EDWARD THOMAS, F.R.S., LATE OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY'S BENGAL CIVIL SERVICE. LONDON: TRÜBNER & CO., 8 AND 60, PATERNOSTER ROW. 1871. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PREFACE. THE subjoined compilation embraces much new matter, which was necessarily omitted from the brief Appendix on the Revenues of the Mughals, inserted in my late work on “The Pathán Kings of Dehli.” The growing interest of the subject, and the surprise expressed at the amounts realized at these periods, have induced me to scrutinize more fully the available data, and to present them in the amplified form of a Supplement to the "Chronicles" of the race, whose defeat secured the dominion of the Mughal. LONDON, November, 1871. REVENUES OF THE MUGHAL EMPIRE. FIRUZ SHAH'S REVENUES. I HAVE had occasion to advert in the pages of "The Chronicles of the Pathán Kings of Dehli," to the revenues of India under Akbar, in elucidation of the State resources of his predecessors. As much difficulty has hitherto been felt in the definition of values, even where figures were unassailable, I revert to the subject as an appropriate sequel to Akbar's monetary system, in order to exhibit more fully, by absolute numismatic data, the intrinsic amount of the taxes imposed. And, further, in consideration of the interest at present attaching to the question of British Indian finance, I have taken advantage of this opportunity to extend my previous notice to an examination of the revenues of the later Mughal monarchs, so as to place before the public a progressive series of Imperial balance sheets extending up to 1707 A.D., when our own countrymen began to appear in force upon the Húghli, when Job Charnock, "the father of Calcutta," was buried in his own city (1692), and the foundation of "Fort William, in Bengal," (1700), foreshadowed the reduction of Agrah, Dehli, and Láhor to provincial capitals. Before entering upon the details of Akbar's revenue, it may be as well to dispose of the earlier returns of Fírúz Sháh and Bábar, which in their modest totals only confuse the sequence of the Mughal lists, and in reality have little or no bearing upon the State resources of the later periods, which were derived from so much more extended an 1 |