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The Mughal Polity—A Critique of Revisionist Approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

M. Athar Ali
M. Athar Ali
Affiliation:
Aligarh, India
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Extract

The nature of the pre-colonial Indian state, especially as one could see it in similarity or opposition to the state in Europe, has exercised a particular fascination since the seventeenth century, when François Bernier spelled out his theory about Oriental monarchies, with special reference to the Mughal Empire and Turkey. It may be recalled that he saw eastern states different from the European in two major particulars: (1) The king here was the owner of the soil, in other words, the exactor of rent; and (2) those who actually collected the tax-rent held only temporary tenures, as holders of jagirs or timars, unlike the hereditary European lords. The temporary tenures, which were a necessary reflex of state ownership of land led to over-exploitation of the peasantry, and, therefore, a progressive decline of the economy and polity. This was in contrast to Western Europe, where the limitation of state right of sovereignty and the dominance of private property over the land, under its protection, were the surest means to progress and prosperity. Already in Bernier we have the articulation of the contrast between the Oriental despotic state and the occidental laissez faire state.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , October 1993 , pp. 699 - 710
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

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39 For the careers of all these officials, whose cases Chetan Singh, pp. 306–7, cites as indicators of all theses regional affiliations, see Apparatus of Empire (indexed refs).

40 Singh, Chetan, ‘Center and Periphery’, p. 317.Google Scholar

41 ‘At the heart of the Indian administration lay the land revenue system’ (Stokes, Eric, The English Utilitarians and India (Delhi, 1959/1982), p. 81.Google Scholar

42 I may here quote my own remark on these limitations of the Mughal state, in JRAS, 1978, no. 1, p. 47: ‘If it [the Mughal Empire] had some rudiments of an unwritten constitution, it yet did not claim to itself the legislative power and functins that are the hall-marks of a morden state’.