198 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA 
whole, could hardly have been expected to rise above this 
standard, because, with foreign trade interrupted, and a 
consequent scarcity of silver, prices remained abnormally 
low,! and the province generally was depressed. When, 
therefore, the Valuation was revised in 1658, there would be 
no accumulated data to justify a general rise, though 
particular regions may have yielded the small increase 
shown in Grant's figures. 
Economic conditions began to change rapidly about this 
time with the large influx of silver imported by the Dutch 
and English Companies; and Grant conjectured, with some 
probability, that at first the change was reflected, not in an 
enhancement of the formal Demand, but in the imposition 
of private cesses. If this is true, then the decay of the 
Mogul administration under Aurangzeb would explain how, 
in formal documents, the Demand on the Intermediaries, 
based, as it had come to be, on the original Valuation, would 
be shown as fixed, the actual enhancement being intercepted 
by subordinates and in this way we should reach the position 
as presented by Grant in the first half of the eighteenth 
century, a Demand on the Intermediaries nominally almost 
unchanged for more than a century, but increased by 
cesses, first taken privately, then brought formally on to 
the record, and growing by degrees, until, about the year 
1755, the total recorded Demand on the Intermediaries 
was about double the original standard. 
This explanation of Grant's account is, it will be observed, 
conjectural. My reasons for offering it are, firstly, that the 
account, as it stands, is irreconcilable with the known 
administrative methods of the Mogul Empire ; and, secondly, 
that it holds the field in all recent discussions of eighteenth- 
century conditions in Bengal. It is not absolutely incon- 
ceivable that Akbar’s administrators should have adopted, 
from the outset, methods entirely at variance with their 
usual practice, and established in Bengal a revenue-Demand 
not ordinarily alterable from vear to year; but it seems to 
17 discussed these facts in From Akbar to Aurangzeb, 178 ff. 1 there 
suggested that the annual drain of silver up-country might have been of 
the order of 50 lakhs of rupees. Grant asserted (Analysis, 323) that the 
drain was at least a kror yearly, but, again, I am doubtful as to his authority 
for this statement.