India In Xvi Century: The Internal Structure

Two groups of the ruling class formed around themselves two disjoint social structures, each with its own economy, urban and rural. Some commodity links between town and country were available, but they did not play a determining role in their relationship. The huge urban population (15-20%), which consisted of merchants, moneylenders, artisans, feudal lords, army, servants and lumpens, could not get the food they needed on purely commercial channels.

Grain and other products seized in the village in kind, then sold with the help of wholesalers or went directly to warehouses - public or private. Grandees did not use the products that went to the bazaar. Their consumption consisted of products produced in their own suburban farms or delivered by trusted merchants. Handicraft production of the city was designed not for the village, but first of all for the city - its own, neighboring or remote. In the latter case, trade in urban goods could be called external.

India In the Xvi Century: an internal structure.
The rural social structure (landowners idle, landowners-farmers, peasants without their own land, landless workers, servants, traders, artisans) relied mainly on their own strengths. The economic relations between craft and agriculture were built according to a system that in modern sociological literature was called jajmani, ie a village or a group of villages acquired an artisan of the required specialty, tied him with a series of mutual obligations, gave him confidence in a piece of bread and received in return a corresponding craft service In the right amount.

The same relationship jajmani - the relationship of institutionalized, non-commodity exchange of services - pervaded other aspects of life: agriculture, the social system, religious relations.

Exchange in the amounts necessary for the functioning of subsistence farming was also available with its village markets, usurers and small traders in almost every village, and finally with the purchase of valuable crops at the root. This level of marketability, leaving intact the basis of natural economic ties, existed for centuries, and it was imperceptible that it lead to changes in the economy of the village.

Obviously, the main reason for the slow development of the comradisation was the tax that took from the village all the money that it could help out for its products. But there were other reasons that also adversely affected this process. The social structure of the village as a whole (the caste hierarchy of the way of life and the claims of social groups) hindered the development of needs and limited the growth of both production and income and, consequently, marketability.

India In the Xvi Century: an internal structure.