The agrarian system of Moslem India

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1804119261

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-188010

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Moreland, William Harrison http://d-nb.info/gnd/172263670

Title:: The agrarian system of Moslem India

Edition:: 2. ed. Reissue (d. Ausg. Cambridge) 1929; [Reprint]

Place of publication:: Delhi

Publisher:: Oriental Books, Munshiram Manoharlal

Year of publication:: 1968

Scope:: XVII, 296 S.

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter VII. The outlying regions

Collection:: Economics Books

THE OUTLYING REGIONS 189 insufficient (10), and he was liable to a fine (49) for each plough lost by the absconding of peasants. The collector was formally directed to deal with individual peasants, but the practice of farming a village was recog- nised (8, 9, 16, 39), and it may be inferred from the detailed provisions that farms were, at any rate, common. The collector was paid by a commission on the amount he realised; out of the total, he had to defray the salaries of his sanc- tioned staff (58), and the balance was his personal remunera- tion, so that he had a direct pecuniary interest in his work. In the case of these regulations, as of some others which have been examined in previous chapters, the only comment that is required is that their results must have depended mainly on the quality of the administration. An honest and zealous collector, under competent supervision, could have worked the system with satisfactory results; without these qualities, the life of the peasants could have been made almost intolerable. The numerous prohibitions show that abuses were expected, but their frequency is a matter of conjecture; and here, as elsewhere, the conditions of peasant- life must have depended very largely on the presence or absence of competition for land. So long as opportunities for migration existed, they set a limit to oppression Or ex- tortion; where the peasant was tied to his village by the want of any accessible refuge, a limit can scarcely be said to have existed. 2. BENGAL The agrarian history of Bengal is of peculiar interest, because it was in Calcutta that the early British adminis- trators acquired the terminology which they carried with them to the North, and which combined with other circumstances to involve them in the mass of misconceptions described in Holt Mackenzie’s Memorandum: but for Bengal as a whole [ have found in the northern literature scarcely anything beyond the statement in the Ain (i. 389) that Akbar main- tained the methods of assessment which were in force at the time of annexation; and such information as I have been able to gather from the earlier sources relates only to a few villages along the Hiigli, which were possibly not

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