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.
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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
Aurangzebs religious policies, and his later Deccan campaigns, and traced the decline in
Mughal economy, institutions, and society to Aurangzebs faulty policies. He also viewed
the peasant rebellions that destroyed Mughal political stability as a Hindu reaction to
Aurangzebs 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. Sharmas The Religious Policy of the Mughal
Emperors (1940) and Ishwari Prasads 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
Chandras 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 Aurangzebs 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 Habibs 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 empires political edifice.
Irfan Habibs 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 empires 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 Alams The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab,
1707-1748 (1986) and Chetan Singhs 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 Baileys 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 Baileys 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.