Innovative Historiography
HARBANS MUKHIA
THE ECONOMY OF THE MUGHAL EMPIRE C. 1595: A STATISTICAL STUDY by Shireen Moosvi Oxford University Press, 1987, 442 pp., 195
Sept-Oct 1987, volume 11, No 5

The historiography of medieval India saw its most significant break in the 1920’s when W.H. Moreland published his three major works: India at the Death of Akbar, From Akbar to Aurangzeb, and the Agrarian System of Moslem India. Moreland had sought to understand the working of medieval, specially Mughal Indian economy in all its various aspects—the systems of agricultural and non-agricultural production, internal and external trade, patterns of social consumption, famines, size of population, revenue administration, standards of living of different social strata and so forth. For this vast project Moreland had at his disposal a rather narrow data base but an imaginative mind. He derived his information from the medieval court chronicles, the European travellers’ account of the seventeenth century and the records of the East India Companies. And if he used a great deal of imagination to extract meaning out of the most negligible bit of information, he nevertheless strictly followed the contours of the available evidence in developing his argument. If anything, his writing would appear a shade too puritanical compared, for example, with the verbosity of M. Habib’s 102-page ‘Introduction’ to the second volume of Elliot and Dowson’s History of India.

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