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Of Imârat and Tijârat: Asian Merchants and State Power in the Western Indian Ocean, 1400 to 1750

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Affiliation:
Delhi School of Economics, Delhi, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Societies, Paris
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Extract

How best might one address the relationship between trade and state building in early modern South Asia? The question is hardly a new one. To some, like Anand Ram ‘Mukhlis’ (d. 1751), a Khatri from northern India who, though not Muslim, had been educated in Persian letters and accounting (siyâgat), trade was more honourable and safer than statecraft or government. The fortunes of the nobility were fluctuating ones, and the means by which they had been accumulated were of a questionable legitimacy. Doubts of this sort did not of course prevent his Khatri brethren from entering into government service during the later Mughal period, and several of them can be counted among the a'yân (notables) of the reign of the Mughal, Muhammad Shah (1719–48) (Alam 1986:169–75). They maintained a tradition begun in the reign of Ak-bar with the famous Raja Todar Mal (d. 1589), also a Khatri from the Punjab.

Type
Merchants and the State
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , October 1995 , pp. 750 - 780
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1995

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