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

This is the third edition of the Russian classic that first appeared in English translation in 1971. 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 son 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 analyzed in the context of the degree of seperation of agriculture and crafts, disintegration of rural communities, expansion of trade and agricultural marketing, deepening rural stratification, and the institutions of feudal domination.