real burdens had increased, as this period was one of price-deflation
caused by the extraction of tribute; but this is based on a very selective use of the evidence
and goes against contemporary accounts, which show a substantial rise in the prices of
both agricultural and non-agricultural goods in this period. A study of price figures available
from the Dutch settlement of Chinsura and the prices of provisions near Calcutta leave
little doubt about the inflationary tendencies at work in eighteenth century Bengal, especially
from the middle of the eighteenth century. By the most conservative estimate, agricultural
prices had more than doubled during the course of the century with the price-crest stretching
between 1750 and 1795. Prices dipped somewhat after 1790 but remained well above the
level at the middle of the century level, and continued to be so till 1795; and it was only by
1800 that prices tended to fall, but not below the 1736-40 level. Such increases blunted the
edge of the Company’s demands on many sections of rural society. While the smaller and
marginal peasants suffered considerably, landed-magnates and the merchants weathered
the Company’s pressures quite well, and in fact prospered. Some historians have also
ascribed the rise of a ‘rich-peasant class’, the jotedars, to this period.
Turning to the question of the pattern of trading between Britain and India, the picture is one
of overall continuity. Bullion supplies were never discontinued after the battle of Plassey.
They were reduced, and even that restriction seems to have been partial. The Company
imported £2.46 million of treasure between 1758 and 1768, £1.3 million between 1769 and
1779, £3.83 million between 1779 and 1789. But between 1790 and 1805 the Company
pumped in £9.14 million worth of bullion into India of which Bengal’s share was a whopping
£5.77 million. Bengal had never received such huge supplies at any other time in the past.
Private European trade was responsible for the arrival of £5.2 million worth of silver to
Bengal between 1796 and 1806, and despite their trade being on a downward slope, the
Dutch still imported 4.24 million florins worth of bullion per year to pay for their merchandize
between 1790 and 1794. Contemporary grievances, and modern convictions, that a severe
shortage of money in the late-eighteenth century was caused by this great reversal of India’s
pattern of trade need to be seriously countenanced against this evidence. The rate of agio
(batta) being charged by money-changers for converting Arcot rupees into the Bengal sicca
seldom exceeded 7 per cent in the 1770s, which was considerably less than the rates being
charged in the 1720s when Bengal, ostensibly, was receiving huge amounts of bullion.
Commercial reports from the Company’s Bengal’s manufactories (aurangs) in 1773
revealed that the combined investments by the English, the Dutch and the French companies
and those made by private European merchants ‘exceed double the quantity which can
possibly be made in the year’. Customs receipts collected by the Board of Trade in the late
1790s showed that Bengal’s exports had trippled between 1777 and 1797, and that most of
it was still based on an exchange of textiles, foodstuffs and other raw materials for precious
metals and certain manufactured goods. Bengal was still far from becoming a source of
raw materials or a receptacle of the finished products of an industrialising Britain in this
period, and K.N. Chaudhuri’s general assessment that during the ‘half century following
the revolution of 1757, trade continued to flow along the traditional channels’ conforms 25
Historiography and Economy well with the evidence on the ground. The vitality of Bengal’s commercial economy remained
substantially unaltered throughout the eighteenth century.
Elsewhere, too, commercial transactions appear to have remained robust. Nagpur,
Bundelkhand, Ghazipur and Mirzapur were functioning as important nodes for the distribution
of Bengal goods in western India and the Deccan at the end of the century. In the late
1780s, nearly 43 percent of the textiles produced in Banaras were being vended in western
India, 49 percent was being sent to Bengal for shipment overseas, and the remaining 8
percent was destined for the Deccan and the northern provinces. Considering the fact that
the markets for the luxury-end of Banaras textiles, its silk, was traditionally located in
north and western India, whereas Bengal received its medium-priced cottons, this regional
division of the trade from Banaras does not show a major change in India’s internal market
for textiles. By the 1790s, cotton wool from Gujarat and central India, and Malwa opium
and indigo had started becoming an important part of India’s overseas trade, and may have
even partly compensated for the decline of some of the old staples. The North American
market for Indian goods was expanding, and in Asia the demand from Europe was being
supplemented by the demand from the Indonesia, while the west Asian markets revived by
1790. The attempt by the Company to monopolize the production of the ‘new’ international
staples like opium may not have worked as efficiently as believed by some later historians.
As B.B.Chaudhuri has shown, the production or the sale of such cash crops through the
advance-payment system did not prevent ‘market conjunctions’, especially prices, in
determining the autonomous response of the cultivators towards these crops; nor could the
monopolistic policies of the state obstruct indigenous sources of credit from percolating
into these sectors of production. In fact, cultivators often found advances to be an assured
source of income and even welcomed them. International demand had also induced an
element of regional specialization in the production of indigo. Bengal, Bihar and Banaras
produced the finer variety, Awadh produced the ‘middling’ sort, whereas the ‘ordinary’
sort was being produced in the Doab and further west.
Other continuities existed. A major one, the financial relationships between the state and
the bankers, which had been established during the process of regional growth was
continued and even deepened in this period. Indigenous bankers supported the Company
during the Plassey ‘revolution’, and once in place some changes occurred. Though the old
banking establishment of the Jagat Seth had declined, the East India Company’s Bengal
revenue still depended on the advances of Indian bankers, above all on the support of the
great Benares businesses. Their capacity to transfer funds all over India by bills of exchange
or hundi made it possible for armies from Bengal to operate in western India or in the
south. One shouldn’t underestimate the resilience of the Indian banking system nor its
capacity to resist the Company’s financial machinations. Recent research in the banking
sector of late-18th century Bengal has shown that Bengal’s bankers (shroffs) continued
to operate in the framework of their traditional business practices. They cooperated with
the Company, but only on their own terms, and it was their intransigence which was the
main reason why the Company’s repeated attempts at reforming the currency of Bengal
remained unfulfilled till 1835.
Bengal was not an isolated instance. Studies of banking in other parts of India have also
shown the persistence of the relationship between indigenous capital and the early-colonial
state. In Bihar, the change in the political regime in eastern India seems to have adversely
affected some wealthy provincial merchants, but substantial banking firms of Patna and
other cities of Bihar survived and thrived as their remittance business increased under the
aegis of the Company. Like their counterparts in Bengal, shroffs continued to do good
business, taking advantage of the multiplicity of coins. In western India, the linkage stemmed,
paradoxically, not from the strength but from the weakness of the Company’s finances.
Here, the Company was facing an acute shortage of money and this made them turn
inevitably to the financial assistance of the indigenous bankers.
The steady expansion of English trade, particularly English private trading towards China
in the 1780s cemented this relationship. The share of private trade, which was 7.6 per cent
of the total overseas trade of Bengal between 1752-58, 6.8 per cent between 1759-1764, and
26
5.96 percent between 1766 and 1772, rose to 41.88 per cent between 1790 and 1799. Some The Eighteen Century
of this trade was undertaken by the import of bullion, but such huge increases necessitated in Indian History
internally generated funds. Commercial opportunities thus expanded for people with money.
These were available in good measure from Indian financiers who provided private traders
with ready-money loans, or invested in the agency houses, which were growing in Calcutta
and Bombay mainly to finance the growing trade of opium and cotton to China.
In southern India, the documentation on the relationship between the Company and bankers
is not very clear, but the larger nexus relationship between the Company and indigenous
finances seems to have occurred initially in the context of its participation in indigenous
state building, particularly in Arcot, reference to which has been made earlier. Prasannan
Parthasarathi does not see bankers playing a major role in the Company’s finances in the
south, but he detects an expanding relationship between it and merchant-financiers, which
became critical for the rise of English power. The Company also received financial support
from other groups. Using the expanding opportunities of political-profiteering opened by
the Company, dubashes (brokers/interpreters) drawn from the Komati commercial
community of the Andhra region made large fortunes, much of it which they pressed back
into the services of the Company’s finances, and on the Coromandel, Chetty merchants
and Brahman ijaradars (revenue farmers) served as part-financiers and account-keepers
of the Company’s trade. On the Malabar coast, the systems of renting monopolies and an
array of new taxes on valuable agricultural produce which had been established during the
occupation of this region by Mysore, was used by the Company and private British interests
in Bombay to set up lucrative trade in peppers and cardamoms with the help of the indigenous
merchants, who had also provided the commercial support base of the previous regime on
the Malabar coast. Thus it would seem that in south India too the early-colonial system
had the backing of a diverse group of commercial and powerful indigenous people.
For such people, the late eighteenth century was a period of expanding commercial
opportunities. The case of Bengal illustrates this well. Here the Company effectively
intervened to free the internal market of restrictions imposed by zamindari control during
the previous regime. These had taken the forms of a proliferation of zamindari outposts
(chowkies) to collect tolls at various rates dictated by the financial predilections of an
individual zamindar and continuous conflicts between merchants and zamindars over the
rate of tolls, over market jurisdictions and the movement of commodities. By taking a
number of interventionist measures to regulate the administration of non-agricultural taxes,
the Company was able to take a number of steps between 1773 and 1790 to rectify this
situation. The chief of them was the abolition of the myriad duties which were levied at
the various chowkies upon articles of internal consumption, and their consolidation at the
final point of destination. The management of such duties was to be under five customs
houses to be established at Calcutta, Hughli, Murshidabad, Dhaka and Patna. The other
problem, of the control exercised by the zamindars and the taalluqdars over markets,
was redressed in 1790, when the Company introduced a separation between rent collected
in the markets so controlled and the taxes collected there on trade. While rent could
continue to be collected on a private basis, the right to tax was henceforth to be vested in
the Company. These measures streamlined the structure of internal trade, and enabled a
rationalization of incomes between the state, the landed-magnate and the merchant. The
combined result of these policies was a proliferation of market places all over Bengal.
The increase in their numbers or their establishment in previously deficient areas enabled
the peasantry to relate more easily to wider markets, and merchants could move more
easily through them with their networks of credit.
Landed proprietors, who set up markets in the interior areas, provided loans to cultivators
and generally underwrote the finances for agricultural reclamation, also joined the commercial
bandwagon. This was certainly the case in Bengal. Markets created by the petty gentry and
great nobles alike were appearing in Awadh, Maharashtra and peninsular India in the much
less propitious circumstances of the late eighteenth century. In Maharashtra such places
grew into ‘little towns’ (in the words of Sumit Guha) where a whole range of people could
spread themselves into commerce, land holding and revenue farming in equal measure.
Landed magnates also tried their hand at the direct cultivation of indigo when markets 27
Historiography and Economy looked favourable, but most of them preferred to latch on to opportunities opened by the
newly expanding horizons in the trade in indigo and opium by routing some of their monies
into provisioning the agency houses who raised much of their capital locally.

1.8 THE INDIAN ECONOMY IN THE LATE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE EMERGING
DIFFERENCES
While such a picture does not square well with the notions of devastation and decay which
reside so dominantly in the received wisdom of early-colonialism, it would be quite wrong
to think that nothing had changed in India, or that every change was for the better. The
Company’s regime was aggressively mercantilist whose orientation was European, not
Indian. State policy was financially driven and all institutions were to be streamlined to
ensure this ultimate objective. Notwithstanding the great rhetoric which accompanied it,
the Permanent Settlement was a feat of mercantilist social engineering to stabilize Bengal’s
revenue for the purposes of the Company’s commerce. Under its terms the Mughal right
of taxation, traditionally devolved upon the zamindars by the state was fused to their
milkiyat, their ‘private’ domains, both of which could now be sold. Though this enlarged
the ‘rule’ of private property in Bengal’s countryside, the dip in agricultural prices after
1790 exacerbated matters and left the ordinary cultivator to receive the rough-end of the
stick. There is no doubt that agrarian distress had increased considerably in the immediate
aftermath of the Permanent Settlement.
What this indicates is that while the early-colonial regime buttressed regimes of indigenous
landed and commercial properties; it did so by increasing the vulnerability of many at the
poorer ends of society. The case of Bengal illustrates this process well. The Company
was unrelenting in revenue being collected in cash irrespective of the conditions of the
current harvest. This removed an important cushion, which the peasant had during the
previous regime and became a major cause of mortality and distress during the famine of
1769-70. But notions of universal agrarian distress and a devastated peasantry would be
over-pessimistic. The situation on the ground was more complex. Agricultural
reclamation along the northern edges of the province and along its estuaries was
continuing robustly and the fruits of it were being mopped up by the zamindars and
the jotedars. Their positions, especially that of the zamindars’, were becoming
stronger in relation to sharecropping tenants and day labourers. Though the evidence
for this is patchy, some historians believe that jotedars in the northern fringes were
behaving like ‘kulak-landlords’: providing credit and engaging in agricultural trade
over short distances. Rural stratification had increased in the course of the century,
and its pace appears speeded-up during the latter part.
In south India, British intervention, while widening and deepening the circuits of cash
transactions, consolidated the position of the leading mirasdars (peasant-proprietor) as
‘village contractors’. As David Ludden tells us, these mirasdars now began combining
cultivation with revenue farming and local level agrarian management. ‘Mahajan’ mirasdars
used their control over land, labour and various commercial assets to accumulate financial
resources that enabled them to contract for village revenues. But this was accompanied
by a drastic change in the social conditions of the less privileged groups who were pushed
into social and economic subordination. David Washbrook shows how the Company’s
direct intervention in south India consolidated two apparently contradictory elements:
traditional social relations and modern laws of contract. The first was designed to preserve
the existing social structure, while the second was geared to expanding commercial
opportunities, and both these were detrimental to the position of labour. While custom was
upheld to legitimize traditional bonds of labour control, agricultural wages were determined
by laws of supply and demand, and enforced by a system of contracts. The labourers,
especially those belonging to the low-castes, thus stood doubly deprived.
The Company was also a hard commercial taskmaster. In its dealings, the Company as a
28 monopolist-trader was extremely harsh with producers under its control, relentlessly
enforcing the delivery of what was due to it and constantly attempting to depress the The Eighteen Century
wages of the weavers in its employment. This made them extremely vulnerable to any in Indian History
sharp changes in the prices of food: highest famine mortalities were usually recorded
among artisans working at the Company’s manufactories. In south India, Parthasarathi’s
study of weavers in the Coromandel also draws a picture of growing artisanal vulnerability
under the new dispensation. He shows that under the Company the weavers entered a
new regime of labour control, which removed many of their past entitlements, and this led
to a sharp decline in their wages and economic status.
But what we must also remember that this harsh regime did not cover the majority of
cotton-textile weavers, at least not in Bengal, and many artisans managed to find loopholes
in the system. There was a huge internal market for the more common varieties of cotton
textiles, while the luxury-end of production hadn’t completely dried up; and these meant
that cotton textile producers and upcountry cotton merchants could still do well even
under these trying circumstances. The silk industry is another good example of this
differential impact. While Bengal’s silk exports to Surat had shrunk from Rs. 0.45 million
in 1766 to Rs.0.03 million in 1789, the north Indian market seems to have held up well. In
1789 the upcountry consumption of raw silk from Bengal was worth Rs. 1.99 million; in
1790 it was pegged at Rs.1.68 million. In the meantime, the Company’s investments for
Bengal’s silk had increased from Rs. 0.92 million 1766 to Rs.5.54 million in 1789. This had
induced a structural shift of Bengal’s silk from an internal to an international market with
somewhat serious consequences. Any drop in the Company’s investment for silk had
serious repercussions for the silk-growers (chassars) and the winders’ incomes, and
contrary to cotton, the existence of a small internal market for silk held out slim prospects
of a limited recovery. Any improvement depended on the vagaries of the international
market. A partial upturn in the 1790s was offset by a depression caused by the outbreak
of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, and it was only after 1813 that silk exports began to
pick up from Bengal once gain. By that time silk production in places like Murshidabad
and Rajshahi had already gone into steep decline.
Thus, despite increasing the scope, scale and volume of commercial transactions, the
end-result of the Company’s intercession was to tie the Indian economy into the north
European cycles of trade and production. This integration wasn’t new. It had begun with
the increasing trend in the seventeenth century with the steady expansion of European
trading in India, and its great expansion in the early eighteenth century had speeded up the
process considerably. The difference now was that key sectors of India’s economy were
henceforth tied into the vicissitudes of this global-economy, and downturns in the latter
caused harm to these important components of the Indian economy or foreclosed the
possibilities of their autonomous growth. While many Indians were able to enrich themselves
enormously in the process, much of the profits accruing from expanded commercial
opportunities were siphoned away from India with little or no corresponding benefits to the
country. There was rampant fiscal and commercial profiteering. Private British and European
individuals made huge profits from revenue farming, from the expanding trade in opium or
indigo, and from political corruption. These were mostly pumped out of India to East Asia,
especially to Macao and Canton (port cities on the southern edge of China) through the
agency of private British shipping and Portuguese commercial houses, where it was used
to make further fortunes for the European expatriates. The agency houses became the
front through which the salaries, perquisites and often illegally made money by
individuals was siphoned out of India. £17.67 million were taken out of Bengal alone
through these channels between 1757 and 1796. Much of the Indian capital in the
service of private trade was thus dissipated through such remittances.
The remittances of private fortunes were accompanied by the official transfer of substantial
amounts of India’s surpluses to Britain as tribute. This was the drain of wealth in its classic
sense, which, understandably, has come to occupy centre-stage in understanding the impact
of the early-colonial system on the India economy. While an estimate places the combined
(that is, on private and official accounts) transfer under this head at £4 million in the 1780s
and 1790s, lower estimates ranging between £1.8 million and £1.92 million per year have
been suggested by others for the period between 1757 and 1793. Given the nature of the 29
Historiography and Economy data, it is difficult to establish incontrovertible figures, but these were indeed enormous.
They were also unprecedented not just because of their magnitudes alone. Enormous
amounts of up to 1 crore rupees (£1 million) a year had been sent to Delhi from Bengal in
the 1720s. The difference of the transfers under the tribute of the late-eighteenth century
arose on the grounds that for the first time official channels of trade were used to transfer
private fortunes. Additionally there was no mobility of labour and capital between Britain
and India to partially compensate for this loss as would have existed in the past when
enormous amounts of imperial tribute being remitted from Bengal to Delhi in the past.
General economic indices however do not suggest that this drain had succeeded in
paralysing the Indian economy. As discussed earlier, commodity prices held up well till the
end of the century and there was no shortage of money. But what is indisputable is that
transfers of such magnitudes from India were easing the massive deficits on Britain’s
balance of trade with both India and China, thus leaving the Company free to divert its
finances to the aggrandizement of India by enlarging the scale of its subsidies from Indian
powers and by borrowing money from private Indian and European capital in India. India
was now subsidising the colonisation of its own economy.

1.9 SUMMARY
The eighteenth century was marked by the decline of the Mughal Empire, giving rise to the
emergence of several regional centres of power. Towards the middle of the century another
factor came into the forefront with the establishment of the political power of the British
East India Company, which had much deeper implications. The eighteenth century is
interpreted by the historians from two angles, one set of historians, following an
empire-centric approach, argue that the decline of the Mughal empire was catastrophic
resulting in ‘chaos and anarchy’. The other set of historians, who have followed a region-
centric approach, emphasize that though the empire declined, this did not result in ‘chaos
and anarchy’. Regions became vibrant centres of socio-economic activities and the Indian
economy continued to expand despite the political problems. This process was not
substantially disrupted under early British rule, though numerous changes did emerge which
were subjecting the Indian economy to unprecedented financial burdens.

1.10 GLOSSARY
Chaudhuri Semi-hereditary pargana level official, mainly
concerned with revenue collection.
Florin A silver coin first struck in twelfth century
Florence, and noted for its beauty. In India, this
coin was widely used by the Dutch traders and
was valued at about forty cents.
Jagat Seth Lit. Bankers to the world. It was the title wielded
by the famous Jain bankers of Bengal. It was
during Siraj-ud Daulah’s reign, the then Jagat
Seth played a pivotal and treacherous role
together with Siraj’s maternal uncle Mir Jafar,
Umichand and Rai Durlabh in determining the
outcome of the battle of Plassey in 1757.
Jagirdari system The assignments given in lieu of salary to the
nobles. The areas thus assigned were called jagir
and its holder jagirdar. However, jagirdar was
not allotted the land instead he received the
income/revenue from the area assigned to him.
Jagirs were frequently transferable.
Jotedars Village landlord. The jotedars used to take lands
on long-term leases from the zamindars and then
got that cultivated on contract on a sharecropping
30
 basis. The lease so granted by the zamindar for The Eighteen Century
the purpose of bringing the land back into in Indian History
cultivation at concessional rates. However,
peasants’ rights in the jotes were recognized by
a set of customary codes.
Mansabdari system Mansab means rank. Each individual entered in
the Mughal bureaucracy was allotted a mansab.
It has dual ranks – zat and sawar. Zat determined
the status of its holder in the official hierarchy
and the personal pay of the holder. Sawar rank
denotes how much contingent (horses, horsemen,
and equipment) a mansabdar was supposed to
maintain.
Taalluqdars Substitute for zamindar. The term came into
usage during the late 17th century.
Zamindars Hereditary superior right holder. The zamindar
was entitled to a percentage of the total revenue
collected. It was generally 10% (though varies
upto 25%) of the total revenue collected. When
the zamindar was collecting the revenue for the
state it was known as nankar and when the state
was directly collecting the revenue by-passing
him he was entitled to malikana.

1.11 EXERCISES
1) ‘The eighteenth century was a century of universal decline.’ Comment.
2) Critically analyse the ‘empire-centric’ approach. Do you agree with a view that the
eighteenth century was a century of ‘anarchy and chaos’?
3) How would you view the eighteenth century in the context of the regions emerging as
vibrant centres of socio-economic activities.
4) Examine the region centric approach of historians in the context of the eighteenth
century.
5) Analyse the state of Indian Economy during the eighteenth century.
6) What continuities and changes do you see in the Indian economy in the late eighteenth
century?

1.12 SUGGESTED READINGS

Alam, Muzaffar, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India, Awadh and the Punjab
1707-1748, Delhi, 1986.
Alavi, Seema (ed.), The Eighteenth Century in India, Delhi, 2002.
Ali, M. Athar, ‘The Eighteenth Century: an Interpretation’, Indian Historical Review, vol.
5, nos. 1-2, 1978-79.
Bayly, C.A., Rulers Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British
Expansion 1770-1801, Cambridge, 1983.
Habib, Irfan, ‘The Eighteenth Century in Indian Economic History’, in Seema Alavi, The
Eighteenth Century in India, Delhi, 2002.
Marshall, P.J. (ed.), The Eighteenth Century in Indian History, Evolution or Revolution,
Delhi, 2003.
Singh, Chetan, ‘A Critique of Revisionist Approaches’, Proceedings of Indian History
Congress, 52nd Session, Delhi, 1991.
Stein, Burton, ‘State Formation and Economy Reconsidered’, Modern Asian Studies, vol.
31
19, no. 3, July, 1985.