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Lecture 12 (6)

The lecture discusses the evolution of capitalism in early modern India, focusing on commercialization, monetization, and globalization, alongside changes in the agrarian sector and labor dynamics. It highlights the increasing market exchange, the growing use of cash, and the intensification of global connections post-1500, which stimulated production and trade. Additionally, it addresses the impact of climatic fluctuations, the Indian Ocean slave trade, and the relationship between slavery and capitalism, emphasizing the complexity of labor systems in the region.

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Maya Gonga
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3 views

Lecture 12 (6)

The lecture discusses the evolution of capitalism in early modern India, focusing on commercialization, monetization, and globalization, alongside changes in the agrarian sector and labor dynamics. It highlights the increasing market exchange, the growing use of cash, and the intensification of global connections post-1500, which stimulated production and trade. Additionally, it addresses the impact of climatic fluctuations, the Indian Ocean slave trade, and the relationship between slavery and capitalism, emphasizing the complexity of labor systems in the region.

Uploaded by

Maya Gonga
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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12.

Capitalism (I)
HIST0901: India and the Early Modern World
Today’s lecture:
• commercialisation, monetisation, and globalisation
• changes in the agrarian sector
• labour (free/unfree, waged or not)
Market exchange
• greater production for the market, and an increasing range,
volume, and value of goods moving through marketing centres
of various sizes:
• hath – small market at the village level, often periodic rather than
daily, although not all villages have a hath
• mandi – a market at the pargana level, again not necessarily daily
• qasbah – a market town, of varying sizes but an intermediate type of
settlement between the mandi and the major commercial centres
• shahr – cities (i.e. imperial or provincial capitals) and bandar – port
cities
• more and more activity captured by relations of the market; not
a new trend, but one that is widening/deepening in early
modern time
‘Cloth merchant seated in his shop selling chintz to a
customer’, British Library, Add.Or.2531
Monetisation
• growing use of cash as a medium of exchange: people
increasingly sold their goods for cash, using this to buy
other goods as well as to pay their taxes
• again, a longer-term process, but widening/deepening
due to:
• spread of the Mughal imperium and its fiscal and monetary
systems = demands taxes in cash, mints standardised coins, etc
• influx of bullion and/or coined metal = money supply increases
• growth of trade at various scales (local, regional, overland,
overseas), especially Indian Ocean and Euro-Asian trade =
easier/more opportunities to sell goods
gold coin (reign of Jahangir);
British Museum, OR.7180

silver coin/rupee (reign of Babur);


British Museum, 1886,1003.23

copper coin (reign of Humayun);


British Museum, IOLC.5253
Mints in
Aurangzeb’s time

Map credit: Mike


O’Sullivan – not for
circulation

Key: yellow = gold


(44); blue = silver
(82); red = copper
(26)
Globalisation
• refers to the steady increase or ‘thickening’ of
connections between different parts of the world, and
the intensification of connection (i.e., more goods,
people, ideas, etc, flowing between places)
• India already very well-connected before c. 1500, but
greater globalisation after c. 1500
• stimulates monetisation, but it also created greater
demand for goods and services that stimulates greater
production for the market
Cash crops and the Columbian
exchange
• jins-i ghalla (foodstuffs for subsistence, surplus possibly
for the market): rice, wheat, barley, millet
• jins-i kamil or jins-i a‘la (higher-grade and/or cash
crops): oilseed, cotton, sugarcane, indigo and other dye-
yielding plants, hemp and other fibre-yielding plants,
spices, saffron, and fruit
• new American species: tobacco, maize, chillis, guavas,
pineapples, papayas, cashews
The ‘unending frontier’?
• land ‘reclaimed’ from other ecosystems, causing habitat loss, a reduction
in both biomass and biodiversity, the dropping of the water table around
irrigated lands or increased flooding where waterways were modified, etc
• states encourage the ‘colonisation’ of what they see as ‘virgin’ or ‘empty
lands’; when colonisers come into conflict with indigenes, the result is
often (ethnic) conflict
• e.g., Sufi expansion in east Bengal; forest clearance intensifies in Shah
Jahan’s reign – most acute in sub-montane, tracts, central India, and
Gangetic valley
• long-term (negative) effects:
• economic: soils wash away, fertility falls, yield drops
• environmental: silting of waterways, increasing flood risk, loss of biodiversity and
biomass
Limits
• not everyone involved in settled agriculture…
• not all areas resemble this pattern of agrarian
production…
A couple of the kallar caste (Tanjore, c. 1770), ©
Victoria and Albert Museum, AL.9128:19
Toddy tappers (Malabar Coast, 1826), © Victoria and
Albert Museum, IS.264-1951
Climatic fluctuation and the
Little Ice Age
• ninth to thirteenth centuries: favourable climatic conditions
• fourteenth to late sixteenth centuries: highly variable period of adverse weather (including
cooling or drying), then a milder, slightly more agriculturally propitious period
• from 1560s-70s: mega eruptions – have cooling effects and contribute to ENSO events – and
combine with lower output from the sun, bringing about the ‘Little Ice Age’
• eighteenth century: warmer/milder weather

• Little Ice Age coterminous with scarcities/famines (not necessarily causal): 1554-56 (afflicting
Delhi, Agra, and other large tracts of the Gangetic valley), the 1560s (Gujarat), 1572-73 (Sirhind),
1574-75 (Gujarat), 1578-79 (parts of north India), 1587-88 and 1589-90 (Sind), 1596 (across
Hindustan), 1597 (Kashmir), the great famine of 1630-32 (Gujarat and the Deccan), 1636-37
(Punjab), recurrently in the 1640s and in 1650 (across north India), 1651 (Punjab), 1655 (parts of
the Deccan), 1662-63 (Bengal), during the war of succession fought after Shah Jahan’s death, in
1670 (Bihar and Bijapur), 1678 (around Lahore and Ajmer), 1685 and 1691 (Gujarat), 1686 (the
Deccan), 1694-95 (Gujarat and Delhi), 1695 (Orissa), 1696-97 (parts of Gujarat and Malwa), a
great famine in 1702-04 (the Deccan), two at the start of Farrukhsiyar’s reign (1713-19) and
another in Delhi in 1719
The Indian Ocean slave trade
• ninth century: boom in export of enslaved people from
the east African coast via maritime networks across the
Indian Ocean
• enslaved labour used less widely in agricultural settings
than elsewhere in the Indo-Islamic world; wider use
made of military slaves (e.g., in Dehil Sultanates, in
Bengal Sultanate, and in Deccan Sultanates)
‘shabih-e ‘ambar amal-e hashim’ (‘Likeness of Ambar the
work of Hashim’), painted by Hashim in the Mughal
Empire, c. 1620

(c) Victoria and Albert Museum, London, accession no.


IM.21-1925
Enslavement
• of the 63,000 enslaved persons imported into the Cape
Colony, 1652-1808, 25.9 per cent of Indian origin;
driven by European demand
• indigenous demand also existed; Indians enslaved and
taken to markets in central Asia (but insignificant)

• Gujarati merchants involved in Mozambiquan trade in


enslaved persons
Slavery and capitalism
• wage labour is a defining feature of capitalism
• slavery is the opposite of wage labour
• slavery, however, was crucial to capitalism’s development in
the Atlantic Ocean world
• the Atlantic Ocean slave trade system actually interlinked with
an Indian Ocean system, with implications for the role of Asian
economies and actors in the development of capitalism
• note: slavery in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean systems very
different
• note: binary of free and enslaved/unfree not useful in the IOW
context
Wage Labour
• history of labour in precolonial India, Shireen Moosvi
notes, is underdeveloped compared to other parts of
Asia, let alone Europe…
A warrior and his wife (Tanjore, c. 1805), © Victoria
and Albert Museum, AL.9254:6
A weaver (Tanjore, c. 1770), © Victoria and Albert
Museum, AL.9128:14
A weaver and his wife (Thanjavur, c. 1800), ©
Victoria and Albert Museum, AL.8940N
A washerman and his wife (Tanjore, c. 1770), ©
Victoria and Albert Museum, AL.9128:27

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