18th Century Debates (I)

Eighteenth Century Debates The 18 century in India witnessed two important transitions. The first transition occurred in the first half of the century from the Mughal political economy to regional political orders. The second was the transition after the battles of Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764) in the polity, society and economy, as the English East India Company began to rise in prominence. th

The 18th century has been a subject of intense debate among historians in recent times. The early historiography of the 18th century focused on Mughal decline with special reference to the administrative and religious policies of the rulers. From 1924 to 1930 Sarkar wrote a five volume work titled History of Aurangzeb. From 1932 to 1950 Sarkar published a four volume work titled Fall of the Mughal Empire. Sarkar studied Aurangzeb’s religious policies, and his later Deccan campaigns, and traced the decline in Mughal economy, institutions, and society to Aurangzeb’s faulty policies. He also viewed the peasant rebellions that destroyed Mughal political stability as a Hindu reaction to Aurangzeb’s Muslim orthodoxy. The religious policy of the Mughal Emperors and its role in Mughal decline in the 18th century were also the themes of S.R. Sharma’s The Religious Policy of the Mughal Emperors (1940) and Ishwari Prasad’s The Mughal Empire. All these earlier studies presented the 18th century as a politically chaotic, economically crisis ridden, and socially and religiously a period of strife. From the late 1950s, Marxist historians began to present Mughal decline in economic and materialist terms. Among the early works with a Marxist orientation was Satish Chandra’s Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707-1740 (1959). In this work Chandra argued that structural flaws in the working of the Mughal institutions of jagir and mansab were responsible for the fiscal crisis that gripped the Mughal Empire. He argued that the Mughal failure to ensure the smooth functioning of these institutions that became very pronounced in Aurangzeb’s reign and was an important cause of imperial collapse. From the 1960s onwards, economic historians with a Marxist orientation explained Mughal decline and the resulting political and social unrest in fiscal terms. The most influential of these works was Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 15561707 (1963). In this Habib argued that the high rate of land revenue demanded from the peasants caused large-scale rural exploitation, leading to peasant migration and rebellion. The agrarian crisis that gripped the Mughal Empire contributed considerably to weakening the empire’s political edifice. Irfan Habib’s theory of a fiscally centralized state was accepted by Athar Ali in his work The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (1966). However, Athar Ali attributed the Mughal decline not so much to the high revenue demand but to the shortage of jagirs. The deficit, he said, was created because of Mughal expansion into less fertile lands, especially in the Deccan. This resulted in an increase in the number of nobles without a corresponding

increase in jagir lands. The shortage of jagirs created an administrative problem, which, in turn, added to the economic crisis. J.F. Richards, in his work titled Mughal Administration in Golconda (1975), challenged the idea that there was a shortage of jagirs in the Deccan. His conclusion that the Deccan was not a deficit area questioned the argument that be-jagiri (absence of jagirs) was a major cause of Mughal decline. In the 1980s Satish Chandra once again shifted the focus of the debate to the economic aspects of the imperial crisis. Chandra, in his article ‘Review of the Crisis of the Jagirdari System’ (1982) argued that as jagirs became few and relatively infertile, the gap between the jama (estimated revenue) and hasil (actual yield) increased. This adversely affected the ability of state officers to ensure regular revenue collection. Thus, Satish Chandra argues that a jagirdari crisis with a distinct economic dimension undermined Mughal stability in the 18th century. The decline of the Mughal Empire has also been viewed by some scholars as a cultural failure. Athar Ali, in his article ‘The Passing of Empire: The Mughal Case’ (1975), argues that between 1500 and 1700 Europe witnessed tremendous technological and intellectual progress and emerged as a centre of world commerce. As Europe emerged as the main market for luxury crafts manufactures it also attracted high value products from traditional Eastern markets. This increased the cost of luxury items in India and therefore intensified the financial difficulties of the ruling class. The ruling class tried to solve its difficulties by increasing the agrarian exploitation. He argued that such wrong imperial policies contributed to the empire’s eventual demise. One feature of the early works on the 18th century, their differences notwithstanding, was that they projected the 18th century as a ‘Dark Age’, its hallmark being political chaos and economic decline. These works focused on the imperial centre alone and took no note of the various ways in which Mughal institutions were being modified and transformed at local and regional levels so as to pave the way for a shift of power away from Delhi to the regions. Alongside, however, there also existed alternate views on the 18th century. Historians like Hermann Goetz and Bernard Cohn moved beyond the Mughal agrarian system and the machinery of revenue extraction in their works on the 18th century. Goetz, in his book The Crisis of Indian Civilization in the 18 th and Early 19th Centuries: The Genesis of IndoMuslim Civilization (1938), documented the resilience of Mughal society as reflected in the evolving musical and architectural styles following the imperial collapse. Bernard Cohn, in his article ‘The Initial British Impact on India: A Case Study of the Benares Region’ (1960), focused on groups like zamindars and amildars and tried to study how they manipulated the imperial and regional power structures to carve out independent spaces for themselves. It was on these carefully crafted administrative and fiscal networks that British rule later structured itself. Both Goetz and Cohn, though

differing in their objectives, show that imperial collapse needs to be examined alongside the emergence of new power centres. Such studies also demand a reconsideration of the centralized nature of Mughal governance. A new group of historians have emphasized a range of factors that led to imperial decline and encouraged regional economic and political dynamism. They emphasize different non-agricultural strands that sustained the local economies. Ashin Das Gupta points out that even though inland trade increased, export trade and port cities suffered a setback in the face of European advances. Ashin Das Gupta, in his work Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat (1979), shows how the port city of Surat in Gujarat declined around 1720 as did the port cities of Massulipatnam in Madras and Dhaka in Bengal. He further points out that while these port cities were in decline, colonial port cities like Bombay, Madras and Calcutta rose to prominence. B.R. Grover, in his article ‘An Integrated Pattern of Commercial Life in the Rural Society of North India during the 17 th and 18th Centuries’ (1966), argues that as a result of foreign invasions, European and English competition in trade and the ruin of the Mughal nobility, local rural commercial production found new avenues in the provincial markets within the subcontinent. He argued that this greatly compensated for the comparative loss of foreign trade with regard to handicrafts and cottage industries. Karen Leonard, in her article ‘The Great Firm Theory of the Decline of the Mughal Empire’ (1979), emphasizes the movement of mercantile from Delhi to the regional centres as the crucial factor which promoted the growth of regional political economy and the relative decline of Delhi. The shift of credit and trade of the great banking firms to the regional centres was accompanied by the emergence of a mobile service class which could perform multiple functions: trade, accounting as well as revenue collection. The link between war, pillage and the regional economies was examined by Stewart Gordon and Burton Stein. Burton Stein, in his article ‘State Formation and Economy Reconsidered’ (1985), advanced the theory of military fiscalism as a revenue extracting and distributing process involving the military. He said that in the context of war, large military establishments had to be maintained, which made the regularity of revenue collection an ever more pressing necessity. This was ensured, in large parts of south India, by active involvement of the military in revenue collection. Thus, according to Stein, war and military mobilization were the main agents of change in the 18th century. In 1977, Stewart Gordan advanced a model of state building in the Malwa territory that depended on an economy sustained by marauding by the Marathas as they integrated the region into their commercialized polity. Gordan advanced this thesis in his article titled ‘The Slow Conquest: Administrative Integration of Malwa into the Maratha Empire, 1720-1760’.

An entirely different argument on state formation was advanced by Richard Barnett in his book North India between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British, 1720-1801 (1980). Barnett argued that the economy was sustained by the sophistication with which the Nawabs concealed from the British the true extent of their revenue resources. Several recent studies have argued for the need to study the 18 th century on its own terms and to adequately study the emergence of regional political orders. Two such works are Muzaffar Alam’s The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707-1748 (1986) and Chetan Singh’s Region and Empire: Punjab in the 17 th Century (1991). In these region based studies, the dissociation of the region from the centre has been studied in order to understand the nature of the political transformation that occurred in the 18th century. The studies locate the changes in the 18 th century in the conflict-prone functioning of the Mughal Empire where Delhi, rather than exercising centralized control, began to play the role of a mere coordinator between the regions and social groups. The scholars emphasized the increasing assertiveness of the regional powers. A pioneering work published in 1992 was Christopher Bailey’s book titled Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars. According to Bailey, the rise of the regions was the result of three important developments. The first was the emergence of a cross-caste mercantile organization and its involvement in politics. He says that the proliferation of the Mughal practice of revenue farming meant a merger of merchant and agrarian interests resulting in the emergence of a new class of intermediaries. The second development was the gentrification process. This brought together a class of scribes, accountants and other Mughal service groups that served the new regional powers and established themselves in the small towns or kasbahs. Finally, Bailey draws attention to the practice of military fiscalism. This meant the maintenance of large armies and their deployment in revenue collection. The emphasis in Bailey’s work was on the rise of intermediaries. These intermediaries depended on Mughal military and financial institutions and emerged as new power centres. It was only later in the 18th century that these groups began to disappear with the rise of the East India Company. Thus, the studies on the first half of the 18th century suggest that far from being the ‘Dark Ages’, the period was marked by significant economic and social change, resulting in the emergence of regional polities even as the edifice of Mughal imperialism collapsed.