India in the early modern world economy: Modes of production, reproduction and exchange

Journal of Global History

Volumn 2, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 87-111

  Washbrook, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950019436     PISSN: 17400228     EISSN: 17400236     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1740022807002057     Document Type: Review

References (123)

1. Needless to say, India was not a nation-state in this period and the extent to which 'it' possessed an integrated economy, rather than a series of regional economies themselves closely related to 'networks of trade and civilization' beyond its shores, is open to debate. India is used here as a loose territorial designation. See K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and civilisation in the Indian Ocean: an economic history from the rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
2. Babur, The Baburnama: memoirs of Babur, prince and emperor, Trans. W. M. Thackston, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
3. Paul Bairoch, 'International industrialization levels from 1750-1980', Journal of European Economic History, 11, Fall, 1982.
4. Prasannan Parthasarathi, 'Rethinking wages and competitiveness in the eighteenth century: Britain and South India', Past & Present, 158, 1998;
5. K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: economy and civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
6. Quoted in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The political economy of commerce: Southern India, 1500-1650, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 7.
7. Most notably, Subrahmanyam, Political economy;
8. Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the economy of Bengal, 1630-1720, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985;
9. Chaudhuri, Trade and civilisation.
10. Irfan Habib, 'Potentialities of capitalistic development in the economy of Mughal India, Journal of Economic History, 29, 1, 1969.
11. Irfan Habib, 'The technology and economy of Mughal India', Indian Economic and Social History Review [IESHR] 17, 1, 1980;
12. K. N. Chaudhuri, 'The structure of Indian textile industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries', IESHR, 11, 2/3, 1974;
13. S. Arasaratnam, Merchants, companies and commerce on the Coromandel coast, 1650-1740, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986.
14. David Washbrook, 'South India 1770-1840: the colonial transition', Modern Asian Studies [MAS], 38, 3, 2004.
15. Om Prakash, European commercial enterprise in pre-colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998;
16. the total trade carried in English 'bottoms' may even have been 2.5 million pieces, K. N. Chaudhuri, The trading world of Asia and the English East India Company, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
17. W. H. Moreland, The agrarian system of Moslem India, Cambridge: Heffer, 1929.
18. Irfan Habib, The agrarian system of Mughal India, 1556-1707, Bombay: Asia, 1963.
19. Irfan Habib, 'Population' and 'Monetary system and prices', in Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib, eds., The Cambridge economic history of India I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
20. Prakash, Dutch East India Company.
21. Prasannan Parthasarathi, The transition to a colonial economy: weaver, merchants and kings in South India 1720-1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
22. Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta, 'The early modern great divergence: wages, prices and economic development in Europe and Asia, 1500-1800', Economic History Review, 59, February 2006.
23. Ashok V. Desai, 'Population and standards of living in Akbar's time', IESHR, 9, 1, 1972,
24. and 'A second look', IESHR, 15, 1, 1978;
25. Satish Chandra and H. Fukazawa, 'Standard of living', in Raychaudhuri and Habib, Cambridge history I.
26. Kingsley Davis, The population of India and Pakistan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951;
27. Sumit Guha, Health and population in India: from the earliest times to the present, London: Hurst, 2001;
28. Desai, 'Population' and 'Second look'.
29. Guha, Health.
30. For example, in Bengal between 1661 and 1671 alone, Om Prakash has calculated average annual rice prices oscillating between Rs 27 and Rs 71 per 100 maunds. Om Prakash, 'Silver influx and prices - the case of early modern India', Paper presented at 13th International Economic History Congress, Buenos Aires, 2002;
31. for South India, see also Tsukasa Mizushima, Nattar and socio-economic change in South India in 18th and 19th centuries, Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1986; for North India, Habib, 'Systems of agricultural production', pp. 222-4.
32. David Washbrook, 'Land and labour in late eighteenth-century South India: the golden age of the pariah?', in Peter Robb, ed., Dalit movements and the meanings of labour in India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993.
33. Ravi Ahuja, 'Labour relations in the early colonial context: Madras 1750-1800', Modern Asian Studies [MAS], 36, 4, 2002.
34. Arasaratnam, Merchants.
35. Andre Wink, Land and sovereignty in India: agrarian society and politics under the eighteenth-century Maratha Swajya, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
36. Washbrook, 'Golden age'.
37. Richard M. Eaton, The rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
38. David Ludden, Peasant history in South India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
39. Habib, 'Systems of agricultural production';
40. Paul R. Greenhough, 'Review of Irfan Habib and Joseph Schwartzberg, An atlas of the Mughal Empire: political and economic maps', Journal of Economic History, 44, 3, 1984.
41. David Washbrook, 'The commercialization of agriculture in colonial India: production, subsistence and reproduction in the "dry" south', MAS, 28, 3, 1994.
42. On the extent of the grain market in Bengal, see Rajat Datta, Society, economy and the market: commercialization in rural Bengal c.1760-1800, Delhi: Manohar, 2000.
43. Clive Dewey, 'Images of the village community: a study in Anglo-Indian ideology', MAS, 6, 3, 1972.
44. David Ludden, Agrarian history.
45. Washbrook, 'South India'.
46. Eaton, Rise of Islam.
47. Ludden, Agrarian history.
48. C. A. Bayly, Rulers, townsmen and bazaars: North India society in the age of British expansion, 1770-1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
49. Karl Polanyi, The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our times, Boston: Beacon Press, 1944.
50. Habib, Agrarian system.
51. Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, rajput and sepoy: the ethno-history of the military labour market in Hindustan, 1450-1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
52. Washbrook, 'Commercialization'.
53. A sense of this pattern of development is gained from Burton Stein, Peasant state and society in medieval South India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980.
54. T. Scarlett Epstein, Yesterday, today and tomorrow: Mysore villages re-visited, London, 1973.
55. Simon Commander, 'The Jajmani system in North India: an examination of its logic and status across two centuries', MAS, 17, 2 1983.
56. Burton Stein, 'The economic functions of a medieval South Indian temple', Journal of Asian Studies, 19, 2, 1960.
57. Nicholas B. Dirks, The hollow crown: the ethno-history of a South Indian little kingdom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
58. William R. Pinch, Peasants and monks in British India, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996;
59. Warrior ascetic and Indian empires, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
60. Ludden, Peasant history.
61. John F. Richards, ed., The monetary system of the Mughal Empire, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.
62. Irfan Habib, 'Merchant communities in pre-colonial India', in J. D. Tracy, The rise of merchant empires, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990;
63. B. D. Grover, 'An integrated pattern of commercial life in the rural society of North India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries', in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed., Money and the market in India, 1100-1700, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994.
64. For the rise of European inter-Asian trade, both corporate and private, see Prakash, European commercial enterprise.
65. Mizushima, Nattar.
66. K. N. Chaudhuri, 'Markets and traders in India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries', in K. N. Chaudhuri and Clive Dewey, eds., Economy and society, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1975;
67. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed., Merchants, markets and the state in early modern India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.
68. Grover, Integrated pattern;
69. A. I. Chicherov, India: economic development in the 16th-18th centuries, Moscow: Moscow Publishing House, 1971.
70. David Washbrook, 'Sovereignty, property, land and labour in colonial South India', in Huri Islamoglu, Constituting modernity, London: I. B. Tauris, 2004.
71. Douglass C. North, Institutions, institutional change and economic performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
72. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 'Rural industry and commercial agriculture in late seventeenth-century South India', Past & Present, 126, 1990.
73. Whether the relations of adimai in South India actually constituted slavery is a moot point, but 'self-selling' was a common feature of famine conditions. Benedikte Hjelje, 'Slavery and agricultural bondage in South India in the nineteenth century', Scandinavian Journal of Economic History, 15, 1/2, 1967.
74. Parthasarathi, Transition.
75. David Washbrook, 'From comparative sociology to global history: Britain and India in the pre-history of modernity, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient [JESHO], 40, 4, 1997.
76. Dirks, Hollow crown.
77. Baramahal Records. VI. Madras, Government of Madras Press, 1907, p. 58.
78. Chaudhuri, Trading world.
79. Washbrook, 'From comparative sociology'.
80. Max Weber, The religion of India: the sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, Trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale, London: Allen and Unwin, 1958;
81. Louis Dumont, Homo hierarchicus: the caste system and its implications, Trans. Mark Sainsbury, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1970.
82. David W. Rudner, Caste and capitalism in colonial India: the Nattukottai Chettiars, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
83. Mattison Mines, The warrior merchants: textiles, trade and territory in South India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
84. On guns and gun-making, Randolph G. S. Cooper, The Anglo-Maratha campaigns and the contest for India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003;
85. shipbuilding may have been one of the first industries 'outsourced' to India, see S. Sangwan, 'Shipbuilding in India during the company rule', in G. V. Rahamanickam and Y. Subharayalu, eds., History of traditional navigation, Thanjavur: Tamil University Press, 1989.
86. Nanditha Krishna, Arts and crafts of Tamilnadu, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 1992.
87. Dharma Kumar, 'The forgotten sector: services in the Madras presidency in the first half of the nineteenth century', in Dharma Kumar, ed., Colonialism, property and the state, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998.
88. Stephen P. Blake, 'The patrimonial-bureaucratic empire of the Mughals', in H. Kulke, ed., The State in India 1000-1700, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
89. John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 85.
90. John F. Richards, ed., Kingship and authority in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978.
91. For an extended critique of Moosvi, see Frank W. Ellis, 'In what way, and to what degree, did the Mughal State inhibit Smithian growth in India in the seventeenth century', Working Paper No. 14/05, Global Economic History Network [GEHN], London School of Economics, 2005.
92. Frank Perlin, 'State formation reconsidered', MAS, 19, 3, 1985.
93. Richards, Monetary system.
94. For the significance of aristocratic consumption, Bayly, Rulers.
95. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 'The Mughal State - structure or process? Reflections on recent western historiography', IESHR, 29, 3, 1992.
96. Richards, Mughal Empire.
97. Alam, Crisis;
98. Wink, Land and sovereignty;
99. Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600-1814, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996;
100. Frank Perlin, 'Of white whale and countrymen in the eighteenth-century Maratha Deccan', Journal of Peasant Studies, 5, 3, 1978.
101. See, for example, Kate L. Brittlebank, Tipu's search for legitimacy: Islam and kingship in a Hindu domain, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
102. Such as those of Virji Vora in Surat and Kasi Veerana in Madras. See M. N. Pearson, Merchants and rulers in Gujarat, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976;
103. Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C. A. Bayly, 'Portfolio capitalists and the economy of early modern India', in Subrahmanyam, Merchants;
104. A. Dasgupta, 'Indian merchants and the trade in the Indian Ocean', in Raychaudhuri and Habib, Cambridge history.
105. Parathasarathi, Transition;
106. Frank Perlin, 'Proto-industrialization and pre-colonial South Asia', Past & Present, 98, 1983.
107. Karen Leonard, 'Indigenous banking firms in Mughal India', Comparative Studies in Society and History [CSSH], 21, 1, 1979;
108. John F. Richards, 'Mughal state finance and the premodern world economy', CSSH, 23, 2, 1981;
109. John F. Richards, Power, administration and finance in Mughal India, Aldershot: Varorium, 1993.
110. P. J. Marshall, Bengal - the British bridgehead, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
111. Rajat K. Ray, 'Colonial penetration and the initial resistance', Indian Historical Review, 12, 1/2, 1986.
112. W. W. Rostow, The stages of economic growth: a non-Communist manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.
113. Kenneth Pomeranz, The great divergence: China, Europe and the making of the modern world economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
114. Jan de Vries, The first modern economy: success, failure and perseverance in the Dutch Economy 1500-1815, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
115. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, eds., The birth of a consumer society: the commercialisation of eighteenth-century England, London: Europe Publishers, 1982.
116. Karl Marx, Capital: a critique of political economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin Books, 1990.
117. Some historians have seen evidence of indigenous 'modernization' in states such as that of Tipu Sultan. Irfan Habib, ed., Confronting colonialism, Delhi: Tulika Books, 1999.
118. Marx, Capital.
119. Burton Stein, 'State and economy reconsidered', MAS, 19, 3, 1985.
120. Lakshmi Subramanian, Indigenous capital and imperial expansion: Bombay, Surat and the West Coast, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996;
121. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Improvising empire: Portuguese trade and settlement in the Bay of Bengal 1500-1700, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994;
122. Ashin Dagupta, Malabar in Asian trade 1740-1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
123. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Penumbral visions: making polities in early modern South India, Delhi; Oxford University Press, 2001