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

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

APPENDIX B 221 insists (pp. 556, 574) on the contrast furnished by the wise and lenient administration of Firtiz, under whom ‘no Wali or Muqti” came to ruin from this cause. The processes of audit and recovery thus varied in point of severity, but they were throughout a normal feature of the administration. This statement of the Muqti’s position indicates on the face of it a purely bureaucratic organisation. We have officers posted to their charges by the King, and transferred, removed, or punished, at his pleasure, administering their charges under his orders, and subjected to the strict financial control of the Revenue Ministry. None of these features has any counterpart in the feudal system of Europe; and, as a student of European history to whom I showed the foregoing summary observed, the analogy is not with the feudal organisation, but with the bureaucracies which rulers like Henry II of England attempted to set up as an alternative to feudalism. The use of feudal terminology was presumably inspired by the fact that some of the nobles of the Delhi kingdom occasionally behaved like feudal barons, that is to say, they rebelled, or took sides in disputed successions to the throne; but, in Asia at least, bureaucrats can rebel as well as barons, and the analogy is much too slight and superficial to justify the importation of feudal terms and all the misleading ideas which they connote. The kingdom was not a mixture of bureaucracy with feudalism: its administration was bureaucratic throughout. The question remains whether there were differences in status or functions between the Wali and the Muqti. The chronicles mention a Wali so rarely that it is impossible to prepare from them a statement similar to what has been offered for the Mugqti. The constantly recurring double phrases, walis and mugqtis, or iqtas and wildyats, show that the two institutions were, at any rate, of the same general nature, but they cannot be pressed so far as to exclude the possibility of differences in‘detail. A recent writer has stated that the difference was one of distance from the capital! the nearer provinces being iqtis and the remote ones * Qanungo’s Sher Shah, p. 349, 350. Barni, however, applies the term wildyat to provinces near Delhi such as Baran (p..58), Amroha (p. 58), or Samana (p. 483); while Multan (p. 584) and Marhat, or the Maratha country (p. 390) are described as iqti. Some of the distant provinces had apparently a different status in parts of the fourteenth century, being under a Minister (Vazir) instead of a Governor (Barni, 379, 397, 454, &c.), but they cannot be distinguished either as wilavats or as igtis.

Access restriction

Copyright

fullscreen: The agrarian system of Moslem India

Monograph

Table of contents

Download

Monograph

This page

Image fragment

Citation links

Citation recommendation