India and the Early Modern World

India and the Early Modern World provides an authoritative and wide-ranging survey of the Indian subcontinent over the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, set within a global context. This book explores questions critical to our understanding of early modern India. How, for instance, were Indians’ religious beliefs, their ways of life, and the horizons of their learning changing over this period? What was happening in the countryside and towns, to culture and the arts, and to the state and its power? Were such experiences comparable or linked to those in other parts of the world? Can we speak of a global early modernity, therefore, within which India played an important role? Organised thematically, each chapter engages with such key issues, debates, and concepts, covering wide ground as it connects, compares, and contrasts developments witnessed across early modern South Asia to those around the globe. Drawing on the fruits of research in numerous fields over the past fifty years and rich in detail, India and the Early Modern World is a pathbreaking volume written engagingly and accessibly with scholars, students, and non-specialists in mind

The pattern of trade in seventeenth-century Mughal India: towards an economic explanation

This paper identifies the absence of both sub-continentally oriented histories which knit together the land and sea trades, and convincing explanations of the persistence of the Indo-Central Asian trade (for example) despite the growing Indo-European trade from the seventeenth-century. The customs-union model usefully approximates this trading-situation (i.e. the Europeans were given a privileged trading position by the Mughals vis-à-vis the Central Asians). It is used to structure the investigation and provide suitable explanatory hypotheses, as it suggests the separation of the likely creative and divertive effects of such privileged relations. Two tradeables (and related industries) are examined. The textile-industry demonstrates the possibility for trade-creation (i.e. due to substitution between otherwise regionally-specialised production-centres as in Gujarat, and the utilisation of spare capacity as in Bengal); it is not, however, possible to comment on the extent to which trade-creation took place. The horse-trade persisted because of limited trade-diversion. This was in turn the consequence of the absence of a European supply of horses, on the one hand, and the continued/unchanging geographical comparative advantage and demand conditions in the Mughal Empire, on the other. The necessary extensions to the model and analysis – for a complete understanding of sub-continental trading patterns – are noted (e.g. extending geographical and chronological scope, investigating private trading, and introducing balance of payments issues)