Towards an interpretation of the Mughal Empire

Abstract

It is nowadays common for Indian history textbooks to treat the various “empires” that successively occupied the stage of Indian history, with their respective “administrations”, as so many successive repetitions with merely different names for offices and institutions that in substance remained the same: namely, the King, the Ministers, the Provinces, the Governors, the Taxes, Landgrants, and so on. But D. D. Kosambi, in hisIntroduction to the study of Indian history(Bombay, 1975), rightly observed that this repetitive succession cannot be assumed, and that each regime, when subjected to critical study, displays distinct elements that call for its analysis in the context of “relations of production” (as he put it) existing at that time.