When we ask ourselves the question why India failed to industrialize (and develop a capitalistic economy) either before or after the British conquest, we touch the core of an old and hallowed controversy in which the partisans and opponents of British imperiahsm once confronted each other. To admirers of British rule, generally, it seemed that the fault lay with certain inherent weaknesses in Indian society. The influence of an “enervating climate,” the heritage of “oriental despotism” and recurring cycles of anarchy (inhibiting the accumulation and investment of capital), primitive techniques and ignorance, the rigidities of the caste system, the prevailing spirit of resignation rather than enterprise, all created conditions in which nothing but a subsistence economy could function. From such wretched beginnings, the British could not, whatever they did, lift Indian economy to European levels. The critics of imperialism saw things in a different light. They insisted that the primitive nature of Indian economy before British conquests ought not to be overstressed, and they ascribed India's backwardness chiefly to the strangulating effects of British rule, to “the drain of wealth,” the destruction of handicrafts, heavy taxation, and discrimination against Indian industry and capital. It will thus be seen that though the controversy involved a number of important aspects of modern Indian economic history, in part at least it centered on the potentialities of development in the Indian economy prior to the British conquests.
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USURY IN MEDIEVAL INDIABy convention the medieval period of Indian history is supposed to begin either with the death of Harsha, c. 648, or, as in this study, with the Turkish conquest of Northern India (about the beginning of the 13th century), and to end on the eve of the British conquests (about the middle of the 18th century). Although this sets a very late date for the close of the Indian medieval period, the arrangement is not illogical, since it was only with the British conquests that India became subject to the modern capitalistic system. But if we can say with certainty that the society of the period previous to British rule was not capitalistic, it is yet not a simple matter to define its basic elements. It is no longer possible to accept the assumption that its economy was based primarily on production for use, and not exchange, and that commodity production and money economy are entirely a gift of British rule. There are in fact strong grounds for supposing that the cash nexus was established in the central parts of the Dehli Empire as early as the beginning of the 14th century; 1 and there is overwhelming evidence at hand to suggest that over large parts of the Mughal Empire (16th and 17th centuries), the land-revenue, which comprised the bulk of the peasant's surplus produce, was collected in money and not in kind. 2 From such wide use of money, we should naturally infer the prevalence of money-lending and credit on a large scale.The chief object of the present study is to test this inference by examining the actual evidence from the period relating to usury. The term "usury" has been employed here in the same sense as is sanctioned by usage in writings on medieval European history, namely, lending at interest, whatever the rate or the form of extracting it. We propose to examine the extent of usury, and the various forms in which it was practised, in the different sectors of medieval Indian economy, as well as the ways in which different classes of medieval Indian society were affected by it. It should, however, be confessed at the outset that our information does not come uniformly from the entire period, but comes in the larger measure from the 17th century alone. Moreover, it is full on only some aspects of the subject while being fragmentary or even non-existent on others.
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