The mid-eighteenth-century background

Abstract

At its height the Mughal empire had imposed on the greater part of the Indian sub-continent a fair measure of political unity. Historians of a later generation have equated the decline of the Mughal empire with sharp downward trends in the Indian economy, and assumed that by the mid-eighteenth century it had reached its lowest ebb. The categories used in the Mughal revenue literature in describing villages are a useful if somewhat indirect source of information on the subject for northern India. The identification of different levels of land rights in India has been hag-ridden by the confused use of terms both in the Persian and the English sources. By the mid-eighteenth century, development of market forces had made deep inroads into the subsistence character of Indian agriculture, though the producer continued to meet all his requirements of food out of his own produce.

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