An Economic History of Early Modern India 2012047350, 9780415690638, 9780415690645, 9780203380918

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AN ECONOMIC HISTORY OF EARLY MODERN INDIA

The death of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1707 until the annexation of Maratha territories by the British East India Company in 1818 was a period of transition for the economy of India. This book focuses on these transitions, and shows how a study of this period of Indian history contributes to a deeper understanding of the long-run patterns of economic change in India. Momentous changes occurred in business and politics in India during the eighteenth century – the expansion of trade with Europe and the collapse of the Mughal Empire – resulting in the formation of a number of independent states. This book analyses how these two forces were interrelated, and how they went on to change livelihoods and material wellbeing in the region. Using detailed studies of markets, institutions, rural and urban livelihoods, and the standard of living, it develops a new perspective on the history of eighteenth-century India, one that places business at the centre, rather than the transition to colonial rule. This book is the first systematic account of economic change in early modern India. It is an important contribution for students and scholars of Economic History, Business History and South Asian History. Tirthankar Roy is Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. His previous publications include India in the World Economy from Antiquity to the Present (2012), The Economic History of India 1857–1947 (third edition, 2011) and Rethinking Economic Change in India: Labour and Livelihood (Routledge, 2005).

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AN ECONOMIC HISTORY OF EARLY MODERN INDIA Tirthankar Roy

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business c 2013 Tirthankar Roy  The right of Tirthankar Roy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Roy, Tirthankar. An economic history of early modern India/Tirthankar Roy. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. India–Economic conditions–18th century. 2. India–Economic conditions–19th century. I. Title. HC434.R698 2013 330.954’029–dc23 2012047350 ISBN: 978-0-415-69063-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-69064-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-38091-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Sunrise Setting Ltd, Paignton, UK

For Om Prakash

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CONTENTS

List of illustrations Preface

1 Introduction: the ‘early modern’ in Indian economic history

viii ix

1

2 Formation of new states

13

3 Consequences of state formation: colonialism, public goods and institutions

39

4 The agrarian order

50

5 Conditions of business

73

6 Towns

103

7 Levels of living

126

8 Conclusion

139

Notes

145

References

158

Index

169

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

2.1 Shah Alam II seated on a throne overlooking a river 2.2 Mahadaji Sindhia entertaining a British naval officer and military officer 5.1 Banian (agent or comptroller in European or Indo-European firms of Calcutta) 5.2 Sarkar (chief steward in European or Indo-European firms of Calcutta) 5.3 Weaver of cloth 6.1 Chitpore Road, Calcutta 7.1 India, peasants irrigating fields

22 28 92 93 95 119 133

Maps

2.1 3.1 5.1 6.1

Geographical zones and political formations, 1800 Political divisions, 1930 The Indian Ocean trading world, routes and ports, 1700 Overland trade routes and trading towns, 1700

17 42 82 107

Tables

3.1 State income, 1667–1853 (million £) 5.1 The relative scale of foreign trade, 1750–1913 6.1 Population estimates for selected towns

42 76 108

PREFACE

The idea for this book suggested itself in 2009 when I was revising my Economic History of India 1857–1947. There was insufficient scope in that book to discuss the controversial eighteenth century. But leaving that period of Indian history as only a prelude meant missing the chance to read the eighteenth-century scholarship closely, to question the concept of the early modern and to tell my own story about the early modern. In this book, I give vent to all three ambitions. The story itself, which reads the early modern as a time when two orders of capitalism recast their relationship, I have suggested elsewhere (India in the World Economy from Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge, 2012; and ‘Capitalism in India in the Very Long Run’, the Cambridge History of Capitalism project led by Larry Neal and Jeffery Williamson). One of these paradigms was located in the landlocked interior and formed a part of the imperial fiscal system and overland trade, and another on the seaboard, engaging in foreign trade from a base within relatively weak coastal-deltaic states. In the eighteenth century the seaboard emerged as the dominant force, eventually taking control of the inland business world. The emergence of the seaboard is seen as the most dynamic element in the story; in all other spheres, change came slowly. I restate this thesis here with reference to the research that is the most germane to it. But the book is driven above all by the first of the three ambitions, that is, to delve into the scholarship on the eighteenth century. I find that research using archival material is very diverse, and much of it has grown without reference to the academic debates that have placed early modern India at the centre of recent discussions on global history. That fact justified the attempt at a synthesis. The book has gained from the experience of teaching Indian and global history, and participation in writing projects connected with these fields. It would be impossible to list the many individuals who have directly or indirectly contributed to both these enterprises. Specific to the book, I should first of all thank the anonymous readers of the book proposal for the many helpful suggestions that they made, and which I have tried here to implement. Rosanne Das Gupta read the entire manuscript with painstaking care, and suggested many improvements. Mina Moshkeri of The London School of Economics and Political Science drew three of the four maps.

x

Preface

The book was planned in 2009 during discussions with Om Prakash, when we were co-teaching a seminar course on India. It would not have been possible without his enthusiasm for the project, his comments and suggestions, and an unconditional offer to read and discuss my writings. Tirthankar Roy

1 INTRODUCTION The ‘early modern’ in Indian economic history

The 111 years that spanned the death of the last great Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (1707) and the annexation of Maratha territories by the British East India Company (1818) form the subject of this book. This was a period of transition for the economy of India, as well as for the economy of the world. The book is about these transitions, and shows how a study of the time can contribute to a deeper understanding of the long-run patterns of economic change in India. There are several ways to justify the project. One approach would be to suggest that these years set the stage for three forces of change that historians often identify with modernity in the economic plane, namely, the rise of European empires, especially the British Empire in Asia, the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the ‘first globalization’ that enabled an enormous increase in trade, migration and investment in the nineteenth-century world. Since these forces saw fuller play in the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century can be designated the early modern era. The early modern can be described as a preparatory, scene-setting era; one that led up to big changes. Since that era preceded the modern, a study of the time should reveal how novel and how revolutionary modern economic growth really was.1 Such a viewpoint can be criticized for being too derived and too teleological, because it does not offer a definition of the early modern on its own terms. There have been several attempts to define this category of time on its own terms and with reference to India. Almost all of them import the concept from world history into India. In the clearest articulation of the concept, early modernity is defined with reference to the set of phenomena that transformed the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The world in these two centuries experienced revolutionary new forces, such as the European mariners’ entry into Asia and the consequent integration of the Indian Ocean trading world with the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the rise of large stable imperial states, the growth of world population, and the extension of cultivation. India was early modern by virtue of experiencing these same phenomena and a similar transformation.2 Indeed, to a great extent the Indian transformation even shaped world history of this time.3 There are two problems, however, with taking the alternative approach. First, it again leaves unspecified, even renders unnecessary, a detailed economic history of

2

Introduction

India in this time. World history speaks for Indian history. But letting world history speak for Indian history entails a risk. An India-focused study may well reveal the many obstacles that stand in the way of fitting India into a stylized narrative of world history. Divergence in experiences within the region may render any attempt to standardize these experiences untenable. Not all dimensions of economic historical change in this time can be understood easily with a concept that seems to give too much importance to market expansion. We are not sure if Indians really traded all that much with the Europeans; after all, only a few littoral-deltaic regions were engaged in foreign trade on a significant scale. Importing a world history category into India may flatten some of the distinctiveness in the way Indians engaged with foreign capitalists or responded to new opportunities. There is a second problem with using world history in order to make sense of Indian history. The eighteenth century was a time when some of the defining features of the early modern as a world historical era were beginning to end in India. If one of the defining features of this period was ‘the growth of large, stable states’, eighteenth-century India saw their dissolution.4 The Mughal Empire disintegrated, foreign trade gave rise to warfare and colonialism, the age of discovery was over, and the age of rivalry had arrived. If it is relevant at all, the early modern in the context of the book should be a period that saw many stable relationships disappear, to be followed by chaos, experimentation, conflict, and the emergence of new livelihoods, new regions, new relationships and new institutions. If, however, we define the early modern as a discontinuity – at least ‘a break with a previous “medieval” condition’ – the problem of a definition is compounded by the controversies that surround the issue of what kind of a break eighteenth-century India experienced.5 This question is answered differently in two unfinished debates. One of these considers shifts in high politics and their effects on the Indian economy, and the other considers India’s position in the world economy.

The state and the economy debate These years saw the disintegration of the Mughal Empire, political turmoil, warfare, and the establishment of new states in northern, western, and central India. The Mughal Empire (1526–c. 1750) had created a rule of law and a space for mercantile enterprise to function, especially in financing grain trade. The empire encouraged production and trade of luxury manufactures located in the cities, as well as banking and financial services. Some of these institutions weakened, or even collapsed, in the ensuing warfare of the eighteenth century. Warfare may have increased insecurity of property; it certainly intensified pressures of taxation and led to more indebtedness. It led frequently to the requisition of food and labour for military purposes, at times giving rise to famines. But warfare also allowed merchants and bankers, who were close to these new courts, the chance to do profitable business with the warlords. It, thus, allowed financial and commercial actors to play a more important role in administration.

Introduction

3

There was a growth in the export of cotton textiles by the European chartered companies and private traders. Fiscal pressures encouraged expansion of cultivation in regions where an unexploited land frontier was present. If old imperial cities in the Indus and the Ganges flood-plains declined with the collapse of the Mughal Empire, the new capitals of interior states and the cities already engaged in overseas trade expanded. With a picture as diverse as this is, it is possible to rearrange the elements only slightly to read either an overall decline in economic activity, or the emergence of a vibrant and growing economy during the eighteenth century. The choice between these alternative readings about the economy depends on how the significance of the state is interpreted. According to nineteenth-century British historians, the turmoil on the political plane led to economic decline. The utilitarian thinker and the official historian for the Company, James Mill, wrote in his monumental History of British India that firm rule by the East India Company restored order after a period of anarchy that followed the end of the Mughal Empire.6 In the late twentieth century, historians of the Aligarh School, principally Irfan Habib, read the end of the empire in much the same way, as a process that upset and disturbed established modes of production and exchange, even though contributors to this school did not share the imperialist view that the regime that came thereafter was better. The Aligarh school approached the transition mainly from an understanding of the fiscal and administrative system that had been in place before the transition. In this view, as the imperial state became militarily weak and divided, central regulation over fiscal officers and agents was compromised. Tax became a marketable contract. Revenue farming eroded state capacity and gave rise to ‘reckless rapine [and] anarchy’, decline of certain regions, intensification of local conflicts, and the atrophy of private capital that had been connected with imperial finance and the economy of luxury production in the towns.7 From the 1970s, a different interpretation of the eighteenth century gained ground. There are differences among individual contributors to the revision. But, taken together, six propositions can be identified as the hallmarks of the revision. First, the Mughal state depended on the cooperation of its notionally allegiant and substantially autonomous constituent parts.8 Second, the break-up of the empire encouraged commercial accumulation and led the landed elite to forge closer partnership with merchants and bankers.9 Third, maritime trade and land-based Asian trade from the seventeenth century strengthened the accumulation process in textiles, cotton, grain, and banking.10 Fourth, an active market for military supplies and labour became a source of economic stimulus.11 Fifth, while anarchy did prevail in some regions, resources were mobile enough to shift from zones of insecurity to zones of greater security. Those regional states that managed to keep the old administrative order more or less intact, Bengal for one, could devise ‘efficient tax gathering procedures’, encourage ‘rural investments’, and foster ‘a more prosperous agriculture’.12 Sixth and last, there was a shift in the locus of urbanization. Towns such as Benares, Pune, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Mysore or Jaipur experienced growth

4

Introduction

in the eighteenth century as the capital cities of major successor states at the expense of Delhi, Agra and Lahore, located in the heart of the Mughal Empire. They were bolstered by the migration of merchants and bankers to these new domains. The essential difference between the Aligarh position and the revisionist one pertains to the relationship between the state and the market. In the former position, markets of consequence depended on the state, insofar as the state had the power to extract such a large share of the agrarian surplus that the agrarian order was drained of endogenous entrepreneurial drive, and non-agricultural production was left dependent on the wealth of the military aristocracy. Commerce and capitalism evolved in a dependent relationship with politics, so that the collapse of the empire and the rise of successor states led to a crisis in commerce and capitalism.13 Arguing against this position, revisionists assert that the imperial centre had been more thinly engaged with the local and regional economies than claimed. Indeed, a militarily stable empire had enabled commerce to flourish in the Gangetic plains, to such an extent that merchants and bankers could withstand the collapse of the empire and the decline of the military aristocracy, especially by making use of the opportunity to join new trades and forge new business partnerships with the Europeans. Briefly, in the 1990s, the debate became radically polarized. Historians made sharply different claims about what the eighteenth-century transition meant to the livelihoods of ordinary people. Habib, for example, asserts that a ‘dark age’ followed the Mughal decline, the features of which should ‘cause us to entertain doubts about [the successor states] having witnessed any significant measure of economic growth’.14 One contributor to the debate suggests that ‘the [eighteenth] century emerges as one marked by economic prosperity’, only to qualify that ‘there is no one pattern of change’.15 A review of the field makes a case for distinguishing the first half of the century, which in this estimation saw more economic growth, from the second half, which saw more decline.16 The picture of a vibrant growth, led by the successor states, coming to an end as colonialism established its roots, has been received warmly in some strands of global history as well. André Gunder Frank, who believed that Asia, not Europe, was the most dynamic economic region in the world until access to New World silver changed the balance in favour of Europe, is an example of this reversal-of-fortunes perspective.17 Others have made a similar point concerning the centrality of India in the world until the mid-eighteenth century, and the declining position of India in the world economy from the end of the eighteenth century.18 We need to admit at the outset that there is little chance of testing any of these propositions statistically, and with a reasonable degree of confidence. There is little quantitative data available to measure overall growth or decline, let alone comparing the earlier and the later halves of the eighteenth century.19 For no other reason than a lack of systematic and sufficient knowledge, eighteenth-century India remains an ingredient available for use in whatever dish a historian wishes to cook. Even if the growth-versus-decline debate remains unresolved, in the last 25 years the revision has been hugely influential in shaping new research. It has provided an alternative paradigm of economic and political change in the eighteenth century.

Introduction

5

One particular source of its success is that it is spatially more inclusive than the Aligarh position, which develops mainly upon an understanding of Mughal rule in northern India. The revisionists’ emphasis upon states that left a great deal of the fiscal administration to agents and partners, and consequently were only able to penetrate and control the affairs of taxation at the local level to a limited extent, seems to connect together widely variable regional experiences. Such a diverse collection of post-Mughal regimes as Bengal, Awadh, Carnatic, Hyderabad, Maratha-ruled Deccan-Gujarat-Malwa, Mysore, the Rajput states, and numerous smaller principalities, all became in principle comparable insofar as all of them relied on an implicit contract with the private sector in managing their economic systems. In all of them, markets and merchants were partners rather than satellites of the warlord states. In their effort to correct a bias that had placed too much weight upon the imperial state, the revisionists may have gone too far the other way, at times verging on the suggestion that a weak state or statelessness was good for markets at this time. Frank Perlin, for example, considers that the field needs to delink the state from the economic order, ‘a critique must begin with the still dominant tendency to view economic developments. . . as dependent functions of. . . governments’.20 Other contributors to revisionism appear more cautious, but none raises questions about how far the agency of the state could be sidelined. Most economists, however, would find the plea to decouple ‘development’ and ‘government’ perplexing. Even some sympathetic critics of revisionism do not accept the quiet purging of the state from economic history.21 The suggestion that commercialism did not, and need not, depend crucially on the capacity of the state is unlikely to stand either theoretical or empirical scrutiny. The duty of supplying public goods carries huge economies of scale. And, therefore, small, vulnerable, shrinking, and quarrelsome states left with too little money to spend on anything other than the defence of their realms – the universal condition in India in the second half of the eighteenth century – could not have been ideal for the supply of public goods and in turn, for sustained and deep commercialization in their domains. Furthermore, the revisionism is unable to account for one conspicuous fact about the successor states: all of them with one exception failed to create strong fiscal–financial systems in their domains. Theirs was as much a story of failure, urban decline, one military debacle after another, and emigration of capitalists, as of a limited and short-lived prosperity. In 1977, an Indian filmmaker turned a famous Hindi short story about Lucknow in the last days of the Awadh raj into a feature film, The Chess Players. The lethargic state of the city elite shown in the story and the film seems to represent the condition of the successor states rather better than does the revisionist historiography. Whether we look at Awadh, or Mysore, or Hyderabad, Rajputana and the territories of the Peshwa, Bundelkhand or Berar, in the late eighteenth century, all of them were struggling so hard to achieve some semblance of order in their fiscal management that it was well beyond their capacity to actually commit money to infrastructure. It is true that some of the local infrastructure, such as policing or country roads, were perhaps provided not from

6

Introduction

a central treasury but from the retained income of the local chiefs and landlords. But that does not affect the argument. At a time when all constituents of the state, however decentralized, faced pressure to supply arms and money to war effort, something had to give, and that something was crucial for commercialization. No doubt towns such as Benares, Pune, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Mysore or Jaipur experienced growth in the eighteenth century at the expense of Delhi, Agra, and Lahore. From the modern perspective, however, the significance of that growth is not obvious. By 1800, commercially speaking, the capitals of most successor states were towns without a secure future. At any rate, they were eclipsed by the dynamism of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. The re-emergence of the former capitals of successor states into the metropolises that they are today was rooted much more in a nineteenth-century pattern of urbanization based on administration, cantonments, higher education, long-distance trade, railway links to the seaports, and a process of industrialization based on a revival of artisanal enterprise. As far as we can tell from population counts, the earlier growth owing to the eighteenthcentury state formation was not really very impressive, certainly not sustained, especially when compared with the later growth during the era of colonial rule and globalization. Furthermore, rich and provocative as this debate has been, it leaves important gaps in our understanding of how livelihoods were changing. It is much too focused on trade and the working of the fiscal system at the top. There is too much emphasis upon what some economic historians call ‘Smithian’ growth, that is, a better allocation of resources propelled by increasing transactions. The story tends to overlook institutions. The revisionist corpus contains little discussion on peasants or peasant communities. It is suggested that the formation of new warlike states was the most important process in the political economy of the region in this time. And yet, there is little discussion available on how wars shaped state capacity, and how state capacity translated into property rights, law, and justice; so necessary to the conduct of material life. The new states appear in this literature, as indeed many of them did to contemporary British eyes, as a collection of individuals. Some of these individuals were tragic heroes, like the young Nawab of Bengal Siraj-ud-daula, who lost the battle of Plassey thanks to the treachery of his courtiers; or Tipu Sultan, who died in battle with the British. Some others were less heroic characters. But rarely do these states or the peoples represent institutional types. There are few generalizations available about the whole ruling order, fiscal problems that transcended individual states and represented systemic failures, or indeed about the dynamics of state collapse that enabled the Company to gain an upper hand.

The divergence debate The second of the two debates on the eighteenth century concerns the origins of international inequality in modern times. From the early nineteenth century, as modern economic growth took root in Britain, the rest of the world experienced

Introduction

7

very different trajectories. Levels of living tended to converge among countries in Western Europe and North America. On the other hand, between these regions and what became tropical colonies of major European nations, there was increasing inequality in average levels of living. There were also variations within the tropical world, even within large territories like India or China. India, for example, industrialized much more than did almost any other tropical region of the nineteenth century, even as Indian agriculture remained technologically backward, and there was decline in the handicrafts. How we read such a mixed picture depends partly on how we read the pre-history of the change. Reading pre-colonial history backwards, in the light of conceptions about colonialism, is a long-established tradition. The great nineteenth-century philosopher and economist, Karl Marx, believed, on the basis of English writings available to him in the 1840s and 1850s, that the British Empire in India brought stability and modernity in a decaying, ancient and tyrannical society. Marx’s point of emphasis was despotic imperial regimes that had suppressed private initiative before the British came. That Mughal and post-Mughal India represented a dark and despotic age was a belief that persisted into later readings of world inequality. Eric Jones follows up the contrast between Europe’s competitive state systems and Asia’s empires, and suggests that political competition led in Europe to sovereign dependence on capital and to ‘continual borrowing and. . . “stimulus diffusion” ’ whereas the ‘despotism’ of the east functioned as ‘a revenue pump’ in the best of times, deteriorating into chaotic ‘fluctuations without development’ in the eighteenth century.22 In the 1980s, new institutional economic history shifted the accent away from the disadvantages of despotism towards the advantages of rule of law, once again suggesting that the Western European polity discovered economically rational institutions before their Asian counterparts did. All of these alternatives carry the implication, as in Marx, that Asian backwardness had endogenous causes and that European colonialism and conquest carried the promise of removing these obstacles.23 The hypothesis of endogenous obstacles to rule of law or free enterprise in Asia or Africa has been opposed. The case for Asian despotism is undermined by the new scholarship on Indian empires, which projects a negotiated rather than hierarchical relationship between sovereigns and communities in this region.24 A large and flourishing scholarship on the Indian Ocean trade shows just how outwardlooking indigenous enterprise had been in the region. Twentieth-century critics of colonialism, inspired by Marx’s theory of exploitation if not his reading of India, often took the view that the pre-colonial economy had more potential for growth than the colonial economy. Nineteenth-century colonialism, according to them, frustrated a dynamic form of ‘proto-industrialization’ in South Asia by shifting the centre of gravity in the economic field from industry to agriculture and from serving consumption needs of the whole world to serving Britain’s particular economic interests.25 Aided by new and highly effective methods of political control, India was converted into a market for British goods, and a source of supply of primary goods and labourers. Skills were destroyed, scale economies under-utilized, the

8

Introduction

economy ‘peasantized’ and the peasants exposed to terms-of-trade shocks that they were poorly able to weather.26 These claims and counterclaims, together with the recent reincarnation of the inequality debate, have energized scholarship on eighteenth-century India.27 The present work does not join the debate, however. Perceiving the eighteenth century from the perspective of the nineteenth century means that the notion of the early modern tags along with that of the modern. And if we then subscribe to extreme positions on colonialism, either that colonialism modernized a backward society or that it destroyed indigenous economic growth, we are almost forced to choose from highly stylized conceptions of the eighteenth century. The choice must settle on a series of artificial binaries: dynamic society versus stagnant society; innovative state versus despotic state; benign imperialism versus exploitative imperialism, and so on. While the book does not join the debate, the debate still enables a restatement of the purpose of the book in precise terms. It should be possible to study the eighteenth century without the mediation of a theory of colonialism. A freestanding look at the eighteenth century does not have to be free of preconceptions, but it should at least be free of the postcolonial obsession with imperialism. And if we can manage to read the eighteenth century without the prism of imperial history, perhaps we will be able to take better notice of the diversity of the history unfolding within India at this time. The eighteenth century was, as the revisionists mentioned in the previous section remind us, a paradoxical mix. Opportunities were created as well as frustrated, new forces in society and politics helped some people and obstructed others, and inertia and dynamism were both present. The most compelling reason to study early modern India, then, is not to explain the ‘great’ divergence in the whole world, but to seek the roots of the many divergences within India that were to become manifest in the next century or so.

Beyond the debates We cannot deny that these two debates, and the new readings that the field has seen in recent times in their wake, do give the study of the economic history of India between the two empires a particular relevance. But we cannot say that these debates serve as a substitute for an economic history of early modern India, or even that they make the task of writing such a history easier. What makes the task especially difficult is the problem of facts: what facts to take notice of and how to connect them. Approaching the subject through the eyes of orthodox or revisionist readings of the passage of empires, or through Eurocentric readings of world inequality or its critics will more likely lead us to gloss over, rather than take notice of, many relevant details. Such a prospect is present also with the anthologies published recently on the history of these times. Two major edited anthologies and an overview have appeared in the last decade.28 The editorial introductions to these volumes should

Introduction

9

be essential references for the student of Indian history. From the perspective of an economic history, however, these books are, even if necessary, not sufficient. They are insufficient for two reasons. The main interest of the books is in the transition to British colonialism. This is so because, despite the differences among them, the standard narratives treat state formation as the central problem. Debates and argumentations focus on the state, its nature and its role. Business history is not neglected, but interest in business more or less derives from the need to explain the origins of colonial rule. Business does not occupy an autonomous sphere in the historiography; it gets its meaning from politics. If business history is derivative, the history of other kinds of livelihood, such as peasants and artisans, make at best shadowy appearances in the narratives. Furthermore, the anthologies are interested in contrasting the big picture stories already asserted in the literature. They feature authors who are prepared to make bold generalizations about their subject matter. They capture debates over historiography, but they are not very useful as descriptions, nor do they serve as a window into the sources. In both respects, the aim of the present work is quite distinct from that of these books. In this book, the main drivers of the debates, namely, state formation and the transition to colonialism are underplayed. The real meaning of the early modern is found instead in the sphere of livelihood. Second, the interest of the present work is in constructing a big picture from the little pictures that are available in detailed empirical work. My aim is an artisanal one. Much of the scholarship that is drawn upon here remains as specialist research on merchants, peasants and artisans. That is, their authors pursue an empirical goal defined in relation to the immediate context visible in archival materials. These works do not necessarily project an explicit view of whether the economy of India became better off or worse off than before. Writings like these form essential raw material in a stock-taking exercise such as this one. At the end of the exercise, the historiography does undergo a certain shift in this book, even though it still builds upon elements already developed in the scholarship, and in my own earlier work.

A new interpretation The basis for a new interpretation is that a sense of geography is essential to understanding the trends in economics and politics in this time. Because of geographical characteristics, the great flood-plains of northern India, the uplands and the forests, and the coasts had evolved as somewhat distinct political economic worlds. Conditions of business and the nature of the state were dissimilar between these worlds until the early 1700s. During the eighteenth century, however, the separation began to end, and a drive towards convergence began to gather force. That tendency was an outcome of two independent variables that roughly coincided in time, and sometimes worked in concert; these were the relocation of trade and finance from the interior to the coasts, and the rise of a coastal state that was militarily stronger

10

Introduction

than the coastal states of the past. Underneath these upheavals, rural livelihoods changed relatively little, again because natural resource endowments mattered to agricultural production and peasant welfare far more than did kings, warlords, merchants and bankers. Parts of this argument – the geographical factor in business history especially – I have discussed elsewhere, and will not elaborate in this account.29 This book will follow up a particular implication of that factor, namely, the cleavage between the interior and the coasts and the changing relation between the two worlds in the eighteenth century. This larger thesis can be broken down into three parts concerning the peasant, the merchant and the state. Politics, of course, must play an important role in any narrative. But high politics in this time mattered little to the most important livelihood in the region, namely peasant agriculture, because the states were incapable of far-reaching institutional or technological intervention at the local level. I do not suggest that agricultural institutions or technologies saw no change at all, but that the changes came slowly and in the face of a great deal of resistance. In fact, the process of state formation through warfare even led to a disengagement of the successor states from peasant livelihoods. How else can we explain the great dearth of systematic information on the peasant and rural resources in the administrative records of the post-Mughal states? It was quite a different story with merchants and bankers. The debates between the orthodoxy and the revisionism on the eighteenth century stems in part from the fact that the scholarship on private enterprise is also divided into two segments. One of these describes the world of the merchant and banker tied to the economic bases of the great empires that formed in the upper-Gangetic plains and, in a classic account, reads the commercial efflorescence in the imperial core as a dependent development that contained the seeds of its own destruction.30 Another describes the world of the merchant and banker on the coasts, functioning from within relatively weak states or the autonomously ruled provinces of the empire. It was their entrenched position in Indian Ocean trade as well as coastal trade, their relative freedom to manoeuvre and the absence of state patronage that drove the maritime groups to form partnerships with the European chartered companies and private traders. And it was the fluid and fragmented political situation of the coasts that enabled the European companies to establish themselves as landlords here. If we are too focused on the inland, we may notice mainly the damaging effects upon private enterprise of the end of the Mughal Empire; if we look to the coasts, we may notice mainly the dynamism of private enterprise. But can these two visions be joined? The cleavage within the world of business, between one segment bound to the fiscal system, and via the fiscal system, to agriculture and urban consumption, and another looking outward to the sea, is not only a characteristic of the historical scholarship: it was real. In my reading, the cleavage should be a fundamental part of any definition of India during this time, because it was an indigenous and enduring feature of the economic system shaped by geography and political heritage.31

Introduction

11

From some time before the collapse of the Mughal Empire, the littoral world was acquiring strengths through the elaborate network of contacts that Indo-European trade had established. The trading settlements located on the littoral were protected by small states that were able to defend themselves and willing to safeguard merchant interest. At the same time, the political turmoil of the eighteenth century led to depopulation of the interior cities. The conjunction of the two trends meant a progressive shift of enterprise in the eighteenth century from the land to the littoral, which process hastened the end of the business world formerly tied to the empire, but was no less damaging to the majority of the successor states either. The third ingredient in the new story is the state. Merely the rise of a Britishruled state in India holds no intrinsic meaning in the narrative that I outline, nor provides it with a sense of purpose. The transition to colonialism carries no obvious relevance for economic history. The relevance needs to be shown, not presumed. In my reading, during the eighteenth century, the rise of a colonial state made a difference to livelihoods by making the Indian firms more mobile than before. Together, the two trends described above gave a choice to merchants and bankers from Punjab, Gujarat, Deccan or Rajasthan to migrate to Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, and some of their satellites. More than that, with the political ascendance of the littoral, private capital based in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras eventually looked to the interior, returned inland, and started taking firmer control over the agricultural commodity trade on a scale unprecedented in the region. It was in this integration of the two business worlds, one based in the land and the other in the seaboard, an operation funded largely by the seaboard capitalists, that the significance of this time can be found. Neither of the two features – the integration and its occurrence on the terms of seaboard capitalists – was a part of Indian business history until the late 1700s. And the two trends formed the foundation using which colonial rule could expand itself, the nineteenth-century globalization could penetrate India, the surviving successor states ended up as economic satellites of British India, and industrialization of Bombay and Calcutta became possible. For this book the phrase ‘early modern’ would mean the beginning of the end of the cleavage in private enterprise that had been a long-standing and geographically rooted characteristic of India. What I call ‘the central dynamic’ (see Chapter 8) was a momentous change at the level of business history, namely, the economic emergence of coastal towns through Indo-European trade, and the extension of coastal capitalism into the deltas, the uplands and the riparian plains. The transition to colonialism was embedded within this shift, but reinforced and extended it in turn. The significance of the early modern cannot be found in the fall of the Mughal Empire, nor can it be found in the parallels between Indian history and world history, the rise of the successor states, and the transition to colonialism. The real significance was the evolution of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta from the fishing villages that they were in 1600 into the global cosmopolitan business hubs that they became in the nineteenth century, and onwards, vanguards in India’s tryst with globalization in the late twentieth century. Everywhere else, the pace of change was glacial.

12

Introduction

Chapter outline The rest of the book breaks up the subject-matter into five detailed themes: state formation; cultivation of land; conditions of business; the urban economy; and levels of living. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with state formation; they describe the history of collapse and consolidation among regional states, and the rise of the Company’s power in the region. In the process, the chapters also look at state capacity, militaryfiscal strategies, and institutional dimensions of state formation. Chapter 4 describes conditions of peasant agriculture, discussing the security of peasant land rights, a subject close to analytical economic history. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the non-agricultural economy. Chapter 5 surveys the large scholarship on maritime trade and the export industry; rethinks what we know about domestic and overland trade; and interprets institutional change in commercial transactions and industrial production. Chapter 6 surveys patterns of urbanization, which were fundamentally reshaped by state formation. Chapter 7 takes stock of quantitative historical research, in an attempt to answer how deeply and in what direction the changes described in the book affected the welfare of ordinary people. The last chapter concludes with a restatement of the main findings, and a discussion of the implications of these findings.

2 FORMATION OF NEW STATES

Within decades of the death of Aurangzeb (1707), the Mughal Empire began to disintegrate. As Delhi witnessed the phenomenon that James Tod called ‘phantoms of royalty [flitting] across the scene’, major provincial rulers still loyal to Delhi, such as the Nizam-ul-mulk of Hyderabad (1671–1748, reign 1720–48), Murshid Quli Khan in Bengal (c. 1665–1727, reign in Bengal c. 1717–27), and Saadat Khan or Burhan-ul-Mulk (reign c. 1724–39) and his nephew Safdarjung (reign 1739–54) in Awadh consolidated their finances and armies, and in their capacity as advisers to the Emperor grew more powerful than the Emperor himself.1 While formally owing allegiance, some of them also profited from the troubles the Emperor faced trying to cope with rebellions and invasions. In the process, the territory from which Delhi drew its revenue rapidly shrank, and its vassals in the east, west and south, became independent states or colonies of the newly emerging powers. The fragmentation of political power intensified a conflict over revenue. Individually many of the new states lacked the capacity to raise more taxes with their existing military and administrative means. Therefore, the drive to expand the revenue base by means of extortion and conquest of weaker neighbours was constantly present. Even so, in the second half of the century some of the more stable political constituents had established institutions of government in the regions whence they originated, or which they had held long enough. In these zones attempts were made to recast the relationship between the state and the peasantry, with a view to encouraging cultivation and tax collection, if only to sustain the military enterprise. If the eighteenth century is taken as a whole, these two contradictory tendencies – predatory tactics and consolidation of governance – were always present. By the end of the eighteenth century, one of the regional rulers, the East India Company, had emerged as the dominant political force. The Company played the game by means of a similar combination of predation and fiscal consolidation. But having tasted more success with the fiscal side of the enterprise, it could begin to dominate the game, as we shall see. State formation is a central theme in the scholarship on early modern India. But why this subject should be important to an economic history is not so obvious from the scholarship, and requires an explanation. There were three major links between state formation and economic change in India at this time.

14

Formation of new states

(1) Wars increased inequality. Warfare benefits those who supply money or material to the war effort but is stressful for most others because the others lose access to markets and resources. (2) Wars affected state capacity. The proportion of revenue spent on military heads was high in the eighteenth century. While this factor did stimulate the military labour market, it compromised the state’s capacity to supply public goods necessary for expansion in economic activity. (3) To sustain the war effort states had to make innovations in the fiscal system, which in turn affected class relations, even the production system. Throughout India, the relationship between the states and the intermediaries – court officers, landlords, tax farmers, mercenaries and warlords – who had some share of power in the fiscal system had been changing in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, the transition to colonialism cannot be understood except with reference to how the fiscal strategy was adapted to warfare by the Company, its rivals and its partners. In order to explore these dimensions, we must first try to understand the nature of the state itself.

The early modern state According to the notion that seems best to capture the Indian state in this time, the state consisted of a coalition between the bodies in possession of land grants. In India, land grantees usually commanded substantial military power. Some of these bodies were corporate, others individual; some of these had military origin, others originated in civil service; and some were hereditary, others not. It would be a mistake therefore to apply any epithet of European origin, such as ‘feudal’, to all of these entities. There is room to define the holders of land grants quite flexibly, and variations of these rights formed one reason for regional differences in political economy. Still, four major layers in the military-fiscal hierarchy can be distinguished in principle: the king; the warlord or commander of armies; the landlord; and the peasant, who was the main tax-payer. By and large, medieval rulers maintained territorial control by assigning land revenue grants to military commanders, who in turn relied on the local landlord for collection of taxes from the peasants, for organizing extension or improvement in cultivation, for maintenance of law and order, and for military supplies. In Mughal India, the command of cavalry was an honour bestowed upon deserving candidates by the Emperor for distinguished military service and was a mark of acquired nobility. But such command was also a potential threat to royal power. The revenue assignment that the military elite were rewarded with (jagir), therefore, was in principle transferable. In its pure form, the jagir signified a notional share over a region’s tax resources; the holder of that office had little actual contact with or even knowledge of the region concerned.

Formation of new states

15

Beneath these groups were the gentry or the landlord (zamindar was the term commonly used in north India). They lived in close proximity to the peasant and sometimes rose from the ranks of the latter. Although technically a tax collector rather than proprietor of land, the landlord in most cases enjoyed a practically hereditary right. Like the jagirdars, they almost always owned arms, but their position was contingent on control of cultivation rather than control of soldiers. The landlord class can be, and has been, further divided into groups that were relatively more militaristic and groups that were relatively more peasant-like (see Chapter 4 for a discussion), but some of these divisions crystallized through the eighteenth-century conflicts. The situation in southern, western and eastern India maintained broad similarity with that in the north on the point of a tiered structure of rights based on land-tax collection. One difference was that in peninsular India, local military authority was often vested in a tributary king. The tributary king lived on land tax, lived in a fort, was in command of an army at the service of the regional state, but did not necessarily belong in the nobility. In the Deccan sultanates and Gujarat, tributary kings were common figures in the eighteenth century. Another difference between the flood-plains and the arid uplands was the weak presence of a gentry-landlord class in the latter. The hierarchy among the peasants was also more muted here; the figures in authority in the countryside were not landlords but state officers who sustained themselves by land grant. It goes without saying that the fiscal, institutional and military capacity of the state depended on how many tiers there were and whether or not the interest of the king and the interest of the land grantees were aligned. If interests were compatible, a multi-tiered hierarchical state should have been efficient for tax collection purposes, by delegating responsibility and by being able to collect and process a great deal of information about the production system that formed the foundation of the structure. But if there were too many tiers, and the king depended on all of them for raising money or an army, economies of scale in governance could be lost and potential conflict of interest became more likely. The warlords and landlords would consider if they might escape a serious reprisal by declaring independence, simply because the king’s attention was engaged on a number of fronts. Clearly, the more the number of tiers that thought this way, the more likely would become the collapse of the empire. Eighteenth-century politics contained this propensity within it because invasions had led to a proliferation of land grantees, leading in turn to increased chances of rebellions. A steady weakening of governance at the top, however, need not necessarily mean a weakening of the economic system functioning below. A weak king could even be good for business if the merchants and bankers previously functioned in a restrictive regime dominated by the military noblemen. Business communities could come up with, or strengthen, alternative forms of regulation. Consistent with that prospect, the period saw market expansion in some areas notwithstanding conflicts on the political plane.

16

Formation of new states

The breakup of the Mughal Empire soon after the death of Aurangzeb has been attributed to various factors, such as a fiscal crisis generated by constant wars, Aurangzeb’s religious intolerance, the intrigue of nobles and ministers, and lack of financial support.2 The overextension of the military elite class leading to increasing contests at the top was another factor.3 Not all of these variables are relevant to this chapter. The one factor we do need to deal with concerns the balance of power between the various constituents that served the state, for it was here that the continuity and break between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth in the sphere of political economy can be discerned most clearly. Between 1690 and 1720, almost everywhere the equation between the four major constituents of states – the king, the military commander, the landlord and the peasant – was beginning to change. The transferability of jagir rights became more difficult to enforce. Armies were unwilling and unable to defend Mughal territorial claims anywhere outside the Gangetic plains. Landlords rebelled near Delhi, in Rajasthan, and in the western and eastern Gangetic plains. There was a consolidation of local military power and a weakening of supra-local power. Bankers and financiers, who might come to the aid of the bankrupt state, were more active in the newly emerging provincial centres of commerce and manufacture rather than in the imperial cities. Against this backdrop, the formation of the successor states broadly followed two pathways. The first road to state formation can be called rule by nobility, that is, a rule assigned by the Emperor to prominent generals and administrators. One proximate cause behind rule by nobility was the implicit assertion of revenue autonomy in the richest of the imperial provinces: Bengal, Awadh and Hyderabad. In these cases, new states formed in a relatively peaceful manner, without protracted wars and rebellions or military action. The noblemen previously running these states as imperial governors (Nawabs), continued to do so in the name of the Emperor; they remained close to the court in Delhi, visited it often, sometimes at the behest of the Emperor, and issued coins in the name of the Emperor. This situation continued till as late as the 1740s. And yet, they were sending less money to Delhi than before; in some cases they stopped all payments with the exception of the occasional gift, and had appropriated the imperial privilege of granting jagirs and mansabs (rank of nobility) within their territory. One common feature of these regimes was that they were militarily not very secure. All of them relied on conventional armies and battlefield strategies, and were averse or unable to introduce innovations. Given that these regimes represented a continuity of the Mughal administration, the armies were not seriously tested and building military strength was not a priority for these states. Away from the spheres of influence of the Mughal governors, or Nawabs, state formation followed a different trajectory. The west ruled by Rajput states, the western Deccan ruled by the weak state of Bijapur and, in the south, the states left behind by Aurangzeb’s unfinished conquests had never been administratively or politically integrated into the empire. Their own spheres of authority were contested in the early eighteenth century by powerful and ambitious neighbours. From the turmoil, four major territorial and military powers emerged in

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Bengal had numerous advantages for any trading operation, such as the low price of food and cheap transportation along the deltaic rivers. The larger of the river systems could be used to move cargo to and from northern India at a relatively small cost, enabling the Europeans to access saltpetre and indigo, two other highly valued Indian exports. Bengal had large numbers of highly skilled textile artisans. Behind the shift of business focus, there was also at work a change in the European consumption pattern. From coarse cotton, or painted and printed cotton, in which the Coromandel coast excelled, there was a relative shift in demand towards fine white cotton or muslins, in which Bengal artisans and local cotton growing tradition excelled. But the larger significance of the shift of the English Company’s operations towards Bengal and the dominance of the Company in Indo-European trade, was that the politics of the Mughal province of Bengal and British commercial enterprise were beginning to get deeply interdependent. The second big development of this time was the breaking up of the Mughal Empire. Warfare broke out in the interior from the second decade of the eighteenth century. By mid-century, hundreds of wealthy Indian merchants and bankers hailing from the western part of the Gangetic plains had migrated to the Company towns. The exodus was of a significant scale in Bengal, where repeated Maratha raids raised insecurity in the more commercialized western borders. Some of these merchants who came to Calcutta played a mediatory role in the Company’s own dealings with the regional state. Later generations of merchant and migrants would partner many of the private traders. The third significant change arose from the entry of the French East India Company. A late entrant into the Indian Ocean and much smaller than the English Company in terms of scale of business, the French were a formidable military force, so that they emerged as the principal rivals of the English in regional politics. In particular, the rivalry spilled over into territorial wars during two large-scale engagements in Europe, in which the English and the French were enemies. These were the War of Austrian Succession (1740–8), and the Seven Years War (1756–63, see also Chapter 2). On both occasions, the local French leadership and the English leadership took opposite sides in succession disputes and palace intrigues in Bengal and Carnatic. The English emerged victorious in these battles, leading to the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which all but destroyed French ambitions in India. The French Company was wound up, restarted and wound up again during the Napoleonic wars. During these mid-eighteenth century Anglo-French conflicts in India, the local leaderships of both Companies defied instructions from the headquarters. The quiet and long-standing drive towards autonomy had reached a decisive point. From now on, the local employees, the Royal Navy officers stationed to protect the ports, and their friends, the private traders, called the shots in deciding the policies of the East India Company in India. The culmination of the three tendencies was military and political domination of the Carnatic, and Bengal. For well over a decade after 1765, when Bengal was acquired (see Chapter 2), the administration was divided between the local ruler and the Company, so that the Company had little effect on governance. It did

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have an immediate effect on the balance of payments, however. The long dependence upon silver to pay for Indian exports ceased. The Company now began to use land revenues to pay for exports instead. Between 1757 and 1787, official statistics recorded negligible import of silver into India. These volumes probably underestimated the true extent of silver import, because already by then, the private merchants were doing large volumes of business and they imported silver on private account, which is not well recorded.15 Furthermore, the drop also reflected the fact that the Company was beginning to experience some success with selling British goods in payment of Indian goods. The British goods that sold well at this time were manufactured iron, instruments, cannons and guns.16 Also, deeper engagement with warfare and defensive expenditure in India led the Company to spend more of its local revenues on administration and army than overseas trade. The new interest in Indian politics was, commercially speaking, a disastrous move. The Company’s military adventures in north India in the 1770s received censure from lobbies in Parliament, especially the critics of the monopoly charter. British provincial mercantile and industrial interests, from whose ranks came many of the leading private traders, joined these criticisms. Adam Smith gave the misgivings a philosophical foundation in his Wealth of Nations (1776), suggesting not only that monopoly was a bad market principle, but also, with specific reference to the East India Company, that a firm that ran a state would fail both as a state and as a firm. The Company ran up a huge debt and had to borrow from Parliament, in exchange for stricter Parliamentary regulation upon governance in India. An abortive regulating act of 1773 was succeeded by the more comprehensive India Act of William Pitt (1784), which created the administrative set-up that was to establish Parliament’s authority over the Indian territories acquired by the Company. The India Act confirmed the East India Company’s role as a ruler in India, to the same extent devaluing its role as a trader. In revisions of the charter in 1793, private trade was given significant formal privileges. The Company raised a voice in protest but there was no effective opposition. Nor was the opposition more than symbolic in 1813, when the monopoly was withdrawn from the Company’s India trade. For decades before the change, the monopoly had operated merely in name.

Private traders By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Company had as good as given up the long-running battle to suppress private merchants. Indeed, the close relationship of patronage and protection that had developed between the local officers and the growing number of private traders made disciplining the latter an impossible project. Among these people many were the Company’s own employees, and nearly all of them knew the Company officers well or were in their good books. A substantial number of these enterprises were in the nature of clandestine joint ventures with the officers. The political clout of these people was on the rise. These clandestine partnerships raise a fundamental question about the very character of the firm. On this subject, a recent interpretation has suggested that the

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European chartered companies can be compared with the modern multinationals, insofar as both shared strategies that enabled the managers to economize on transaction cost and reduce opportunism by agents.17 If indeed the principals were in control of the actions of the agents, it would follow that the partnerships were tolerated as an incentive mechanism. On the other hand, historians such as K. N. Chaudhuri and Holden Furber suggest that unlike a modern multinational firm, the Company did not have a unitary command-and-control structure. Its overseas enterprise was a peculiar combination of modern joint stock principle in raising money and pre-modern partnership in management. The two sets of partners were the sedentary City of London merchants and peripatetic sailors, soldiers and officers. These two classes were not friendly at home. But the sailors and soldiers joined the venture on the promise that they could trade on the side. On the other hand, it was the latter group that had to make friendships in India, deal with hostile kings and untrustworthy agents, which made them more aggressive and opportunistic than the shareholders back home. As the local officers became involved in Indian politics, they often acted against the instructions of the London bosses or the shareholders. The private traders and the local agents’ economic interests converged and the military success of one made the other bolder than before. The conflicts with the Bengal state that the Company ran into between 1756 and 1763 concerned the issue of taxation of European private trade. On each occasion, the dispute blew up into a battle because the officers of the Company sided with the private traders. After the Company took over power, private traders moved more freely and some of them started innovative new enterprises that bore new kinds of risk. After 1813, artisans joined the now much larger pool of merchants and fortune-hunters coming to India. Therefore, even though most of the new ventures continued to be in traditional businesses, such as textiles, a significant number were in manufacturing and finance. Since iron was already the major import from Britain to India, and yet iron ore and charcoal were both available in plenty in the foothills of the Chotanagpur, a number of ventures started up in iron smelting in these areas from the 1770s. Dockyards near Calcutta employed European capital. In the 1790s, interest in indigo and cotton processing in Caribbean-style plantations also attracted much interest. The largest group among private enterprises was engaged in commodity trade – opium, indigo, cotton, saltpetre and a few other articles – and set up banks and insurance businesses at the same time in order to fund such trade. Almost all of them were formed of Indian and European partnership, in some cases, such as the famous Carr-Tagore enterprise in Calcutta, the Indian partner supplied the capital and the Europeans supplied the management. The history of these hybrid partnerships is now well researched. So are the shocks that finished off many of them in the 1830s and the 1840s.18 The shocks came from commodity trade speculation and price fluctuations, blowing up into banking crashes that pulled many healthy businesses down as well. Not all firms disappeared during these episodes, and the many that weathered the shocks laid the foundation for industrialization in the late nineteenth century.

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Yet the easy road to bankruptcy in trade as well as artisanal enterprise revealed the fact that such ventures faced serious obstacles that arose from poor access to information, insufficient hedging, high trade costs in the oceans as well as in the interior, insider lending and insufficient reserves of the financial system. When crashes became imminent, money dried up and began flowing along channels of community and caste. At the same time, land was becoming an attractive alternative investment in Bengal, as zamindari taxes became more affordable. The Company state in the early nineteenth century was not particularly friendly to these European enterprises. By 1800, the Company itself had changed its identity from a body of merchants to a government. Many individual officers were still known to the entrepreneurs, but extending overt support had become politically incorrect. As a ruler the Company lived on land tax like any other Indian regime and was deeply averse to interference by Europeans in the property relations in the countryside. Only after the 1830s was the land law relaxed enough to allow Europeans to hold large landed property. The Company also tried to block the grant of any banking charter to private firms, as this was an important channel for the transfer of remittances. If the European private traders had a mixed experience, the fate of the Indian merchant operating in the Indian Ocean after European ascendance was also a mixed one.

Indian merchants The seminal work of Ashin Das Gupta suggests three major propositions on the Indian Ocean merchant after European entry. First, big merchants who owned ships and operated like business firms in their own right stood on their own ground until the early eighteenth century. European traders were not yet the dominant players in maritime trade. Second, a shift in the balance did occur thereafter, but it was not so much a result of a direct substitution. Rather, it was a result of the unequal balance of advantage as the direction of trade changed from intra-Asian trade to Asia– Europe trade. Third, subsequent to European dominance, there was a redefinition of Indo-European relationships, older forms of partnership giving way to newer ones. Who were the Indian merchants we are dealing with here? The decline story does not apply to all categories of Indian traders, but a particular class who owned ships, employed large volumes of capital and made the relatively longer voyages between Surat and West Asia, or in the east, between Bengal or Coromandel and Southeast Asia. In the Arabian Sea, these substantial merchants carried valuable cargo, employed their own staff and often received special treatment on board other ships and at the ports. Smaller in scale were the merchants who did not own ships and often worked as agents of the principal merchants. Below them were many small-scale merchants who carried generic cargo. Shipping was an important marker in this hierarchy. The conjunction of trade and shipping made for the really big players who were potential partners or rivals of the European firms. One of

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the reasons for the vitality of Indian shipping was that it charged lower freight rates than European ships. However, there were not many merchant firms that owned ships because shipping was not a popular field of investment. It was not possibly because the ships were individually owned and, while insurance covered the goods, it did not cover the ships. In the India–Europe trade, even the biggest of these Indian merchants fell behind the European ones on account of unequal standards of knowledge of navigation as well as markets. The Europeans had developed a global understanding of the oceans long before the other ocean-bound cultures. In the 1700s they had knowledge of long-distance navigation spanning all of the world’s major oceans. Their understanding of charts, maps, ocean currents, instruments, routes and their technique of making sturdier and larger ships carrying guns on board was superior to that of the Indian seafaring merchants. Indians were good navigators, but they did not venture beyond the Indian Ocean. A particular advantage that this global reach gave the Europeans was the access to Spanish silver. But these differences do not explain why the Indian merchant mariner had to give way even on the Indian coasts. Das Gupta offered an answer based on an understanding of commercial institutions, and in turn business-politics relations. He developed this answer, and more generally the conception of the Indian Ocean merchant, by disputing with the work of the Dutch historian of Indonesian trade and society, Jakob Van Leur. In 1955, Van Leur argued against what was in his time the mainstream assumption, that Asian trade was a minor factor in world trade. He contended that European trade was a minor factor in Asian trade to begin with. But he also suggested that European and Asian trades represented distinct business organizations. Maritime trade in Asia was carried out mainly by people who hawked from port to port. The Asian merchant was a peddler, the trade was confined to luxuries, the composition had remained changeless for centuries, and traders were controlled by powerful noblemen. As a commercial world, it was ‘irrelevant to later capitalist development’.19 Das Gupta engaged with this characterization many times, rejecting some of its elements, and refining others. Trade, Das Gupta showed, was not confined to luxury articles, but was both conducted by and served the demand of common people. The ruling powers along the littoral depended on the seafaring merchants, even partnered with them.20 The presence of substantial ship-owning merchants complicates the picture. Any notion that all Indian merchants were small players must be discarded. And yet, many did in fact share a dependence on spot markets and auction-type sales, and an aversion to building long-lasting contractual arrangements and lasting institutions. ‘[I]t is possible that they remained pedlars somewhere deep in their minds’.21 Furthermore, despite their large scale of operation, they remained family firms headed by individuals. Personal honesty and cooperation were important to their commercial success. These personal sentiments were often founded on the notion of community and family. On the other hand, when merchants came from different communities, the reliance on personal ties did not lead to the ‘consciousness of being men of the same calling’.22 It was their incapacity to form professional

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collectives that made the merchants potentially vulnerable to political pressure. A particular effect of such divisions could be seen in the fragmentation of the financial market. The financial system could perform most routine tasks, but was not capable of meeting crises, for ‘money was not pooled together even within Surat’.23 Despite a great deal of bargaining and the presence of large transactions in the commodity market in Surat, competition was not free because of information and entry barriers. This structure, Das Gupta believed, was stable even if not changeless.24 In Das Gupta’s reading, the decline of the Indian merchant marine, and with it the substantial ship-owning merchants, was not a direct outcome of European competition. Rather, the decline had an endogenous source. It began when the local rulers increased pressures on them to fund wars. Merchants were ‘hounded to death by ruthless political pressure in the second half of the 18th century’.25 The pressure was especially acute in those leading ports which formed parts of empires. Those who ‘faced extinction at the hand of Indian administrators exchanged that dangerous position for a constricted existence’.26 The weakness of collective bodies among them became a life and death matter at the time of imperial collapse and political turmoil. Although the crisis was political in source, the quality of the response depended on institutional features. The Indian family firms weathered it worse than did the joint-stock European companies. The emphasis on family and community modes of management raises larger issues of comparative business organization. In Asia, the most important firms financed investments with their own money, family savings or, at the most, money borrowed from members of the same caste or community. The idea of the joint stock was unknown. Perhaps the most decisive advantage the European companies possessed stemmed from their identity as joint-stock firms. The form of management allowed the English Company to pool huge amounts of money and make use of the economies of scale available in overseas trade. It could build an elaborate infrastructure consisting of forts, factories, harbours and ships. Joint stock also made them better risk-takers. Most Indian traders spread risks by dealing in a variety of goods in auction-type exchanges. The Company, thanks to its capacity to absorb risks, dealt in a few goods, which it bought on a large scale. Being specialized, it needed to contract with a specific set of suppliers year after year and to pay out vast sums of money as advances. Contractual sale of goods was not unknown in India before, but contractual sale on such a scale by a single firm had no precedent. Finally, the Europeans operated in a more integrated financial market than did the Indians, allowing for larger scale of investment, greater capacity for risk absorption, and higher capital intensity of the enterprise. Their capacity to procure silver in larger quantities, for example, owed to the presence of well-developed financial markets in Europe at this time. In India, banking was less developed, money passed through fewer hands and interest rates were higher. All of this would explain only the decline of the largest Indian firms, the shipowning merchants, who were potential competitors to the European firms. What

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about the numerous groups of agents and the real peddlers below these substantial family firms? The rise to power of the Company in the second half of the eighteenth century was, in fact, a boon to those Indian groups already engaged in coastal trade. The Company ships after all did not transport materials and supplies, such as grain or timber, between points on the Indian coasts. They did not even often shuttle between the three Company ports. And yet the growth of these towns, the rising volume of shipping in them, and warfare in the interior, greatly increased the demand for coastal transportation. The gap was filled by indigenous shipping. Demand also increased for ship repair services. By far the most successful shipwrights were the Parsis of western India. They began as carpenters, entered shipbuilding and repair in the Company docks of Surat and Bombay towards the end of the eighteenth century, and ended as merchants themselves. They were the master shipwrights in Bombay at the turn of the nineteenth century, mainly engaged in repairs, but already beginning in a small way to build ships for the coastal trade. In this transition, their established position as shipwrights and their knowledge of timber supplies from Malabar were especially useful. A well-developed system of artisanal apprenticeship that ensured that the master-builder status continued down the family lines also helped develop these skills. Furthermore, they were among the first Indian merchant and seafaring people to have gone to England to take training in shipbuilding. Such exposure mattered a lot during the transition from sail to steam in the 1840s. The Parsi master-builder made the change quite smoothly. When the Company began its withdrawal from India trade (after 1813) and, 20 years later, from China trade (the charter ended in 1833), the Parsi shippers bought up some of the ships and refitted them for coastal or China trade. Wars with China (1839–42) and Burma (1824–6) saw these ships being used for supplies. Already Indian opium had emerged as the main export to China, and the proceeds from opium sale funded huge quantities of tea imported from China to the Atlantic. The Parsi shippers played a significant role in cargo transportation in the Bombay–Canton and the Calcutta–Canton routes. Among other groups that directly gained from European ascendance were those merchants who contracted with the European companies.

Agents and associates The companies and the private traders needed to hire agents to procure the goods. The process of negotiation between these enormously large firms working from within fortified settlements on the seacoast, and thousands of artisans residing in the countryside ordinarily out of sight of the Company officers, was a complex affair. The extensive negotiations, contracts, disputes over non-performance of contracts, and the process of performance of contracts, were subjects that engaged the Company officers on a day-to-day basis and filled the pages of the ‘consultation books’ maintained in the factories. In the early seventeenth century, much purchase in overseas trade was done via the spot market. However, contractual sales increased

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in importance, especially after cotton textiles became the main investment for the companies. Initially the contractors were powerful people, even warlords on the Coromandel coast. But in the eighteenth century, the typical contractor was either a local textile merchant, or a weaver-headman, or a combination of both. Contracts were often made for a whole year, and entailed giving out large sums of money as advance payments. The specifications of the quality of cloth, the designs and the volume were usually very detailed, which increased the risks of disputes on delivery. Disputes were about both the quality and the quantity of delivered goods. Such negotiations, contracts and disputes had no Indian precedents, and therefore were not protected by any Indian law. Legally, the companies could do little when the contracts were broken or seen to have been wilfully disregarded. In order to avoid such situations, the English Company recruited its chief agents carefully. They were often individuals who held power over the artisans. At the same time, they were more knowledgeable about the production site than were the Company’s own officers. Being more powerful or more informed than both parties, the agents could become more of a liability than a help. The Company officers, therefore, disliked this dependence and distrusted their closest partners in the trade, but they could not do without them either. In the conventional historiography, there is ambivalence and uncertainty about these transaction costs. Most studies tend to overlook the issue of non-performance of contracts, or see it as a sign of the artisans’ bargaining power.27 Another strand in the literature contends that there were risks, but that the ascendance of the East India Company as a government could lead to a coercive way of enforcing contracts.28 Both are valid hypotheses, but both are in need of qualification. The bargaining theory overlooks the fact that the companies had neither enough policing power nor the information reach to monitor performance. If the weavers or the agents decided to cheat, there was little legal penalty that the firm could impose on them. The beginning of governmental control did address one weakness, the lack of policing power, among the many weaknesses constraining the principals. But it did not remedy the legal vacuum or solve the asymmetric information problem. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, these two problems continued to plague the private traders, who did not have substantial access to policing power. In recent scholarship these transaction costs have received more attention than they do in the conventional historiography. A view is gaining ground that suggests that these problems help us understand the evolution of business organization at this time, and even explain in part the motivation that the Company officers might have had in making political and administrative decisions.29 At a completely different level from the paid agents were the Indian bankers, another group that the Company and the private traders relied on heavily. Two services in particular were quite crucial for the latter: conversion of Spanish money into Indian money, and remittance of funds between Indian regions. Reputation mattered in the business of valuation of the coins in a world where almost all valuable coins were made of alloys of gold and silver. Therefore, there were not many players in this business. Later in the eighteenth century, the Company’s own

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revenues were transmitted across the three presidencies by means of bankers’ drafts drawn on Indian banking houses. Again, reputation was crucial in the matter of trade in these IOUs. These services were developed relatively more in western India than in the east. The main centres of indigenous banking were Surat and Ahmedabad. A number of large firms also existed in the cities of the Gangetic plains. Some of them had risen in political power thanks to extensive tax farming. During the late eighteenth century, such diversification took the prominent merchants and bankers of the region closer to land-holding. On the other hand, the business of banking, because of its close and growing dependence on the regional states, also faced potential obsolescence, even hostility, in the new regime. The chief banker of Bengal in the 1750s, the Jagatseth, was a big firm, but its large scale was a misleading index of its economic strength. It was large because of the government licence it had enjoyed under indigenous rule to coin money, change money and commute taxes. Although a friend of the Company, the Jagatseth lost relevance rapidly as the Company consolidated its own fiscal administration and embarked on unification of currency. Beneath these partners in trade and finance were hundreds of thousands of textile artisans, the real foundation of Indo-European trade in the eighteenth century.

Artisans The major textile supply regions for the European traders were Bengal, Coromandel and Gujarat. Of the three, Gujarat was accessed first, Coromandel next, but Bengal dominated the trade in the eighteenth century. Leading histories of the European companies and regional economies have concentrated mainly on Bengal and Coromandel.30 The Gujarat scholarship has only recently been catching up.31 There were significant similarities between regions in their trading systems. In all of these regions, the export textiles were manufactured in large villages or clusters of villages located at some distance from the port city – Calcutta, Madras, Masulipatnam and Surat – but relatively easily accessible from it. These clusters were never located deep into the interior. In general, transportation overland was both costly and unreliable, and therefore it made sense to offer weavers some incentive to relocate near the warehouses. The policy became much more feasible after the English Company started as landlords. There was, therefore, a gradual tendency for textile manufacture for export to gravitate towards Calcutta and Madras. Although both cities were homes to merchants and agents, the artisans did not move into the urban core, preferring to stay in the periphery of the towns probably to enjoy the lower cost of living and better quality of life there. These then resembled ‘urban villages’, a concept dealt with more fully in Chapter 6. It is difficult to say if elsewhere in the region commercial efflorescence and concentration led to similar rural clustering of craft enterprise or not. In any case, the exporting villages in Coromandel and Bengal were home to an elite class of weavers, who contracted supplies with the agents and brokers of the Companies, and enjoyed a great deal of authority locally. Needless to say, the power derived

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Banian (agent or comptroller in European or Indo-European firms of Calcutta), by the Flemish painter Balthazar Solvyns (1760–1824), Calcutta, 1799. From the collection of Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr. Reproduced with permission. See also R. L. Hardgrave, Jr, A Portrait of the Hindus: Balthazar Solvyns and the European Image of India 1760–1824, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

FIGURE 5.1

from a variety of factors, the ability to negotiate with a number of companies at the same time, the ability to trade on the side, facility with European languages and their role as coordinators of a complex production process. Spinning of cotton yarn was done locally by hand, and cotton did not grow in the same areas where textile production was taking place. The task of spinning employed a vast army of domestic workers. Cotton supplies to this dispersed labour pool needed to be ensured. The headmen directly or indirectly took care of many of these tasks. The authority that they enjoyed in turn could be misused to oppress those making textiles under their command. The authority was social in nature and, therefore, its legitimacy was judged by others with reference to social benchmarks. For example, P. Swarnalatha’s research on the Coromandel textile manufacturers suggests that the weavers tended to accept a headman’s authority more readily when he was seen as a

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Sarkar (chief steward in European or Indo-European firms of Calcutta), by Balthazar Solvyns, Calcutta, 1799. From the collection of Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr. Reproduced with permission.

FIGURE 5.2

caste-man, and contested the authority when he was from outside the community and an imposition from above.32 There is a view that the transition to colonialism in Bengal and South India brought a decisive change in business organization in its wake. The transformation did impart significant effects on manufacturing and commerce located in the deltas and along the coast. It removed competition of other European corporate bodies in the textile market, increased the stranglehold of the Company officers and private traders upon the textile artisans, and secured contractual obligations between weavers and English merchants, at times by violent means.33 Any inference that the ascendancy of the Company delivered a blow to the textile industry must be qualified, however, for the effect was restricted mainly to the few thousand weavers of Bengal catering to the European market. This was a small segment of the industry. But it weakened the position of headmen and master weavers well before imported cotton textiles cut the ground from beneath their feet.

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Compared with the artisans who supplied the Indo-European trade, the larger segment that served the home market and sold goods entering the overland trade has been researched only in bits and pieces. One area where some knowledge exists is the urban crafts of the Gangetic plains. The Mughal-era cities contained a large pool of artisans. The artisans were professionals in possession of special skills and knowledge of particular kinds of clients. They made carpets, brass articles, fine pottery, and wool and silk garments, among other goods, in urban factories. Some of these factories were owned by the wealthy courtiers and consumers themselves. There are descriptions available of the factories of the seventeenth century, called karkhana or workshops. Inside the factories, teams of male artisans arranged in hierarchical master–apprentice relationships executed contracts for specific articles. It is plausible that the masters were in permanent employ of the factories, but there was considerable circulation among apprentices and workers. This organizational form contrasts with artisanal production that we encounter elsewhere; almost all other contexts of production were dominated by household labour and allowed more women to work in industry.34 On the other hand, by their very proximity to the wealthy and powerful body of consumers, the karkhana production and trade suffered less from the kind of contractual failure that plagued Indo-European trade. It is not completely clear how this sphere of manufacture changed in response to the collapse and reorganization of states in the eighteenth century. The decay of a number of towns and cities in the western part of the Gangetic plains (Chapter 6) surely forced a painful adaptation upon these people, but that history has not been recorded. We do, however, encounter factories from the early to mid-nineteenth century, again bearing the same name (karkhana) as their counterparts in the seventeenth century. These reincarnations were more commonly found in the eastern Gangetic plains, but a smattering of them remained in the old Mughal towns, suggesting that there had never taken place a total extinction of these skills and modes of working. There was nevertheless an important change. The articles produced by these units now served a growing export market or urban middle-class market, and the factories were either owned by the masters themselves (a partial convergence with the family firm), or owned by export merchants rather than by the political-military classes as in the past. A recent work has broken new ground in the historiography of eighteenthcentury artisans by studying a group that served domestic consumers of a princely state.35 The territory of Jodhpur was mainly arid, with a patch of irrigated area located in its eastern half. Strategically positioned on overland trade routes, the state was home to many merchants and bankers, who consumed a lot of the skillintensive manufactures that were made in the cities. These capitalists thrived owing to the fiscal weakness of the state. A key point of emphasis of the study is the difference in political organization between the cities and the countryside of Jodhpur. In both contexts, artisans had developed community institutions of dispute settlement, and their autonomy with respect to civil law was respected by the state. But comparatively speaking, the rural artisans were less organized and therefore more exposed to the arbitrary exercise of power and exploitation by the landlords. By

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Weaver of cloth, from Pierre Sonnerat (1748–1814), Voyage aux Indes orientales et á la Chine, 1782. This illustration shows a south Indian weaver. The basic technological standard did not change more than marginally in the following century. Much weaving and connected tasks were performed in the open air, sometimes with c Bridgman Art Library. the help of household or neighbourhood labour. 

FIGURE 5.3

contrast, the town artisans could employ community solidarity more effectively. This work is suggestive of the status of artisans in the successor states. Like these artisans, much overland trade and the traders connected with it remained far removed from Indo-European trade. And, therefore, overland trade maintains a shadowy presence in the archival sources. We do, however, get glimpses of important changes occurring in this sphere.

Trade and finance in north India Despite the claim by historians of medieval India that banking and commerce flourished in the imperial realm, it remains difficult to find concrete information on actual firms. Business history of Mughal India is almost totally faceless. Major works on this issue are either disappointing or vague on references to real entrepreneurial

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figures or on the histories of real firms.36 We do know something about the circulation of money among the nobility or among the city merchants. We know, for example, of the presence of deposit bankers in Agra in the seventeenth century, their main clients being the military-political elite of the same cities.37 Perhaps the only actual firm that there is good data on, thanks to the Company’s complex relationship with it, was the Jagatseth in eighteenth-century Bengal. But this was an unusual story. The firm of Jagatseths held the licence to carry on a variety of monetary functions that should ordinarily be done by the state. They were big and powerful to the same extent that the Bengal Nawab’s hold on the monetary system was precarious, and yet money was valuable in Bengal because of Indo-European trade. Not surprisingly, this great firm fell like a sack of bricks within a few years of the political transition in Bengal. One interpretation of the obscurity of the trader-cum-banker among the city big shots in north India is that the historians have looked in the wrong place. Taking such a line, Sanjay Subrahmanyam argues that ‘[d]ealings between the Mughal state, nobles, and the trading economy took several forms’, and in particular, the ruling order ‘themselves at times took a substantial interest in trade’.38 The evidence on nobles owning ships, or of traders who used their position in the court for profit, is indeed frequent.39 But how we should read these examples is not clear at all. A trading order dominated by powerful nobles could mean institutional atrophy in trade on a large scale. The latter reading will be consistent with the position of Adam Smith’s that the early Company state in Bengal, where merchants ran a state, was a massive distortion of the market principle. Perhaps this is a misreading of the medieval trading world, and Subrahmanyam is right that political interest in trade was a sign of the strength of trade. But then we need to be sure that it was possible to do as well in trade without political backing. And here, the missing biographical material makes it difficult to conclude anything. Without taking sides in the rhetorical debate over the status of trade in Mughal India, we should note that there remains a serious deficiency of business history material to settle these issues. Much less controversial would be the statement that, on a small individual scale, family firms that were organized within community networks, did extensive business in moving goods. Apparently, outside Agra and Delhi, the commercial world of northern India did not contain many substantial firms; it was populated instead by hundreds of thousands of smaller actors. The commercial efflorescence depended vitally on the road-cum-river-based transportation arteries along the Ganges and the Indus, which greatly reduced the costs of trade. The rivers, though not navigable throughout their lengths, enabled the movement of bulk goods such as grain, sugar, salt and cloth, valuable goods like silks and spices, and strategic goods like horses, far more cheaply in northern India than in southern India. The plains themselves afforded wheeled traffic and short-haul caravans. These arteries along the Ganges and the Indus joined in Punjab, where trans-Himalayan caravan routes met, giving rise to large seasonal fairs and spot markets on the outskirts of Delhi and Lahore. There were several roads leading out of northern India towards Afghanistan,

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Persia and Central Asia. The mountain passes could accommodate sheep and horses, but not camels and bullocks. Therefore, the carrying capacity of the trade was not large while the risk of death of the pack animals was quite high. Given the cost of transit, the trade concentrated on low-bulk, high-value articles, such as silk and wool.40 Also from across the mountains there came horses, which were essential to warfare. It is not clear at all how these older trading enterprises adapted when the breakdown of the empire led to a fragmentation of control over the vital transportation routes. In the eighteenth century, the two major segments of overland trade of which we have some knowledge were the transporting of valuable articles such as Bengal silk to north India and beyond India, and the bullock caravans that carried grain to the coasts and cotton to the textile producing areas. Sushil Chaudhury suggests that the Asian merchants who organized overland trade along the Ganges– Jumna plains exported a lot of the artisanal goods from this region. Whether or not the scale of their operations was larger than that of overseas trade, a claim made by Chaudhury, remains subject to speculation. But the work justifiably questions the tendency to overstress the European element in regional commerce, and points to differentiations within mercantile enterprise operating inland.41 Notwithstanding Chaudhury’s evidence, there are unmistakable signs that the north Indian overland and river-borne trade system was facing attrition in the eighteenth century. Commercial dynamism was moving elsewhere. The successor states in the interior were at best a minor beneficiary of that movement. The major benefits went to the port cities, where the flow of capital was much larger in volume. The social history of major merchant-banker communities supplies many illustrations of the point. Two prominent examples, Khatri and Marwari, should suffice. The migration of north Indian traders, who had a direct or indirect link with the overland trade routes within the Mughal commercial system, had begun well before the creation of Calcutta in 1690. The Mughal invasion of Bengal was followed by a steady migration of Punjabi Khatri individuals into the region. They resettled as court officers, military officers and land-holders under some of the larger landed estates. That the same movement also involved migration of some of the prominent Khatri firms is illustrated in the figure of Amirchand or Umichand, one of the Company’s principal agents in the 1750s, and of Khatri origin.42 The already established channels of migration were evidently used more often after 1750, for in the mid-nineteenth century, Khatris were prominent in Calcutta as brokers and agents of European firms, though some of them were soon to be replaced by the Marwaris in that role.43 If the Khatri move into Calcutta began from their established role as partners of the Mughal Empire, migration of the Marwari merchant and banking firms followed a more commercial logic. The most prominent of these firms originated in Rajputana where the east–west trade routes had offered them business opportunities and the princely states offered them legal autonomy and immunity. From this base, in the eighteenth century, some of them migrated to the newer capitals of Indore and Hyderabad. But the implicit guarantee of security was evidently not enough, or

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the business opportunities seemed to dry up, for at about the turn of the nineteenth century these firms displayed a preference for moving inside British territories.44 In the case of Indore, Marwari merchants, who were involved in the inland trade in Malwa opium, formed a link between Bombay and central India. From early in the nineteenth century, Marwari entry into Calcutta became enlarged in scale and diversified in business interest. The Khatris and the Marwaris operated in the trans-Indian trade routes, which could not possibly continue on the same level as before after the major empires of west Asia also lost their former glory. Interestingly, there were reports that caravans that traversed the Deccan plateau were doing well in the eighteenth century. The evidence is prone to be misread as a sign of general commercialization and prosperity. In fact the scale of the caravan traffic was too small to make a difference to markets in general. The timing of these reports, and the occurrence of many of these in the Company’s war-related correspondence, suggests that the caravans represented a warfare-induced stimulation to mobile mercantile activity.

Mobile transporters of southern India Major caravan routes took off from market points located on the Ganges and the Indus and went towards central, western and southern India. Along these roads, bullock caravans were managed by specialist carriers known as the Banjaras or Lambadas. The origin of the Banjaras remains a matter of speculation. But there is no doubt as to their value to the commercial world of the arid interior and forested uplands of southern-central India, which had few navigable rivers and few roads suitable for wheeled traffic until the railway era. The presence of bullock caravans in these regions was recorded from the fifteenth century, when the influence of the Delhi Sultanate began to spread southward. The caravan runners, however, acquired a special prominence during organized military campaigns in the Deccan between 1670 and 1818. For this reason, the English East India Company records and contemporary travel narratives contain much valuable material on them.45 Caravan trade in the Deccan plateau was stimulated in two distinct ways which benefited the Banjaras.46 The first of these was the necessity to supply raw cotton to the cotton textile manufacturing clusters along the coasts. Much of the cotton that entered long-distance trade came from western India and moved east towards Bengal and Coromandel. The trade was so established that attempts by the Company to procure cotton for export, which meant trying to divert cotton away from the domestic routes, ended in partial success, even failure, at the turn of the century. Only much later in the mid-nineteenth century did these attempts begin to succeed. By then, the reduction in hand-spinning had made domestic industrial demand for cotton much less. A part of this cotton was exported from Calcutta to China late in the eighteenth century. The trade was not insignificant in scale, since it finds mention in many accounts. But there is no indication that it was of much importance to any of the merchant groups in India at this time.

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The second stimulus was the supply of grain to the armies on the march. The major powers in the Deccan plateau – the Marathas, Hyderabad and Mysore – all relied on Banjara caravans for the subsistence of the populace and the soldiers. They did so because, unlike the Company, none had easy access to seaports that could transport grain supplies from the rich deltas. In return for their services, the regional states offered the Banjaras freedom of movement. The East India Company had more choice about grain transportation, thanks to its ports, but when engaged in battles deep inside the Deccan plateau it was still reliant on the same groups and needed to negotiate with the Banjaras in much the same way as did the others. All of these changes put immense pressure on the Banjara groups towards the end of the eighteenth century. There were a number of groups in operation. Despite their theoretical neutrality, prolonged military rivalries inevitably spilled over into rivalries between groups allied to different armies. Questions of loyalty became paramount, and incentives were offered and punishments meted out in constant efforts to divert supplies away from enemy armies. The idea of diplomatic immunity did not go far in the late 1700s Deccan. Furthermore, grain was not always available. Indeed, it was almost impossible to obtain grain during the great famines of 1770 and 1783, which surely made competition between the groups even more intense than before. It needs to be remembered that the Banjaras were purely transporters and did not possess stationary storage capacity. In fact, they were rarely visible in permanent markets in the capacity of traders. An East India Company document estimated that the bullock caravans that carried grain, cotton and salt between north and south India and across the Deccan plateau, that is, the combined carriage capacity of the two major Banjara camps, Rathor and Bartia, numbered 170,000 bullocks around 1790.47 The average load carried by a medium-sized bullock was 75 kg.48 The carrying capacity of the overland system at the very peak of its development was a little over 10,000 tons, which was a tiny fraction (less than 1 per cent) of the possible south Indian grain output of several hundred million tons. For a comparison, in 1901, goods carried by the main south Indian railway companies amounted to over 5 million tons. If we add the Great Indian Peninsular railway, which connected Bombay with the western part of the Deccan plateau, the number would rise to 8 million tons. This was an increase of 800 times. Production in the region would have increased between these two benchmarks, but possibly not even doubled. In short, if the level of trade in the railway era represents a peak level of commercialization, the level in the earlier benchmark year was one-eight-hundredth of that peak, or no commerce to speak of. These comparisons would be misleading when the caravans carried valuable goods. But the main business of the bullock caravans was not silk, gold or wool, but grain, cotton and salt. As far as grain was concerned, a contemporary assessment for Bengal, that ‘except in cities, the bulk of the people is every where subsisted from the produce of their own immediate neighbourhood’, held true in the eighteenth century for most interior regions.49 Even this rudimentary infrastructure was in a state of disarray during the second and the third Maratha wars.

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The insignificant percentage that overland trade forms of the total consumption demand for the southern Indian population should suggest to us that, in peacetime, the Banjaras could not have been an effective or important player in the grain markets. And yet the estimated volume was large enough to feed warring armies. The total numbers engaged in the major Deccan conflicts were not large at any time; usually well below 100,000 people in each case. For such numbers, 10,000 tons could mean half a year’s rations. In short, the Banjaras were not critical to consumption for the general population, but they were a critical aid to warfare. As a result of this significance, the eighteenth century ended with a sharp rise in demand for the services of these mobile transporters together with steadily increasing pressure to politicize their services. Equally, with the end of warfare in southern India, there came a time when the Banjaras faced growing irrelevance. Later in the nineteenth century, the railways and the enclosure of the common lands as farms or forests deprived them of markets and pastures, and pushed many of them to disreputable livelihoods that the state connected with criminality.

Conclusion It is tempting to reduce the business history of early modern India into a single answer to a single question: why did overseas trade lead to an empire? The material presented in this chapter suggests the need to be mindful of business trends in answering the question. But, then, the significance of these trends was not restricted to the political changes to which they contributed. They were significant in themselves, as the symbol of a deep transformation in the very character of capitalism in the region. The characteristic feature of the early modern times was that the vertical split between a land-based sphere and an ocean-bound sphere of private enterprise was becoming unstable. There was atrophy of capital allied to the fiscal system and agricultural trade. We do not know much about overland trade, but it would be surprising if overland trade escaped unhurt from Mughal collapse, notwithstanding the short-lived and precarious prosperity of the successor states. There was, on the other hand, the growing number of merchants and bankers with an interest in the sea, many of whom had left the inland business world in search of new opportunities. It was not the case that all of these new groups were sponsored by the East India Company, or were serving the Company’s interest. It is true, however, that the Company’s own transformation from a trading to a governing power opened up profitable fields of investment for private capital connected with the sea. In a long-term perspective, the whole change can be read as a movement towards an integration of these two spheres, the interior and the maritime. Whereas the seventeenth-century state formation had encouraged the empires located inland to take control of seaports and maritime trade, now merchants from seaports moved inland and into enterprises connected with agriculture. The convergence between the two parts of a dualist world was a long-drawn-out affair, and might never have

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happened without the mid-nineteenth-century railways. But the early nineteenth century initiated the tendency. Underlying these changes, therefore, there were stories of rise and stories of decline and bankruptcy. It is impossible to tell these stories in ethnic terms. Not all Europeans succeeded as entrepreneurs. The fact that Europeans ruled over a part of India was of no real help to European business because the Company was powerless to overcome the biggest challenges of doing business in the interior, namely, high transportation cost and at times insecurity. Likewise among the Indian merchants, shippers and bankers, there was a reshuffle. Those who lost out were sometimes allied with the enemy camps, for example, bankers or Banjaras supplying the Company’s rivals. But not all of them were enemies of the Company. The Jagatseths of Bengal, friends of theirs, were symbols of the ancient regime who had outlived their usefulness. They failed to adapt, having long been used to government patronage. On the other side, the bankers of Gujarat, north Indian Khatris and Marwaris, or the Parsis of Bombay and Surat, carved out a niche in the new regime by investing in activities that were directly or indirectly linked with the sea and, therefore, grew with the world economy. By 1830, indigenous merchants were entrenched in almost all of the major commodity trades in the region: cotton, grain, even opium and indigo. Their main centres of operation were the Company ports, and many of their partners were Europeans. One of the key processes of change was the transformation of the East India Company itself, not only from a trading power to a colonial power, but also from a direct player in the world economy to an indirect agent in market integration. The Company underwent a creative destruction late in the period, an outcome partly of the contradictions that lay at the heart of this complex entity. In Britain, the Company represented the interests of the City merchants; in India, it increasingly worked to protect the businesses of private traders, many of whom did not like the City merchants, came from the provincial towns, and having acquired wealth campaigned to end the monopoly charter. Foreign trade mattered little, quantitatively speaking, to the Indian economy as a whole, even to the regional economies that supplied Indo-European trade. Maritime trade mattered even less. But, then, foreign trade and maritime trade were the dynamic segments of the economy. However small, these were the sunrise sectors, as opposed to the sunset world of the western Gangetic plains where overland trade and governance were in disarray. Maritime trade mattered not necessarily via its capacity to affect the lives of a large number of people, but because the dominant state power was keen to keep it going and because it was opening up many more opportunities than did overland trade. The huge rise in the trade–GDP ratio in Table 5.1 illustrates this dramatic expansion of opportunity. If foreign trade was dynamic, overland trade was not. Long distance trade was as good as an invisible force in central, peninsular or submontane India, or in the western desert. It was still a visible force in the western Gangetic plains, where the Mughal order had once been at its strongest, but it did not touch the lives of the wealthy landlords and noblemen. The Company appeared in these zones

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more as a usurper of power, even a parasite, than as a sponsor of a new economic order. Awadh, Rohilkhand and Bundelkhand had wealthy individuals, but none were traders or had a remote interest in trade. It was here that the resistance to the new economic and political regime crystallized during the mutiny of 1857; whereas along the coasts, Indian merchants and bankers kept the supply lines open and functioning smoothly, and thus quietly helped the colonial regime survive its worst crisis. One of the key factors making for such an asymmetric response to the new political-economic order was urban decay in northern India. Chapter 6 places this episode in context.

6 TOWNS

Arguments about growth, decline and redistribution of business enterprise in the eighteenth century often use the growth and decline of the towns as evidence. The rise and fall of towns illustrate state formation, state collapse, changes in the relationship between business and politics, and the evolving links between the ports and the interior. The scholarship on the towns in the eighteenth century is uneven. It is rich on the ports and the Gangetic plains, patchy on the other regions. Nevertheless, the evidence of urban history does allow us to draw out a few general patterns of change in economic history. It is necessary to start with a discussion of what kind of a settlement a ‘town’ was in the period in question. In the way that space was perceived in contemporary accounts, and rather less clearly in actual fact, the boundaries between the town and the countryside tended to be blurred.1 Still, in imperial north India, nine moreor-less urban characteristics did often occur together – a garrison, a fort, courts of justice, a police force, a big bazaar, settlements of skilled artisans, bankers, a transit point in long-distance trade and a large mosque. To make the point in another way, in settlements where these features occurred together, the density of population increased sharply. In south India, the towns did not necessarily possess all of these features. Some of them displayed different ones such as the presence of a temple that served as a cultural and manufacturing hub. They were also on average smaller in population when compared with those located in the Gangetic plains, and were few and far between. Indeed, clusters of villages specializing in an industrial-commercial occupation such as weaving sometimes acquired town-like features. That is, they became hubs of administration, craft activity, commerce and banking. Despite this difference, the north Indian constellation of features marking a convergence of the economic, the cultural and the spiritual capitals is useful in making sense of the urban history in all regions of India in that it helps us understand why towns were so important to capitalist enterprise. In both north and south India, town and country were deeply interdependent. The village delivered taxes, food and mercenary soldiers to the towns; and the political elite who lived in the towns protected property rights on land and sponsored the extension of cultivation. In one sense, therefore, the town lived on rural resources

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and the village lived on urban power. The one business that had an unambiguously urban bias in this scheme was banking, which lived mainly on long-distance trade, remittances and loans to rich clients, rather than on rural credit. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, several processes of change began to transform settlements of the kind described above. Whereas the urban core of the Mughal Empire had been located in the zone that lay at the intersection of the Gangetic and Indus plains, the breakup of the empire and the rise of new states saw the core urban zone shift eastwards, towards Bihar, Bengal and Awadh. The rise of new regimes out of old Mughal provinces of Awadh, Hyderabad and Bengal stimulated the growth of their new capitals. None of these new capitals was as large as the principal imperial cities, but they grew in size and occupational base nonetheless. The three ports where the Company was a landlord experienced increase in population and incomes. The rapid growth of Madras and Calcutta did not only stem from the trade that the Company directly gave rise to, but also from the attraction that these towns had for the indigenous capitalists who migrated from the interior and from other decaying ports. Bombay gained from the troubles of Surat; Madras from the decline of the Golkonda state and its chief port Masulipatnam; and Calcutta from the militarily unstable western zone of Bengal and the attrition of Hooghly. Away from these grand trajectories, a silent form of urbanization was unfolding in the eighteenth century. Agricultural trades encouraged the emergence and growth of market towns. Towns that traded in cotton, food and cloth, and were located nearer the sources of supply of these goods, began to appear more frequently in the European trade records towards the end of the century. These new dynamics redefined the town. Large settlements did not need to have all of those features in order to remain relevant. The model of political town formation slowly gave way to a new model of commercial town formation. In the course of the change, did the scale of urbanization increase or decrease? How did eighteenth-century urbanization influence business enterprise, then or later? I return to some of these larger questions in the last section of the chapter. The greater part of the chapter discusses the character of the trajectories themselves. A convenient point to begin from is the characteristic form of the towns, or urbanism for short, in the seventeenth century.

The seventeenth-century towns There are a number of interpretations of forms of towns in seventeenth century India. One view of the urban system of Mughal India is represented by Irfan Habib, whose account of a highly developed commercial and financial services sector suggests a relatively high level of urbanization in the western Gangetic plains.2 Such urban efflorescence was an outcome of the high proportion of gross output of land that was taken as taxes and channelled to the centres of military and fiscal administration. These urban centres became home not only to soldiers, craftsmen and service workers in the employ of the courts, but also bankers and merchants investing money in overland trade and remittance businesses. Certainly during the reign

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of the Mughals, the region where the Ganges and the Indus plains met had possessed three large cities with populations of 400,000 each at their peaks. There had also been a whole cluster of smaller towns living on commerce, usually a specific staple or tradable good, as well as on military settlements. It is not altogether clear how these classes of towns were placed in relation to each other. Did the smaller towns – Budaun, Kanauj, Bayana, Sambhal, Mathura, Lucknow or Benares – grow or decline together with such premier centres of wealth and power as Agra, Delhi and Lahore? Or did they offer some competition to the latter? In other words, was there increasing urban concentration or urban diffusion as the empire progressed? The absence of good data to settle questions such as these leads easily to a different picture of Mughal urbanism. Stephen Blake, for example, concludes that ‘the economy of Mughal India was agrarian-based; 90–95 per cent of the population lived in small villages’, and the main constituents in the fiscal administration and the urban economy were military personnel rather than commercial actors.3 The three principal cities of the empire were large no doubt, but their economic basis derived from their military-political importance. The economic drive towards urbanization was relatively weak. A third view of the Mughal urban system suggests a hierarchical core–periphery relationship between the largest of the towns on the one hand and the countryside and the smaller towns on the other. In this world, the growth of the large centres would not necessarily mean a quick rise in the overall urbanization level. K. N. Chaudhuri designates Lahore, Delhi, Agra, Patna, Burhanpur and Ahmedabad the ‘primate cities’ of the empire, that is, cities that were many times larger in size than the next largest, indicating a high degree of concentration.4 Chaudhuri does not discuss the position of the smaller towns. It is implied that the smaller regional centres did not matter to the rate and scale of urbanization partly because they were few in number and much smaller on average, and partly because they were related to the core cities in the same fashion as was the countryside, that is, as a dependent periphery. There is yet a fourth interpretation of seventeenth-century towns, one that sees towns, whether large or small, as representing distinct regional political-economic systems. Following up this idea, B. G. Gokhale divides all of India into six regional systems that conducted more trade within themselves and with outsiders than between each other. ‘Each was dominated by a large urban center serving a vast area rich in agricultural and industrial production’, as well as a state that commanded sufficient power to run a stable fiscal administration. The six systems and the corresponding urban centres were: Bengal–Bihar (Dhaka–Patna), Agra, Punjab (Sialkot–Multan), Deccan (Burhanpur), Madras (Cochin) and Gujarat (Surat and Ahmedabad).5 This idea has the virtue of including the extra-imperial realm, as well as incorporating the agency of actors who came from outside the empire, such as European companies or Asian traders. Although helpful in thinking about India in terms of regional segmentation, the picture still leaves questions about relationships between towns within a regional network and about the scale of urbanization open to speculation. It decentralizes the big picture too much and obscures from view the existence of core–periphery arrangements.

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There were not many seaports in any of these systems, but the few that were large enough deserve special notice. Although a great deal of overland caravan trade passed through Lahore and Agra, cities which were home to middle-eastern and Armenian merchants, the premier trading point of the empire was Surat in Gujarat, populated by a much more mixed collection of merchants. The significance of Surat was manifold; as the major access to the lucrative Red Sea trade, as a source of revenue; and as a port of embarkation for the hajj pilgrims. Already cosmopolitan, Surat became the main business centre of the European companies in the seventeenth century. To the Mughal Emperor in the second half of the century, a major motivation to keep Surat within the folds of the empire was to contain the political ambitions of these maritime operators. With the picture as divided as it is, trends in urbanization in Mughal northern India, or indeed anywhere else, remain an open question. Not surprisingly, Tapan Raychaudhuri concludes a useful discussion with the statement that ‘urbanization as well as population had, in all probability, an upward trend’ during the peak of the Mughal Empire, only to qualify the statement by pointing at the ‘limited magnitude and uneven character of this upward trend’.6 There is, nevertheless, a point of agreement across these readings. No matter whether we start the construction of the big picture with the empire or with the regions, one fundamental reason for urban concentration was ‘the complementarity of economic nodality and political attributes’.7 There was mutually reinforcing growth of military-political power and economic activities. Many European descriptions of interior cities – such as Delhi, Agra, Lahore, Burhanpur, Ahmedabad or Dhaka – observed the simultaneous presence of four attributes within each one of these towns: a market place that sold the produce of a large hinterland, a cosmopolitan collection of merchants and bankers, a seat of administration and a large garrison complete with a well-defended fort. In these respects, Surat was not an exception to the rule. The choice of a city as the base for a powerful and upwardly mobile nobleman had much to do with the attraction of the city for the merchants, bankers and skilled artisans. Bankers, especially, did not depend exclusively on trade credit, but also on accommodation extended to tax collectors and warlords. In this way, there came to be a concentration of trade, banking, handicrafts, agricultural processing and transport of cargo in tandem with the military-fiscal expansion of any state. In more recent writings on the imperial cities, a further dimension has been added to this list – religious endowments. ‘Rulers constructed religious monuments and civic institutions that simultaneously functioned as commercial centers’.8 Hence, we obtain the constellation of nine features characterizing the town in our times (see the beginning of the chapter). Such a picture of politically driven urbanism connects easily to the standard narrative of urban decline in north India in the eighteenth century. Urban decay was predicated on the dependence of towns upon military-political power. How far do any of these perspectives receive confirmation in the limited statistics available on town size?

Towns 75i

901

Towards Kashgar, Tibet and China

Balkh

Towards Baghdad, Meshed and Caspian Sea

107

Kabul PUNJAB

Lahore

;

30

Kandahar .Delhi'. Towards Hormuz

RAJPUT STATES SIND

Naaaur

Jodhpur

Agra'

Sambhal .Badaun Kanauj

Bayana,

AWADH BUNDELKHAND Patna

MALWA^

Benares

Dhaka

BENGAL'

.GUJARAT /lAhmedabad

Calcutta (Eng lish).

Cambay

Balasore Bay o f Bengal

Surat ORISSA. Bombay | (E nglish)

MARATHAS'

GOLKONDA

Pegu

Golkonda 1_5°

Arabian

7Masulipatnam

15_I

Sea G oaf (P ortu gu ese ) \

; Madras

(E nglish)

Pondicherry Tranquebar

(F rench) (D anish)

Cochin^ (D utch)

0 b 0 751

MAP 6.1

200

400 Kilometers 200

400 Miles

90°I

Overland trade routes and trading towns, 1700.

What do the numbers show? Nearly all contributors to the subject agree that numbers are very hard to find even for the largest cities in pre-colonial India. In this bleak scenario, the occurrence of outlandishly large figures (see Lucknow and Calcutta in Table 6.1) suggests that those who reported these data did not have a definite idea where a city began and where it ended. What these problems tell us of the quality of urban government is another story. If we do, however, assemble what little information there is on city size, and ignore the outliers, five points can still be made (Table 6.1). The first point is an obvious one, and already alluded to. The premier cities in the Ganges–Indus plains were de-populated in the eighteenth century. Second, the trend was slowed, if not arrested, by the growth of new regional centres in northern India. The third point is rather less obvious than the first two. The capitals of major successor states, and especially the ones situated in the Deccan plateau, were individually too small to make a difference to the picture. The table shows Hyderabad and Pune, each

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TABLE 6.1

Population estimates for selected towns 1660–80

Agra Delhi Lahore Lucknow Benares Pune Hyderabad Madras Calcutta Bombay

1740–50

400,000 400,000 400,000

10–50,000

1800–20 100,000 100,000 100,000 500,000 582,000 100,000 120,000

70,000

500,000 180,000

1820–40

200,450

179,917 236,000

1860–70

1891

149,008 154,417 98,924 284,779 175,188 118,836

168,622 192,579 176,854 265,000 219,467 161,390 124,057 452,518 741,144 821,764

427,771 377,924 816,562

1941 647,073 671,659 259,798 203,804 158,856 500,623 518,660 1,043,307 979,445

Sources: 1660–80, see text, and India, The Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. 8, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908, p. 410; 1740–50, Ibid.; 1800–20, text, and Walter Hamilton, The East India Gazetteer, London: John Murray, 1815, 114, 204, 678; 1800–20; Tom Kessinger, ‘Regional Economy: North India’, in Dharma Kumar, ed., Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, 1757–1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 265–6; and Irfan Habib, ‘Studying a Colonial Economy—Without Perceiving Colonialism’, Modern Asian Studies, 19(3), 1985, 355–81; 1860 onwards, India, Statistical Abstract relating to British India, various years, London: HMSO.

barely 100,000 in size; Mysore, as far as we know, was about half this size. Fourth, all of these cases of decline and stasis in the interior were far outweighed by growth in the three port cities. The fifth proposition is perhaps the most surprising one. If we take a really long view and extend the town-size data well into the twentieth century, it is clear that somewhere from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century the interior cities started regaining their prominence; some of them did so quite dramatically. Observe Lahore, for one example. The principal site of this huge reshuffle was the late-Mughal northern India. Although statistics measuring this are hard to find, historians have been undeterred by that fact from making bold statements about the proportion of urban population in this region, and how the proportion changed in the eighteenth century. Stephen Blake believes that urban population in seventeenth-century India was about 5 per cent. James Heitzman writes, ‘Measured against estimates of total South Asian population between 100 and 200 million around the year 1750, we may posit an urban population then between 10 and 20 per cent of total population (I am inclined to accept a figure of about 20 million urban dwellers)’.9 Since the three major cities of northern India did not contain a population exceeding 1.2–1.4 million in total, and since these were the primate cities – all others should have been individually much smaller in size – a figure of 20 million is an exaggeration. Even a long list of the towns of the Gangetic plains would not yield more than 20 identifiable large urban sites. The rest were insignificant as population concentrations. Furthermore, the actual level of urbanization in the western Gangetic plains was 8–10 per cent in 1800, so that the assumption of 20 per cent in 1750 should imply an improbably large decline in urban population in the late eighteenth century. Equally, the assumption of 5 per cent in 1700 would suggest a rise in urbanization while leaving the exact period of the rise unspecified. There is, of course, a third scenario – that there were no significant changes in the aggregate

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scale of urbanization because wealth and power was redistributed from the imperial primate cities to the regional primate cities. The lower end of Heitzman’s range, 10 per cent, will support that conclusion. The choice between a narrative of bleak desolation and a narrative of energetic economic growth rests on nothing more substantial than these guesstimates at this point. But we can do better with the case studies.

De-urbanization: Delhi, Agra, Lahore, Dhaka There is little controversy on the point that the primate cities declined. The complementarity of economics and politics made it inevitable that this should be the outcome. These cities had expanded in the seventeenth century as their command over fiscal resources increased. And by the same token, the beginning of the end of this urban system started with the outbreak of rebellion, warfare, fiscal decay and migration of capital, from the end of the seventeenth century. The formal and more visible processes of disintegration of the empire did not begin until the second, or even the third, decade of the eighteenth century. But the seeds of a decline of the primate cities had already been sown. That said, if we take a long enough view, decline may seem too strong a word to describe what was really happening in these cities. Lahore, the first capital of the Mughal Empire was situated on the well-cultivated banks of the Ravi. The city consolidated its position by becoming a transit point in overland trade between the Indian plains and the trans-Himalayan markets. Its commercial importance stayed intact until the third decade of the eighteenth century. Thereafter, foreign invasion and warfare drove many of its wealthy residents to Amritsar. Lahore re-emerged in the last quarter of the century as the second city in the Sikh confederacy under Ranjit Singh. It was ‘still a town of considerable size, with a good bazar’, but little long-distance trade and banking remained.10 Delhi, the capital of the sultanates from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth century and again the capital of the Mughal Empire from 1648 until 1858, had a similar fate in the eighteenth century as it progressively lost access to its tax base and was repeatedly sacked. Delhi’s ruins were the most remarked upon by nostalgic noblemen travelling between Hindustan and Afghanistan en route to Persia.11 Interestingly, invaders from Afghanistan and Persia were two major factors behind Delhi’s woes. The images are evocative, but do not add any insight into an economic history narrative. Delhi carried enough strategic and symbolic value to re-emerge as a major urban centre, but that was a much later affair. Agra was the more important business centre in the trio, apart from being the capital of the empire for a century. Agra illustrates the effect of the military contests in northern India better than Delhi and Lahore. Agra was the nodal point connecting trade from eastern India with that from Rajputana and Malwa. It was the point where trade along the Ganges–Jumna axis left the rivers and took the roads towards the Gulf of Cambay or towards Persia. It was located within the cotton-producing zones of the Gangetic plains, and, therefore, was advantageous to

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the textile industry. These strengths did not completely disappear even as the city’s political status changed. Agra ceased to be the imperial capital in 1648. Within 20 years the large agricultural and commercial province of which Agra was the centre faced a Jat uprising. The resultant warfare was intermittent and a truce of sorts was in effect in 1721. However, the truce was broken in the wake of Nadir Shah’s invasion of Delhi (1739). In the 1750s again, Agra was in the vortex of the rivalry between the Afghans and the Marathas, and the city was alternately under the Mughals (until 1757, 1773–83), the Marathas (1757–61, 1772–3, 1784–1803), the Jats (1761–8), the English (1803–) and effectively without a government in the interstitial years. According to Jadunath Sarkar, the prominence of the city as a business centre stayed intact throughout the turmoil thanks in part to the exodus of wealthy capitalists from Delhi to Agra, but this assessment is difficult to believe. In fact, the hinterland of the city was severely squeezed as major trade routes to the west and the east came to be controlled by rivals.12 Away from the pivot of the military contests, numerous former administrativecum-commercial centres went into decay in the eighteenth century. If Delhi, Agra and Lahore were in the line of fire, in the provincial capitals there was not much insecurity of life, but these towns were slowly starved of trade, tax income and state sponsorship for civic institutions as moneyed capital and skilled labour began to leave. Dhaka was temporarily the capital of the Mughal province of Bengal. When the capital was shifted to Murshidabad (c. 1703–12), Dhaka was saved only because of strong European interest in muslins still made in the vicinity of the town. The presence of the European companies and private traders buying this cloth for export continued into the nineteenth century. It is hard to date precisely when this business began to become unprofitable. In any case, by 1830, Dhaka experienced the same fate suffered by Murshidabad, and before it another Bengal capital, Rajmahal – growing irrelevance. An official visit in the 1850s found ‘all its splendid buildings . . . the palaces of the ancient newaubs, the factories and churches of the Dutch, French, and Portuguese nations, are all sunk into ruin, and overgrown with jungle’.13 Burhanpur and Ahmedabad, like Dhaka, were capitals of large Mughal provinces in the seventeenth century and had grown as commercial and manufacturing centres, points of caravan trade, and military settlements. Both suffered a similar fate in the eighteenth century, even though population estimates are unavailable to judge the extent and timing of the decline.

Emergence of regional capitals: Lucknow, Benares, Hyderabad, Pune No matter what the aggregate trend, it has been observed by all scholars that from the first quarter of the eighteenth century, an institutional change had begun to unfold in the towns and cities of the imperial realm. In a number of sites, merchants and bankers had begun to acquire power in the local and provincial courts. They took over more fiscal responsibility than before and were rewarded with titles and positions in the courts. There was a mercantile consolidation of sorts,

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not only locally but also in terms of links between the imperial capital and the local commercial centres.14 With these foundations, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the far-flung regions overwhelmed the imperial core in commercial importance. The towns that rose from the ashes of the empire were distinctive in a number of ways. The constant need to finance warfare added to the scale and nature of the economic services available in the new capitals. Bankers had rich clients, and yet they needed to mitigate the risks of lending to cash-strapped warlords by means of tax farming. Unlike the empire, these towns could not rely on a flow of tribute from outside the core region of influence. The Peshwa’s dominion did depend on such a flow, but it dwindled as the Maratha states in Malwa, Bundelkhand and Gujarat assumed an independent bearing. Furthermore, the local elite defined the character of the towns to a great extent, and made each different from the other. The religious Brahmin rulers of Pune, for example, left their mark all over the city, and made it culturally speaking poles apart from Hyderabad, whose rulers saw themselves as carrying the legacy of the Mughal nobility. C. A. Bayly’s work suggests that there was a shift of urban enterprise in the Gangetic plains from the second half of the eighteenth century. As the Mughal Empire crumbled after 1740, the process made way for regional centres of power in Rohilkhand, in Awadh, in the Jat domain in Haryana, in Punjab under the Sikhs, in Bundelkhand and Malwa under the Marathas, in Benares under a Bhumihar Brahmin landlord, and in Bengal under the East India Company. Delhi, Agra and Lahore had a population of 400,000 each in 1700, which was reduced to 100,000 each by 1800. In the same period, Benares and Lucknow expanded to 200,000 each. Decline could be matched by dynamism because de-urbanization did not necessarily mean a retreat of commercial capital, rather its relocation. Commercial capital migrated eastward, eventually reaching Calcutta. The cities in the new zones tended to be governed by semi-independent bodies consisting of merchants and the landed gentry. The partnership between the Jagatseth, the Nawab and prominent zamindars in Murshidabad would serve as an example of the point. Equally, the disintegration of that partnership leading to the end of the rule would suggest that the successor-state model was fundamentally not very stable. The hypothesis that there was active migration of moneyed capital receives confirmation in Karen Leonard’s work on banking in Hyderabad. In this view, the ‘great firm’ migration from the heart of the empire hastened the collapse of the empire by starving it of credit. Whether or not migration of great firms can be considered evidence for a theory of imperial collapse is controversial. The theory stands on the assumption of sufficient autonomy of the banking business with respect to the fiscal and commercial systems, an assumption that J. F. Richards questioned.15 Without this assumption, it is not clear which variable – trade collapse, state collapse and migration of capital – was the cause and which the effects. Be that as it may, the fact of a migration of financial services stands undisputed. The fortunes of the regional towns were not necessarily secure, as the example of Lucknow suggests. When Asaf ud Daula relocated his capital from Fyzabad to

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Lucknow (1774), ‘bankers and men of property accompanied the court’.16 A rich state produced a rich aristocracy and consequently wealthy capitalists and skilled artisan communities. But being located in the middle of a vast fertile agricultural zone that yielded the highest level of taxes in India, the region was constantly exposed to demands made by the Maratha forces. Unable to meet this threat, the state became a dependency of the Company. The subsequent history of the state is a sordid one of extortion by the Company together with inefficiency and wastage of the money that remained. In the second half of the eighteenth century, there was a sharp decline in urban trade in manufactures in the Awadh territory. Customs realized by the state fell in 1785 to 20 per cent of what it was 30 years before. In Allahabad, in Tanda, and in the capital Lucknow itself, manufacturing and trade were believed to be much reduced in scale. According to one report submitted in 1787, the fall was due to the efforts of the Company to cut competition by force in almost all major trades of the region, mainly cloth.17 The privileges that the Company had exacted from the dependency led to a fall in customs revenues, even though these revenues were not large to begin with. The other factor behind the fall was the reduction in trade in the region as a whole, and especially trade in the direction of Agra and Delhi. The report was successful in restoring ‘free’ trade in the region after 1787 but, by then, the authority of the state was so reduced that customs continued to be evaded anyhow. By the early nineteenth century, the aristocracy was ruler only in name. When the Company eventually assumed power in Awadh (1856), little of the economic dynamism still remained, and Lucknow was largely irrelevant in the new trading world. Urban dynamism had already shifted further east. As the shadow of the empire receded from Benares, the greatest of all Hindu pilgrim centres, the city went through a small-scale construction boom. Temples, bathing and burning ghats, monasteries, schools of learning and palaces were built with donations from Maratha and Rajput princes. Its importance as a pilgrim centre increased. This factor, together with the wealthy consumers who lived here, stimulated the production of luxury handicrafts, chiefly brassware and silk textiles. A rural stretch sandwiched between two business towns located 50 miles apart, Mirzapur and Benares, and conveniently located on the Grand Trunk Road developed as a hub of cotton and woollen carpet manufacture. In the nineteenth century, railway connection further strengthened these three foundations of the Benares economy: religion, education and the crafts. The capitals of the new regimes retained and deliberately recreated some of the features of the capitals of the old regime – namely, a sponsored settlement of skilled artisans, home to garrisons and their commanders, a walled city with a fort and large markets. Periods of sustained peace would strengthen all of these elements by keeping a flow of rural taxes into the capital intact. Providers of skilled services, such as scribes, bankers and artisans formed the middle class of these towns. Even the poorest among these three, the town artisans, still commanded vastly more prestige and power than did the artisans in the villages. Such power had a corporate basis. Nandita Sahai’s research on late eighteenth-century Jodhpur reveals the presence of

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strong caste-based associations of artisans in the capital city. These bodies conducted collective bargaining in the market, no doubt gaining in the process because of their proximity to the court.18 In the new capitals commerce and banking thrived, as they had in the Mughal Empire, on the back of a fiscal system that lived on land tax and tribute from dependencies. Leonard’s study of Hyderabad draws the picture of a flourishing commercial-cum-financial centre that built its wealth on the back of an aristocracy living on land taxes.19 Pune was another example. Shivaji was interested in the town, but it was the Peshwa who adopted Pune as the capital of the Maratha dominion in 1730 and elevated it to ‘the nerve centre’ of contemporary Indian politics.20 Chitpavan Brahmins and Bhats, migrants from the western coastal towns which had fallen under the influence of Muslim naval captains known as Sidis, joined as officers of the court and enriched the religious and intellectual life of the town. Tributary payments from the outer regions of the dominion sustained this superstructure. Thus, though not a major trade centre, without easy access to long-distance trade routes, and located in a semi-arid agricultural tract, the town continued to grow in economic importance thanks to the prosperity of the state. The military machine was not directly managed by the state, but farmed out to chiefs. These commanders in turn financed their participation in the wars by raising loans. Pune, therefore, also developed a money market geared to wars.21 B. G. Gokhale observes that the two characteristics of eighteenth century Pune, military-fiscal origin and the systematic use of religion as a state ideology, made Pune a special case: ‘We have no instance of another such large city of this character in the urban history of India. Poona reflected the mores of a lifestyle dominated by Brahmanical ideas to a much greater extent than any other city’. Gokhale estimates that as much as 10 per cent of the Peshwa’s revenues, a truly staggering sum of money, went towards religious institutions. On a smaller scale than in Mughal Empire, the end of the Maratha dominion between 1803 and 1818 led to a similar process of urban decay. With the decline of the dominion and the loss of tributary flows at the end of the century, the banking business also shrunk. In 1815, when it was still ruled by the Peshwa, Pune ‘better answers the description of a large village than a city’.22 But the same source also wrote that the city had a large bazaar. Although not destined to become irrelevant, Pune remained on the brink of obscurity for many decades before its re-emergence as a centre of administration. Similar examples of desolation recur from the outlying branches of the dominion. When Cuttack came into British hands from the control of the Nagpur rulers, early European visitors to this Orissa town believed that the town had suffered a long period of depopulation and de-commercialization because of over-exaction by the state. Gwalior and Baroda may also have experienced a similar period of inertia at the turn of the nineteenth century. Quite a different order of urban emergence from the successor states can be seen in the cities where foundations in commerce were becoming stronger. These were the Company cities on the coast, commercial-industrial centres in the Gangetic

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plains (some, like Patna, were Mughal towns that reinvented themselves), and major textile production clusters in south India.

The port cities: Surat, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Karachi The Mughal Empire had owned ports, Surat and Hooghly being the main ports at the turn of the eighteenth century. But ports were not a vital resource for the empire. Nor were they vital to the peninsular states of the seventeenth century. The states wanted to have access, but in most cases would have found it too costly to secure access to the sea. Their survival lay inland in cultivation. By the 1800s, this picture had changed beyond recognition. Three port-cities controlled the interior, militarily speaking. Population growth reflected this significance. Already by 1760, Calcutta and Madras were far larger in population than any Indian town of the time, whether those still in decline or those in ascendance. Anyone trying to read the future political map from the population data and occupational structure of the towns could not possibly fail to see the outcome of the political contest. And yet, in the 1750s, their value as base camps in a conquest could hardly have been foreseen. Until then, these towns gained because the cities in the western Gangetic plains had already been in turmoil. When in the late eighteenth century these towns did become engaged in territorial campaigns, they were not only much larger but also more diversified and more cosmopolitan as business hubs than their counterparts in the interior. In other words, colonial conquest did not make them hubs of trade, their status as hubs of trade enabled colonial conquest. Such conjunction of wealth, military power and global orientation on the littoral spaces was unprecedented in the region, as was the concept of an empire started by seafaring merchants. In the nineteenth century, when many of the interior states had disappeared, the imbalance was great. Not only did Bombay, Calcutta and Madras draw capital and labour from all over India, but new satellite towns that joined in the trading world centred in these three coastal towns also experienced similar growth. For example, Kanpur, Allahabad, Patna and Karachi experienced growth by joining in the maritime trade that had been the source of prosperity for the Company towns. The early history of the three ports is too well known to be repeated in detail. Charles II received ownership of the Bombay Island from the Portuguese in 1661, and transferred the estate to the Company seven years later. Taking possession of the new estate was not easy in the face of hostility from the Portuguese settlers and the Dutch East India Company who did not like the deal. States on the Konkan littoral were individually weak but could still cause trouble to the Company’s ships offshore. The Mughal admirals, the Sidis and the Marathas under Shivaji threatened the port. English politics cast an adverse shadow upon the future of the port (see Chapter 5). On top of all these troubles, Aurangzeb had a spat with the governor in Bombay over European pirates in the Arabian Sea. Bombay survived in the face of these problems, but it was in no position to become a strong contender to Surat until the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was only the subsequent decline

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of Surat, which was poorly defended against both Maratha and pirate attacks, that turned the balance of advantage in favour of Bombay. Calcutta’s early history closely parallels that of Bombay. About 1690, Job Charnock, an officer and, temporarily, the leader of the Company establishment in Bengal, secured from the ruler of the province permission to build a fort on the river Hooghly. The settlement might have remained an irrelevant one to the future of either Bengal or the Company but for two circumstances, the break-out of war in Europe (1740–60) that pitted the French against the English in Bengal; and Maratha forays into western Bengal that drove large numbers of Bengali businesses and service workers to Calcutta (1740s). French reverses in south India together with the collaboration of these indigenous merchants helped the English take over Bengal between 1757 and 1765. As Chapter 5 shows with the example of the Khatris and the Marwaris, the decline of the Mughal Empire with the consequent disruptions to trade in the core imperial zone pushed traders and banking firms to migrate into the capitals of the successor states in central, southern and eastern India. Merchants who had transported grain, had moved across the Himalayas or the western desert, and sponsored the river-borne trade in the western Gangetic plains, were no longer able to operate freely or safely. As a result the trade between the big cities and their hinterlands, as well as trade connected with the system of taxation, were much reduced in scale. This was the unstable commercial zone from which merchants and bankers fled to the emerging towns in the second half of the eighteenth century. As these two particular examples show, the flow into Calcutta from the north was almost certainly much larger in scale than that into any of the other towns, some of which would appear in this story as intermediate stations before the final move to Calcutta or Bombay. Madras was the earliest of the three settlements, and despite French occupation in the 1750s survived the eighteenth century without major setbacks to its political and economic importance. Its economic importance derived mainly from the cotton textile trade, which was contracted out to large weavers’ settlements within easy reach of the town. Like Calcutta, Madras experienced growth in population as indigenous businessmen, some connected to textiles and some not, went to live there in search of security and higher returns in investment. Bombay’s rise is usually narrated with reference to Surat. Unlike the other two cities, Bombay was in direct competition with the largest of the old Indian ports. Its economic advantages would not have been obvious to indigenous businesses in the early 1700s. Bombay’s importance in the first half of the eighteenth century owed more to defence than trade. Its population was small compared with those of Calcutta and Madras, and, despite efforts by local governments to increase trade and invite settlement, it did not pose a challenge to Surat in drawing away capital. The profits of trade did not justify the expense incurred to hold this settlement. The resource base of the town was small until new territories were acquired in the 1770s in exchange for participation in the Maratha succession conflicts. Even though better defended than Surat, Bombay was still exposed to attacks by a Maratha navy. Above all, when compared with Surat it had little indigenous commercial

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infrastructure to enable a continuous supply of textiles and other goods for the Company’s trade. There was one advantage that the city enjoyed, however. It had better access than did Surat to timber from the forests of Malabar. And, therefore, Bombay was better situated for shipbuilding. During a decisive period of Surat politics, a number of carpenters and weavers left the city to settle in Bombay. The weavers were of little economic consequence, but the Parsi carpenters recreated a shipbuilding industry that eventually surpassed the scale of the industry in Surat. In the 1740s, the master shipbuilder, Lowji Wadia, was the chief contractor for the repair and construction of ships for the Company, while three other large Parsi merchant houses possessed the timber contact (Chapter 5). In the first half of the eighteenth century, new conflicts developed and collaborations were forged within the 30,000 strong merchant community of Surat. Already at the turn of the century, when the city was yet to feel the effects of the breakup of the empire, piracy off the coast conducted by European privateers had led to a series of disputes between the European companies and the Indian merchants of the town. The disputes almost ended the English presence in Bombay. Although reprisals by the Mughal court were avoided by an agreement to supply protection to convoys of trading ships, the solution satisfied neither the English Company, who thought it was expensive, nor the local merchants, who thought it was inefficient. In this atmosphere of unfriendliness, a few Parsi families emerged as trusted agents of the English. Rustom Manock was the pioneer in building this collaboration. Unusually resourceful and a skilled negotiator, he managed to gain the trust of officers in the Surat establishment and to create a captive pool of artisans who supplied goods in time and of the required quality.23 The agency of the Rustom Manock family was embroiled in disputes because of the perennial suspicion that the agents were not completely trustworthy and that they tried to intimidate other merchants to protect their rent. A short-lived move to cut out the Parsis from agency had to be given up in the 1720s when Manock’s son went to London to plead his case with the directors of the Company, and won a decision in his favour. It is likely that in deciding in favour of Manock’s claim to continued custom of the Company, London directors, as well as sections within the Surat council, took into account the changing political economy of the town. Maratha invasions in Gujarat disrupted the flow of food, tax revenue and textiles into the city, and disputes between merchants threatened to become explosive under the decaying town administration. Merchants of the town rallied under their respective communities and/or sympathized with the empire or the local ruler or other concentrations of power. The only community that did not have an alternative to siding with the English were the Parsis. The prospect of partnerships between Parsi coastal merchants and the European traders was, therefore, an invaluable asset to the Company in the hostile environment of the 1730s. Surat was effectively occupied by the Company from 1759. The significance of the take-over for economic history is probably minor, for already before 1750 a diversion of maritime trade as well as shipping and shipbuilding had begun towards

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Bombay. In the third and the fourth decades of the century, European factors stationed in Surat complained of the decline in shipping from the town. For the English this was an argument for a full-scale shift towards the safer port of Bombay. As Mughal authority over Surat crumbled, the economic hinterland of the city shrank in scale, and local political actors were left without effective control from above. The chances of disputes between Indians and Europeans increased, inducing the Europeans to blockade the port on several occasions.24 The events leading up to the capture of the Surat castle by the English in 1759 have been the subject of a debate concerning the relationship among the Company, the town administration, and the Hindu and Jain merchants and bankers who had their base of operation in Surat. The point of the debate is whether the occupation followed a partnership or a conflict between the English and the Indian business interests.25 Irrespective of the conclusion, there can be little doubt that Surat was a special case. While facing a similar source of decay as elsewhere in the empire, it was unique in being a major port and having a cosmopolitan urban environment. In the second half of the century, Bombay eclipsed Surat. But Surat did not become irrelevant. Lakshmi Subramanian has shown that it continued to be important, if on a different political and economic foundation, in the subsequent business history of western India. Even as maritime trade dwindled to insignificance, trade and banking links between northern India and western India increased in the late eighteenth century. The resurgence was an outcome of the growing remittance business between the two zones and the growth of new trades with China, both an indirect result of the ascendance of the Company in Surat and Bombay. In these developments, the indigenous bankers played a leading role and they also supplied political support to the Company when it made its authority over Surat formal in 1800.26 The last major seaport to emerge was Karachi, which more or less started as a conduit for the Indus river cargo towards the end of the eighteenth century. Until then, Karachi was a minor port that lived on the Red Sea trade, much like the merchants in Gujarat and Konkan did. Around 1790, the population of Karachi was 10,000, mainly merchants and mechanics, who traded with Muscat, Surat, Bombay and Malabar by sea, and overland by camels with Kandahar and Kabul. As Karachi did not have any timber of its own, an important item of import was timber from Malabar. Previously the site of a mud fort and not much more, the population of the region retained a military bearing, always going armed. ‘This strong feature of a martial character is highly contrasted by their childish amusements; for it is nothing uncommon to see a number of old men, with long grey beards, passing their time and highly delighted with flying paper-kites’.27 Such a statement, made by an eighteenth century visitor to the town, would seem out of place by the second quarter of the nineteenth century when Karachi was beginning to change its character and scale of trade by participating in Indo-European trade. Were the colonial cities qualitatively a different kind of settlement from the indigenous cities? They were clearly different in an economic historical sense, in being mainly business towns rather than mainly garrison towns. They drew

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in artisans in search of the custom of that huge buyer of textiles, the Company. Urban history explores another dimension of the distinctiveness; whether or not the colonial cities fostered a different demographic pattern as well.

The morphology of the port city: one world, two worlds or many worlds? Contributions in historical geography as well as those in economic and social history have tried to identify the key features of the colonial cities.28 These works make frequent use of the word ‘hybrid’ and try to give the word an analytical content. A certain ethnic model of settlement has been popular behind the concept of the colonial port city. This default model projects a dualistic world consisting of a white town centred round the fort and a semi-rural black town supplying food and labourers to the former. The two worlds did a lot of trade between them, but at arm’s length, never mixing socially. They were not initially governed by the same rules. Indeed, ‘these two sections of the city – the European and the Indian – shared little in the way of social or economic institutions’.29 An interesting question for historians is whether the ethnic dualist model is valid only for the Company cities or applied equally well to the Mughal imperial cities also, where again the rulers were often migrants carrying an image of nobility, who were obviously far more wealthy and powerful than the denizens. The question is yet to be settled. This picture of a sharp separation is probably over-stylized.30 In any case, it is particularly problematical for the eighteenth century. Heterogeneity rather than uniformity marked both spaces to such a degree that the two spaces can hardly be defined. The so-called black town usually had a certain number of European artisans, sailors and workers who had married into Indian society. And in its business dealings at least, the white towns were so heavily dependent upon the partnership of prominent Indian merchants and bankers that a certain proximity was bound to develop between them. The indigenous part of the colonial town, moreover, drew symbols of sustenance from indigenous cities, so much so that the difference between the pre-colonial and the colonial towns became blurred. For example, a study of Madras shows how the Indian population in Madras tried to recreate the centrality of the temple so characteristic of the urbanism of the region.31 There were also state efforts to bridge the gap. Susan Nield has called Madras a city of villages, emphasizing the fact that suburban Madras had roots in, continued dependence on, and occasional conflicts with, the pre-colonial agrarian society that lay on its borders.32 Ravi Ahuja has shown how a ‘city of villages’ transformed into a city during the eighteenth century under the combined impetus of appropriation of land, migration into the city partly pushed by warfare in the interior, rising property prices and, above all, the formation of a bureaucratic apparatus set up to define and regulate property rights.33 The dualist model of two spaces and two communities is also unhelpful in discussing those cities that were indigenous in origin and entered the nineteenth century either as the capitals of major princely states, or as new commercial centres.

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Chitpore Road, Calcutta, by Thomas Daniell (1749–1840), 1789–90. The picture of Chitpur Road (presently Rabindra Sarani), on which wealthy Indian merchants built homes and bazaars, shows why in these times the port cities would create c The British Library Board. the impression of being ‘urban villages’. 

FIGURE 6.1

In the largest cities of pre-colonial northern India, with a substantial presence of courtiers and military personnel, settlements developed around a fort. The pattern of settlement and division of space were organized according to the relationship between the court and the settlers. Settlements reflected hierarchies in militarypolitical power. Indirectly, ethnic divisions may have played a role too. In the largest of the south Indian cities, settlements were organized around temples and occurred according to caste and professional specialization. In either case, European intrusion remained an add-on rather than a fundamental restructuring influence. As one study of Patna has shown, the considerable growth of European settlement and Indo-European trade based in Patna grew as an adjunct to the old core, the Mughal walled city.34 If settlement pattern is doubtful as a defining feature of the colonial city, cosmopolitanism of the business culture is a more promising marker of these places. Through much of the eighteenth century Calcutta was an Indian city with a difference. It was Indian in the sense that its population was drawn mainly from indigenous traders and artisan communities, with a smattering of Europeans among them. It was, however, different from a contemporary north Indian city in drawing its sustenance almost wholly from long-distance trade rather than taxation of landed estates. The wealthiest of its residents were traders and not garrison commanders living on income from military-fiscal tenures. In keeping with its orientation towards maritime rather than overland trade, Calcutta attracted traders and bankers

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from many regions. The city was home to an Armenian community, who were already prominent in Madras, and in trade and silver transactions in the western Pacific. It had provided settlement to groups of Portuguese traders. Finance was the costliest resource in any Indian city of the eighteenth and nineteenth century and, consequently, trade attracted migrant bankers. Numbers of them came from Punjab and Rajputana to start businesses in Calcutta. The position of the city as an English settlement made it further attractive to private bankers, who would have been at the mercy of the Jagatseth if they were to operate in any other part of Bengal. In the 1740s, a number of moneyed and skilled Bengali families relocated to Calcutta. These families consisted of both traders and the literati. Whereas the senior administrative officers of the Nawab’s court were often suspected by the English of divided loyalty, these groups of Bengalis, and occasionally the north Indians, posed no such problems. The resultant Indo-European collaborations took three main forms: governance, business and intellectual production. The literate sections of the city represented a pillar of collaboration both with the English government that formed after the transfer of the Diwani as well as with the private European merchants who did business from Calcutta after the Company’s trading interests dwindled. Kapil Raj, who calls late eighteenth-century Calcutta a ‘contact zone’, shows how the intellectual enterprise, initially built upon an administrative need for legal officers versant in indigenous law, at the same time proceeded unpredictably in the direction of the study of language, natural philosophy, medicine, botany, and social customs and practices.35 The contact was far from being a ‘clash of civilizations’ or arm’s-length dealings between Indians and Europeans; there was a mutual exchange of information and ideas, which prepared the ground for a latter-day intellectual efflorescence in the city. By the end of the century, Calcutta’s wealthy residents consisted of many European tradesmen and mechanics. Peter Robb calls them ‘European residents of a middling kind’.36 In Robb’s description of the society, drawing on a private diary written in the 1790s, many people here lived a speculative sort of life on borrowed money. Fortunes could be made in innovative new businesses catering to the new expatriate society or even to the Company state, but equally often fortunes were lost in speculation over risky enterprises. Few individuals represented experienced firms with cash reserves of their own. Most took unusual risks, and financed their ventures with money loaned to them at high rates of interest. Since escape into the interior was not an easy option, if not impossible, risk for the creditor was small. And yet, through this chaotic flux, a new institutional order was emerging as ‘[p]rivate credit was being drawn into relations with the law and the state’. Debt contracts were recognized in the Company court, and employment contracts were beginning to receive a legal form and legal recognition. In many of these relationships, Robb observes, the use of physical force was equally common, among both Indians and Europeans. So easily did violence draw on both Indian and British traditions, that ‘[i]t would be wrong to consider it characteristically colonial’.

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Towards the end of the eighteenth century, private traders and Company sponsorship encouraged a number of significant industrial ventures in lower Bengal. Charcoal iron smelting on a large scale, ship repair and dockyard, indigo manufacture and salt manufacture are perhaps the most well-known examples. Indigo, salt and iron were resource-based enterprises and needed to locate themselves deep in the countryside where these resources were available relatively cheaply. But the firms that entered these industries needed to be in close touch with Calcutta in order to secure loans, access ports and, in the case of iron, secure markets. The only existing docks, even those of rudimentary construction, came up on the river Hooghly in Calcutta. Between the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, some of these ventures went bankrupt and were given up, especially in iron; some registered dramatic success, such as indigo; others, such as shipping and shipbuilding, continued on despite frequent bankruptcy; and still others, such as salt, were taken over by the state for fiscal reasons. Collectively, they created the foundation for bigger things to come in the late nineteenth century. The beginning of a number of developments that supported factory industrialization can be traced to the last years of the period covered in this book. The list should include joint-stock banking, insurance business, rudimentary contract laws, deep-shaft mining, increasing employment of steam engines and, of course, a growing urban business lobby seeking fast and safe transportation into the interior. The railways had their beginnings in this consolidation of modern business in the ports in the Company towns.

Market towns With the political unification of the large territory at the turn of the nineteenth century, there emerged another distinct pathway of town formation, the consolidation of the market town. As in the previous set of cases, neither politics nor garrisons drew migrants to these towns. Business alone and, increasingly, opportunities of training and education, served as the principal attractions. In the process, new and old settlements in the Gangetic plains revived and were reincarnated. Textile clusters in south India re-emerged. In some of these cases, the roots of the emergence went back to the eighteenth century. A Mughal provincial town, Patna was located advantageously on the Ganges and on one of the main arteries of goods traffic between Bengal and Agra. Imperial decline did not affect Patna deeply, since already in the first half of the eighteenth century, it had become a point of transit in Indo-European trade. The commercial importance of the town was strengthened a few years after the Company assumed diwani, with the growth of two businesses that were vital to the survival of the regime: saltpetre and opium. Kumkum Banerjee’s work on Patna illustrates the hypothesis of a shift in the axis of business from the west to the east in the late eighteenth century.37 The resurgence was due to new foreign and domestic trades led by European capitalists in eastern India. The Bihar plains integrated seamlessly with the trading system of Bengal. Situated in a fertile plain, Patna was the node

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of a vast grain trading network that built up from small market towns to transport hubs to the major market and grain storage points, chiefly Patna again. Capital and credit flowed down the hierarchical structure, reaching the remotest villages that had some marketable surplus. A part of the profits of trade and finance was retained by the towns at the bottom of the commercial pyramid. The list of these expanding and emerging market towns included Bhagalpur, Purnea, Dumraon, Sasaram and Bakhtiyarpur. Kanpur was another city with a somewhat similar trajectory to that of Patna. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the town had little commercial importance except as the site of a Company trading station. In 1778, Kanpur also became a military station, situated there to defend the Awadh territories and to keep a watchful eye on the Nawab himself. The eighteenth century ended in this fashion. Subsequently, the military importance of the city increased, and so did its attraction to European businesses supplying provisions and goods to the garrison. The convenient location of the town on the river stimulated grain, hide and cotton trade in the town bazaars. On these foundations, a large tanning and textile factory industry developed later, making Kanpur the second most industrialized inland town after Ahmedabad. The model of emergence of commercial towns was present in the successor states as well. As one account of turn-of-the-eighteenth-century Marwar has shown, many small towns in the late eighteenth century developed around only one resource, a large market in grain.38 In what is now the southern part of Andhra Pradesh, earlier ruled by small local chiefs who professed allegiance to Mysore or Maratha states, a similar pattern of market-oriented urbanization dependent on grain trade emerged in the late 1700s.39 Such urbanization was clearly the outcome of improving physical integration of markets and producing zones. Another pattern of purely trade-driven urbanization was the one developing in the Kaveri delta around a cluster of large villages. This is the type that David Ludden calls ‘early modern textile urbanism’, and illustrates with Kanchipuram and Tirunelveli, two large craft-cum-trade settlements that supplied textiles to IndoEuropean trade.40 In this description, ‘farming, manufacturing, war, finance, and commodity trades came together’ in these towns, rather clusters of large villages. Tank-irrigated agriculture sustained extensive grain production and trade. Temples validated the power of the rising mercantile and artisanal groups. Skilled artisans were organized around strong caste associations and dealt with European traders from a position of great economic strength. And a differentiated class of merchants and intermediaries took part in long-distance trade.41 The convergence of different types of towns based on economic interests was reinforced in the nineteenth century, when the railways and new agricultural trades revived the comparative advantage of some of the old imperial towns that derived from their situation in the western Gangetic plains. The journey of the Mughal cities into obscurity continued in the early nineteenth century, but began to slow thereafter. Some of the regional capitals carried on as economic backwaters, with an illusion of power under the rule of the princely states. But some of the others

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were coming back into business. The largest examples of decline discussed in this chapter also had far too many physical locational advantages to become completely irrelevant. Delhi, Agra and Lahore bounced back after the railways connected them with the ports and with the main routes of overland trades along the Ganges and the Indus in the mid-nineteenth century. All began to experience a rise in population, a rise that far exceeded in scale anything these cities had seen during their days as imperial capitals. Likewise, Ahmedabad, Dhaka and Cuttack survived the turmoil in the political-economic units of which they were the representatives. Dhaka and Cuttack rapidly increased in population in the late nineteenth century, thanks to their situational advantage and the re-emergence as administrative centres. The textile urbanism came to an end in south India, according to Ludden, with the end of the Company trade and peasantization of the rural landscape. Still, not long after these tragic developments, the towns that had once led the textile trade saw a huge resurgence in handloom weaving. The industry now served domestic consumers. In 1930, the Kanchipuram industry was many times larger than what it was in 1700. Adaptive entrepreneurial capacity and political patronage were two different things. The urban story shows the fall in patronage but also the strengthening of adaptive capacity for a cluster of towns, now with orientation in new trades.

Conclusion This chapter set out to study the general character of the urban reshuffle and how it connected to capitalistic dynamics. It is possible now to offer a definite view on these issues. It is a truism, but worth repeating, that the time-span saw a redistribution of urban enterprise from one kind of town to another. The fact of a reshuffle has been noticed, especially in the backdrop of the Gangetic plains. In H. K. Naqvi’s reading, ‘[w]ith the disappearance of a controlling authority at the centre, anarchy spread all over the region, [and] there was a shift in the urbanizational progress from the west of the Ganges to its eastern side’.42 Tom Kessinger argues a similar shift towards the east, with Calcutta drawing away a lot of the business of the western plains.43 C. A. Bayly’s study would again suggest a shift of the urban momentum to the eastern Gangetic.44 I find no reason to dispute these interpretations. But all limit the scope of the argument through a focus on north India, and a focus on a transfer over geographical space. Can we instead generalize the thesis of a reshuffle to all of India, and understand it as a qualitative change rather than a mere west-to-east movement? My conclusion is that, if we take a longer and broader view, there was indeed a qualitative change. A model of urbanism wherein politics was the chief attraction to business in an earlier era was superseded in the new world by a model of urbanism where existing business attracted new business to a town. There was a change from political towns to business towns.

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By the early 1800s, the regional military-political elite had been rendered irrelevant in the making of towns. The Company cities were initially winners in this competition. The remarkable conjunction of maritime trade and a cosmopolitan business class placed the three cities on a high-growth trajectory that had no precedence or comparative standard in the interior of India. With such foundations as these, the port cities in the nineteenth century could stay at the frontiers of globalization and factory industrialization. They were not the only gainers. Others conveniently located on the trade routes serving the new commodity trades gained too. To a capitalist hailing from Punjab, Gujarat or Rajputana, or a skilled artisan from the Gangetic plains, the attraction of the Company towns, and these new urban centres, derived more from the advantages of joining an all-India market, and accessing relatively cheap capital and labour, rather than the protection afforded by the garrisons stationed there or the consumption of the aristocratic classes living in these towns. In this way early modern India saw the decline of one model of urban formation and the growth of another. The new principle of urbanization was not based on tax income or elite sponsorship, but on diversification of the livelihood base. The dominant new trades involved a variety of agricultural goods, including grain. To this basis was added development of services, mainly education and health-care. Merchant sponsorship of public goods joined with state investment in infrastructure and administration to strengthen further the comparative advantage of these towns. This interpretation of a qualitative change carries two further implications. First, commercial urbanism was an abstract quality and, as such, not tied to particular sites. It was a mobile force and it could spread its reach westward after British rule consolidated itself in northern India and the railways expanded. We should be careful about reading the urban history in terms of decline, obscurity and spatial shift. Not only the Gangetic plains, but also South India, do not easily fit the pattern of urban decay. The medievalists’ account of depopulation in Delhi, Agra and Lahore leaves their subsequent rise unexplained. The rise happened because these zones were integrated more closely with the commercial world of the coasts that had begun exporting north Indian grain, sugar, cotton and craft manufactures. Second, we should not read early modern town formation mainly in terms of the rise of the successor states. State formation had a transitory and weak effect upon urbanization patterns. If a few unbelievable population estimates for Lucknow can be ignored, then none of the capital cities of the successor states was large enough to achieve the scale that could sustain commercialization. Many of these capitals did become prominent in the twentieth century. But it is not clear how far the later prominence owed to the status as capitals of the successor states or the commercialization of the nineteenth century. What was the magic ingredient in commercial urbanism? Where did the adaptive capacity of the business town come from? Why did business attract other business to these towns? A modern answer to the question would be ‘networking’ economies. As the scholarship on the cities of Gujarat has shown, in the past ‘systems of communication, often centring on interpersonal, caste, and religious

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ties, were the key to trade’, and this was so especially because commercial intelligence mattered crucially. But before the eighteenth century these systems of communication were not necessarily urban-centred.45 Remote temple towns that represented the places of origin and religious ties for mobile merchant communities continued to exercise a great influence on the pattern of enterprise, flow of information and credit, and the migration of merchants across the vast spaces of the subcontinent. This link was becoming weaker in the new world. Port cities and other commercial cities became homes to large and rooted bodies of merchants doing sufficiently novel businesses to develop a degree of autonomy and distance from the places of origin located, say, far away in Rajasthan. The slightly later growth of mass transportation and communication, that is, the emergence of public modes of exchanging information alongside the more private and tacit modes, further strengthened that autonomy and strengthened the association between towns and the location of private enterprise. It is hard to date this development exactly. But in some regions the process may have begun in the eighteenth century. Chapters 2–6, then, present a narrative of rise and fall, security and insecurity, profit and bankruptcy. For the economic historian, such big pictures of a time and place require to be tested with measurable indices of levels of living. The presence of huge diversities makes that task difficult as well as necessary. The next chapter shows that despite the dearth of good statistical data a few generalizations can be advanced about trends in levels of living and inequality in eighteenth-century India.

7 LEVELS OF LIVING

Generalizing about the eighteenth century based on quantitative data meets with two difficulties. The first problem is that of the sources. Contemporary sources are not necessarily sparse; indeed they can be quite rich. But they are biased towards two aspects, trade and warfare. The major archives, which consist of Persian or Marathi records and the archives of European trade in the Indian Ocean, do not supply systematic time-series data on (indeed anything more than occasional snapshots into) the lives of the peasant, landlord, merchant, banker or the artisan. With few exceptions, Persian chronicles tend to be obsessed with the military exploits of courtiers and noblemen, little heroes now banished to the dustbin of history, while the English and the Dutch sources are concerned with a small segment of the larger sub-continental trading world, and one confined to the littoral and the river-borne trade. The coverage of themes in the East India Company’s administrative records expanded progressively from the 1770s, but it was only a regional state after all until the end of the period covered in this book. The use of regional state archives has increased in recent years especially for Rajasthan, though not, however, on a scale to make a significant difference to our knowledge of material life even in western India. With the sources being so biased, too much reliance on regional state records, given their justifiable obsession with military-fiscal matters, may lead to a picture of collapse and turmoil; while too much reliance on maritime trade records, during a time when trade was profitable and growing, may lead to a picture of robust economic growth. Both these pictures would represent only half-truths. The second problem is regional diversity. Both the older interpretation of the eighteenth century as a period of instability, and the revisionist emphasis on growth, can be faulted for projecting too much uniformity upon a territory that really had no essential unity at all. India did not exist as an integrated political, economic and environmental entity in the eighteenth century. Conditions of living and parameters of economic change varied substantially between regions. Some of these regions were as large as a mid-sized European country. The benchmarks differed also between the imperial centre and the peripheral zones, between the Indus and the Ganges floodplains, and between the deltas and the coasts on the one hand and the arid uplands on the other. Although the capacity for any part of India

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to experience significant growth or decline was not geographically determined, there was a geographical dimension to that capacity. In the arid central Indian and Deccan uplands, states were poor; in well-watered zones, states were richer (measured in tax per person or tax per square mile). Exposure to long-distance trade was clearly greater in the ocean littoral, the deltaic regions and along the Ganges. The urban and semi-urban settlements located on the mouths of four river systems – the Ganges, the Godavari-Krishna, the Kaveri and the Narmada-Tapti – saw flourishing textile production and export trade develop in the eighteenth century. While the development of these clusters in turn stimulated long-distance domestic trade in cotton and grain, the scope of a more broad-based trade expansion was limited by the cost of bulk transportation, which increased hugely in the land-locked central Indian plateau or on the trans-Himalayan tracks. No story of transition can qualify as a plausible story unless it is able to accommodate regional diversity in a systematic fashion. Remaining mindful of these two problems, what generalizations can we make about trends in levels of living in the period of study?

The wage studies In 1968 a contributor to a debate on Indian economic history presented a freehand drawing depicting the economic condition in India over 300 years. The drawing showed, not surprisingly for the time when it was drawn, a steady decline in the eighteenth century.1 Interestingly, major quantitative studies conducted soon after confirmed the fact of a decline, while leaving the precise timing of the decline open to interpretation. The oldest tradition in quantitative history among Indian scholars made use of stylized wage series to suggest a fall in the levels of living. Based mainly on Dutch reports of wages paid out to unskilled and semi-skilled labourers in the Mughal establishments (Rs. 3–10 per month), and what the Dutch factory paid out to a similar class of workers, an Indian historian of the interwar period, Brij Narain, concluded that the ordinary wage-earners were lavishly well-off in the Emperor Jahangir’s time (1605–27) compared with Narain’s own (1929).2 In 1927 real wages were less than 20 per cent of the 1627 level. The ‘labourer’ of 1627 needed no more than one-third the earning to feed a large household, leaving two-thirds ‘for ghee, milk, vegetables, salt, sugar and clothes’. Many of these items were absent from the budget even of the rural rich 300 years later. Interestingly, the leading historian of pre-colonial India, William Moreland, had already used more or less the same sources, and his conclusion was quite different.3 He estimated wage rates to be somewhat less in the earlier years, and inclined towards the view of Francisco Pelsaert and other contemporary European travellers that the ‘common people’ in the seventeenth century were ‘poor wretches’ whose lives were little better than that of ‘contemptible earthworms’.4 With such a baseline as this one, any change should be a change for the better.

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The time-span in these comparisons is too wide to pinpoint when the actual decline, if any, occurred. If we take Tapan Raychaudhuri’s freehand drawing too literally, the decline occurred between 1689 and 1813. In a leftist-nationalistic account, the decline would have peaked in the nineteenth century. In one reading, British colonial rule stemmed the downslide; in another reading, colonial rule caused the downslide. The reliability of these estimates, however, rests too heavily on two dubious pieces of data – prices and wages. The wages used by most writers were paid in a labour market where the buyers of labour services were the wealthiest of the time; they could not possibly be buying a quality of service that was remotely comparable with the services provided by, say, the farm servants in a village. Given that grain markets were segmented and consumption patterns varied between regions, a single rice or wheat price such as those that Narain used, cannot be reliable either. The old tradition of wage-based studies has been revived by Prasannan Parthasarathi more recently. He has shown that real wages were relatively high in the Kaveri delta towards the end of the eighteenth century, thanks to high productivity of agricultural land.5 The work does not deal with trends directly, but it is obvious that with these wages as the benchmark, the nineteenth century would have seen a significant regress in the conditions of labour. Parthasarathi, in a later work, infers agricultural growth in south India mainly based on movements of migrant labourers.6 No doubt many components of the labour force did move. But we know little on the precise scale of such movements. Farm servants on long contract, a prominent component of the south Indian society, could not possibly become mobile unless we add an argument that contracts became less enforceable than before.7 In any case, this work has changed the terms of the wage discourse by dealing with the wages of artisans, by bringing south India in, and by placing wages in the context of agricultural productivity. What do we know about the productivity of land?

Land yield Agricultural livelihoods before the twentieth-century green revolutions tended to be deeply influenced by geography. In terms of agro-ecological conditions, five major sub-regions in the Indian subcontinent can be distinguished: the submontane, the western desert and savanna, the flood-plains of the two great Himalayan river systems (the Ganges and the Indus), the peninsular uplands and the seaboard. Of these five zones, the submontane lands had been largely forested, before parts of the forests were cleared for tea cultivation and timber extraction in the nineteenth century; and the desert and savanna sustained only pastoralist groups. In the other three zones settled agriculture was the norm, it being the main source of living and the main contributor to taxation. All were dependent on the monsoon rainfall for growing the main crop. Conditions of irrigated agriculture, and the prospects of increasing intensity of cultivation or crop diversification, however, varied enormously.

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On average, the flood-plains and the seaboard had better soil in most places than the peninsular, being loamy and nutrient-rich, and with easier access to groundwater. The peninsular was deficient in both respects, except in narrow river valleys. A further distinction was the quantity of rainfall received on average, in which respect again the peninsular was relatively deficient. Rainfall fell away in the western parts of the flood-plains, giving rise to savanna conditions. The western flood-plains, however, had huge rivers fed by snowmelt. Proximity to these perennial rivers could potentially create good agricultural conditions. By and large, the monsoon-dependent peninsular rivers provided a more limited and uncertain source of water. Owing to their ability to produce valuable grains such as wheat and rice, the availability of a larger agrarian surplus and easier transportation, the flood-plains emerged as seats of powerful imperial states, overland trade and flourishing urban centres. By contrast, the Deccan plateau that dominates the map of the peninsular was an agriculturally poorer zone, growing locally consumed millets, and constantly exposed to the threat of harvest failure. The peninsular was home to smaller, less wealthy and less commercialized and urbanized states. The seaboard in this picture formed a politically ambiguous zone. Parts of it were more involved in maritime trade than with the interior, and had long received foreign settlers. Some regions and states on the seaboard had the economic means and the cultural make-up to assert a degree of autonomy from the land-based states. Yet the autonomy was not always backed up by effective military might, leaving them vulnerable to conquest. In one such zone, the lower Bengal delta, European colonization began in the middle of the eighteenth century. Given the diversity it is necessary to read any evidence on land yield with reference to specific regions rather than to all of India. One cluster of studies exists on conditions in the Gangetic plains. A well-known work on north India by Ashok Desai estimates the ratio between average consumption in Akbar’s time and average consumption in the 1960s by assuming that consumption was roughly proportional to agricultural value-added per worker.8 Consumption in the seventeenth century was found to be between 40 and 80 per cent higher than in the 1960s. The exercise used Ain-i-Akbari figures for average productivity per acre and per person in major crops in different qualities of land. Even if we treat the samples to have come from north India alone, it would seem that agricultural yields were higher in the seventeenth century than in the mid-twentieth. Desai accounts for the decline by the hypothesis that through these three centuries population growth and extension of cultivation to inferior lands reduced yields per acre and per worker, and in turn reduced consumption and levels of living. Later re-examination of the dataset suggests a downward revision in the estimates, and a position closer to William Moreland’s that ‘the average cannot have been greatly different from what it is today’.9 If there was a decline in yield, when precisely did it occur? A set of studies on north and south India would time it in the nineteenth century. ‘One striking fact about Indian agriculture in pre-colonial and early colonial days is the very

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high yield per acre’, writes Tapan Raychaudhuri.10 Raychaudhuri cites Francis Buchanan’s estimate of rice yield, 200 seers per bigha (700 kgs/acre) in the central Bihar plains c. 1800, as evidence. Comparisons between these numbers that pertain to 1600–1800 and the figures that come from late nineteenth century survey statistics usually lead to the inference of a decline in the productive power of land between pre-colonial and colonial India. If these sets of data come from north India, another set from south India offered by Parthasarathi confirms high natural yield initially and suggest a possible decline in yield in the nineteenth century. Parthasarathi cites yield figures for paddy in late eighteenth-century deltaic south India (708 kg/acre) that are nearly double the average yield in Tanjore in 1906.11 Raychaudhuri and Habib report three estimates of rice yield from Tanjore that average to 650 kg/acre. This is again significantly larger than those derived from later surveys.12 If there was a decline, an argument is available that would time the decline somewhat earlier: some historians have argued a long-term climatic-cum-ecological shift in the eighteenth century. C. A. Bayly, for example, suggests that climatic change imposed increasing ecological stress in the Delhi–Agra region in the mideighteenth century. A recent paper on the genesis of world inequality builds partly upon this proposition. The authors contend that the period 1735–1813 saw a greater frequency of failure of rain owing to the El Niño phenomenon, which in turn made land yield fall, prices increase and de-industrialization more likely.13 Not all elements of this broad conjecture are relevant here. Climatic shocks may indeed have increased in frequency in the eighteenth century. However, how deeply and permanently such episodes affected the peasants and land rights remains open to question. For the most recent years that it is possible to test the relationship (1870–1900), long-term land yield in the region was invariant to temporary climatic shocks, and the eighteenth century need not have been any different to that pattern. Further, a universal failure of rain is a rather rare occurrence, and the effect of partial failure of rain depends on where the rains failed. The two actual instances of famine that we know something about were the Chalisa (1783–4) and the Bengal famine (1770), both affecting regions that were relatively abundant in rainfall, with better irrigation, and were agriculturally developed. Overall, the link between El Niño events and agrarian production conditions remains a conjectural one, not implausible but not firmly established either by means of fact or with reference to agronomy. That is not to say that ecological stress did not occur. A different kind of ecological stress was in evidence from the nineteenth century in the western delta and the uplands of Bengal, with the change in the course of the rivers and consequent land degradation. It is almost certain that in some areas, the process had begun in the previous century. But, then, this process was partly endogenous to the agrarian order in that it was partly a result of more intensive cultivation. Are these inferences on the long-term trend in yield robust enough? Are they consistent with other facts of economic history of the time? Were the inferred trends general to all of India? I will answer all three questions with a negative.

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It should be evident from the above discussion that there is considerable randomness about the precise period for which inferences on growth or decline are expected to apply. That apart, the problem with inferring either a decline or a growth on the strength of the data supplied is that these inferences are not backed up by a theory of agricultural growth. Most findings are put forward without a theory of causation. The causation is left at the door of the vaguely and rhetorically formulated concepts of anarchy or colonial exploitation. If the cause of a change in yield was institutional or political condition impinging on property right or market conditions, we should expect the fall to be quite general. If it was ecological in origin, we need to define the region and the precise set of conditions that led to the change. And if, much more reasonably, the proximate factor behind agricultural prospects were resource conditions and technology, while institutions, politics, markets and ecological shifts all were relatively distant and neutral, we should not expect any change at all. The possibility of any long-term trend in yield at all can be questioned on the ground that there is no significant evidence of either a dramatic improvement or a deterioration of technologies employed in agricultural production to warrant expectations of a rise or a fall in yield. The overwhelming dependence of agricultural production on rainfall and soil did not reduce in extent anywhere in the subcontinent during the eighteenth century. The available options for man-made intervention in reducing the risks of agriculture were few, and there is no evidence that new options became available during this time. Some of the existing assets like canals and embankments decayed in the eighteenth century. But the effect of the capital loss upon land yield is unknown. Overall, crop regimes remained more or less unchanging. There is little evidence showing that attempts to raise the productivity of land occurred on a sufficiently large scale anywhere in the subcontinent in the eighteenth century. In view of the poverty of the states, the ecological constraints, the enormous amounts of money that wells and canals cost, it is improbable that such attempts were made on a significant scale. Almost anywhere in monsoon India, such improvement would have needed large-scale public investment in water resources, and the states did not reveal any capacity or interest to invest money on a large enough scale. The presence of an institutional factor militating against such investment has been remarked on from time to time especially in the context of Mughal and post-Mughal northern India. The most important and valuable form of proprietary rights in land were held by the jagirdars (holders of military-fiscal tenure) and the zamindars (landlords), ‘whose involvement in agricultural production was virtually nil’.14 B. B. Chaudhuri, in a recent assessment of the eighteenth-century economic history scholarship, suggests that any expectation of changes in land productivity is not only speculative but also implausible on the ground that those in command of money, power and, therefore, superior access to potential gains, were too distant from the production system.15 The ecological constraint arose not only from the scarcity and high cost of extracting water, but also from the fact that an absence

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of regulated flow of moisture made controlled use of manure virtually impossible and thus restrained the level of manure usage in Indian agriculture. Such conditions made private investment risk-averse and limited it in scale. No wonder that ‘[t]he eighteenth century did not produce a break in the agricultural technology of India’.16 The simplicity and limited capacity of the agricultural equipment used is attributed by Raychaudhuri to ‘the poverty’ of the peasant, which lives uneasily with his observation that natural yields were high in the region. More plausibly, the high natural yield was an exception present only in some districts of the deltas and flood-plains. In general, resource endowments limited the feasible techniques, and warfare diverted resources away from productive investment. A similar assessment can be obtained in writings on the western Deccan. Towards the end of the eighteenth century in Maratha Deccan, ‘private investment in technological improvement or irrigation remained rather limited. The ecological context made the returns on agriculture risky, and substantially lower than those available in the politico-military arena. High net-worth risk-prone individuals were typically investing in the political-military process rather than agriculture, because of the massive difference in returns’.17 The difficulties of translating any one region’s dataset into a reliable average for the subcontinent are insurmountable. Available numbers for agricultural productivity come from the highly fertile flood-plains and the deltas. To our knowledge, no attempt has been made to collate data on productivity in arid crops such as sorghum in the eighteenth century, or even productivity in dry area rice as compared with irrigated rice. Although Raychaudhuri considers that the numbers obtained from the western Gangetic plains cannot be dismissed as ‘errors of observation’, using them out of context could lead to errors of analysis. Any analysis of grain yield needs to be sensitive to the large variation that ordinarily occurred between districts in respect of yield, a variation that owed mainly to the quality of soil and available groundwater resources. Groundwater conditions and, related with these, the intensity of application of manure could change dramatically between even contiguous districts. Between the alluvial flats, the uplands and the seaboard, the difference was exceedingly wide. To take a later survey, in rice, the range within Bengal was 1:3 (1900). In rice again, the range in Madras was about 1:2 (1906). In wheat, the range was 1:4 (1870).18 The higher numbers cited in the earlier one-off estimates represented the situation in the wet zones. From the late nineteenth century, official statistics overcame various ambiguities caused by regional diversity and calculated ‘standard yields’ based on crop-cutting experiments, standardized the unit of measurement, and collected figures for every district. Mughal India, notwithstanding Abul Fazl’s magnum opus the Ain-i-Akbari (c. 1590), had no dataset comparable in representativeness. A comparison between one-off numbers taken necessarily from irrigated lands in 1600 or 1800 with the later averages, therefore, cannot lead to any sensible result. The unit of measurement is also often left unclear in the scholarship on land yield. The available estimates of yield of the principal crops, for example winter rice, suffer from two kinds of ambiguities about unit. First, it is not clear whether

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India, peasants irrigating fields, from Pierre Sonnerat (1748–1814), Voyage aux Indes orientales et á la Chine, 1782. The picture has a timeless quality – the mode of performance of this essential operation would not have looked different a century after c Bridgman Art Library. the French naturalist and traveller Sonnerat visited India. 

FIGURE 7.1

the estimates referred to unhusked paddy or husked rice. It is necessary to observe that all available market prices are prices of rice, so that we need to know yield in terms of rice. Ordinarily, the proportion of rice was about 60 per cent that of paddy. Second, whereas all estimates refer to the units ‘maund’ for weight and ‘bigha’ for land area, the definition of these two units varied over time and between regions. In 1900, by official metrology, one maund was divided into 40 seers, and one seer was divided into 80 tolas, each tola being 180 grains Troy. Each seer was then equivalent to 2.057 lbs, and one maund 37 kg. In the seventeenth century, the man-i-Akbari of northern India was again divided into 40 seers, but the seer of Akbar was of 30 dams, dam being the copper coin, and weighed less. In eighteenthcentury eastern India, both the Akbari maund (25 kg) and the colonial maund (37 kg) were in usage. Bigha, the common unit of measurement of land area in

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northern India came in two versions, the bigha-ilahi of 0.6 acres and the raiyati bigha of 0.33 acres. In parts of northern India, the same term applied to different measures. For example in Bengal, the raiyati bigha was in common usage in the late eighteenth century in rice cultivation, but the bigha-ilahi was the common unit in indigo cultivation. To see what difference units could make, assume that the Buchanan figure referred to unhusked paddy and the unit of land was the raiyati bigha, the rice yield from Patna–Gaya region cited by Raychaudhuri translates to 330 kg/acre, which is almost identical with the average yields in these districts in the late nineteenth century. Similarly, the high Tanjore numbers, if scaled down on the assumption that the original figures had referred to rice in the husk, would be similar to those found in agricultural surveys in the early 1900s. What difference could regional variation make? Let us illustrate the point by using a set of numbers taken from eighteenth and nineteenth century Bengal. Consider first the extent of dispersion around the average in two datasets pertaining to 1860–1900, when reliable and comprehensive sample surveys were conducted for the first time in history in Greater Bengal.19 These datasets suggest that the average yield of rice in Bengal was in the range of 410–40 kg/acre (444 in 1866 and 409 in 1901). The earlier of these is a report by William Hunter prepared after the 1866 Orissa famine. His district data suggest that the lowest yields occurred in northern Bihar (Purnea 285), whereas in deltaic Bengal, yield reached 571 kg/acre (Rajshahi). According to official data in 1901, the later of the two sources, the ‘standard’ land yield of Purnea was 276 kg per acre; that of seven lower Bengal districts 550, and the average for all of Bengal 409. In both cases the average for Bengal was 75 per cent of that of deltaic Bengal. It is not inconceivable that rice yields sometimes exceeded 600 kg for individual plots in the delta. But the average was still considerably below these high figures. Given that the period 1750–1860 did not witness any noteworthy mechanical or biological change in the manner of paddy cultivation at all, if we assume that a similar level of dispersion in yields characterized 1750 as in 1860, that is, assume neither inter-regional convergence nor divergence, the result would be an average yield substantially smaller than those commonly cited in the before–after comparisons. We have located four estimates of a ‘large’ yield of rice from late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.20 The observers were based in deltaic lower Bengal. In all cases, the unit of measurement can be ascertained. These four estimates are (in kg/acre) 396, 444, 634 and 543. The two numbers in the middle come from H. T. Colebrooke. The average of these numbers, 540 kg, lies in close proximity to what official statistics found to be the standard yield of deltaic Bengal a century later. Rajat Datta reports four other estimates from lower Bengal. The units of measurement are not defined. On the assumption that these figures referred to rice in the husk, large maund and small bigha, the average yield was 633 kg/acre.21 These observations are the highest yield we can obtain for the eighteenth century, and they all came from the most fertile districts of the flood-plains. But these high yields of 1760–1800 were near the high yields of 1860–1900. On the assumption that there had been no inter-district convergence or divergence in the intervening

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years, the earlier low yields and the later average low yields would be similar as well. And therefore the average yield would not have changed at all. To conclude, once the units are adjusted for, and the existence of a range is factored in, the inference that the grain yields were on average higher than the late nineteenth century ones looks shaky. There may not necessarily be anything wrong with the numbers, but in order to be able to use them we do need to know more about where these numbers came from, and how much dispersion there was around these numbers. The more acceptable hypothesis is that productivity did not change in the direction of either rise or fall in the eighteenth century. Such a proposition, of course, suggests that if growth was possible at all, almost certainly such growth was extensive, that is, generated by expansion in cultivation. In the eighteenthcentury context, such a growth would possibly be redistributive between regions as well. That is, new cultivation in one region happened by drawing away labour from elsewhere. None of this necessarily questions the hypothesis of gathering ecological stress in the flood-plains of the Ganges in the late nineteenth century, and possibly some diminishing returns owing to this factor, but the effect could not have been other than negligible. There have been a few attempts to infer levels of living on the basis of population and income.

Population and income An older scholarship has tried to draw inferences on levels of living and especially the effect of subsistence shocks on levels of living by studying demographic data, in particular, population and urbanization. Urbanization is a complex subject that deserves a separate and longer treatment (see Chapter 6). Reading population data is not an easy task either. In one view, there was small but positive (less than one per cent) population growth in the seventeenth century.22 In another re-examination of the pre-census (pre-1872) evidence, population grew at around 1 per cent in early nineteenth-century Bengal, a somewhat higher rate in Madras and a nearzero rate in north India.23 It is unlikely that the eighteenth-century population growth rate would significantly exceed zero anywhere in India – any prospect of a rise would be negated by the two major famines that occurred in the last quarter of the century. The use of population in order to infer levels of living in the long run depends on how the relationship between the two variables is conceived. This is a controversial task and best abandoned, even if it has seen a bold revival of late.24 One approach to measurement of the scale of regional income makes use of government tax receipts. Based on the premise that government income was a major source of aggregate demand, an exercise in this class suggests that the Bengal economy possibly experienced some growth in the first half of the eighteenth century.25 Such measures must necessarily assume that the tax–income ratio did not change. Furthermore, the scale of real tax collection can be shown to be sensitive to the price series used to deflate the nominal collection. It has been shown in a more recent study that the most widely used grain prices should lead to the conclusion

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that tax collection in real terms did not change in Bengal between 1720 and 1763.26 A steady rise thereafter owed to successful manipulation of the tax–income ratio by the East India Company regime. Finally, an innovative exercise in the estimation of GDP per head based on a production function approach has found enough bases to suggest that ‘Indian per capita GDP declined steadily between 1600 and 1871’.27 The decline holds true for the eighteenth century, and is confirmed by the evidence of silver wages deflated by the prices of major consumption articles.28 The major advantage of an exercise like this one, compared with the before–after kind of exercises, is that it allows us to observe a trend rather better and, therefore, corresponds to a more realistic sense of time. In this case, the period did see a decline in inferred GDP per head. But the order of the decline was not large, nor was there a sharp reversal in the trend at any time, which the story that economic trends had owed to regime shifts might lead us to expect. If the presence of yield growth remains uncertain, there was undoubtedly agricultural expansion in this time.

Agriculture: expansion of trade and cultivation The pessimistic reading of wages, yields and GDP do not necessarily dispute another set of findings suggesting commercialization and ‘proto-industrialization’ along the deltaic-coastal zones. The story of a post-Mughal Bengali golden age, which many historians readily believe in, is probably overdrawn.29 But there is little scope to question the proposition that in some regions, including Bengal, trends in politics, markets and resources reinforced each other to unleash much entrepreneurial drive. Relatively high agricultural yield and access to transportation by navigable waters created strong domestic demand for manufactures, and enabled wealthier states. This was true of the Bengal delta as well as the Kaveri delta studied by Parthasarathi. In these zones, or near them, there was growth of long-distance trade in wheat, rice and cotton in the second half of the eighteenth century. How large in scale this commercialization was, and how it altered production conditions, must remain speculative. After all, much of the new trade depended on the few roads that existed in the interior, highly labour-intensive caravan trade and coastal shipping that served only a limited hinterland. Nevertheless, evidence of commercialization of grain and cotton is at least compatible with the pattern of regional specialization in the manufacturing industry. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Gujarat cotton found an outlet in China, Berar cotton was traded overland to Bengal and a flourishing eastern coastal trade in rice continued. In studies on the middle-Gangetic plains, considerable inter-regional trade in grain is noticed too. By the end of the eighteenth century, opium and indigo had joined rice and cotton as articles of long-distance trade. Was this commercialization sufficiently general and present in most regions of the subcontinent? Did it contribute to agricultural growth?

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Ghulam Nadri sees ‘expansion in agricultural production in the second half of the eighteenth century’ in Gujarat, based on the evidence of increased sale of cotton.30 Recent historical research without exception notes the presence of agricultural growth in many other regions in the eighteenth century. Nearly always the growth involved settlement of migrant peasants and labourers in new lands and, in some cases, resettlement in regions deserted because of famine or war. In arid regions like Punjab or the Deccan plateau, scarcity of water imposed limits upon the possibility of expansion in cultivation. On the other hand, in regions with a plentiful supply of water, such as Bengal, resettlement of forested zones was proceeding apace, and both demographic expansion and the offer of economic incentives by zamindars to induce reclamation of forest lands played visible roles. Richard Eaton shows that there were many grants of land to religious institutions in the eastern Bengal delta, where there was also extensive forest clearance.31 But, then, in western Bengal the evidence on area expansion and forest clearance was much weaker, and the famine of 1770 placed a check on such developments that possibly lasted for more than a generation. The localized growth experiences could partly be an effect of a shift of resources from famine-ravaged and war-torn zones to safer areas. The story of agricultural expansion allows us to speculate to some extent upon income and wealth inequality in the rural economy. The scholarship on the countryside in the eighteenth century suggests that in some regions where land was more fertile and water more abundant, political fragmentation saw a consolidation of rural magnates, who eventually exercised considerable control over property rights in the colonial period (see also Chapter 4). If this seems to indicate increasing inequality, we need to remember that land was still available in plenty, the peasants willing to spare the effort to cultivate these lands were still relatively few, and the states and the magnates were dependent on the peasantry in order to meet their own needs. Furthermore, magnate formation, or ‘gentrification’, was not a universal phenomenon, being distinctly weaker in the arid areas where land was harder to cultivate, produced too little to sustain a magnate group, and willing hands were harder to find. Overall, it is possible to discount a trend towards consolidation of hierarchy, class and inequality in the eighteenth century rural world, even as institutional control passed on from the top layers of the governing elite to bottom layers located near the village. A final piece in the story of a changing quality of life in the eighteenth century is the falling capacity of the regional governments to create public goods, but this issue has been discussed in Chapter 3.

Conclusion To sum up the discussion: (a) there is insufficient ground to believe that agricultural yield changed in any particular direction, let alone a downward one; (b) wages across time and space are difficult to read unless we obtain more data on who were paying these wages and for what work; (c) population and agricultural

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production may have changed, but the change was at best of small order; (d) GDP reconstruction suggests a mild decline in income. Even here, the extent of the fall was too small to turn this matter into a serious dispute. If there was a decline, what could have been the source of the decline? Merely attributing it to anarchy, war or famine would not serve us. We need to know how these variables affected livelihoods. In principle, two mechanisms can be identified – a deterioration of production conditions and de-commercialization. In the former case, the peasants produced less or produced at greater cost than before, perhaps because their property rights were less secure than before owing to warfare and state failure. In the latter case, merchants and bankers took the hit, either owing to direct extortion by the warlords or indirectly because roads and long-distance communication had become unsafe. The property rights story is almost certainly wrong, as we showed in Chapter 4. Anarchy or not, peasant property did not weaken during the time. It is possible to surmise then that de-commercialization rather than deterioration of peasant production was the more likely cause of a slight fall in levels of living. Although commerce flourished in the eighteenth century, the zones of commercialization were narrowly restricted in space. These were the deltas, the ports and the eastern Gangetic plains. Outside these specific channels there was no particular factor helping long-distance trade. Overall, then, the big picture is dominated by stasis in production conditions, withdrawal of states from public goods, de-commercialization in the interior and increasing scope for subsistence cultivation. That is as far as a cautious assessment of the levels of living could go. The conclusion of only a slow change in levels of living has as its foundation the reasonable expectation that agricultural resources and technology did not change very much. But then, the earlier chapters have shown also that, outside agriculture, big reshuffles had been going on. Let me now combine these pieces into a larger story accommodating both inertia in land and dynamism in trade.

8 CONCLUSION

According to all general readings of the time, the eighteenth century in India saw momentous changes. What were these changes? Why were they momentous? The impulse behind these questions is more than just desire for knowledge, or even the need to integrate a diverse scholarship. Rather, the motivation comes from an unresolved tension in the historiography. The temptation to offer a definite view on the eighteenth century is great, since the period in question formed a bridge between two empires about which historians hold strong views. But knowledge about these one hundred-odd years is limited and uneven; we know more about the time before and the time after, both being served by greater documentary sources. Therefore, while the drive to find meaning in eighteenth-century India is great, the risk that the meaning will be sought in abstractions external to the time and place – such as conceptions of world history, conceptions about the British Empire, theories of the genesis of poverty or definitions of modernity – is great too. This book is an attempt to avoid the trap by gathering together what we definitively do know or can safely infer about the processes of economic change between 1707 and 1818.

What do we know? A convenient way to bring this book to a conclusion is to boil the substantive chapters into plausible and testable hypotheses, and then to integrate these hypotheses into a conception of the economic history of early modern India. Here are the five theses that I would like to work with. (1) The political upheaval changed the locus of market activity from the interior to the coasts, but in all regions precarious government finance led to a decay of public goods (Chapters 2, 3). (2) Despite increasing pressure upon the fiscal system and, in the British-held areas, property right reforms, the security of peasant property was ensured by all regimes and underwent little fundamental change (Chapter 4).

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(3) The dynamic business environment in the eighteenth century was represented by maritime trade. Overland trade was small in scale and increasingly drawn into the business of supplying the armies at war (Chapter 5). (4) The Company towns and towns allied to the dynamic business world grew in scale and represented a new model of urbanization, one wherein business attracted business, as opposed to the old imperial and interior towns where the concentration of military-political-religious power attracted business. Although small in absolute and relative terms, the urban littoral space drew in enterprise on a scale that had not been seen before (Chapter 6). (5) Nothing can be conclusively said about either growth or decline in average levels of living. Trade and services being small in scale, trends in levels of living should depend on agriculture, which showed no sign of a shift in scale or capability. The security of peasant property meant that the fiscal turmoil could not have a serious impact on agricultural production. On the other hand, geographical constraints upon agrarian technology made it unlikely that growth could happen via rise in yield (Chapter 7). Let me dwell on these five theses a little more fully before building upon them. The political upheaval, the shift in business enterprise and the security of peasant property should suggest to us a way to read how personal economic status changed. The military-political layer, consisting of generals, ministers and soldiers, occasionally secondary and primary landlords, took the most chances and experienced the most changes. There was a considerable reshuffle too among merchants and bankers. The most dramatic change of fortune affected those business houses that had earlier dominated the Arabian Sea trade, and yielded the position of dominance to the Europeans because of decline in West Asia trade and a rise of Indo-European trade. But they were few in number. The vast majority of Indian merchants along the coasts functioned as agents both before and after European entry, and moved into coastal trade. Compared with any of the other classes, the peasantry was much less affected by the reshuffle. These theses should also allow us to read the spatial history of the eighteenth century somewhat differently from the mainstream scholarship. It is difficult to read eighteenth-century history in terms of the decline of regions located in the core zone of the Mughal Empire and the rise of other regions that formed the successor states. There was decline, no doubt, in urban enterprise in the interior of India, and there was growth of urban enterprise in the capital cities of the successor states. But it remains testable how sustainable the successor state urbanism was, after we factor in the effects of warfare. By 1850 Lucknow, Pune, Hyderabad and Mysore were hardly economic powerhouses. By contrast, the Company cities, and their satellites in the Ganges plains, had by then forged a much more sustainable commercial economy on a far larger scale. We should not overstress the dynamism. Exposure to long-distance trade was greater only in the ocean littoral, the deltaic regions and along the Ganges. The geographical influence on commerce was a long-term feature of the history of

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enterprise and it did not disappear in the new regime. Trading hubs from a long time past tended to be situated on the mouths of four river systems – the Ganges, the Godavari–Krishna, the Kaveri and the Narmada–Tapti. As in periods before, these littoral clusters saw flourishing textile production and export trade in the eighteenth century. The development of these clusters in turn stimulated longdistance domestic trade in cotton and grain. The scope of a more broad-based trade expansion away from these hubs, however, was limited by the high cost of bulk transportation. Furthermore, levels of living did not change very much in any region of India. There was no really large-scale inter-regional migration of peasants in these times, and famines affected the agricultural classes in all regions badly. Whatever inter-regional reshuffle there was, and there was quite a lot of reshuffle, it was confined to trade, banking and services. Indeed, trade, banking and services became much more mobile as professions than they were before. Another source of continuity was institutions. Commercial institutions in India, as anywhere in the world at this time, were privately constituted. These institutions were not particularly sensitive to the rise and fall of state systems, though IndoEuropean trade was beginning to change the rules of the game in ways that we still do not understand very well. The bottom of the economic pyramid consisted of the peasants where, again, institutional changes were slow to come. Trends in high politics affected the classes who held an indirect right to land, such as state officers, tax farmers and warlords, more than it did the peasants. Increased fiscal pressures empowered the landlords and local communities, who had an interest in building stable rights structures in the village because they lived in and on the village directly. The services of the peasant were more in demand than before, and more critical to the survival of the regional states. Therefore, regime changes could not affect peasant property deeply. Colonial officers liked to believe that the property right reforms undertaken by them were a revolutionary new principle framed after classical liberal thinking. A staunch believer in new institutional economic history is likely to be misled by this propaganda into thinking that these were truly revolutionary steps in making property more secure where it had been less secure than before, and the propertied more powerful where they had been less powerful than before. The truth is quite different. These reforms did make property more saleable by disentangling land ownership from fiscal duties. But there was little visible change in the security of peasant rights, and there was little incidence of actual transfer of peasant rights before or after the reforms. The reason for the fundamental stability was the strength that the primary landlords, local bosses, substantial peasants and peasant communities, had acquired in these times, and which persisted through the colonial reforms. It persisted in ryotwari or mahalwari directly because many of these groups were confirmed as the property owners in the colonial regime. Even in the Bengal zamindari system, where the secondary landlords received ownership rights, the power of the local groups did not dissipate all that much. The move formally empowered the tax farmers and large landlords. But, in practice, the Bengal trajectory was no different from the rest of India, since the tax farmers would be lost

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without the dominant tenants helping them get the taxes. There is reason to believe that the 1770 famine had strengthened the substantial tenants or jotedars enough to create local bulwarks against zamindari bullying. But if peasant property was protected, the peasants did not thereby face an incentive to join long-distance trade and expand cultivation. The obstacles to trade there were many, and collapsing states at the top did not help. Overall, the hypothesis that cultivation retreated into subsistence-oriented production or production for small local markets in a large area of the subcontinent seems plausible enough. Where evidence of agrarian expansion exists, such expansion took the form of extension of cultivation. But extension of cultivation involved extremely labour-intensive procedures, which would not have been easy to organize. This was especially so where land extension was contingent upon distress migration, that is, it had to be carried out by groups that had emigrated from zones that suffered economic decline. Furthermore, the most fertile alluvial lands were already in short supply in the late eighteenth century. Did the political turmoil or the famines of the eighteenth century affect productivity in agriculture and, in turn, in manufacturing? The evidence of either an increase or a decrease in average yield remains weak for the reason that documentation of any change in agricultural technology, cultivation practices and access to natural resources cannot be found anywhere. If there was any effect of the turmoil on agriculture, the effect must necessarily have been confined to commercial possibilities alone. As far as we can know, manufacturing flourished mainly in commercial zones that were far removed from the de-commercialized agricultural zones. These two worlds were not deeply connected, nor interdependent.

The big picture: from the early modern to the modern The five theses lead me towards a tentative idea of the ‘early modern’ in Indian economic history. The central dynamic of the eighteenth century cannot be found in high politics of state formation, nor in the rural economy, but in urban business. Everywhere else change came at a glacial speed. The central dynamics was a move by seaboard enterprises to consolidate their economic and political power, and eventually to join and even take control of overland trade and agricultural enterprises. Such a drive was without precedence in Indian history, certainly in terms of the scale on which it occurred from about 1800. The real change, then, was the start of a process that would see a firmer integration of the littoral with the interior, of maritime trade with overland trade, of trade with production, of land with the sea, and of markets for commodity, capital, knowledge, enterprise and labour between themselves. If integrated market is a marker of the modern capitalism, the early modern capitalism in India initiated that process. The move did have something to do with the rise of the Company as a political power. But from decades before colonialism began, the three East India

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Company ports, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, were acquiring strengths that would eventually make them sites of agricultural export, globalization, industrialization and Indo-European joint ventures. Merchant migration had already started creating new hubs of cosmopolitan enterprise in these sites. Although established by the Company, livelihoods in these towns, unlike cities located in the interior, did not rely on the power and consumption of the military-political elite. These were cities where businesses had developed considerable synergy among themselves and with overseas trade. The factor markets – especially capital and skilled labour – were significantly more outward-looking in these cities. The presence of the Company and later a new state run by merchants had already set in motion processes of regulation and legislation that made for an institutional environment more conducive to innovation and unorthodox partnerships. Migration of both European and Indian capital and labour rapidly enriched the resource base of these Indo-European port towns. This model of urbanism, which began with the Company cities on the coasts, became more general in the nineteenth century and changed the character of some of the regional political capitals. Some of the new Company-sponsored trades in which the Indians played a major part, such as opium, indigo or cotton, connected the rural economy with the maritime world more closely than ever before. The deployment of merchant and banker capital into agricultural exports created the foundation for a more broadbased rural transformation that was to reach full maturity in the nineteenth century, buttressed further by legal reforms, demographic changes, cadastral surveys and developments in banking and moneylending. In this way, urban knowledge of the countryside increased and the grounds were prepared for market integration inside India on an unprecedented scale. The defining process of change in the economic history of early modern India was not the establishment of the British Empire or the transition to colonialism. To insist that it was would amount to saying that economic trends derive from nothing more substantial than the ethnicity of the rulers. The transition to colonialism was a dependent element in a larger process of transformation of livelihoods that had begun before 1700 and gathered pace towards 1800. In this sense, the early modern was indeed leading up to the modern. Economists often use a model of globalization or trade-induced specialization to understand epochal change in the nineteenth century. In this model trade expansion and the fall in trade costs induced agricultural exports from and de-industrialization in the tropics, and advanced industrialization, regional market integration and the spread of the growth impulse within the Atlantic economy.1 The model is useful, with qualifications, for the nineteenth century. For eighteenth-century India, it is of little direct use. But it is still helpful in thinking about the eighteenth century. In particular, without the eighteenth-century transformation of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, without the emerging trades in opium, sugar, cotton and indigo, without the extension of Company power inland, without Indian businesses

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migrating to the port cities, without the enterprise of the private traders in procuring agricultural goods from the interior, and without the institutional consequences of Indo-European trade, it would be hard to explain the emergence of a nineteenthcentury economic system in India that was modern in two strong senses, in enabling the prospect of one of the most impressive episodes of industrialization outside Europe, and in expanding India’s trade with the world.

Notes

1 Introduction 1. Modern economic growth is defined as growth in average income driven by the rising productivity of resources such as land, labour and capital, rather than the accumulation of a greater quantity of these resources. The second process the world had seen before the nineteenth century; the former process was truly modern. 2. John F. Richards, ‘Early Modern India and World History’, Journal of World History, 8(2), 1997, 197–209. See also Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions: Making Politics in Early Modern South India, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001, pp. 261–3. The meaning of the phrase is controversial in the context of world and European history as well. For a discussion, see David Northrup, ‘Globalization and the Great Convergence: Rethinking World History in the Long Term’, Journal of World History, 16(3), 2005, 249–67. 3. David Washbrook uses the phrase ‘to imply involvement [of Indians] in common “Eurasian” processes which contributed to the emergence of “modernity” in western Europe’, ‘India in the Early Modern World Economy: Modes of Production, Reproduction and Exchange’, Journal of Global History, 2(1), 2007, 87–111. 4. Richards, ‘Early Modern India’, p. 201. 5. Washbrook, ‘India in the Early Modern World Economy’. 6. The acquisition of territory in this account was often a course of action the Company was reluctantly driven to adopt. ‘[A]lthough the principle of non-interference had been long and uniformly enjoined by the authorities in England, those in India were continually compelled to deviate from it; for, as the paramount power, it was at once their duty and their wisest policy to put down anarchy and misrule’; James Mill, The History of British India from 1805 to 1835, H. H. Wilson, ed., vol. 3 of 3 vols, London: James Madden, 1858, p. 133. 7. Irfan Habib, ‘The Eighteenth Century in Indian Economic History’; and Athar Ali, ‘Recent Theories of Eighteenth Century India’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution?, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 100–19. For a critical discussion and summary of the Aligarh position, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The Mughal State – Structure or Process? Reflections on Recent Western Historiography’, Indian Economic Social History Review, 29(3), 1992, 291–321. 8. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction’, in Alam and Subrahmanyam, eds, The Mughal State 1526–1750, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. 9. C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; and ‘Epilogue to the Indian Edition’, in Seema Alavi, ed., The Eighteenth Century in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 165–98. 10. Frank Perlin, ‘Proto-industrialisation in Precolonial South Asia’, Past and Present, 98, 1983, 30–95; Om Prakash, ‘Trade and Politics in Eighteenth Century Bengal’, in Alavi, ed., Eighteenth Century, pp. 136–64; Om Prakash, ‘The Great Divergence: Evidence from Eighteenth Century India’, paper presented at the Seventh Global Economic History Network Conference at Istanbul, 2005; Sushil

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11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Notes

Chaudhury, ‘European Companies and the Bengal Textile Industry in the Eighteenth Century: The Pitfalls of Applying Quantitative Techniques’, Modern Asian Studies, 27(2), 1993, 321–40; Sushil Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth Century Bengal, Delhi: Manohar, 1995. See also discussion in Washbrook, ‘India in the Early Modern World Economy’. Frank Perlin, ‘The Problem of the Eighteenth Century’, in Marshall, ed., Eighteenth Century, pp. 53–61. Burton Stein, ‘A Decade of Historical Efflorescence’, South Asia Research, 10, 1990, 125–38. See also, P. J. Marshall, ‘Introduction’, in The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution?, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 1–49. Irfan Habib, ‘Potentialities of Capitalistic Development in the Economy of Mughal India’, Journal of Economic History, 29(1), 1969, 32–78. Irfan Habib, ‘The Eighteenth Century in Indian Economic History’, in Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century, p. 109. The editor’s ‘Introduction’, in Alavi, ed., The Eighteenth Century in India, p. 37. ‘Introduction’, in Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century. A. G. Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. Prasannan Parthsarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence 1600–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. For more discussion and citations, see the section ‘The divergence debate’ below. See, however, discussion in Chapter 7 on some recent attempts to measure GDP in the long run. Perlin, ‘The Problem of the Eighteenth Century’, p. 54. Richards, ‘Early Modern India’, pp. 206–7. Eric Jones, The European Miracle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. xxx, 45, 161, 171, 206. This line of thought is pursued in Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, ‘Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the making of the Modern World Income Distribution’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 107(4), 2002, 1231–94. ‘Introduction’, in Alam and Subrahmanyam, eds, Mughal State. See discussion in Tirthankar Roy, Company of Kinsmen: Enterprise and Community in South Asian History 1700–1940, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010. Perlin, ‘Proto-industrialization’; A. G. Frank, ReOrient; Parthasarathi. Why Europe Grew Rich. For a fuller exposition of how colonial exploitation impoverished the third world, with illustrations from India, see A. K. Bagchi, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. The revival of interest in the subject owes much to Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Marshall, ed., Eighteenth Century; Alavi, ed., Eighteenth Century. See also Lakshmi Subramanian, History of India 1707–1857, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010. India in the World Economy from Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Habib, ‘Potentialities of Capitalistic Development’. Roy, India in the World Economy.

2 Formation of new states 1. The quotation from James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, London: Humphrey Milford, 1920, vol. 1 of 3, p. 475. For further biographical details on the rulers of these states, see H. G. Keene, An Oriental Biographical Dictionary founded on materials collected by the late Thomas William Beale, London: W. H. Allen, 1894, pp. 188, 336, 341. 2. J. F. Richards, ‘Mughal State Finance and the Premodern World Economy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23(2), 1981, 285–308. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds, The Mughal State 1526–1750, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 55–68.

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3. J. F. Richards wrote, ‘in the end the Mughal empire failed to convert the armed, warrior aristocracies of the countryside into quasi-officials in the major structural change that was needed for truly centralized rule’, J. F. Richards, ‘Early Modern India and World History’, Journal of World History, 8(2), 1997, 197–209. 4. Richard Barnett, North India between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British, 1720–1801, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. 5. Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–48, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 6. Bernard Cohn, ‘Political Systems in Eighteenth Century India: The Banaras Region’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 82(3), 1962, 312–20. 7. J. F. Richards, ‘The Hyderabad Karnatik, 1687–1707’, Modern Asian Studies, 9(2), 1975, 241–60. 8. Karen Leonard, ‘The Hyderabad Political System and its Participants’, Journal of Asian Studies, 30(3), 1971, 569–82. 9. Philip Calkins, ‘The Formation of a Regionally Oriented Ruling Group in Bengal, 1700–1740’, Journal of Asian Studies, 29(4), 1970, 799–806. 10. John R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 11. For an excellent overview, see P. J. Marshall, Bengal – The British Bridgehead: Eastern India 1740– 1828, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 12. P. J. Marshall, ‘Economic and Political Expansion: The Case of Oudh’, Modern Asian Studies, 9(4), 1975, 465–82; Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ‘Trade and Empire in Awadh 1765–1804’, Past and Present, 94, 1982, 85–102. 13. James Grant Duff, A History of the Mahrattas, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1826, vol. I, p. 60. 14. Satish Chandra, ‘Social Background to the Rise of the Maratha Movement during the 17th Century in India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 10(3), 1973, 209–17. 15. Stewart Gordon, ‘The Slow Conquest: Administrative Integration of Malwa into the Maratha Empire, 1720–1760’, Modern Asian Studies, 11(1), 1977, 1–40. 16. After 1757 the dominant partner of the Bengal Nawabs, the East India Company, while not directly involved, improved the defences of Calcutta by digging what was then known as the Maratha Ditch, and later renamed Circular Road. 17. On the Maratha–Afghan military contest, see Jos Gommans, ‘Indian Warfare and Afghan Innovation during the Eighteenth Century’, Studies in History, 11(3), 1995, 261–80. 18. Grant Duff, History of the Mahrattas, vol. 2, p. 138. 19. Standard sources on the battle should include ‘An Account of the Battle of Panipat’, Asiatic Researches, 3, 1799, 91–140, translation of the Persian manuscript by Casi Raja (Kashiraj) Pandit, vakil of Awadh and an eyewitness; and Ghulam Husain Khan, The Siyar-ul-Mutakherin (trans. John Briggs), London: John Murray, 1832. 20. E. S. Waring, A History of the Mahrattas, London: J. F. Richardson, 1810, p. 164. 21. See for example the account in John Pemble, ‘Resources and Techniques in the Second Maratha War’, Historical Journal, 19(2), 1976, 375–404. 22. J. P. Thomson, ‘An Autobiographical Memoir of Louis Bourquien’, Journal of the Punjab Historical Society, 9(1), 1923, 36–71. Bourquien was a French mercenary and possibly second in command after Perron in Sindhia’s army. He was one of those officers who refused to join the enemy camp, but was expelled by Daulatrao Sindhia anyway. Although his presence has been noted by military historians from other sources, his own autobiography and diary of events form an important resource that have not yet been fully utilized. 23. Waring, History of the Mahrattas, p. 164. 24. Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 126–7. 25. V. D. Divekar, ‘The Emergence of an Indigenous Business Class in Maharashtra in the Eighteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies, 16(3), 1982, 427–43. 26. Alam, The Crisis of Empire.

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27. Khushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs. Volume I. 1469–1839, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. 28. Andrew Major, Return to Empire: Punjab under the Sikhs and British in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, New Delhi: Sterling, 1996. 29. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Warfare and State Finance in Wodeyar Mysore, 1724–25: A Missionary Perspective’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 26(2), 1989, 203–33. 30. Poligar was the anglicized term for Palaiyakkarar or local chieftains, landlords and fortress keepers. 31. Nikhiles Guha, Pre-British State System in South India: Mysore 1761–1799, Calcutta: Ratna Prakashan, 1985. 32. Anon., British India Analysed: The Provincial and Revenue Establishments of Tipu Sultan, London: E. Jeffrey, 1793, vol. 1, p. 90. 33. R. D. Choksey, Economic Life in the Bombay Gujarat (1800–1939), London: Asia Publishing House, 1969. 34. Crispin Bates, ‘The Nature of Social Change in Rural Gujarat: The Kheda District, 1818–1918’, Modern Asian Studies, 15(4), 1981, 771–821. 35. R. P. Rana, ‘Agrarian Revolts in Northern India during the Late 17th and Early 18th Century’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 18(3–4), 1981, 287–325. 36. Tod, Annals and Antiquities, vol. 1, 510. 37. Tod, Annals and Antiquities, vol. 3, 1432. 38. Madhavi Bajekal, ‘The State and the Rural Grain Market in Eighteenth Century Eastern Rajasthan’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 25(4), 1988, 443–73. 39. Harbans Mukhia, ‘Illegal Extortions from Peasants, Artisans and Menials in Eighteenth Century Eastern Rajasthan’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 14(2), 1977, 231–45. 40. Dilbagh Singh, The State, Landlords and Peasants: Rajasthan in the 18th Century, Delhi: Manohar, 1990. 41. These were not exclusive alternatives, in fact, statism would be impossible to attain without the capacity to perform militarism. Therefore, a militarily weak regime would have no choice at all. 3 Consequences of state formation 1. Charles Tilly, ‘Cities and States in Europe, 1000–1800’, Theory and Society, 18(5), 1989, 563–84. Mobilization of resources for war as a catalyst in the making of the fiscal system is emphasized in Patrick K. O’Brien, ‘The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815’, Economic History Review, 41(1), 1988, 1–32, and in the formation of nation states by Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change in Early Modern Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. 2. Jawaharlal Nehru, Discovery of India, London: Meridien, 1946, p. 230. 3. R. V. Nadkarni, The Rise and Fall of the Maratha Domain, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1966, the cited text is the title of a section, pp. 352–63; The works of G. S. Sardesai, V. S. Khare, and others addressed leadership issues, see the discussion in A. R. Kulkarni, The Marathas, New Delhi: Books and Books, 1996, pp. 177–80. 4. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 136. Also G. J. Bryant, ‘Asymmetric Warfare: The British Experience in Eighteenth-Century India’, The Journal of Military History, 68(2), 2004, 431–69; and the brief discussion in Jeremy Black, War and the World, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998, p. 152. 5. Deepak Lal, ‘Asia and Western Dominance’, Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, 8(3), 2003, 283–99. 6. For discussion and some of the citations, see Tirthankar Roy, Natural Disasters and Indian History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012, chapter 3. 7. David Mosse, ‘Colonial and Contemporary Ideologies of “Community Management”: The Case of Tank Irrigation Development in South India’, Modern Asian Studies, 33(2), 1999, 303–38.

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8. Roman Studer, ‘India and the Great Divergence: Assessing the Efficiency of Grain Markets in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century India’, Journal of Economic History, 68(4), 2008, 393–437. 9. Despite an explosion of interest in colonial law, almost the entire output of the recent scholarship in this area is interested in governance rather than the institutional issues that make economic historians particularly interested in law. My own research and writings in this area, on which this section is based, consist of Tirthankar Roy, ‘Empire, Law and Economic Growth’, Economic and Political Weekly, 47(8), 2012, 98–104; ‘Law and the Economy of Early Modern India’, in Debin Ma and Jan Luiten van Zanden, eds, Law and Long-term Economic Change: A Eurasian Perspective, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011; Company of Kinsmen: Enterprise and Community in South Asian History 1600–1940, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010; and ‘Indigo and Law in Colonial India’, Economic History Review, 64(S1), 2011, 60–75. 10. Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998; Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 11. David Washbrook, ‘South India 1770–1840: The Colonial Transition’, Modern Asian Studies, 38(3), 2004, 479–516. 4 The agrarian order 1. For surveys of the scholarship, see, Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India 1857–1947, Delhi: Oxford University Press, Third Edition, 2011, Ch. 2; Burton Stein, ed., The Making of Agrarian Policy in British India 1770–1900, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992; Dharma Kumar, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, 1750–1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 2. Paul Axelrod, ‘Living on the Edge: The Village and the State on the Goa-Maratha Frontier’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 45(4), 2008, 553–80. See also Frank Perlin, ‘Of White Whale and Countrymen in the Eighteenth-Century, Maratha Deccan: Extended Class Relations, Rights and the Problem of Rural Autonomy Under the Old Regime’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 5(1), 1978, 172–237; Stewart Gordon, Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994; and Andre Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 3. For more discussion on these settlements, see Roy, The Economic History of India, Ch. 2. 4. Neeraj Hatekar, ‘Farmers and Markets in the Pre-Colonial Deccan: The Plausibility of Economic Growth in Traditional Society’, Past and Present, 178(1), 2003, 116–47. 5. Binay Chaudhuri, Peasant History in Late-precolonial and Colonial India, Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2008. 6. See discussion in David Ludden, ‘Introduction’, in Ludden, ed., Agricultural Production and Indian History, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 1–23. 7. On hierarchy, Dilbagh Singh, The State, Landlords, and Peasants: Rajasthan in the 18th Century, New Delhi: Manohar, 1990; Narayan Singh Rao, Rural Economy and Society: Study of South-eastern Rajasthan during the Eighteenth Century, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat, 2002, pp. 61–2. 8. Rajat Datta, Society, Economy, and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c. 1760–1800, New Delhi: Manohar, 2000. 9. Some caution is necessary in suggesting how large this restraining factor was. Other historians of commercialization in contemporary Bengal consider that the Company’s ability to restrain the landlords in matters of local importance was limited. See Kumkum Chatterjee, Merchants, Politics and Society in Early Modern India. Bihar, 1733–1820, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996. There cannot be any dispute, however, on the point that the state was indeed gaining strength in relation to the local centres of power. 10. Discussed in Asiya Siddiqi, ‘Money and Prices in the Earlier Stages of Empire: India and Britain 1760–1840’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 18(3–4), 1981, 231–62. 11. Ratnalekha Ray, Change in Bengal Agrarian Society c. 1760–1850, New Delhi: Manohar, 1979, p. 284.

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12. Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. 13. Datta, Society, Economy and the Market. 14. See, for further discussion and citations, Tirthankar Roy, Natural Disasters and Indian History, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012. 15. Douglass North and Robert P. Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. 16. W. W. Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal, vol. 1, New York: Leypoldt and Holt, 1868. See also Datta, Society, Economy and the Market; Nikhil Sur, ‘The Bihar Famine of 1770’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 13(4), 1977, 525–31; N. K. Sinha, Economic History of Bengal – from Plassey to the Permanent Settlement, vol. II, Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1962. 17. Chaudhuri, Peasant History, pp. 180–1. 18. Ibid. 19. Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia’, Past and Present, 98, 1983, 30–95. See pp. 82–3. 20. Mountstuart Elphinstone, Report on the Territories Conquered from the Paishwa, Calcutta, 1821, Appendix, pp. xv–xxiv. 21. James Grant Duff, A History of the Mahrattas, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1826, vol. I, pp. 22–3. 22. Grant Duff, History of the Mahrattas, vol. I, p. 315, reference to Peshwa Balaji Bishwanath, c. 1715. 23. Dilbagh Singh, The State, Landlords and Peasants: Rajasthan in the 18th Century, Delhi: Manohar, 1990. 24. James Tod, The Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, vol. 1 of 3, London: Humphrey Milford, 1920, p. 576. 25. Dilbagh Singh, The Role of the Mahajans in the Rural Economy in Eastern Rajasthan during the 18th Century’, Social Scientist, 2(10), 1974, 20–31. 26. Eric Stokes, ‘Agrarian Relations: Northern and Central India’, The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, 1750–1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 36–85, see p. 39. 27. Dirk Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, Sepoy: An Ethno-History of the Military Labour Market in North India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 28. C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 92–3. 29. Ibid., pp. 84–6. 30. Ibid., p. 104 31. Meena Bhargava, ‘Landed Property Rights in Transition: A Note on Cultivators and Agricultural Labourers in Gorakhpur in the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Studies in History, 12(2), 1996, 243–53. 32. Muzaffar Alam, Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab 1707–48, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986. 33. V. Sachdeva, Polity and Economy of the Punjab during the Late-Eighteenth Century, Delhi: Manohar, 1993. 34. J. T. Blunt, ‘Narrative of a Route from Chunargarh to Rajahmundry’, Asiatic Annual Register, London: J. Debrett, 1801, pp. 128–200. 35. G. N. Rao, ‘Agrarian Relations in Coastal Andhra under Early British Rule’, Social Scientist, 6(1), 1977, 19–29. 36. David Ludden, Peasant History in South India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 88, 90. 37. Brian J. Murton, ‘Key People in the Countryside: Decision-makers in Interior Tamilnadu in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 10(2), 1973, 157–180. Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965; Nilmani Mukherjee, The Ryotwari System in Madras: 1792–1827, Calcutta, 1962; A. Sarada Raju, Economic Conditions in the Madras Presidency, 1800–1850, Madras: Madras University Press, 1941. 38. Tod, Annals and Antiquities, vol. 1, p. 575.

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39. S. S. Sivakumar, ‘Transformation of the Agrarian Economy in Tondaimandalam: 1760–1900’, Social Scientist, 6(10), 1978, 18–39. 40. Ludden, Peasant History, pp. 167–9. 5 Conditions of business 1. William H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar: An Economic Study, London: Macmillan, 1920; and From Akbar to Aurangzeb: A Study in Indian Economic History, London: Macmillan, 1923. 2. Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Incorporation of Indian Subcontinent into Capitalist World-Economy’, Economic and Political Weekly, 21(4), 1986, PE28–PE39. 3. The pioneering works were the histories of the organized European enterprise. See Holden Furber, John Company at Work, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948; Tapan Raychaudhuri, Jan Company in Coromandel, 1600–1690: A Study in the Interrelations of European Commerce and Traditional Economies, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1962; Charles R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825, London: Hutchinson, 1969. K. N. Chaudhuri’s influential contributions helped form a conception of the Indian Ocean as a totality. See especially, Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; and Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Important overviews and collections should include Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea, Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin, eds, Asian Merchants and Businessmen in the Indian Ocean and the China Sea, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000; Ashin Das Gupta and Michael N. Pearson, eds, India and the Indian Ocean, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1987; Om Prakash, The New Cambridge History of India; Vol. II.5. European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. For important regional studies, see Ashin Das Gupta, Malabar in Asian Trade 1740–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967; Surendra Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, 16th and 17th Centuries: A Study in the Impact of European Expansion on a Pre-capitalist Economy, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1975; Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast, 1650– 1740, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986; Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630–1720, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500–1650, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Sushil Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth-Century Bengal, Delhi: Manohar, 1995; Lakshmi Subramanian, Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion: Bombay, Surat and the West Coast, Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Recent collections of research and surveys of the field can be found in Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, eds, How India Clothed the World: the World of South Asian Textiles 1500–1850, Leiden: Brill, 2009; and Tirthankar Roy, India in the World Economy from Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. See also on private trade, silver inflow, textile trade, and shipping in Bengal, Indrajit Ray, Bengal Industries and the British Industrial Revolution (1757–1857), London: Routledge, 2011. 4. Proto-industrialization refers to a growth of manufacturing in semi-rural clusters serving distant markets. Frank Perlin, ‘Proto-industrialisation in Precolonial South Asia’, Past and Present, 98, 1983, 30–95. 5. ‘Inland Trade’, in Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib, eds, The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 1, 1200–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 335. 6. Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline, pp. 174–5. 7. Om Prakash, ‘Bullion for Goods: International Trade and the Economy of Early Eighteenth Century Bengal’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 13(2), 1976, 159–86. 8. Tirthankar Roy, ‘Economic Conditions in Early Modern Bengal: A Contribution to the Divergence Debate’, Journal of Economic History, 70(1), 2010, 179–94. 9. Ibid. 10. Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline.

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11. Prakash, ‘Bullion for Goods’. 12. Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the Eighteenth Century: Britain and South India Compared’, Past and Present, 158, 1998, 79–109. 13. For a longer summary, see ‘Indian Ocean Trade’, in Roy, India in the World Economy. 14. Ashin Das Gupta, The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant 1500–1800, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 46. 15. H. V. Bowen, ‘Bullion for Trade, War, and Debt-Relief: British Movements of Silver to, around, and from Asia, 1760–1833’, Modern Asian Studies, 44(3), 2010, 445–75. 16. H. V. Bowen, ‘Sinews of Trade and Empire: The Supply of Commodity Exports to the East India Company during the Late Eighteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 55(3), 2002, 466–86. 17. Ann M. Carlos and Stephen Nicholas, “‘Giants of an Earlier Capitalism”: The Chartered Trading Companies as Modern Multinationals’, Business History Review, 62(3), 1988, 398–419. 18. See, for example, Anthony Webster, The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of AngloAsian Commerce and Politics, 1790–1860, Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2009; Blair B. Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1977. 19. Das Gupta, World of the Indian Ocean Merchant, p. 92. 20. See also Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C. A. Bayly, ‘Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 25(4), 1988, 401–24. 21. Das Gupta, World of the Indian Ocean Merchant, p. 98. 22. Ibid., p. 131. 23. Ibid., p. 100. 24. Ibid., pp. 101, 127. 25. Ibid., p. 108. 26. Ibid., p. 169. 27. Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600– 1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 28. Om Prakash, ‘From Negotiation to Coercion: Textile Manufacturing in India in the Eighteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies, 41(5), 2007, 1331–68. 29. R. E. Kranton and A. V. Swamy, ‘Contracts, Hold-up, and Exports: Textiles and Opium in Colonial India’, American Economic Review, 98(5), 2008, 967–89; Roy, India in the World Economy; and Tirthankar Roy, East India Company: The World’s Most Powerful Corporation, Delhi: Allen Lane, 2011. 30. Prakash, Dutch East India Company; Raychaudhuri, Jan Company in Coromandel; Arasaratnam, ‘Weavers, Merchants and Company: The Handloom Industry in Southeastern India 1750–1790’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 17(3), 1980, 257–81; Subrahmanyam, Political Economy of Commerce; Parthasarathi, Transition to a Colonial Economy; Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline; Hameeda Hossain, The Company Weavers of Bengal: The East India Company and the Organization of Textile Production in Bengal, 1750–1813, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988. 31. Ghulam Nadri, Eighteenth-Century Gujarat: The Dynamics of Its Political Economy, 1750–1800, Leiden: Brill, 2009; Pedro Machado, ‘A Regional Market in a Globalised Economy: East Central and South Eastern Africans, Gujarati Merchants and the Indian Textile Industry in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, eds, How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles 1500–1850, Leiden: Brill, 2009, pp. 53–84. 32. P. Swarnalatha, ‘Revolt, Testimony, Petition: Artisanal Protests in Colonial Andhra’, International Review of Social History, 46(1), 2001, 107–29. 33. Parthasarathi, Transition to a Colonial Economy; and Prakash, ‘From Negotiation to Coercion’. 34. Tripta Verma, Karkhanas under the Mughals, from Akbar to Aurangzeb: A Study in Economic Development, Delhi: Pragati, 1994. 35. Nandita Prasad Sahai. Politics of Patronage and Protest: The State, Society, and Artisans in Early Modern Rajasthan. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. 36. For a survey that reflects this weakness of the scholarship well, see Karen Leonard, ‘The “Great Firm” Theory of the Decline of the Mughal Empire’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 21(2), 1979, 151–67.

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37. Irfan Habib, ‘Usury in Medieval India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 6(4), 1964, 393–419. 38. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The Mughal State - Structure or Process? Reflections on Recent Western Historiography’, Indian Economic Social History Review, 29(3), 1992, 291–321. 39. For a set of examples from Golkonda, see Subrahmanyam and Bayly, ‘Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India’. 40. The trans-Himalayan trade with Central Asia has been studied by Scott C. Levi, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and Its Trade, 1550–1900, Leiden: Brill, 2002, pp. 30–1, and Levi, ‘India, Russia and the Eighteenth-century Transformation of the Central Asian Caravan Trade’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 42(4), 1999, 519–48. Also on overland trade, Sushil Chaudhury and Michel Morineau, eds, Merchants, Companies and Trade: Europe and Asia in the Early Modern Era, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 41. Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline. 42. John R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 177. 43. Thomas Timberg, ‘Three Types of the Marwari Firm’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 10(1), 1973, 3–36. 44. Ibid. 45. Bhangiya Bhukya, Subjugated Nomads: The Lambadas under the Rule of the Nizams, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2010. 46. Captain John Briggs (Persian interpreter in the Hyderabad court), ‘Account of the Origin, History, and Manners of the Race of Men called Bunjaras’, Transactions of the Literary Society of Bombay, vol. I, London: John Murray, 1819, pp. 170–97. See also, R. G. Varady, ‘North Indian Banjaras: Their Evolution as Transporters’, South Asia, 2(1), 1979, 1–18; and Joseph Brennig, ‘Textile Producers and Production in Late Seventeenth Century Coromandel’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 23(4), 1986, 333–55. On the nineteenth century, useful references to the Banjaras can be found in Ravi Ahuja, ‘ “Opening up the Country”? Patterns of Circulation and Politics of Communication in Early Colonial Orissa’, Studies in History, 20(1), 2004, 73–130; and N. Benjamin, ‘The Trade of the Central Provinces of India (1861–1880)’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 15(4), 1978, 505–14. On ‘criminalization’, see Bhangiya Bhukya, ‘ “Delinquent Subjects”: Dacoity and the Creation of a Surveillance Society in Hyderabad State’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 44(2), 2007, 179–212. 47. Cited by Briggs, ‘Account of the Origin, History, and Manners of the Race of Men called Bunjaras’. 48. H. T. Colebrooke, Remarks on the Husbandry and Internal Commerce of Bengal, Calcutta, 1804, p. 163. 49. Ibid., p. 161. 6 Towns 1. David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 145–7. 2. For a discussion and the necessary citations, see C. A. Bayly, ‘State and Economy in India over Seven Hundred Years’, Economic History Review, 38(4), 1985, 583–96. See also for a mainly descriptive study, H. K. Naqvi, ‘Progress of Urbanization in United Provinces, 1550–1800’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 10(1), 1967, 81–101. 3. Stephen P. Blake, ‘The Urban Economy in Pre-modern Muslim India: Shahjahanabad, 1639–1739’, Modern Asian Studies, 21(3), 1987, 447–71. I draw on the discussion in Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C. A. Bayly, ‘Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 25(4), 1988, 401–24. 4. K. N. Chaudhuri, ‘Some Reflections on the Town and Country in Mughal India’, Modern Asian Studies, 12(1), 1978, 77–96. 5. ‘Ahmadabad in the XVIIth Century’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 12(2), 1969, 187–97. 6. Irfan Habib and Tapan Raychaudhuri, eds, The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 1, 1200– 1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 337.

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7. Chaudhuri, ‘Some Reflections’. 8. Stephen F. Dale, ‘Empires and Emporia: Palace, Mosque, Market, and Tomb in Istanbul, Isfahan, Agra, and Delhi’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 53(1–2), 2010, 212–29. 9. ‘Middle Towns to Middle Cities in South Asia, 1800–2007’, Journal of Urban History, 35(1), 2008, 15–38. 10. Walter Hamilton, The East India Gazetteer, London: John Murray, 1815, p. 489. 11. See Z. U. Malik, ‘The Core and the Periphery: A Contribution to the Debate on the Eighteenth Century’, Social Scientist, 18(11/12), 1990, 3–35. 12. Fall of the Mughal Empire 1789–1803, vol. 1 of 4, Calcutta: M. C. Sarkar, 1932–50, pp. 324–5. 13. Edward Thornton, A Gazetteer of the Territories under the Government of the East India Company, and of the Native States on the Continent of India, London: W. H. Allen, 1854, p. 64. 14. Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘The Middle Classes in the Mughal Empire’, Social Scientist, 5(1), 1976, 28–49. 15. For a discussion of the debate, see Karen Leonard, ‘Indigenous Banking Firms in Mughal India: A Reply’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23(2), 1981, 309–13. 16. Hamilton, East India Gazetteer, p. 497. 17. G. H. Barlow’s commission, cited by Purnendu Basu, Oudh and the East India Company, Lucknow: Maxwell, 1943, pp. 134–5. 18. ‘Artisans, the State, and the Politics of Wajabi in Eighteenth-Century Jodhpur’, Indian Economic Social History Review, 42(1), 2005, 41–68. 19. ‘The Hyderabad Political System and its Participants’, Journal of Asian Studies, 30(3), 1971, 569–82. 20. B. G. Gokhale, ‘The Religious Complex in Eighteenth-Century Poona’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 105(4), 1985, 719–24. 21. V. D. Divekar, ‘The Emergence of an Indigenous Business Class in Maharashtra in the Eighteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies, 16(3), 1982, 427–3. 22. Hamilton, East India Gazetteer, p. 677. 23. David L. White, ‘Parsis as Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth Century Western India: The Rustum Manock Family and the Parsi Community of Surat and Bombay’, University of Virginia PhD Dissertation, 1979. 24. Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat c. 1700–1750, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1979. 25. Michelguglielmo Torri, ‘Surat during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century: What Kind of Social Order? A Rejoinder to Lakshmi Subramanian’, Modern Asian Studies, 21(4), 1987, 679–710; Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Social Order in Surat: A Reply and an Excursus on the Riots of 1788 and 1795’, Modern Asian Studies, 25(2), 1991, 321–65. 26. Lakshmi Subramanian, Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion: Bombay, Surat and the West Coast, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. 27. ‘Account of the Present State of Carrachee in Sind’, Asiatic Annual Register, London: J. Debrett, pp. 69–70. 28. For an example from geography, see Meera Kosambi, John E. Brush, ‘Three Colonial Port Cities in India’, Geographical Review, 78(1), 1988, 32–47. 29. Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, p. 8. See also P. J. Marshall, ‘The White Town of Calcutta under the Rule of the East India Company’, Modern Asian Studies, 34(3), 2000, 307–31. 30. Rebecca M. Brown, ‘The Cemeteries and the Suburbs: Patna’s Challenges to the Colonial City in South Asia’, Journal of Urban History, 29(2), 2003, 151–72; William Cunningham Bissell, ‘Between Fixity and Fantasy: Assessing the Spatial Impact of Colonial Urban Dualism’, Journal of Urban History, 37(2) 208–29; Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 59(2), 2000, 154–79. 31. Susan J. Lewandowski, ‘Urban Growth and Municipal Development in the Colonial City of Madras, 1860–1900’, Journal of Asian Studies, 34(2), 1975, 341–60. 32. Susan M. Nield, ‘Colonial Urbanism: The Development of Madras City in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, Modern Asian Studies, 13(2), 1979, 217–46.

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33. Ravi Ahuja, ‘Expropriating the Poor: Urban Land Control and Colonial Administration in Late Eighteenth Century Madras City’, Studies in History, 17(1), 2001, 81–99. 34. Brown, ‘Cemeteries and the Suburbs’. 35. Kapil Raj, ‘The Historical Anatomy of a Contact Zone: Calcutta in the Eighteenth Century’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 48(1), 2011, 55–82. 36. Peter Robb, ‘Credit, Work and Race in 1790s Calcutta: Early Colonialism through a Contemporary European View’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 37(1), 2000, 1–25. 37. Kumkum Banerjee, ‘Grain Traders and the East India Company: Patna and its Hinterland in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 23(4), 1986, 403–29. 38. B. L. Bhadani, ‘Land Tax and Trade in Agricultural Produce in Seventeenth Century Western Rajasthan’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 29(2), 1992, 215–25. 39. David Ludden, ‘Spectres of Agrarian Territory in Southern India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 39(2–3), 2002, 233–57. 40. Ludden, ‘Spectres of Agrarian Territory’. 41. Ludden, ‘Spectres of Agrarian Territory’; Prasannan Parthasarathi, Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 42. Naqvi, ‘Progress of Urbanization’, p. 84. 43. ‘Regional Economy: North India’, in Dharma Kumar, ed., Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, 1757–1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 265–6. 44. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars. 45. Howard Spodek, ‘Studying the History of Urbanization in India’, Journal of Urban History, 6(3), 1980, 251–95. See also Howard Spodek, ‘Rulers, Merchants and Other Groups in the City-States of Saurashtra, Around 1800’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16, 1974, 448–70. 7 Levels of living 1. Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘A Reinterpretation of Indian Economic History?’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 5(1), 1968, 77–100. 2. ‘The most common rate of wages for ordinary unskilled work at the time of Jehangir was about Rs. 3 per month’. Brij Narain, Indian Economic Life: Past and Present, Lahore: Uttar Chand Kapur & Sons, 1929, p. 13. With wheat selling at 185 lbs per rupee (Ain-i-Akbari, Brij Narain defended the use of the Ain prices for 1637), if even 70 per cent of this income was spent on food, these wages meant a daily access to wheat as high as 7 kg per earner per day, or in a family of four, 1.75 kg per capita. Spring millets sold at nearly half the price. 3. W. H. Moreland,From Akbar to Aurangzeb: A Study in Indian Economic History, London: Macmillan, 1923. See also W. H. Moreland, ‘The Ain-i-Akbari – A Base-Line for the Economic History of India’, Indian Journal of Economics, 1(1), 1917–18, 44–53. 4. Francisco Pelsaert, Jahangir’s India: The Remonstrantie of Francisco Pelsaert (W. H. Moreland and P. Geyl, tr.), Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1925, p. 64. 5. Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the Eighteenth Century: Britain and South India’, Past and Present, 158, 1998, 79–109. Parthasarathi also suggests that South Asia (or south India) and Europe were similarly placed in the eighteenth century. Recently, a number of authors have shown that money wages expressed in silver were lower in India than in Europe in the seventeenth century. R. C. Allen, ‘Real Wages in Europe and Asia: A First Look at the Long-term Patterns’, in R. C. Allen, T. Bengtsen and M. Dribe, Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-being in Asia and Europe, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, pp. 111–30; and S. Broadberry and B. Gupta, ‘The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500–1800’, Economic History Review, 59(1), 2006, 2–31. 6. Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants, and Kings in South India, 1720–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, ch. 5. 7. Binay Chaudhuri, Peasant History of Late-precolonial and Colonial India, New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2008, pp. 172–3.

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8. A. V. Desai, ‘Population and Standards of Living in Akbar’s Time’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 9(1), 1972, 43–62. See Satish Chandra, ‘Standard of Living I: Mughal India’, in Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib, eds, The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 1, 1200–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 458–71, for a somewhat different result based on wages. 9. Cited by Desai, ‘Population and Standards of Living’. 10. Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘The Mid-eighteenth-century Background’, in Dharma Kumar, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, 1757–1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 3–35, p. 17. 11. Parthasarathi, ‘Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness’. 12. Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib, eds, The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 1, 1200– 1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 218, 232. Madras, Season and Crop Report of the Madras State, Madras: Department of Statistics, 1905–6, p. 15. The average paddy yield for Tanjore was 1600 lbs/acre, which translates to 436 kg of rice per acre. The average for Madras Presidency was less than 300 kg per acre. 13. D. Clingingsmith and J. G. Williamson, ‘Deindustrialization in 18th and 19th Century India: Mughal Decline, Climate Shocks and British Industrial Ascent’, Explorations in Economic History, 45(3), 2008, 209–34. 14. Chaudhuri, Peasant History, p. 12. 15. Chaudhuri, Peasant History, pp. 49–107. 16. Satpal Sangwan, ‘Level of Agricultural Technology in India (1757–1857)’, Asian Agri-History, 11(1), 2007, 5–25. 17. Neeraj Hatekar, ‘Economic History as an Endangered Discipline: Issues in Pre-Colonial Studies’, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(42), 2004, 4675–6. 18. J. A. Voelcker, Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1893, pp. 40–1. 19. W. W. Hunter, Famine Aspects of Bengal Districts, London: Trübner, 1874, pp. 17, 36, 64, 94, 100, 105, passim; and Bengal, Season and Crop Report of Bengal, Calcutta: Government Press, 1901–2. 20. ‘Five quarters of rice per acre are reckoned a large produce’ in Bengal, Walter Hamilton, The East India Gazetteer, London: John Murray, 1815, p. 122. The measure of a quarter elsewhere in the same report is stated as follows: 15 maunds to 7 quarters, p. 20. H. T. Colebrooke in two different measures took 7 maunds and 10 maunds per bigha of unhusked rice the standard for one crop, Remarks, pp. 101, 107. Another contemporary writer on standard of living, Robert Kyd, reported a large rice yield to consist of ‘13 maunds per beegah’. The bigha measure was specified at 3600 square ‘guz’, or the ‘ilahiguz’, see the India Office Record manuscript number IOR Mss Eur F95, p. 21. 21. Rajat Datta, Society, Economy, and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal 1760–1800, New Delhi: Manohar, 2000, p. 41. 22. John F. Richards, ‘Early Modern India and World History’, Journal of World History, 8(2), 1997, 197–209. 23. Sumit Guha, ‘The Population History of South Asia from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries: An Exploration’, in Ts’ui-jung Liu, James Lee, David Sven Reher, Osamu Saito and Wang Feng, eds. Asian Population History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 63–78. 24. André Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. See also, Tirthankar Roy, ‘An Asian World Economy?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 36(31), 2001, 2937–42, for a discussion of Frank’s use of demographic data in relation to economic growth and levels of living. 25. Satish Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1979. 26. Tirthankar Roy, ‘Economic Conditions in Early Modern Bengal: A Contribution to the Divergence Debate’, Journal of Economic History, 70(1), 2010, 179–94. 27. S. Broadberry and B. Gupta, ‘Indian GDP before 1870: Some Preliminary Estimates and a Comparison with Britain’, CEPR Working Paper, London, 2010.

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INDEX

Acemoglu, Daron 146 Afghanistan/Afghan 17–18, 22, 25–6, 31–2, 38, 68, 96, 109–10, 147 Africa 7, 40, 73–4, 79 Agra 4, 6, 67, 96, 105–6, 108–12, 121, 123–4, 130 Ahmad Shah Abdali 18, 25–7 Ahmadnagar 23 Ahmedabad 91, 105–6, 109, 122–3 Ahuja, Ravi 118, 153, 155 Ain-i-Akbari 129, 132, 155 Alam, Muzaffar 18, 145–7, 150 Alavi, Seema 145–6 Ali, Athar 145 Aligarh School 3–5, 145 Alivardi Khan 21, 25 Allahabad 112, 114 Allard, Jean-Francois 32 Allen, R.C. 155 America 7, 73 Amirchand 97 Amritsar 109 Andhra Pradesh 122 Arabian Sea 77, 81, 86, 114, 140 Arasaratnam, S. 151–2 Arcot 19–20, 70 Armenians 106, 120 artisans 6, 9, 37, 46–7, 81, 83, 85–6, 89–95, 97, 103, 106, 112–13, 116, 118–19, 122, 124, 126, 128 Asaf ud Daula 111 Assam 58, 62, 71–2 Assaye, Battle of 28–9 Atlantic Ocean 1, 80, 89 Aubin, Jean 151 Aurangzeb 1, 13, 16, 18, 20, 31, 81, 114 Awadh 5, 13, 16–18, 21–3, 25–6, 28–9, 31–2, 38, 41–3, 54, 66–8, 102, 104, 111–12, 122 Axelrod, Paul 149

Bagchi, A.K. 146 Bahmani rule 23 Bajekal, Madhavi 148 Bajirao I 24, 26 Balwant 18 Banerjee, Kumkum 121, 155 Banjara 69, 98–101, 153 bankers 2–4, 10, 15–16, 18, 20–1, 27, 31, 34, 47, 50–1, 54, 57, 60, 71, 80–1, 83, 90–1, 94, 96–7, 100–4, 106, 110–2, 115, 117–20, 126, 138, 140, 143 Baramahal 69–70 Barlow, G.H. 154 Barnett, Richard 147 Baroda 113 Basu, Purnendu 154 Bates, Crispin 148 Bayana 105 Bayly, C.A. 67, 111, 123, 130, 145, 150, 152–3, 155 Benares 3, 6, 18, 47, 67, 71, 105, 108, 110–12 Bengal 3, 5–6, 13, 16–18, 20–3, 25, 27, 30, 38–9, 41–5, 47, 53–4, 58–62, 71, 77–8, 81, 83, 85–6, 91, 93, 96–9, 101, 104–5, 110–11, 115, 120–1, 129–30, 132, 134–7, 141 Benjamin, N. 153 Berar 5, 25, 41, 68, 136 Bhadani, B.L. 155 bhaiachara 53 Bhargava, Meena 67, 150 Bhomia/Bhumia 53–4, 65, 70 Bhosale 25, 29–30, 68 Bhukya, Bhangiya 25, 29–30, 68 Bihar 22, 42, 54, 60, 71, 77, 104–5, 121, 130, 134, 149–50 Bijapur 16, 23–4, 33 Bissell, William 154 Black Death 61

170

Index

Black, Jeremy 148 Blake, Stephen 105, 108, 153 Blunt, J.T. 150 Bombay 6, 11, 27, 79–81, 89, 98–9, 101, 104, 108, 114–16, 143 Bowen, H.V. 152 Boxer, C.R. 151 Brahmaputra 58, 62 brass 94, 112 Brennig, Joseph 153 Briggs, John 147, 153 Britain 1, 6–7, 75, 85, 101 British Empire 1, 7, 56, 139, 143 Broadberry, S. 155–7 Brown, R.M. 154–5 Brush, J.E. 154 Bryant, G.J. 148 Buchanan, Francis 77, 130, 134 Budaun 105 Bundelkhand 5, 24–5, 27, 29–30, 41, 66, 68, 71, 102, 111 Burdwan 20 Burhanpur 105–6, 110 Burma 89 Buxar 22 Calcutta 6, 11, 22, 47, 79–83, 85, 89, 91, 97–8, 104, 107–8, 111, 114–15, 119–21, 123, 143, 147 Calkins, Philip 20, 147 Cambay 77, 109 canal 33, 44, 48, 50, 67, 72, 131 Canton 6, 89 caravan trade 45, 75, 79, 96–100, 106, 110, 136, 153 Carlos, A.M. 152 Carnatic 5, 19, 33, 83 carpet 94, 112 Carr-Tagore 85 Casi Raja Pandit 147 Caste 47–8, 54–6, 59, 67, 71, 86, 88, 93, 113, 119, 122, 124; see also community Chandra, Satish 23, 147, 156 Chandragiri 80 Charnock, Job 115 chartered companies 81, 84–6, 89, 101 Chatterjee, Kumkum 149 Chattopadhyay, Swati 154 Chaudhary, Latika 157 Chaudhuri, B.B. 131, 149–50, 155–6 Chaudhuri, K.N. 85, 105, 151, 153–4 Chaudhury, Sushil 77–8, 97, 146, 151–3 Chhattisgarh 68–9, 71 Chikkadevaraja 33

China 7, 39, 81, 89, 98, 117, 136 Chingleput 70 Chitpavan 31, 113 Choksey, R.D. 148 Chotanagpur 20, 85 chowgule 31 City of London 80, 85 Clinginsgsmith, D. 156 Cochin 105 Cohn, Bernard 18, 147 Colebrook, H.T. 77, 134, 153 colonialism 2, 4, 7–9, 11, 14, 39, 47, 49, 93, 143 community 6–7, 15, 31–2, 35, 43–9, 51–2, 54, 55–7, 59, 65–7, 70–1, 86–8, 93–7, 112, 116, 118–20, 125, 141 Coromandel 29, 83, 86, 90–2, 98 cotton 3, 45, 48, 67, 85, 92, 97–9, 101, 104, 109, 122, 124, 127, 136–7, 141, 143 cotton textiles see textiles Cuillier-Perron, Pierre 28 Cutch 36 Cuttack 44, 113, 123 Dale, Stephen 154 Das Gupta, Ashin 86–8, 151–2, 154 Datta, Rajat 134, 149, 156 Daulatrao Sindhia 28, 147 Deccan 5, 11, 15–17, 19–20, 23–6, 30, 33, 54–5, 75, 98–100, 105, 107, 127, 129, 132, 137 Deccan sultanate 15 Delhi 4, 6, 13, 16–18, 20, 24–6, 28–9, 37, 67, 76, 96, 98, 105–6, 108–12, 123–4, 130 Delhi sultanate 98 desai 31 Desai, Ashok 129, 156 desert 101, 115, 128 deshmukh 31 deshpande 31 Dhaka 105–6, 109–10, 123 Dhar 24 Divekar, V.D. 31, 147 divergence debate 6–8 Doab, Ganges Jumna 65–6 Doab, Raichur 19 Downing, Brian 148 East India Company (Danish) 76 East India Company (Dutch) 76, 78, 80, 114

Index

East India Company (English/British) 1, 3, 6, 11–14, 17–23, 27–9, 32–3, 35–43, 45–9, 53, 55, 57–8, 61, 63, 66, 68–70, 73, 77, 80–1, 83–6, 88, 89–91, 93, 96–101, 104, 111–18, 120–1, 123–4, 126, 136, 140, 142–3, 145, 147, 149 East India Company (French) 17, 27, 34, 76, 83 Eastern India 15, 25, 54, 58–62, 109, 121, 133; see also Bengal Eaton, Richard 137, 150, 157 El Nino 130 Elphinstone, Mountstuart 63, 150 Europe 4, 7, 14, 27–9, 39–40, 61, 73–5, 80–1, 83, 86–8, 93, 115 famine 2, 23, 44, 45, 52–3, 56–7, 59–62, 64–6, 99, 130, 134–5, 137–8, 141–2 feudalism 14, 40, 61 flintlock gun 41 Fort William 18, 22 Fox, Richard 67 Frank, A.G. 4, 156 Furber, Holden 85, 151 Fyzabad 111 Gaekwad 25–7 Ganges 3, 41, 44, 58, 65, 96–8, 105, 107, 109, 121, 123, 126–8, 135, 140–1 Gaya 134 Genovese merchants 80 gentrification 54–7, 67, 137 Ghulam Husain Khan 147 global history see world history Godavari 127, 141 gold 90, 99 Golkonda 19, 80, 104, 153 Gommans, Jos 147 Gopal, S. 151 Gorakhpur 67 Gordon, Stewart 147, 149 grain 2, 3, 26, 45, 58–60, 63, 69, 78, 89, 96–7, 99–101, 115, 122, 124, 127–9, 132, 135–6, 141 Grand Trunk Road 112 Grant Duff, James 30, 63, 147 Grant, James 77 Guha, Nikhiles 148 Guha, Sumit 156 Gujarat 5, 11, 15, 24–6, 35–6, 53, 64, 79, 91, 105–6, 111, 116–17, 124, 136–7 Gupta, Bishnupriya 155–7 Gwalior 25, 113

171

Habib, Irfan 3, 105, 108, 145–6, 151, 153, 156 Haidar Ali 17 hajj 106 Hamilton, Walter 108, 154, 156 Hardgrave, R.L. Jr. 92–3 Hastings, Warren 22, 47–8 Hatekar, Neeraj 149, 156 Heitzman, James 108, 109 Heston, Alan 76 Holkar 25–9, 36, 68 Hooghly 60, 79–80, 104, 114–15, 121 Hossain, Hameeda 152 Hunter, William 61, 134, 150, 156 Hyderabad 3, 5–6, 13, 16–17, 19, 24, 33, 41–2, 97, 99, 104, 107–8, 110–11, 113, 140 Ibrahim Khan Gardi 26 Indian Ocean trade 1, 7, 10, 73–4, 77, 79–84, 86–7, 126, 151 indigo 48, 62, 67, 81, 83, 85, 101, 121, 134, 136, 143 Industrial Revolution 1, 75 institutions see law, property right insurance 60, 85, 87, 121 iron 32, 41, 84–5, 121 Jagatseth 21, 91, 96, 101, 111, 120 jagir 14–6, 19–23, 25, 29, 32–3, 36–7, 64, 69, 131 Jahangir 127 Jain 117 Jaisalmer 37 Jat 17, 25–7, 36, 110–11 Jodhpur 94, 112 Johnson, Simon 146 joint-stock firms 88, 121 Jones, Eric 7, 146 jotedar 59, 142 Kanauj 105 Kanchipuram 122–3 Kandahar 117 Kanpur 114, 122 Karachi 114, 117 karkhana 94 karnam 69 Katehr see Rohilkhand Kaveri 78, 122, 127–8, 136, 141 Keene, H.G. 146 Kessinger, Tom 108, 123 Khan, I.A. 154 Khare, V.S. 148

172

Index

Khatri 97–8, 101, 115 khudkasht 67–8 Kling, Blair B. 152 Kolff, Dirk 66, 150 Konkan 77, 79, 114, 117 Kosambi, Meera 154 Kota 37 Kranton, R.E. 152 Krishna 127, 141 kulkarni 31 Kumar, Dharma 149–50 Kyd, Robert 156 Lahore 4, 6, 96, 105–6, 108–10, 123–4 Lake, Gerard 28 Lal, Deepak 148 Lambada see Banjara land revenue 14, 23, 38, 55, 84 landlord 6, 10, 14–16, 18–20, 23–5, 30–2, 34, 36, 40, 46, 49–55, 58–9, 61, 65–6, 69, 71–2, 81, 91, 94, 101, 104, 111, 126, 131, 140–1, 148; see also zamindar law 2, 6, 7, 14, 35, 39, 45–9, 53, 81, 86, 90, 94, 120–1, 149 Leonard, Karen 111, 113, 147, 152, 154 Levi, Scott 153 Lewandowski, S.J. 154 Lombard, Denys 151 Lowji Wadia 116 Lucknow 3, 5–6, 105, 107–8, 110–12, 124, 140 Ludden, David 122–3, 149–51, 153, 155 Machado, Pedro 152 Macleod, J. 63 Madras 6, 11, 17, 79–81, 91, 104, 106, 114–15, 120, 135, 143 Madras Presidency 69; see also South India Mahadji Sindhia 22, 27–8 mahalwari 53, 141 Mahanadi 44 Maharashtra 24–5, 28–30, 35, 38, 58, 62–4, 71 Major, Andrew 148 Malabar 33, 70, 73, 79, 89, 116–17 Malacca 79 Malay 79 Malik, Z.U. 154 Malwa 5, 24–5, 27, 30, 35–6, 68, 71, 98, 109, 111 Mansa Ram 18 mansab 16 Maratha dominion (also domain/terrioty) 1, 23–31, 33, 38, 40, 63, 113,

Maratha state 31, 35, 42, 58, 69, 111, 122 Marshall, P.J. 145–7, 154 Marwari 97–8, 101, 115 Marx, Karl 7 Masulipatnam 79–81, 91, 104 Mathura 105 McAlpin, M. 76 McLane, J.R. 21, 147 McPherson, Kenneth 151 Mediterranean 79–80 merchants, Indian 40, 47, 74, 81, 83, 86–9, 101–2, 116, 118–19, 140 Metcalf, Thomas 154 Mewar 24, 36, 65 migration 1, 4–5, 54, 56–7, 62–3, 67, 71, 73, 97, 109, 111, 118, 125, 141 military-fiscal 14, 40–1, 58, 73, 106, 113, 119, 126, 131 Mill, James 3, 145 mining 121 Mir Qasim 21 mirasdar 53–4, 55, 63–5, 70–1 Mirzapur 112 Moreland, William 74, 127, 129, 151, 155 Morineau, Michel 153 Mosse, David 148 Mughal Empire 2–4, 10, 11, 13, 16–17, 20, 24–5, 35, 37, 53, 80, 83, 97, 104, 106, 109, 111, 113–15, 140, 147 Muhammad Reza Khan 22 Muhammad Shah 24 Mukherjee, Nilmani 150 Mukherjee, Rudrangshu 147 Mukhia, Harbans 148 Mullah Abdul Ghafur 77 Multan 105 Murshid Quli Khan 13, 20 Murton, Brian 150 Mutiny, the Indian 33, 48, 102 Mysore 3, 5–6, 17, 19, 28, 33–4, 41, 43, 53, 56, 69, 99, 108, 122, 140 Nadir Shah 18, 110 Nadkarni, R.V. 148 Nadri, Ghulam 137, 152, 157 Napoleonic wars 83 Naqvi, H.K. 123, 153, 155 Narain, Brij 127, 155 Narmada 127, 141 Nayaka 19 Nehru, Jawaharlal 40, 148 New World 4, 78 Nicholas, Stephen 152 Nield, Susan 118, 154

Index

Nizam-ul-Mulk 13, 19, 24–5, 28, 33–4 North India 15, 21, 24–5, 27–9, 37, 44, 52, 53, 68–9, 71, 84, 95–7, 101, 103, 106, 108, 119–20, 123–4, 129–30, 135 North, Douglass 150 Northern Circars 19, 58 Northrup, David 145 O’Brien, P.K. 148 opium 48, 67, 81, 85, 89, 98, 101, 121, 136, 143 Orissa 22, 25, 29, 42, 58, 62, 71–2, 113, 134 Ottoman Empire 79–80 Pacific Ocean 1, 120 pahikasht 67–8 Panipat, Third battle of 26–7, 31–2 Parker, G. 148 Parthasarathi, Prasannan 78, 128, 130, 136, 146 Patna 44, 105, 114, 119, 121–2, 134 Pearson, M.N. 151 Pelsaert, Francisco 127, 155 Pemble, John 147 Perlin, Frank 5, 62–3, 145–6, 149–51 Permanent Settlement 23, 53, 55, 59, 61, 69 Persia/Persian 18, 26, 48, 79, 109, 126, 153 Persian Gulf 79 Peshwa 5, 24–31, 41–2, 63, 111, 113, 150 Pindari 29 Pitt, William 84 Plassey, Battle of 6, 21, 58 poligar 19, 34, 148 Pomeranz, Kenneth 146 Pondicherry 17 population growth 50, 52, 54, 62, 67, 71, 114, 129, 135 ports 6, 71, 79–83, 86, 88–9, 99–100, 103–4, 106, 114–21, 123, 138, 143 Portuguese 79–80, 114, 120 pottery 94 Prakash, Om 76–8, 145, 151–2 private trade 3, 10, 22, 75, 81, 83–6, 89–90, 93, 101, 110, 121, 144 property right 6, 36, 39, 43, 46–7, 49–53, 55, 59, 62–4, 66–7, 69–71, 103, 118, 131, 137–8, 139, 141 proto-industrialization 7, 75, 78, 136, 145 public goods 5, 14, 39, 44–5, 49–50, 124, 137–9 Pune 3, 6, 17, 25, 29, 31, 107–8, 110–11, 113, 140

173

Punjab 11, 17, 25–6, 31–3, 41, 68, 71–2, 96–7, 105, 111, 120, 124, 137 Purnea 122, 134 Qutb Shahi rule 19 Raj, Kapil 120, 155 Rajasthan 11, 16, 27, 35–7, 53–4, 57, 64–5, 70, 72, 125–6 Rajputana 5, 16, 25, 29, 35–6, 55, 64, 97, 109, 120, 124; see also Rajasthan Rana, R.P. 36, 148 Ranjit Singh 32, 109 Rao, G.N. 150 Rao, Narayan Singh 149 Ray, Indrajit 151 Ray, Ratnalekha 59, 61, 149 Raychaudhuri, Tapan 76, 106, 128, 130, 132, 134, 151–3, 155–6 Red Sea 106, 117 regulations 48 revenue farming 3, 14, 29, 31, 35, 37, 52, 54, 57–8, 61, 62, 64, 68–9, 91, 111, 141 Richards, J.F. 111, 145–7, 156 Riello, Giorgio 151 Robb, Peter 120, 155 Robinson, James 146 Rohilkhand 29, 31–3, 67–8, 102, 111 Rohilla 17, 26, 31–2 Roy, Tirthankar 146, 148–52, 156–7 Royal Navy 83 ryotwari 53, 55, 70, 141 Sachdeva, V. 150 Sadashiv Bhau 26 Safavid Empire 79 Safdarjang 13 Sahai, Nandita 112, 152 Salem 69 saltpetre 81, 83, 85, 121 Sambhal 105 Sangwan, Satpal 156 Sarada Raju, A. 150 Sardesai, G.S. 148 Sarkar, Jadunath 110 Saurashtra 35–7 Sawai Jaisingh 65 Sen, Sudipta 55, 159 Seven Years War 20, 84 Shah Alam II 21 shipping 79–80, 86–7, 89, 116, 121, 136 Shivaji 23–4, 29–30, 32–3, 113–14 Sialkot 106

174

Index

Siddiqi, A. 149 Sidi 113–14 Sikh 22, 32–3, 43, 109, 111, 148 silk 48, 67, 94, 96, 97, 99, 112 silver 4, 59, 73–4, 76, 78, 81, 84, 87–8, 90, 120, 136, 155 Sind 25 Sindhia 22, 25–9, 36, 66, 147 Singh, Dilbagh 37, 64, 148 Singh, Khushwant 32, 148 Sinha, N.K. 150 Siraj-ud-daula 6, 21 Sirohi 37 Sivakumar, S.S. 151 Sivasubramonian, S. 76 Smith, Adam 84, 96 South India 20, 33–5, 52–3, 57, 93, 95, 99, 103, 114–15, 119, 121, 123–4, 128–30 Southeast Asia 73, 86 Spodek, Howard 155 steam engine 121 Stein, Burton 146, 149 Stern, Philip 45 Stokes, Eric 51, 65, 150 Studer, Roman 149 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 33, 96, 145–6, 148, 151–3 Subramanian, Lakhsmi 117, 146, 151, 154 sugar 67, 96, 124, 127, 143 Sur, Nikhil 150 Surat 35, 77, 79–81, 86, 88–9, 91, 101, 104–6, 114–17 Surma 44 Swamy, Anand 152, 157 Swarnalatha. P. 92, 152 Sylhet 44 talukdar 53–4 Tanjore 19–20, 33–4, 130, 134 Tapti 127, 141 tax 2, 5, 21, 27, 30–1, 79, 85, 115, 119, 128, 148 tea 81 temples 70, 103, 112, 118–19, 122, 125 textiles 3, 35, 48, 58, 62, 73, 77–8, 83, 85, 90–3, 97–8, 112, 114–16, 118, 121–3, 127, 141 Thomas, R.P. 150 Thomson, J.P. 147 Thornton, Edward 154 Tilly, Charles 148 Timberg, Thomas 153

Tipu Sultan 6, 34, 69 Tirunelveli 122 Tod, James 13, 36, 55, 65, 70, 146 Torri, Michelguglielmo 154 trade, Indo-European 11, 48, 73–5, 77, 79, 83, 91, 94–6, 101, 117, 119, 121–2, 140–1, 144 trade, overland 9, 12, 32, 44–5, 48, 75, 78–9, 94–5, 97, 100–1, 104, 107, 109, 119, 123, 129, 140, 142, 153 trade, river-borne 75, 97, 115, 126 Van Leur, Jakob 87 Varady, R.G. 153 Venetian merchants 80 Ventura, Jean-Baptiste 32 Vijayanagar 33 Virji Vora 77 Voelcker, J.A. 156 Vyamkoji 33 wage, levels and trends 78, 81, 127–8, 136–7 Wallerstein, I. 74, 151 War of Austrian Succession 20, 83 warfare 2, 6, 10, 14, 16, 19, 25, 28–9, 32–4, 39–40, 43–4, 48, 50–3, 55–7, 64, 68, 72, 80, 83–4, 88–9, 97–8, 99–100, 109–11, 113, 118, 126, 132, 138, 140 Waring, E.S. 147 warlord 2, 5, 10, 14–15, 17, 30, 43, 46, 51, 56, 81, 90, 106, 111, 138, 141 wars, Anglo-Maratha 19, 28–9, 32, 41, 53, 99 wars, Anglo-Sikh 32–3, 43 wars, Mysore 33–4 Washbrook, David 45, 145–6, 149 weavers 45, 78, 90–3, 115, 116 Webster, Anthony 152 Wellesley, Arthur 28 Western India 53, 62–5, 89, 91, 98, 117, 126 White, D.L. 154 Williamson, J.G. 156–7 Wink, Andre 149 Wodeyar 33 wool 94, 97, 99, 112 world history 1, 2, 4, 11, 139 Zalim Singh 37 zamindar 15, 18–21, 23, 27, 30, 36, 43, 53–4, 59, 61–2, 66, 86, 111, 131, 137, 141–2; see also landlord