Center for Historical Studies

In Mughal India, accounts were kept by individuals and institutions for purposes of reference and planning. Accountancy required a set of objectives and techniques for collecting, organizing, and presenting information so that it could then be put to use. It also fostered learning. Subsisting on formal or informal training, professional accountants equipped themselves with linguistic and mathematical skills, the art of notation, mnemonic devices, and the ability to translate loosely defined units into precise terms and numbers. Accountants were an important component of the state apparatus, village administration, and elite household management. In the seventeenth century manuals were produced in Persian by private individuals for the guidance of persons seeking to acquire proficiency in accountancy (siyaq) and clerical work. No study has been made so far of the manuals themselves nor of the people who compiled or used them. This introductory essay examines the manuals (generally titled Dasturu-l Amal) and the information they contain about the system of accountancy as well as about the professional ethics and norms of ideal behaviour of the secretarial class.

This chapter explores four institutional factors which went into the making of the wage structure in the Mughal Empire. Focusing on the relationship between monetization, patterns of currency circulation and wage payments, it also raises historiographical issues crucial to the understanding of the overtime movement of money wages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It must be admitted that quantitative data on wages, prices, money supply and income are extremely limited and fragmentary for the whole of medieval India (00-800). It is only from the middle of the nineteenth century (8) that one begins to get unbroken statistical series on prices and wages. This explains the short treatment the subject has received in current historiography. However, there is sufficient evidence -some of it fresh -to commence an investigation into the process of wage determination and payment and to offer new interpretations for existing material.

In empires encompassing vast territories and diverse customs, the standardization of currencies, exchange rates, weights and measures, was essential for the smooth conduct of economic affairs. Standardization rationalized economic exchange and reduced time and transaction costs. In pre-modern times, standardization often coincided with the establishment of effective sovereign power and the political unification of trading zones. The coincidence between sovereignty and control of standards is especially well illustrated in the realm of exchange and currency circulation in the Mughal Empire.

South Asia during 16 th -18 th centuries was a geographically and culturally diverse region but a large part of it was politically and administratively united by the Mughal state. Despite being a unified political entity it was not a homogeneous economic unit. The experiences of the different sub-regions of the Mughal Empire were varied and not all were able to maintain a uniform level of production and exchange. However, the principles governing the provinces administratively and fiscally were more or less uniform in all areas of the empire. The standardized currency system, the organization of the mint, the taxation system, and the maintenance of law and order were integrative elements of the state policy that worked together to provide a formal unity to the diverse market and monetary structures.