IGNOU HISTORY Study Notes for IAS, UPSC Exams

History India From 8th to Mid 15th Century

Potentialities of Capitalistic Development

This is the last unit of your present course (EHI-04). By now you must have
become intimately familiar with the many facets of Medieval India during the 16th18th centuries. Here we do not intend to give a resume of the subject-matter of the
foregoing Blocks. Instead, we will raise an important question and try to respond to
it. We have dispensed with the formal mode of structuring in this Unit so that you
read the entire argument in a flow. The question we are going to address here
relates to the economic structure of Medieval India.
It has often been asked why India failed to industrialise and evolve a capitalistic
economy before the British conquest. In other words, was there any potentiality of
emergence of capitalism in Mughal India along the lines of what happened in
Europe? This ,query was casually probed by W.H. Moreland (India at the Death of
Akbar, London, 1920; From Akbar to Aurangzeb, London, 1923) and Brij Narain
(Indian Economic Lib, Past and Present, Lahore, 1929). However, since 19608,
there has been a regular debate on this question beginning with Moms D. Morris
(1963) and Toru Matsui and followed by Bipn Chandra and Tapan Raychaudhuri
(1968). But their views largely dwell on the 19th century India. It will, however, be
more fruitful to us if we focus attention on the status of the Mughal economy. A
pioneering enquiry on these lines was conducted by Irfan Habib in 'Potentialities of
Capitalistic development in the Economy of Mughal India' (presented at the
Internation Economic History Congress, Bloomington, 1968 and published in
Enquiry, New Series, Vol. 111, No. 3, 1971, pp. 1-56). This was followed by A. I.
Chicherov's India: Economic Development in the 16th-18th centuries, Moscow,
1971. (You may also consult A. Jan Qaisar's, "The Role of Brokers in Medieval
India" published in The Indian Historical Review, Vol. I, No. 2, Sept. 1974, pp.
240-46).
In fact what we are concered for this Unit is not why a capitalist structure did not
emerge during the Mughal period; our query is whether we can see signals of
capitalist development within the Mughal economy. Significantly Europe did not
possess capitalist economy in the 17th century. Capitalism started emerging, for
example in England, from the second half of the 18th century only. It was, by and
large, merchant capitalism that prevailed in England at this time, not industrial
capitalir m.
To begin w:th, we must be clear about what do we understand by the term
capitalism. Thereafter we may begin to investigate the presence or absence of its
features in Mughal economy. Let us list the most important features of early
capitalism:

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