The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15.s1.22

c15.s1.22

Though the imperial administration held on to an exhaustive organization of the total area claimed by the Mughal in nested territorial units—pargana, district, province—it would be misleading to view the empire as an integrated territorial whole, pushing its boundaries ever further into the subcontinent. Rather, we have to think of the empire in terms of strings of greater and smaller centers controlling their immediate hinterlands. These centers were the market towns, where the cash nexus found its natural solution. From these towns, the business communities could control the immediate agrarian hinterland, extract the marketable surplus, convert it into cash, and pay the revenue. These greater and smaller market centers did not exist in isolation. They were linked with each other by an extensive network of trade routes. In an ancient trading area like India, with its strategic position in the Indian Ocean and its overland connections with Western and Central Asia, important trade routes existed together with a well-developed system of long-distance transport and finance. "All nations bring coin and carry away commodities for the same; and this coin is buried in India and goeth out not," as an early English merchant succinctly put it.³³