3 - The South

Summary

Three centuries separate the high point of Vijayanagara authority and the establishment of undisputed British rule in south India. The death of Krishnadevarāya in 1529 may be taken to mark the beginning of this troubled political era, and the British defeat, in 1818, of the Marathas, who had established an important presence in the macro-region during the late seventeenth century, is taken as the terminal date. In the historiography of the late- and post-Vijayanagara periods and the British period, these centuries are, with some justice, considered as a time of extreme disorder. This was engendered by warfare among the numerous indigenous political entities of the southern peninsula culminating in the brilliant expansion of the Mysore state of Hyder ‘Alī and Tipū Sultān, and this warfare was exacerbated by the intrusion of powers from outside the region: the Deccani sultanates of Bljapur and Golconda, the Marathas, the Mughals, the Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the French and British in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If it were to be argued that the performance of the south Indian economy depended upon stable state authority (and the British did so argue in justifying their rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), then it would be expected that the economy was a shambles for much of the entire period. But such a conclusion is unwarranted by the substantial, and increasingly diverse, extant evidence on the economy of the macro-region during the later medieval period.