Silver, trade and the Ain-i Akbari as source

Detail

The Mughals inside a ring of stable empires

• In the 16th–17th centuries four big empires held Asia steady at the same time: the Mughals in India, the Ming in China, the Safavids in Iran and the Ottomans in Turkey.
• Because these states were stable, goods and money could move safely along the long routes from China to the Mediterranean.
• Trade did not stop at Asia. The New World voyages (European ships reaching the Americas) opened a much bigger sea trade between India and Europe.

Why silver came to India

• India had no natural silver mines of its own. All the silver in Indian coins came from outside.
• Silver mined in the New World flowed into Asia to pay for Asian goods — cloth, spices, indigo, pepper.
• A large share of that silver ended up in India, because India sold far more than it bought. Class 8 calls this an export surplus (the value of what India sold abroad was more than the value of what it bought).
• Giovanni Careri, an Italian traveller who wrote about India around 1690 (he came after the Frenchman Bernier), said that all the gold and silver moving around the world "at last Centres" in Hindustan — that is, it all finally collects in India.

What the silver did to the economy

• A stable silver rupya. The silver coin kept nearly the same value and quality from the 16th to the 18th century. That is rare in history and it made prices and contracts dependable.

• The tri-metal system (gold, silver, copper) that the Mughals used was largely built by Sher Shah Suri (1540–1545), who issued a silver coin called the Rupiya weighing 178 grains — the Mughals kept this standard [2][3].

• A huge expansion of minting. More silver meant many more mints working and many more coins in circulation.

• The state could tax in cash. Because coins were plentiful, the Mughal state could demand land revenue in money instead of only in grain. This pushed peasants to sell their crops in the market.
• Two everyday coins (Class 8): the silver rupaya and the copper dam. The copper dam was the small coin used by ordinary people for daily buying.

Credit, merchants and ports

• The hundi — a written instruction to pay money, like a modern cheque or bank draft.
• A merchant in one city handed over cash and got a hundi.
• His partner in another city, or even another country, got the cash there against that paper.
• So money moved without carrying heavy coin on dangerous roads. This is an early form of banking.

• Marwari merchant networks were famous for running these hundi chains.

• Major ports: Surat (west coast), Calicut (Malabar), Masulipatnam (Coromandel, east coast) and Hooghly (Bengal).

• Temples as economic hubs. Big temples were not only places of worship:
• they held endowments (gifts of land and money);
• they paid for irrigation works and facilities for pilgrims;
• they gave credit (loans) to merchants.

The other side: peasant stress in the late 1600s

• The cash demand was heavy. By the late 1600s many peasants were over-taxed.
• To pay, they borrowed. When they could not repay, they slid into bonded labour — working to clear a debt they could never finish paying.

The Ain-i Akbari: what it is

• Written by Abu'l Fazl, Akbar's court historian [4].
• Completed in 1598, in Akbar's 42nd regnal year (the 42nd year of his rule), after five revisions — he rewrote it five times.
• It is the third book of the Akbar Nama. The first two books are narrative history (the story of the reign); the third is different.
• It is a compendium of imperial regulations (a collected rule-book of the empire) and a gazetteer (a place-by-place description of the whole empire).
• Its purpose was to show Akbar's empire as a place where a strong ruling class kept social harmony [4].
• It is arranged in five books, called daftars.

The five daftars

Daftar	Contents
manzil-abadi	the imperial household
sipah-abadi	military and civil administration; short sketches of mansabdars, learned men, poets and artists
mulk-abadi	the fiscal (revenue) book: revenue rates + the "Account of the Twelve Provinces"
book 4	religious and literary traditions of the people
book 5	cultural traditions and Akbar's "auspicious sayings"

Inside the mulk-abadi — the fiscal heart

• It lists each suba (province) and, under it, the sarkars, parganas and mahals (smaller and smaller revenue units).

• Each unit is set out in eight-column tables: 1. pargana / mahal — the unit's name 2. qila — forts in it 3. measured area of land 4. naqdi — revenue assessed in cash 5. suyurghal — land or income given away as charity grants 6. zamindars — the local landed chiefs 7–8. zamindar castes and their troops, counted as sawar (horsemen), piyada (foot soldiers) and fil (elephants)

• The book also records how the state arranged for land to be cultivated, how its agents collected revenue, and how the state dealt with the zamindars [4].

• Akbar's finance minister Todar Mal and his land-survey methods are described in the work [4].

Strengths as a source

• Five revisions — the text was checked again and again.
• Oral testimony was cross-checked — spoken reports were tested against other reports before being written down.
• Numbers were written out in words, not figures, so a careless copyist could not turn 100 into 1,000.
• It broke with the old style of war-and-dynasty chronicles. Instead of only kings and battles, it recorded the empire and its people — crops, prices, castes, crafts, customs.
• Result: it is the single best benchmark for what India looked like around 1600.

Limits as a source

• Totalling errors — some column sums do not add up correctly.
• Skewed data — the coverage is uneven:
• no zamindar-caste information for Bengal and Orissa;

• prices and wages are mainly from Agra, the capital region, so they are not a fair picture of the whole empire.

• Always the view from the apex — it reports what the court knew and what the court wanted shown. The village's own voice is missing.

• The cure: read it alongside regional records and English East India Company (EIC) records, which were written from the ground up rather than from the throne down.

Translations

• H. Blochmann edited the text and translated volume 1 into English, published at Calcutta in 1873.
• H.S. Jarrett translated volumes 2 and 3, published in 1891 and 1894.
• Both were published by the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Volume III is available in digitised form on the Indian Culture portal [5].

Prelims Hooks

• The Ain-i Akbari was completed in 1598, Akbar's 42nd regnal year, after five revisions.
• The Ain is the third book of the Akbar Nama; the first two are narrative history.
• The mulk-abadi is the fiscal daftar containing the "Account of the Twelve Provinces".
• The Ain's revenue tables have eight columns, including naqdi (cash revenue) and suyurghal (charity grants).
• Zamindar troops in the Ain are counted as sawar (cavalry), piyada (infantry) and fil (elephants).
• The Ain gives no zamindar-caste data for Bengal and Orissa; its prices and wages come mainly from Agra.
• Blochmann translated vol. 1 (Calcutta, 1873); H.S. Jarrett vols. 2–3 (1891, 1894), Asiatic Society of Bengal.
• Giovanni Careri (c. 1690) wrote that the world's gold and silver finally "Centres" in Hindustan.
• India had no silver mines, yet the silver rupya stayed stable from the 16th to the 18th century.
• The Rupiya standard of 178 grains of silver was set by Sher Shah Suri (1540–45) and continued under the Mughals [2][3].
• The hundi was a written payment order used to move money without carrying coin; Marwari networks ran it.
• Ports of the period: Surat, Calicut, Masulipatnam, Hooghly.

Mains Points

• Silver inflow made Mughal fiscal power possible. New World silver, drawn in by India's export surplus, gave the state enough coin to demand land revenue in cash. This monetised the village: peasants had to sell crops in the market to pay tax. Link this to commercialisation of agriculture and to the growth of rural markets and merchant credit.
• The Ain shows both the strength and the blind spot of state records. Its method — five revisions, cross-checked oral testimony, numbers in words — makes it unusually reliable for a 16th-century document. But it is the view from the apex: the court's picture of a harmonious, well-ordered realm [4]. Historians must set it against regional and EIC records to recover the peasant's side.
• Monetisation cut both ways. The same cash economy that funded a strong central state pushed peasants into debt when the demand was heavy, and by the late 1600s into bonded labour. Prosperity of the empire and distress of the cultivator ran together, not in sequence.
• India as the world's silver sink. Careri's remark (c. 1690) is evidence that contemporaries already saw India as the endpoint of global bullion flows. Use this to link Mughal India to the early modern world economy — the Ming, Safavid and Ottoman empires, the Atlantic voyages, and the European trading companies that later turned this trade into political control.