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10 results

  • 1 - Prelude: The Mughal Empire, 1526–1750

  • Sudev Sheth, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    Bankrolling Empire
    Published online:
    16 November 2023
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023, pp 43-70

  • Summary

    Chapter 1, a prelude, provides necessary background about the Mughal Empire, and details about its conquest of Gujarat beginning in 1572. Standard histories portray conquest as swift and decisive. The picture I present is somewhat different. Akbar’s annexation of Gujarat was a slow and protracted effort requiring the astute balancing of military force and the pacification and absorption of local political elites into Mughal administration. A successful campaign, as we shall see, absorbed local elites into the Mughal idiom of hierarchy, privileges, duties, and system of wealth distribution. The arranging of tribute payments and indemnities was a core feature of this system. Money over the course of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries became central to Mughal political dispensation. This background chapter concludes by laying out key opportunities Mughal rule provided for the Jhaveri family as they built their influence.

  • Drawn-out Protests in China's Rustbelt: Land Revenue and the Limits to Bargained Authoritarianism

  • Xingyan Chen, Shaohua Zhan
  • Journal:
    The China Quarterly / Volume 252 / December 2022
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    13 July 2022, pp. 1162-1182
    Print publication:
    December 2022

  • The rise of the land revenue regime in China, characterized by land dispossession in the countryside and land redevelopment in the city, has sparked numerous protests. This study draws attention to the paradox that the regime has helped to mitigate labour unrest, at least temporarily, in China's Rustbelt, where millions of workers were laid-off in the 1990s. Based on field research in Anshan, Liaoning province, and data from other cities in the Rustbelt, this article shows that laid-off workers’ protests persisted much longer than previously thought, largely owing to a lack of local fiscal resources to meet workers’ demands. Only with the growing revenue from land sales in the recent decade has the local government finally been able to ease the tension with laid-off workers. The article argues that bargained authoritarianism, or “buying stability,” widely considered to be an effective strategy by the local state to control social unrest, has its limits, mainly owing to its dependence on local fiscal resources. Recent economic downturns and declining land revenue will disrupt this strategy, leading to protracted protests and struggles in future.

  • 4 - The Patchwork Nature of Colonial Governance

  • from Part II - Historical Roots
  • Adnan Naseemullah
  • Book:
    Patchwork States
    Published online:
    09 June 2022
    Print publication:
    23 June 2022, pp 77-103

  • Summary

    This chapter explores some of the particular dynamics of differentiated colonial governance at the apex of colonial rule, and how governance changed in response to political and economic shocks of the twentieth century. It begins with the establishment of the Government of India following the rebellion of 1857, and the general characteristics of colonial rule in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It then provides snapshots of aspects of governance, based on a variety of data from the 1910s, differentiated by governance category. It provides data on land revenue and total revenue, judicial and nonjudicial stamp tax, income taxes and the number of government servants, police deployment and army recruitment and deployment. The chapter then surveys some of the key changes in politics and government of the last decades of the colonial era, including economic dislocations and the rise of the nationalist government. I use data from the 1940s, including revenue and policing, to demonstrate that these governance distinctions remain relevant despite significant pressures toward greater institutionalization, and that the influence of the Indian National Congress itself varied by territory.

  • 4 - Land revenue and rural society

  • John F. Richards, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book:
    The Mughal Empire
    Published online:
    28 March 2012
    Print publication:
    18 March 1993, pp 79-93

  • Summary

    In 1580 Todar Mal began a drastic experiment designed to completely restructure the Mughal agrarian revenue system. The revenue ministry under Todar Mal established a fresh, accurate revenue assessment to be placed against each village, pargana, revenue circle, district, and province. In forcing its agrarian system upon the variegated aristocracy of the North Indian plain, the Mughals began to compress and shape a new social class. The social class found itself becoming more dependent upon the state for its prosperity and for an essential aspect of its identity. Mughal success in the countryside relied upon the services of numerous local members of a gentry class whose interests and activities were both rural and urban. Akbar's new policy forced grantees to shift their holdings to selected parganas and districts within the central provinces of North India where these tax-free land grants could be better managed and controlled. Such grants provided a living to a substantial number of Muslim and non-Muslim gentry.

  • 3 - Western India

  • from II - Agrarian Relations
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 177-206

  • Summary

    Western India comprises roughly the long narrow coastal area from the Rann of Kutch to north Kanara; the wide flat Gujarat plains and the Deccan plateaus. The new system of survey and assessment framed by G. Wingate and Goldsmid in 1835, called the Bombay Survey System, was introduced with some modifications into all the government villages of the Presidency, including British Gujarat. After the conquest of greater Gujarat in 1803 and 1817, the Peshwa's domains, about one-third of Gujarat, became part of Bombay Presidency; another third of Gujarat proper and part of Saurashtra was assigned to the Gaikwad's Baroda state, and in the remaining third, about 150 small princely states were recognized. From the middle of the nineteenth century, western India began to emerge from the sustained depression of the first third of the century, when prices and output were low, and when large tracts of land and many villages and small towns were deserted.

  • 4 - South India

  • from II - Agrarian Relations
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 207-241

  • Summary

    South India is a region of great physical diversity. This is also a region of great social and historical diversity. This chapter starts with a description of the agrarian structure as the British found it. Next, it describes changes in agrarian relations and government policy affecting them, particularly as regards the land revenue, between 1792 and 1855. Three regions are described separately: Madras Presidency excluding British Malabar and south Kanara, the west coast, and Hyderabad and Mysore. Since there are much more data available on such matters as agricultural prices, wages, rents and conditions of tenancy from 1855 onwards, the section covering the period 1855 to 1947 is organized rather differently. After a discussion of changes in governmental policy, the chapter describes the changes in the fortunes of the main agricultural groups including landowners, tenants and labourers.

  • 1 - Northern and Central India

  • from II - Agrarian Relations
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 36-86

  • Summary

    The upper Gangetic region, which today falls largely within the boundaries of Uttar Pradesh, exercised a palmary influence on the evolution of the Indian landholding system in the colonial period. When the British annexed the upper Gangetic region and formed the Ceded and Conquered Provinces in 1801-03, they at first made considerable use of the magnate element for local revenue collection purposes. Apart from increasing the importance of cash in the agrarian economy, the other important change effected by the British revenue system in the first half of the nineteenth century was to make the incidence of the revenue demand more uniform, at least within individual districts. The last half-century of British rule in the United Provinces witnessed a sharp intensification of agrarian difficulties and an increasing reponsiveness of the land revenue administration to political pressures. By the beginning of the century the net cultivated area reached almost its maximum extent of some 35 to 36 million acres.

  • 2 - Eastern India

  • from II - Agrarian Relations
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 86-177

  • Summary

    This chapter emphasizes that despite certain elements of continuity, the pre-British agrarian society and system was not quite the same as that which evolved during British rule. The continuity of the small peasant economy as the basic organization of agricultural production, and the continuities in terms of certain agrarian institutions, and of the numerical sizes of some economic groups, such as sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, concealed a significant process of change. Initially, throughout eastern India, the most decisive influence was the British policy of maximizing land revenue, which gradually lost its first potency, particularly in Bengal and Bihar, with the share of the state in the total agricultural produce eventually shrinking to insignificance. In other parts of eastern India, too, the old order could scarcely be wholly preserved, and the composition of the landed society considerably changed, mainly as a result of the growth of a land market, an altogether new development in the rural society.

  • XII - The Monetary System and Prices

  • from PART II - c. 1500–1750
  • Edited by Tapan Raychaudhuri, Irfan Habib
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 1982, pp 360-381

  • Summary

    Until the reign of Sher Shah, the principal coin in circulation in northern India was the billon sikandari, a copper coin with a small silver alloy, which had developed out of the progressive debasement of the silver tanka of the Delhi sultans. While the rupee became the principal coin for commercial transactions and tax payments, the Mughals issued a gold coin, muhr of 169 grains troy. The prices of foodgrains may theoretically be the best index of the movement of the general price-level, because of the fact that in a mainly agrarian economy, these determine to a large extent the costs and prices of all commodities. In the experience of modern capitalist economies, the doubling of prices during the first sixty years of the seventeenth century and again the first fifty years of the eighteenth century, would hardly merit the designation of inflation. The income of the ruling class came from collection of taxes, mainly the land revenue.

  • 2 - Agrarian Economy

  • from III - Northern India under the Sultanate
  • Edited by Tapan Raychaudhuri, Irfan Habib
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 1982, pp 48-76

  • Summary

    Agriculture was carried on by peasants living in villages. The first ruler credited with digging canals for promoting agriculture was the immigrant 'Qarauna' sultan, Ghiyasuddin Tughluq. It was under Flruz Tughluq in the period 1351-86 that the biggest network of canals known in India until the nineteenth century was created. The peasants of the Delhi sultanate cultivated a very large number of crops. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the introduction of sericulture, or the breeding of the mulberry silkworm for producing true silk. In the western Panjab, which had seen two centuries of Ghaznavid rule, the Islamic taxation system was in operation. Barani introduces a new relationship in medieval economy: the relationship between land revenue and agricultural production. The iqtā's were the main instrument for transferring agrarian surplus to the ruling class and its soldiery. Another form of transfer of revenue claims existed, which went largely to maintain the religious intelligentsia and other dependants of the ruling class.