1 - Introduction

Summary

The eighteenth century in India began with the disintegration of one great empire and ended with the birth of another. The wars of succession, rebellions, invasions, and warlordism gave rise to “the Black Legend of the eighteenth century” which emphasized economic decline and patterns of disorder during the dissolution of Mughal power. Pre-World War II historical analyses attributed the chaotic condition of the century to extractive absolutism or moral decay, with a surge of disloyalty, opportunism, and corruption. British accounts, seeking to justify European colonialism and demonstrate the inferiority of Indian culture and political forms, tended to portray Indian states as arbitrary and predatory, without the mitigating checks of private property, an hereditary, intermediate aristocracy between the Mughal elite and agrarian society, or even a coherent legal framework. They credited colonial rule with substituting administrative and commercial stability for what they described as pre-colonial despotism disintegrating into anarchy.

Historical revisionism

Since World War II, and especially in the 1980s, scholars have revised the older dominant view that the British conquest marked such a clear disjuncture in Indian development. Historians have noted the growing monetization and commercialization of the pre-colonial economy, made possible by the Mughal collection of money taxes, the importation from Europe of silver bullion that Indian rulers minted into rupees, and rising commodity production and trade, both internal and foreign. Instead of seeing British rule as reversing the trajectory of dominant trends, the new school sees the late Mughal economy having evolved communities of profit-oriented entrepreneurs and military adventurers, some of whose interests converged with European interests.