1 - Mughal India

Summary

It is hardly necessary to observe that the majority of the inhabitants of the Indian sub-continent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries passed their entire lives in a predominantly agrarian village-oriented environment, and that only a small minority were acquainted with urban patterns of living, however loosely the term ‘urban’ is applied. Yet regardless of the exact proportion (which can never be known), the urban population of Mughal India possessed an economic and cultural significance far exceeding its actual size. Under the Mughals, as under earlier régimes, but now with a greater degree of intensity, the cities and towns of the sub-continent fulfilled diverse and overlapping roles. The largest were thriving centres of manufacturing and marketing, banking and entrepreneurial activities, intersections in a network of communications by land and water which crossed and recrossed the sub-continent and extended far beyond, to south-east Asia, to the Middle East, to western Europe, and elsewhere. Similarly, in a contracted network of regional or sub-regional markets, smaller urban centres performed a more modest role in relation to local commerce, local resources and local consumer needs. Almost everywhere they went in the Mughal empire at its apogee under Jahāngīr and Shāhjahān keen-eyed European travellers noted the activity and prosperity of the urban centres, and especially those most heavily engaged in weaving and those ancillary crafts inseparable from the manufacture of textiles.