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Peasants, Zamindars And The State
Discuss, with examples, the significance of monetary transactions during the period under consideration.
(a) The political stability of the Mughal, Ming (China), Safavid (Iran) and Ottoman (Turkey) empires led to increased overland trade from China to the Mediterranean Sea.
(b) Discovery of new lands also gave an impetus to Asia’s trade with Europe. As a result enormous amount of silver entered India as payment for goods bought from India.
(c) This benefitted India as she did not have enough resources of silver. Therefore from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries there was sufficient reserves of silver in India and the silver rupya was available readily.
(d) This resulted in an unprecedented expansion in the minting of coins and circulation of money allowing the Mughal state to extract taxes and revenues in cash.
(e) Giovanni Careri’s account gives us an idea of the phenomenal amounts of cash and commodity transactions which took place in seventeenth century India.
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Describe the role played by women in agricultural production.
Discuss, with examples, the significance of monetary transactions during the period under consideration.
Examine the evidence that suggests that land revenue was important for the Mughal fiscal system.
To what extent do you think caste was a factor in influencing social and economic relations in agrarian society?
How were the lives of forest dwellers transformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?
Examine the role played by zamindars in Mughal India.
Discuss the ways in which panchayats and village headmen regulated rural society.
On an outline map of the world, mark the areas which had economic links with the Mughal Empire, and trace out possible routes of communication.
Visit a neighbouring village. Find out how many people live there, which crops are grown, which animals are raised, which artisanal groups reside
there, whether women own land, how the local panchayat functions. Compare this information with what you have learnt about the sixteenth-
seventeenth centuries, noting similarities and differences. Explain both the changes and the continuities that you find.
How were the village artisans compensated by the villagers for their services? Write about any one.
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