The Cambridge History of India, Vol. IV: The Mughul Period v4.c22.66

v4.c22.66

The practice of assignment continued in operation throughout the reign of Aurangzīb, but early in the eighteenth century it lost the popularity which it had hitherto enjoyed, and there are some indications that the officers of the empire preferred to be paid in cash by the treasury, depleted as it was, an arrangement which had formerly been regarded as implying something like a slur on the recipient. Three factors can be distinguished as contributing to this result, but they are in fact merely different aspects of the collapse of the Mughul empire. In the first place, the progressive decline in agriculture necessarily resulted in a progressive loss of revenue, so that it became increasingly difficult for an assignee to realise his promised and expected income. In the second place, as has been explained in an earlier chapter, the emperor had been forced to grant the Marāthās a share (known as *chauth*)¹ of the revenue of the Deccan provinces; and this first charge on the declining produce, extended as it was to other regions, left so much less for the assignee. In the third place, the emperor was no longer able to guarantee the peaceable enjoyment of an assignment, so that questions of possession had passed from the forum of administration, and had to be decided by force of arms. The decay of the system of assignment was therefore inevitable.