IX. The Value of Money at the Court of Akbar

Extract

In the Journal for October, 1917 (p. 815), I discussed some of the material available for the study of wages and prices in the latter part of Akbar's reign, and offered the tentative conclusions that, while a much wider basis is desirable for a final judgment, (1) we may take the rupee to have been worth at the Imperial capital about seven times as much grain as in the years 1910–12, (2) on the same basis we may regard urban wages as having been worth sotaewhere about the same amount of grain at the two periods. I have since been enabled to extend the inquiry to certain other commodities, which make, it possible to indicate provisionally and in general terms what money was actually worth to the population of the Imperial capital. The results apply directly only to this population, but they also have some bearing on the economic conditions prevailing over a wider area in Northern India.