THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 147 
very strongly on his mind, and it is noteworthy that he does 
not attribute any part of it to exceptional mortality. Had 
plague been raging throughout the country, he, as a prac- 
tising physician, could scarcely have ignored the fact; but 
he is quite definite in attributing the evil, not to any such 
cause, but to the severity of the administration, which 
drove the peasants to abscond. Much of the Empire, he 
observed, was 
“badly cultivated, and thinly peopled; and even a considerable 
portion of the good land remains untilled from want of labourers?; 
many of whom perish in consequence of the bad treatment 
they experience from the Governor. These poor people, when 
incapable of discharging the demands of their rapacious lords, 
are not only often deprived of the means of subsistence, but are 
bereft of their children, who are carried away as slaves. Thus 
it happens that many of the peasantry, driven to despair by so 
execrable a tyranny, abandon the country, and seek a more 
tolerable mode of existence, either in the towns, or camps; 
as bearers of burdens, carriers of water, or servants to horsemen. 
Sometimes they fly to the territories of a Raja, because there 
they find less oppression, and are allowed a greater degree of 
comfort.” 
According to Bernier, then, the peasants were being 
driven by administrative pressure into other occupations, or, 
into regions where the Mogul administration did not operate; 
and his account, which is in itself credible, fits in precisely 
with the situation depicted in Aurangzeb’s orders, a 
peasantry heavily assessed and kept under strict discipline, 
but decreasing in numbers to an extent which was seriously 
embarrassing the administration.. The increase in adminis- 
trative pressure which had occurred during the first half of 
the century must be attributed either to Jahangir, or to 
Shahjahan, or to both Emperors. According to the tra- 
ditional account summarised in an earlier section, we must 
look to the reign of Shahjahan for most, if not all, of the 
increase, since the revenue from the Reserved areas rose in 
that period from 150 to nearly 400 lakhs; but more definite 
evidence is wanted for a final verdict.2 All that can be 
{ The quotation is from the published translation; '‘ peasants’ would 
be a more precise rendering than ‘labourers’ of the word laboureurs. 
*In From Akbar to Aurangzeb, Ch. VIII, sec. 5, I argued that the in- 
creased pressure during Shihjahin’s reign was reflected in certain revenue 
statistics which have survived. I have since found that the argument is