India -- Changing Economic Structure in the Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries : Outline History of Crafts & Trade

Professor Tchhitcherov's classic, "India -- Changing Socio-Economic Structure in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries" first appeared in English translation in 1971.

This is its third edition. The author draws on administrative documents of the Mughal empire, chronicles, memoirs, inscriptions, travellers' observations, and records of the European trading companies.

He uses these sources to describe how in a feudal system, on the eve of the colonial period, the output of textiles, metal products, salt, sugar, wood work, leather items and so on was transformed from household village crafts supported by the village economy to production for various markets, with the beginnings of wage labour and dependence on merchant capital.

This is analysed in the context of the degree of separation of agriculture and crafts, disintegration of rural communities, expansion of trade and agricultural marketing, deepening rural stratification, and the institutions of feudal domination.

Also discussed in this book are patterns of trade, rural and urban markets, merchant-state nexus, coinage and money supply, and increasing engagement of the feudal class in trade. Finally, with European merchants came new forms and volumes of trade and commodity production.

Pre-colonial Indian society had developed to the level of inchoate capitalism, and urban economies, for example, functioned parasitically on redistributed feudal rent.

This made possible the large-scale destruction of productive forces under British rule.

Also, poorly developed bourgeois elements could afford scant resistance to colonial subordination.