Tirthankar Roy-Where Is Bengal in Early Modern Economy

WHERE IS BENGAL?
SITUATING AN
INDIAN REGION IN THE EARLY
MODERN WORLD ECONOMY*
I
Recent studies on the economic and social history of Bengal from
Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Delhi on May 5, 2013

the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries suggest that the region
experienced an economic boom in this time span, owing to ex-
pansion in the agrarian frontier, a flourishing textile industry,
urbanization, trade with the western Gangetic plains, and Indo-
European maritime trade. The economic boom began with the
incorporation of Bengal into the Mughal Empire (c.1590), which
stimulated new urban settlements, overland trade, and growth of
cultivation. In addition to a strong state, Bengal had significant
resource advantages. Thanks to a long coastline, huge riparian
highways of goods traffic, alluvial soil, plentiful water, and con-
sequently high yield of land, parts of early modern Bengal had
already been a trading and manufacturing region for centuries.
Such advantages, it is proposed, had placed peasants, artisans and
merchants of Bengal in a position of strength when new export
opportunities opened up.1
* I wish to thank the participants of the panel ‘Globalizing Economic

Historiography’ at the World Economic History Congress, Utrecht, 2009, where an
earlier draft of the article was discussed. Annu Jalais graciously directed me to an
important reference. I would also like to thank Mina Moshkeri for drawing the map.
1
‘Bengal offers the most dramatic example of export-stimulated economic growth’:
John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1995), 202. John R. McLane
considers that commercialization in Mughal Bengal had proceeded further than in
any other part of the empire, stimulated by ‘gigantic inland trade, and foreign export’:
see his Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal (Cambridge, 2002), 6.
Richard M. Eaton explains ‘the seventeenth century’s booming rice frontier in the
east’ with reference to ‘the eastward movement of Bengal’s rivers and hence of the
active delta, the region’s political and commercial integration with Mughal India, and
the growth in the money supply with the influx of outside silver in payment for locally
manufactured textiles’: see his The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760
(Berkeley, 1993), 207. Sushil Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth
Century Bengal (New Delhi, 1995), 1, begins with the assertion: ‘Bengal’s prosperity
before the British conquest cannot be in doubt at all’. Economic history statements
often draw upon general works on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bengal. A
selection should include: W. H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar (London,
1920); Tapan Raychaudhuri, Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir: An Introductory
(cont. on p. 116)
Past and Present, no. 213 (Nov. 2011) ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2011
doi:10.1093/pastj/gtr009
116 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 213
Records of European voyages in Bengal confirm the picture of

prosperity. François Bernier, an otherwise cynical commentator
on north Indian society in the time of Aurangzeb (1658–1707),
was effusive on Bengal:
The rich exuberance of the country, together with the beauty and amiable
disposition of the native women, has given rise to a proverb in common
use among the Portuguese, English, and Dutch, that the Kingdom
of Bengale has a hundred gates open for entrance, but not one for
departure.2
Bernier leaves the reader in some doubt as to what it was the

Europeans found attractive in Bengal, but the tone of approval
is unconditional. Similar endorsement, if more tempered in tone,
can be found in the travelogues of Caesar Frederick and Ralph
Fitch in the late sixteenth century, and Thomas Bowrey and
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in the seventeenth.3 Until a few years
after the East India Company became the ruler of Bengal,
British opinion of the region was not very different. In 1764,
Robert Clive described the erstwhile capital of Bengal as being
‘as rich as London’. Twenty years later, a merchant in Calcutta
described Bengal as ‘one of the most fertile and productive
Kingdoms under the sun’.4
Global historians have made significant use of a prosper-
ous Bengal in their interpretations of the early modern world
economy. Three examples illustrate this use. Frank Perlin calls
upon historians to consider a ‘framework’ in which commercial
(n. 1 cont.)
Study in Social History (Delhi, 1969); Rajat Datta, Society, Economy, and the Market:
Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c.1760–1800 (New Delhi, 2000); P. J. Marshall,
Bengal: The British Bridgehead. Eastern India, 1740–1828 (Cambridge, 2006); Om
Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630–1720
(Princeton, 1985); Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal
since 1770 (Cambridge, 1993).
2
François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, AD 1656–1668, 2nd edn, revised
Vincent A. Smith (London, 1916), 439.
3
On Caesar Frederick’s account of trade in lower Bengal, see A General History and
Collection of the Voyages and Travels Arranged in Systematic Order, vii, ed. Robert Kerr
(Edinburgh and London, 1824), 178–81; Ralph Fitch: England’s Pioneer to India and
Burma, his Companions and Contemporaries, with his Remarkable Narrative Told in his
Own Words, ed. J. H. Ryley (London, 1899), 118; Thomas Bowrey, A Geographical
Account of Countries round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679, ed. Richard Temple
(Cambridge, 1905), 212–13. Tavernier dealt in diamonds; some of his principal cli-
ents were in Bengal. See also his description of goods exported from the region, in
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India (1676), ed. V. Ball, 2 vols. (London, 1889), ii,
1–12.
4
India Office Records, London, IOR/H/392, Papers of George Smith, 11.
WHERE IS BENGAL? 117

BENGAL IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
manufactures and peasant production in the pre-colonial Indian

regions can be seen to belong in ‘the increasingly international
character of commerce and production relations during this
period’. Perlin discusses Bengal in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries as a site of ‘rurbanization’ and ‘accumulation’.5
André Gunder Frank uses the Bengal discourse to integrate India
into the debate on ‘the great divergence’. Historians are invited
to see an equivalence between ‘India’s most productive region’
and regions in coastal-deltaic China, both being ‘ ‘‘central’’ to
5
Frank Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia’, Past and
Present, no. 98 (Feb. 1983), 33, 81, 93.
the world economy’ in the seventeenth century.6 Prasannan

Parthasarathi suggests that fertile land and cheap grains made
Bengal manufactures attractive in the world market at this
time.7 Eastern Bengal, which was ‘largely jungle before the six-
teenth century’, experienced population growth, urbanization
and agrarian prosperity in the next two hundred years, all of
which ‘added enormously to the productive capacity of the sub-
continent as a whole’.8
The picture of the flourishing seventeenth century leads on to a
sequel of gathering crisis in the late eighteenth century and

onward to the misery that awaited Bengal in the mid twentieth.
Stories of such dramatic regress hint at only one factor to which
the reversal of fortune could possibly have been owed, namely
British colonialism. Frank proposes that India began to experi-
ence a decline from the mid eighteenth century as Spanish money
dried up, and the ‘rape of Bengal’ by the East India Company
began.9 Chaudhury makes the case that ‘the decline in the trad-
itional trade and industry can be discerned only in the second half
of the eighteenth century’.10 According to Perlin, a vigorous
‘proto-industrialization’ began to assume exploitative charac-
ter with the ‘assumption of governmental control in Bengal and
Coromandel by the English East India Company’.11
How sound is the picture of early modern Bengal as a haven for
commerce and industry? Did this region really possess the insti-
tutional prerequisites for sustained economic growth to take
place? It is necessary to ask the question because contributors
to the Bengal discourse, and the global and comparative history
practitioners who employ it to infer the origins of ‘divergence’,
have relied mainly upon European trade archives or Persian
sources to construct their narratives. But accounts left by traders
and rulers who did not speak the language of the region cannot be
6
André Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley,
1999), 127. See also Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and
the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000).
7
Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘Agriculture, Labour, and the Standard of Living in
Eighteenth-Century India’, in Robert C. Allen, Tommy Bengtsson and Martin Dribe
(eds.), Living Standards in the Past (Oxford, 2005).
8
Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘Cotton Textiles in the Indian Subcontinent, 1200–
1800’, in Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (eds.), The Spinning World: A
Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (New York and Oxford, 2009), 40–1.
9
Frank, ReOrient, 267, 293.
10
Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline, 1.
11
Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia’, 94.
wholly reliable as sources on the history of the region. In order to
test the reliability of the mainstream account, we should also con-
sider what the ordinary Bengalis thought about material life. Any
random sample of their thoughts would seem to contradict the
mainstream story. The literature of the Bengalis a century before
and a century after the Mughal takeover too often projects a pes-
simistic outlook on markets, livelihoods and states. A few illus-
trations are in order.
In the fifteenth century, ancestors of the Vaishnava master Sri
Chaitanya had migrated to the banks of the Bhagirathi (see Map)

to escape anarchy in Sylhet in north-eastern Bengal, and perse-
cution in Jajpur on the Orissa–Bengal border. In Chaitanya’s own
times (1486–1533), the landlord ruling an estate on the border
between Bengal and Orissa was robbing pilgrims; and when he
became Chaitanya’s disciple, the same landlord accompanied his
spiritual master in order to protect him from river pirates.12
Vaishnava literature of the mid sixteenth century paints regions
distant by only a few miles from the river Bhagirathi in much the
same colour. Robber barons lived in Nabadwip, the intellectual
capital of Bengal, disguised as elite citizens.13 Defaulting peasants
were ruthlessly tortured by landlords.14 Shortly before the
Mughal invasion, a poet from north-eastern Bengal described a
state of anarchy in her own milieu — householders hid wealth,
officers of the state failed to protect property, peasants robbed
travellers, and robbers were as powerful as kings.15 In a village in
western Bengal, a contemporary, Mukundaram Chakrabarty, ex-
plained that the constant harassment by revenue officers and ac-
countants drove the family, along with many merchants and
bankers, to leave the ancestral village.16 About the same time,
12
Sri Sri Chaitanya Charitamrita, ed. Jagadishwar Gupta (Calcutta, 1902), 367–71.
13
For the episode of ‘the Brahmin, the leader of the robbers’, see Sri Chaitanya
Bhagabat, ed. Atulkrishna Goswami (Calcutta, 1935), 467–9. See also the episode of
Sanatan’s escape from prison, with the help of an officer who initially intended to
murder him for money, Sri Sri Chaitanya Charitamrita, ed. Gupta, 458–9.
14
J. N. Das Gupta, Bengal in the Sixteenth Century AD (Calcutta, 1914), 71–2.
15
In summarizing the relevant passage, I combine three versions of the poem by
Chandrabati (c.1545–80), available in Purbbabanga Geetika [Eastern Bengal Ballads],
ed. Dinesh Chandra Sen, 4 vols. (Calcutta, 1923–32), i, 202–3; Prachin Purbbabanga
Geetika [Old Eastern Bengal Ballads], ed. Kshitishchandra Moulik, 7 vols. (Calcutta,
1970–5), i, 262; and Dinesh Chandra Sen, The Bengali Ramayanas (Calcutta, 1920),
190.
16
Sukumar Sen, Bangala Sahityer Itihas [History of Bengali Literature], 4 vols.
(Calcutta, 1959–63), i, 512.
in a village near the eastern seaboard, the romantic poet Alaol’s

life was endangered by Portuguese pirates who had killed his
father. Alaol found asylum in the Arakan state, only to risk his
life when he fell out of favour with the Arakan king.17
The so-called eastern Bengal ballads, composed mainly in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, do not suggest any im-
provement in conditions of life after Mughal takeover. Not only
was there anarchy, but there was also the effect of an unstable
environment, intrusive communities and extortionate officers.18
With regular force, floods destroyed cultivation and drove peas-

ants to ruinous indebtedness. Storms and pirates ruined the
seagoing merchant. Individuals without the protection of the
community were exposed to persecution. Young women falling
in love outside the community were hounded by that community.
The Mughal state in these accounts had at best a symbolic pres-
ence. The qazi (judge in the Islamic court) commanded neither
respect nor trust. Anyone who could hire soldiers or arm kinsmen
could hope to gain control over a part of this world. Such people
included bands of robbers who roamed the forested highways and
plied the Brahmaputra in the guise of boatmen, while their cap-
tains pursued respectable professions in the towns.
How do we reconcile these hints of pervasive risk and uncer-
tainty that the literary sources convey with the strongly positive
tone in which present-day historians have painted conditions of
material life in early modern Bengal? One possible response
would be to choose between growth and anarchy, but that
would amount to disregarding either the one or the other body
of evidence altogether. Perhaps they are both right. The ‘Bengal’
which both the literary and the historical sources are considering
included quite different institutional environments with little
endogenous drive towards convergence. If, however, we follow
that path, we must also ask, where did diversity come from? The
present article attempts to answer this question.
I show that Bengal was a segmented totality. There were regions
within Bengal that did not trade very much between themselves,
17
Daulat Kazir Lorchandrani o Satimayna [Lorchandrani and Satimayna of Daulat
Kazi], ed. Debnath Bandopadhyay (Calcutta, 1995), 15.
18
The term ‘ballad’ has been used to refer to Bengali poetic narratives, for example
by W. Sutton Page, ‘Bengali Ballads’, Bull. School of Oriental and African Studies, iv
(1926). For a fuller description of these works and the appropriateness of the term, see
below.
and that were subject to such severe geographical constraints and
high transportation costs as to make hegemonic states possessing
the institutional means to generate sufficient income for them-
selves an impossible project. The account of growth-followed-
by-decline is at best a generalization based on the experience of
a strip of land in western Bengal and extrapolated to a vastly more
differentiated land mass. The segments did not necessarily live in
autarky. Many outlying areas had frequent transactions with out-
siders accessible to them. Such contact did not everywhere take
the shape of commodity trade and precious metal inflow. Our

considerably enhanced knowledge of that part of Bengal which
supplied European traders needs to be used as a benchmark to
read how regions that did not trade so much with European mer-
chants nevertheless charted their own distinct modes of engage-
ment with outsiders.
The argument of the article is that differences, marked by geo-
graphical, cultural and political fragmentation, ran so deep that a
notion of ‘Bengal’ as a meaningful unit in global economic history
cannot be sustained. Indeed, any attempt to suggest otherwise
would risk looking like a projection of post-1857 political maps
and recreated cultural identities upon a time and place that had
no essential homogeneity. Nor can it be salvaged by having re-
course to a core–periphery terminology wherein one zone (in the
mainstream view the one exporting cotton textiles) is defined as
the core and the others as its periphery (usually the grain produ-
cing ‘hinterland’). Instead we should consider a notion of early
modern Bengal as a series of parallel globalizations formed out of
interactions between resources, trade costs, an increasingly am-
bitious fiscal state, itinerant merchants, and military adventurers.
Contemporary Bengali literature would be consistent with such a
picture, while suggesting that this fluidity made many ordinary
lives unsafe.
The ground for a reinterpretation is supplied by the hundred or
so poetic narratives produced between Mughal takeover (1590)
and the confirmation of the East India Company as the rulers of
Bengal (1765). These tales were recovered and published in
annotated editions in the 1920s to the 1950s.19 Poetic narratives
19
For standard compilations, see Purbbabanga Geetika, ed. Sen; Prachin Purbba-
banga Geetika, ed. Moulik. A smaller third cluster is Mafizul Islam, Rangpurer Pala-
gan [Ballads of Rangpur] (Dacca, 1985).
in Bengali in this time span came from several regions, and were
quite varied in content. Perhaps the most familiar to historians are
two clusters, Vaishnava literature and the mangalkavyas, which
were devotional in intent, written mainly by the Hindu upper-
caste literati, produced in the Bhagirathi floodplains in the west,
and received patronage from the Hindu kings. Several thousand
manuscripts and manuscript fragments discovered in the 1950s
and 1960s in the same broad region followed this high tradition
with more limited and more rustic resources.20 One of the last
major outputs in the high tradition was the Annadamangal, com-

posed by the mid eighteenth-century court poet Bharatchandra
Ray. These western Bengal devotional texts have been employed
as material in constructing the cultural history of the time, and
more recently, in interpretations of kingship.21 But I rely only
marginally on these products.
Instead, in this article, I make use of the tales that originated in
eastern Bengal. These were composed in three distinct regions:
Mymensingh, a large district to the east of the river Brahmaputra;
Rangpur to the west of the river; and the Noakhali–Chittagong
coast. Collectively they represented a corpus quite different from
that of western Bengal. They were secular. They were not about
kings and chieftains in the main, which hints at an obscure and
diffused pattern of patronage. And they belonged, to a relatively
greater extent, in an oral-performative tradition. The minstrels
who composed them were not ordinarily members of the intel-
lectual elite. Unlike in balladic traditions, quite a few of these tales
were autobiographical, and the others followed the lives of a
varied collection of anti-heroes and anti-heroines such as sailors,
soldiers, tribal headmen, merchants, landlords, gypsies, mendi-
cants, fishermen, robbers and women. Most important for my
purpose, the tales engage with economic life to a far greater
extent than do those of the western Bengal corpus. We find
many references in the stories of occupations, employment rela-
tions, environmental risks and political extortions, in contrast
with the devotional texts of western Bengal.
20
The main output of the project was published as Punthi Parichaya [Introduction
to Manuscripts], ed. Panchanan Mandal et al., 6 vols. (Calcutta, 1951–89).
21
David L. Curley, ‘Kings and Commerce on an Agrarian Frontier: Kalketu’s Story
in Mukunda’s Candimangal’, Indian Econ. and Soc. Hist. Rev., xxxviii (2001).
Ballads are often used as source material for historical re-
search.22 But they also present a difficulty for the historian inter-
ested mainly in the societies that produced and consumed these
poetic narratives. Traditional tales followed literary conventions,
which, in turn, followed the expectations of the patrons and the
intended audience. The Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp has
shown that the morphology of traditional tales was amenable to
analysis.23 The presence of a predictable form makes it possible
that what the historian might read as the immediate reality experi-
enced by the poets was in fact an image or a literary device. There

has been an attempt recently to study the morphology of the
Annadamangal.24 On the other hand, the formulaic content of
the eastern Bengal ballads has not been discussed at all. The
material that I draw upon was quite different from those analysed,
and while they contained a few formulaic plots of heroism and
love, they also contained much that was unconventional in medi-
eval Bengal or in balladic traditions. The social conventions that
bound them and the entertainment markets that they served
remain obscure. It is even possible that the ballads considered
here formed a category of their own that did not share many fea-
tures with the tales that lend themselves more fruitfully to the
formalist discourse. In other words, while I do not see a good
reason to discount the evidential value of the material, it is neces-
sary to acknowledge that the cultural context of these tales re-
mains under-researched. In the next section I develop further the
geographically segmented definition of Bengal; the two sections
that follow illustrate distinct paths of globalization.
II
Like any other large Mughal province of its time, seventeenth-
century Bengal can be defined as a unit of administration, a
quasi-independent state, a geographical space, a linguistic-
cultural entity, and an integrated economy. These five ways of
22
See, for example, J. C. Holt, ‘The Origins and Audience of the Ballads of Robin
Hood’, Past and Present, no. 18 (Nov. 1960).
23
Vladimir Propp, Theory and History of Folklore, ed. Anatoly Liberman, trans.
Ariadna Y. Martin and Richard P. Martin (Minneapolis, 1997); see esp. editor’s
intro. A frequent criticism of the formalist agenda is that it underestimates the indi-
viduality of the products and their makers.
24
Clinton B. Seely, Barisal and Beyond: Essays on Bangla Literature (New Delhi,
2008).
defining Bengal did not correspond to identical spaces. Bengal

was also an idea. In the accounts produced by European visitors
in the Mughal court, the word ‘Bengala’ referred to lands located
in an easterly direction from Agra rather than a definite region.25
In administrative discourses in Mughal and post-Mughal peri-
ods, Bengal tended to mean the region under the formal authority
of its capitals. By this definition, Bengal in the late eighteenth
century was an area
governed by the presidency of Fort William, comprehending the whole
Subas [provinces] of Bengal and Bahar; a part of the adjoining Subas of

Ilahabad, Oresa, and Berar, and some tracts of country, (such as part of
Morung, Cooch, and other provinces) which had maintained their inde-
pendence even in the most flourishing period of the Moghul empire.26
Here, I consider this area to correspond to that available in early
maps showing the officially claimed extent of the Mughal
province.
The political unit designated Bengal was geographically di-
verse, as historians recognize.27 Nineteenth-century geographers
devised a scheme to read the Indian landscape, dividing it into the
alluvial, the peninsular and the extra-peninsular.28 Adapting this
schema, the geography of Bengal can be divided into three main
zones, the western uplands, the central alluvial flats and the
southern seaboard.29 About 1700, there was very limited eco-
nomic, political and cultural interaction between the three
zones, and between the more accessible parts of the alluvial
plains and the less accessible ones.
The alluvial flats spanned the floodplains of the Ganges river
system, and were by far the largest of the three zones. There was
considerable economic, political and cultural diversity within the
alluvial flats. For example, the existence of all-weather waterways
25
Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar, 120.
26
H. T. Colebrooke, Remarks on the Husbandry and Internal Commerce of Bengal
(Calcutta, 1804), 114.
27
Sugata Bose, for example, distinguishes four ecological zones within colonial
Bengal, the submontane north, the western plateau, and two river deltas, the one in
the east being active and the one in the west in decline: see his Peasant Labour and
Colonial Capital, 9–14. The seaboard plays a marginal role in this division. In the early
modern period, the north was a less important region in economic terms, and the
seaboard more prominent.
28
R. D. Oldham, ‘The Evolution of Indian Geography’, Geog. Jl, iii (1894).
29
For Bengal, the threefold division was applied by Cotton Hand-Book for Bengal:
Being a Digest of All Information Available from Official Records and Other Sources on the
Subject of the Production of Cotton in the Bengal Provinces, comp. J. G. Medlicott
(Calcutta, 1862), 29.
made the river banks stand out as the commercial and political
centre, whereas in areas further away from the rivers penetration
of trade and authority dropped away sharply. An important con-
centration of commerce and culture developed along the river
Bhagirathi in western Bengal, which provided relatively easy
access to the Bay of Bengal in the south and the Mughal
Empire in the west. The uplands were made up of the eastern
projection of the central Indian plateau spanning Bengal and
Bihar. The whole uplands region, due to its common geograph-
ical characteristics, came to be referred to as Chota Nagpur, the

name of one state located in its centre. During the later stages of
the Mughal campaign in Bengal, the imperial forces engaged with
a number of substantial landlords who ruled Birbhum, Pachet
and Hijli in the west of Bengal. In cultural and economic terms,
these territories spanned the alluvial and the upland zones. The
seaboard, despite the vast waterways that criss-crossed it, was
commercially not the centre. A large part of it consisted of forests,
and there were few industrial and commercial settlements. While
there was trade in grain, dried fish, and salt in the lower delta, the
scale of these trades was not large. According to the evidence of
the ballads, the traders who dealt in these goods lived in the coun-
tryside, owned land and cultivated it for six months of the year,
venturing out on trading missions only occasionally.
There was much diversity in resource conditions between these
zones. The productivity of land varied, and so did the taxable
wealth. Paddy was the principal crop everywhere. And yet, as
nineteenth-century agronomists pointed out, paddy yields varied
enormously between rain-fed and irrigated zones, and between
laterite and alluvial soils. In the nineteenth century, parts of the
water-rich delta produced yields of husked rice that exceeded
600 kg per acre, whereas the Chota Nagpur laterite uplands pro-
duced half as much.30 On the defensible assumption that the two
regions had a similar pattern of access to water resources a
century earlier, the ratio of paddy yields between major regions
in the eighteenth century or before should not be too different.31
30
W. W. Hunter, Famine Aspects of Bengal Districts (London, 1874), 17, 36, 64, 94,
100, 105.
31
Change in rice yield requires variable application of biological input. All evidence
on the matter suggests that the intensity of biological inputs in Bengal agriculture had
been low and invariable at least from the mid eighteenth century. For a discussion of
(cont. on p. 126)
The extent of crop diversification was also considerably smaller in

the uplands.
Although Bernier mentions that Bengal could be entered by as
many as a hundred gates, most European merchants and travel-
lers knew only one. Those taking the route of this gateway fol-
lowed the western coastline from the Dutch outposts in Balasore
and Pipli, to Hijli at the mouth of the river Rasulpur, sailed up the
river Bhagirathi to Portuguese Hooghly and north to Rajmahal,
the provincial capital, and then turned west towards Patna in the
heart of the empire (see Map). Few Europeans in the seventeenth

century travelled more than a few miles inland from the banks of
the river. For the purpose of trade, they were not constrained by
being so confined. Lower Bengal had no highways or roads
worthy of the name. Caravan trade and overland traffic were
present, but these were not the main modes of moving goods.
The overwhelmingly larger portion of long-distance goods traffic
was carried by the rivers. Bhagirathi, by contrast with most other
rivers of Bengal, could be navigated throughout the year. Being
navigable, and (after Mughal annexation) the only trade highway
that was relatively safe, peaceful, and within easy access of the
provincial capital, this river bank also became the home of intel-
lectuals, merchants and military commanders.
This attraction of Bhagirathi had been long-standing. At the
time of Chaitanya, a large number of service workers left the sea-
board and submontane regions to settle in the port towns in west-
ern Bengal. For at least three hundred years before this time, the
river bank had seen the most stable form of state formation,
flourishing commerce and education. The port Saptagram, the
scholastic centre Nabadwip, the sultanate capital Gaud, and
the administrative outpost Ambua (Kalna) were all located
on or near the river.32 The factories that the European com-
panies built — Hooghly, Patna, Kasimbazar, Rajmahal, Chin-
surah, Chandannagar and Serampore — were located on the
Bhagirathi or the Ganges. The knowledge of greater Bengal
(n. 31 cont.)
trends in rice yields in Bengal, see Tirthankar Roy, ‘Economic Conditions in Early
Modern Bengal: A Contribution to the Divergence Debate’, Jl Econ. Hist., lxx (2010).
32
A description of this world before the Mughals can be found in Haraprasad
Shastri, ‘Notes on the Banks of the Hughly in 1495’, Proc. Asiatic Soc. Bengal
(Calcutta, 1892).
among European traders, settlers and officers was coloured by
the experience of business and war in the Bhagirathi plains.
Although their nerve centre was located in the Bhagirathi zone,
both the Indo-European trade in textiles and the overland trade
with northern India did achieve an integration of some sort be-
tween the central alluvial flats with Bihar and Agra in the west and
the seaboard and the trans-Brahmaputra alluvial lands in the east.
The eastward expansion of commerce, cultivation and military
power was also present. Bengal was, by some accounts, the main
supplier of rice and sugar to the imperial centre. The founding of

Dacca (Dhaka) as the Mughal provincial capital increased traffic
along the eastern rivers. The expansionary impact of long-
distance trade should not be exaggerated, however. Om
Prakash estimates that the net employment generated by the tex-
tile trade of the Dutch and the English companies amounted
to about a hundred thousand ‘full-time job equivalents’.33 In a
workforce of roughly twelve to fifteen million, that number rep-
resents less than 1 per cent. Such a number of workers plus their
families could be fed a generous ration of rice the whole year
round out of less than half of 1 per cent of estimated cultivated
land in eighteenth-century Bengal. In 1658, the revenue from
Bengal to be delivered to the Mughal imperial treasury was set
at about Rs 13 million. The corresponding figure in 1722 was Rs
14 million. Adjusted for inflation, these figures suggest a fall in
real collection.34 If the wealth of the government maintained a
roughly stable relation with the wealth of the population, Bengalis
became poorer in this time span. The trade in rice and salt, two
bulk items for mass consumption, brought the ‘hinterland’ into
increasing contact with the urban core. But the supplies of both
these goods came from only a few districts, and their scale remains
a matter of conjecture. According to one contemporary estimate,
at the end of the eighteenth century, Bengal exported about
7.5 per cent of its rice output. The proportion was surely much
smaller in the seventeenth century.35
33
Om Prakash, ‘Bullion for Goods: International Trade and the Economy of Early
Eighteenth Century Bengal’, Indian Econ. and Soc. Hist. Rev., xiii (1976), esp. 172–3.
34
On prices, see Najaf Haider, ‘Prices and Wages in India (1200–1800): Source
Material, Historiography and New Directions’, paper given at the conference
‘Towards a Global History of Prices and Wages’, Univ. of Utrecht, 19–21 Aug.
2004, preliminary draft available online at 5http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/papers/haider
.pdf4.
35
India Office Records, London, IOR/H/392, Papers of George Smith, 31.
Why, despite cheapness of grain and, in places, high-yielding

land, did the region not trade more and industrialize early? The
answer to that question can be found in geography. Road trans-
portation was expensive because of the streams that splintered the
delta. How expensive it was in time and money in the early
modern period can be gauged from some figures collected later,
when carriages were faster than before. In the 1830s, the overland
journey between the two principal cities of Bengal, Dacca and
Calcutta, by the fastest means (the mail carriage) was feasible
only for six months of the year, involved twenty-two ‘stages’

and twenty changes of ferry. The distance was less than 200
miles.36 Overland travel from Dacca to Bakarganj in the south
or Sylhet in the north-east was seldom undertaken at any time,
because the rivers that it was necessary to travel on were navigable
for only part of the year, even when there was enough water in
them. Of the major rivers of the delta, the Brahmaputra was no-
torious for whirlpools, and the daily tides in the Meghna could
become murderous for small sailing boats. Each day during the
ebb tide, the Meghna exposed massive sandbanks in its middle,
and these sandbanks shifted position, so that even seasoned mari-
ners did not know their routes through this maze. The rivers in the
Sundarbans opened out to snake-infested no man’s lands. The
rivers that originated in the uplands dried up in winter. Even in
the best of conditions, river transportation was possible for about
six months of the year. The ballads specify mid June, after the first
monsoon showers and after the first rice sowing, as being the
season when country merchants set off in their boats. And the
season came to an end by February. Consequently, vast stretches
of land within the Mughal province did not trade at all internally
for almost half the year.
It took some time before the sense of diversity began to
be appreciated among late eighteenth-century administrators.
When it did, two things happened. First, the greater knowledge
of rural Bengal imparted a sobering effect upon the discourse on
the wealth of the entire region. In the same year that Clive wrote
about the riches of the area, an official report argued that these
riches had been vastly overstated.37 ‘The great mass’ of the
36
James Taylor, A Sketch of the Topography and Statistics of Dacca (Calcutta, 1840),
120.
37
Comments by William Cowper (revenue officer), in Select Committee, and
Committee of Whole House of Commons, on Affairs of East India Company Minutes of
(cont. on p. 129)
Bengalis, another officer stated, ‘are not likely to become custom-
ers for Europeans articles, because they do not possess the means
to purchase them’.38 In Britain, Adam Smith offered an assess-
ment of Bengal in terms that anticipated Malthusian econom-
ics.39 The second effect was the commissioning of fact-finding
trips. Soon after the East India Company assumed taxation rights
in Bengal, James Rennell was sent on cartographical expeditions.
For the first time, he charted a reliable map of the lower delta,
nearly losing his life in the process. And Francis Buchanan was
sent on a tour of two segments of the erstwhile Bengal subah

about which the Company had never had any first-hand know-
ledge: the Chota Nagpur uplands and the Chittagong–Arakan
coast.
Fitting those two sub-regions within the territorial possession
of the Company was a particular priority because earlier regimes
had laid claims to much of Bengal, including these lands, without
anything like administrative and fiscal control. In the next section,
I explore the condition of statelessness in which the seaboard, the
uplands and the more remote parts of the alluvial plains had
found themselves until the consolidation of Company rule.
III
During much of the sixteenth century, Bengal was divided into a
number of effectively independent kingdoms. The larger of these
owed formal allegiance to the Sultan in Gaud in central Bengal
and/or had been established by chiefs formerly in the employ of
Gaud. Several others had no relations with this centre of power. A
fierce contest raged between them over land revenue. This was
low, due not only to the poor state of cultivation in many areas,
but also to the dependence of the fiscal system on village land-
lords. In this scenario, the formal conquest of Bengal by Mughal
forces beginning in the 1580s installed the bare framework of
(n. 37 cont.)
Evidence (Trade and Shipping, and Renewal of Charter), House of Commons
Parliamentary Papers Online, 5http://parlipapers.chadwyck.co.uk4, 1812–13
(122), 22.
38
Comments by John Malcolm, ibid., 57.
39
For a discussion, see Geoffrey Gilbert, ‘Adam Smith on the Nature and Causes of
Poverty’, Rev. Social Econ., lv (1997).
an imperial administration, which had more credibility near

Dacca and Rajmahal than anywhere else.
Persian sources on the lower reaches of the delta remain scarce,
reflecting the limits of Mughal power in the area. In European
travelogues, the seaboard was remarked upon for its forests, the
snakes and tigers that made human settlements near the forests
dangerous, the rhinoceros that damaged crops, the many king-
doms at war with each other, and piracy.40 According to one in-
terpretation, the insecurity of life on the seaboard was mostly due
to Portuguese and Arakanese raids.41 By contrast, I consider the

internal context to be rather more important. Insecurity was
rooted in the fragmented polity, which had a mainly geographical
source.
Early nineteenth-century geographers, affected by the ro-
mance of the unknown, proposed a theory that the Sundarban
forests were not more than three hundred years old. The region,
they suggested, had once seen flourishing civilizations that were
destroyed by tidal waves and slave raiders.42 While this theory is
questionable, there is no disputing the fact that the extreme rap-
idity with which alluvial deposits formed and unformed in the
lower delta would have made large urban settlements and gar-
risons a precarious enterprise for any state. The rivers were unfit
for navigation by large ships. Military supplies could not easily be
procured from markets because few markets of sufficient scale
existed. Mud and swamp slowed cavalry. All-weather roads
were impossible to build and maintain because of frequent inun-
dations and shifting rivers. Even shipbuilding was not practised
widely. Timber could not be removed at a comparatively low cost.
Although Chittagong became a port for the timber trade in the
seventeenth century, this timber came from the eastern forests
rather than the Sundarbans.
The seaboard, therefore, never saw the institutions of imperial
state take root. When the Mughals began the Bengal campaign,
all of eastern Bengal had been splintered into small kingdoms.
40
For example, Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies: Being the
Observations and Remarks of Capt. Alexander Hamilton, who Resided in those Parts from
the Year 1688, to 1723, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (London, 1739), ii, 24–7.
41
Raychaudhuri, Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir.
42
H. J. Rainey, ‘What Was the Sundarban Originally, and When, and Wherefore
Did It Assume its Existing State of Utter Desolation?’, Proc. Asiatic Soc. Bengal
(Calcutta, 1867).
Legend has it that twelve of these estates were especially powerful.
However, histories of the campaign produce names of hundreds
of chieftains, who resisted the advance individually rather than
according to any common plan.43 These chieftains commanded
armies consisting of small mobile bands of soldiers. As Ralph
Fitch remarked, ‘here are so many rivers and Ilands, that they
flee from one to another, whereby his [the Emperor Akbar’s]
horsemen cannot prevaile against them’.44 There were few
horses and elephants, and little artillery. A capital-saving and
labour-intensive military infrastructure, consisting of small

boats, matchlocks, spears, swords and mud forts, had a better
chance. For that very reason, military debacles left little lasting
impact. The forces could be reassembled quickly, but, like the
military infrastructure, the institutional setting was also rudimen-
tary. There was no mention in the ballads of police and justice that
commanded wide legitimacy, nor of patronage of merchants, art-
ists, artisans and bankers. Unlike in the Bhagirathi zone, on the
seaboard these classes were not of great relevance to the political
economy. When Mughal rule had established itself in Dacca,
Alexander Hamilton observed that people living towards the
south preferred the Mughals to their own kings, ‘for the Mogul
taxes them gently, and every one knows what he must pay, but the
Pagan Kings or Princes tax at Discretion’.45
In the southern delta, the principal urban centres in the six-
teenth century were Sonargaon and Sripur, capitals of two neigh-
bouring states.46 Sripur contained a shipbuilding and repair
industry, possibly managed by Portuguese sailors. The ruler at
Sonargaon, Isa Khan, was ‘chiefe of all the other kings, and is a
great friend to all Christians’. These words were written by Fitch,
the principal European traveller to visit the region. Fitch found
Sripur to have a considerable port. ‘Great store of Cotton cloth
goeth from hence, and much Rice, wherewith they serve all India,
Ceilon, Pegu, Malacca, Sumatra, and many other places’. The
statement can be misread, for after all, Sripur was little more than
43
Baharistan-i-Ghaybi: A History of the Mughal Wars in Assam, Cooch Behar, Bengal,
Bihar and Orissa during the Reigns of Jahangir and Shahjahan, trans. M. I. Borah, 2 vols.
(Gauhati, 1936), ii, passim.
44
Ralph Fitch, ed. Ryley, 119.
45
Hamilton, New Account of the East Indies, ii, 25.
46
These towns were located on the northern bank of the confluence of the Ganges
and the Brahmaputra, within 5–20 miles of Dacca.
an overgrown village, where the town residents lived in straw-mat

huts, in fear of tigers and foxes, wore little clothing, and subsisted
on ‘rice, milke, and fruits’.47 Fitch mentions no article of import,
nor any silver. Fitch also visited the king of Bakla, the southern-
most major kingdom. Since he does not mention either an over-
land journey or changing ship, it would seem that Bakla was
located at the mouth of the river. The Ain-i-Akbari mentions
some years later (c.1590) that the town was destroyed by a giant
wave from the sea, taking two hundred thousand lives with it.
The Bakla kingdom re-emerged to play a role in the subsequent

politics over control of the Sundarban islands.
In the interstices of a fractured polity, the Portuguese mariners
entrenched themselves. The Portuguese presence in the eastern
delta began with the arrival of John D’Silveyra from the Maldives
in 1517 to erect a factory at the mouth of the Meghna, and his
subsequent employment with the king of Arakan as a naval cap-
tain. While their trading station later shifted to Bandel, because of
‘the Dangers their ships run in coming thither in the South-west
Monsoons’, Jesuits and mercenaries stayed on.48 Owing to the
risk of sandbanks, the most common gunships were the one- or
two-masted galliots carrying no more than ten cannons and a few
dozen men, the flyboat of about 100 tons, and the flat-bottomed
pink, good at negotiating shallow waters, rather than the larger
frigates and carracks. The Portuguese and the Dutch were the
master-builders of these light gunships. The Dutch never settled
here; the Portuguese did. They were hired by the landed states in
two distinct capacities, as artillerymen and as naval commanders.
The king of Jessore (well inland) had an army with which he beat
off advance parties of the Mughals; this army and the police relied
on Portuguese mercenaries. Sripur hired them; so did the
Mughals themselves. In the early seventeenth century, a partner-
ship formed between the Arakan state, the Portuguese and the
Bakla king, all interested in taking firmer control of the islands.49
47
Ralph Fitch, ed. Ryley, 118–19.
48
Hamilton, New Account of the East Indies, ii, 26.
49
The following description of the partnership between the Arakan kingdom and
the Portuguese relies on F. C. Danvers, The Portuguese in India: Being a History of the
Rise and Decline of their Eastern Empire, 2 vols. (London, 1894), ii, 170–81; H.
Beveridge, The District of Bakarganj, its History and Statistics (London, 1876), 34–
40; J. C. Jack, Bakarganj (Bengal District Gazetteers, xxxvi, Calcutta, 1918), 18–20.
In this case, the Portuguese functioned as sailors rather than
soldiers.
The Arakan–Portuguese partnership represented the strongest
military power around 1600. The Arakan state commanded mus-
keteers (eighty thousand joined a campaign against the Mughals
in 1609) and a considerable number of skilled Burmese swords-
men, but not an effective navy. Here Portuguese partnership
made a difference. Both these forces tend to be seen as opportun-
istic. More likely, they entertained colonial ambitions. When
they had their chance, Portuguese soldiers quickly settled on

and cultivated the land. The Arakan state had more obvious
imperial designs, fuelled by the disintegration of the monarchy
in Pegu.50 Both forces were moreover interested in the outer
islands as a deterrent to the Mughals.
Had this partnership lasted, a loosely constituted empire com-
bining naval and landed power might well have emerged on the
seaboard. However, as Persian sources amply illustrate, although
the farangian-i-harmad (Franks commanding armadas) and the
Arakanese were allies, they shared a deep mutual distrust.51 The
partnership foundered over control of Sandwip in the early seven-
teenth century. Sandwip was a prize possession because of its salt
trade, fertile soil and strategic location. It was successively ruled
by Mughal agents, the Arakan state, and the Portuguese heroes of
the Pegu campaign, after persecution of the Portuguese in the
Arakan capital had turned Sandwip into a battle front. The pro-
tagonist of the campaign was the enigmatic Sebastiao Gonzales
Tibao (the Gawsawal Firingi, in Baharistan). It is not necessary
here to repeat the well-known story of how Gonzales conquered
Sandwip, and of the four-cornered rivalry that followed between
the Portuguese, the Mughals, the Arakan state and the Bakla
50
On the rise to prominence of the Arakan state in the seventeenth century, and its
significance for the historiography of European influence upon the south-east Asian
polity, see Michael W. Charney, ‘Crisis and Reformation in a Maritime Kingdom of
Southeast Asia: Forces of Instability and Political Disintegration in Western Burma
(Arakan), 1603–1701’, Jl Econ. and Social Hist. of the Orient, xli (1998). On the geo-
politics of the seventeenth-century Bay of Bengal, see Cayetano J. Socarrás, ‘The
Portuguese in Lower Burma: Filipe de Brito de Nicote’, Luso-Brazilian Rev., iii
(1966). See also Rila Mukherjee, ‘Mobility in the Bay of Bengal World: Medieval
Raiders, Traders, States and the Slaves’, Indian Hist. Rev., xxxvi (2009); Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of
Bengal, 1500–1700 (Delhi, 1990).
51
Baharistan-i-Ghaybi, trans. Borah.
landlord, which culminated in his losing it. The closest equivalent

to a Portuguese territorial state on the seaboard ended in 1616.
Thereafter the Portuguese soldiers and sailors, numbering sev-
eral thousands, divided into loose communities. Some of these
communities continued overland as employees of the zamindars
(Mughal revenue officers, who were effectively proprietors of
landed estates). A few of them turned zamindars themselves,
whereas the others ‘gradually sunk to the level of the natives’.52
Other bands settled near Chittagong and raided the mouth of the
river. Between 1615 and 1665, when Chittagong and Sandwip

remained in Arakan control, the Portuguese and the Arakanese
shared an interest in the slave trade. Despite the recapture of
Sandwip, and the expulsion of the Portuguese from Hooghly in
1670, Mughal authority in the islands was weak at best. Predatory
raids by the Arakanese continued even after the East India
Company obtained the taxation rights of Bengal, and reached
as far as Calcutta.53 Rennell’s tours in Bakarganj between 1764
and 1767 led to the mapping of towns and estates belonging to the
landed gentry among the Portuguese.54 On the other hand, de-
scriptions of Chittagong in the early eighteenth century painted a
picture of a town living on uncertain means, which included vari-
ous kinds of pillage. The Portuguese were the ‘domineering
Lords’ in this officially Mughal town. And yet, the poverty of
the town was such that it was a ‘matter of indifference whom it
belongs to . . . The Government is so anarchical, that everyone
goes armed with Sword, Pistol, and Blunderbush, nay, even the
52
The Journals of Major James Rennell, First-Surveyor-General of India: Written for the
Information of the Governors of Bengal during his Surveys of the Ganges and Brahmaputra
Rivers, 1764 to 1767, ed. T. H. D. La Touche (Calcutta, 1910), 39. On the post-history
of the Portuguese in the Dacca region, see B. C. Allen, Dacca (Eastern Bengal and
Assam District Gazetteers, v, Allahabad, 1912).
53
Historical documentation on slavery in Bengal is thin. Some material was col-
lected on practices prevalent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
when abolition was already the deliberate policy in the British territories. See William
Adam, The Law and Custom of Slavery in British India, in a Series of Letters to Thomas
Fowell Buxton (Boston, 1840), letter V; Captain Fisher, ‘Memoir of Sylhet, Kachar and
the Adjoining Districts’, Jl Roy. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, ix (1840). Also useful, though in
the main concerned with Malabar and Canara, is East India: Copies of the Special
Reports of the Indian Law Commissioners: (C.) No. I. Papers Connected with Law
Commissioners’ Reports on Slavery in India and (C.) No. II. On the Examinations of
Absent Witnesses, Parliamentary Papers, 1842 (585), 470–532. Moreland, India at
the Death of Akbar, 91–3, describes the institution based mainly on Persian and
Goan sources.
54
Journals of Major James Rennell, ed. La Touche, 136.
Priests are obliged to go armed, and often use their Arms to as bad
Ends as the Licentious Laity’.55
Some of the eastern Bengal ballads originated in the Chitta-
gong area, and dealt with the lives of peasants and merchants.
The peasants faced the despotic landlord — who is typified in
the tale ‘The Battle of the Chaudhuris’. The Chaudhuris were a
north Indian family who captured an estate in Noakhali from
the descendants of a legendary Brahmin general who protected
the residents from raiders. The tale, composed in the early
eighteenth century, relates the exploits of Rajchandra, a young

prince, and his brutal minister Ram Bhandari; the story ends with
a devastating battle between two neighbouring kings. The mer-
chants, on the other hand, faced a dangerous stretch of water,
such as the infamous kalapani (black water), and raiders from
the sea. The pirates formed their own settlements along the Chit-
tagong coast.56 They used as lookout posts the uninhabited is-
lands that were submerged during high tide.57 The ships they
raided carried bamboo, dried fish, salt and rice. None of these
goods interested them. On one occasion, the stinking cargo of a
captured ship almost led to its abandonment by the pirates. They
were mainly after the cash, including Burmese bullion that the
merchants sometimes carried with them. The ballad evidence
does suggest Portuguese interest in slavery, but does not confirm
the statement made by Bernier and Tavernier that they raided
villages in search of slaves. The Arakanese predators, however,
penetrated deeper. ‘The land became abandoned [the word used
is awrajawk, literally ‘stateless’] due to the constant attacks
from the Mogs [Arakanese]’, one author lamented. That some
of these communities of attackers also lived a long time in the
55
Hamilton, New Account of the East Indies, ii, 26–7. Francis Buchanan visited
Chittagong in the late eighteenth century. For his account of what was still a
Portuguese town, see Francis Buchanan in Southeast Bengal (1798), ed. Willem van
Schendel (New Delhi, 1992), 123.
56
For ‘The Battle of the Chaudhuris’, see Purbbabanga Geetika, ed. Sen, iii, 1031–
138; on the pirates, who kept watch on the coast at Ujantek, see ‘Nurunneha and the
Tale of the Grave’, ibid., iv, 1302: ‘As merchant ships pass by, they chase the ships in
speedy boats. Ruthless at heart, the pirates are tireless fighters on the sea. They take
everything, kidnap the crew, and sink the ship’.
57
References to and descriptions of such islands can be found in ‘Nasar Malum’,
ibid., iii, 1239; and in ‘Nurunnesa and the Tale of the Grave’, ibid., iv, 1302.
conquered lands is hinted by reports of buried treasure in the

outer islands.58
Interestingly, oppression did not follow one trajectory all the
time. The king appears in these stories as an opportunist, rather
than as a despot. In the Chaudhuri case, conversations between
rulers and subjects were conducted in the style of arguments be-
tween equals.59 Where they could, the subjects organized them-
selves and resisted the small bands of soldiers that accompanied
Rajchandra. When the qazi of Shafla port desired the wife of Amir
the merchant, Amir’s family organized an army made up of north

Indian mercenaries and together with his own fleet attacked the
qazi’s domain.60 As in the case of the kings, so with the pirates and
raiders, the relationship between the oppressed and the oppress-
ors was uncertain and opportunistic. The Bengali merchant often
entered into partnerships with the Arakanese, though such col-
laborations were weakened by fundamental distrust.61 Boats that
went past the outer islands always carried arms (‘sticks, spears,
powder and guns’). They needed expert sailors as well, for it was
still a disaster to go off course and finish up on one of the unin-
habited islands.62 Fishermen went out to sea in groups, and in one
battle they overpowered the Portuguese.63 The landed gentry
settled slaves, washermen and barbers, as tenants around them.
These groups, according to one family history, served as a pro-
tective buffer in case of pirate attacks.64
In the cluster of ballads that originated in the trans-Brahma-
putra region, we encounter the same ingredients as in the sea-
board stories, namely, dangerous travel, weak and predatory
kings, oppressed peasants and merchants, and counterattacks.
58
In one episode in ‘Nasar Malum’, the Arakanese visited the home of the peasant
Gafur and his panic-stricken family, looking for buried treasure left behind when
fleeing from the Mughals: ibid., iv, 1241.
59
This is illustrated in the episode where Rajchandra, leading a hunting party,
attacked a marriage procession as it was going through the forest. The bearers of the
palanquin carrying the bride argued with him as equals before being overpowered.
Ibid., iii, 1036, 1081.
60
Ibid., 910.
61
When a joint trade venture between a wealthy Arakanese and Nasar, a ship’s
captain, faltered because Nasar fell into the hands of the pirates, Nasar feared the
prospect of returning to his partner, ‘A foreigner after all, he will cut my throat’: see
‘Nasar Malum’, ibid., iv, 1247.
62
Ibid., 1238–40, 1246.
63
Ibid., 1304.
64
Introduction to ‘Nurunneha and the Tale of the Grave’, ibid., 1586.
The dangers of travel arose from navigation difficulties in the
Brahmaputra. In some places, the crossing involved a journey
of almost thirty miles, with guides of doubtful reputation, upon
treacherous waters that ended in miles of virtual wilderness.65 In
these territories, the oppressors included agents of the state. In
one ballad, when the qazi had his amorous advances refused by
the wife or daughter of a merchant, he simply issued a notice to
seize the merchant’s property.66 In another, a zamindar tortured
a rich tenant on the basis of a rumour that he had come upon
hidden treasure, and a moneylender was arrested on the pretext

that his cows had been grazing on the zamindar’s land.67 But the
victims could also organize themselves. In Mymensingh, the
powerful and wicked king of Rangchapur met his match in
Madan Sadhu, a merchant.68 If on land the king possessed the
means to oppress, the merchant could do the same on water.69
Indeed, sometimes the local kings, who were little more than sub-
stantial landlords, were vulnerable. The hero of ‘Rupabati’, the
raja of Rampur, decided to escape to the forests when the sultan of
Gaud expressed an interest in his daughter.70 In another version
of the same story, the minister who desired the princess was de-
feated in battle by a force raised by peasants and fishermen.71
Rulers and subjects being near-equals, powerful subjects tried
to set up their own rule. A cluster of biographical ballads dealt
with the lives of robbers. Unlike Robin Hood, these robbers were
not outlaws. No aura of heroism or defiance surrounded them;
they were simply professional robbers. These included Manik-
tara, a robber herself and partner of Basu, Kenaram and Nizam.
In later life Maniktara and Basu, in Olsonian fashion, watched
over the merchant boats on the Brahmaputra in return for
65
‘Upon crossing the Brahmaputra, the passengers thanked their gods / For so
many would fail to cross the river / Among the boatmen, some were good, others
rogues / Who knifed the passengers in broad daylight / Struck them with an axe, or
tied them up to throw them in the water / Having robbed all belongings, they would
hand over the booty to their Ustad’: see ‘Maniktara or the Story of the Robbers’, ibid.,
ii, 600.
66
‘Molua’ (c.1700), ibid., i, 101.
67
‘Kamala’ (seventeenth century), ibid., 155; ii, 454.
68
‘Bhelua’, ibid., ii, 548, 579.
69
Mohua, a gypsy girl who left her companions and went off with a Brahmin boy,
received shelter from a foreign merchant sailing the Brahmaputra. The merchant tried
to murder the boy and abduct Mohua. Ibid., i, 64–6.
70
‘Rupabati’, ibid., ii, 245.
71
Prachin Purbbabanga Geetika, ed. Moulik, ii, 161.
protection money.72 Nizam operated on the seaboard, and the

story relates his conversion to god. However, the Sufi saint ( pir)
who converted him did not set any condition that he should give
up being a robber, and clearly he did not.
To conclude, the ballads painted a picture of a society in which
policing was weak because the kings were weak. In this world,
property was privately owned, private property was valuable,
but the propertied needed to devise their own mechanism for
resisting opportunistic attacks from kings and robbers alike.
More than systemic anarchy and pillage, the stories suggest to

us a society where security was supplied by communities rather
than by the agents of the state. The state more often represented
one community among several. Without adequate physical
means of creating strong and lasting state power, all those who
owned valuable property were equally weak or equally strong.
This was a world of political competition, and, like all unregulated
competition, it gave rise to huge transaction costs.
When we look towards the uplands along the western border of
Bengal, we encounter a region that shared a fundamental simi-
larity with the seaboard, namely the absence of imperial hegem-
ony combined with fragmentation of the polity. Nevertheless,
the sources and pathways of institutional change in the uplands
were quite distinctive, relative to the two other regions.
IV
In the sixteenth century, roads and navigable waterways were so
few in the uplands that the region did not seriously interest the
long-distance trader. Although marginal in respect of commodity
trade, and unlike segments of the seaboard and the alluvial flats,
the uplands were exposed to periodic attempts by the agents of the
Mughal state to reorganize taxation on land. Even in this respect,
the uplands appeared to have followed a different course. Relative
to the other regions, land produced little of value, and much of the
agricultural land (being located within forests) was almost in-
accessible to the agents of the state. These conditions gave rise
to a property rights regime that reinforced the isolation of the
72
Purbbabanga Geetika, ed. Sen, i, 233–6. Mancur Olson used the parable of a
roving bandit who found it more sensible to become a sedentary tax collector to
illustrate the origin of the government: see his Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing
Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships (New York, 2000).
peasantry from the state. But, from the late eighteenth century,
this administrative and physical isolation was coming to an end,
the property regime began to change, and a proportion of the
peasantry lost access to land while gaining access to a growing
labour market. An externally induced region of transformation,
the uplands of Bengal illustrate the working of a different agent of
change — land and labour markets rather than merchant capital.
The diversities within Bengal made a difference to the nature of
sources available for the early modern period. The history of the
Chota Nagpur uplands is not well served by literary material. The

region itself had few towns or intellectual hubs. Although part of
the uplands belonged to Bengal, there was cultural isolation of the
uplands from the literate Bengal of the Bhagirathi plains, even
though the two regions were barely a hundred miles apart.73
The region received few, if any, European or literate Bengali trav-
ellers. There were occasional exceptions, of course. About 1510,
Sri Chaitanya travelled with one companion from Nadia to
Mathura through the forests of ‘Jharikhand’ (literally, ‘forested
land’). Along the forest roads, the tigers and bears became docile
on seeing him. One tiger apparently even danced in ecstasy calling
out ‘Krishna Krishna’. But the indigenous peoples who lived in
the hills and forests were not so lucky in the way they were
described. ‘The forest-dwellers are pure evil’, his biographer
wrote, without further explanation.74 Such sentiments of the
plains elite towards their uplands brethren reflected the almost
total lack of contact, partly due to simple geography. The Chota
Nagpur plateau was surrounded on all sides by forests. Wheeled
traffic was almost impossible on these forest roads, and even as
late as the eighteenth century, hill passes through which the trav-
eller would enter the plateau were not fit for bullock carts.75
Commerce was of little consequence in this area. Although it
was rich in minerals, and iron-working was present everywhere,
the major part of the output was locally consumed. Transporta-
tion was rudimentary because the major rivers in the region were
not navigable in the dry seasons, were dangerous in monsoon, and
73
The kingdoms on the fringes of the Chota Nagpur plateau produced family
histories. These carried little information on the people themselves. The folk songs
of the region compiled from the late twentieth century are more informative, but not
on the pre-colonial past.
74
Sri Sri Chaitanya Charitamrita, ed. Gupta, 385.
75
Jagdish Chandra Jha, The Kol Insurrection of Chota-Nagpur (Calcutta, 1964), 22.
had no known bridges before the railways of the late nineteenth

century.
The uplands were populated by communities the colonial
sources called ‘tribes’: the main tribes, the Mundas and the
Oraons, were interspersed with Kherias, Hos, Birhors and
Bhumijs. Mundas and Oraons together were referred to as
Kols, and the land where they had settled was Kolhan.76 The
population lived on agriculture that concentrated in the river val-
leys. The monsoon rains had high run-off, leaving little possibility
of storing water. In the Kol region, there were in 1840 ‘no agri-

cultural works on a large scale, such as tanks and bunds to meet
the exigencies of a dry season . . . There is no farmer or landholder
[among the Hos] with capital enough to go through with such a
work’.77 The soil in some parts of the plateau was good, and rains
were sufficient to sustain rice cultivation. Without the prospect of
extensive irrigation and multiple cropping, the agricultural
regime provided subsistence at best.
Nevertheless, the region felt the pressure of agrarian and fiscal
expansion as Mughal rule consolidated in Bengal. The pressure
was uneven and intermittent. The battles necessary to subjugate
the local chieftains would not have been worth the revenue to be
had from this resource-poor region. The revenue demands, con-
sequently, often involved tiny sums of symbolic value. Effective
authority was vested in chieftains who ruled from the more ac-
cessible parts of the uplands. In standard accounts, these chiefs
hailed from the Hinduized sections of the upland communities.
The best-known of the kings ruled Palamau, which was relatively
easily reached from the river Son on its western border.78 In these
western fringes of the uplands, Tavernier saw in the mid seven-
teenth century the remnants of diamond mining in the bed of
76
On the Kols and their region of ancestry, see E. T. Dalton, ‘The ‘‘Kols’’ of
Chota-Nagpore’, Trans. Ethnological Soc. London, vi (1868).
77
Lieutenant Tickell, ‘Memoir on the Hodésum (improperly called Kolehan)’, Jl
Asiatic Soc. Bengal, ix (1840), 804.
78
Augustus Prinsep, ‘On the Traces of Feudalism in India, and the Condition of
Lands Now in a Comparative State of Agricultural Infancy’, Jl Roy. Asiatic Soc. Great
Britain and Ireland, viii (1846). Francis Buchanan travelled in Chota Nagpur in the late
eighteenth century and reported on the origins of the local states. See ‘Journal of
Francis Buchanan (Patna and Gaya Districts)’, ed. V. H. Jackson, Jl Bihar and
Orissa Research Soc., viii (1922). On the Mughal military campaign in Jharkhand
and its consequences, see Muzaffar Alam, ‘Eastern India in the Early Eighteenth
Century ‘‘Crisis’’: Some Evidence from Bihar’, Indian Econ. and Soc. Hist. Rev.,
xxviii (1991).
the river Koel, an industry in which the Mughals had been
interested.79
Although Mughal penetration in the uplands remained limited,
there were nevertheless some changes in administrative practices
in the kingdoms following Mughal contact. The kings in the
region tried to install a jagirdari system of rights and taxation
( jagirs were territorial revenue assignments, usually enjoyed by
military commanders). With the jagirdars came service profes-
sionals into the domain of these chieftains, including weavers,
blacksmiths and plains-peasants. The kings did not have

enough soldiers to enforce jagirdari right everywhere. In some
instances, land grants made by the kings led to dispossession of
the old settlers from landed property, and their conversion into
serfs. By and large, however, interaction between the uplands
population and the kings remained limited. There is at least one
case where a Munda headman, upon receiving demand for higher
taxes, receded deeper into the forest and established a new
domain.80 In the usual case, a quit rent from the villages, settled
according to the number of ploughs per village, was the com-
promise agreed upon.
As a result of such isolation of cultivators from the state, in the
eighteenth century the alluvial plains and the uplands had de-
veloped very different property regimes. The plains had better-
quality land, states which had the institutional means to identify
and protect that land, and taxes that were assessed on identifiable
plots. The uplands did not generate enough taxes or possess a
fiscal administration. The Mundas had political organization, but
no fiscal administration. Taxes were not assessed on land but on
work, and the right to cultivate was a loosely defined territorial
right derived from the payment of a fee calculated on the level of
effort, rather than on the right to cultivate an identifiable plot.81
79
Tavernier, Travels in India, ed. Ball, ii, 65. Nothing very much was heard of dia-
monds in this area after Tavernier. Presumably the mines had already been nearly
exhausted when he arrived here.
80
N. K. Basu, Hindu Samajer Garan [The Structure of Hindu Society] (Calcutta,
1949), 24–5.
81
J. Hoffmann, ‘Principles of Succession and Inheritance among the Mundas’, Jl
Bihar and Orissa Research Soc., i (1915), 6: ‘the proprietary right rises in the first
instance naturally out of creative or formative work. Hence the man who first turns
a piece of jungle or a plot of wasteland into arable land, becomes ipso facto the owner of
that land even as he who shapes a piece of wood into an axe-handle or a plough,
becomes the owner of that handle or plough’. Hoffmann’s testimony was influential
in the legal recognition of collective property in the uplands. See also Sarat Chandra
(cont. on p. 142)
Village headmen had the power of custom to allocate lands to

individual families.
When the taxation right of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa was de-
livered to the East India Company by the Mughal Emperor
(1765), the uplands had an ambiguous status in the deal. It was
by default taxable and yet was barely taxed. The first British entry
into Chota Nagpur occurred in 1772, via an agreement with an
eastern chieftain to secure help to fight Maratha incursions. In
1780 a notional district was formed out of the areas bordering
Bihar, with a single officer acting as judge, magistrate, collector,

and battalion commander. Policy with respect to the uplands
population depended much on the predilections of this com-
mander. One of them in the 1820s invited the headmen in
Birbhum into an agreement to police the hill passes. The decisive
administrative step during the early Company rule, however, was
the Permanent Settlement in 1793. The chieftains became pro-
prietors of land, a privilege that entailed responsibility for the
payment of taxes.
Wherever it could, the government tried to extract a higher tax
than before, and in turn the zamindars put pressure upon the
formerly rent-free tenure holders.82 They gave out land grants
to contractors from outside the region, while auction purchasers
bought pieces of estates located in the uplands. Many local offices
were created, people paid money to buy these offices, and they
then became linked to the fiscal system with a minor interest in the
revenue. The lowest level of such offices was that of headmen
based in the revenue village.83 The new sub-landlords were not
happy with the plough tax, and tried to introduce tax on land and
on consumption. There were cases of dispossession of land,
which was read by the victims as dispossession of territorial
rights. At the turn of the eighteenth century, a few criminal
(n. 81 cont.)
Roy, The Mundas and their Country (1912; Ranchi, 2004); and discussion in P. P.
Mohapatra, ‘Class Conflict and Agrarian Regimes in Chotanagpur, 1860–1950’,
Indian Econ. and Soc. Hist. Rev., xxviii (1991); Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, Peasant
History of Late Pre-Colonial and Colonial India (New Delhi, 2008), 716–19; Sangeeta
Dasgupta, ‘The Journey of an Anthropologist in Chhotanagpur’, Indian Econ. and Soc.
Hist. Rev., xli (2004).
82
K. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘British Imperium and Forested Zones of Anomaly in
Bengal, 1767–1833’, Indian Econ. and Soc. Hist. Rev., xxxiii (1996).
83
S. T. Cuthbert, ‘Extracts from a Report on Chota Nagpore’, Jl Roy. Asiatic Soc.
Great Britain and Ireland, viii (1846).
cases came before the magistrates’ courts alleging violence
against defaulters. These cases did not halt the process. The
first major shock came with the 1831 Kol Insurrection. The vio-
lence in the uprising was everywhere directed initially at the out-
siders, though its level was so intense that it quickly engaged the
Company troops. This pattern was to repeat itself several times
more in the nineteenth century.
The extensive literature on these rebellions leaves little room
for debate on their proximate causes, which were increased rev-
enue demand, intrusion of outsiders, and dispossession of her-

editary rights to land.84 The literature attributes the collapse
mainly to a predatory capitalism of a colonial type. The tribal
misfortune illustrated the darker side of the colonial moderniza-
tion project. Greedy capitalist and revenue-hungry states, ac-
cording to this view, employed repression and fraud to destroy
indigenous land rights. More recently, environmental history has
emphasized the colonial policy of exclusive control over forests,
both because of the resource value of the forests, and from a desire
to extend colonial authority over a marginal zone.85
It is difficult to argue, however, that the collapse was a necessary
consequence of either colonialism or pillage. The nature of trans-
formation of the uplands agrarian economy was due in part to its
own pre-colonial property regime. In the alluvial flats, peasant
property was intrinsically more valuable and protected by the
state in return for the payment of taxes. In the uplands, which
entailed a right to cultivate lands of poorer quality for the payment
of a nominal fee, the legal obligation to protect rights had never
been well developed. The precise plot was not mapped, the cul-
tivators were unknown, and land rights were not supported by the
institutions of a fiscal state, such as courts of law and cadastral
surveys. When the administrative isolation of the uplands ended,
84
For example Jha, Kol Insurrection of Chota-Nagpur. The literature on the Santals is
large, partly because the Subaltern Studies Group used this example to illustrate ar-
guments about subaltern identity. For economic history of the rebellion, see Elizabeth
Rottger-Hogan, ‘Insurrection . . . or Ostracism: A Study of the Santal Rebellion of
1855’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, xvi (1982); Chaudhuri, Peasant History. For a
subaltern analysis of the rebellion, see Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant
Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi, 1983). A rare Bengali eyewitness account of the
1855 rebellion can be found in the eastern Bengal ballads.
85
For a representative statement of the argument, see Nandini Sundar, Subalterns
and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, 1854–2006, 2nd edn (New Delhi,
2007).
and its accessibility improved by means of road and railway pro-

jects, a convergence of the two property regimes was inevitable,
which led to an asymmetry of rights. The zamindar’s private prop-
erty was recognized in courts of law but the collective property of
the indigenous peasantry was not.
Even before the nineteenth century, the plains and the uplands
had begun to converge on another route. The inequality in agri-
cultural conditions between the uplands and the alluvial zones
had for a long time involved a limited movement of population
between them. To this factor was now added the loss of access to

cultivation rights. In 1827, the magistrate of Ramgarh reported
that a large number of Kols annually left the district to work on the
indigo plantations of Bihar and Bengal.86 From the next decade a
steady flow of Kol emigrants moved towards the tea plantations in
Sylhet, Cachar, Assam and the Dooars. From the 1840s, Oraons
enlisted in large numbers as indentured labourers bound for
Mauritius and the Caribbean.87 In the second half of the nine-
teenth century, flows of migrants were much greater, and also
partly seasonal.
Large gangs of them are to be seen leaving their homes in December after
the harvest has been gathered in. Marching up to the tea districts on foot,
they often work there for the best part of a year, returning home again at
the close of the tea season in October and November.88
As the overseas and domestic plantation work slowed thereafter,
many Oraons joined the coal and iron mines in the eastern part of
the region.
On a very limited scale, circulation of labour, including military
labour, between the uplands and the plains had a prehistory,
which we know from the fact that the creators of the eastern
Bengal ballads noticed groups from the uplands. The ballads
contain references to the hiring of ‘Dhangars’ (the Bengali
name for Oraons) to work in construction in Bengal in the seven-
teenth century. The hero of one Mymensingh ballad was a
hunter-cum-soldier named ‘Munda’, who fell in love with a
Bengali Brahmin girl, with unhappy consequences for both.89
86
F. B. Bradley-Birt, Chota Nagpore: A Little-Known Province of the Empire, 2nd edn
(London, 1910), 175.
87
Tirthankar Roy, ‘Sardars, Jobbers, Kanganies: The Labour Contractor and
Indian Economic History’, Mod. Asian Studies, xlii (2007).
88
Bradley-Birt, Chota Nagpore, 171.
89
‘Sheeladebi’, in Purbbabanga Geetika, ed. Sen, iv, 1253–70.
This Munda, whose provenance is uncertain, raised an army
made up of his kinsmen from the forest, which, despite their brav-
ery, failed in the presence of royal artillery. An interesting char-
acteristic of this tale is the ambiguous sentiment that Munda
evoked in the Bengali poet. His affair with the Brahmin girl was
sympathetically portrayed, whereas his defeat and death at the
hands of the Tripura forces is described as good riddance rather
than as the end of a tragic hero. Such evidence notwithstanding,
the scale of labour transfer between Bengali regions before the
eighteenth century had been quite limited, and involved the mili-

tary market as well as the economic market. The nineteenth cen-
tury, by contrast, represented a much larger and more purely
economic transfer.
V
I propose in this article that a consideration of geography, state
capacity and patterns of interaction between local and exogenous
forces invites us to rethink the place of Bengal in the standard
narratives of global history. In suggesting a reinterpretation, I
make use of descriptions of material life available from contem-
porary literature, a corpus so far under-utilized as evidence for
economic history. The resultant narrative reminds global histor-
ians of three potential hazards of their craft: to read the pattern of
globalization based mainly on evidence of long-distance trade; to
read standards of living of a large region from conditions of trade
that engaged a small proportion of the population; and to under-
estimate the risks that weak states and hostile environments posed
to early modern livelihoods.
A major aim of the article is to understand the political context
of property in early modern Bengal. The common assumption
that incorporation into the Mughal Empire made a significant
difference to local institutions is questioned. Over a vast area
within the Mughal province of Bengal, imperial command
made little difference. The small isolated kingdoms that ruled
these regions did not have the physical means to establish credible
administrative machines or stable institutionalized relationships.
The meaning of a fragmented polity was variable, however.
Property in the alluvial zones was valuable and privately owned.
In the uplands, land had little value as a taxable asset, merchant
capital was weak, and property rights were joint cultivation rights.
While the desire to control assets gave rise to conflicts in the al-
luvial zone, in the uplands the desire was weak to begin with.
Out of this contrast, there emerged different pathways and
possibilities for globalization. In the seaboard, the global be-
came a part of the local, and outsiders joined in the competition
for assets, at times with destabilizing effects. Reflecting the syn-
drome, the eastern Bengal ballads are obsessed with the fragility
of fortunes. The uplands were less prone to such risks. Political
fragmentation had three important consequences: reduced inten-
sity of conflict over property, increased isolation in respect of

trade, and an institutional division between the plains and the
hills. In these zones, the end of isolation came in the wake of
new land rights, and globalization took the form of labour migra-
tion. In contrast with the seaboard and the uplands, in the alluvial
flats — or more precisely along the river Bhagirathi within the
alluvial zone — the three consequences of fragmentation rein-
forced each other. The states were relatively rich and possessed
institutions for policing and justice; land was fertile, transport
costs relatively low, and the level of exposure high both before
and after European entry. Unlike the Portuguese colonization
project on the seaboard that withered away in four-cornered con-
tests, British colonization succeeded because it targeted a richer
state in this zone.
A revised account of early modern Bengal also suggests a re-
interpretation of colonial Bengal. The colonial period saw a real
political convergence between regions, supported in the late
eighteenth century by the East India Company’s military suc-
cesses, and, in the nineteenth century, by new and vastly more
penetrative technologies, namely, railways, steamboats, bridges
and the telegraph. Economic and political integration of the three
regions increased the circulation of capital, labour and govern-
ment personnel between them. The Bengali identity began to
encompass a wider physical space than before, and encouraged
exploration into the poetic narratives that supplied one of the
motivations behind the present article.
London School of Economics and Political Science Tirthankar Roy

Tirthankar Roy-Where Is Bengal in Early Modern Economy

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WHERE IS BENGAL?

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* I wish to thank the participants of the panel ‘Globalizing Economic

Records of European voyages in Bengal confirm the picture of

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manufactures and peasant production in the pre-colonial Indian

the world economy’ in the seventeenth century.6 Prasannan

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in a village near the eastern seaboard, the romantic poet Alaol’s

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defining Bengal did not correspond to identical spaces. Bengal

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The extent of crop diversification was also considerably smaller in

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Why, despite cheapness of grain and, in places, high-yielding

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an imperial administration, which had more credibility near

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an overgrown village, where the town residents lived in straw-mat

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landlord, which culminated in his losing it. The closest equivalent

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conquered lands is hinted by reports of buried treasure in the

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protection money.72 Nizam operated on the seaboard, and the

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had no known bridges before the railways of the late nineteenth

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Village headmen had the power of custom to allocate lands to

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and its accessibility improved by means of road and railway pro-

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London School of Economics and Political Science Tirthankar Roy

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