State and Economy in India over Seven Hundred Years

Abstract

Indian economic history has tended to develop as a series of selfcontained specialisms. One area of expertise grew up around the analysis of the agrarian taxation of the Mughal empire of the seventeenth century. Heavily reliant on Persian documents, it has flourished in India, particularly at the Aligarh Muslim University. Another area intensively studied has been India's pattern of external trade during the era of the Portuguese, Dutch and English expansions. This work has been based on the papers of the European trading companies importing Indian textiles. A third well-trodden area has been the theory and practice of the revenue systems introduced by British colonial administrators in the nineteenth century as they transformed Mughal taxation of the agrarian product into a true tax on land owned. Yet neither the polemics between nationalists and apologists for empire at the end of the last century nor more recent forays into development economics have welded these disparate specialisms into a unified and comparative area of study.1 Against this background the achievement of the Cambridge Economic History of India is outstanding. Here for the first time it is possible to attain an overview of Indian economic history by reading a series of short but authoritative chapters. To anyone who has to try to teach or to learn this subject the value of these volumes is very great whatever one's disagreements in detail or preferred ideological bias. At the same time the main weakness of the CEHI is a reflection of this strength. The process of integration has begun, but it has not been pushed very far. It is difficult here to gain a broad impression of how the Indian economy might have changed over time or how features such as demography, foreign trade, agricultural production and state policy might have acted on each other. This article does not seek to offer a critique of these volumes as a whole; that would certainly be presumptuous and probably impossible. Instead it uses the CEHI in conjunction with work which has appeared since the early