Monetary History of Mughal India as Reflected in Silver Coin Hoards

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IAROSTA

MONETARY HISTORY OF MUGHAL INDIA AS REFLECTED IN SILVER COIN HOARDS

This page intentionally left blank

MONETARY HISTORY OF MUGHAL INDIA AS REFLECTED IN SILVER COIN HOARDS

JAROSLAV STRNAD

© Jaroslav Strnad 2000

Contents Contents Graphs Tables INTRODUCTION PART ONE : CHARACTER OF DATA 1. Coin Hoards, Treasure Troves and Hoard Inventories 2. Approaches to Statistical Processing of Mughal Silver Coins The Method of Aziza Hasan The Method of Shireen Moosvi The Method Based on Data Derived from Hoards 3. The Filters Filter I: Coins Circulating - Coins Hoarded Filter II: Coins Hoarded - Coins Recovered in Modern Times Filter III: Coins Recovered in Modern Times Coins Entered into Treasure Trove Reports Filter IV: Coins Inspected and Entered into Treasure Trove Reports Written Evidence of Dispersed Coins 4. Types of Hoards Long-term Savings Hoards Composite Hoards Emergency Hoards Other Hoards v

v viii ix 1 7 7 8 8 11 15 18 21 25 26 30 31 31 33 33 34

PART TWO : STRUCTURE OF HOARDS 1. Chronology of Hoards 2. Spatial and Temporal Distribution of Hoards 3. Sizes of Hoards 4. Structure of Hoards Temporal Structure 1. Akbar 2. Jah€ng…r 3. Sh€hjah€n 4. Aurangzeb 5. Sh€h ³lam I. and FarruÇsiy€r 6. Muhammad Sh€h PART THREE : THE MINTS 1. Preliminary 2. Mints of the Akbar… Period (1556-1605) Three Great Akbar… Mints Ahmadabad Thatta Lahore 3. The Regnal Period of Jah€ng…r (1606-1627) Qandahar 1606-1622 4. The Era of Sh€hjah€n (1627-1658) Multan Surat Patna 5. Mints During the Reign of Aurangzeb (1658-1707) Surat The Rise of Central Mints 6. The Period 1707-1760 7. Peculiarities in Dispersal Patterns of Coins Minted in the Area of the U.P. 8. Mughal Silver Coin Stock, 1560-1760 CONCLUSION Bibliography vi

37 37 40 43 49 50 52 54 56 58 60 61 63 63 65 71 71 73 76 81 84 88 90 93 100 102 105 109 117 121 123 130 141

APPENDIX I 1. Basic Statistics of Silver Coin Hoards of the U.P. 2. Mughal Silver Coin Hoards 1536-1760 with Percentual Shares of Coins of Different Regnal Periods 3. Hoards 1760-1942 APPENDIX II 1. Hoards Arranged by Districts 2. Hoards Arranged by Districts - Summary by 50-year Periods APPENDIX III 1. Mughal Silver Mints 2. Incidences of Silver Coins with Monthly Dates from the Ahmadabad, Lahor and Tatta mints (Akbar and Jahangir)

vii

147 149 153 159 163 165 181 183 185 200

Graphs Fig. 1. Coin incidences in museum catalogues and in hoards of the U.P. compared Fig. 2. Hypothetical growth of Mughal silver coin stock computed by two different methods of increment assessment and different estimates of the basic coin stock (1595=100) Fig. 3. Coin hoards of the U.P. registered by the State Museum, Lucknow in the years 1882-1979 Fig. 4. Accumulation periods of Mughal silver coin hoards Fig. 5. Mughal coin hoards of the U.P., 1560-1760 Fig. 6. Sizes of Mughal silver hoards of the U.P. (1556-1942) Fig. 7. Percentual shares of silver coins of different regnal periods in hoards, 1556-1760 Fig. 8. Average percentages of Akbar… silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in the years 1556-1700 Fig. 9. Average percentages of Jahang…r… silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in the years 1605-1735 Fig. 10. Average percentages of Sh€hjah€n… silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in the years 1628-1760 Fig. 11. Average percentages of Aurangzeb… silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in the years 1660-1760 Fig. 12. Average percentages of Sh€h ³lam… and FarruÇsiy€r… silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in the years 1707-1760 Fig. 13. Average percentages of Muhammad Shah’s silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in the years 1719-1760 Fig. 14. Incidence of Mughal silver coins minted in the years 1556-1605 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. and recovered in the years 1882-1979 Fig. 15. Incidence of Ahmadabadi silver coins minted in the years 1573-1760 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. Fig. 16. Fluctuations in the monthly output of the Ahmadabad mint, based on hoards containing Akbar… (38.-50. r.y.) and Jah€ng…r… (1.-12. r.y.) coins Fig. 17. Incidence of silver coins minted in the mint of Thatta in the years 1556-1740 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. Fig. 18. Fluctuations in the monthly output of the Thatta mint, based on hoards containing Akbar… (38.-50. r.y.) and Jah€ng…ri (11.-22. r.y.) coins Fig. 19. Incidence of Lahori silver coins minted in the years 1556-1760 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. Fig. 20. Fluctuations in the monthly output of the Lahore mint (based on hoards containing Akbar… and Jah€ng…r… coins) Fig. 21. Incidence of Mughal silver coins minted in the years 1606-1627/28 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. and recovered in the years1882-1979 viii

10 15 26 36 38 45 51 53 55 57 59 61 62 65 72 73 74 75 77 78 82

Fig. 22. Incidence of Qandahari silver coins in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. Fig. 23. Incidence of Mughal silver coins minted in the years 1627-1660 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. and recovered in the years 1882-1979 Fig. 24. Incidence of Multani silver coins in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. Fig. 25. Incidences of Jah€ng…r… and Sh€hjah€n… silver coins minted at Surat in hoards of the U.P. Fig. 26. Incidences of silver coins minted in Patna in the years 1556-1760 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. Fig. 27 Incidence of Mughal silver coins minted in the years 1660-1707 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. Fig. 28 Incidences of silver coins minted at Surat in the years 1660-1760 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. Fig. 29. Incidences of coins from major central mints minted in the years 1680-1760 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. Fig. 30. Trends in the development of the Bengal trade of the E.I.C. and V.O.C. compared to the trend in silver coin incidences from the central and eastern mints Fig. 31. Incidence of Mughal silver coins minted in the years 1708-1760 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. and recovered in the years 1882-1979 Fig. 32. Total of all incidences of Mughal silver coins minted in the years 1556-1760 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. Fig. 33. Hypothetical growth of north Indian Mughal silver coin stock (values of yearly increments identical with observed incidences of coins minted in the respective year) adjusted for various yearly rates of coin loss

85 89 92 95 100 103 107 110 113 118 124

127

Tables Tab. 1. Distribution of Akbar…, Jah€ng…r…, Sh€hjah€n… and Aurangzeb… silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in the years 1560-1942 Tab. 2. Factors of hoarding and subsequent recovering of coins Tab. 3. Gold, silver and copper in U.P. hoards containing Mughal coins inventoried in the years 1882-1978/79 Tab. 4. Mughal silver coin hoards classified as emergency and short-term savings accumulations Tab. 5. Spatial and temporal concentrations of hoards Tab. 6. Sizes of hoards containing more than 100 coins Tab. 7. Estimate of gold and silver imports in Surat by the V.O.C.

ix

13 20 28 35 42 48 98


Preface

The genesis of this book was in a doctoral dissertation, Mughal Silver Coin Hoards of Uttar Pradesh, 1560-1760, submitted to the Charles University, Prague in 1999. I must express my gratitude to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the University of London for awarding me in 1991 the T. G. Masaryk Scholarship which enabled me to visit the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and to use its splendid library. My great thanks are due to the Librarian at SOAS, Miss Barbara Burton, who was most helpful in making my soujourn there as productive and comfortable as possible. I must thank to doc. dr. Miloslav Vošvrda, DrSc. from the UTIA, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic who was always ready to advise me on the more intricate problems of statistical evaluation of the numismatic material. Mr Deepak Bhojwani, the Minister at the Indian Embassy, Prague, invested a great deal of personal energy into arranging my trip to India in 1999 during which I was able to consult the problems concerning the interpretation of coin hoards with Indian historians and numismatists. I am particularly grateful to Prof. Dr. Dietmar Rothermund from the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University and to Dr. Lakshmi Subramanian from the University of Calcutta who read the whole manuscript and encouraged me to go ahead with its publication; to Pratip Kumar Mitra, Keeper in the State Archaeological Museum of West Bengal, Calcutta and to prof. B. N. Mukherjee from the University of Calcutta who recommended me to visit the Indian Institute of Research in Numismatic Studies (IIRNS) in Anjaneri. Its Director, Mr. Amiteshwar Jha and the staff of the library were most helpful in making available to me not only all the relevant literature but also the detailed reports of coin hoards found in Maharashtra. My greatest thanks are due to the founder of this admirable institution, Shri K. K. Maheshwari for his personal commitment which made possible the publication of the book in the present form. For any mistakes and shortcomings of this work, of course, the responsibility is solely mine. Jaroslav Strnad

Prague, October 2000

xi


Introduction

Money, in the form of metallic coins as well as bills of exchange, formed an essential part of Mughal economic system from its formative phase in the second half of the 16th century till its demise in the second half of the 18th.1 Keeping in mind the recent criticism of traditional notions of the Mughal state as the single and sovereign organizer of the early modern Indian economic and political system, I still feel that, at least in the present context, it is reasonable to use the term „Mughal“ not only in its more general sense referring to a particular period of Indian history, but as a designation with specific content characterizing several essential attributes of the political and economic system. One can hardly imagine the late medieval Indian economy without Mughal administrative, fiscal and monetary reforms. In all these three areas the Mughal state managed to push its power and influence farther than any of its predecessors. Still, Mughal control in the political and economic sphere was never total: at all times the Mughal state was a product of a number of compromises between imperial aspirations (often presented by contemporary chroniclers as actual facts) and resistant forces of the Indian environment. This combination of prescriptive policy and realistic accommodation to forces perceived as lying beyond the possibilities of imperial control was apparent also in the sphere of the imperial currency system. Here the Mughal state kept always close watch over the quality of coins minted in numerous imperial mints2 (only state-controlled mints were allowed to operate on Mughal territory) and was largely successful in keeping unified and almost unchanging standard of currency all over its dominions for a period of nearly two centuries - an achievement which very few states or empires could match. One should ask why it should have been so. Monetary stability was certainly not a prominent feature of great Asian empires in this period. Ottoman Empire, for example, was in the 17th century beset by a series of fiscal and monetary crises which led in the period of 1580 to 1640 to an exceptional instability of the silver akçe and to closing of many mints. One of the causes of these adverse developments appears to lie in the increasing difficulties the Ottoman 1 The most recent and very thorough study is S. Moosvi´s The Economy of the Mughal Empire: c. 1595. A Statistical Study. Delhi 1987. Mughal monetary system and policy is a subject of several articles. See, e.g., I. Habib, Currency System of the Mughal Empire (1556-1707). Medieval India Quarterly IV, 1-2 (1960); O. Prakash, On Coinage in Mughal India. IESHR XXV, 4 (1988), pp. 475-491 and collection of papers edited by J. F. Richards, The Imperial Monetary System of Mughal India. Delhi 1987, esp. the contributions of. J. S. Deyell, M. H. Martin and I. Habib. 2 List of all Mughal gold, silver and copper mints was compiled by M. P. Singh, Town, Market, Mint and Port in the Mughal Empire, 1556-1707. (An Administrative-cum-economic Study). New Delhi 1985, Appendix A, pp. 237-256, supplemented by extensive bibliographic note.

1

2

Monetary History of Mughal India

government was having with locating sufficient supplies of silver.3 There are clear indications that a great deal of silver coming from the West into the territories controlled by the Ottoman authorities, tended to leave them again by eastern routes, drawn away mostly by the lively Indian trade.4 Apart form the balance of payments the role of the state in the process of monetary circulation and redistribution of monetized wealth has also to be considered. Sophisticated and efficient methods of revenue collection, underpinned by a permanently mobilized mansabdari military system, made the Mughal state the biggest creditor in the country. Being in the position of the single most important recipient and spender of coins, the omnipresent Mughal fiscal apparatus could easily set and enforce its monetary standards in every part of the empire.5 The state was therefore eminently interested in maintaining a stable currency; thanks to the constantly active balance of payments on the one hand and successful integration of newly conquered territories into its unified monetary system on the other, it was also able to enforce it. Whereas the control of the Mughal state over the form and quality of circulating coins was quite strict and effective, the quantity of coins in circulation and exchange rates between gold, silver and copper coins were left to spontaneous economic developments and selfregulating mechanisms of the market. Everybody could have his monetary metals minted, at a moderate price and in any requested quantity, in official mints, into fresh gold muhrs, silver rupees or copper d€ms. These, and their fractions, were the only monetary media allowed to circulate within the boundaries of the Mughal empire. The fact that these coins were (with only small and temporary exceptions) also in actual practice the only acceptable ones everywhere in the vast Mughal domains, testifies to the dominant position of the Mughal state in the economic and financial affairs of the country. The interest of the Mughal state in the quality of circulating coins was reflected in even more detailed regulations than was the precious metal content of each minted coin. Newly struck coins (called sikk€) fetched a certain premium over coins minted in the previous years of the same regnal period (the so called calan…) and these latter were in turn counted as of slightly higher value than coins struck during the previous reign (called Çaz€n€) or those of foreign origin which were considered simply as bullion. Reminting of old and worn-out coins, carefully cultivated by this well-designed system of premiums and discounts6, H. Inalcik and D. Quateret (eds.), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire. Volume Two: 1600-1914. Cambridge 1994, pp. 961-2 in Part V, Money in the Ottoman Empire, 1326-1914 by Şevket Pamuk. 4 The role of Indians in the eastern trade is acknowledged but so far little studied by historians of the Ottoman Empire. For a short overview by Suraiya Faroqhi, see ibid., p. 524-5. 5 Redistributive capacity of Mughal tax system was by any standard quite extraordinary and at the same time heavily biased towards numerically very small elite of imperial mansabd€rs (holders of official ranks tied to service in the army or administration). The overwhelming bulk of financial transactions (in terms of their value) must have taken place in the sphere of its operation. See, S. Moosvi, op. cit., pp. 191-295 on the Akbar… period and A. J. Qaisar, Distribution of Revenue Resources of the Mughal Empire among the Nobles. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 1965, pp. 237-242 on the times of Sh€hjah€n. 6 The system is described i.a. by I. Habib in his article on the currency system (see note no. 1 above) and by M. H. Martin, The Reforms of the Sixteenth Century and Akbar’s Administration: Metrological and Monetary Considerations. In: J. F. Richards (ed.), op. cit., pp. 68-99. 3

Introduction

3

helped to keep silver in the monetary sphere and discouraged their owners from hoarding it: the longer the coins were laying idle in their coffers the more they lost of their initial value and buying power. On the other hand, there was no way the Mughal state could exercise effective control over the supply of monetary metals; in the 16th and 17th centuries neither gold nor silver was mined in any significant quantity anywhere in its vast and otherwise wealthy domains.7 There were several copper mines, but their production lagged far behind the strong and apparently growing demand. Nearly all new gold and silver that backed the gradual built-up of this impressive currency system came from two main sources: either from plunder and dishoarding of old precious metals stocks (this was true especially in the initial stages of the rapid imperial expansion) or from foreign trade. Gold and especially silver were the main commodities demanded by Indian merchants in exchange for their export products - in the 16th and 17th centuries mainly textiles and spices. There is a general agreement among historians that for greater part of the Mughal period silver and gold imports, containing large element of American origin, constituted by far the most important source of monetary metals. Most of the imported stock probably remained in India; unknown amounts were re-exported to pay mainly for high quality horses purchased regularly for the Mughal army in the countries of Near East and Central Asia.8 Quantitative characteristics and modes of payments prevailing in the trade with Central Asia certainly constitute a promising field for future study. This continuing influx of precious metals into the Indian subcontinent puzzled European contemporaries, worried the directors of East India Companies and continues to occupy minds of modern historians; one has to ask not only about causes of the apparently insatiable Indian demand for silver, but also about actual quantitative aspects of their imports and, last but not least, about their long-term effects on the internal stability and general well-being of the Mughal imperial structure. Recent studies attempting to set these economic developments in comparative perspective and broader contexts of Eurasian or world history suggest that in the long run these effects might not be as unequivocally benign as the admirable stability of the Mughal monetary system, considered in isolation, might lead us to believe. Abundant supply of silver might have led to a general rise of prices and so to cause effects similar to the so-called price revolution in Europe; the long debate over possible effects of imported silver on the general price level is, however, still inconclusive. Reasons for this are to be sought not only in the critical lack of hard evidence, but also in different methodological approaches and theories applied to the explanation of this phenomenon.9 7 F. R. Allchin, Upon the Antiquity and Methods of Gold Mining in Ancient India. JESHO V (1962), pp.195-211; J. S. Deyell, Living Without Silver: The Monetary History of Early Medieval North India. Delhi 1990, Appendix A, Medieval India’s Precious Metal Resources, pp. 249-252. 8 For the estimates of value of the horse trade and other imports in the Mughal period, see S. Moosvi, op. cit., pp. 376-381. 9 It is not necessary to recapitulate here the long debate on the thesis formulated by E. J. Hamilton in his book on American silver. Two recent studies on the Indian incarnation of the problem are J. J. Brennig, Silver in Seventeenth Century Surat: Monetary Circulation and the price Revolution in Mughal India. In: J. F. Richards (ed.), Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds. Durham (N.C.) 1983, pp. 474-496, and

4


Recently, several scholars turned their attention to problems that the relatively abundant silver might cause in the political sphere. Money, flowing more and more into channels over which the state authority exercised only limited or no control, might contribute to internal destabilization and eventual political disintegration of the Mughal empire. Parallel and similar processes of erosion of traditional political structures are observed in the 18th century in several states of the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Here too, their gradual integration into the sphere of international trade and money flows is sensed as a major force behind their political and social crises and transformations.10 Another, much older theory, stresses the often observed propensity to hoarding among wealthier classes of the Indian population. According to this theory, much of the silver imported into the subcontinent was used unproductively for hoarding either in the form of hidden treasures or ornaments of gold and silver. Some authors even suggested that it might have been just this proclivity to hoarding that lay behind the huge Indian demand for precious metals.11 It should be noted that at the present time the majority of historians specializing in medieval and early modern Indian history pursue the former two approaches while the last mentioned one is still influential among scholars of universal history. Here, hoarding is often silently accepted as a last cause, a sort of „black box“ where no further explanation of motives is necessary. Taken to extreme, the idea of silver laboriously extracted out of the bowels of the earth in America and transferred half a globe away only to be buried underground again in India is manifestly absurd. Nevertheless, we have no reason to disbelieve the observations of foreign travellers and other contemporaries that in pre-colonial India hoarding was a widespread phenomenon and saving one of important functions of money. But how common was this habit? Was it I. Habib, A System of Trimetallism in the Age of the „Price Revolution“: Effects of the Silver Influx on the Mughal Monetary System. In: J. F. Richards (ed.), The Imperial Monetary System, pp. 137-170. A bold attempt at quantification of the phenomenon is S. Moosvi, The Silver Influx, Money Supply, Price and Revenue Extraction in Mughal India. JESHO XXX (1987), pp. 47-94. Her methodological approach will be dealt with in Part One, pp. 11-14 of the present work. 10 Concise statement of this position has been formulated by C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian. The British Empire and the World 1780-1830. London, New York 1989, esp. chapter two, pp. 35-74. Methodological aspects of the study of increasing use of money and its impact on the transformation of political structures have been highlighted by F. Perlin, Precolonial South Asia and Western Penetration in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries: A Problem of Epistemological Status. Review IV, 2 (1980), pp. 267-306. See also his Money Use in Late Pre-colonial India and the International Trade in Currency Media. In: J. F. Richards (ed.), The Imperial Monetary System, pp. 232-373. 11 The remark of 17th century English traveller W. Hawkins that „India is rich in silver, for all nations bring coin, and carry away commodities for the same; and this coin is buried in India and goeth not out“ has become almost classic; it was approvingly quoted, among others, by the great authority in the field of medieval Indian economic history, W. H. Moreland, in his influential book From Akbar to Aurangzeb. A Study in Indian Economic History. London 1923, p. 53. A. H. Lloyd in his Hoarding of the Precious Metals in India, JNSI XXIII (1961), repr. from the Transactions of the International Numismatic Congress, London 1936, went so far as to see in the precious metals coins’ suitability for hoarding „perhaps even a prior influence upon the introduction and early spread of coinage in India“ (ibid., p. 127). In recent times hoarding is seen as an important factor e.g. by I. Wallerstein in his Modern World System, vol. I., New York 1974, p. 41 or vol. II., New York 1980, pp. 108-109.

Introduction

5

typical for wealthy classes only or was it widespread among broader strata of population? Were the buried treasures predominantly large or rather small? Can we say anything about the period of their accumulation? Was this activity habitual or was it restricted mainly to periods and areas of unrest or warfare? To what extent was the unabating demand for monetary metals stimulated by slow velocity of circulation? Was not a rationally motivated saving, formation of necessary cash-reserves by temporary withholding and subsequent slow and gradual releasing of coins one of the more important factors in this? Attempts to answer these and similar questions may bring us nearer to understanding actual role of hoarding in the late medieval India. To obtain the much needed information in this so far little explored field, we shall have to turn in the first place to the hoards themselves. Apart from throwing some light on these questions and problems, the hoards, if properly examined, can yield interesting information about structure of currency of certain metal (in our case silver) in a certain period and about its changes in time. Here the historian can work with three types of data: if he is extremely lucky, he can inspect the hoards themselves, if he is less so, he is able to see the reports and inventories kept in official archives and museums and work with data and numbers contained in them. As a first approximation and in the case when these original reports are beyond his or her reach, however, he may content himself with abstracts containing reliable summaries of these hoards reports. In India, the Numismatic Society and several state museums have published such abstracts, thus making series of important data available to broader scholarly community.12 Unfortunately, these abstracts are not of equally informative value, as they reflect strongly varying standards applied in compiling of the original Treasure Trove Reports themselves.13 This makes direct comparisons of certain types of data from different regions difficult or impossible. Probably the best abstract available is the detailed list of „Coin Hoards of Uttar Pradesh“ edited by A. K. Srivastava and published by the State Museum in Lucknow in 1980. This work lists a total of 1141 hoards registered and described by museum officials between the years 1882 and 1978/79. From the early stages of Indian history, the area of presentday Uttar Pradesh (coextensive with United Provinces of former British India) gave birth to important supra-regional states and empires and often formed their inner core. As can be expected, such area yields also rich harvest of hoards ranging from the Indo-Sassanian to the late Mughal and British periods. Of the total number, 530 hoards contain Mughal coins and can be therefore dated to Mughal or British periods. This represents a quantity where an attempt at statistical processing may not be out of place, especially when the data offered are relatively detailed and 12 Besides Coin Hoards of Uttar Pradesh mentioned in the text there are several other lists of this type covering the vast area of northern and central India. P. L. Gupta published Coin Hoards from Gujarat State, Varanasi 1969 and Coin Hoards from Maharashtra, Varanasi 1970. H. K. Prasad published Coin Hoards from Bihar, Indian Numismatic Chronicle VIII, 1-2 (1970), pp. 45-109 and Coin Hoards from Orissa, ibid., VI, 2 (1967-69), pp. 63-71. 13 The data from Gujarat, for example, are sadly incomplete when compared with the much superior list of U.P. coin hoards. Reasons for this are differing administrative practices and rules applied in the former United Provinces on the one hand and in Gujarat (part of the former Bombay Presidency) on the other. Compare the prefaces of A. K. Srivastava and P. L. Gupta to their respective lists.

6


reliable. Unfortunate is the absence of information on the number of doubles in hoards which debars us from computing exact percentages of coins of each type in each hoard and forces us to restrict our investigation to broader categories such as regnal periods or incidences. The incidences approach, however, has certain advantages of its own which should place it among legitimate methods of statistical enquiry. One should, however, constantly bear in mind that units (hoards or coins) we are dealing with do not constitute classical random samples demanded by rigorous statistical theory. Problems of evaluation and methods applied to the processing of these data form the subject of Part One. Part Two summarizes findings obtained by application of these procedures and presents them in convenient tabulated or graphic form. In the concluding part I shall try to set these results into wider contexts and - without trying to construct, on this rather limited basis, any grand hypothesis - contribute to the current debate on the silver influx, money use and hoarding in Mughal India. Finally, the Appendices contain the full list of all datable Mughal hoards described in Srivastava’s inventory, arranged by their latest coins, and the data on which graphs included in the main text of the book are based. All through this study hoards are identified by their serial numbers used by A. K. Srivastava; these are supplemented by the slash and abbreviation UP in order to set them clearly off from other types of numerical data.

Part One : Character of Data For ages, old coins have drawn the attention of antiquarians, museums as well as private collectors as valuable objects endowed by historic, aesthetic and - especially in the case of gold and silver - metallic value. Since the 19th century coins have been systematically used as an important source for determining regnal years, establishing relative or absolute chronologies and compiling dynastic tables. All these purposes were served well by well-preserved and easily legible specimens of coins datable on the basis of either their own internal (dates on coins) or external (circumstances of their finds) evidence. The structure of coin collections of most museums (including the Indian ones) reflects this attitude: until recently museums have contented themselves mostly with keeping only a few specimens of each coin type, disposing of the rest of a hoard by sale, exchange, etc. In many countries, however, hoards were registered and more or less detailed inventories of their content made before their dispersal. It is only relatively recently that such reports began to be appreciated as valuable sources of their own, offering economic and monetary historians new possibilities of interpretation. This widening range of interest has led in the last fifty years to the preparation and publication of coin hoard inventories covering territories of many European and other countries. (Several Indian inventories are mentioned in the Introduction). The aim of the first part of the present study is to draw attention to several important methodological problems involved in evaluating hoard evidence for the purpose of economic history.

1. Coin Hoards, Treasure Troves and Hoard Inventories To avoid possible terminological misunderstandings, it seems appropriate to explain at this point the sense in which the term hoard is used in this work. The Oxford English Dictionary defines hoard as „an accumulation or collection of anything valuable hidden away or laid by for preservation or future use; a stock, store, esp. of money; a treasure.“1 It appears from this definition that hoards are looked upon as results of conscious activity, as intentional accumulations hidden with some purpose. In English (and also Indian English) numismatic terminology, however, the term hoard is often used for any discovered accumulation of valuables, intentional or not. This usage is reflected also in the titles of published inventories: e.g. Inventory of British Coin Hoards, Coin Hoards of Uttar Pradesh, which contain, apart from genuine hoards, also unintentional losses, stray coins, etc. It is in this broader sense that the term hoard is used in this study. The alternative term „treasure trove“, stressing the aspect of hoard as something hidden 1

The Oxford English Dictionary, vol. V., Oxford 1933, p. 312.

7

8


and subsequently discovered, is a fixed collocation that cannot be easily modified to designate specifically finds of coins; in this sense, the term „coin finds“ is more explicit2 but may be taken as designating finds of single coins or coins unrelated to each other. In view of the fact that it is often difficult or impossible to discern intentional accumulations from unintentional, the term coin hoard in its more general sense seems to be in no way less appropriate than the other alternatives. Like coins, hoards too can be studied either as single units or in a wider series of finds belonging to certain period and place. Studied as single units, hoards are classified as intentional or unintentional, stray finds, hoards proper, excavation finds, etc.3 Information of this kind can be obtained from find reports but is, in the Indian case, lacking in the published inventories. Finds that are physically available for inspection can be further studied from the point of view of metrology, average metallic content of coins, etc. Needless to say, these procedures are more or less regularly applied only to recently discovered (and therefore not yet dispersed) finds; their results usually do not find their way into published inventories. Statistical methods form an integral part of these investigations; it is when hoards can be studied in series, however, that the role of statistics becomes especially prominent. In this field attention paid to methodological aspects of data processing and interpretation is, as far as I am aware, not as thorough and detailed as these problems would deserve.4 In this study I shall focus my attention primarily on two sets of questions which hoards may possibly answer: the first concerns hoards as sources for study of the hoarding behaviour of a given population in a given area and its changes in time, the second the much more intricate problem of the relationship between the number and structure of hoards on the one hand, and the quantity and structure of currency circulating in a given period of time on the other.

2. Approaches to Statistical Processing of Mughal Silver Coins The Method of Aziza Hasan Aziza Hasan was probably the first Indian historian who tried to draw conclusions for economic history from the evidence of Mughal coins. She realized the possibilities of utilization 2 German, Danish and Czech terminology prefers to stress this aspect of discovered accumulations: e.g. the German inventories bear in their titles terms „Münzfunde“ or „Schatzfunde“, Danish have „skattefund“, Czech „nálezy mincí“. 3 General principles of classification of coin finds are laid down in several textbooks and introductions to the field. See, e.g., P. Grierson, Numismatics. London etc. 1975, pp.124-139. For the Indian context useful summary is found in J. S. Deyell, Living Without Silver, pp. 272-291. 4 Exceptional in this respect and methodologically stimulating are the monographs of German numismatists and historians P. Ilisch, H. Eichhorn and J. Schüttenhelm, listed in the bibliography at the end of this book. Several questions and methods of statistical processing and interpretation of hoard series in the Indian context are discussed in two papers in: A. K. Jha (ed.), Coinage, Trade and Economy. 3rd International Colloquium, January 8th-11th, 1991. Anjaneri 1991. They are P. Berghaus, Coin Hoards: Methodology and Evidence, pp. 16-19 and J. S Deyell, Numismatic Methodologies Which Answer Questions Economists Might Ask, pp. 1-15.

Approaches to Statistical Processing of Mughal Silver Coins

9

of Mughal coins for statistical analysis that present themselves thanks to happy coincidence of three factors: 1. the Mughal coins kept uniform standard of weight and high purity of precious metal through most of the Mughal period and can be therefore looked upon, for an extended period of time, as mutually commensurable units fit for statistical processing; 2. they bear the date and name of the mint of their issue and can be therefore exactly localized on the spatial plane as well as on the temporal axis; and 3. the system of Mughal coinage was free, i.e. open to everybody who brought his own silver to mint to have allowed to circulate within Mughal imperial boundaries - a rule where the theory and practice almost totally coincided.5 These facts led A. Hasan to a not unreasonable presupposition, that changes in coin output of various mints over time must be reflected also in greater or smaller quantity of coins which have survived into the present day. She then chose as an indicator of the strength of particular coin populations the evidence of major coin collections built up by important museums and private individuals and from the totals of incidences of particular types of coins represented in them, constructed data series of changing output of mints spanning from the late 1560s to the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. This pioneering and ingenious approach led to interesting insights and trend curves (which are, as will be shown later in this section, in their basic shape similar to those arrived at in the present study). The method, however, suffered from and has been criticized for several flaws which cast doubts on the reliability of her results. As has been remarked by A. Hasan’s critics, museum collections are samples with strong inherent biases. Coins collected by museums have been selected with one main objective - to build up, as far as possible, a complete collection of all known coin types (coins of particular date, place, weight, execution, etc.), each being represented by one or two specimens: what can be gleaned from the catalogues are not quantities of actually found and registered coins but frequency of incidences of their particular types in the selected coin collections. This in itself is not necessarily a drawback - quantities too (esp. when analysed without regard to their hoard context) can contain serious biases and as a material for study of mint output are not necessarily superior to incidences. The problem with A. Hasan’s method lies, in the opinion of the present author, not in the - perhaps inadvertent - selection of the incidences approach but rather in the type of source from which the incidences data have been drawn. Museums and private collectors always strive for completeness and they often exchange among themselves redundant specimens to fill the gaps in their collections. However, if we decide to use the incidences method for an assessment of mint output, we should consider both the gaps and incidences as of equal significance. „Smoothing out“ of the sample by filling out the gaps cannot but distort the evidence. “Currency Output in the Mughal Empire and the Extension of the ‘Price Revolution’ to India.” (Summary). In: Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Mysore Session, December 1966, pp. 235-36. “Mints of the Mughal Empire: A Study in Comparative Output.” In: Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Patiala Session - part I, 1967, pp. 314-345. „The Silver Currency Output of the Mughal Empire and Prices in India during the 16th and 17th Centuries“, IESHR VI, 1 (1969), pp. 85-116; subsequent critique of O. Prakash and J. Krishnamurty, ibid., VII (1970), pp. 139-150 and A. Hasan’s reply ibid., pp. 151-160. J. S. Deyell returned to the theme several years later in his article „Numismatic Methodology in the Estimation of Mughal Currency Output“, ibid., XIII,3 (1976), pp. 393-401. 5


10

120 No. of coins in catalogues (A.Hasan)

Ilahi months on coins

Total of all coin incidences in hoards

number of incidences

100

80

60

40

20

1117

1113

1109

1105

1101

1097

1093

1089

1085

1081

1077

1073

1069

1065

1061

1057

1053

8

1049

4

22

18

14

6

10

2

48

44

40

999

995

991

987

983

979

975

971

967

963

0

years (in A.H.; form 1001 to 1047 A.H. datation expressed in regnal years of Akbar, Jahangir and Shahjahan)

Fig. 1. Coin incidences in museum catalogues (A. Hasan) and in hoards of the U.P. compared

There is still another, probably more serious distortion of evidence based on catalogue incidences: catalogues contain relatively greater number of coins of the same year if these differ from each other even by a single distinctive feature, e.g. the month of mintage. For museum collectors, coins of different months of the same year represent different types and are therefore sought after and incorporated into their collections. Years when the Il€h… monthly dating prevailed as a general standard are consequently numerically strongly over-represented in comparison with coins marked in accordance with the standard Islamic yearly dating. Comparison of curves constructed from the data collected by A. Hasan on the one hand, and from incidences of coins minted in the same year and found in hoards of the U.P. (an altogether different type of sample; the principle of counting incidences of years, not months in hoards has been strictly adhered to) collected by the present author on the other, will perhaps show the point. The fact that both curves fluctuate mostly in the same range of tens of incidences (an accidental feature) makes their quick comparison easier. Generally, long-term fluctuations of both curves correlate surprisingly well;6 more significant discrepancies occur only in the period of Il€h… dating when months of minting formed a regular part of the coin legend. Incidences extracted from coin catalogues, while following, during this period, the same general trend as incidences from hoards, are regularly twice as numerous as those com6 Correlation coefficients of both curves for particular regnal periods: Akbar 0,923; Jah€ng…r 0,852; Sh€hjah€n 0,785; Aurangzeb 0,719.


11

puted from the evidence of registered coin hoards: the collectors’ interest in every month’s issue raised the total number of coins belonging to an Il€h… year and is thus responsible for the observed bias. This fact, although not so graphically obvious, can be noticed on closer inspection of the catalogue entries themselves. If this bias is not filtered away, the incidences - understood to be in direct relation to silver influx - create, for the last quarter of the 16th and first third of the 17th century, a false impression of very dramatically fluctuating and at times very massive imports of silver. It should be expected that abrupt changes in silver import trends of such magnitude would have left their trace in other types of evidence too. As far as the present author is aware, no such evidence is available.

The Method of Shireen Moosvi Another attempt at quantitative evaluation of Mughal coins was made in an extended article by another Indian historian of the Aligarh school, Shireen Moosvi.7 When approaching the problem, S. Moosvi was aware of the criticisms and objections that had been raised against the methodology of A. Hasan. Accepting A. Hasan’s conclusions based on the three general characteristics of Mughal currency as valid, S. Moosvi tried to escape the biases inherent in the catalogue method by resorting directly to Treasure Trove Reports which could be reasonably expected to be free of distortions of this kind. Irrespective of their hoard context, she calculated quinquennial totals of all datable Mughal silver rupees registered in the Reports, first for each region of the Empire (Gujatrat, North-west etc.) and then for all north India; on these data she constructed a quinquennial histogram designed on the model of graph published earlier by A. Hasan.8 Comparing both graphs, S. Moosvi noticed that, apart from numerous correspondences, both graphs differ in representation of quantities of Akbar… silver coins. Lower profile of A. Hasan’s Akbar… period was explained away as being due to a particular type of negative bias - the fact that fewer silver mints operated in Akbar’s time than, for example, in the regnal period of Aurangzeb and the Akbar… coinage is consequently less rich in coin variants (interesting for coin collectors) than the coinage of later Mughal emperors. This may be partly true - although comparison of A. Hasan’s data with mine presented in the graph above does not suggests that this is the case. In fact, closer inspection reveals that in this particular case the bias may be hidden in the data (and therefore in the method) of S. Moosvi.9 Great quantity of extant coins struck in a certain period may be caused by at least three possible factors: first, by a more intensive hoarding activity in the respective period - if this is the case, greater number of extant coins may be due to a greater number of contemporary S. Moosvi, “The Silver Influx, Money Supply, Prices and Revenue Extraction in Mughal India“, JESHO XXX (1987), pp. 47-94 and Chapter 15 of her synthetic study The Economy of the Mughal Empire, c.1595. A Statistical Study. Delhi 1987, pp. 351-374. 8 S. Moosvi, The Silver Influx, p.53. 9 Unfortunately, S. Moosvi did not publish her data as a series of yearly sums but only in the more compressed form of quinquennial totals. It is therefore not possible to compare details of trends arrived at by her method with the hoards incidences curve in the same way as has been done above with the data of A. Hasan. 7


12

hoards containing them; second, the absolute numbers of coins are so small that one or two big hoards composed predominantly of one particular coin type may seriously distort the overall relative quantitative proportions between different periods - greater number of coins may be the result of a purely accidental fact that an extremely big hoard was uncovered and registered in modern times; the third possible cause of more frequent occurrences of coins of certain dates in hoards is, of course, greater output of mints supplied with greater quantities of silver - acquired either by reminting of the older coin stock or by imports. Only in the last case, and after elimination of all the other factors enumerated above, can the quantity of extant coins of particular type (date, etc.) be understood as reflecting, more or less accurately, the changes in the volume of coin stock. Moreover, historian should be aware of the fact that what he or she tries to reconstruct is not the volume of coin stock of all Mughal India but only of that part of its territory in which the extant coins under study have been buried and subsequently found - in our case of the area of the present-day Uttar Pradesh. In fact, the first of the three factors enumerated above, the hoarding activity factor, cannot be easily filtered away. And it need not be, if the tacit assumption behind S. Moosvi’s method of assessment of the coin stock, namely that a more widespread and/or more intense activity of saving and hoarding is primarily a result of expanding money supply, is correct. This may or may not be the case. The problem is that the relation between the volume of the past coin stock on the one hand and numbers of its coins which have survived to the present day in museum collections or Treasure Trove Reports on the other, is not so direct and straightforward. It is complicated by circumstances which determine both the formation of hoards and their survival to the present day. It is obvious that these circumstances are not necessarily directly related to coin stock volumes. Attempts to relate quantities of extant coins to past coin stock volumes should therefore take into account the hoard factor - this, in turn, can be done only when the hoard context of the respective coins has been taken seriously into account. An attempt to distinguish two main motives for hoarding will be found in the second part of this work10 . As far as Mughal silver coin hoards from the U.P. (the source of data for S. Moosvi’s statistics) are concerned, a bias of the second type mentioned above (the influence of big hoards) can be proved to have affected just the part of data that relate to quantities of Akbar… coins. The following tables should demonstrate this fact. Comparison of coin totals of the four Mughal emperors shows that Akbar… coins greatly outnumber those of the other three Great Mughals. S. Moosvi has interpreted this fact as a reflection of massive silver imports in the last twenty years of Akbar’s reign.11 In this particular See below, Part Two, pp. 40-48. S. Moosvi, The Silver Influx, pp.51-55. Quantities of coins assigned to the four emperors in her study differ from the numbers in the tables above. S. Moosvi saw the Treasure Trove Reports of the years 1880-1968, whereas Srivastava’s book, on which my calculations are based, includes new material and ends in 1978/79. Moosvi also eliminated all coins from the Deccan mints and converted silver coins of smaller denominations as well as slightly heavier Jah€ng…r… rupees into standard rupee units. In this study the latter recalculation was not possible owing to incomplete information on the number of particular types of coins in Srivastava’s inventory. However, the proportions are similar: Moosvi counted 2653 Akbar…, 1109 Jah€ng…r…, 1678 Sh€hjah€n… and 1942 Aurangzeb… coins. Hoard 426/ UP datable to 1614/15 was discovered in 1907/08 and therefore must have found its way into Moosvi’s statistics. 10 11


13

A. Akbar… NO. OF HOARDS

HOARD NO.

AKBAR¸ COINS IN HOARD

PER CENT OF ALL AKBAR¸ COINS

1

426/UP

1201

26,16

1

975/UP

556

12,11

1

450/UP

484

10,54

1

203/UP

207

4,51

1

530/UP

200

4,36

1

973/UP

162

3,53

1

972/UP

135

2,94

1

742/UP

127

2,76

115

1 519

33,09

123

4 591

100

B. Jah€ng…r… NO. OF HOARDS

HOARD NO.

JAH³NG¸R¸ COINS IN HOARD

PER CENT OF ALL JAH³NG¸R¸ COINS

1

972/UP

347

17,70

1

203/UP

284

14,49

1

426/UP

186

9,49

1

742/UP

117

5,97

108

1026

52,35

112

1960

100

C. Sh€hjah€n… NO. OF HOARDS

HOARD NO. SH³HJAH³N¸ COINS IN HOARD

PER CENT OF ALL SH³HJAH³N¸ COINS

1

465/UP

435

13,70

1

302/UP

180

5,67

1

74/UP

144

4,53

1

344/UP

131

4,13

1

68/UP

106

3,34

119

2179

68,63

124

3175

100

Tab. 1. Distribution of Akbar…, Jah€ng…r…, Sh€hjah€n… and Aurangzeb… silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in the years 1560-1942 (ctd. on the next page)


14 D. Aurangzeb… NO. OF HOARDS

HOARD NO.

AURANGZEB¸ COINS IN HOARD

PER CENT OF ALL AURANGZEB¸ CONS

1

465/UP

477

13,14

1

129/UP

322

8,87

1

1101/UP

290

7,98

1

624/UP

174

4,79

1

969/UP

150

4,13

1

546/UP

143

3,94

1

319/UP

119

3,28

139

1956

53,87

146

3631

100

Tab. 1. (ctd.) Distribution of Akbar…, Jah€ng…r…, Sh€hjah€n… and Aurangzeb… silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in the years 1560-1942

case, such straightforward conclusion is probably misleading. As our table of distribution of Akbar… coins clearly shows, more than one quarter of all Akbar… coins registered in U.P. Treasure Trove Reports comes from a single source - the hoard no. 426/UP which is, incidentally, one of the biggest Mughal hoards ever registered in the area of U.P. Published abstracts of the U.P. hoards do not contain information which would allow us to form a hypothesis about possible origin of this hoard. Nevertheless, the fact that somebody lost or hid huge amount of money which somebody else discovered and reported to the authorities three hundred years later, is not in itself in any direct relation to silver imports. The circumstances which led to the formation and especially to the loss of this hoard were probably extraordinary. If we eliminate this extraordinary case from further statistical processing, the total number of Akbar… coins descends to the level of Sh€hjah€n… and Aurangzeb… quantities (3390 Akbar… compared to 3175 Sh€hjah€n… and 3631 Aurangzeb… coins). In this context it should be also noted that two thirds of all Akbar… coins come from 8 big hoards with 100 or more coins whereas the remaining 33 per cent is distributed between 115 smaller hoards. This distribution pattern is restricted to Akbar… coins only: as the table shows, in the case of the other three Mughal emperors the proportion of coins from big hoards to the total number of all registered coins never raises above 50 per cent. As a result of this bias, the size of the Akbari coin stock computed by S. Moosvi on the basis of the coin evidence appears to be grossly overestimated - the more so that S. Moosvi, in order to get the base-figure for the 1595 coin stock (an initial value for which the index is 100), totalled up all rupee coins for the years 1556 to 1595 without taking into account yearly deductions for coin losses. This inflates the basic 1595 stock still further. Yearly increments added up to this base raise its initially high level only slowly, although the current loss rate is set to 1 per cent only. A different method of estimation of the coin stock,

15


based on numbers of incidences of particular coin types, has been delineated in the next sub-section and applied to the existing hoard material in Part Two. The graph comparing the results of both approaches shows marking similarities in the reconstructed development of the coin stock, especially in the decades after 1650 - on the condition that the basic, 1595 silver stock arrived at by the incidences method is multiplied by three. The remaining discrepancy between the two trends is then due to initial huge increments in the Akbari stock in the decade 1595-1605 in S. Moosvi’s curve. 240 220

Index

200 180 160 140

Index, S.Moosvi, 1% loss rate Index, hoards incidences, 1% loss rate

120

idem, coin stock 1595 tripled

1705

1700

1695

1690

1685

1680

1675

1670

1665

1660

1655

1650

1645

1640

1635

1630

1625

1620

1615

1610

1605

1600

1595

100

Fig. 2. Hypothetical growth of Mughal silver coin stock computed by two different methods of increment assessment and different estimates of the basic coin stock (1595=100).

To sum up: accidental factors (such as one or few extraordinary huge hoards) and specific patterns of hoarding which may have varied in both longer and shorter time spans invalidate absolute numbers of (extant) hoarded coins, taken out of their hoard contexts, as relevant data for reliable estimates of coin output and consequently, of silver imports too. As necessary correctives at least, hoards should always form an important part of quantitative investigations. This said, it should be noted that certain basic features of the coin stock curves, arrived at by three different approaches discussed here, are surprisingly similar.

The Method Based on Data Derived from Hoards The method developed in this work tries to eliminate the biases involved in the previous two approaches. While accepting the fact that evidence derived from hoards too contains its own biases, the method presented and developed on the following pages tries to identify and, if possible, to eliminate them. The present author believes that data analysed consistently


16

in their proper hoard context can ultimately yield more reliable results than the two previous approaches - probably the best we can have, given the character and general availability of sources standing at historian’s disposal. Evaluating the evidence of hoards, the present author has been constrained by the necessity to content himself with published abstracts of Treasure Trove Reports of the Uttar Pradesh (the reports are stored in the archive of the State Museum, Lucknow.) Compared to published hoards abstracts covering other states of the Indian Union (Gujarat,12 Maharashtra13 ), the inventory dealing with the U.P. is far more detailed and in every respect superior. Nevertheless, it does not contain information about numbers of doubles (coins of identical dates and mints) and thus does not allow us to utilize the material to the fullest possible extent. Even with this limitation, however, the abstract contains vast amount of important data suitable for statistical processing. First step of the analysis concerns the hoards themselves. Each hoard has been dated by the latest coin found in it; hoards dated by this method are then located on time axis; concentrations around particular dates or long-term trends have been noted and taken into consideration in later stages of analysis. Next, percentual shares of coins minted in the regnal period of each Mughal emperor (from Akbar to ³lamg…r II, a period covering the years 1556-1760) have been computed for each hoard which contains more than five coins and which can be assigned an exact date by the latest coin method. Percentual shares of coins of each emperor, grouped into five-year periods (pentads), have been then ordered on the time axis and the resulting curves have been interpreted. The very fact that they follow a consistent, logical and expectable pattern, is considered to be a definitive proof that hoards indeed are valuable, though in some respects biased, samples of the coin stock structure of the past. The problem inherent in this approach lies in the often very small number of hoards belonging to some of the forty five-year periods chosen as basic units for computing averages: each single hoard (after the so-called long-term and emergency hoards have been excluded as biased) can sway the final result of a pentad more than would have been the case if sufficient number of hoards were available. In other words, number of hoards belonging to a certain period (indicating perhaps the level of hoarding activity at that time) can affect the exactness of the results but does not constitute an inherent bias which would consistently distort the data in one particular direction. Next, all datable hoards have been scrutinized for all incidences of coins struck in a particular year in a particular mint. At this place, an explanation of few terms used in this text is necessary. Each occurrence of a particular type of coin in a hoard is called an incidence; there can always be only one incidence of any type of coin in any one hoard. Type of coin is defined by the coin’s metallic composition (but not denomination: this type of information is unfortunately not included in the published hoard inventory; hence, all silver Gupta, P. L., Coin-Hoards from Gujarat State. (The Numismatic Society of India, Numismatic Notes and Monographs, No.15). Varanasi 1969. 13 Gupta, P. L., Coin-Hoards from Maharashtra. (The Numismatic Society of India, Numismatic Notes and Monographs, No. 16). Patna 1970. 12


17

coins are understood as equal units), year (but not month) of mintage and the name of the mint. As the information on numbers of doubles is missing from the published abstract, counting of incidences has been the only possibility to extract information about mints from the available material.14 This method is similar to that used by A. Hasan; samples from which the incidences have been drawn are, however, not museum collections with their own biases but hoards themselves. More than two hundred hoards, including the small (1 to 5 coins), emergency and long-term ones, form a sufficiently wide base for results of the analysis to be considered representative. There is one possible bias which has to be taken into account: as coins of a certain date tend to occur more frequently in hoards formed in time close to or slightly later than this particular date, greater number of hoards concentrated in a certain period might result in overrepresentation of coin incidences contained in them in comparison with incidences drawn from hoards belonging to “poorer” times. Fortunately, the accumulation period (i.e. time-spans between the earliest and the latest coin in hoard) of most of the analysed hoards is longer than twenty years; accumulation periods of fifty years or more are no exceptions. Stronger populations of coins are therefore given the opportunity to show up even in relatively late hoards; such coin populations can thus „collect“ more incidences than would have been the case if the accumulation period of hoards would have been only a few years. The principle of one incidence per hoard irrespective of actual number of specimens of a particular coin type in a hoard keeps various biases stemming from peculiarities in composition of different types of hoards at the lowest possible level. It must be admitted, however, that while the incidences approach described above can serve well in smoothing out the effects of short-term fluctuations in the numbers of hoards, it is less effective in comparisons of coin incidences belonging to two longer periods with different general longer-term levels of hoarding activity. Here consistently higher quantity of hoards will generate generally higher numbers of coin incidences. A question must be asked about causes of this higher level of hoards incidence. Was it caused by easier availability of silver money or by generally higher level of insecurity and violence in the area under investigation? In interpreting all long-term trend curves of coin incidences these two possibilities have to be constantly borne in mind. Finally, sums of incidences of coins minted in all Mughal mints in each year from 1556 to 1760 have been summarized in a graph which, if the three presuppositions of A. Hasan and S. Moosvi are correct, reflects the overall activity of Mughal silver mints in a period spanning for nearly two hundred years. An attempt has been made to interpret basic features of the resulting graph and subsequently to construct on its basis a curve representing the growth and quantitative development of north Indian Mughal silver coin stock; as one Knowing numbers of doubles would be fine; however, one should be aware that direct counting of coin numbers might introduce a bias stemming from a possibly peculiar composition of big hoards (or better, hoards with great number of particular coin doubles). This would be the same type of bias that lays hidden in the data of S. Moosvi discussed above; translating absolute numbers into percentages could partly eliminate it. This step can be undertaken only after close inspection of the full version of the evidence, i.e. the Treasure Trove Reports. In the future, this may form another step of the present investigation. 14


18

important constant, the yearly attrition of the existing coin stock, remains unknown, several alternative curves have been offered, each of them based on a different possible yearly rate of attrition. The results, although not translated into absolute numbers of metric tons of minted silver (a problematic and in the present context probably unnecessary exercise), nevertheless can - with the above-mentioned caveats in mind - throw some light on the question of longterm development of the volume of silver coin-stock and connected problems with the assessment and interpretation of the rise or stability of prices in Mughal India. This has been the final aim and last step in the laborious and occasionally somewhat complicated analysis. All these procedures have been based on the conviction that hoards, with all their biases, still form probably the most reliable and most important source for Mughal monetary history that stands at the disposal of historians. Hoards, their biases and “filters”, or “sieves” through which they have to pass before they reach the hands of modern historians, therefore form the first part of the present study.

3. The Filters As suggested above, the main difficulty inherent in any study of past monetary systems by the (sole) means of extant coins or - better - coin hoards is that hoards are not independent random samples drawn for the purpose of historical analysis in conformity with the rigorous demands of statistics. The number, size and structure of these samples was determined by subjects whose motivation is itself a subject of scholarly debate15 and factors over which the contemporary historian can exercise no control. It is therefore very important that he should be, as far as possible, fully aware of their existence and influence on the formation of the sample. At this preparatory stage, the central question is to what extent and in which directions do these distorting factors create biases in the extant evidence, which make it structurally different from the hypothetical ideal random sample. Each hoard may have its own particular bias or a combination of biases. The situation is often further complicated by occasionally missing data on one or more variables (due to, for example, lack of exact identification of coins as far as their denomination, metallic composition or date of minting are concerned) or by systematic exclusion of one variable from the published evidence (in the case of U.P. hoards, systematic omission of number of doubles in hoards). It should be stressed that in a situation where particular samples, typically of greatly unequal size, are results of different types of sampling processes, distributed unequally in space and along the temporal axis, they cannot be processed as a single mass (in cases where this could be both suitable and convenient) and cannot be subjected to certain types See, e.g. the discussion of German numismatists on main motives and incentives for hoarding in the past societies, summarized in: P. Ilisch, Münzfunde und Geldumlauf in Westfalen in Mittelalter und Neuzeit. Numismatische Untersuchungen und Verzeichnis der Funde in den Regierungsbezirken Arnsberg und Münster. Münster 1980, p. 3. 15

The Filters

19

of analysis (e.g. testing) devised for evaluating independent random samples.16 The diverse mass of hoards made available for historical analysis therefore has to be divided and grouped into several categories defined by specific structural features and amounts of data (i.e. by the same number of categories of variables in each group). It is these smaller, internally more homogeneous groups that should be subjected to quantitative analysis and used for formulating specific questions. When we try, for example, to form an idea about the age structure of coin stock circulating in a certain period of the past, we shall have to limit our sample not only to hoards formed in the period concerned, but shall also try to exclude from this limited number longterm saving hoards which contain, from the point of view of circulating coin-stock, uncharacteristically high proportion of old coins, and also the so-called emergency hoards made up from homogeneous blocks of freshly minted coins drawn not out of circulation but taken more or less directly from the mint. Both would distort our results: the first type would make the age structure of the coin-stock look older, the second would exercise a bias distorting the results in the opposite direction. Both these types, however, form specific groups worth of study in their own right in their appropriate contexts. The method chosen here for identifying and defining these groups is to describe and analyse „filters“ or „sieves“ through which hoards, understood as samples of coins, have to pass before they finally reach, in more or less biased and incomplete form, the hands of modern historian. On the following pages we shall look more closely at these „filters“ and try to understand the way they distort these original (mostly also biased) samples. Recently, an ingenuous analysis of the hoard formation was made by P. Sarvas.17 Sarvas distinguishes five phases through which hoards have to pass before they reach the hands and eyes of the numismatist: 1. thesauration, 2. burying, 3. forgetting, 4. recovery, and 5. scholarly publication. Each of these phases is characterized by certain formative conditions which are arranged in a synoptic table; each factor is assigned a particular mathematical symbol that is subsequently made part of an equation expressing the total number of hoards available to scholars.18 The equation is F = (x5f1f2f3)(x4w1w2)(x3v1v2v3)(x2n1n2x1t1t2C+n1n2C), where F represents the total number of hoarded coins available to the modern research and C the total number of circulating coins of those types that are represented in the hoards. Although none of the symbols used in this equation can be assigned exact numerical value, P. Sarvas’s table is valuable as a heuristic device: in synoptic form it presents all those factors which influence, in greater or lesser degree, the structure of our numismatic evidence. Some of his suggestions are debatable: for example, wars and general upheavals are entered as factors conducive to burying but not to the thesauration itself. This may be correct in most, but not necessarily all cases. 16 Inapplicability of certain statistical procedures to non-standard samples is pointed out by e.g. R. Floud, An Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Historians. London 1979, p. 188. 17 P. Sarvas, Münzschätze und Münzschatzfunde. In: T. Fischer, P. Ilisch (eds.), Lagom. Festschrift für Peter Berghaus zum 60. Geburtstag am 20. November 1979. Münster 1981, pp. 3-10. 18 Ibid., p. 8.


20

PHASES FACTORS

Thesauration I.

Burying II.

Forgetting III.

Recovering IV.

Publication V.

1. Constant

x1

x2

x3

x4

x5

2. Need of the capital

t1

3. Inflation

t2

4. War

n1

v1

5. General upheavals

n2

v2

6. Epidemics

v3

7. Plowing, building activity

w1

8. Exactness*

w2

9. Level of education

f1

10. Treasure trove laws

f2

11. Activity of collectors

f3

*Probability for an accidentally uncovered hoard (during ploughing, bulldozing , transfers of greater volumes of earth, rubble etc.) to be noticed by people.

Tab. 2. Factors of hoarding and subsequent recovering of coins (according to P. Sarvas))

Besides, the dividing line between thesauration and burying may be sometimes rather indistinct. The concept of filters introduced in this study differs somewhat from that of P. Sarvas. My filters have been defined with the single intention of localizing qualitative distortions and quantitative changes in the hoard material as it passed along the temporal axis. The labels „constant“ and „need of capital“ used in Sarvas´ classification, for example, are not directly relevant to this purpose. If we are interested in describing factors that make hoarded material structurally different from the circulating currency, it may be advantageous to describe them under the heading of a filter or transformatory stage. Viewed from this angle, phase III of the table should read „non-forgetting“; in my description it is made part of filter II. On the other hand, it seemed appropriate to insert another stage, that of registration, between recovery and publication. This is relevant especially in cases where the published version draws on authentic Treasure Trove Reports, but selects from them only certain data (variables), leaving out others. Original treasure trove reports may get lost or destroyed together with a lot of important data. This is especially unfortunate when the hoards are regularly dispersed (with coins distributed to museums, sold out or returned to finders) shortly after their registration - as is the case in India. The filters introduced in this work are therefore different from the categories chosen by P. Sarvas for his table; they are situated in the interstices between links of chain circulation - hoarding - recovery - registration - printed edition.

The Filters

21

Filter I: Coins Circulating - Coins Hoarded The first filter concerns the original composition of the sample: this only rarely exactly reflects the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of currency circulating in the place and time to which it belongs. Hoards are most conveniently dated by their latest coins: however, the time span between the oldest and latest datable coin is sometimes very large (one hundred years or more) and, especially when the majority of coins is distributed rather evenly between the two terminal dates, one has to assume that the formation of the sum eventually hoarded was a relatively long process extending for more than one generation.19 Special cases are composite hoards containing two clearly separate parts belonging to different epochs of Indian history - e.g. Indo-Sassanian, {•alj… or Tughlaq coins together with Mughal silver rupees. The older part was probably a hoard discovered in the past and added by its new owner to his own savings. In the U.P. records such hoards are rare20 : however, they remind us of the fact that every hoard has its own peculiar history and therefore a kind of „personal bias“. Similar bias has to be taken into account when we turn to the examination of places of origin or mints of coins that made up the hoard. Strictly speaking, hoards discovered in a certain area should be understood as samples of coin stocks prevailing in the past in this area; for example, hoards found on the area of Uttar Pradesh can throw light on the structure and development of coin stock of the central part of the Mughal empire; the data extracted from them should not be generalized so as to represent the empire as a whole. The total coin stock cannot be assumed to have been perfectly homogeneous, especially when the area of its operation at times covered greater part of the Indian subcontinent. In different regions, coins of local mints may be heavily over-represented in relation to other coin populations which were perhaps more numerous in absolute terms but were produced by some distant mint. Non-homogeneity should be understood as a constant property of regional coin stocks too. Many coins, esp. those of gold and silver, came into circulation in „bunches“, being released by the mints at the order of some owner of bullion - a merchant, a banker, an aristocrat etc. It is reasonable to suppose that these homogeneous „bunches“ were kept for some time together, travelled with their owners for some-times long distances and later were as a whole or in part hoarded and hidden. These temporal and spatial biases of individual hoards cannot be eliminated: at best, they can to certain extent lose their weight when submerged into a larger mass of data coming from other hoards of a given period and area. Thus the picture we try to make of the structure of circulating currency will be always to a greater or lesser extent blurred. The above biases can be better guides for our understanding of hoarding patterns and habits of the moneyed part of the population. For a more detailed discussion of long-term hoards, see below, pp. 31-33. Examples drawn from the corpus of Mughal hoards described in Srivastava´s inventory include nos. 66/UP (Indo-Sassanian and Mughal), 807/UP ({•alj… and Mughal) where both components are silver. More frequent are composite copper hoards or copper parts of mixed silver and copper hoards: e.g. nos. 184/UP, 540/ UP, 868/UP (Tughlaq and Mughal) and several others. 19 20

22


The same can be said about another type of bias - the conscious decision on the part of hoarder to select certain coins or certain metal as most appropriate for hoarding and conservation of wealth.21 In India, the traditional hoarding metals were gold and silver. Copper was undoubtedly an important monetary metal used not only for lower-value transactions but also, until the end of the 16th century, as the official accounting unit of the Mughal fiscal apparatus (revenue demands of the Akbar… administration were stated always in copper dams) and therefore most probably also for the overwhelming mass of financial operations of that time. It is true that up to the end of the 16th century copper often appears in hoards; still, its percentual share hardly adequately represents its importance as the basic monetary unit.22 And, of course, hoards are totally silent about widespread use of cowries (kau±…s), small shells used in wide areas of Mughal India for everyday low-value financial transactions. Gold is a very special case: it was, in the first place, an ideal medium for conservation of wealth. It may, therefore, seem strange that in Mughal hoards it is almost absent. A strong negative bias seems to have been at work: this, however, tends to distort not so much the evidence on the real position of gold as circulating metal (higher value payments were made mostly in silver) as on the size of its stock in relation to silver, and especially on its importance as the medium most suitable for saving and hoarding. This bias was most probably not due to a conscious decision of original owners of gold, but rather to the behaviour of its later happy finders who regularly failed to report and hand over gold coins to the authorities. It is therefore more appropriate to treat it as part of filter three. Hoarders’ preferences do not limit themselves necessarily only to certain monetary metals at the expense of others. In each metal, coins of certain provenience, nominal value or age may be more desirable objects of hoarding than others. Again, main criterion seems to be the factor of value. European monarchs often tried to overcome frequent shortages of money by diluting, more or less perceptibly, the precious metal content of their coins. Older, less debased coins were therefore considered more valuable and - in compliance with the Gresham’s law - gradually disappeared from circulation. The reverse side of this process is their greater incidence in hoards. Taken as samples of circulating coins, such hoards then acquire a temporal bias that makes them, and the coin stock they are supposed to represent, look on the average older than they actually are.23 In Mughal India the situation was rather different. The Mughal silver rupee kept its standard weight and silver content all through the second half of the 18th century. Moreover, official regulations specifying special discounts on older coins raised artificially the value of freshly minted coins by several per cent, and thus discouraged people from keeping coins of older mintage.24 One could perhaps even speculate about a reverse bias: older 21 A conveniently short term for this type of bias would perhaps be „hoarding factor“ - a translation of the accepted German term „Hortungsfaktor“. See, e.g., J. Schüttenhelm, Der Geldumlauf im südwestdeutschen Raum vom Riedlinger Münzvertrag 1423 bis zur ersten Kipperzeit. Stuttgart 1987, pp. 99-100. 22 Percentual shares of gold, silver and copper coins in Mughal hoards are summarized in Tab. 3 on p. 28. 23 J. Schüttenhelm, op. cit., p. 100. 24 For a detailed treatment of the Mughal system of discounts and remintings of old coins, see M. Martin,

The Filters

23

coins in long-term savings might be the most natural candidates for spending before their value decreased to the level of silver bullion. Concerning the qualitative biases, mention should be made of silver fractions of Mughal rupees. These began to be minted during the reign of Akbar and, sooner or later, must have found their way into hoards. If the printed inventory records faithfully all occurrences of small silver coins in hoards (as seems to be the case)25 , their role in hoarding - and in circulation probably too - was only marginal.26 Few words should be said on two basically opposite theories of conditions conducive to hoarding. According to the first, hoarding is symptomatic of growing wealth and relative abundance of money; in the Middle Ages and in the early modern era savings banks were unknown and depositing of precious objects and coins in safe and secret places was nothing unusual or unnatural. According to the other, hoarding activity increases especially in times of wars, uprisings and general insecurity - an assumption which found its way also into P. Sarvas’ table reproduced above. On the general level, it can be said that these two theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. If the hoarding of money rose to higher levels in times of distress, the material necessary for this purpose must have been already there in the first place. Political and military upheavals would yield fewer hoards in poorer regions than in wealthy and monetized areas. One should take into account also the opposite process - the recovering of previously hidden hoards and other precious objects. It can be assumed that under relatively stable political and economic conditions most of these buried accumulations would be dishoarded, spent and therefore dispersed. Even if such accumulations were numerous, today we have little material proof of their past existence. Complete loss of information about the location or even about the very existence of hoards probably occurred more frequently in dramatic and unusual circumstances: the memory may have been obliterated by sudden death or expulsion of the owner or his relatives. (This aspect is better dealt with as part of our filter II). Such situations occur typically in times of wars, uprisings or other violent upheavals which themselves constitute important motive for formation of new hoards. That is why we have typically more hoards from times of wars than from periods of peace.27 Hoarding activity and the numbers of extant hoards (and conseThe Reforms of the Sixteenth Century and Akbar’s Administration: Metrological and Monetary Considerations. In: J.F. Richards (ed.), The Imperial Monetary System of Mughal India. Delhi 1987, pp. 68-99, esp. pp. 88-93. 25 In hoards no. 319/UP, 320/UP, 613/UP, 742/UP silver coins of one and the same regnal period are divided into two groups described separately. Criterion for this division is nowhere explained; we can only guess that they refer to two different types of silver coins, perhaps rupees and half-rupees or annas. In other cases - e.g. nos. 780/UP, 802/UP, 837/UP fractions are identified even in cases of their very small numbers or single occurrences in hoards. 26 Several hoards contain fractional pieces of the Akbar… rupee that are said to be known only from literary evidence. 1/16th of rupee, the anna, was minted in some quantity in the reign of Sh€hjah€n, but according to contemporary testimony, was „rare“. The same seems to hold good, more or less, for the nis€r, a quarter-rupee struck by Jah€ng…r, Sh€hjah€n, Aurangzeb and FarruÇsiy€r. I. Habib, The Currency System, p. 7; P. L. Gupta, Coins. New Delhi 1969, p. 125. 27 Examples supporting this thesis can be probably drawn from any area with at least partly monetized economy afflicted by some violent disturbance. The example of hoards registered in Bohemia and published by E.

24


quently of extant coins too) are two separate phenomena which certainly are mutually related but the relation is not simple and straightforward one: more coins from more hoards do not necessarily mean greater volume of circulating money in the respective period. It would be too risky to conclude on the basis of hoard evidence that greater number of survived coins is an indication of expanding money supply. In the context of the present analysis, questions about relationship between the phenomenon of hoarding and its motives on the one hand and numbers of actually uncovered hoards and coins on the other are not of purely theoretical interest. Quantitative analysis of Mughal coins and hoards must be preceded by an attempt to identify factors responsible for observed unevenness in the temporal and spatial distribution of hoards registered in the area of the U.P. Investigation of this unevenness undertaken in Section 2 of Part II of the present study suggests that in the case of Mughal India too, higher incidence of hoards in certain periods and areas correlates broadly with periods of unrest, wars, raids and general insecurity; areas living in peace and relative prosperity, on the other hand, yield very few hoards even when the process of monetization there (in areas close to the Mughal capital of Sh€hjah€n€b€d, for example) was most probably in no way less advanced than in some other areas with higher incidence of hoards. In sum, in the Mughal case too, higher incidence of hoards appears to be due in the first place to specific events; for the study of more general economic processes which form necessary conditions for the very possibility of saving and hoarding of silver money, however, straightforward quantitative methods do not constitute an appropriate tool. Nohejlová-Prátová (red.), Nálezy mincí v Èechách, na Moravì a ve Slezsku, vols. I-IV, Praha 1955-58 is very instructive in this respect: two very prominent peaks in hoarding activity coincide with Hussite wars of 1420’s and 1430’s and with the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century. See ibid., vol. IV, p. 82. Causes of hoard formation are dealt with in a lengthy article of A. Blanchet, Les rapports entre les dépots monétaires et les événements militaires, politiques et économiques. Revue Numismatique XXXIX(1936), Ser. 4, pp. 1-70, 205-270. This article reads more like a list of hoards formed in response to wars, military campaigns and local power struggles. Some of the examples, drawn from two millennia of European history are speculations and more or less convincing guesses. However, his main thesis is beyond doubt. Apart from political upheavals there were also relatively minor disturbances of local and temporarily limited character: these too could induce people to hide their property. As a good example in this respect may serve the so called Lohe hoard discovered in Stockholm in 1937 and subsequently analyzed by B. Thordemann in a model study The Lohe Hoard: A Contribution to the Methodology of Numismatics. Numismatic Chronicle, vol. VIII (1948), Ser.6, pp. 188-204. Formation of this huge emergency hoard was traced to particular political crisis in Stockholm in 1743. Thorough study of local historical sources was necessary to identify the situation that led to formation of this hoard. Another example, this time known only from narration, is description left by Samuel Pepys in his diary of his own precautionary measures taken in the summer of 1667 in response to the danger of Dutch attack on London. J. Warrington (ed.), The Diary of Samuel Pepys. London, New York 1953, vol. II, pp. 481-2, 488 and vol. III, pp. 80-81. We have also a rare literary description of such a local crisis from Mughal India - an account left by a jeweller Ban€ras…d€s from Jaunpur about violence and extortion committed by the Mughal governor Qul…j {•€n. R.Ch. Sharma, The Ardha-Kath€nak. A Neglected Source of Mughal History. Indica, vol. VII, no.1 (1970), p. 58. Hoards formed in this type of local crisis may be chronologically isolated and their testimony of some political disturbance may be deciphered only after careful study of local sources. Thordemann’s thesis that „series of chronologically proximate deposits indicate periods of war or other political disturbance, while chronologically isolated finds do not allow of any such conclusion“ (The Lohe Hoard, p.193) is formulated in this respect perhaps too sharply. For the German debate and subsequent empirical research (confirming the thesis stated above), see P. Ilisch, op. cit., p. 3-5.

The Filters

25

Here, the analysis of internal evidence of each hoard-sample (temporal structure of the coin content of the accumulation, provenance of coins included, their material composition, fabric and weight), may yield more reliable results than simple counting of their numbers.

Filter II: Coins Hoarded - Coins Recovered in Modern Times Not all hoards hidden and forgotten in the past have been discovered in the modern era; some still lay hidden in the ground, others were found accidentally in the pre-modern period. The fact that such discoveries occurred from time to time is attested not only by legends, tales and folklore in general, but also by certain type of the existing hoards themselves. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, several U.P. hoards registered and described in modern times contain two clearly separate parts belonging to two totally different periods. Old hoard uncovered in the past was sometimes lumped together with contemporary savings and subsequently buried together with them. We can speak with confidence about two originally separate hoards when the time distance between them (the period represented by no coins in the hoard) is relatively great and therefore clearly evident. However, there are probably also composite hoards whose parts are, on the temporal axis, not very far from each other: such hoards cannot be easily distinguished from hoards accumulated more or less continually for a longer period of time. We have no means of estimating the rate of attrition of the original hoard stock due to these pre-modern discoveries. Generally, the more distant the date of hoard is from the present, the greater is the probability of its discovery in the past. As far as the frequency of hoards is concerned, owing to this filter older hoards are numerically underrepresented in comparison to those of more recent origin. The rate of attrition was probably not even through the centuries and millennia: the rate of discovery must have been increasing steadily together with growing population density and, especially in the more recent times, with transport of great masses of earth in the intensive building of infrastructure, new houses, etc. Finally, we should not forget that a number of hoards was later reclaimed by their owners or their informed relatives; these are hoards whose existence never disappeared from the memory of local inhabitants. Here the „sieve“ is likely to be much more dense in periods of peace, which ensured greater continuity of habitation and tradition passing from one generation to the next. The „sieve“ is understandably looser in times of wars, migrations, disturbances, etc. This, together with greater hoarding activity, is the reason why periods of war and unrest are better represented in hoard statistics than periods of peace. The existence of the quantitative bias due to long-term attrition should be kept in mind particularly in comparisons of quantities of hoards belonging to different epochs; it is not exactly quantifiable. The period of two hundred years (1560-1760) which is under discussion here is perhaps too short for this bias to distort in a serious way the quantitative evidence. Fluctuations in the number of hoards over shorter periods, on the other hand, may be, for reasons stated above, quite strong - this should be borne in mind especially in attempts to relate the number of hoards to the volume of currency in circulation. There is no bias that could affect qualitative aspects (internal structure) of hoards passing through this filter.


26

Filter III: Coins Recovered in Modern Times - Coins Entered into Treasure Trove Reports Not all coins recovered in modern times (defined for our purposes as the period when museums systematically register hoards and collect and catalogue old coins) have been entered into official museum inventories. From the total number of hoards recovered in modern times - in the case of U.P it is since 1882 when hoards reported to the authorities began to be registered and described in Treasure Trove Reports - only a fraction came to the notice of government officials or found its way into state museums. It is impossible to say how large - or rather, how small - this fraction actually was. According to an estimate of J.S. Deyell28 up to 95 per cent of the hoards or even more may escape the attention of the state authorities and go unreported into private hands. Only a part of this mass of coins goes into private collections, whereas the great majority is melted down and sold on the silver market as bullion. We may ask whether hoards of Mughal coins have had in the last hundred years always equal chance to get into the possession of museums, or whether there was, at times, a selective bias affecting their share in all hoards registered in a given time-span in a given area. To get an idea about possible trends or fluctuations, the mass of data from the U.P., available for the period of 1882-1979 (total of 1141 hoards) has been divided into five-year periods and summarized in the following graph. 160 HOARDS WITH MUGHAL COINS

140

ALL HOARDS

number of hoards

120 100 80 60 40 20

1976-80

1971-75

1966-70

1961-65

1956-60

1951-55

1946-50

1941-45

1936-40

1931-35

1926-30

1921-25

1916-20

1911-15

1906-10

1901-05

1896-00

1891-95

1886-90

1881-85

0

Fig. 3. Coin hoards of the U.P. registered by the State Museum, Lucknow in the years 18821979. 28

J.S. Deyell, Living Without Silver, p. 279.

The Filters

27

Basically, two interpretations of this graph are possible. According to one, the percentage of loss of hoards due to laxity in law enforcement would bee seen as a constant, and the decline of registered hoards, noticeable since the fourth pentad of this century, would be explained by the decline of absolute numbers of all hoards found in this area. This decline would be explained as being due to the simple fact that the total quantity of all hoards buried in the past gets gradually exhausted, and the decreasing trend noticeable in the graph simply reflects this fact. Another explanation might point to factors 8 to 10 of the list of P. Sarvas reproduced here on p. 28 above. Use of machines capable of turning and transporting large masses of earth may destroy uncovered hoards or disperse them so that their parts or single coins easily escape human attention. Level of education may be perhaps less important than the opportunity to sell coins for metal on the bullion market or to private coin collectors. This last factor seems to be, particularly in the second half of this century, of growing importance, and may go a long way towards explaining the post-war declining trend. Apart from these more or less general factors operating in many other countries of the world (numbers of finds registered in European countries show the same declining trend), there are several other features characteristic to the U.P. Even in the U.P., with its exceptionally high standard of treasure trove record keeping, the quality of registering and subsequent storing of records has been quite uneven.29 As A. K. Srivastava informs us in his introduction to the published volume, complete evidence of coin finds based on the original Treasure Trove Reports is available for the years 1898-1918, 1939-1956/57 and 1965-1979 (the time of compilation of the inventory). The evidence from the intervening years is incomplete and has to be reconstructed, as far as possible, from other archival material. The situation is especially bad in the case of the late thirties, when the description of a hoard is often restricted to laconic statement „Mughal“ and „disposition not known“. Such finds can be drawn only into the most elementary statistics about the total number of Mughal hoards. It is not improbable that unknown number of hoards was dropped completely. The fault does not seem to be in incompetent registration but rather in the later handling of the records. Summary description of some hoards may create the impression that their whole content is made up of only one type of coin (of single mint and year), a characteristic feature of the so-called emergency hoards. To avoid the inadvertent bias possibly inherent in this type of defective evidence, all hoards registered in the years 1934-1938 have been excluded from processing of this aspect of hoard-formation. As far as the share of hoards containing Mughal coins in the total number of all registered hoards is concerned, there does not seem to be any bias either in favour or against The fact that U.P. has probably the best inventory of hoards available anywhere in India, is due to no accident. Making a unique arrangement, in 1899 the Government of U.P. constituted a small Treasure Trove Committee from persons interested in numismatics who subsequently examined and reported on the finds of the province. The extant Treasure Trove Reports belonging to the years prior to 1899, however, show equal level of professionalism: perhaps similar committee assisted the officials in less formal way since the early 1880s. Beside the central position of the area of U.P. in the Mughal empire, this is another factor that makes its hoards especially worth of historian’s attention and careful study. 29


28

Mughal finds: their share in the total fluctuates mostly between forty and fifty five per cent (with two exceptions in the pentads of 1886-90 and 1946-50, when their share sinks to under thirty per cent).30 Turning to possible qualitative distortion, it is highly probable that in India this filter stops a greater proportion of gold coins than coins of any other metal. Gold is little affected by corrosion and its constantly high price on the market makes it ideal for conservation of value. Its original proportion in hoards was therefore probably higher than its share in hoards registered in the Treasure Trove Reports of the U.P.

Gold Silver Copper Other TOTAL

pieces

per cent of all coins

139 44 057 13 509 36 57 741

0,24 76,3 23,4 0,06 100

per cent in terms of value 3,6 95,13 1,27 100

Tab. 3. Gold, silver and copper in U.P. hoards containing Mughal coins inventoried in the years 1882 - 1978/7931

The relatively low percentages of copper are due to the general prevalence of silver as the main and relatively accessible monetary metal whose higher intrinsic value made it more suitable for hoarding than the cheaper copper. Apart from the effects of this „hoarding factor“, specific provisions of the Treasure Trove Law also played a considerable role (see below). On the other hand, the causes of the relatively very low percentage of gold, a metal most suitable for hoarding, must have been very different. In this case, small numbers suggest that gold coins, instead of being duly reported and handed over to the authorities, tended to disappear into private pockets.32 In comparison to silver and copper, gold is, in official reports and collections, most probably seriously underrepresented. Of considerable interest in this context are the Treasure Trove Laws regulating the procedures of registration and disposal of hoards, as well as the remuneration for the honest Average share of Mughal hoards in the total is 44.64 per cent (pentads 1881-85, 1961-65 and 1971-75 have been excluded), standard deviation from the mean is 10.22. The Mughal share in the two exceptional pentads is 23.38 and 28.00 per cent respectively. 31 From the numbers have been excluded 535 gold coins of no. 763/UP (Treasury of Kunwarpur) as well as 2851 silver, 787 copper and 245 silver alloy coins of no.1060/UP (Treasury of Rampur). As these coins were inventoried by state officials directly on the spot, filter III in these two cases did not intervene. In all, coins from 528 hoards have been included. Percentual shares of gold, silver and copper expressed in terms of their relative value have been calculated on the basis of gold to silver rate1:12 and copper to silver rate 23:1. The rates are averages calculated for the period of 1560-1760 from data published by I. Habib in his article A System of Trimetallism in the Age of the „Price Revolution“: Effects of the Silver Influx on the Mughal Monetary System. In: J. F. Richards (ed.), The Imperial Monetary System of Mughal India. Delhi 1987, pp. 148-150. 30

The Filters

29

finder.33 The first such law, Regulation 5, was passed in 1817. This was superseded by Act VI of 1878 which, supplemented with a minor amendment in 1891, remained in force until the end of British rule and was subsequently inherited unchanged by the independent India. In its substance the Act is very liberal, but the accompanying procedures are very lengthy and cumbersome; this has deterring effect on any finder - if he happens to know about the existence of the Act at all. His duty is to report and hand over the hoard to district officer who shall, by way of public notification, give a chance to potential owners of the find to raise their claim. If no such person appears in the stipulated time, the hoard is, after inspection, returned to the finder. The collector, however, may acquire the hoard, or part of it, for the government and pay to the persons entitled thereto a sum equal to the value of materials of the treasure. (In fact, it was only in 1884 that provincial governments were advised to issue instructions to collectors that all coins of non-British mintage should be invariably acquired for the government). If a claimant appears, the case is to be settled by a Civil Court. The final verdict and the sum to be payed is reported to be usually quite long in coming - four or five years are no exception. Moreover, few people are aware of the real content of this Act and many, including police officials, wrongly believe that hoards are the property of the state. This state of affairs has had two unfortunate results: finders try to hide their finds and police, on receiving notice, often tend to behave in an unduly harsh way. P.L. Gupta, an eminent Indian numismatist with lifelong experience in the field, believes that hoards which come to the notice of the government constitute hardly five to ten per cent of all hoards found.34 The Act contains also one provision that has worked as a kind of filter holding back copper hoards. Section 4 exempts from the application of the Act objects of value of less than ten rupees. Even at the beginning of the 1960s this sum could cover a hoard of five hundred copper coins. This may partly explain the fact that the Mughal copper hoards are apparently underrepresented, especially in the hoard profile of the second half of the 16th century. However, if we concentrate on a single metal (in this case on silver), the quality of our sample should not be affected by this filter - except perhaps by the loss of such rarities as the „zodiacal“ coins of Jah€ng…r sought after by every private or public collector. As the Mughal rupees kept an almost unchanging standard of weight for long periods of time, there is no reason for the existence of any serious qualitative bias. Quantitative attrition caused by this filter, on the other hand, must have been extremely heavy.

J. S. Deyell reports about private collections containing rare gold coins coming undoubtedly from such unreported hoards. „Even academics appear embarrassed by questions about their source of gold coin photographs.“ Living Without Silver, p. 281. 33 Competent summary of the history of treasure trove laws in India, the present situation and complete text of the Treasure Trove Act in force gives P. L. Gupta, Treasure Troves Laws in India - A Review. Journal of the Numismatic Society of India XXV (1963), p. 137-151. 34 Ibid., p. 147. 32


30

Filter IV: Coins Inspected and Entered into Treasure Trove Reports - Written Evidence of Dispersed Coins Today’s historians have at their disposal for visual inspection only a small percentage of the total of all registered and described coins. In India, state museums select only a limited number of specimens suitable for completing their own collections and distribute the rest to other museums or sell them on the market. Hoards are therefore usually soon dispersed and the historian is left only with written records. A lot of very useful information about coins that is available only after their careful visual inspection (composition, exact weight, wear, dies used, etc.) is either irretrievably lost or, if the coin is inspected after the hoard has been dispersed, taken out of its original context. In addition, there may be mistaken identifications or simple typographical errors that cannot be corrected when the original is no longer available. Moreover, many historians may not have ready access to the original Treasure Trove Reports and have to make do with the published inventories. In the ideal case, these should be in the form of reprints of the original reports, supplemented with the necessary critical apparatus. However, not all published inventories fulfil these requirements. For example, the published inventory of the U.P. hoards that has supplied data for this study is at least in one important respect incomplete. Its compiler leaves out information about the number of duplicates in hoards; these data are important for statistical processing of year and mint frequencies. There are some obvious errors in dating which can be in most cases corrected35 ; the less obvious ones could be eliminated only after careful comparison with the original reports. On close inspection, however, these errors appear to be marginal. We should not expect them to constitute any bias that would distort the data systematically in one direction. As far as the Mughal coin hoards are concerned, it seems, therefore, that if we concentrate on a single metal (silver), understand the sheer quantities of hoards and coins contained in them primarily as indicators of past hoarding activities rather than of quantities of coins in circulation and study the coins always in their hoard context, we can to a great extent escape the qualitative distortions inherent in the material. An attempt to escape, as far as possible, the bias exercised by uneven number of hoards on the coin evidence has been made in Part Two of the present work: the method of counting incidences of particular types of coins instead of their sheer numbers is explained in the second part of Section 4 dealing with the structure of Mughal silver hoards.

Most coins are dated by both the regnal year and also by the year of hijra. It is relatively easy to discover instances where these two dates do not tally. There are two possible explanations of these errors: the master of the mint did not change at the appropriate time the dies for the obverse and reverse side of the coin in this case the later date should be taken as valid; or the discrepancy is due to wrong identification of the sometimes hardly legible dates on worn or damaged coins. In this work, if the two dates on a coin do not tally, the later one has been selected as the probably correct one. In other dubious cases where this solution has not been possible, a question mark has been appended. 35

Types of Hoards

31

4. Types of Hoards As has been stated above, hoards are analysed mainly to answer two broad sets of questions concerning the role and use of money in the past ages. The first set concerns the hoards themselves and sees them as a source for study of hoarding behaviour of the population (or a segment of it) inhabiting a certain area in a certain period of time and tries to understand its motivation and social background. The second approach tries to utilize the data contained in hoards for a reconstruction of past coin stock in its qualitative as well as quantitative aspects. In this case, coin hoards are looked upon as samples of past coin stocks. It must be stressed again that these are not independent random samples as defined by the modern science of statistics. Apart from biases affecting differently the quantities of different types of hoards, there are also factors which influence the internal composition of hoards. Unintentional coin finds or coin accumulations may have different internal structure than intentional hoards built up by their owners with a particular type of selection criteria in mind. There are several types of hoards and, from the point of view of reconstruction of past coin stocks, not all are of equal importance. Unintentional loss of a purse with recently acquired coins will have different internal structure and will reflect different aspect of money use than a saving hoard accumulated gradually by two or more generations of owners. In so far as hoards keep the information about their origin coded in their internal structure, they should be, as far as possible, divided into several structurally distinct groups. Analysis of the hoard content should be supplemented, wherever possible, by circumstantial evidence: exact location of the find, receptacle, if any, etc. Facts of this kind should form an integral part of Treasure Trove Reports. Unfortunately, in published inventories of Indian coin hoards this information is regularly omitted. This omission debars the researcher from distinguishing certain types of intentional and unintentional hoards and from identifying some rather special cases - e.g. accumulations of coins motivated not by economic but ritual behaviour. Under these conditions, an analysis of internal structure of hoards is our sole tool.

Long-term Savings Hoards The first group of hoards identifiable on the basis of analysis of their content consists of long-term hoards. Typically, such hoards include significant percentage of relatively old coins (relatively to the date of the latest coin in the hoard); the temporal distance between the oldest and latest coin may be one hundres years or even more. This broad temporal range is usually covered by more or less continuous series of coins from the oldest to the latest. (Hoards containing one or two old coins isolated by a long temporal gap from a more compact group of later coins constitute a special category that will be dealt with further below.) Inclusion of a hoard into this category must take into account broader context of other hoards belonging to the time and place under consideration. If all or great majority of other hoards show this same or very similar temporal structure, it has to be assumed that they constitute a more or less reliable sample of coin stock circulating at the time fixed by their latest coins. Large share of old coins compared to the

32


number of those of later mintage then reflects, first of all, weak influx of monetary metal into the economy and probably also a relatively slow monetary circulation: the quicker the circulation, the more rapid is the attrition of the coin stock due to various kinds of losses. Greater stability of the coin stock indicates its slower velocity.36 If, on the other hand, hoards of this type are in a minority and stand in contrast to prevailing hoards of considerable younger temporal structure (as is the case of Mughal hoards), they can be interpreted as a long-term saving hoards in the proper sense of the word: as accumulations formed gradually by greater number of smaller additions to the existing stock, made sometimes by two or more generations of owners.37 There is no universal time-limit that could be taken as a clear dividing line between such long-term saving hoards and the more common shorter-term accumulations; average time-span of contemporaneous „ordinary“ hoards should constitute the main basis for comparison and classification. Higher percentage of these long-term saving hoards in the corpus of all extant hoards belonging to a certain period and area may be seen as an indication that hoarding was a habitual activity and one of the more prominent functions of money. For the purposes of analysis attempted in the present study, following criterion has been formulated: if the share of coins minted during past regnal period(s) is in a given hoard larger than the average share of coins of this type in hoards belonging to two preceding pentads, it is highly probable that this hoard does not reflect the state of stock circulating at the time of its concealment but belongs to the category of long-term savings hoards. J. Schüttenhelm has formulated a hypothesis that coins of different mints and different minting dates should be better mixed in these „archaic“ hoards or hoard components (designated in German numismatic literature by the term „Altbarschaften“) than in hoards whose period of accumulation was shorter.38 If the term (inter)mixed should refer to the result of mixing in circulation, i.e. before the coins were hoarded, this statement may not be necessarily true. If, at an earlier date, coins were taken out of circulation and picked out for saving and hoarding under similar circumstances as later coins were at a later date (i.e. the same selection process was at work), then, other factors being equal, no such difference between older and newer coins, as far as the degree of their inter-regional mixing is concerned, should ever arise. Greater diversity of older components of hoards is better explained by longer process of gradual addition of newly acquired coins to the already existing hoarded material. In Europe, where the gradual debasement of coins was a common phenomenon and a fact constantly present in the minds of hoarders, older, less debased coins were naturally preferred to more 36 This seems to be the case e.g. of Novgorod in the second half of the 9th and second half of the 10th century: see, В. Л. Янин, Денежно-весовые системы русского средневековья. Домонгольский период. Москва 1956, p. 67. 37 V. L. Janin, op. cit., p. 63 recommends, rightly, to restrict the term „long-term accumulations“(клады длительного накопления) exclusively to this second type of long-term hoards. 38 J. Schüttenhelm, op. cit., p. 157: „Grundsätzlich unterscheidet sich die Altbarschaft aber von der Neubarschaft dadurch, daß die einzelnen Münzen der Altbarschaft einem wesentlich größeren Zeitraum entstammen und deshalb stärker durchmischt sind, d.h. ein größeres Spektrum an Prägestätten und Münzarten aufweisen als die Neubarschaft.“

Types of Hoards

33

recent ones as the money most suitable for conservation of value. This criterion of selection naturally „drew into the pot“, in the first place, heavier coins including those of more distant mints and times. The apparent diversity thus might arise only „in the pot.“ There is one sense, however, in which Schüttenhelm´s statement is valid for the circulating coin stock too: namely, when it should refer explicitly to the ever present component of older coins remaining in circulation and gradually depleted by natural losses and remintings. Here the process of inter-regional mixing is generally more advanced than in the case of more recent coins; as will be demonstrated on the case of Qandahari coins of Jah€ng…r’s time further on, study of these older components may yield interesting results.39

Composite Hoards This is a peculiar type of hoard that, on superficial inspection, can be classified as a longterm savings accumulation, but constitutes in fact a separate category; it contains two distinct components separated from each other by a longer chronological gap. Such gap may reflect the fact that the hoard consists of two separate hoards put together by their last owner.40 When interpreted with an eye on the analysis of hoarding behaviour, these composite hoards (never very numerous) may be seen as forming a separate category, demonstrating perhaps the human tendency to keep, as far as possible, lump sums intact. If, however, the focus is on the study of hoards as samples of a past coin stock, such hoards have to be broken into their two constituent components; these should be analysed separately as two distinct hoards.

Emergency Hoards The name of this type of hoards seems to imply rather dramatic circumstances of hoard formation: hasty concealment of money in time of imminent danger. Main characteristic feature of this hoard type is its very short period of accumulation (mostly one to three years) and, in the Mughal case, small number of mints: in extreme cases all coins belong to single mint and single year. It seems that circumstances leading to formation of such hoards must have been exceptional; it is not very probable that, under normal circumstances, people would get their bullion converted with certain expense into freshly minted coins which would (at least in the Mughal case) bear a premium on the market, only to bury them immediately underground. Apart from the extreme case (single mint and single mint year) that can be interpreted in the way suggested above, there are hoards with coin dates concentrated in a very narrow time span (up to three to four years) and very small number of mints. For such accumulations, containing often no more than thirty silver coins, different interpretation has to be found. Hoards of this type may have been formed e.g. as short-term See below, Part Three, pp. 84-88. Another, at least theoretically possible explanation would be an erroneous registration of two separate finds, possibly from the same locality, but belonging to two different ages, as one single hoard. 39 40


34

savings of peasants who sold their agrarian produce on the market and were paid by new coins minted in a nearby mint.41 Violent events may have supplied the impulse for their ultimate concealment.42 There is always the possibility that some of the hoards belonging to this group are results of unintentional irretrievable losses rather than of intentional hoarding activity. Such cases can be identified only on the basis of unambiguous circumstantial evidence - for example, when the “hoard” was found in the riverbed - and are probably rather exceptional. (Printed hoard inventory which serves as a base for this study does not contain information of this kind.). As far as the U.P. coin inventory is concerned, one should not totally discount the unpleasant possibility that an accumulation which looks like a fine example of emergency hoard is in fact only inadequately described ordinary hoard. In most cases, numbers of unidentified coins in a hoard are clearly stated; problematic in this respect appear only few hoards registered and described in the 1930s. In the context of the present study, identifying emergency hoards is necessary when hoards are used as samples of currency in circulation. While the old-savings hoards would tend to represent the coin stock as older than it actually was at the time of their concealment, the emergency hoards would distort the evidence in the opposite direction. It is therefore necessary to exclude these emergency accumulations from the set of hoards used as samples of the circulating coin stock. Two main criteria have been used in identifying the emergency hoards: an accumulation has been interpreted as a genuine emergency hoard if: 1. the number of mints represented in it is not higher than two and 2. the period of accumulation is not longer than two years. To this narrowly defined group have been added shortterm savings hoards with period of accumulation up to five years and coins issued by max. three mints. In some cases, such short-term saving blocks seem to form a part of a larger hoard containing variety of other mints and mint-years. These hoards have been treated as short-term accumulations only if such blocks form substantial part of the whole. Lastly, there are few other exceptional hoards that contain coins with dates spanning two decades but minted in a single mint. These too appear to be products of a very peculiar process of selection. For easier reference these hoards have been arranged in a table.

Other Hoards Systematic observation of time spans between oldest and latest coin in hoards will show that long periods of accumulation (80 years or more) are not very frequent except in genuine old-saving hoards. Distributions of particular accumulation periods are presented in the following graph. J. Schüttenhelm, op. cit., p. 156 German numismatic terminology using the more general term “Neubarschaft” does not face this problem. J. Schüttenhelm, ibid., characterizes these hoards as containing “eine große Zahl prägefrischer, noch nicht im Geldumlauf eingemischter Münzen, zumeist verbunden mit einer Konzentration auf eine bestimmte Prägestätte.” In the analysis of concrete numismatic material, more exact definition criteria have to be formulated to mark this category off from the mass of “ordinary” hoards; see further below in the main text. 41 42

Types of Hoards Identification number

Latest coin Number of Ag coins

Share of regnal periods

35

Accumulation period (only Ag coins)

Number of mints

a) emergency hoards (accumulation period max. 2 years and max. 2 mints) 373/UP 779/UP 1041/UP 869/UP 712/UP 895/UP 894/UP

1629 1705/06 1713/14 1722/23 1724/25 1729 1744/45

110 91 9 23 19 56 109

86,36% Jah 100% Aur 100% FS 100% MSh 100% MSh 100% MSh 100% MSh

2? (Sh 2) 2 2 2 2 1 1

2 (Sh 1) 1 1 1 1 1 1

b) short-term saving hoards (max. three mints) 890/UP UP 920/UP UP UP UP UP UP UP UP

1623/24 1628/29 1644/45 1716/17 1717 1728 1732 1740/41 1750/51 1756/57

15 42 9 24 39 8 6 38 19 47

100% Jah 3 76,19% Sh 32 (Sh 2) 100% Sh 5 95,83 FS9 (23FS: 4; 21Itawa: 3) 100% FS 5 100% MSh 3 100% MSh 5 100% MSh 5 52,63% AhSh 4 100% ³lam. 3

3 265/ 5 (Sh 3) 2 838/ 3 86/ 1 921/ 2 290/ 1 757/ 3 847/ 2 683/ 1

c) other exceptional hoards 575/UP 429/UP 516/UP

1738/39 1741 1742/43

23 23 47

100% MSh 100% MSh 100% MSh

18(not emerg. but untyp.:) 1 20 1 16 1

Tab. 4. Mughal silver coin hoards classified as emergency and short-term savings accumulations

It can be seen that accumulation periods usually do not exceed one hundred years; majority of them have periods not longer than sixty years. This seems to tally with the observation of contemporary French traveller J.B. Tavernier who informs us that in monetary transactions one frequently encounters coins whose age may be even forty years. This brings us to the question to what extent can be the observed temporal structure of hoards interpreted as reflecting real historical processes and facts. We shall be probably not far off the mark when we understand hoards with these most common accumulation periods as more or less representative samples of currency circulating at the time of final stage of their formation (ascertained by the date of latest coin). Our relative method described above will add to their number several other hoards containing small proportion of older issues but otherwise similarly structured. On the other hand, old savings hoards should not


36 120

40 number of hoards

number of hoards

100 80 60

Frequency of accumulation periods: periods from 1 to 40 years

30 20 10 0 1

40

4

7

10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 period of accumulation (years)

20

461-480

421-440

381-400

341-360

301-320

261-280

221-240

181-200

141-160

101-120

61-80

21-40

1

0

period of accumulation (years)

Fig. 4. Accumulation periods of Mughal silver coin hoards

be used as samples of currency circulating in a particular time: as samples they would represent the coin stock older than it actually was. Hoards of this type should be better understood as indicators of particular hoarding behaviour, the long-term saving. Similarly, the so-called emergency hoards, esp. if showing certain local and temporal concentrations, should raise questions about certain type of hoarding behaviour and its probable causes. In short, for the purposes of investigation of particular questions, one should form particular subsets from the total number of available Mughal silver coin hoards - subsets defined always by common structural features and identical sets of data.

Part Two : Structure of Hoards Published inventory of U.P. hoards allows us to ask questions about their chronological and spatial distribution and to some extent also about their internal structure. From the latest coin in hoard we can establish the terminus ante quem; the date of earliest coin in the same hoard determines period of accumulation. It is unfortunate, however, that the inventory does not contain information about the number of doubles of each type of coin - these, esp. in big hoards, are often numerous. As almost every silver coin bears the name of mint and date of minting, complete inventory would allow us to compute percentual shares of coins of different mints and years in hoards - these could provide another set of data for an assessment of varying output of mints over time. The present author hopes to complete this laborious task later when opportunity will present itself to work with the original Treasure Trove Reports. For the present, he has to content himself with data available in the printed edition - summaries of coin numbers by regnal periods and incidences of different coin types. However, phenomena such as the apparently dominant position of Ahmadabad mint in the time of Akbar, extraordinary output of Qandahar mint between the years 1612-1622 or increasing role of inland mints during the reigns of Aurangzeb and his successors emerge clearly even from the incomplete evidence.

1. Chronology of Hoards From the inventory of hoards it is readily apparent that hoards continued to be formed and hidden long after 1760, the terminal date of our investigation. Reason of the choice of the year 1760 has been purely technical: during the sixth decade of the 18th century the East India Company took over several North Indian Mughal mints and began to strike their own coins in them. At first, these were mainly imitations that differed only little from their genuine Mughal predecessors: in their form these were still the known Mughal rupees with the traditional inscriptions and name of the ruling emperor. The English, however, discontinued the old Mughal practice of exact dating and used the same dies (i.e. dies with one and the same date) for greater number of years or even decades.1 Owing to this practice many coins are datable only approximately within rather broad time-limits.2 These coins make exact dating of hoards For a detailed account of types of coins issued by British-managed mints of Calcutta, Murshidabad, Patna, Dacca etc., see the general but very informative overview by P. L. Gupta, Coins. New Delhi 1969, pp. 153-168. 2 Examples of coins minted for greater number of years with fixed dates include Murshidabad, regnal year (r.y.) 19 whose several varieties were produced between the years 1777-1834: Banaras, r.y. 17 with the name of 1

37


38

impossible. This new feature of the late Mughal or Anglo-Mughal coins makes the identification of short-term trends in hoarding impossible; it even stands in the way of an attempt to ascertain with greater degree of precision the time when the habit of hoarding of coins began to fall out of use. Decisive change in this respect occurred probably in the twenties or thirties of the 19th century: hoards datable to 1840s or later decades are already very rare (from the total of 530 hoards investigated here only 17 hoards belong to the period of 1840-1942). For the sake of easier graphic presentation, all hoards which could be dated by the latest coin have been grouped into five-year periods. Dates on coins are mostly in years of the hijra; and as the beginnings of Christian and Muslim years seldom coincide, most dates when converted into Julian (till 1582) or Gregorian calendar, have to be defined by two adjacent years. In the graphs which follow, if the latest hijr… date covers parts of fourth and fifth year of a decade, the hoard has been included into the first pentad of the respective decade: if the date covers the fifth and sixth year or happens to coincide exactly with the fifth, the hoard has been assigned to the second pentad. The same rule has been followed in the case of dates at the end of decades3 and also in conversion of dates from the Il€h… system of dating. 18

number of hoards

16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2

only Ag coins Ag, Cu and Au

only Cu coins Ag and Au coins

1750-55

1735-40

1720-25

1705-10

1690-95

1675-80

1660-65

1645-50

1630-35

1615-20

1600-05

1585-90

1570-75

1555-60

0

Ag and Cu coins only Au coins

Fig. 5. Mughal coin hoards of the U.P., 1560-1760. Sh€h ³lam II, minted with slight modifications from the year 1775 until 1819: and Farrukhabad, r.y. 45, minted between the years 1805 and 1834. Individual variants of each type can be dated within narrower limits: however, these too span one or more pentads or even decades. Ibid., pp. 161-163. 3 The conversion was carried out with the aid of F. Wüstenfeld, E. Mahler, Vergleichungs-Tabellen zur muslimischen und iranischen Zeitrechnung. 3. Ed., rev. von J. Mayr and B. Spuler, Wiesbaden 1961. Persian months that appear regularly on silver rupees of Akbar since the 35th year of his reign, intermittently on some types of Jah€ng…r… and early Sh€hjah€n… rupees were not taken into account in the conversion.

Chronology of Hoards

39

Several hoards had to be eliminated at the outset from further statistical processing. In some cases only small percentage of coins in a hoard has been identified: if the unidentified coins ran into tens of per cent, dating of the respective hoard on the basis of such defective evidence appears to be problematical. There are several other cases when the date can be determined but a more detailed inventory of coins of a hoard is incomplete or lacking. Such hoards have been included into the statistics of hoards but had to be excluded from the analysis of hoard content. In all, there are about 15 such hoards.4 One hoard seems to have been entered twice under two different serial numbers (839/UP identical with 855/UP): it has been counted as one unit. Small mistakes which could be discovered in the printed inventory have been, where necessary, corrected at the appropriate place in the index at the end of this study. Dating by latest coin is, in the great majority of cases, the most reliable way of fixing the age of hoards, but it is not necessarily absolutely exact. Several years may have intervened between the date of minting of the latest coin and the date of burying of the hoard: period of three or four years probably would not be unusual. Owing to this time lag, unknown number of hoards in the following statistics will appear in earlier pentad than that into which they actually belong. This irreducible margin of error should lead us to greater restraint about relating this or that particular hoard to a certain known political or military event. General long-term trends in hoard frequencies are far less affected by this phenomenon than short-term fluctuations. The graph of Mughal coin hoards incidences shows not only temporal distribution of particular types of hoards but also the role of the three monetary metals in hoarding. The first feature that strikes the eye is a marked predominance of purely silver hoards, esp. from the second half of the 17th century, and decreasing number of gold, copper and mixed hoards in the same period. (Since even single finds have been included in the category of hoards, gold finds, often consisting of single gold coin, are perhaps visually somewhat over-represented.5) In spite of the fact that copper has become a victim of biased negative selection (due to workings of filter IV), in early Mughal hoards it is still prominent enough to demonstrate its importance in the formative stage of the Mughal monetary system. Silver is certainly more suitable for hoarding than copper; lack of prominence of silver in hoards testifies to its relative scarcity in circulation. All three silver hoards belonging to the pentad of 1560-65 contain large shares of pre-Mughal Sˆr… silver coins. In the following decades these Sˆr… coins gradually disappeared from hoards in whose silver component the newly minted Akbar… rupees began to predominate. See Appendix I at the end of the book. Definition of hoard in terms of number of coins is to some extent arbitrary procedure. Authors of Danish inventory of hoards, for example, chose to define a treasure hoard as „two or more coins which were lost or deposited together“. J. S. Jensen et al., Danmarks middelalderlige skattefund, c.1050-c.1550. Del 1, København 1992, p. 119. (K. Grinder-Hansen). Hansen is nevertheless aware of problems inherent in this decision: owing to its inherent metallic value even single gold coins constituted a small „treasure“, more valuable than many „genuine“ hoards consisting of small copper coins. In India, one gold muhr might be worth ca 140 copper dams (computed on the basis of long-term averages of exchange rates between the monetary metals - see fn. 31 on p. 28 above; copper dam was twice as heavy as gold muhr). It seemed unjust, therefore, to exclude single gold coins from the statistics. 4 5

40


From the point of view of history of silver in Mughal India, the important turning point seems to have been the year 1573 when Akbar’s army conquered and annexed Gujarat and opened thereby an important corridor to the Indian Ocean and its lucrative trade for the rapidly expanding but still landlocked empire. From the 1580s, silver in hoards gradually replaces copper and maintains its dominant position until the very end of the period examined here (and, in fact, until the very end of hoarding in the U.P.). Whereas the interpretation of the rising share of silver in hoards presents little problem, great fluctuations in the numbers of hoards themselves over time are less easy to explain. Hoard frequency appears to have reached a generally higher level after the death of Aurangzeb. Should we ascribe this rise to a generally easier availability of silver money caused by stronger silver influx or to deteriorating security and generally higher level of violence? In the first case, numbers of hoards, of coin incidences and also of coins themselves would more or less faithfully reflect the expanding volume of coin stock. In the second, numbers of hoards (and consequently also coin incidences and coins) formed in such disturbed period are not in the same proportion to the coin stock from which they had been drawn are those less numerous hoards which were formed in periods of relative stability. In the context of quantitative analysis aimed at an estimation of volume of coin stock, this would mean that violence - if conducive to more intensive hoarding and hoard-forgetting - has to be understood and taken into account as a distorting factor.

2. Spatial and Temporal Distribution of Hoards As numbers of hoards grouped in pentads are often small, effects of purely accidental factors unconnected in any way with the past processes of hoarding and hoard-forgetting (e.g. points 7 and 8 in the list of P. Sarvas reproduced above) cannot be ruled out. Still, it is important to try and discern forces which stand behind changes in the frequencies of hoard incidences in the short as well as long-term perspective and also in their spatial distribution on the area of the U.P. As a first step at this stage of hoard analysis, hoards have been divided into groups by districts in which they were found. Next, they have been arranged, by dates of their latest coins, into five sub-groups spanning a period of fifty years each. The first group covers the years 1560-1610 and corresponds broadly with the regnal period of Akbar; the second lasts for the next half-century 1610-1660 and coincides almost exactly with the reigns of Jah€ng…r and Sh€hjah€n; the third, covering the years 1660-1710, coincides with the era of Aurangzeb; the fourth period beginning in 1710 and ending in 1760 (the terminal date of this study), is characterized by a process of imperial decentralization and formation of new regional centres of power and affluence. The last, post-1760 period, includes all hoards which contain Mughal coins even when they belong into the second or third decade of the 19th century and covers, therefore, more than the standard 50 years. As the dating of hoards in the post-1760 period is very uncertain, it is impossible to say exactly how many hoards were formed after the formal final date of this last period, i.e. after 1810.

Spatial and Temporal Distribution of Hoards

41

A significantly higher quantity of hoards which fall into this last sub-group in comparison to previous periods may be due to some extent to this factor. Similar procedure has been adopted in the case of the first group: this includes also those Mughal silver hoards which were formed before 1560: in all, there are only eight such hoards belonging each to a different district, so that the possible distortion is minimal. Next step in the analysis consists in identifying striking or extraordinary concentrations of hoards on a small area (a district) within a short time-span of one to three years. This procedure is based on the assumption that extraordinary events (raids, plunders, epidemics, natural catastrophes) are often limited to short time-spans of one or two years. It must be admitted that some of such hoard concentrations may be purely accidental and mutually unconnected; if, however, such concentrations or hoard-clusters occur in certain periods with a significantly higher frequency than in others, the possible influence of extraordinary events on the overall higher incidence of hoards belonging in the respective period should be taken seriously into account. The ratio of the total number of hoards grouped in such hoard-clusters to the total number of all hoards falling into the respective fifty-year period may broadly indicate the role of extraordinary or catastrophic events in the processes of hoard-formation and, even more importantly, of hoard-forgetting. The pattern in which great number of hoards are grouped in short-term hoard-clusters, can be interpreted as a sign of a series of adverse events or generally unsettled circumstances; in this case, higher incidence of hoards probably reflects, in the first place, this „catastrophic factor“ rather than an expanding volume of coin stock. If, on the other hand, the hoard incidences are more or less evenly distributed over time and over the area under investigation, and their rise is more gradual and general, one can interpret higher number of hoards as reflecting primarily more widespread use of money and their generally easier availability - as the number of people or families which formed hoards was rising, so was also the number of hoards which were subsequently forgotten and left in the ground until modern times; in this case, the long term ratio of hoard-forming to hoardforgetting would remain the same. Data on the distribution of hoards and coins in districts and in fifty-year periods have been arranged in a synoptic table6 which contains, apart from respective absolute numbers of hoards and coins, also their percentual shares in the total of all hoards and coins found on the area of the state in the respective half-century. Closer attention has been paid to districts which show higher percentual shares of hoards not only when compared to other districts in the same period, but appear to limit this higher percentage to a single period - the comparison should be synchronous as well as diachronous. Hoards whose exact dating is not quite certain (in the general list of all hoards their date fixed by the latest identified coin is followed by a question mark) have been left out of consideration. Districts showing in one or several of the fifty-year periods exceptional concentrations of hoards are listed in Tab. 5. The basic statistics included in the first column of the table shows that numbers of hoards falling into the first three periods are roughly at the same level: 61 hoards in the 6

See Appendix II at the end of the book.


42 Period

Districts with high share of hoards or with hoard-clusters (in italic)

Hoard-clusters, if present

1560-1610 hoards: total 61, Ag 39

Bara Banki Sultanpur

1610-1660 hoards: total 69, Ag 63

Agra Jhansi Mainpuri

1660-1710 hoards: total 64, Ag 64

Allahabad Banda Bulandshahr Jhansi Saharanpur Sitapur

740/UP (1701); 929/UP (1703)

Aligarh Allahabad

575/UP (1738/39); 139/UP (1740); 212/UP (1741/42) 1. 650/UP (1737/38); 778/UP (1737/38) 2. 757/UP (1740/41); 497/UP (1742/43) 502/UP (1743); 473/UP (1745/46) 1. 577/UP (1748); 1015/UP (1750) 2. 224/UP (1759/60); 374/UP (1759/60) 1021/UP (1721/22); 346/UP (1722/23) 392/UP (1716/17); 966/UP (1718) 1. 960/UP (1710/11); 370/UP (1712/13) 2. 128/UP (1739/40); 206/UP (1741/42) 1. 705/UP (1723/24); 13/UP (1725) 2. 791/UP (1756/57); 773/UP (1757/58)

1710-1760 hoards: total 120, Ag 115

Banda Bijnor Fyzabad Gorakhpur Jalaun Jhansi Lakhnau Mathura Moradabad Unnao

348/UP (1591/92); 51/UP (1591/92); 359/UP (1592/93)

973/UP (1614); 426/UP (1614-15); 418/UP (1615/16) 265/UP (1628/29); 282/UP (1629/30)

465/UP (1684/85); 1016/UP (1684/85) 1097/UP (1687/88); 602/UP (1688) 653/UP (1700/01); 553/UP (1702/03)

1139/UP (1748); 1138/UP (1749/50) - two parts of one hoard? 516/UP (1742/43); 894/UP (1744) 814/UP (1724/25); 891/UP (1726/27)

Tab. 5. Spatial and temporal concentrations of hoards

period ending in 1610, 69 hoards in the second, covering the years 1610-1660, and 64 in the period 1660-1710. Many hoards of the first, Akbar… period either contain some copper coins or are composed exclusively of copper d€ms or other copper coins. As we have seen above7, the treasure trove evidence contains a selective negative bias against copper coins and copper hoards; it is therefore not improbable that, if copper hoards had the same chance to get into the official evidence as those hoards which are composed of silver coins, their numbers, especially in the Akbar… period, would have been higher. In the Akbar… period, there are also problems with exact dating of certain hoards; this applies, in particular, to three hoards formed probably in the 1580s and found on the area of the district of Sultanpur. At least some of the six Akbar… hoards found in the Sultanpur district may be components of another one or two hoard-clusters. Thus the fact that in the whole period there is only a 7

Part I, Filter III.

Sizes of Hoards

43

single hoard-cluster with three hoards - a bare 4,9% of all hoards of the period - may be due to the combined effects of anti-copper biases and uncertain dating. The following two periods covering together most of the 17th century contain nearly the same numbers of hoards and also share similar pattern of hoard distribution. In the period 1610-1660 we have two hoard-groups with five hoards - 7,2% of the total, in 1660-1710 there are four groups with eight hoards, 12,5% of all hoards of this period. The post-Aurangzeb… era, on the other hand, appears to be different. Not only is the total number of hoards twice as high as in the previous periods, but the number of hoard groups is also significantly higher: while the number of hoards doubled, hoard-clusters nearly quadrupled. 15 - or, if the Mathura group consisting possibly of two separately inventoried parts of an originally single hoard is excluded - 14 hoard-groups with 31 (29) hoards amount to 25,8% (24,2%) of all hoards falling into this fifty-year period. This rise of the share of hoards occurring in groups by 12% is too great to be dismissed as insignificant or due to accidental factors. In ideal case, an attempt should be made to trace each hoardgroup to a particular event to verify the hypothesis of the violence factor formulated above. In the present circumstances this has not been possible. To establish probable connections between violence and particular groups of hoards, a great amount of written sources on local history of the „suspected areas“ will have to be studied and evaluated. Until this laborious task has been done, statistical evidence is the only means to show that conditions which determined the frequency of hoard-forgetting may have changed in the period after 1700. As a rough estimate, about 13% of the total hoard incidences in the period 1710-1760 may be attributed to higher level of violence. All attempts to establish long-term trends in the development of silver coin stock on the basis of hoard or coin incidences should take this factor into account and downgrade the results for the 1710-1760 period accordingly.

3. Sizes of Hoards In the context of analysis of hoard incidences and their distribution it will not be without interest to look at the sizes of hoards - typical size may tell us something about typical hoarders. In different context, part of this question was touched in Part I above in connection with the possible distortion of sample owing to untypical sizes of hoards.8 However, sizes of hoards should not be assessed solely on the basis of purely formal criteria - quantity and type of coins making up the treasure; the intrinsic worth of the respective monetary metal at the time of formation of the hoard in question should be also taken into account. Assessment of purchasing power of hoarded sums acquires special importance when studies of hoarding patterns and habits are concerned with longer periods of time and are used for comparisons and broader generalizations. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to make reliable assessments of changes in purchasing power of silver in Mughal India during the 16th and 17th centuries. The data on 8

See the tables on the pp. 13 and 14 above.

44


prices of basic commodities are relatively few and far between and cannot be used for construction of price curves for any commodity except gold and to some extent copper and indigo. (This is also a great obstacle to all serious efforts to evaluate real impact of silver imports on prices and subsequently to draw comparisons between India and Europe concerning the so-called „price revolution“). However, gold and copper were no ordinary commodities but, in the first place, monetary metals and as such cannot be used as typical indicators of long-term changes in (consumer) prices. Indigo was a typical export commodity and its price tended to fluctuate in response to developments at sometimes fairly distant markets. If we follow the so far largely undisputed assessments and conclusions of I. Habib, we see that at the end of the 17th century silver declined to somewhere between two thirds and one half of the worth it had had in 1595.9 These estimates should be kept in mind when reading the following graph.10 9 Any reliable price curve for ordinary commodity should fulfil these basic requirements: 1. as the price level varied greatly from region to region and from town to town (owing mainly to transport difficulties in premodern times), each particular series should be constructed from data of only one chosen locality; 2. as the prices of esp. agricultural commodities depended closely on results of harvests, they fluctuated widely even in short-term periods. To be able to distinguish such short-term fluctuations from longer-term trends, the statistician should work with greater quantity of data covering rather densely the period under study; and 3. ideally, the data should be supplemented by contemporary evidence about harvests: esp. famines and droughts should be taken into account. In the case of Mughal India such strict conditions cannot be fulfilled. This should be kept in mind while wondering at the large margins of error contained in I. Habib’s assessment that „if the price-level expressed in silver was 100 at the time of the ³’…n [i.e. in ca. 1595], it should have risen to over 150 in the twenties of the [17th] century; another ascent in the fifties and sixties put it somewhere between 178 and 276. Thereafter, it fell a little and stood between 145 and 200 by the end of the century.“ I. Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (15561707). Bombay 1963, p.89. Although the estimation was made on the basis of only few basic commodities (wheat, gram, mash, mung, moth, gh… and few others) in Agra and Lahore in few mutually distant years, this is probably still the best rough assessment we have. See also his „A System of Trimetallism in the Age of the „Price Revolution“: Effects of the Silver Influx on the Mughal Monetary System. In: J. F. Richards (ed.), The Imperial Monetary System of Mughal India. Delhi 1987, pp. 137-170 and J. J. Brennig, Silver in Seventeenth-Century Surat: Monetary Circulation and the Price Revolution in Mughal India. In: J. F. Richards (ed.), Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds. Durham (N.C.) 1983, pp. 477-496. Brennig corrects Habib’s calculations of prices of Biana indigo, but agrees with him in description of the overall trend: „Price increases occurred but the periods of increase were short and were followed by longer periods of relative stability. The most decisive increase occurred in the 1620s, for the price level achieved at the end of this period, even if occasionally surpassed, was generally maintained throughout the remainder of the century. The dramatic increase of the mid-1650s and 1660s, although remarkable, was too brief to be significant.“ Ibid., p. 491. 10 It is not possible and probably not necessary to collect and interpret in this place all the data about prices from which the conclusions quoted in the foregoing footnote were made. However, to make a basic idea about purchasing power of one silver rupee (10,9 g of pure silver during the reign of Akbar) the following prices prevailing in Lahore (then the capital city) in 1595 were selected from the long list compiled by Akbar´s court chronicler Abˆl Fazl in his ³’…n-i Akbar…, vol. I, ³’…n 27. Basic articles of food (kg per 1 rupee): wheat 84.0 lentils 84.0 moth (Phaseolus aconitifolius) 84.0 barley 125.6 rice (ordinary) 50.0 millet168.0 sheep 1.5 r. per head oil 12.55 brown sugar 17.92 gh… 9.56 duck 1 r. per head salt 46.76 curds 55.8 milk 40.0 goat 0.75-1 r. per head

Sizes of Hoards

45

percent of all hoards deposited during the rule

60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1-20

2140

4160

6180

81100

size of hoard (num ber of silver coins in hoard)

100 and more

AKBARI HOARDS

JAHANGIRI HOARDS

SHAHJAHANI HOARDS

AURANGZEBI HOARDS

HOARDS 1708-1760

HOARDS 1760-1942

Fig. 6. Sizes of Mughal silver hoards of the U.P. (1556-1942) 11

Few words should be added on the possible biases and distortions due to the filters considered in the previous chapter. Bias against exceptionally big hoards exceeding in value one l€kh rupees was, as we saw earlier, eliminated in 1878. As our sample begins in 1882 (date of first recorded hoard), there is no real possibility for this factor to influence our statistics. More serious effect may have had the Section 4 of the Act of 1878 that exempts objects of value of less than 10 Rupees from the application of the Act. It is probable that due to this regulation unknown number of copper and small silver hoards escaped the attention of numismatists. Small amounts of silver coins are also more easily concealed and disposed of by the finder without anybody else’s taking notice. Real share of small hoards may be therefore somewhat higher than shown in Fig. 6. In this graphic presentation, hoards have been divided into six groups defined by number of silver coins in hoard. The published inventory does not state explicitly which types of Mughal silver coins make up the hoard; these could be either rupees or their fractions (heavy silver coins worth several rupees were always rare). As the silver rupee was by far the commonest silver coin, for practical purposes it has been chosen as the most likely coin type described by the term „silver“ or „silver coin“, whenever this is used in the Mughal hoard context. In fact, however, certain percentage of silver coins counted as rupees is of smaller denominations. In the graphic presentation the correction of this error would, thereThe hoard inventory does not specify the exact type of silver coins found in hoards. Beside the most common rupees hoards may have included unspecified number of their fractions. Here, each coin had to be counted as one unit. 11

46


fore, mean increase of percentual shares of groups with smaller hoards at the expense of those which contain bigger accumulations. Long-term changes in hoarding patterns can be highlighted by division of hoard groups defined by hoard sizes into several periods which can be subsequently mutually compared. One possible criterion for such temporal division is a regnal period. It is true that regnal periods of the four Great Mughals are not of equal length. Akbar ruled for 49 years (15561605), Jah€ng…r for 22 years (1605-1627), Sh€hjah€n for 30 years (1628-1658) and Aurangzeb for 49 years (1658-1707). However, regnal periods of Akbar and Aurangzeb happen to be of almost exactly the same duration and are therefore mutually comparable. The intervening period is divided by two reigns of unequal duration; taken together, however, Jah€ng…r… and Sh€hjah€n… eras lasted for 52 years - a time span roughly comparable to the other two periods. Their separate graphic presentation will show certain mutual similarities as well as differences. The period beginning with the death of Aurangzeb and ending with the accession of Sh€h ³lam II on the Mughal throne includes several regnal periods but still has some internal unity: this was the time of gradual weakening and dissolution of the central administrative and military structures and territorial shifts of centres of political and economic power. As far as the last period is concerned, even the only more or less approximate dating (a defect caused by confused dating of coins) shows quite clearly that in the second half of the thirties of the 19th century the era of hoarding was over: about 90 per cent of hoards hidden after 1760 belong to some date before 1835. The second half of the thirties is very poor in hoards and unless we suppose some rather sharp fall-off in hoarding in the middle of thirties, we can assign most of the late hoards to tens or twenties. The last period then, although formally longest, has most of its hoards concentrated in a time span not longer than, say, 50 to 60 years. The general pattern of hoarding is obvious at the first glance: relatively, and in the case of Akbar… and Jah€ng…r… periods, even absolutely, most numerous are smaller hoards with less than 20 silver coins. Quantities of hoards belonging to higher categories gradually decline; only the last category of accumulations with more than 100 coins shows an obvious percentual increase. It must be pointed out, however, that the quantitative span of this last category is much broader than of all the previous ones taken together: the smallest hoard in this category counts exactly 100 coins, the biggest, 5610 silver coins. On the whole, the smallest hoards on the one hand and the biggest ones on the other seem to form two poles of certain general pattern and as such deserve somewhat closer scrutiny. In the first group, the most marked trend is a gradual long-term decrease of its percentual share of the total. This decrease appears to be matched to some extent by corresponding increase in the next group of hoards containing 21 to 40 coins. It is difficult to resist the temptation to explain this phenomenon by easier availability of silver coin in general. Typical hoarder then seems to have been a man of rather moderate means hiding his small fortune either in response to some direct threat or in anticipation of some possible future crisis (scarcity and dearth, weddings etc.). C. A. Bayly enumerates several types of hoarding used by pre-modern Indian merchant and peasant families as a form of insurance against future needs. Merchant families always

Sizes of Hoards

47

laid great stress on the necessity to avoid risky and speculative investments.12 The available capital therefore should not be all invested in a single enterprise even when this might appear to be highly profitable but rather divided in several parts managed separately. Only one portion should be invested in trade; another should be lent out at interest (with the generally high interest rates, a profitable, but not completely risk-free allocation of money); another part should be used to buy jewellery which could fulfil the function of movable and universally acceptable form of capital. Moreover, in accordance with the prevailing Hindu inheritance systems, it could be owned and inherited by women and used as an insurance for wife after the death of her husband. Finally, one portion should be hoarded in the form of coin. Bayly quotes a characteristic mnemonic formula designed to teach children of merchant families the proper course one should follow in building up a household and conducting business: the formula is based on the first letters of the Devan€gar… alphabet, each letter standing for one basic activity: ka = k€m, work; kha = kh€n€, food; ga = g€±n€, to hoard (lit. to hide, bury in the ground); ghar = house etc. Such hoard served as family’s basic reserve which could be drawn upon in case of a sudden and unexpected demand to honour an obligation etc. Moneychangers and moneylenders had to keep constantly certain sum of ready money simply to be able to conduct successfully their business. Peasants, at least the moderately prosperous ones, felt the need to keep a reserve for the eventuality of bad harvests or natural calamities. Building such reserves can be hardly called an irrational activity, „hoarding“ with the pejorative tinge. Amounts of ready money kept as a „first reserve“ can be expected to be of a rather moderate size, adjusted to clearly defined set of circumstances; crises and expenses of greater magnitude were to be met with the help of non-monetary silver and gold reserves, jewellery, etc. As we have seen, by far the greatest part of silver Mughal hoards uncovered on the area of the U.P. are accumulations not exceeding 60 silver coins many of them possibly first cash reserves of cautious and prudent householders. The group of big hoards is in no way less interesting. Here the general trend seems to be gradual increase of the share of big hoards in the total; high percentages of Jah€ng…r… and Sh€hjah€n… hoards of this group are, on this interpretation, exceptional and seem to anticipate future trends. In this large group we can expect great differences in sizes: it can be argued that hoards containing 100 coins should be looked upon as belonging to a different category than hoards with 500 or even thousands of silver coins. It seemed, therefore, convenient to divide these hoards into three sub-groups, as is shown in the following table. Mutual comparisons of the sub-groups of each period will reveal interesting trends and patterns in hoarding behaviour in the central part of Mughal empire. 12 This paragraph is heavily indebted to Ch. Bayly’s discussion of various functions hoarding had in family enterprises in the 18th century north India. See his Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars. North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870. Cambridge 1983, pp. 396 and 401-404. In a list of various types of monetary and non-monetary hoarding Bayly mentions also a distress hoarding, „common in the late eighteencentury in the old imperial cities. It was a technique for survival and should not be confused with hoarding that occured as part of the regular running of businesses.“ Ibid., p. 402. Our hoard evidence confirms that this is the case of Allahabad, Lakhnau and, to a lesser extent, Agra. Bayly’s interesting but rather short remark obviously touches a phenomenon which would deserve closer investigation.


48

The first thing that strikes the eye is the particular distribution of Akbar… and Jah€ng…r… hoards. No silver hoard of the first class has survived from the era of Akbar and only one from the regnal period of Jah€ng…r. This absence or near absence of big silver hoards, explicable partly by widespread use of copper for hoarding, contrasts with relatively high percentages of hoards of this class in the later periods and is at the same time underscored by lack of Akbar… hoards in the group of 81-100 coins and similar absence of Jah€ng…r… hoards in the group 61-80. Akbar… and Jah€ng…r… hoards seem to be rather sharply polarized: we can see high percentages of small hoards, few fairly huge accumulations and several mediumsize hoards in between. Can this phenomenon be interpreted as an effect of the great redistributive power ascribed generally to the Mughal fiscal apparatus? In the 16th century silver was still rather uncommon monetary metal; great part of it was introduced into circulation by dishoarding of the non-monetary silver and by plunder - which means that it had to pass through official hands. Wealth accumulated by the state was subsequently distributed via the manbsabd€r… system whose selectivity and biases are well known. The Akbar… and perhaps also Jah€ng…r… pattern of hoarding may reflect this highly unequal access of various strata of population to silver money: although the percentages of small hoards are high, absolute numbers are quite small. PERIOD

100-199 COINS 200-399 COINS IN HOARD IN HOARD

400 AND MORE COINS IN HOARD

TOTAL

Akbar (1556-1605)

0 = 0%

1 = 50%

1 = 50%

2 = 100%

Jah€ng…r (1605-1627)

1 = 16.67%

1 = 16.67%

4 = 66.67%

6 = 100%

Sh€hjah€n (1628-1658) 7 = 77.78%

2 = 22.22%

0 = 0%

9 = 100%

Aurangzeb (1658-1707) 6 = 66.67%

2 = 22.22%

1 = 11.11%

9 = 100%

1708-1760

13 = 65%

6 = 30%

1 = 5%

20 = 100%

1761-1942

23 = 48.94%

15 = 31.91%

9 = 19.15%

47 = 100%

Tab. 6. Sizes of hoards containing more than 100 coins

This pattern continues during the reign of Jah€ng…r but changes abruptly during the rule of Sh€hjah€n. There is relatively higher percentage of Sh€hjah€n… medium-size hoards (two groups with 61-100 hoards); in the last group, big hoards of the first class (100-199 coins) clearly predominate while hoards with 400 coins or more are totally lacking. Similar pattern seems to characterize the regnal period of Aurangzeb. During his rule silver had penetrated deep into the networks of local trade and Mughal economy in general. Relatively more even distribution of hoards in the particular size groups seems to reflect this fact. There had always been one important social group that could be, and actually was expected to be hoarding money in a big way - the Mughal aristocracy. Official schedules specifying their salaries graded according to their mansabs or ranks testify to the extremely unequal distribution of the state income among the ruling class. However, even the few extremely wealthy mansabd€rs living at the apex of this strictly hierarchical system fell

Structure of Hoards

49

often in debt: the state looked to it that the allotted money was duly spent on the maintenance of the prescribed number of cavalry units (men, horses, pack animals, servants etc.); besides, the aristocrat was expected to maintain large household, live in a style imitating the air and manners of the royal court and, at specified occasions to present to the emperor expensive gifts. Moreover, Mughal emperors looked upon the members of the military aristocracy as on their own servants and considered their property as belonging ultimately to the state treasury. This applied not only to j€g…rs, or assignments of land, but also to that part of movable property which an aristocrat accumulated during his service for the state. Widows and children had to content themselves with minor or even symbolic sums. This practice of rigorous enforcement of this so called „law of escheat“ (an established, but somewhat misleading term) had been vividly described by Dutch merchant Francisco Pelsaert who mentions in his account cross-examinations and even torture of the servants of the house as methods used by the state officials in order to extort information about property hidden by the deceased aristocrat.13 The hoard evidence would suggest that early dishoarding of large accumulations, in themselves certainly less numerous than small household hoards, was perhaps not an uncommon phenomenon.

4. Structure of Hoards The available treasure trove reports contain data: 1. on the place of find of the hoard; the name of locality is supplemented by name of the respective district, sometimes also th€na, pargana or tahs…l; 2.on the number of gold, silver and copper coins found in the hoard; 3. on the number of coins belonging to particular regnal period (e.g. silver 51: Akbar 14, Jah€ng…r 3, Sh€hjah€n 24, Aurangzeb 10); 4. on the presence, and, esp. in descriptions of big hoards, on the number of coins of a particular mint; 5. on the presence, but not exact number of coins minted in a particular year; data are presented in the form found on the coins - most often in regnal years, frequently combined with the respective years of hijra. In his 37th regnal year Akbar introduced the so called Il€h… calendar based on the solar year; from this year till the tenth regnal year of Sh€hjah€n when the Islamic lunar calendar was reintroduced again, coins are dated in Il€h… regnal years, supplemented sometimes (during the reign of Jah€ng…r and Sh€hjah€n) with years of hijra and and sometimes with name of respective Il€h… month. In the latter case, the date can be fixed with great exactness - e.g. coin bearing the inscription „Akbar, Ahmadabad, 38 ³b€n“ was minted in Ahmadabad at some time between 23rd of October and 21st of November 1593. The system of regular yearly dating of silver and gold coins was adhered to until 1760 when the East India Company began to issue, first in the name of the reigning 13 W. H. Moreland, P. Geyl (ed., tr.), Jahangir’s India. The Remonstrantie of Francisco Pelsaert. Cambridge 1925, pp. 54-55.

50


Mughal emperor, their own coins and gradually abolished this practice. Therefore, hoards containing such post-1760 coins can not be exactly dated and are consequently of lesser value for statistical processing based on chronological ordering of samples. 6. Having been inventoried by members of the Coin Committee, hoards were either returned to their finders, dispersed (coins sent to other museums) or sold on the bullion market. Each entry in the inventory contains information about the final disposition of the respective hoard and reference to its treasure trove report. These data, available for most of the total of 530 Mughal coin hoards, can be used for the analysis of temporal structure of hoards as well as for the study of the origin of coins contained in them. Study of the value structure (shares of coins of different metals and different nominal and real values), the third topic recommended by quantitative numismatics, had to be left out owing to serious biases mentioned in the previous chapter.14 The first two aspects of the hoard evidence, however, esp. if studied in broader time span (in our case, two hundred years) can yield interesting and important information on changes in structure and, to some extent also on changing volume, of Mughal silver coin stock between 1560 and 1760.

Temporal Structure Hoards which can be, on the evidence of latest coin contained in them, located with relative precision on the temporal axis and whose coins can be assigned to particular regnal periods, can be, under certain conditions, understood also as more or less representative samples of coin stock prevailing on the area and at the time of their formation. In order to keep various biases at the minimum, three types of coin finds should be eliminated from further processing: old savings hoards and emergency hoards for reasons explained above,15 and in addition, finds containing less than five coins (too small to deserve the designation of hoard) where one or two coins may make up for a share of 50 or even 100 per cent; in this case, number of coins may be too small to reflect actual structure of coin stock. Of the rest, percentual shares of coins (calculated for each hoard separately) minted in a particular regnal period, can be assumed to roughly indicate their percentual shares in the coin stock circulating in the area and time of formation of the respective hoard. Hoards may be grouped into five-year periods; this will enable us to calculate average shares for each pentad. As numbers of hoards in pentads vary from one (or, in exceptional cases, even zero, if old savings and emergency hoards are excluded) to ten and more, the averages for pentads have not all the same degree of reliability - a drawback that can not be eliminated. Results can be conveniently summarized in form of a graph.16 14 See the reasons for negative selective biases operating in the case of gold and copper coins, described in the section Filter III in Part One above. 15 See, Part One, Section 4: Types of hoards, p. 31 sq. 16 For classification of individual hoards and percentual shares of coins of different regnal periods - data on which this graph is based - see Appendix I at the end of this study.

Structure of Hoards

51

Despite several gaps in the sequence of data and, in several cases, their small number (for more details, see further on), general pattern of gradual alteration of Mughal silver coin stock over time stands out quite clearly. At the beginning of a new regnal period the percentual share of coins marked with the name of the previous emperor reaches its maximum (Akbar… coins in the pentad of 1600-05, Sh€hjah€n… coins in 1655-60, coins of Muhammad Sh€h in the pentad of 1745-50) or level very close to it (Jah€ng…r 1625-30, Aurangzeb 1705-10, FarruÇsiy€r 1715-20).17 After the accession of a new emperor, shares of these coins gradually decline; the rate of their decline is in direct proportion to the rate of expansion of coins minted in the new regnal era. After several decades these coins vanish from the hoard evidence.

100,00 90,00 80,00 70,00 60,00 50,00 40,00 30,00 20,00 10,00

Akbar 1556-1605 Aurangzeb 1659-1707 Muhammad Shah 1719-1748

Jahangir 1605-1627 Shah Alam I. 1707-1712 Ahmad Shah 1748-1754

1755-60

1745-50

1735-40

1725-30

1715-20

1705-10

1695-00

1685-90

1675-80

1665-70

1655-60

1645-50

1635-40

1625-30

1615-20

1605-10

1595-00

1585-90

1575-80

1565-70

1555-60

0,00

Shahjahan 1627-1659 Farrukhsiyar 1712-1719 Alamgir II. 1754-1760

Fig. 7. Percentual shares of silver coins of different regnal periods in hoards, 1556-1760 (old savings and emergency hoards excluded)

It seems that despite relative scarcity of samples, the picture they convey has an inner logic and conforms to a surprising degree to our logical expectations - to an ideal model of changes in the structure of coin stock over time. Apparently, coin hoards are samples which, despite their various individual biases, reflect more or less faithfully an important aspect of 17 The fact that peaks in the graph do not coincide exactly with the pentad in which the change on the throne took place, can be explained (esp. in the case of Jah€ng…r… coins) by extreme scarcity of data - when the old savings hoards, emergency hoards and accumulations containing five coin or less are excluded, we are sometimes left with only one or two hoards. In these circumstances we can hardly expect exact results; the other possibility, i.e. to take into account all hoards of the pentad (including the old savings, emergency and small hoards) would not yield more reliable results. Besides, it is desirable to apply the same exclusion criteria to the whole corpus of hoards; as in the later pentads numbers of hoards increase, advantages of the exclusion method begin to prevail.

52


development of past coin stock; this property of Mughal hoards can be utilized fully only if these samples are studied in context of larger temporal series rather than in mutual isolation. At the same time, one should be aware of limits of this approach. It is perhaps not necessary to emphasize that the percentual shares are not direct indexes of absolute quantities of coins of a particular type. If the absolute volume of coin stock grows rapidly due to strong influx of new silver from abroad, relative shares of older coins may decline rapidly but absolute quantities of these coins in circulation may decline at much slower rate than that indicated by the graph; conversely, if the influx of new metal would be weak, percentual shares of the old stock would remain high even if its attrition (or loss rate) would be high. However, we may suppose that the loss rate (although impossible to determine exactly) was more or less constant over long periods of time; and if this was the case, the more gradual or, in the possible opposite case, markedly rapid percentual decline of older components in the hoards probably reflects weaker, or in the latter case, stronger influx of minted silver into circulation. Again, translation of this varying tempo of structural changes in the coin stock into absolute numbers is not feasible; these relative indications, however, can be confirmed or disproved by results arrived at by a different method based not on computing of percentual shares but on counting and summarizing incidences of particular types of coins in hoards;18 that will allow us to draw more exact picture of changes in the volume of coin stock as well. It is necessary to look at the data which constitute each series (Akbar…, Jah€ng…r…, etc. coin stocks) more closely and to try and interpret, one after another, each of the curves presented synoptically in the Fig. 7.

1. Akbar The main problem of reconstructing the growth and decline of the Akbar… silver coin stock lies in the relative scarcity of data. As we have already seen, the quantity of hoards belonging to the second half of the 16th century is rather small and not all hoards contain silver coins. Of those which do, hoards containing 5 or less coins had to be excluded for reasons explained above and few others on account of their incomplete description in the inventory.19 Those which remain, however, convey fairly consistent picture of an expansion of Akbar… silver coin stock. The observed rapid percentual increase of Akbar’s silver currency in the early years of his reign has to be ascribed to the fact that relatively few silver coins circulated in north India before this time: silver rupee had been introduced by Sher Sh€h Sˆr in the 1540s but the overall quantity of minted silver was small and the most common medium in financial transactions was copper - in fact, even the revenue statistics and claims in the ³’…n-i Akbar…, 18 On the method of counting coin incidences, see the introductory note to Part Three, further below on pp. 63-64. 19 E.g. in the case of mixed hoards no. 943/UP, 1027/UP and 974/UP containing silver and copper coins the inventory does not specify their exact numbers. These and several other reasons for exclusion of hoards are stated in the list of all registered hoards in the Appendix I.

Structure of Hoards : Akbar

53

composed in the 1590s, are stated in copper dams. Steep increase in percentual shares of Akbar… silver coins in hoards of this period therefore may not necessarily indicate any dramatic influx of silver from abroad: dishoarding and minting of silver acquired as a tribute or booty during the early phase of Mughal territorial expansion probably sufficed to create this effect. As will be shown further on, provenance of coins, as far as it could be ascertained, confirms this conclusion: most coins minted until the 1570s were issued from mints of Malwa, Rajasthan and central parts of the emerging empire. It was only in the last quarter of the 16th century that the contribution of Gujarati mints raised the Akbar… share to a level approximating 100 per cent - an indication that the silver-stock was now growing also in absolute terms. At this place it is necessary to point out that the basis for estimation of the pentad 1585-90 is extremely weak: we are left with a single hoard containing only seven coins, all of them Akbar…. Pentads 1575-80 and 1580-85 with two hoard each, are in this respect only slightly better. The fact nevertheless is that in no hoard formed in the quarter of century between the years 1580 and 1605 does the Akbar… share sink under 90 per cent - a level not attained by any other later emperor’s coin stock, not even Aurangzeb’s whose regnal period was of comparable length; on the other hand, while Akbar started virtually from the scratch, Aurangzeb’s share had to „struggle“ against an already existing large stock of Sh€hjah€n… silver rupees. In the Akbar… period, coins of the current reign could achieve a dominant share with a smaller absolute volume of silver than coin populations of later periods.

100 90 80

per cent

70 60 50 40 30 20 10 1685-90

1680-85

1675-80

1670-75

1665-70

1660-65

1655-60

1650-55

1645-50

1640-45

1635-40

1630-35

1625-30

1620-25

1615-20

1610-15

1605-10

1600-05

1595-00

1590-95

1585-90

1580-85

1575-80

1570-75

1565-70

1560-65

1555-60

0

pentad

Fig. 8. Average percentages of Akbar… silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in the years 1556-1700 (excluding emergency hoards, old savings hoards and accumulations with five coins or less)


54

The curve representing proportional decline of Akbar… coin stock after the emperor’s death is smooth even when constructed on quite small amount of data. The rise in 1645-50 is in fact percentual share of hoard no. 313/UP, a single, if big hoard of the pentad. The years when Akbar… coins gradually petered out are covered by greater number of hoards than the period of their prevalence: we can follow their declining share up to the mid 1680s - 75 years from Akbar’s death - when they finally disappear from the hoard evidence. Over this long time-span, the decline proceeded at a fairly stable rate of ca. 4 per cent per year; relative halflife - i.e. the period during which the share of a coin population in circulation falls to a half of its highest level reached at the end of the his regnal period - is approximately 18 years.20

2. Jah€ng…r When Jah€ng…r ascended the Mughal throne in 1605, he ordered that the weight of both gold and silver coins be increased by 20 per cent; in the case of silver it meant increase in weight from 178 to 213,6 grains. In the fourth year of his reign he ordered to increase the weight still further by another five per cent. This reform of coinage was soon found to be inconvenient for business transactions and on requests of people (probably mainly from the business community long used to the Akbar… standard) the old weight of gold and silver coins was restored in the sixth year of his reign (1611/12). It could be expected that after the return to the old weight standard these heavier coins would tend, in conformity to the Gresham’s law, to disappear from circulation to become favourite pieces for hoarding. If things worked this way, one would expect these coins to be relatively over-represented in hoards. However, the actual evidence of incidences of different types of coins does not confirm the expectation that owners of heavy Jah€ng…r… coins would considered them in any way „better“ or more suitable for hoarding than the normal lighter coins: in U.P. hoards, both of the Jah€ng…r… and later periods, these heavy Jah€ng…r… coins are extremely rare. It seems that silver coins were saved (hoarded) primarily with view to their use as ready money, a necessary reserve for the eventuality of unexpected cash payments rather than as bullion with certain intrinsic metallic value. This latter aspect, important for the purpose of long-term conservation of value, was better represented by non-monetary silver and gold (jewellery, etc.). In the next quinquennium we are left with four hoards (if we exclude hoard no. 462/UP, most probably an emergency hoard), all of them containing low shares of new coins - the average of 7 per cent is in fact somewhat lower than that of the preceding pentad. This may be due partly to the peculiar composition of two hoards no. 973/UP and 1079/UP. The first contains an uncharacteristically large share (32 per cent) of non-Mughal Sˆr…, ³dil Sh€h… and Bengali coins; even if these are excluded, however, the Jah€ng…r… share measured solely Perhaps it should be stressed that the half-life introduced here is not the same value as the half-life of coins in circulation used as an index of absolute loss rate; if, after Akbar’s death, the coin stock grew in absolute terms, the half-life of the percentual share was bound to be shorter than the half-time of the physical volume of the stock. The actual value of the latter is for the Mughal period a great unknown. If e.g. the loss rate amounted to 2 % a year, the half-life of coins in circulation would be 35 years. For a detailed exposition, see C. C. Patterson, Silver Stocks and Losses in Ancient and Medieval Times. The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., vol. XXV (1972), no. 2, pp. 205-208. 20

Structure of Hoards : Jah€ng…r

55

against that of Akbar would raise to just 8,6 per cent. The second hoard contains just 9 silver coins, none of them Jah€ng…r… and is dated to the year 1611/12 on the evidence of the huge copper component (1011 coins) of the hoard. Neither recalculation (in the case of the first hoard) nor exclusion or independent dating of the silver component (possibly in the case of the second) would raise the proportion of average Jah€ng…r… component for this pentad much higher. As we shall see later, number of incidences of coins minted in the first decade of Jah€ng…r’s reign is also markedly low; causes of low Jah€ng…r… shares, esp. in the second pentad, are therefore to be sought either in the relatively low level of minting activity or in the low preference for hoarding of heavy coins; possibly both factors were at play. 100 90 80 70 per cent

60 50 40 30 20 10 1730-35

1720-25

1710-15

1700-05

1690-95

1680-85

1670-75

1660-65

1650-55

1640-45

1630-35

1620-25

1610-15

1600-05

0

pentad

Fig. 9. Average percentages of Jah€ng…r… silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in the years 1605-1735 (excluding emergency hoards, old savings hoards and accumulations with five coins or less)

In the next pentad we have single hoard with 38 per cent share of Jah€ng…r… coins. Single hoard is certainly a very weak ground on which to build convincing estimates; we must content ourselves with the observation that it fits well into an ascending trend culminating in the decade of 1620-1630 when all the four hoards available for analysis contain in the average about 65 per cent of Jah€ng…r… coins. This level seems to have been reached in the first half of this decade, the second being characterized by stagnation on the existing level. Analysis of coin incidences attempted below21 will show a sudden and sharp, if short, upsurge of production of the north-western mints, particularly those of Qandahar and Lahore, lasting from about 1615 till 1622 and following upon a barren period extending from the death of Akbar till the end of the first decade of the 17th century. Thereafter, a very 21

See the analysis of coin incidences of the regnal period of Jah€ng…r in the next section, pp. 81-88.

56


marked decline followed, caused most probably by war over Qandahar and subsequent loss of this important commercial and strategic point to the Persians. As this falling-off was not made up by increase in mint activity in other parts of the empire, the existing ratio between the old Akbar… and newer Jah€ng…r… coins could hardly change. However, after a slow beginning in the first two Jah€ng…r’s pentads, the level reached at the end of his 22 years long reign does not seem to be low - esp. when we keep in mind that his coins were added to an already existing and not inconsiderable stock of Akbar… coins. The decline of Jah€ng…r… stock after 1627 can not be reconstructed with any degree of certainty: the period of 1630-35 is covered by a single hoard of just 15 coins, two thirds of them Jah€ng…r…. Next pentad has only one old-saving hoard with high proportion of Akbar… coins (no. 784/UP) and another one of 140 coins, 50 of them described as „defaced“ and therefore unidentifiable (no. 807/UP). As the possible margin of error could amount in this case up to 36 per cent, computing percentages of the rest seems to be a rather problematic exercise. Two hoards available for the pentad of 1640-45 show the Jah€ng…r… shares already at a low level of less than 10 per cent; this low and slowly declining share continuing until the mid-1670 is broken only in the period 1645-50 when single hoard (no. 313/UP) contains 37 per cent of Jah€ng…r’s silver coins. In contrast to 1615-20 however, value of this single piece of evidence as a coin stock sample is put in doubt by other data in the same chronological series. Moreover, the incidences evidence shows a very marked increase in the production of north-western, Gujarati and central mints in the opening years of Sh€hjah€n’s reign followed by a less massive but nevertheless significant coin production lasting until the beginning of 1650s. The silver influx which supported this minting activity must have considerably augmented the Sh€hjah€n… stock. The hoard no. 313/ UP is therefore probably not representative of the state of the coin stock of the pentad; its structure makes it look more like an old-saving hoard. By the middle of the 1670s, i.e. ca. fifty years after Jah€ng…r’s death, his coins seem to have disappeared from circulation. Generally, the data on Jah€ng…r… coin stock are too scarce to allow exact estimates of the relative half-life and loss rate. From the graph we can infer that the former value could not have been much higher than ten years, the second appears to come close to 5 per cent per year - both indicating more rapid relative decline of stock than was the case of the stock of Akbar… coins. There can be little doubt that this relatively higher loss rate had been caused to a large extent by a selective reminting campaign initiated by Sh€hjah€n shortly after his accession to the Mughal throne.

3. Sh€hjah€n The problems stemming from insufficient amount of data that prevent us from forming a more exact assessment of Jah€ng…r… coin stock in the decades of 1630 to 1650 are mirrored in difficulties we face while reconstructing the ascending phase of the silver coin stock of Sh€hjah€n. We can only repeat that, for reasons stated above, the relatively high share of his coins attested by just two extant hoards for the pentad of 1640-45 seems to be closer to reality than the much lower value represented by a single hoard in the next quinquennium.

Structure of Hoards : Sh€hjah€n

57

We are in a somewhat better position in the next six pentads: hoards which fall into this period are not very numerous but follow a relatively consistent pattern. Characteristic features are not only high percentages of Sh€hjah€n… coins in the last two pentads of his reign (Sh€hjah€n… coins continued to be minted in certain mints up to the year 1660 when other, more centrally located ones had already began to issue Aurangzeb… rupees) but also their massive presence in all hoards formed before the end of the 1670s. Such a slow initial decline has no parallel among trend curves reconstructed for coin stocks of other emperors and seems to indicate a relatively low output of Mughal mints in the first thirty years of Aurangzeb’s reign. Lower output, in turn, may have been caused by weaker influx of new silver coming to India from abroad. Graph of coin incidences presented in the next section22 corroborates this hypothesis: behind erratic short-term fluctuations a long-term declining trend is clearly visible. This phenomenon shall be dealt with in more detail in the section discussing coin incidences; what is perhaps worth stressing here is the fact that data arrived at by two different approaches tend to support each other. Until 1680, the reconstructed Sh€hjah€n… coin stock shows a very low rate of decline of 0,86 per cent per year. In fact, 1680 appears to be a turning point after which much more rapid decline of about 5 per cent a year can be observed. Graph of incidences will show reversal of the above mentioned declining trend at the end of 1670s, followed by a steep increase lasting into the third pentad of the 18th century. The initially massive Sh€hjah€n… 100

100

90 80

per cent

70 60 50 40 30 20 10 1755-60

1750-55

1745-50

1740-45

1735-40

1730-35

1725-30

1720-25

1715-20

1710-15

1705-10

1700-05

1695-00

1690-95

1685-90

1680-85

1675-80

1670-75

1665-70

1660-65

1655-60

1650-55

1645-50

1640-45

1635-40

1630-35

1625-30

1620-25

0

pentad

Fig. 10. Average percentages of Sh€hjah€n… silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in the years 1628-1760 (excluding emergency hoards, old savings hoards and accumulations with five coins or less) 22

See below, Fig. 27 in Part Three, Mints During the Reign of Aurangzeb (1658-1707), p. 103.

58


stock was now quickly losing its dominant position to a rapidly expanding Aurangzeb… coinage; it seems, however, that at least initially this decline was really of relative share rather than of absolute numbers of Sh€hjah€n… coins. These vanish from the hoard evidence only after 1730, seventy years after the emperor’s death. The zero share in 1690-95 is due to defects in the evidence - we are again left with single hoard, composed exclusively of Aurangzeb… coins. As in the next three pentads the coins of Sh€hjah€n are relatively well represented, this sudden fall-off is hardly representative. After 1710 their low share must have reflected their quickly diminishing numbers - hoards containing no Sh€hjah€n… coins grow in number but until 1730 this feature is still not universal. In view of such a long survival, comparable only to that of Akbar… coin stock, the suspicion that the Sh€hjah€n… coins perhaps became victims of massive reminting campaigns that would speed up the process of substitution of new Aurangzeb… coins for those of previous emperors does not seem to be well-founded. It has to be at least considered, however, as one of theoretically possible explanations for the peculiar monetary developments (massive output of central, inland mints) reflected in the hoard evidence from 1690 onward.

4. Aurangzeb After a slow start - we do not possess a single hoard dated to the long period before 1680 that would contain more than 36 per cent of Aurangzeb… coins - the curve turns, almost abruptly, upwards and reaches in another ten or fifteen years a respectable level of 80 per cent. Again, relative scarcity of data forces us to limit ourselves to such general observations. The improbable 100 per cent in the pentad 1690-95 is due to the same single hoard 839/UP (probably identical with no. 855/UP) which brought the Sh€hjah€n… share in the same pentad to an equally improbable zero. Data furnished by three hoards of the previous pentad of 1685-90 nevertheless suggest that by this time the Aurangzeb… coin stock must have been already clearly dominant. From the last twenty years of Aurangzeb’s reign we have five hoards which cannot be classified as emergency accumulations and still consist exclusively of Aurangzeb’s coins. It would be probably wrong to suppose that on such a large area as the present-day Uttar Pradesh the coin stock was at all times mixed so well as to constitute a homogeneous mass. Fluctuations of percentual shares of coins of different age in hoards belonging to the same pentad, for instance, may have been caused not only by peculiar individual histories of each hoard but also by peculiar monetary characteristics of the place which supplied all or most of coins to it. The 100 per cent Aurangzeb… hoards should be therefore considered as upper limits of a broader range beginning somewhere near 75 per cent. 80 to 90 per cent seems to be a reasonable estimate for the turn of the century - a time documented by uncommonly high number of six hoards, all with high proportions of Aurangzeb… coins. Evidence derived from the calculation of incidences of coins of particular years and mints broadly supports these observations. From the beginning of 1690s till the end of Aurangzeb’s rule, the number incidences is approximately double compared to the lean 1660s and 1670s. As we shall see later on, the Mughal monetary system had experienced

Structure of Hoards : Aurangzeb

59

similar floods of silver at least two times before, in the 1610s and 1630s; in contrast to these earlier waves, caused mainly by coins of north-western or Gujarati provenience, this last one, apart of being of longer duration, was sustained mainly by massive production of centrally located mints - a feature that appeared as a riddle to other scholars dealing with the same subject before.23 Supported by intensive mint activity, the observed high percentages of Aurangzeb… coins in hoards cannot be interpreted as only relative to previous stocks already depleted by gradual and natural attrition; it is equally impossible to ascribe this wave to a consistent policy of reminting older coins into new - quantities of new coins (as far as they can be inferred from the incidences) are too huge and the declining curve of Sh€hjah€n… coins too gradual for this hypothesis to be plausible. Central mints therefore could not but be fed mainly by new silver imported from abroad. I shall reserve my explanation of this phenomenon for the next section24 and concentrate my attention on the fate of Aurangzeb’s coin stock in the decades following his death in 1707. 100

100

90 80 70 per cent

60 50 40 30 20

16,67

10 1755-60

1750-55

1745-50

1740-45

1735-40

1730-35

1725-30

1720-25

1715-20

1710-15

1705-10

1700-05

1695-00

1690-95

1685-90

1680-85

1675-80

1670-75

1665-70

1660-65

1655-60

0

pentad

Fig. 11. Average percentages of Aurangzeb… silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in the years 1660-1760 (excluding emergency hoards, old savings hoards and accumulations with five coins or less) A. Hasan, Mints of the Mughal Empire. A Study in Comparative Currency Output. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Patiala Session - Part I. Patna 1967, p. 327, correctly observes that such a huge increase cannot be ascribed solely to a recoinage of bullion and suggests as possible explanations a dispersal of minting establishment decreed as administrative measure or a rise of numerous medium size commercial centres in the inland region during this period. However, she feels that this is not the whole story and leaves the problem as a task for future research. S. Moosvi, The Silver Influx, pp. 73-74 explains this phenomenon by greater efficiency or more attractive terms offered by the inland mints in comparison to those of Bengal. This is probably the correct explanation - only the reasons of the difference in terms between the Bengali and inland mints would deserve a more detailed elaboration. 24 See below in Part Three, The Rise of Central Mints, pp. 109-117. 23

60


In the first pentad after Aurangzeb’s death (1710-15) his stock was able to hold its own against the coins of his immediate successor Sh€h ³lam I. In part it was due to poor performance of mints in Sh€h ³lam’s fifth regnal year and their almost complete inactivity in the sixth. Supply of silver was apparently restored after the accession of FarruÇsiy€r and in the next twenty years (1715-35) the share of Aurangzeb’s coins fell approximately by 70 per cent to bare 14 per cent - a huge relative loss of nearly 10 per cent per year. Relative half-life is then between 13 and 15 years; last coins disappeared from the circulation around 1750, some 43 years after Aurangzeb’s death. This relatively short time-span is comparable only to the approximately 50 years long life-time of Jah€ng…r… coins which, of course, had formed much smaller coin stock. As we have seen, the decline of Jah€ng…r… coin stock was greatly accelerated by forced remints of Nˆrjah€n… and zodiacal coins after the accession of Sh€hjah€n. It is possible that similar policy of remintings of older coin stock during the reign of FarruÇsiy€r contributed to a more rapid decline of Aurangzeb… silver coins. It should be noted, however, that the final phase of the Aurangzeb… coin stock comes very close to 1760, the terminal date of our investigation. After this date it is impossible, for reasons stated above, to date extant hoards with exactness necessary for the subsequent identification and elimination of emergency and old savings hoards. It is therefore possible that Aurangzeb’s coins would appear in small quantities in standard hoards (i.e. those not classified either as old savings or emergency hoards) even for some time after 1760. However, this possible vanishing trace could hardly change the overall picture: the rapid proportional and since 1740 at least, also physical decline of this once massive stock. The process may have been accelerated by more intensive reminting than was usual in the seventeenth century.

5. Sh€h ³lam I. and FarruÇsiy€r Both Sh€h ³lam I. (1707-1712) and FarruÇsiy€r (1712-1719) ruled for short periods during which their coin stock could not develop into a mass comparable to stocks of preceding emperors. Despite the fact, however, that these two men ruled for almost identical length of time, curves of their coin stock differ greatly. That of Sh€h ³lam rose to 12,5 per cent during the period 1705-10, a fairly steep increase esp. when we keep in mind that the year of his accession lies in the middle of the pentad. Graph of incidences will show corresponding steep increase in the years immediately after Aurangzeb’s death followed by even steeper fall in 1712. What is somewhat surprising is the relatively long survival of Sh€h ³lam… coins in hoards of the following three pentads: it seems as if the rapidly growing share of FarruÇsiy€r… coins expanded at the expense of those of Aurangzeb, leaving the stock of Sh€h ³lam more or less intact. We have noted the extraordinarily high loss rate of Aurangzeb… stock in the same years; it appears to be mirrored by an equally extraordinary initial increase of FarruÇsiy€r’s share - a rise by nearly 30 per cent in his second pentad. The peculiar character of these three curves in the first quarter of the 18th century can be perhaps best explained by possible selective reminting of older Aurangzeb… coins during FarruÇsiy€r’s reign - a process which apparently left the newer and in any case not very numerous coins of Sh€h ³lam aside.

Structure of Hoards : Muhammad Sh€h 40,00

Shah Alam I.

35,00

61

3 5 ,8 5

Farruk hs iyar 3 0 ,6 2

30,00

2 8 ,7 2

20,00 15,45

15,00

14,10

12,90

11,7 3

10,71

10,00

7,31 0 ,14 1,04

0 ,0 0 0,00

1755-60

1740-45

1730-35

1725-30

1720-25

1,8 1 0,56

1750-55

3 ,2 3 1,72

1715-20

1710-15

1700-05

0,00

1,11

0 ,0 0

1705-10

0,00

5 ,7 6 3,37

1745-50

6,11

5,00

1735-40

per cent

25,00

pe ntad

Fig. 12. Average percentages of Sh€h ³lam… and FarruÇsiy€r… silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in the years 1707-1760 (excluding emergency hoards, old savings hoards and accumulations with five coins or less)

We can see simultaneous and rapid decline of both Sh€h ³lam’s and FarruÇsiy€r’s coin stock after 1730 when the coins of Muhammad Sh€h reduced their shares to a level well under ten per cent. Again, such a rapid decline can be interpreted as a result of a reminting campaign during the pentad of 1730-35. Sporadically, these coins appear in hoards until 1760 - only slightly longer than the once much more numerous coins of their immediately preceding Aurangzeb… stock.

6. Muhammad Sh€h The regnal period of Muhammad Sh€h (1719-1748) was of duration comparable to that of Sh€hjah€n; at the end of their regnal periods coin stocks of both culminated with a share of approximately 90 per cent of all coins then in circulation. Behind these overt similarities, however, there must lay hidden important differences. Sh€hjah€n’s coins acquired quickly wide currency thanks to spectacular output of north-western and Gujarati mints which maintained high rate of production till the end of 1630s. Subsequent steep decline soon levelled off at a still respectable level and declined thereafter only slowly. Muhammad Sh€h, in contrast, ascended the Mughal throne at a time when the heightened activity of the central mints had come to a rather abrupt end and continued - if the evidence of coin incidences reflects the actual situation - at a more modest level. The total coin stock accumulated at the beginning of Muhammad Sh€h’s reign may have been greater than it was in 1628 when Sh€hjah€n began to issue his coins. If the final share of both stocks was very nearly the same, the coinage of Muhammad Sh€h must have been helped on its way to overwhelming


62

1755-60

1750-55

1745-50

1740-45

1735-40

1730-35

1725-30

1720-25

1715-20

per cent

dominance in the late 1740 by greater attrition of older stock. This may have been due either to increased outflow of silver abroad (the invasion of N€dir Sh€h in 1739 may have played a part) or to systematic reminting of older coins. The terminal date of 1760 does not allow us to follow the development of Muhammad Sh€h’s coin stock in its declining phase; its ascent, on the other hand, is documented by greater number of hoards than is the case of any of his predecessors. These hoards, as far as their percentual shares are concerned, follow a peculiar pattern: their dispersal around the mean is low in the initial two pentads, grows very wide in the middle period (third and fourth pentad) and decreases again significantly in the last decade of the reign. This feature may not be purely accidental. It can be assumed that at the end of a regnal period, particularly a longer one, the share of coins minted during it would be uniformly large - in this respect the coin stock was homogeneous and its coins predominating everywhere. Hoards tend to reflect this fact and the dispersal of percentual shares in them is low. On the other hand, the process 100 100 100 when the growing stock of the currently 90 ruling sovereign gradually replaces coins of his predecessor (the middle 80 pentads), seems to make the total coin 70 stock (again in respect of percentual 60 shares) far less homogeneous: the in50 termixing of new coins with the old 40 stock was a relatively slow process that advanced at various places and 30 regions with different speed - veloc20 ity of circulation was undoubtedly an 10 im-portant factor in this. As the ve0 locity of circulation is in itself one of the more important characteristics of mo-netary systems (and one quantity pe ntad in the Fisher’s equation summarizing his quantitative theory of money), it Fig. 13. Average percentages of Muhammad Sh€h’s would be worthwhile to try and assess silver coins in hoards deposited in the area of U.P. in it by the means of analysis of disperthe years 1719-1760 (excluding emergency hoards, sal observed for coins of particular old savings hoards and accumulations with five coins dates and mints in the available hoard or less) evidence. For this type of analysis, however, we would need to know exact numbers of coins of particular year and mint present in a hoard - a type of data which has been denied us by the abbreviated format of the published inventory. Computation of percentual shares of coins issued by a particular mint in each successive year and a subsequent analysis of this more detailed set of data hidden in the original treasure trove reports, however, might yield more exact results.

Part Three : The Mints During the long existence of the Mughal empire many mints were established; they minted greater or smaller quantities of coins and after longer or shorter period of time not few of them went out of operation to be substituted by other mint-towns which, for various reasons, served better the needs of their regions or were better located on the shifting streams of precious metals flowing through the vast Mughal territories. Coins issued by Mughal emperors bear, in the overwhelming majority of cases, not only more or less exact dates of mintage but also names of the respective mints. These two sets of data allow us, if collected systematically and for longer periods, to reconstruct life-times and changes in productivity of particular mints.

1. Preliminary We can attempt to investigate these processes with the help of hoards, proceeding from the assumption that strong populations of coins will occur in hoards more frequently than small ones. We can register incidences of a particular coin population in hoards - i.e. the fact that a coin minted in the town x in the year y is present in a particular hoard, quantity of the respective type of coin playing no role. Numbers of incidences for each mint can be then presented in form of a graph which will show fluctuations of its activity over time; adding up data on a group of mints located in a particular region will reveal this region’s importance as a supplier of precious metals to the area under investigation (in our case the area of the U.P.); and finally, totals of all incidences of all mints for every year of the whole period of 1556 to 1760 will constitute a data series of varying coin incidences reflecting, with several important qualifications, the changing overall output of all Mughal mints. A graph constructed on this series can then serve as a basis for assessment of relative and changing scale of silver imports over time, and, in combination with analysis of subtotals for particular regions, can help to pinpoint the contribution of different regions - i.e. to identify major routes of silver imports and their changes in the time span of two centuries. It should be stressed at the outset that one can interpret these data properly only if one constantly keeps the appropriate historical context in mind. Systematic comparing of results obtained by this type of quantitative analysis with relevant historical events for such a long period can be attempted in this work only in the barest outlines; this method can serve i.a. as a heuristic device for systematic collection of additional relevant data scattered in the vast corpus of available historical sources - data which would form a solid ground for the assessment 63

64


of validity of the present attempt. Of special relevance in this context is the necessity to take into account occasional selective reminting campaigns (the most important being probably the administratively enforced remints of certain types of Jah€ng…r… coins in the beginning of the reign of Sh€hjah€n) which could, and most probably did, distort the relationship between the original strength of the affected coin population and its representation in the hoard evidence. Another requirement is methodological in the strict sense of the word: as was the case in all previous steps, one has to be aware of biases inherent in the sources of data and of their possible distorting effects on eventual results. Before accepting the thesis that particular coin incidences reflect more or less faithfully the actual strength of their respective coin populations, we have to make sure that observed numbers of coin incidences are related to numbers of actually minted coins (i.e. to the actual strength of particular coin populations) rather than to numbers of hoards belonging to a period contemporaneous with or slightly later than the coin population in question. As we have seen above1, the most common period of accumulation of Mughal silver hoards is 20 to 40 years and there are still more than twenty hoards whose accumulation time span lies between 80 and 100 years These time limits are sufficiently broad to allow the incidences representing a strong coin population of a date relatively remote from the terminal year of the hoard (the year of its latest coin) to manifest its real strength. This capacity of great number of hoards to include even relatively old coins can to some extent offset the possible bias caused by a particular circumstance when the time of prevalence of a strong coin population (i.e. the time when its coins were „young“ and therefore least affected by natural attrition) happened to coincide with a period which was relatively poor in hoards. This phenomenon can be illustrated by the case of a strong population of Jah€ng…r… silver coins from Qandahar which are only poorly represented in Jah€ng…r… hoards but occur frequently not only in hoards dated in the regnal periods of Sh€hjah€n and Aurangzeb but also in those formed during the first quarter of the 18th century. Working with coin incidences yields, in this particular type of investigation, more reliable results than counting of actual numbers of coins representing a particular coin population in each hoard; in this latter case, uneven numbers of hoards belonging in different periods may seriously distort the evidence. This is not to say that the former approach eliminates the bias completely; the inevitable distortion is, however, considerably reduced by the fact that the relationship between the number of hoards belonging to a certain period on the one hand and incidences of coins minted in it on the other is much looser than the relationship between hoards and surviving quantities of particular coin types. There can be always only one incidence of a particular coin type in a hoard, no matter whether the actual number of such coins in the same hoard is high (as is often the case in hoards formed in the time when the respective coin population was still strong) or low - frequent occurrences of single representatives of an old coin population in much later hoards are very significant because they reflect its long life-time; long life-time of a coin population, in turn, is a sign of its great original strength. 1

See Part I, Fig. 4., showing the distribution of accumulation periods of Mughal silver coin hoards.

Mints of the Akbar… Period

65

2. Mints of the Akbar… Period (1556-1605)

45

NORTHWEST GUJARAT AND SINDH MALWA AND RAJASTHAN CENTRAL EAST DECCAN URDU (ZAFAR QARIN) TOTAL

40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5

1603, 1603/04

1600, 1600/01

1597, 1597/98

1594, 1594/95

1590/91, 1591

1587/88, 1588

1585

1582, 1582/83

1579/80

1576/77, 1577

1573/74, 1574

1570/71, 1571

1567/68, 1568

1564/65, 1565

1561/62, 1562

1558/59, 1559

0 1556

number of hoards containing coin(s) of particular year

It is hardly surprising that incidences of coins from the beginning of Akbar’s reign are rare and limited to few inland mints (Delhi, Narnol). Their number rises steadily from the beginning of 1560s; this steady growth is temporarily interrupted only at the beginning of the 1580s. This progress reflects three parallel processes which were at work in the northern part of the subcontinent in the second half of the 16th century: first was the territorial expansion of the Mughal empire that gradually brought under its sway north-western India, Gujarat and part of the north Deccan, and Bengal with Orissa in the east. Second was the economic stabilization accompanied by sound monetary policy; this last would have been far less successful if at the same time the third process, the steady and growing influx of silver, mainly of American provenance, had not created favourable conditions for monetary consolidation and expansion.

ye ar of m intage

Fig. 14. Incidence of Mughal silver coins minted in the years 1556-1605 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. and recovered in the years 1882-1979

The graph presents interesting information on relative contributions of different regions to the overall growth of the Akbar… coin stock. Until the mid-1570s this increase was a result almost exclusively of the activity of mints located in the central regions of north India - areas of the present-day Uttar Pradesh, parts of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. We may safely assume that most of the silver used during these early phases of monetary

66


expansion for minting of Akbar… rupees was obtained by dishoarding of silver accumulated in the treasure vaults of conquered rulers. The graph suggests, however, that possibilities to expand the supply of precious metals by these means alone were limited. It was only when direct contacts with the broader world of Indian Ocean and Near Eastern commercial circuits had been established after the conquest of Gujarat in 1573 and north-western frontier had been stabilized in the 1590s that silver generated by active trade balance of India began to penetrate the north Indian interior. Even before the great conjuncture of the 1590s set in, however, the stagnation at the level reached toward the end of 1560s was temporarily interrupted by significant increase in the second half of the 1570s. For the interpretation of this rise two points seem to be of special importance: first, the increase was caused mainly by a sharply increased activity of central mints: more detailed scrutiny will show that from 1576 to 1578 Agra and Delhi were the main contributors, whereas in the second phase, from 1578 to 1581, massive output of the mint in Fatehpur Sikri overshadowed the production of all other mints of the central area; indeed, Fatehpur Sikri appears to have been, for this short period, the most productive mint in the whole empire.2 The second point to be made concerns the marked coincidence of this phenomenon with the duration of the so called karo±… experiment started by Akbar in his 19th regnal year (1574/75) and abandoned five years later. The nature of this experiment was described differently by different chroniclers of Akbar’s time; only limited attention has been paid to it by modern scholars. Irfan Habib, for example, interprets Abˆl Fazl’s relatively short description of this reform as a general cadastral survey the main aim of which was to standardize collection of land revenue, make it more rational and bring more land under the plough.3 The territory of the empire was divided into large blocks, each yielding revenue amounting to one karo±, i.e. ten 2 Niz€mudd…n Ahmad mentions in his Tabaq€t-i Akbar… a large reservoir in the courtyard of the palace at the capital of Fatehpur which Akbar ordered to be filled with gold, silver and copper coins. This treasure equivalent to twenty karo±s of tankas was during the subsequent three years distributed among his nobility, the poor, the holy and the learned. H. M. Elliot, J. Dowson, The History of India as Told by its Own Historians. Vol. V., London 1873, p. 409. It is highly probable that at least part of this generously distributed money consisted of silver coins currently minted in the local mint. Fatehpuri silver coins from the years 1579-1582 found in the hoards of the U.P. may have been originally distributed from this pool. 3 I. Habib, The Agrarian System, pp. 214, 221, 251, 324. This evaluation accords with the main theme of this extensive monograph which deals with political reforms and development of political structure of the empire mainly from the viewpoint of historian of agrarian system. Niz€mudd…n Ahmad, op. cit., p. 383 describes the reform in similar terms. The best summary still appears to be P. Saran, The Provincial Government of the Mughals 1526-1658. Bombay etc. 1973 (2nd ed.), pp. 275-6. Latest synthesis, The Mughal Empire by J. F. Richards (The New Cambridge History of India I.5), Cambridge 1993, pp.84-85 mistakenly places the beginning of the experiment to 1580, the year when it actually came to its inglorious end. According to Richards, Akbar reestablished the j€g…r system after five years of direct administration. i.e. (on his own wrong dating) in 1585 when „the state achieved its end“, having instituted the new revenue system based on the new cadastral survey and the zabt assessment. In fact, the j€g…r system was re-instituted by Sh€hb€z {•€n who was put in charge of the administration during Akbar’s expedition against M…rz€ Muhammad H€kim in the spring of 1581. See, D. Streusand, The Formation of the Mughal Empire. Delhi 1989, pp. 164-165.


67

million copper d€ms per year. Important part of this measure was a general resumption of all j€g…rs (temporary assignments of land given in lieu of salaries to Mughal military aristocrats and officials) and their return into Ç€lsa (lands under direct administration of the crown). Only the recently conquered provinces (Gujarat, Bihar, Bengal) were to be exempted from this general reform. It is important to keep in mind the broader context of these measures. 1570s were the years of intensive searching on the part of Akbar and his ministers for the most effective (which to them meant as centralized as possible) form of government suitable for administration of vast, recently conquered territories. Institution of the first form of the mansabd€r… system and of the branding regulations (d€û) all fall into this period and bear the stamp of Akbar’s top Persian bureaucrats Muzaffar {•€n Turbat… and Sh€h Mansˆr Sh…r€z…. All these measures were probably meant as parts of a grand plan of building a centralized imperial system in which all military aristocrats and civil officials would be turned into obedient servants living on the salary paid directly from the imperial treasury and would thus become completely dependent on the imperial will. Political and administrative reforms were supplemented by an offensive on ideological front where disputes with orthodox Muslim ulam€ in 1579 prompted Akbar to issue the so called mazhar, a decree that gave the emperor the right to pass final verdict in all disputes relating to Islamic faith - an arrangement rather uncommon in the Islamic world. Conditio sine qua non for such general reform to succeed was, of course, the general availability of monetary means that would cover the vastly increased monetary transactions which had now to supplant completely the j€g…r system. Great volumes of metallic currency media were needed; the heightened activity of the three most important central mints had to meet these needs. If the testimony of coin incidences is correct, Gujarat’s coin production in these years, if compared with the level reached around 1575, stagnated or even declined. North-western routes still brought to the subcontinent only insignificant, if any, quantities of silver - at least this is what the absence of coins from north-western mints in hoards clearly suggests. Requirements of great quantities of silver needed for the production of new coins were therefore to be met by tapping local sources - perhaps minting of the imperial silver reserves and systematic reminting of the older Sˆr… coins. The graph of Akbar… coin stock (see Fig. 8., p. 53 above) shows significant increase of the share of Akbar… coins in hoards in the period 1580-85, compared with the previous pentad; percentages of around or above 90 per cent common form the 1580 onwards indicate that substitution of old and non-Mughal coins was by that date more or less complete. In the period 1575-78 the most active mints were those of Agra and Delhi; in 1579 and 1580 the minting activity appears to have been concentrated into the imperial capital of Fatehpur Sikri. Earliest coins issued by this mint are dated by the year 985 A.H. (1577/78 A. D.), when Akbar together with his ministers decided to carry out a general reform of currency. According to Abu’l Fazl4, on 2nd ³z€r of the 22nd regnal year (13.11. 1577), 4

Abu’l Fazl All€m…, Akbarn€ma. (Tr. by H. Beveridge).Vol. III, Calcutta 1904, p. 320-21.

68


Akbar held council with his leading financial experts Muzaffar {•€n Turbat…, R€ja Todar M€l and {•w€j€ Sh€h Mansˆr Sh…r€z… and decided to put the mints under stricter central control. Mints which had been so far under the charge of chaudhur…s (probably locally appointed mint-masters), were now put under charge of highest officials of the empire nominated by the emperor. Six mints are mentioned in this connection by Abu’l Fazl: Fatehpur, Lahore, Bengal, Jaunpur, Gujarat and Patna. This list, however, does not tally with mint names found on coins in the U.P. hoards. The absence of Bengali coins from the hoard evidence may be perhaps explained by low output of the Bengali mint and, particularly in the years 1579-81, by the fact that during the great revolt the whole province was for a time outside of imperial control. More difficult to explain is the relative frequency in hoards of coins minted in Agra, Delhi, Narnol and several issues struck in Urdˆ zafar qar…n („the victorious camp“), mint names absent form Abu’l Fazl’s list. Perhaps the list should not be understood as a complete enumeration of all mints - the mints mentioned by the chronicler are all associated with one of the leading personalities of Akbar’s court; the names of other mints put under charge of lesser officials may have been omitted. Or perhaps the responsibility for the operation of the other mints was added to the charge of one of the six officials mentioned by Abu’l Fazl. Striking of square coins (the so called jal€l… rupees) during this reform was only a short-lived experiment; generally improved outward appearance of gold and silver coins, on the other hand, was to become a lasting feature of Mughal imperial coinage. It was no accident that administration of the mint in the imperial capital of Fatehpur was entrusted to {•w€j€ Abdus Samad, an eminent calligrapher at Akbar’ court. Activity of all imperial mints except those at Agra and Ahmadabad abruptly ended with the year A.H. 989 (1581/82). By this time the karo±… experiment had been abandoned, probably in consequence of a widespread uprising of Akbar’s nobility which broke out in 1580 as a violent reaction to the widely resented reforms. During the next year Akbar succeeded in crushing the revolt and pacifying most of the turbulent regions but at the same time realized that continuation of his administrative and fiscal experiments might again destabilize the situation; in 1581, perhaps as a visible sign of change in his political course, he had one of the architects of his reforms, Sh€h Mansˆr Sh…r€z…, put to death, probably on fabricated charges of alleged conspiracy.5 Fall in the output of central mints reflected in sharp decline of coin incidences in 1581 and 1582 is most probably related to these developments. Evidence from coin hoards thus appears to reveal an interesting monetary aspect of Akbar’s reforms. 5 The suspicion that Sh€h Mansˆr fell victim to Akbar’s effort to conciliate critics of his reforms in his own camp is strengthened by Abˆl Fazl’s relation in the Akbarn€ma: according to the chronicler, Sh€h Mansˆr „did not read the signs of the times, and did not distinguish between the season of conciliation and that of strictness. ... The appreciative monarch often uttered with his pearling tongue, ,From that day the market of accounts was flat and the thread of accounting dropped from the hand.’“ Akbarn€ma,. vol. III, pp. 503-4. Niz€mudd…n Ahmad, op. cit., p. 426 expressly mentions Akbar’s regret of {•w€j€’s death after an investigation into this case showed the compromising letters to be forgeries. A good analysis of these events and of the resulting „imperial compromise“ is to be found in D. Streusand, The Formation of the Mughal Empire. Delhi 1989, pp. 154-172.


69

In the decade after 1582 the production of the central mints seems to have been very low, perhaps as a consequence of exhaustion of local reserves of bullion; for the second half of the 1580s striking of new coins was limited almost completely to the mint in Ahmadabad whose output was now after a temporary stagnation in the second half of the 1570s steadily growing. By the beginning of 1590s, a period of a general monetary conjuncture appears to have set in: the flow of precious metals imported into the Mughal empire by the maritime route through the Gujarati ports and minted in Gujarat’s capital was now in increasing measure supplemented by silver brought from the Middle East by land routes and turned into Mughal silver coins in the mint of Lahore. Another important centre profiting from the expansion of commerce was Thatta in Sindh whose coins, dated to the second half of the 1590s, are markedly well represented in hoards of the distant U.P. Important role in the monetary expansion of the early 1590s seems to have been played by silver rupees whose mint name was recorded as „urdˆ zafar qar…n“ („victorious camp“ or „camp associated with victory“) and whose date was expressed by the letter alif representing the number 1000. As the Mughal chronicler Bad€’ˆn… informs us, these coins were meant to serve as reminders of the Islamic millennium; according to Bad€’ˆn…, the year 1000 A.H. had to be the terminal date of the Islamic faith, at least for Akbar and his court circle. The life-span of Islam being now completed, Akbar „felt at liberty to embark fearlessly on his design of annulling the statutes and ordinances of Islam, and of establishing his own cherished pernicious belief [in their stead].6 This „pernicious belief“ was no doubt his new cult known as d…n-e il€h…. The problem with Bad€’ˆn…’s account is that it dates this new departure to Akbar’s twenty-seventh regnal year, which corresponds with the year A.H. 990/991 (A.D. 1582/83); this agrees with the beginnings of the new cult, but not with the date represented by the letter alif on coins. This difficulty can be perhaps solved if we understand the letter alif as representing not the last year but the last decade of the first millennium. If the chronicler’s account and its interpretation presented here are both correct, coin incidences marked by the letter alif (and invariably also by the inscription „urdˆ zafar qar…n“) should be distributed between all years of the decade 1582/83-1591/92. In our graph, the sharp peak coinciding with the latter date (the A.H. 1000) would then disappear and the curve representing the total of all incidences would ascend less sharply. The distribution of incidences of coins of this type to particular years is a matter for conjecture. In his report on the events of the thirty-seventh year, i.e. the year of the millennium, Bad€’ˆn… states that the „Dirhams and Dinars which had been coined with the stamps of former Emperors were to be melted down and sold for their value in gold and silver, and no trace of them was to be left of them in the world.“7 This can be interpreted as a massive reminting campaign during which the rests of hitherto circulating Sˆr… and other non-Mughal coins were drawn from the circulation and converted into Akbar’s rupees, d€ms and muhrs. The sharp increase of incidences around the year of the millennium could then be understood as reflecting, more or less closely, actual monetary developments. Evidence of copper d€ms, 6 7

‘Abdu’l Q€dir Bad€’ˆn…, MuntaÇabu-t-taw€r…Ç. Calcutta, Vol. II (tr. by W.H. Lowe) 1884, p. 310. Ibid., p. 393.

70


where the „urdˆ zafar qar…n“ issues were marked not solely by the letter alif but sometimes by regnal years, seem to support this interpretation. All copper d€ms dated by this more exact way were struck in regnal years 35 to 38, i.e. between the years A.H. 998 and 1002 (A.D. 1590-1594); coins bearing the dates of r.y. 42 and 48 are perhaps exceptional cases.8 As far as silver is concerned, „urdˆ zafar qar…n“ with its alif coins was by no means the single mint in operation at this time. Ahmadabad, Lahore, Multan and Delhi continued striking their own coins dated by regnal years and months or, less frequently, by the hijr… date. Isolated specimens bearing the hijr… date 1000 are available for Jaunpur, Dogaon, Fatehpur, Ujjain, Narnol and Bangala mints. „Urdˆ zafar qar…n“ probably should not be identified with any of them - its identity remains unknown. One can perhaps guess that a mobile mint accompanied Akbar on his journey to Kashmir and back to Lahore in the second half of 1592 and that it might bear this name; however, it is improbable that it would have been able to produce, in short period of five months,9 coins in such huge quantity as is suggested by the significant number of incidences in our hoard record. The conjuncture whose beginning in the 1590s coincides with the urdˆ zafar qar…n issues maintained itself, on the hoard evidence, until 1605 and appears to have been caused by simultaneous outbursts of heightened minting activity of just three great imperial mints Ahmadabad, Thatta and Lahore. Whereas the number of incidences struck in Ahmadabad rises gradually from the early 1580s and culminates in the middle of 1590s, declining again slowly afterwards, the incidence curves for both Lahore and Thatta show much sharper turns. Both these mints appear to have expanded their output virtually from zero (in the case of Thatta explicable by its lying outside of the Mughal empire until 1593), and in a short interval of two or three years. Whereas the rise of the Ahmadabad mint could have been caused, at least to some extent, by direct imports of precious metals from Europe, the location of both Lahore and Thatta suggests another immediate source of silver - the Safavid Persia, undergoing a process of internal consolidation under the energetic Sh€h Abb€s the Great (1587-1629). Already by the end of the 16th century, there must have existed at least a rudimentary network of Indian merchants resident in Persia who stood behind the expanding Indo-Persian trade and repatriated their profits, converted into silver, to their homes in Gujarat, Multan or Rajasthan. Their numbers and influence in Iran reached their apogee by the middle of the 17th century when they appear to have achieved absolute dominance in the Indo-Persian trade and served as main suppliers of capital to capital-starved Persian economy.10 R. B. Whitehead, Catalogue of Coins in the Panjab Museum, Lahore. Vol. II. Coins of the Mughal Emperors. Oxford 1914, p. 80: copper coins no. 592 (r.y. 35), 593 (r.y. 36), 594 (r.y. 37), 595 (r.y. 38), 596 (r.y. 42) and 597 (r.y. 48, struck from an inverted die). H. N. Write, Catalogue of the Coins in the Indian Museum Calcutta. Vol. III. Mughal Emperors of India. Oxford 1908, p. 313 (Chronological Index), has two copper coins, with the date of r. y. 36 (no. 528) and r.y. 37 (no. 529). See also H. N. Wright’s note on the Urdˆ zafar qar…n mint in his introduction to the catalogue, pp. lxxxi-lxxxii. 9 If the dates given in the Akbarn€ma are correct, Akbar set out from Lahore on or around 22nd of July, 1592 and returned to the capital on 29th of December of the same year. Abˆ’l Fazl All€m…, The Akbarn€ma of Abu-l-Fazl. Tr. by H. Beveridge. Calcutta, Vol. III. 1910-1921, pp. 943 and 966. 10 S.F. Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750. Cambridge 1994, pp. 66-75. 8

Mints of the Akbar… Period : Ahmadabad

71

It should be stressed that such massive transfers of silver were made possible, in the first place, by steadily increasing production of American silver mines, increasing imports of silver into Europe and subsequently further to the east (as S. Moosvi rightly points out)11. As far as India is concerned, however, another factor of perhaps equal importance has to be taken into account - the general security of long-distance trade (or lack of it) which followed closely the turns in relations between Mughal India, Safavid Iran and the Uzbek empire. Operation of the Lahore mint, described in greater detail below, will illustrate this fact. Greater amount of relevant data on Lahore, Ahmadabad and Thatta enable us to take a closer look at their activity in the late Akbar… and early Jah€ng…r… period - an attempt justified by their importance in the formation of the Mughal silver coin stock.

Three Great Akbar… Mints Starting from 1593/94 (his 38th regnal year), Akbar abandoned the Islamic calendar and chose as a basic unit of periodization his regnal years (introducing the so called Il€h… era)12 which, from this time on, supplanted hijr… dates on his coins; in many cases, the Il€h… year was supplemented by the name of Il€h… month in which the respective coin was struck. The practice of including the Il€h… months was continued by various mints for varying number of years during the reign of Jah€ng…r and, much less consistently, into the sixth or seventh year of the reign of Sh€hjah€n. In the case of Ahmadabad, Thatta and Lahore, three great mints of Akbar’s and Jah€ng…r’s time whose coins are represented in our hoard evidence by greater number of specimens, it is possible to summarize incidences of coins minted over greater number of years in the same month of the year and thus to attempt to reconstruct seasonal fluctuations in the mints’ yearly output.

Ahmadabad Ahmadabad, the capital of the independent sultanate of Gujarat, was incorporated into the expanding Mughal empire by Akbar in 1573 (A.H. 980); first coins struck in the local mint are dated by this year. From the middle of the seventies, the output (reflected by frequent incidences in hoards) was growing rapidly until a peak was reached in the middle of 1590s. During the last twenty years of Akbar’s reign Ahmadabad was by far the most productive mint in the Mughal empire. Until 1610, the year when a new mint was opened in Surat, Ahmadabad was the single mint establishment in the whole sˆbah of Gujarat - all silver imports S. Moosvi, Silver Influx, pp. 59-62. Particulars on the introduction of the Il€h… calendar are to be found in Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarn€ma, (transl.) vol. II., pp. 15-24; shorter account is given in his ³’…n-i Akbar…, vol. II. (tr. by H.S. Jarrett), Calcutta 1894, p. 30. Unfortunately, Abu’l Fazl’s description of the new calendar is not systematic: it leaves out important details on the length of Il€h… months. Last word on this question is probably the discussion contained in: M. A. Alvi, A. Rahman, Fathullah Shirazi, a Sixteenth Century Indian Scientist. New Delhi 1968. As far as our statistical analysis is concerned, however, the differences in the lengths of months are too small to be of any practical importance. 11

12

72


20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 1755, 1755/56

1748, 1748/49

1742, 1742/43

1735, 1735/36

1728, 1728/29

1721, 1721/22

1714/15, 1715

1707, 1707/08

1700, 1700/01

1693, 1693/94

1686, 1686/87

1679/80, 1680

1673, 1673/74

1666, 1666/67

1659, 1659/60

1652, 1652/53

1645/46, 1646

1638/39, 1639

1632, 1632/33

1625, 1625/26

1611/12

1618, 1618/19

1604, 1604/05

1597, 1597/98

1583

1589/90, 1590

1576/77, 1577

1569/70, 1570

1556

0 1562/63, 1563


carried by trade to the Gujarati ports (the most important during Akbar’s time being Khambayat and later Surat) had to be turned into Mughal silver currency in this hinterland city. Relative abundance of silver coins struck in this mint in the Il€h… era when most coins were dated by Il€h… year and month, makes an attempt at quantitative evaluation possible and worthwhile.

year of mintage

Fig. 15. Incidence of Ahmadabadi silver coins minted in the years 1573-1760 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P.

In the case of the Ahmadabad mint, the fluctuation in monthly output is very prominent and also easily explicable. Characteristic is the peak in the mint’s activity in the autumn and winter period from October to January, which corresponds well with the seasonal rhythm of maritime traffic determined by the monsoon cycle. From the end of May till the end of August the ports on the Indian cost had to remain closed due to strong monsoon winds that made the sea traffic virtually impossible. When the seas calmed, it was the time for ships selling Indian wares in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf area to come home and unload their cargo, important part of which regularly consisted of precious metals, especially silver. It took some time to have the goods cleared through the customs and to transport the silver to the mint: in Akbar´s time Ahmadabad was the only mint in the whole Gujarat. Generally, heightened activity of the Ahmadabad mint appears to have coincided with the main sailing season in the Arabian Sea that lasted from December to March.13 With the early spring, the time came for ships to depart with winter monsoon winds in their sails; by Shipping seasons and time-schedules for departures and arrivals of vessels plying the Indian Ocean routes have been described by many authors. For comprehensive treatment, see the excellent synthesis by J. Deloche, Transport and Communication in India Prior to Steam Locomotion. Vol. II: Water Transport. Delhi 1994, p. 209-219. 13

Mints of the Akbar… Period : Thatta

73

this time the mint had already processed most of the metal accumulated during the rush autumn months. The output from March till September then is barely half of the maximum level. There is a slight rise in June and July, caused by pre-monsoon arrivals from the Gulf14 and possibly by caravans arriving by the overland routes from the north-west.

45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10

Is Feb/Mar

Ba Jan/Feb

Di Dec/Jan

Az Nov/Dec

Ab Oct/Nov

Mi Sep/Oct

Sh Aug/Sep

Am Jul/Aug

Ti Jun/Jul

Ar Apr/May

0

Kh May/Jun

5 Fa Mar/Apr

number of hoards containing coin(s) of particular month

50

m onth of m intage

Fig. 16. Fluctuations in the monthly output of the Ahmadabad mint, based on hoards .) coins containing Akbar… (38.-50. rr.y .y .) and Jah€ng…r… (1.-12. rr.y .y .y.) .y.)

The resulting curve summarizes two sets of data: coin incidences of Akbar´s time and incidences belonging to the regnal period of Jah€ng…r, each covering a period of twelve years. Trends shown by both are nearly identical - a fact that speaks in favour of hypothesis that coin incidences do reflect real changes in the output of mints: the evidence of Ahmadabad, consistent and logical, appears to be clear and unambiguous. (The data for Ahmadabad, Thatta and Lahore are summarized in the last part of the Appendix III at the end of the book.)

Thatta Situated in the Indus delta, Thatta had long been an important commercial centre of the western part of the Indian Ocean. The city, connected by sea lanes with ports of Gujarat, Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, joined the maritime world to overland caravan routes leading via Khuzdar, Kalat and Quetta to Qandahar and then further west and north to the Near East and Central Asia. Another frequented route followed the course of Indus, itself an important waterway with busy traffic, up to Mithankot and then turned along Chinab and Ravi to Multan and Lahore.15 14 15

S. F. Dale, op. cit., p. 46. Ibid., pp. 46-55; J. Deloche, op. cit., Vol. I.: Land Transport. Delhi 1993, pp. 24-29.

74


20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 1752, 1752/53

1744/45, 1745

1737, 1737/38

1729, 1729/30

1721, 1721/22

1713/14, 1714

1697, 1697/98 1705, 1705/06

1689, 1689/90

1674

1681, 1682

1666, 1666/67

1650, 1651

1658, 1658/59

1642/43, 1643

1635, 1635/36

1627, 1627/28

1619, 1619/20

1611/12

1603, 1603/04

1595, 1595/96

1579/80

1586/87, 1587

1571/72, 1572

1556

0 1563/64, 1564


Apart from serving as an important entrepôt on the intersection of long distance trade routes, Thatta offered a variety of locally produced textiles exported to Persian and Arabian markets. First Europeans who took notice of Thatta’s wealth were the Portuguese who plundered the city in 1556. Later, in slightly more peaceful pursuit of the spice monopoly, they sold here this commodity with good profit which was subsequently invested in purchases of textiles exported to Persia. However, both English and Dutch sources suggest that this maritime trade was not very brisk; its volume did not seem to be so great as to convince the English and Dutch East India Companies to make substantial investments in it; both Companies limited themselves to harassing the Portuguese rather than directly competing with them.16

year of mintage

Fig. 17. Incidence of silver coins minted in the mint of Thatta in the years 1556-1740 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P.

In the present context it is perhaps interesting to note that in 1634 the VOC director in Iran saw possible profits in this area if the existing substantial trade of Thatta with Iran could be diverted from the overland to sea routes frequented by Dutch ships: the possible profit was estimated at Fl. 1.011.500.17 This idea never materialized. Overland trade and the profits derived from it were and remained fully in the hands of local merchants and merchant communities who felt no need to ask for a European participation. Gradual decline of Thatta which in the latter part of the 17th and in the 18th century was caused by silting up of the arm of Indus which joined the city with the sea; in 1758 the river changed its course and W. Floor, The Dutch East India Company’s Trade with Sind in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Moyen Orient et Océan Indien, XVIe-XIXe siècles, vol. III (1986), p. 111. 17 Ibid., p. 112. 16

Mints of the Akbar… Period : Thatta

75

bypassed Thatta and its port Lahori Bandar completely. In the 19th century the role of the main commercial entrepôt in the lower Sindh was taken over by Karachi.18 Thatta was conquered by Akbar in 1593; the oldest extant silver rupee minted in the newly established Mughal mint bears the date of Farwardin, r.y. 38 (March/April 1593).19 From this date till the end of Akbar’s reign, coins issued from this mint occur relatively frequently in U.P. hoards; all of them are dated by regnal years and Il€h… months.

25 20 15 10

Isfandar (Feb/Mar)

Bahman (Jan/Feb)

Dai (Dec/Jan)

Azar (Nov/Dec)

Aban (Oct/Nov)

Mihr (Sep/Oct)

Shahrewar (Aug/Sep)

Amardad (Jul/Aug)

Khurdad (May/Jun)

Ardibihisht (Apr/May)

0

Tir (Jun/Jul)

5

Farwardin (Mar/Apr)

number of hoards containing coin(s) of particularmonth

30

m onth of m intage

Fig. 18. Fluctuations in the monthly output of the Thatta mint, based on hoards containing Akbar… (38.-50. r.y.) and Jah€ng…r… (11.-22. r.y.) coins

The relative importance of the overland caravan routes for the trade of Thatta can be illustrated by the same type of data which was used in the case of Ahmadabad. In contrast to the Ahmadabad mint, monthly incidences of coins from the Thatta mint show two prominent peaks instead of one - the first in May/June and the second in October/November. The former, more prominent culmination of May/June, corresponds with the smaller increase in the Ahmadabad mint activity preceding the onset of the monsoon and is to be attributed probably to the same cause; as the journey from the Gulf to Thatta was shorter than to ports in Gujarat and more ships could make it before the monsoon arrived here, the influx of silver imported by Indian merchants was greater. The latter peak in October/November, on the other hand, can not be ascribed to any significant intensification of sea traffic in this part of the year - from September to November the seas remained rough and wind velocities J. Deloche, op. cit., Vol. II.: Water Transport. Delhi 1993, p. 53 and map on the page 54. In the hoard no. 426/UP. Coin of the same month and year is registered also by H. Nelson Wright in his Catalogue of the Coins in the Indian Museum Calcutta. Vol. III, Oxford 1908, cat. no. 256. 18 19

76


unsteady20. In this part of the subcontinent, the autumn months were marked by greater activity on the land routes. At the end of October, Afghan nomadic tribes, known collectively as powindahs, descended from their summer pasturage areas in the highlands beyond the Sulaiman range to the Indus plain and brought with them products from Afghanistan and Central Asia. They also hired out their camels to traders or their agents who then travelled to their destinations in India through the dangerous zone of Baluchi mountains with the tribe and in relative security. This seasonal migration played an important part in the commercial contacts between the Indus Valley and the north-west of the subcontinent as late as the nineteenth century.21 Coin evidence seems to be in harmony with this interpretation and to show clearly the importance of overland trade for this city, classified primarily as an important port of the western Indian Ocean. As in the case of Ahmadabad, the curve is again build on two sets of data covering the same length of time - the last twelve years of Akbar’s rule and second half of the reign of Jah€ng…r.22 Again, both sets of data are in marked agreement - a fact which points to the existence of clearly defined trading seasons and minting rhythms. One exception seems to be an increase of coins minted in January/February which is limited to the Akbar… period and is not caused by any sudden increase in one or two years. It may be due to similar factors as the parallel rise in the output of Ahmadabad mint noticeable in the same month resurgence of maritime traffic in the early spring.

Lahore Lahore, the imperial capital in the years 1585-1598, is situated at the banks of the river Ravi which enabled seasonal riverine traffic with Kashmir to the north and cities of Multan and Sind to the south. Indus joined Lahore with the distant coast of Arabian Sea. The importance of this connection is testified i.a. by the name of the southernmost port in the Indus delta and important point in the long distance trade network in the Indian Ocean - Lahori Bandar, the port of Lahore. At the same time, the city was located at the „Long Walk“, so often described by European travellers, or „Great Trunk Road“ (as the British preferred to call it), an important land route connecting the major cities of the Doab with Panjab and continuing farther north-west via the Khyber pass to Kabul where it met with caravan routes to Persia and Central Asia. Earliest Akbar… coins from the Lahore mint attested by our hoard evidence come from the middle 1560s and until 1581 occur in U.P. hoards only sporadically. The coin collection of the Lahore museum (well supplied with coins of local origin) has an almost uninterrupted series of silver coins spanning the years A.H. 971 = A.D. 1563/64 to A.H. 989 = A.D. J. Deloche, op. cit., Vol. II., p. 216. S. F. Dale, op. cit., pp. 52-53; J. Deloche, op. cit., Vol. I., pp. 252-254. 22 In the case of Thatta, the data relating to the first part of Jah€ng…r’s reign are too scarce to serve as a basis for this type of graph; this is the only reason of using the incidences from regnal years 11 to 22 instead of 1 to 12 (as has been done in the case of Ahmadabad). 20 21

Mints of the Akbar… Period : Lahore

77

12 10 8 6 4 2

1749, 1749/50

1736, 1736/37

1722, 1722/23

1708, 1708/09

1694, 1694/95

1680, 1681

1667, 1667/68

1653, 1653/54

1639/40, 1640

1625, 1625/26

1611/12

1597, 1597/98

1583

1569/70, 1570

0 1556


1581.23 In the next ten years, from 1582 to 1591, the Lahore mint, on the evidence of both coin hoards and the Lahore museum catalogue, was either shut down or minted only insignificant number of coins. This seems somewhat strange, esp. when we remind ourselves that from 1585 this city served as the imperial capital with huge official establishment and therefore a centre of considerable commercial and financial activity. It should be pointed out, however, that primarily it was Akbar’s growing concern about the developments in north-western parts of his empire that led him to the decision to shift his capital city to Lahore. The 1570s saw a consolidation and continuous expansion of Uzbek power: in 1572/73 Abdull€h {•€n Uzbek seized Balkh, in 1584 occupied Badakhshan and his units begun making incursions into the Mughal territory in Afghanistan. In 1587 he invaded and subsequently annexed Khurasan. These developments must have adversely affected security of roads and trade in general, esp. when the Afghan tribes in the Swat and Bajaur area north of the Kabul-Peshawar route rose in open revolt. Slowly and gradually, Akbar was able to consolidate the Mughal position in the north-west: the suggestion made by Abdull€h {•€n Uzbek to Akbar to invade jointly the Safavid empire and to divide it between themselves were rejected but in 1587 a pact was concluded fixing the Hindukush as the boundary between the Mughal and Uzbek dominions. The Uzbek ruler also made it known that he would respect the Mughal interest in Persian-held Qandahar and would not object if the Mughals took it.24 This they did, without armed struggle

year of mintage

Fig. 19. Incidence of Lahori silver coins minted in the years 1556-1760 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. Two years of this period are missing from the series in the Lahore collection: A.H. 979 = A.D. 1571/72 and A.H. 982 = A.D. 1574/75. They are not represented in the hoard evidence either. 24 Riyazul Islam, Indo-Persian Relations. A Study of the Political and Diplomatic Relations Between the Mughul Empire and Iran. Teheran 1970, pp. 51-55. 23

78


22 A kbar,35.-41.r.y.

20

A kbar,42.-50. r.y.

18

Jahangir, 6.-11. r.y.

16 14 12 10 8 6 4

Is Feb/Mar

Ba Jan/Feb

Di Dec/Jan

Az Nov/Dec

Ab Oct/Nov

Mi Sep/Oct

Sh Aug/Sep

Am Jul/Aug

Kh May/Jun

Ar Apr/May

0

Ti Jun/Jul

2 Fa Mar/Apr

number of hoards containing coin(s) of particular month

in 1595. In the same year Mughals conquered eastern Baluchistan and thus rounded their conquest of the westernmost parts of the subcontinent begun in 1591 by annexation of lower Sindh and of the important port of Thatta two years later. Simultaneously, in a series of energetic campaigns, the Afghan insurgency was temporarily put down and the main roads opened to peaceful traffic. This consolidation probably has to do with the great increase in Lahore silver coin incidences from the second half of 1591; in the next decade, Lahore together with Ahmadabad and Thatta belonged to a small group of mints which supplied the Mughal empire with most of its coined silver. Coins dated by a regnal year and Il€h… month began to be issued from the 35th regnal year of Akbar (A.D. 1589-90) and continued to be minted until the 11th regnal year of Jah€ng…r. In Jah€ng…r’s twelfth year the Lahore mint supplanted the Il€h… month with the year of the Islamic era. For the construction of monthly output of the Lahore mint coins minted from the 35th to the 50th regnal year of Akbar and from the 6th to the 11th year of Jah€ng…r have been used.25 The total quantity of incidences used for the graph (188) is slightly greater than that of Thatta (151) and smaller than that of Ahmadabad (238).

m onth of m intage

Fig. 20. Fluctuations in the monthly output of the Lahore mint (based on hoards containing Akbar… and Jah€ng…r… coins)

The monthly rhythm of coin output of the inland Lahore mint is very different from the rhythms of both Ahmadabad and Thatta, connected more directly with the maritime The first five years of Jah€ng…r’s reign, i.e. the period of the early Jah€ng…r… „slump“ are represented in the hoard evidence by only two incidences belonging to the second and fourth regnal year, both lacking the name of the month. 25

Mints of the Akbar… Period : Lahore

79

routes in the Indian ocean, and is also more difficult to interpret. To begin with, in the period covered by the Il€h… coins, the Lahore mint appears to have made two shifts between two very different patterns of minting activity. In the first pattern, prevailing between the 35th and 41st regnal year of Akbar (1590/91 to 1596/97) and, with slight variation, between the 6th and 11th regnal year of Jah€ng…r (1611/12 to 1616), the mint activity is spread out more or less evenly, with relatively minor fluctuations, throughout the year, with gradual increase in the months of Bahm€n and Isfand€rmuz (February-March). In the second, covering Akbar… regnal years 42 to 49 (1597-1604), the mint seems to have been standing almost completely idle in the six months between October and March, compensating for this long inactivity by massive coin output in the half-year between April and September. Attempts at explanations of these patterns and their shifts must be, owing to our limited knowledge of detailed history of the area, more speculative than in the case of Ahmadabad or Thatta. The first Akbar… and the Jah€ng…r… pattern seems to reflect the pivotal role of the city as an important political, industrial and trading centre at the cross-roads of two great commercial arteries: first, the „great trunk road“ connecting the Ganga-Yamuna Doab with Panjab and continuing farther north-west across the Indus to Kabul and then either to Iran or to Central Asia, and second, the route connecting the Indian north to Sindh and the western parts of the Indian Ocean. The rivers of Panjab and the Indus, navigable on great stretches of their courses for greater part of the year, have always borne a lively down- and up-river traffic and besides, were also supplemented by parallel land routes.26 Supplied by silver coming by these different routes, the mint can be expected ho have been maintaining its coin production at a relatively stable level throughout the year. The second pattern, on the other hand, is marked by heavy concentration of production in the warmer half of the year; moreover, the change to this rhythm seems to have been achieved, at least partly, at the expense of, rather than by simple addition to the old minting pattern. This may signify a shift of commercial traffic from one route to another at some time in 1597. We know that in 1595 Mughals took Qandahar, a very important city on the long-distance route connecting India to Persia; subsequent consolidation, including a temporary suppression of the Raushan€… insurgency along the Khyber pass route in 1596, meant also greater degree of security, always an important factor in development of trade and trading networks. In the same year, as Abu’l Fazl informs us in his chronicle, an order was given for levelling the Khyber road27 - another measure that might have helped to attract the commercial traffic to it. Journey from Qandahar to the Indian plains was, of course, limited to spring and summer months when higher parts of the routes (either via Pisin and Dera Ghazi Khan to Multan and then by the Ravi to Lahore or via Ghazni or 26 See, J. Deloche, op. cit., Vol. II., pp. 14-17 for a description of the Panjab river network and pp. 174-177 for a discussion of the pace of river transport and travelling times. From attached table of average duration of voyage between selected localities along the rivers one can derive approximate length of journey upriver from the sea to Vazirabad on the Chanab (by its length and general conditions comparable to the journey to Lahore): according to season, on low or high water: on low water the journey took around 111 days, on high water 74,5 days. 27 Abu’l Fazl All€m…, Akbarn€ma, vol. III, (tr.), p. 1052.

80


Kabul to Bhera and Lahore)28 were without snow. This northern route to Lahore was perhaps preferable to the southern, more time-consuming journey along the rivers. Such shift of preferences on the part of trading caravans could explain the observable shift in the rhythm of the Lahore mint. The shift back to the first pattern occurred already in the 50th year of Akbar; this reversal to the pre-1597 situation appears to last into the Jah€ng…r… years covered by the Il€h… coins. Significantly, this change coincides exactly with renewed Mughal-Persian hostilities around Qandahar in 1604/05 when the Mughal garrison had to repulse an organized Persian attack in the area. Another bid for the coveted stronghold was made by the Persians immediately after the accession of Jah€ng…r on the Mughal throne; this attempt was repulsed definitively only in 1607 when the Mughals reinforced significantly their troops in and around the city.29 Change on the Mughal throne or internecine conflict among members of the dynasty (such as Prince {•usraw’s revolt against Jah€ng…r in 1605-06 or rebellion of Prince {•urram in 1622) was always seen by the Persians as a welcome opportunity to try and capture this important fort. Unfortunately, we do not possess data in sufficient quantity that would enable us to construct similar monthly output curves for other mints of the empire. However, the three cases presented here demonstrate clearly the fact that the output of every mint was governed by particular and unique production rhythm which was determined, to a great degree, by particular environmental circumstances. Apart from this monthly rhythm, production of each mint was influenced, in the longer horizon of years and decades, by political events, shifts in the intensity of traffic along different branches of trade routes network etc. and may have fluctuated quite sharply from one year to the other. This complex set of various determinants makes all attempts at absolute quantification of silver output on the basis of combination of relative data (derived by the method of A. Hasan, S. Moosvi or this author) on the one hand and known output of a particular mint in a short interval of time on the other, extremely problematic. This scepticism applies also to the ingenuous attempt of S. Moosvi to derive an absolute constant on the basis of a piece of information on the Surat mint. From the fact that English factors in Surat in 1634 and 1636 were able to obtain from the local mint 8000 to 9000 rupees daily, S. Moosvi has concluded that this quantity was an average for the whole year; and proceeding on the assumption that this average daily quantity of 8000 rupees was turned out by the mint 365 days a year and that the known number of coins recovered from hoards is in constant relation to the production, she has come to the number of 253 913 silver rupees representing each one rupee found in the hoards. Equal ratio is then applied to other mints in the empire.30 Monthly fluctuations in the output of Ahmadabad, Lahore and Thatta mints show that reliable estimates of average yearly output cannot be made on the sole basis of data relating to a short period of one or a few months in a year. Both Ahmadabad and Thatta show very See, J. Deloche, op. cit., Vol. I., the map on the p. 26. Riyazul Islam, op. cit., pp. 68-69. 30 S. Moosvi, The Silver Influx, pp. 56-57. 28 29

Mints of the Jah€ng…r… Period

81

sharp monthly fluctuations and there is every reason to suppose that the profile of Surat, another mint supplied mainly by maritime trade, would be similar. To calculate average output of a mint on the basis of isolated daily output figures (which may be perhaps understood as typical of a particular part of the year, a season etc.) in fact means to accept a very large margin of error. Besides, one has to take into account the possibility that the percentage of fresh, imported silver turned into new coins may have been greater in the mints on the periphery of the empire than in the inland mints where more significant part of the silver bullion may have been obtained by melting of older Mughal coins brought for remint. Moreover, reports of English factors make it clear that the Surat mint did not operate 365 days a year but was subject to not infrequent closures lasting sometimes for whole months. Such irregularities were certainly not limited to Surat; quantitative output estimates based on short-term production data are problematical if applied to any Mughal mint. Unless other, unambiguous evidence on the production of mints appears (which is not very probable), historians would perhaps do better to content themselves with series of relative data without trying to transform them, with the help of an absolute constant, into absolute numbers31.

3. The Regnal Period of Jah€ng…r (1606-1627) Immediately after the accession of Jah€ng…r, very sharp decline in the number of coin incidences of virtually all mints in the empire is clearly visible in the graphical presentation of our evidence. The total of all incidences that fluctuates slightly below the number 40 in the last decade of Akbar’s reign, plummets suddenly to 11 and less in the years 1606-1611. Then, equally suddenly it soars as high as 36 in 1612/13 and keeps rising to a total of 46 incidences two years later. It would be probably a great mistake to interpret such deep and narrow gap in the coin evidence solely in terms of a universal slump in the output of Mughal mints. There is no evidence of an internal or external crises which could, by effectively interrupting the argentiferous trade routes, explain this strange feature. Although very clearly defined, this „depression“ is too long to be explicable in terms of confused dating of coins or other similar purely formal distortions of evidence. On closer investigation one striking coincidence emerges that can help to solve this riddle. Immediately after his accession Jah€ng…r ordered to increase the weight of gold and silver coins by 20 per cent so that the silver rupee now weighed 212 grains instead of 31 M. P. Singh in his Town, Market, Mint and Port in the Mughal Empire 1556-1707 (An Administrativecum-Economic Study), New Delhi 1985, pp. 255-256 has chosen a different method of estimating the capacity of mints: a Dastˆr-ul camal of Aurangzeb’s time gives an annual revenue obtained from the mint of Surat; this amount is known to be identical with minting charges, fixed at 5,2% of the rupees coined in the year. From these numbers one can easily calculate the yearly and daily output of the mint (exceeding, in this particular case, 5000 rupees per day). However, to get a meaningful series of data one would have to work with dastˆr figures for greater number of consecutive years. Apparently, these are not available; and M. P. Singh himself rightly reminds his readers of all the possible pitfalls connected with hasty generalizations of isolated pieces of data.

82


50 NORTHWEST GUJARAT A ND SINDH MALWA A ND RAJASTHAN CENTRAL EAST DECCAN TOTAL

45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5

1627, 1627/28

1626, 1626/27

1625, 1625/26

1624, 1624/25

1623, 1623/24

1622, 1622/23

1621, 1621/22

1620, 1620/21

1619, 1619/20

1617, 1618

1618, 1618/19

1616, 1617

1615, 1616

1614/15 1615

1613/14 1614

1612/13

1611/12

1610, 1610/11

1609, 1609/10

1608, 1608/09

1607, 1607/08

1606, 1606/07

0 1605, 1605/06


traditional 176 or 177. In the fourth year the emperor (motivated perhaps by relative plenty of silver available for minting coins?) raised the weight of the rupee still further by another 5 per cent to 222 grains.32 However well meant this reform might have been, it caused great inconvenience to all participants in financial transactions conducted by means of silver money: as the value of the rupee was determined strictly by its real silver content, issuing new heavy money brought with it an unpleasant necessity of recalculating prices or adjusting volumes, quantities etc. of all goods and payments to the new standard.

ye ar of m intage

Fig. 21. Incidence of Mughal silver coins minted in the years 1606-1627/28 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. and recovered in the years 1882-1979

At the same time, it was not feasible to terminate instantly the validity of the huge mass of „light“ rupees - and the coexistence of two standards complicated the situation still further. Jah€ng…r states in his memoirs that people explained to him the inconveniences which this reform caused in mercantile transactions; and „as in all affairs the contentment and ease of the people are to be looked to“, he issued an order that from the 11th of Ard…bihisht of the 6th regnal year (i.e. beginning of May, 1611) all mints in the empire should revert to the old standard.33 Evidence of the coin catalogues shows that this order was implemented gradually as mints received the new instructions and adjusted their production process in accordance 32 33

A. Rogers, H. Beveridge (transl.), The Tˆzuk-i-Jah€ng…r…. Vol. I. 2nd ed., Delhi 1968, pp. 10-12. Ibid., p. 197.

Mints of the Jah€ng…r… Period

83

with them. Probably the first extant coin minted under the new regulation is a silver rupee struck in the capital of Lahore in the month of Amard€d in the 6th year (July/August 1611). Other mints followed suit, the more distant ones with considerable delay (mint at Qandahar, for example, issued heavy rupees as late as in the 7th year, A.H. 1021 (1612/13).34 Now, when the old standard had been restored, what happened to the heavy rupees? On a traditional explanation, heavier and therefore more valuable pieces should disappear from the circulation and be kept as savings or go into hoards. Our evidence suggests that at least in Jah€ng…r’s India this was not the case: coins seem to have been saved (or hoarded) primarily for their capability to serve as money rather than for their silver content. It is nevertheless possible that these coins were turned into bullion, jewels etc. and thus hoarded in demonetized form or used as material for silver embroidery or other „industrial“ purpose. Another, less speculative explanation of the fate of these heavy coins is suggested by our evidence: from 1611/12 till 1618 coin incidences indicate higher level of activity of central mints. As most of the newly imported silver was probably turned into Mughal currency in mints situated in the border areas (Gujarat, Afghanistan, Panjab), at least part of the material which sustained the production of the central mints may have been obtained by reminting these impracticable, heavy coins. Of course, there is no reason to suppose that the reminting activity was limited to the central, inland mints; the observed universal and significant increase of incidences (reflecting higher output) in the second decade of the 17th century may have been helped, to an unknown degree, by general reminting of these heavy Jah€ng…r… rupees. Concluding the discussion of this early Jah€ng…r… slump, it should be pointed out that this fall in coin incidences must not be necessarily caused solely by factors reconstructed in the preceding paragraphs. Temporary decline in silver imports can not be completely ruled out as a contributing factor - production of Gujarati mints, for example, seems to have been falling already in the last years of Akbar’s reign. In general, however, institution of new, heavier standard of currency would not seem to be a logical reaction to any really serious scarcity of the minting metal - indeed, the contrary situation can be imagined as a more probable background for such decision.35 Quick return of the incidence curve to the pre-1605 level after the currency reform experiment had been wound up suggests that any possible decline in silver imports could R. B. Whitehead, Catalogue of Coins in the Panjab Museum, Lahore. Vol. II., Oxford 1914, p. 146. cat. no. 1036. The same catalogue has under its cat. no. 1076 a rupee from Kashmir dated also to A.H. 1021. 35 S. Moosvi in her Silver Influx, pp. 62-65 does not take these possible effects of changing standards on survival chances of particular coin types into account and ascribes the observed decline in number of extant rupees from Gujarat (reflecting according to her interpretation lower level of mint output) to an assumed contraction in the amount of silver entering Spain from America that in its turn affected adversely the total silver outflow from Europe to the East. Her use of ten-year totals (in this case the decades of 1605-15 and 1616-25) blurs the sharp temporal limits of the slump, clearly visible when the data series is constructed on yearly intervals. This can partly explain her failure to see parallel decline in the case of north-western mints: between 1611 and 1615 coin incidences (and most probably numbers of extant coins) representing these mints show sharp increase which would, in ten-year total, to a great extent even out the pronounced fall of the first five years in the decade. Glance at the data will show that different method of counting (number of extant coins versus number of coin incidences in hoards) would, in this case, play only marginal role. 34

84


have been of only short duration. As far as the shares of particular regions in the total output are concerned, however, comparison with the 1590s will reveal one significant change: restoration of the number of incidences to the pre-1605 level was due, to a considerable extent, to increased activity of two north-western mints, Lahore and Qandahar. Whereas the Lahore curve can be interpreted simply as a return to its „normal“ level, the case of Qandahar was different. Judged by U.P. hoards incidences of Qandahari coins minted during Jah€ng…r’s reign, the output of its mint must have been phenomenal; it therefore deserves closer scrutiny.

Qandahar 1606-1622 Through the Middle Ages Qandahar had been one of the most important commercial and strategic points situated in the area of contact between the Indic and Middle Eastern cultural and political worlds. Its excellent fort and location at the important overland trade route connecting cities of north-west India with Herat, Khurasan and the great centres of Islamic civilisation further west on the one hand and with flourishing cities along the Silk Road in central Asia on the other, made it almost inevitably an area of conflicting interests of Indian and Persian empires. At the beginning of the 16th century Qandahar had got into the possession of B€bur and was subsequently under Mughal control until 1558 when it was lost to the Persians. In 1595 Akbar recovered the city without single shot by bribing the commander of its fort to surrender. The city was in Mughal hands until 1622 when it was conquered by the Persians. In 1638 the Persian commander, again unable to resist the power of Mughal silver, changed sides and handed over the city to Sh€hjah€n’s army. Finally, in 1649 the Persians snatched Qandahar from Mughal hands by military force and were able to hold it against three successive Mughal sieges (1649, 1652, 1653).36 On the basis of available evidence, it seems that Akbar did not institute a mint in Qandahar after he had got into the possession of the city in 1595. The only Akbar… mints operating in the area were located in Kabul and Peshawar;37 low profile of their coins in U.P. hoards is to be explained by the dominant position of Lahore whose mint seems to have had in this time an almost complete monopoly in minting the silver which arrived into India by north-western overland routes. This situation changed dramatically during the first decade after Akbar´s death. Jah€ng…r instituted mint in Qandahar probably in the year 1606/07.38 For the first five years of its existence, however, the mint’s activity had been either intermittent or limited to minting only low quantities of silver, probably mainly for the local market: its coins are almost completely absent from U.P. hoards. Abrupt change occurred in 1611/12: this and all the subsequent years until the end of Mughal rule in Qandahar in 1622 are abundantly represented in U.P. hoards. It is highly probable that the increasing activity of Qandahar mint in these years is closely For a detailed account of the Mughal-Persian struggle over Qandahar in the broader context of IndoPersian relations, see Riyazul Islam, op. cit., pp. 57-70, 78-145. 37 Peshawar is not included in the list of Mughal mints compiled by M. P. Singh in his book Town, Market, Mint and Port in the Mughal Empire, 1556-1707. (An Administrative-cum-economic Study). New Delhi 1985, pp. 239-252 but the activity of its mint is documented (unless it is an error) by one coin in hoard no. 418/UP. 38 This is the date of the oldest Qandahari coin, found in the hoard no. 74/UP. 36

Mints of the Jah€ng…r… Period : Qandahar

85

20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4

1750, 1750/51

1733, 1733/34

1715, 1715/16

1697, 1697/98

1679/80, 1680

1662, 1662/63

1644/45, 1645

1627, 1627/28

1609, 1609/10

1590/91, 1591

1573/74, 1574

2 0 1556


related to rapidly deteriorating security situation further south in the Persian Gulf and western part of the Indian Ocean generally. During these years, coastal Arabs intensified their attacks on merchant ships, retaliating in this way against the equally brutal attempts of the Portuguese to regulate the maritime trade by their system of passes (the so-called cartazes). This state of affairs bordering on permanent war still worsened in 1614-15 with the Persian conquest of the Portuguese port of Gombroon (Bandar Abbas) and simultaneous Persian blockade of Portuguese Hormuz. Traders reacted immediately and shifted their routes further to the north. The rise of importance of Qandahar, connected with the revitalization of the overland route, was corroborated by several contemporary observers, English and Portuguese.39 Relatively lower level of coin incidences from Ahmadabad and Thatta in the 1610s and 1620s suggests that the contemporaneous growth of the north-western inland mints was due to massive shifts of traffic on the main trade routes connecting India to the Middle East.

year of m intage

Fig. 22. Incidence of Qandahari silver coins in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. 39 See the classic study of Niels Steensgaard, Carracks, Caravans and Companies. The Structural Crisis in the European-Asian Trade in the Early 17th Century. København 1973, esp. pp.206-207 for the new role of Qandahar. In 1615 English merchant Steele commented on the situation in and around Qandahar: „By reason of frequent passage of Caravans it is much enlarged lately, that the Suburbs are bigger then the Citie. For within this two yeare, that the way of Ormus is stopped up by the wars betwixt the Persians and Portugals, all Caravans which passe betwixt India and Persia, must of necessitie goe by this place. And here they doe hire Camels to go into India, and at their returne for Persia... Trade it yeelds not of it selfe, but accidentally by the meeting of Indian, Persian and Turkie Merchants, which are not willing to travel further at twentie per Cento profit.“ Purchas IV, 272-3, quoted by R. Ferrier in: The Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. 6.: The Timurid and Safavid Periods. Ed. by P. Jackson and L. Lockhart. Cambridge 1986, p. 475.

86


Another fact that deserves to be noted is the time lag between the increased output of Qandahari mint on the one hand and the incidence of Qandahari coins in the U.P. hoards on the other. During the years of the mint’s operation, the percentage of its coins in the total of all coins buried in the area of the present-day Uttar Pradesh is never higher than slightly over 5 per cent; on the other hand, in hoards dated to the second half of the 17th or to the 18th and 19th centuries, the percentages of Qandahari coins climb to as high as 50 per cent and sometimes even more of all Jah€ng…r… coins found in these „late“ hoards.40 There seems to be only one possible explanation of this peculiar trend: huge quantities of imported silver minted in Qandahar in the second decade of the 17th century and up to 1622 stayed for a long time in the north-western periphery of the Mughal empire and penetrated only gradually into its central parts. The process of thorough mixing of Qandahari coins into the silver stock circulating in the Mughal sˆbas of Delhi and Ilahabad seems to have lasted for thirty to fifty years. This process of slow inflow of Qandahari coins was accompanied by a parallel process of gradual disappearance from the current hoard horizon of coins which had been issued by the less productive mints - with the general and gradual disappearance of older coins only their most frequent types (or strongest populations) were able to hold themselves in circulation and therefore also in the more recent hoard profiles: they were becoming increasingly isolated reminders of past times. High percentages of the Qandahari coins in later Mughal hoards are therefore not directly representative of the actual share which these coins had in the total silver stock circulating in the Mughal empire (or, more exactly, in its central parts) at the death of Jah€ng…r: these high percentages in late hoards are to some extent inflated by a disappearance at this time of other, less prolific mints from later hoard horizons. From the total number of 28 Jah€ng…r… silver mints documented by U.P. hoards, names of only few recur constantly in the hoards of late 17th and 18th century: most prominent are the coins of Qandahar, followed by those of Lahore, Thatta and Patna.41 Two preliminary conclusions can be drawn from the above observations. First, the case of Qandahar again clearly shows close correspondence between mint activity on the one hand and incidence of its coins in the available hoard evidence on the other. In cases when the mint was located in greater distance from the area in which hoard samples have been taken, this correspondence may become visible, owing to an apparently slow velocity of circulation and consequent slower tempo of intermixing of the current minted stock, only after the lapse of several decades. Qandahar’s production shows the test of time to be 40 As the hoard inventory does not contain information about the number of doubles, all calculations are only more or less exact approximations. Inspection of the original Treasure Trove Reports could remedy this defect. 41 The list of Jah€ng…r… silver mints compiled by M. P. Singh, op. cit., pp. 239-252 includes 28 localities; it does not tally with the list of mints documented in the U.P. hoard evidence: here the mints of Jalesar, Katak Banaras and Peshawar are totally absent. M. P. Singh, on the other hand, does not include the mints of Akbarpur (documented by the hoard no. 426/UP), Bairat (426/UP, 203/UP), Bangala (418/UP), Islamabad (= Chittagong, 997/UP), Jalnapur (= Jalapur?, 371/UP, 426/UP, 972/UP, 1035/UP) and Muhammadabad (15/UP). Urdˆ zafar qar…n (203/UP) may correspond to Urdˆ of M. P. Singh’s list.

Mints of the Jah€ng…r… Period : Qandahar

87

of great importance. In fact, this mint is a good test case: the rise of its importance and trade is documented by independent written evidence which corroborates the picture derived from hoard statistics. This may strengthen our confidence in the general reliability of the application of statistics to hoard evidence - perhaps even in those cases where additional independent infor-mation is either not at hand or is in itself not strong enough to prove the case.42 Second, systematic registration of time-lags in mixing of silver, newly arriving from the peripheries of the empire (mints of Gujarat, Sindh, the Nort-west, Deccan, Bengal) into the older stock already circulating in the central parts, might serve as another guide for assessment of the velocity of circulation of coined silver at the supra-regional level. Complementary and of equal interest should be the study of dispersal at the peripheries of coins minted in the core region of the empire (in the mints of Delhi, Agra, Ilahabad and certain others). The still rather general picture of monetary flows from the peripheries to the centre and (to a lesser extent?) vice versa, driven to a great extent by the Mughal revenue system, would thus obtain more concrete contours. The fall of Qandahar into Persian hands in 1622 was not only a serious setback for Mughal strategic positions in the north-west and a blow to their prestige but, as our graph of incidences clearly shows, was also a cause of serious disruption of the flourishing longdistance trade passing through this area. After 1622 the number of incidences of northwestern coins falls quite abruptly to the half of the previous level. The eclipse of Qandahar was not compensated by a comparable increase of output of other mints in the area; the Lahore mint, instead of regaining the dominant position it had held before the rise of Qandahar, appears to have been hit, for most of the 1620s, by a temporary slump too. Disruption of the trading networks in the area between the Safavid and Mughal empires appears to have outlasted the fall of Qandahar by almost a whole decade. Neither Ahmadabad nor the recently established mint in Surat were able to compensate for this north-western drop-off - security problems on the maritime routes were by no means over. Keeping in mind the fate of the early Jah€ng…r… coinage, one has to ask - was the slump of the late 1620s real, i.e. caused by a real decline of silver imports from abroad or does it exist only in the hoard evidence distorted by another official manipulation of the existing coin stock? Influence of the last-mentioned factor cannot be ruled out. From the 13th regnal year to the end of Jah€ng…r’s rule (i.e. from 1618/19 to 1627), the Agra and Ahmadabad mints issued, on the orders of the emperor, the celebrated zodiacal coins. As soon as Sh€hjah€n ascended the Mughal throne in 1627, he forbade, under the death penalty, the use of these coins and ordered that they should be returned to the mint and melted down. This order, if implemented consistently, might artificially reduce the numbers of coins struck during the last Jah€ng…r… decade; apart from this distortion one has to take into account possible effects of filter III, described above:43 Zodiacal coins always were and still are highly prized The importance of supporting evidence independent of the hoards in the interpretation of their evidence has been rightly stressed e.g. by J. Werner, Münzschätze als Quellen historischer Erkenntnis. Jahrbuch für Numismatik und Geldgeschichte, vol. 2 (1950/1951), pp. 137-138. 43 See, Part I, pp. 36-41. 42

88


collectors’ items, fetch nice price at the market and are therefore more likely to disappear into private pockets and collections than other, more „ordinary“ rupees. In fact, there is a marked decline of coin incidences of the Agra and Ahmadabad mints that coincides with the period of zodiacal coins. The performance of Ahmadabad had been, for the whole Jah€ng…r… period, far from spectacular: in general, this had probably more to do with conditions in the western part of the Indian Ocean. The fact, however, that for the years 1623/24 to 1627/28 there is not available in the U.P. hoards a single Ahmadabadi silver coin, is striking and the influence of Sh€hjah€n’s order can not be ruled out. The record of Agra is similar: from the short period 1619/20 to 1622/23 there are no silver coins and from the years immediately following we have in the hoard evidence only one or two incidences per year. The pressure of Sh€hjah€n’s monetary policy on coin populations of the late Jah€ng…r… period was intensified by another order by which he banned the use of all coins bearing the name of Jah€ng…r’s wife Nˆrjah€n. These coins began to be issued by greater number of mints44 in 1624/25 and continued to be struck until the end of his reign. These coins too had to be melted down and their continuing use punished by death. It is therefore possible that this reminting campaign to some extent distorts our evidence: what appears in the 1620s as a stagnation, might have been actually a recovery; this may apply particularly to the second half of the decade. It is probable that a dramatic increase in coin incidences at the very beginning of Sh€hjah€n’s reign would appear more gradual if the zodiacal and Nˆrjah€n… coins had been left to their natural fate. Relatively rapid decline of the volume of Jah€ng…r… coin stock in the era of Sh€hjah€n45 seems to corroborate the reminting hypothesis.

4. The Era of Sh€hjah€n (1627-1658) The beginning of Sh€hjah€n’s reign is marked by steep increase of incidences from several major mints of the empire - Lahore, Ahmadabad, Surat and especially Agra. Sh€hjah€n’s order to draw out of circulation all zodiacal and Nˆrjah€n… coins and to melt them down seems to offer an explanation of this sudden upsurge in minting activity; it is probably no accident that all of the above mentioned mints had supplied, in the Jah€ng…r… era, the local money markets with Nˆrjah€n… coins. These coins, drawn on the order of Sh€hjah€n from circulation, supplied these mints with abundant material for massive production of new Sh€hjah€n… issues.46 Return to more orthodox, Islamic model of coinage was completed at the end of the first decade of Sh€hjah€n’s rule when the Islamic lunar calendar was re44 P. L. Gupta, Coins, p.122, has a list of mints which issued Nˆrjah€n… coins: Agra, Ahmadabad, Akbarnagar, Allahabad, Kashmir, Lahore, Patna, Surat. This list includes all of the major mints of the empire - selective reminting affecting these most productive mints could therefore seriously distort the overall production estimates arrived at by the incidences method. 45 See above, Part II, pp. 56-57. 46 Another aspect of monetary policies of Islamic monarchs deserves to be mentioned: valued as marks of regnal sovereignty, coins struck in the name of new monarch at the time of his accession fulfilled also an important symbolic function.

Mints of the Sh€hjah€n… Period

89

instituted and the former practice of using the names of Il€h… (ancient Persian) months on the coins gradually abandoned. It is possible that at the beginning of Sh€hjah€n’s reign the Nˆrjah€n… and zodiacal types of coin were still found in greatest concentrations in regions supplied with coins of these major mints; if this was the case, Agra, Ahmadabad, Surat and Lahore naturally got the greatest share of these coins for remint. In fact, the incidences show that the period from 1628 to 1632/33 represented for the Ahmadabad mint the last „fat years“ in its history: from the middle of 1630 this once important mint was eclipsed by the mint of Surat. It was this recently founded mint establishment that stood, together with the mints of Lahore and Multan, behind the so far unparalleled rise of coin incidences observed in the first decade of Sh€hjah€n’s reign. And, for the first time, the eastern mints located in Patna and Rajmahal joined the general trend and appear to have contributed in a more significant way to the general expansion of the Mughal silver coin stock. Reminting of late Jah€ng…r… coins may have been important in the first few years of Sh€hjah€n’s reign; intensive activity of greater number of mints lasting for a whole decade can not be explained away as having been due mainly to forced reminting of the older coin stock. Analysed from the perspective of regions, the importance of the north-western mints fed by the overland trade with the Middle East and Central Asia is indisputable. Competing

75

NORTHWEST GUJA RA T A ND SINDH MA LWA A ND RA JA STHA N CENTRA L EA ST DECCA N TOTA L

70 65 60 55 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5

1658, 1658/59

1656, 1656/57

1654, 1654/55

1652, 1652/53

1650, 1651

1648/49, 1649

1646/47, 1647

1644/45, 1645

1642/43, 1643

1640/41, 1641

1638/39, 1639

1637, 1637/38

1635, 1635/36

1633, 1633/34

1631, 1631/32

1629, 1629/30

0 1627, 1627/28


80

ye ar of m intage


90


with Lahore, which recovered from its temporary decline caused by the loss of Qandahar in 1622 and subsequent disruption of trade, the most active mint in the 1630s appears to have been located in Multan - a new name in the list of the Mughal mint cities. Multan was a terminal point of a long distance trade route connecting, via Qandahar and Farrah, northwestern India with Isfahan, Mashad and other important cities in Persia. The revival of Indo-Persian trade appears to have taken place in the second year of Sh€hjah€n’s rule (162930) and to have culminated in his eighth year (1635/36); after the Mughals recaptured the city of Qandahar in 1638, mint was re-established there but its production, although not insignificant, never reached the levels of Jah€ng…r’s times: Multan was able to maintain its position as the second most important mint of the north-western region. Nevertheless, the end of the 1630s constitutes a major turning point for the northwestern overland trade in general: from this time onwards, the number of incidences - and presumably the intensity of minting and trade which brought the silver bullion - shows a slow, long-term declining trend interrupted only by a temporary revival in the last twenty years of the seventeenth century. In 1641/42 the total output of mints supplied by maritime trade routes of the western part of the Indian Ocean (Surat, Ahmadabad, Thatta) rises above the level reached by the north-western mints; the port cities, among which Surat was by far the most important, then maintain their position as the most important suppliers of silver coins until the spectacular rise of central mints in the late 1680s. When the incidences computed for each region are added up, the resulting curve shows stagnation or slight decline that follows after the first, „rich“ Sh€hjah€n… decade and lasts until the beginning of 1660. Thereafter, more pronounced decline is noticeable. Even if we take into account the possible distorting influence of remints on the output curve at the beginning of Sh€hjah€n’s rule, the import of new silver coming in the first decade of his reign from virtually all directions including even the usually rather sleepy Bengal - must have led to considerable expansion of the silver coin stock. Analysis of the Sh€hjah€n… coin stock attempted in the preceding section confirms this conclusion.47

Multan Considering the substantial expansion of Indo-Persian overland trade that begun in the late Akbar… period and continued well until the middle of the 17th century, the relatively late rise of the Multan mint to prominence is difficult to explain. Located at the intersection of the overland route to Qandahar and Iran with the riverine route connecting Panjab and Kashmir with Sindh and the Arab Sea, Multan was also an important textile manufacturing centre and a seat of a wealthy and influential business community. Traders, merchants and bankers known abroad under the general designation of Multanis, had formed, and during the 17th century vastly expanded, a wide trading network covering most of the important See above in Part Two, pp. 56-58. For basic information on Multanis, see S. F. Dale, op. cit., pp. 55-64 and chapters 5 and 6 of the same work for the so far little known activities of this Indian community in Russia. 47 48

Mints of the Sh€hjah€n… Period : Multan

91

Persian cities and reaching as far north as Astrachan.48 According to a contemporary estimate of an Indian merchant trading in Russia, in the second half of the 1640s the Indian community in Iran numbered perhaps as much as 10 000 merchants.49 The Astrachan community was an offshoot of the sizeable Iranian network. Indian merchants conducting their business in Iran and Russia traded mainly in Indian textiles which had to be paid in silver and engaged also in money-changing, money lending and other financial operations - in all these activities they were reputed to be unrivalled masters. Profits from these manifold activities were then remitted back to their home bases in India. By 1631 an English observer in Iran remarked that „Silver and Gould ... is transported yearely from hence into India in great quantities by merchaunts of these parts“.50 J. B. Tavernier, a French jeweller generally well informed about precious stones, metals and connected matters, estimated that imports of silver into India fetched, if the customs house was bypassed, between 7 and 8 per cent of profit. By the 1670s the continuing drain of silver toward the east already caused such a shortage of this monetary metal that the Persian authorities were forced to issue an order prohibiting its export from the country. This ban caused some discomfort to the merchants but soon the trade continued, often with the connivance of Persian port officials. 51 Taking into account the indisputable importance of Multan and Multanis in the Indo-Persian trade, one may wonder at the relatively low profile of Multani coins in existing coin collections.52 However, a look at the graph of incidences of coins struck in the Multan mint shows that the impression derived from the coin catalogues is not entirely correct. It is true that until 1629 Multani coins are almost completely absent from the hoard evidence. This may have several causes. Before the 1590s, the trade on the north-western overland routes was, on the hoard evidence, very limited: the few pieces from the Lahore mint, which represent in the hoard evidence its activity between the middle sixties and middle eighties of the 16th century, are hardly more than isolated reminders that the Lahore mint existed at all. Analysis of the seasonal fluctuations in the output of the Lahore mint attempted above has shown that soon after the resurgence of Indo-Persian trade in the early nineties the traffic was deflected to the northern, closely guarded and levelled road through the Khyber Pass to Lahore. When the traffic intensified still further in the second decade of Jah€ng…r’s reign (owing to insecurity of the sea lanes), the Qandahar mint, now firmly in Mughal hands, was able to process most of the imported silver. Ibid., p. 66-67 and p. 89. Dale refers to a passage in a petition addressed to Russian authorities by Indian merchant Sutur in 1647 and published in: К. А. Антонова, Н. М. Гольдберг, Т. Д. Лавренцова (отв. ред.), Русско-индийские отношения в ХVІІ в. Сборник документов. Москва 1958, с. 85. The relevant passage reads: „[...] многие индейцы в шаховых городех живут безвыходно, есть де их 10 000 индейцов, живут без выезду.“ Interpreting these words, one should perhaps take into account the possibility that the number 10 000 stands simply for „a great number of“. This, of course, does not invalidate Dale’s argument; the point rather is that the expression perhaps should not be taken too literally. In the preceding paragraph Sutur complains that Indian merchants residing in Iran are subject to frequent harassment and extortion by Safavid officials. The golden time of Indian commerce in Iran seems to have been nearly over - an impression more or less corroborated by the slowly declining trend of the north-western coin incidences. 50 Cit. by R. Ferrier in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 6., p. 484. 51 Ibid., p. 485. 52 S. F. Dale, op. cit., p. 43. 49


20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 1747/48, 1748

1733, 1733/34

1718, 1718/19

1703, 1703/04

1688, 1688/89

1674

1659, 1659/60

1644/45, 1645

1630, 1630/31

1615, 1616

1600, 1600/01

1585

1570/71, 1571

0 1556


92

year of m intage

Fig. 24. Incidence of Multani silver coins in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P.

It was only after the loss of Qandahar and subsequent resurgence of traffic in the area at the end of the 1620s that Multan started striking coins in greater quantity. The task to supply arriving merchants with Mughal currency, fulfilled previously by the Qandahar mint, was now transferred to Multan, the next Mughal city on the route. In fact, the output of the Multan mint in the 1630 matches, and occasionally even surpasses that of Qandahar two decades earlier. The year 1635/36 can be taken, on the hoard evidence, as a culminating point in the overland trading: population of these coins represented by 20 incidences (second highest number ever attested for any Mughal mint) appears relatively frequently in the contemporary hoards horizon and single coins are occasionally found even in hoards formed on the territory of the U.P. one and half century later. Gradual decline of the importance of the Multan mint, apparent in the hoard record from the 1640 onwards, may not have been due solely to a weakening intensity of the overland commercial traffic between India and Persia, although the repeated and unsuccessful Mughal campaigns to recover Qandahar certainly disrupted traffic in these areas and are undoubtedly responsible for the visible gap in the Multan incidence record in 1649 and 1650. The „natural“ factors responsible for the decline of Multan since the middle of the 17th century were noticed by Tavernier in his description of the route from Isfahan to Agra; in the present context the passage is worth quoting : „[...] from Kandahar to Agra [...] there are only two routes via Kabul or Multan respectively. The latter is shorter than the other by ten days, but the caravan scarcely ever takes it, because from Kandahar to Multan it is a desert country almost all the way, and because one must march sometimes for three or four days without meeting water. Hence the most common and beaten track is by Kabul. [...] Multan is a town where quantities of calicoes are made, and they used to be all carried to

Mints of the Sh€hjah€n… Period : Surat

93

Tatta before the sands had obstructed the mouth of the river; but since the passage has been closed for large vessels they are taken to Agra, and from Agra to Surat, as are also some of the goods which are made at Lahore. As this carriage is very expensive, but few merchants go to make investments either at Multan or Lahore, and indeed many of the artisans have deserted; this has much diminished the revenues of the Emperor in these provinces. Multan is the place from whence all the Banians migrate who come to trade in Persia, where they follow the same occupation as the Jews, [...] and they surpass them in their usury.“53 Comparison of coin incidences for Multan and Thatta indeed shows a parallel gradual decline that began in the early 1660s and led, in the first decade of the 18th century, to an almost complete disappearance of coins struck in these two once important cities from the hoard evidence. Apart from natural causes, political factors probably also played a role. Not only was the Mughal north-west a less secure region in the late 17th century than in its fist half, but the long-distance caravan trade along the transcontinental Silk road also suffered due to political fragmentation and consequent turmoil which lasted until the middle of the 18th century. Overland trade shifted partly to the north, deeper into the Russian territory, and partly was redirected to the south to join and strengthen the increasingly busy maritime traffic.54 This trend, alluded to also in the passage quoted above, resulted around 1640 in the emergence of Gujarati mints as the most important suppliers of monetary silver to the Mughal empire. This second rise of Gujarat to prominence (the first occurred, as we have seen, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century) was to last until the middle of 1680s when the central mints located in the area of the present-day U.P. took over as as the most important production centres of silver coins. From the point of view of the U.P. hoard evidence, the second hegemony of Gujarat, or, to be more exact, of Surat, lasted for about 45 years. In the U.P. hoards, coins from this mint are abundant, if not dominant, until the early 1720s. Measured by the number of incidences, Surat emerges as the most important mint of the Sh€hjah€n… period.

Surat Considering the importance of maritime trade routes connecting the commercial centres of the Middle East with production centres in western India, the career of the mint located in Surat, the „bandar mub€rak“ (blessed port), as the Mughals used to call it, appears to have started surprisingly late. During the first period of intensive commercial activity (attested by numerous incidences of coins of Gujarati provenience) in the last two decades of Akbar’s reign, the only mint in Gujarat was located in the capital of Ahmadabad. Khambhat (spelled Khamb[h]ayat on coin legends), the most important port in the area and one of the most important trading centres in the Indian Ocean area in general, got its mint only during the J. B. Tavernier, Travels in India. Tr. by V. Ball. 2nd ed., vol. I., New Delhi 1995, pp. 73-74. See, M. Rossabi, The „decline“ of the central Asian caravan trade. In: J. Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires. Long-distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750. Cambridge, 1990, pp. 351-370. The parentheses in the title of the article may be slightly misleading: the decline is described as long-term and real. 53 54

94


reign of Sh€hjah€n (earliest Khambhayati coins found in the U.P. hoards date to his 21st regnal year, i.e. 1647/48) when its time of prominence had been long over. By this time, Surat appears to have been, at least on the evidence of coin incidences, the city with the single most productive mint in the whole empire. Although it was itself never an important manufacturing centre, Surat took over from Khambhayat its role of a provider of all sorts of commercial services necessary for the smooth functioning of export-oriented production of the Gujarati hinterland. Its career was, of course, made possible by its port capable of accommodating even large ocean-going ships. For Mughals, the city was important not only as a source of revenue from custom tolls and duties and as a gate through which increasing quantities of precious metals passed in order to feed the ever silver-hungry Mughal monetary system, but also as a place of embarkation for ships carrying every year Muslim pilgrims to Mecca.55 The first, still isolated specimens of Surati silver coinage found in U.P hoards are stamped with the date of the 5th year of Jah€ng…r (1610-1611). However, until the beginning of 1620s, the operation of the mint appears to have been intermittent at best; between 1615 and 1618 the striking of coins seems to have come to a complete standstill.56 More or less regular minting began only in 1619/1620; however, low number of incidences struck in the Surat mint in the 1620s in U.P. hoards point to low coin production - sharp increase is noticeable only after the accession of Sh€hjah€n to the Mughal throne. It was perhaps no accident that the mint was re-established shortly after the English East India Company and the Dutch Oost Indische Compagnie obtained in 1617 imperial farm€ns allowing them to establish their factories in Surat.57 However, the services of the newly opened mint were, for some unstated reason, found by the English factors unsatisfactory and the representatives of the Company tried hard to obtain permission to transport their silver rials of eight inland and to have them converted into rupees in the Ahmadabad mint. They succeeded in November 1621, after the aversion of the Governor to their request was removed by another farm€n.58 Reasons for this unpopularity of the Surat mint can be to some extent reconstructed from scattered remarks in the correspondence of the English and Dutch factors. It seems that the mint, formally supervised by a Mughal official, the d€roûa, was - perhaps from the start - controlled by a body of local moneychangers, the notorious sarr€fs (or „shroffs“ as the English regularly spelled this term) who were interested first of all in their own profit. 55 For general descriptions of the life of the city, its population and its sometimes turbulent history, see, B. G. Gokhale, Surat in the 17th Century. A Study in Urban History of pre-modern India. London/Malmö 1978; A. B. Radwan, The Dutch in Western India 1601-1632 - A Study of Mutual Accommodation. Calcutta 1978, esp. chap. 7; and A. Das Gupta’s excellent Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat: c. 1700-1750. Wiesbaden 1979. 56 Afzal {•€n, the d…w€n of Prince Khurram, reminded in a letter, dated 13.7. 1618, the governor of Surat that earlier he had written him „to take Coja Arab’s house for the Prince, being anciently his mint-house“ - a remark which seem to imply that at the time of writing the house did not serve as a mint. W. Foster (ed.), The English Factories in India 1618-1621. Oxford 1906, p. 36. 57 The Dutch got their farm€n in 1617, only slightly later in the same year when sir Thomas Roe succeeded in obtaining this privilege for the English E.I.C. A. B. Radwan, op. cit., pp. 36 and 123. 58 W. Foster, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 213, 238, 251, 292, 323. Revocation of the prohibition was announced in a letter by Th. Rastell to the Company, dated 7.11. 1621. Ibid., p. 325 and 331.


95

In order to force the Companies to use their help and services, they first - it seems that successfully - tried to make a direct access of the Companies to the mint difficult and unattractive and so to compel the Europeans to sell their imported bullion to them - in exchange for freshly minted coins in their possession. For this service the factors had to pay to the sarr€fs a charge; besides, it seems that the moneychangers who controlled the mint were by a privilege exempted from the obligation of paying the regular minting charges to the imperial treasury.59 Initial hurdles and misunderstandings were finally overcome and the system appears to have been working rather smoothly, as a report by an English factor, dated 1636, suggests: „Concerning the coyneing of your gould and silver into the species of this country, [it] is free for us, though not safe. Wee should have to doe with such dangerous people in the mint that wee dare not adventure; nor will the most cunning merchants of these parts upon any occasion, but sell all to the sharoffes, to whom it is most proper and are in that particular content with very small profitt; or if they should in anything bee unreasonable, wee have presente recourse unto the Governor, who will command speedy redresse, whereof wee have not long since had experience.“60


18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2

1658, 1658/59

1650, 1651

1654, 1654/55

1646/47, 1647

1642/43, 1643

1638/39, 1639

1635, 1635/36

1631, 1631/32

1627, 1627/28

1623, 1623/24

1619, 1619/20

1611/12

1615, 1616

1607, 1607/08

1603, 1603/04

1599, 1599/00

1595, 1595/96

1590/91, 1591

1583

1586/87, 1587

1579/80

1575/76, 1576

1571/72, 1572

1567/68, 1568

1563/64, 1564

1556

1559/60, 1560

0

year of mintage

Fig. 25. Incidences of Jah€ng…r… and Sh€hjah€n… silver coins minted at Surat in hoards of the U.P. 59 In 1661 Mustafa {•€n, the mutassad… of Surat, informed the emperor Aurangzeb that if the production of the mint were put under direct control of the state, it could yield an extra revenue amounting to Rs. 100 000 per year. The exact results of the ensuing conflict between the Governor and Surati financiers are not known; forty years later, however, the production of the mint was still controlled by the local sarr€fs. H. W. van Santen, De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie in Gujarat en Hindustan, 1620-1660. Meppel 1982, p. 80. 60 Francis Breton at Surat to the Company, April 29, 1636. W. Foster, op. cit., vol. I., p. 255.

96


In the first decade of the existence of the Surat mint the quantities of silver imported by the Companies were probably not very large. According to T. Raychaudhuri (quoted by A. Radwan), during a nineteen-year period between 1605 and 1624, the Dutch sent to western India a total of fl. 575 317 - a sum lower than the amount sent in 1629 or 1632/33 alone.61 The exact data on the E.I.C. trade that could be compared with the Dutch ones are not available, but other evidence suggests that in the 1620s their involvement in the Gujarat trade did not match that of the Dutch.62 As far as the Indian trade was concerned, the insecurity of the seas during this period (mentioned above in the section on Qandahar) led to a general shift to overland caravan routes - and consequently to a rise in the output of the northwestern mints, particularly that of Qandahar. Contemporaneous decline of Jah€ng…r… coin incidences from Ahmadabad (strengthened, admittedly, by the Sh€hjah€n’s order to remove from circulation all zodiacal and Nˆrjah€n… coins) suggests that the relatively poor performance of Surat mint in the 1620s was not due primarily to its possible initial lack of popularity among the merchants but had more general causes. The sudden increase in coin incidences in the first year of Sh€hjah€n (1628/29) - 12 cases compared to a single one for the immediately preceding year - probably signals the revitalization of commercial traffic in the western part of the Indian Ocean and marks the beginning of a generally ascending trend of coin incidences that culminates in the late 1640s; in the first year of Sh€hjah€n’s reign, however, the influence of massive reminting campaign which had to destroy all Nˆrjah€n… coins, has to be taken into account. From 11 Jah€ng…r… incidences struck in Surat between the years 1624 and 1627, 10 were issued either in the name of Nˆrjah€n or in the names of both Jah€ng…r and his wife. It seems, therefore, that fulfilling Sh€hjah€n’s order meant, in the case of Surat at least, reminting almost all the silver coin stock issued by this mint in the last four years; much of it probably still remained within the region served by the mint. The relative decline to a lower level that characterises the output in the following six years confirms this suspicion. As in the case of other mints located at the periphery of the empire, quantities of rupees struck in the Surat mint can be, with a great degree of certainty, understood as related to volumes of silver currently imported from abroad - with the exception of relatively short and identifiable periods when the above-mentioned reminting of older coins formed a significant part of the production of the mint. In contrast to north-western mints, however, where detailed information is relatively scarce, operation of Surat mint was from time to time commented upon by English A. B. Radwan, op. cit., pp. 98 and 124. In 1629 the V.O.C. sent to Surat fl. 612 560 and in 1632/33 fl. 700 000. One indicator of the strength and activity of both Companies in Asia is the number of vessels each of them had in the Indian Ocean; between 1621 and 1627 the number of ships of the E.I.C reached in the average one third of the number sailing under the flag of the V.O.C. Ibid., p. 73. The English factors often complained about the continuous shortage of ready money that stood in the way of further commercial expansion. See, for example, W. Foster, op. cit., 1624-29, pp. 201, 295-96, 300, 306, 307, 329, 331 for requests for shipments of more ready cash in order to pay debts to Indian creditors. In a letter of December 7, 1626, the President and factors in Surat complained that after paying off debts, providing goods for the southward voyages and purchasing provisions for the ships, the remaining cash will only suffice for lading home one vessel, although „the merchandize of India doth produce in England more then silke or ought you send from Persia.“ Ibid., pp. 163-164. 61 62


97

and Dutch factors; their reports show that at least some of the irregularities in the mint’s output (reflected by strongly fluctuating numbers of incidences) were caused by organizational problems or political events affecting the city or its immediate hinterland rather than by fluctuations in the influx of silver from abroad. The actual quantity of coins minted in a particular year must have been a result of several factors whose weight may have been changing from year to year. Unfortunately, the available data are not sufficient to make a systematic analysis of these various sets of factors feasible; they can, however, serve at least as informative examples. A recurring complaint of the English factors in the 1630s concerned the slow working of the mint whose capacity seems to have been insufficient for the vastly increased quantities of incoming silver.63 In the 1630s the English seem to have been unable to get from the mint more than 6000 rupees per day: in 1634 we are informed that „It was once brought to 9000; but since the Dutch became competitors, they have 3000 daily and our number is now discended to 5000;...“64 Two years later the situation was still the same: „...we must attend diverse moneths, if we have any competitors, or, if wee have the mint alone, we doe not receive above 6000 rupees dayly.“65 Not all the English silver had to be converted into rupees in the Surat mint: since the E.I.C. had now the permission to carry their uncoined bullion inland, its factors at Ahmadabad and Baroda could be supplied with reales of eighth or rixdaalers and convert them in the Ahmadabad mint where they could expect „suddaine dispatch“.66 It is impossible to say to what extent were these „bottlenecks“ in Surat caused by organizational incapability of the mint establishment and to what degree were these problems created artificially with the intention to force the merchants - at least the European ones - to seek the services of the local moneychangers and bankers. In this context it should be stressed that the role of these financial experts was not limited to exchange operations: both the English and the Dutch used the services of native brokers and financiers to transfer greater sums of money (tens of thousands of rupees) by bills of exchange (the so called hund…s) from one part of India to another characteristically from port cities to production centres located deep in the interior of the country. Not small part of the money invested in purchases of commodities was borrowed from the local bankers; these debts too could run into hundreds of thousands of rupees.67 63 See, W. Foster (ed.), op. cit., vol. IV, p. 103 (Letter of President Rastell and Council, dated at Surat 25.11. 1630 to the factors at Cambay containing i.a. the complaint about „the slow dispatch of quoinage in the mint“); vol. V, p. 68 (Letter of President Methwold and others to the Company, dated in Surat 29.12. 1634 complaining again that „Our greatest trouble, and no small losse (yet unavoidable) is the slowness of the mint...“);similar problems are reported later in 1636 - vol. V, p. 218 and 1642 - see vol. VII, p. 17. 64 Ibid., vol. V, p.68. 65 Ibid., vol. V, p. 218. 66 Ibid., and R. Maloni, European Merchant Capital and the Indian Economy. A Historical Reconstruction Based on Surat Factory Records 1630-1668. New Delhi 1992, pp. 160, 182, 258. 67 The debts of the English E.I.C. to Virji Vohra, the most prominent merchant of Surat, were said to amount to Rs. 30 000 in 1628 and Rs. 6 000 000 in 1669. B. G. Gokhale, op. cit., p. 141. The Dutch faced similar problems of liquidity: the time of arrival of the cash, often in insufficient quantities, was determined by the sailing season when prices of commodities were at their highest level and purchases had to be made under the least favourable conditions. By 1631 the debt of the V.O.C. to a wealthy merchant in Surat was said to be fl. 500 000 (approx. Rs. 670 000). A. B. Radwan, op. cit., pp. 95-96.

98


Borrowing on the local financial markets was but one way the Companies tried out to maximize their purchasing power and at the same time keep the imports of precious metals at the absolutely necessary minimum. Another strategy, pursued with great degree of success esp. by the Dutch, was to pay for the exports by imports of commodities rather than by cash. For the Dutch, Gujarat together with Coromandel was important as a source of relatively cheap textiles which could be exchanged in the Indonesian archipelago for spices sold in turn with great monopoly profits in India, Middle East and Europe. Total of imported silver and gold (in thousands of guldens) 1628-29 1635-36 1636-37 1637-38 1638-39 1639-40 1640-41 1641-42

560 660 450 411 823 1000 707 1148

Per cent of all imports ? ? ? ? ? ? 70% 84%

Total of imported silver and gold (in thousands of guldens) 1642-43 1643-44 1644-45 1645-46 1647-48 1650-51 1655-56 1656-57

632 863 961 538 217 519 474 321

Per cent of all imports 78% ? 71% 69% 35% 53% 40% 30%

Tab. 7. Estimate of gold and silver imports in Surat by the V.O.C. (Source: H. W. van Santen, De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie in Gujarat en Hindustan, 1620-1660, p. 37.)

Both the Dutch and the English soon realized the great opportunity which presented itself when the Spain after the end of the Twelve years’ truce in 1621 imposed embargo on the imports of American indigo and thus substantially raised its price on European markets.68 The Sarkhej and Biana indigo was now worth purchasing directly with cash; and the imports of silver consequently grew. The Dutch, who were able in the second half of the 1630s to gain access to Japanese silver, were in a much better position than the English. Until the middle of the 1640s they financed 70 to 80 per cent of their purchases in Gujarat with imported silver. Only from the second half of the 1640s did they return to their original policy of exchanging goods for goods - and with great deal of success, as we shall see. H. W. van Santen was able to reconstruct from Dutch sources the imports of goods and precious metals by V.O.C. in the years 1628/29 to 1659/60 to Surat.69 The totals of imported gold and silver, relevant to the theme pursued here, have been extracted from a more detailed table and presented in a simplified form above. It should be perhaps added that in the years 1638-39, 1640-41 and 1641-42 the share of Japanese silver in the total gold and silver imported into Surat (separate data for gold and silver are not available) reached approximately 86%. Unfortunately, we don’t have comparable set of data for the precious metals imported in the same period by the E.I.C. (the data collected by K. N. Chaudhuri in his monograph of the East India Company begin only in 1660) and, of course, none for silver imported by Indian merchants on their own ships from the Middle East in exchange for Indian textiles 68 69

J. Israel, The Dutch Primacy in the World Trade. Oxford 1989, p.178. H. W. van Santen, op. cit., p. 37.


99

and other commodities. I have been able to find one isolated piece of information on this point, contained in a letter written by English factors at Surat to the Company in January 1642. The letter says, i.a. that „Some daies before your ships brought these [rials and 6 482 1/2 „rex dollars“], upwards of 1 700 000 r[ial]s were landed from the junkes returned from Mocha“; for Indian merchants this must have been a successful season. By coincidence, in the same year the Dutch imports of precious metals reached their peak, the silver from Japan amounting to nearly one million guldens. The sharp increase of coin incidences from Surat in the year 1641/42 may be due to this coincidence. J. J. Brennig was able to put together data on silver imports into Surat in the season of 1643/44, extracted from the V.O.C. records. In this year the total imports of silver by Asian merchants, the Dutch and the English are stated to have amounted to 1 071 246 rials (i.e. 26 795 kg of silver) - substantially less than the imports by Indian merchants alone two years before reported above.70 Interestingly, the number of coin incidences struck in 1643/44 is considerably lower than of those minted in 1641/42 - 7 pieces of the latter date compared to 12 of the former. We may only guess that the peak shown by the incidences record in 1647/48 was perhaps due to similar coincidence - however, as the data in the table show, at this time the Dutch contribution would have been much smaller. The output of the Surat mint in the 1650s, i.e. in the last decade of Sh€hjah€n’s rule, appears to have been relatively stable. On the other hand, decline in the number of incidences from the Ahmadabad suggest that this mint was quickly losing its former importance; similar, although slower decline is noticeable in the case of Thatta. Surat now emerged as a single most important mint in western India and together with Lahore and Multan supplied most of the new silver infused in the form of rupees into the Mughal monetary system. The data on Dutch silver imports in the second part of 1640s and in the 1650s do not form a continuous series; however, they suffice to show a clearly declining trend in the precious metals imports and growing share of imports of goods. This trend culminated in the second half of the 17th century when the V.O.C., thanks to her successful sales of goods, became a net exporter of silver from Surat (silver which usually ended up in Bengal and therefore did not leave the Mughal monetary system).71 Even when we take into account the growing involvement of the English E.I.C., it seems evident that behind the stable and relatively high output of the Surat mint in this period must be seen the commercial networks and generally active trade balance of indigenous Surati merchants.72 Not only the bare number of incidences but also their temporal distribution - their presence in hoards formed long after Sh€hjah€n’s death, in fact up to the end of the first third of the 18th century, testifies to the extraordinary numerical strength of coin population issued in Surat during the regnal period of Sh€hjah€n.73 J. J. Brennig, Silver in Seventeenth-century Surat, p. 480. H. W. van Santen, op. cit., p. 38. 72 J. J. Brennig, op. cit., pp. 481-482. According to Brennig, the expansion of Asian trade (i.e. trade conducted by non-European merchants) in the second half of the 17th century reduced the European share of silver imports to Surat from a possible 50 % in the 1640s to mere 17 % at the beginning of the 18th century. The case of Surat seems to be different from that of Bengal, where the European silver imports grew in relative as well as absolute terms. 73 See the synoptic table of Sh€hjah€n… coins in hoards in Appendix III at the end of the book. 70 71

100


Patna First coins from the Patna mint which occur in the U.P. hoards are dated, interestingly, to the turbulent years of 1579/80 and 1580/81 when Akbar had to fight hard in Bihar to suppress the uprising of part of his aristocracy. On the evidence of earliest Patna silver coins registered in museums’ catalogues it can be inferred with some confidence that the mint was established in 1574 or 1575; this event was probably related to the Mughal conquest of Bengal, a process which was well under way in the same years.74 During the rest of Akbar’s reign the activity of this mint appears to have been low and intermittent. In later times Patna was an important intermediate point connecting core regions of the empire and its important consumption centres with the trade and production areas of Bengal; as long as the situation in Bengal remained unsettled, the intermediary role of Patna was weakened.


12 10 8 6 4 2

1759, 1759/60

1750, 1750/51

1742, 1742/43

1733, 1733/34

1724, 1724/25

1715, 1715/16

1706, 1706/07

1697, 1697/98

1688, 1688/89

1679/80, 1680

1671, 1671/72

1662, 1662/63

1653, 1653/54

1644/45, 1645

1636, 1636/37

1627, 1627/28

1618, 1618/19

1609, 1609/10

1600, 1600/01

1590/91, 1591

1582, 1582/83

1573/74, 1574

1564/65, 1565

1556

0

year of m intage

Fig. 26. Incidences of silver coins minted in Patna in the years 1556-1760 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P.

It is therefore hardly accidental that higher frequency of incidences of Patna coins in hoards coincides with consolidation of Mughal power in Bengal during the reign of Jah€ng…r. Indeed, authors of both the Lahore and Calcutta coin catalogues conclude, on the evidence of the number of Jah€ng…r… coins from Patna in the possession of these two museums, that the mint under Jah€ng…r must have been very active.75 Both were led to this conclusion by H.N. Wright, Catalogue of the Coins in the Indian Museum, Calcutta, p. lxxii. Ibid., and R.B. Whitehead, Catalogue of Coins in the Panjab Museum, Lahore, p. lxii. Whitehead appears to have taken over most of the statements made by Wright on Patna verbatim into his own overview. 74 75

Mints of the Sh€hjah€n… Period : Patna

101

the fact that Patna silver coins from the era of Jah€ng…r outnumber silver coins issued by this mint in the ruling period of any other Mughal emperor. In the Lahore collection, for example, there are 15 Jah€ng…r… coins compared to bare 9 Sh€hjah€n…, 11 Aurangzeb… and 9 FarruÇsiy€r…; Calcutta museum owned 31 Jah€ng…r… rupees (including those issued in the name of Nˆrjah€n), but only 20 Sh€hjah€n…, the same number of Aurangzeb… and 7 FarruÇsiy€r… silver coins. On such evidence, one can easily conclude that the golden period of the Patna mint has to be placed into the regnal period of Jah€ng…r, in the 1610s and 1620s. However, the evidence drawn from hoards, even though it too reflects the mint’s ascendancy during these years, conveys a fairly different overall picture: the mint seems to have been most active during the reign of Sh€hjah€n, went through a period of relative depression in the era of Aurangzeb and intensified its activity again in the short period from 1705 to 1715. This is a rather different picture from that presented by A. Hasan who based her research on museum catalogues.76 The reason of this difference is the more varied coinage of Jah€ng…r: the Il€h… dating makes from every month’s issue a distinct coin population whose specimens are sought after by museums as well as private collectors. With these selection criteria, relatively uniform coinages of later monarchs are at a significant disadvantage.77 In contrast to Surat, our knowledge of the operation of the Patna mint, derived from European published written sources, is practically nil.78 Patna was a centre of a wider area specializing in weaving cotton textiles for export and also an important market for saltpetre produced in the adjacent region. The Dutch began to buy and export this strategically important substance after they had been granted a farm€n allowing them to trade in this strategic commodity in 1638. By the middle of the 17th century the English joined them and Bihar became a main supplier of saltpetre for the apparently insatiable European market.79 In 1675-76, for example, saltpetre amounted to 38% of the total value of cargo exported by the Dutch V.O.C. from Bengal to Holland, the total value of all V.O.C. exports from this region in that year being fl. 318 000.80

*** If silver coin incidences are more or less reliable indicators of the output of the Patna mint, however, we have to conclude that there is no direct positive relation between the growing European interest in the region in the second half of the century on the one hand and coin production of the Patna mint on the other. Indeed, the contrary seems to be the case - our coin evidence shows the last third of the 17th century to be a period of relative decline of A. Hasan, Mints of the Mughal Empire, pp. 338-339. For more detailed discussion of this point, see the section dealing with various approaches to statistical processing of Mughal silver coins in Part One of this study. 78 Some information may be contained in letters of Dutch and English factors residing in Patna to their superiors; for the period in question, however, one can hardly expect more than few incidental remarks. For published correspondence containing several passages on Patna, see W. Foster (ed.), The English Factories in India, vols. dealing with the years 1620-21, 1655-60, 1661-64, 1665-67 and 1668-69 (in the intervening years a permanent E.I.C. factory in Patna did not exist). 79 K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World, p. 337 an O. Prakash, The Dutch East India Company, pp. 58-60. 80 O. Prakash, ibid., p. 200. 76 77

102


the mint. Unless new evidence becomes available, we may live with the hypothesis that longerterm fluctuations in the Patna mint output were caused by a changing intensity of the Bengal trade (and consequent fluctuating intensity of silver imports) in so far as this was under direct control of Indian merchants and perhaps also by factors of administrative and organizational nature; direct involvement of European companies in the saltpetre production that would require shipments of E.I.C. or V.O.C. silver into the region, is not very probable. It was only in the Sh€hjah€n… era and in a brief period during the reign of Sh€h ³lam I. and FarruÇsiy€r that the output of the Patna mint contributed in a more significant way to the formation of the current coin stock. Even in the early Sh€hjah€n… period, marked by a general increase of coin output, the number of incidences of coins from Patna mint is considerably lower than the number of coins struck in the more distant Lahore or Surat. Despite the growing commercial importance of Bengal and increasing European silver imports into this region from the middle of the 17th century, in the U.P. hoards horizon the coins from eastern mints are never dominant. In fact, as the 17th century drew to an end, their real share in the total Mughal coin output decreased: at its close it was hardly more than 10% while in the 1620s and 1630s it may have been twice as much. Moreover, it is possible that real overall shares may have been even somewhat lower - the structure of coin stock of the U.P. reconstructed with the help of hoards deposited in this area (where coins from local or nearby mints are possibly over-represented) may not have been identical with the - necessarily average - total coin stock structure of the much larger Mughal empire.

5. Mints During the Reign of Aurangzeb (1658-1707) As far as the history of the Mughal silver coin stock is concerned, the long era of the reign of Aurangzeb can be divided roughly in two periods of unequal length and marked by two mutually opposing tendencies in the overall activity of silver mints. In the first, lasting until the middle of the 1670s, the stagnation characteristic of the middle and late years of the Sh€hjah€n… period changes into a more perceptible decline - at least this is what the incidences evidence shows us. The turning point when this trend was reversed appears to have been reached in 1674 or 1675; from then on, numbers of incidences grow - at first, until the middle of 1680s, rather slowly and hesitatingly; around the middle of Aurangzeb… era they jump suddenly upwards and then fluctuate around a level twice as high as that which prevailed in the 1660s and 1670s. This increase appears to have been accompanied by a marked shift in the coin output of different regions of the empire - our hoard evidence shows a phenomenal increase in the incidences of coins struck in central mints and simultaneous decline of incidences from the more distant regions. This development, noticeable both in absolute and relative terms, calls for an explanation. The long-term stagnation of coin production characterizing the later Sh€hjah€n… period and a possible overall decline of the activity of the mints in the first fifteen years of the Aurangzeb… era may have led to a general stagnation or even a decline of the volume of the

Mints of the Aurangzeb… Period

103

Mughal silver coin stock. A method of estimating the development of the total coin stock volume will be introduced in a later section; at this place a mention should be made of a peculiar commercial activity of the Mughal government in the last Sh€hjah€n… decade and first two years of Aurangzeb. Studying the reports of the Dutch V.O.C. factors based at Surat, H. W. van Santen discovered an interesting piece of information concerning an official Mughal involvement into the trade with the Middle East. According to a report written by the V.O.C. director at Surat, in 1651 Sh€hjah€n ordered to build ten or twelve big ships which had to transport Indian goods to Persia and Mokha and possibly to monopolize the carrying trade to these areas. To make his move more effective, Sh€hjah€n forced the merchants to send their goods on his ships to the Middle East markets even when the profit they earned by this was only marginal. The factor explained the motives standing behind this policy in the following words: „His aim is to sell cotton goods produced in Hindustan and Gujarat (in which profession most of his subjects have to make a living) and thus attract an enormous sum of Spanish pieces of eight and ducats to his realm (the Mughal empire having no gold or silver mines of its own).“81

NORTHWEST GUJARAT AND SINDH MALWA AND RAJASTHAN CENTRAL EAST DECCAN TOTAL

65 60 55 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5

1707, 1707/08

1703, 1703/04

1705, 1705/06

1701, 1701/02

1699, 1699/00

1697, 1697/98

1695, 1695/96

1693, 1693/94

1691, 1691/92

1689, 1689/90

1687, 1687/88

1685, 1685/86

1683, 1683/84

1681, 1682

1679/80, 1680

1676

1677/78, 1678

1674

1672, 1672/73

1670, 1670/71

1668, 1668/69

1666, 1666/67

1664, 1664/65

1662, 1662/63

0 1660, 1660/61


70

year of m intage

Fig. 27. Incidence of Mughal silver coins minted in the years 1660-1707 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P. 81 H. W. van Santen, Trade between Mughal India and the Middle East, and Mughal Monetary Policy, c. 1600-1660. In: K.R. Haellquist (ed.), Asian Trade Routes: Continental and Maritime. London 1991, p. 93.

104


Accepting this explanation, van Santen asks about possible reasons of the timing of this new official policy. Was this measure, resembling the contemporary monetarist policies of some European states, a reaction to the steadily declining Dutch imports of gold and silver? And was its abandonment in the early 1660s a sign of what he calls „the big „push“ (i.e. return to higher silver imports) in the 1650s? Stressing the fact that so far too little is known about Mughal policy and Indian economy, he does not offer any definitive answer. The author of these lines feels little confidence to overstep the limits of this publicly stated modesty; what can be offered here, is only an attempt to see the Mughal policy in the context of monetary developments suggested by our graph. If we take the coin incidences as an indicator of silver imports, in the last decade of Sh€hjah€n’s reign the expanding Mughal economy may have indeed faced a shortage of monetary metals caused by weaker silver influx; our evidence shows, however, that this stagnation was due more to the gradual decline of north-western mints rather than those of Gujarat. Moreover, as we have seen, the Dutch imports formed only a part, even though an important one, of the whole picture. Closer study of the Middle Eastern markets in the third quarter of the 17th century could perhaps help answer the question whether the stagnation was due solely to internal Indian developments or whether there were other, external causes. As far as the apparent decline of the north-western mints is concerned, internal developments in the region can go a long way towards explaining this adverse trend. From the second half of the 1660s the north-west frontier region was again in a turmoil caused by an Afghan uprising started by the Yˆsufz€… tribe early in the 1667. Mughal authorities were quick in restoring order but the peace did not last long. In 1672 the conflict flared up again, this time on a much greater scale. The Afr…d… and Khattak clans joined their forces and for three years blocked the Khyber pass and repulsed successfully all Mughal military expeditions sent into the area. In 1674 the situation became so alarming that Aurangzeb himself felt compelled to proceed to Peshawar to direct in person the military operations.82 These developments must have affected unfavourably the trade along the routes passing through this area. Another factor which may have influenced unfavourably the commercial exchange between India and Persia was the deteriorating security situation in the latter country which affected, if we are to believe a contemporary report, the members of the expatriate Indian business community.83 Around the end of the first half of the 17th century the golden age of the overland Indo-Persian trade seems to have been over; trading continued but had to cope with greater risks and more frequent occurrence of unpredictable situations than before. However, the lower output of the north-western mints, very pronounced especially in the 1660s and 1670s, should not itself serve as a sufficient explanation of the declining overall trend. In a period of trading conjuncture in the 1620s and 1630s, even serious interruptions of trade due to wars did not affect significantly the generally high level of commercial exchange: as we have seen, trade shifted from insecure or dangerous routes to safer R. C. Majumdar (gen. ed.), The Mughul Empire. (The History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. 7.) Bombay 1974, pp. 230-232. 83 S. F. Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, p. 94. 82

Mints of the Aurangzeb… Period : Surat

105

ones - a development observable in the sudden increases of incidences of the north-western mints in the decade 1612-1622 which at that time obviously compensated for the temporary slump of the mints fed by silver from the maritime trade. The sudden increase of Surati incidences in 1667, the year of the first Afghan rebellion, may be perhaps understood as to be due, at least partly, to a temporary shift of the overland commerce to the maritime route. In the first half of 1670s, however, the trend shown by Gujarati incidences does not appear to include an element of compensation for the declining north-west. As we shall presently see, Gujarat and Surat, its first commercial centre, too were afflicted with serious security problems and disruptions of trade. The two more dramatic short-term slumps in the overall trend in 1662/63 and 1668/69 appear to have been caused by sudden falls of Gujarati coin incidences, or, to be more exact, of those of Surat. As will be shown further below, both were in all probability effects of two Shivaji’s sacks of Surat in 1664 and 1670. And it was Surat again that was able to push, by its strongly increased minting activity in the second half of the 1660s, the overall trend curve in the upward direction. As its subsequent decline in the first half of the 1670s was not compensated by increases in the activity of other regions, the net result appears to have been an overall decline of Mughal coin output. Again, Surat deserves a closer look.

Surat Activity of the Surat mint in the era of Aurangzeb, reflected by numbers of incidences in hoards of the U.P., shows, esp. in the first twenty years of his rule, more dramatic fluctuations than in the preceding and apparently more stable era of Sh€hjah€n. Attempts at interpretation of the now more jagged curve of Surati incidences have to take into account a new factor the military situation in the Deccan and a lower degree of security which the Mughal power was now able to guarantee to the city and its hinterland. Whereas in the 1620s the problems which the Gujarati commerce had to face lay in the declining security of the sea-lanes in the western part of the Indian Ocean, in the 1660s the greatest danger to Gujarati prosperity came from its own hinterland. In the first half of the 1660s and again in the 1670 the greatest security problem in the area was the Maratha insurgency led by Shiv€j…: against the hit-and-run tactics of his highly mobile bands the Mughal military machine seemed to be nearly powerless. As far as Surat was concerned, the first period of Shivaji’s activity culminated in the four days from 6th to 10th of January 1664 when the Maratha raiders attacked and subsequently completely looted the city, totally unprepared for such eventuality and unable to put up any effective resistance.84 Shivaji’s booty was estimated at ten million rupees85 this is the assessment of English factors which includes also the evaluation of great number of precious stones, pearls and gold coins. As far as silver rupees are concerned, Anthony 84 For a description of the raid see, e.g. J. Sarkar, Shivaji and his Times. Calcutta 1952, pp. 92-100. More detailed eyewitness accounts by the English factors can be found in W. Foster (ed.), The English Factories in India 1661-1664. Oxford 1923, pp. 296-316. 85 Ibid., pp. 303, 307.

106


Smith estimated in his account their quantity at 2 or 2,5 million, great number of them looted in the house of Virji Vohra, the first merchant in the city: „When hee came away, hee could not [but] guess, by the mony heaped up in tow great heapes before Sevagee his tent, than that hee had plundered 20 or 25 lack of rupees: that the day when hee came away in the morning there was brought in neere upon 300 porters, laden each with 2 baggs of rupees, and some hee guessed to be gold: that thay brought in 28 sere of large pearle, with many other jewells, great diamonds, rubies and emeralds ... and these, with an increedable quantety of mony, they found at the house of the reputed richest marchant in the wourld (his name is Verge Vora, his estate haveing beene esteemed to bee 80 lack of rupees): that they were still, every hower while hee was there, bringing in loods of mony from his house. His disire of mony is soe great that he spares noe barbour[ou]s cruelty to extort confessions from his prisoners; whips them most cruely, threatens death, and often executeth it, if thay doe not produce soe much as hee thinks they may or disires they should; at least cutts off one hand, sometymes both.“86 Another report assessed the booty to be „above a million and halfe of mony“, adding by way of explanation, „Suratt not haveing been soe rich, not in many yeares before“.87 The accounts leave us with the impression that the looting was so thorough and effective that very little or perhaps no money of other objects of value were left in the burning and nearly deserted city. Graph of incidences shows that the financial crisis, although short, must have been acute. In all the hoards of the U.P. there is not a single incidence of a rupee struck in Surat in A.H. 1073 (i.e. between 16.8. 1662 and 4.8. 1663) and a single one bearing the date 1074 (5.8. 1663 to 24.7. 1664) - in „normal“ years five to ten incidences are quite common. In fact, in a century between 1619 and 1723 our graph registers only two cases of a total absence of Surati coins from U.P. hoards: the first in 1628, caused most probably by massive reminting of Nˆrjah€n… coins (discussed above) and the second in 1662/63. Shivaji appears to have carried away the total output of the Surat mint from the preceding 18 months that still remained in the city. In the previous section a remark was made on the practice of local moneychangers to keep in reserve greater quantities of fresh coins which could be subsequently offered, at a more or less acceptable rate, to merchants importing silver bullion from abroad and trying to escape the long delays caused by the slow operation of the mint. These reserves now appear to have been carried away together with other movable wealth of Virji Vohra - this may have been the second largest treasury of the empire. The fact that nothing or almost nothing of this huge amount of money found its way to the north of course does not mean that it disappeared altogether: only an analysis of silver coin hoards from Maharashtra could help us follow the path of this immense booty. It is possible that at least part of it left, for longer time if not for ever, the Mughal monetary system. The commercial activity of the city soon turned to normal as did the general security situation when the treaty of Purandar in 1665 put a temporary stop on the Maratha raiding 86 87

Ibid., pp. 308-309. Ibid., p. 306.

Mints of the Aurangzeb… Period : Surat

107

and plundering activities. Overseas trade was not adversely affected and the years 1665 and 1666 appear to have been quite successful for the unhappy city. Surati merchants, working hard to recoup their losses, did not realize that they were just saving wealth and money for another Maratha looting expedition against the city that was to take place on the 3rd of October 1670. This time, the booty was reported to be somewhat less - around 66 l€khs of rupees (6.6 million) in cash, pearls and other precious articles.88 Cash, uncoined precious metals and other objects of high value (precious stones, pearls) appear to have formed a regular part of portfolios of Indian merchants; the strategy of diversifying assets was a way of insuring against losses in commerce which could ultimately ruin the merchant and his family and lead to a fatal loss of credit.

12 10 8 6 4 2

1758, 1758/59

1753, 1753/54

1748, 1748/49

1744

1739, 1739/40

1734, 1734/35

1729, 1729/30

1724, 1724/25

1719, 1719/20

1714/15, 1715

1709, 1709/10

1704, 1704/05

1699, 1699/00

1694, 1694/95

1689, 1689/90

1684, 1684/85

1679/80, 1680

1675

1670, 1670/71

1665, 1665/66

0 1660, 1660/61


14

year of mintage

Fig. 28. Incidences of silver coins minted at Surat in the years 1660-1760 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P.

After two thorough plunders of Surat in six years, when it became obvious that Shivaji’s men could loot without encountering any opposition from the imperial troops, it was in the first place the Mughal government who lost a great deal of its credit as effective provider of security - and of course, a great deal of prestige too. In 1666 and again in 1667, inhabitants of Surat, alarmed at the news of Shivaji’s escape from the Mughal court, were twice at the point of leaving the city in expectation of another raid.89 In 1672, citizens of Surat were prepared to pay a chauth which Shivaji demanded in exchange for leaving the city alone. 88 89

J. Sarkar, op. cit. pp. 170-175. W. Foster, The English Factories in India 1665-1667. Oxford 1925, pp. 171, 172, 176, 268-269.

108


The reason the necessary amount was not paid out in the end was the conviction of the merchants that the money would be embezzled by the Mughal governor who was to act as an intermediary in this business.90 Frequent alarms had a very adverse effect on the position of Surat in the long-distance trade as well as in the local commercial network connecting the city with production centres in the hinterland.91 J. Sarkar enumerated, after close study of the Surat Factory Records, several waves of panic which effectively disrupted the trade and financial prosperity of Surat in the 1670s: November and December 1670, February, June and October 1672, September 1673, October 1674, December 1679.92 A glance at the graph of Surat incidences in the 1670s confirms this gloomy picture: the activity of the mint appears to have been at a very low ebb, comparable only to the meagre output in first half of the 1620s. In contrast to this earlier period, however, now the danger was not hidden beyond the blue horizon of the Arabian Sea but loomed large all the time just behind the poor fortification walls of the city itself. In the middle of the 1670s, the low level of coin incidences is typical not only for Surat but applies, as we have already seen, to the sum total of all coin incidences from all mints in the empire. At this time the English factors at Surat reported a general scarcity of money in the whole of India. The great scarcity of rupees in Surat was ascribed to wars and illgovernment, to a bad commercial season which failed to bring sufficient quantities of silver from Mocha, Basra and Persia and also to Dutch exports of silver coins from Surat to Bengal which, as far as the Dutch were concerned, gradually rose to a position of the most important trading region in the whole of Asia.93 It is obvious that few bad seasons in the western part of the Indian Ocean together with Surat’s problems with Shiv€j… could not by themselves bring about a general, all-Indian scarcity of silver currency. For this to happen, there must have been a long-term deficit in imports, too low to cover losses due to natural attrition of the coin stock, exports and hoarding (in the form of coins and perhaps even more in the form of ornaments and other precious objects). Both the long-term stagnation of the incidences curve characterising the later years of Sh€hjah€n… period and a decline visible in the first fifteen years of Aurangzeb’s reign suggest that the net result may have been a gradual decline in the total volume of the Mughal silver coin stock. J. Sarkar, op. cit., pp. 187-188. J. Sarkar, op. cit., p. 174 describes the position of Surat after the second raid in these words: „The trade of this, the richest port of India, was practically destroyed. For several years after Shivaji’s withdrawal from it, the town used to throb with panic every now and then, whenever any Mar€tha force came within a few day’s march of it, or even at false alarms of their coming. On every such occasion the merchants would quickly remove their goods to the ships, the citizens would flee to the villages, and the Europeans would hasten to Swally. Business was effectually scared away from Surat, and inland producers hesitated to send their goods to this the greatest emporium of Western India.“ 92 Ibid., p. 175. 93 K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company 1660-1760. Cambridge 1978, p. 179. For the Dutch exports of silver from Surat to Bengal, see also H. W. van Santen, De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie in Gujarat en Hindustan, 1620-1660, p. 38. 90 91

Aurangzeb… Period : The Central Mints

109

According to K.N. Chaudhuri, this financial crisis of 1675 may have induced the imperial and provincial treasuries to release their accumulated gold stocks - a move which may have brought about a sudden fall in the silver price of gold one year later.94 Unfortunately, our hoards are not the right type of source to answer this question. As far as silver is concerned, however, starting with 1675 our evidence suggests a somewhat increased activity of the central mints (the mint in Delhi/Shahjahanabad appears to have contributed with the greatest share of coins), an activity which lasts until 1679 and thus creates an impression of a real, if temporal, change in the coin output levels rather than of a mere accidental fluctuation. Interestingly, the incidences of coins from central mints return to their previous lower level in 1680, the same year when the number of Gujarati incidences rises again after the turbulent 1670s were over: relieved of the constant danger of Maratha raids after the death of Shivaji in 1680 and of the subsequent Mughal offensive against the Maratha forces, Surat mint now returns to its older pattern of generally high output marked by strong year-to year fluctuations. Behind these fluctuations a gradual, long-term declining trend is noticeable, then, in 1723 came a sudden end: Surati coins struck in this and the following years are almost totally absent from the U.P. hoards record; as far as central parts of the empire are concerned, coins struck in Surat after 1723 must have been rarities. As the mint in Surat continued to issue coins, possibly in not small quantities, even after this date95, the causes for their abrupt disappearance from the north Indian hoard evidence have to be sought in the political sphere: first of all in the fact that in this year Gujarat was irretrievably lost to the disintegrating Mughal empire. This, together with general insecurity of roads connecting this maritime province with the north Indian hinterland, apparently led to an abrupt termination of established fiscal ties and possibly even to a breakdown of direct commercial contacts between the two regions.

The Rise of Central Mints The time span between the late 1670s and the late 1680s can be interpreted as a period of moderate commercial conjuncture that brought more silver to Gujarati and to a lesser extent also to north-western mints; on the other hand, the developments of the periods which follow are much more difficult to interpret. In the second half of the 1680s, we can observe Ibid., pp. 178-179. Even after the mid-1720s, Surat mint continued its operation, often clogged by incoming silver. See, A. Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, 1700-1750. Wiesbaden 1978, pp.47-49. Coins minted in Surat after 1723 can be found also in coin catalogues of major coin collections: in the catalogues of the museum of Lahore, Calcutta and British Museum in London, for example, there are specimens of Surati silver coins struck even after the fifth year of Muhammad Sh€h’s rule. Compared with the early years of his reign and also with regnal periods of his predecessors, these coins do not constitute a continuous time series. Regnal years 9,11, 13, 14 or 15, 16, 18 or 19, 21 to 25, 28 and 29 are absent from all three collections. Moreover, these catalogues do not contain any Surati silver coins minted in the regnal periods of Ahmad Sh€h and ³lamg…r II. Either the production of the mint in Surat really declined considerably after 1750 or perhaps the collections of the three museums mentioned above were supplied predominantly with coins found in north Indian hoards. 94 95

110


30 Agra Itaw a

25

Shahjahanabad Bareli

20

15

10

5

1759, 1759/60

1756, 1756/57

1753, 1753/54

1750, 1750/51

1747/48, 1748

1744/45, 1745

1742, 1742/43

1739, 1739/40

1736, 1736/37

1733, 1733/34

1730, 1730/31

1727, 1727/28

1724, 1724/25

1721, 1721/22

1718, 1718/19

1715, 1715/16

1712/13, 1713

1709, 1709/10

1706, 1706/07

1703, 1703/04

1700, 1700/01

1697, 1697/98

1694, 1694/95

1691, 1691/92

1688, 1688/89

1685, 1685/86

1682, 1682/83

0 1679/80, 1680


a sharp increase of coin incidences from the central mints: in the period 1689-1710 this increase appears to have been due mainly to a prodigious output of the newly established mint in Itawa, supplemented by a less spectacular but nevertheless significant expansion of the production of mints in Agra/Akbarabad and Delhi/Shahjahanabad. After the death of Aurangzeb, numbers of incidences from the Itawa mint gradually decline and the mint of Shahjahanabad rises to a position of absolute dominance which was to last until the end of the period under investigation, i.e. 1760. Coins minted until about 1720 in the more distant major mints of Surat, Lahore or Patna still appear in the U.P. hoards; after this date they are either very rare or completely absent from the U.P. hoard horizon. Their place was taken over by coins issued by the newly established mints of Bareli, Lakhnau, Kora, Banaras and Farrukhabad.

year of mintage

Fig. 29. Incidences of coins from major central mints minted in the years 1680-1760 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P.

It was A. Hasan who, for the first time, drew attention to the apparently strange phenomenon of a huge increase in the number of issues from central mints in the late years of Aurangzeb’s reign.96 She pointed out, quite correctly as it seems, that this increase cannot be explained solely in terms of some massive reminting campaign - increases are observable not only in the numbers of coins but also in the number of mints. It would be indeed hard to 96

A. Hasan, Mints of the Mughal Empire, p. 327.


111

believe that all these new mints were fed solely or mostly by older silver coins brought to remint. Moreover, as our own analysis of hoards shows, even in the era of predominance of the central mints, older issues of the major „frontier“ mints do not disappear altogether: they are not infrequently found even in late hoards. Obviously, at the time of their formation, certain quantity of these older coins must have still formed part of the circulating coin stock. Aurangzeb… coins from Surat, for example, are present in 8 hoards (one of them being an old-savings hoard) out of 14 formed in the pentad 1710-15; in 6 hoards (including one old-savings hoard) out of 12 formed in the pentad 1715-20; in 7 hoards (including two oldsavings hoards) out of 14 hoards formed in the years 1720-25; in 6 (including 3 old-savings hoards) out of 11 buried in the pentad 1725-30; even as late as 1740-45 these coins appear in 4 hoards (one old savings hoard in this number) out of the total of 19. In short, older Surati issues do not appear solely in the old-savings hoards where their presence is quite natural (but, of course, not representative of the structure of the current stock). What is perhaps equally significant, late hoards contain not only specimens of once undoubtedly huge coin populations from the most active mints in the empire but also pieces from lesser mints - Multan, Khambayat, Rajmahal/ Akbarnagar and others. This relatively long persistence of older coins does not make a hypothesis of a massive and systematic reminting policy very plausible. As we have seen, there certainly were reminting campaigns (apart from the „normal“ remints motivated by the desire to get rid of worn or otherwise devalued coins, affecting hardly more than one or two per cent of the current stock per year)97 - but these appear to have been rather selective and of short duration. Therefore, the huge increase in coin incidences after 1680 must have been caused mainly by influx of new silver from abroad, silver which, for some reason, evaded the mints located at the periphery of the empire and was converted into coins only after it had reached the central parts of the empire. Supplies of silver could be in form of payments for goods purchased there and subsequently exported to other regions, if the trade balance of the central region was active; some silver was certainly remitted to the central imperial treasury in the course of operation of the established imperial revenue system. Where, then, did the silver come from? Certainly not from the north-west whose trade with the Central Asia and Middle East via the overland routes was marked by a long-term decline; Gujarat does not seem to be a suitable candidate either. The trade conducted by Indian merchants from this port recuperated after the turbulent 1670s were over and the main scene of the A. Hasan, in her Silver Currency Output, p. 100, has calculated the remintage at 2,5% (at the inverse compound rate) of coins in circulation per year, while S. Moosvi, in The Silver Influx, p.76-77 argues in favour of a more conservative estimate of mere 1% per year at a simple rate. On the basis of available evidence - one coin inventory - and a relatively low number of hoards included in it is not possible to arrive at a reliable value; the margin of error would be too great. This introduces an inevitable distorting element in all attempts at an estimation of the volume of the coin stock; this can be to some extent corrected by inclusion of the „normal“ or „regular“ losses by remints into the total loss rate: this can be set at, for example, one, two, three, four or five per cent per year. Application of different rates will then result in alternative curves expressing the development of the total coin stock volume. These alternative curves can do no more than show basic long-term trends and their possible changes. See, Fig. 33 on p. 127 below. 97

112


Mughal-Maratha conflict temporarily shifted farther to the south; but the European Companies gradually redirected the focus of their activities to other areas. The Dutch V.O.C. now shifted its attention to Bengal which gradually became its single most important factory in Asia, supplying the ever hungry European textile market with Bengali textiles and raw silk.98 Silver earned by the Company in the intra-Asian trade was now used for financing the expanding Bengali trade - one effect of this policy was also the export of silver coins from Surat to Bengal.99 Is it then to Bengal that we have to turn our attention if we are to understand the growth of the output of central mints? Statistics of the Bengali trade compared with the curve of coin incidences from the central mints suggest that Bengal may have become the main, and soon the sole supplier of fresh silver to the increasingly isolated north Indian hinterland. The growing importance of Bengal may be illustrated by data of the V.O.C. exports of treasure to Bengal in the years 1663 to 1717, made available by O. Prakash.100 Unfortunately, no directly comparable data of this kind concerning the English E.I.C. were accessible to the author at the time of writing of this book; as a substitution, a data series of English imports from Bengal (paid mostly in silver), available for the period of 1660-1760, may be offered here for comparison. Of the two series, it is the V.O.C. data of silver imports which stands in closer relation to the incidences curve: it appears to be fairly closely related not only by the rate of growth but also by timing. English expansion started somewhat later and is marked by greater fluctuations; values of actual quantities of silver imported into Bengal to pay for the goods are not known but must have been somewhere below the green line. If we exclude reminting as a main source for the apparently high and constant output of the mint in Shahjahanabad and to a lesser extent also those located in Itawa and Agra, silver imports from Bengal seem to supply the only possible explanation. It is necessary to set these movements of silver into the known context of the economic and social developments in Bengal and north India at this time. From the sixteenth century, Bengal was undergoing a process of steady expansion of the agricultural base mainly through clearing of the forests in the eastern parts of the delta. The agricultural boom was accompanied by a demographic expansion; this in turn, together with low price of foodstuffs aided the expansion of manufacturing sector. Relatively cheap and high-quality cotton and silk textiles attracted merchants not only of the East India Companies but also of traders from all parts of Asia. Most of their purchases were paid for by silver.101 O. Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, pp. 65-71 and 201-212. See above, p. 108 and H. W. van Santen, De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, p. 38. 100 O. Prakash, op. cit., pp. 66-67. 101 This is a very short summary of R. M. Eaton’s excellent exposition of the role of ecological factors in the development and concomitant islamization of eastern parts of Bengal. See, R. M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760. Berkeley 1993, pp. 194-207. The analysis of the role of trade in the economic growth of Bengal, using standard notions of economic theory, is to be found in O. Prakash, The Dutch East India Company, pp. 234-240. Expositions of both authors supplement each other and recreate a picture of Bengal as probably the most dynamically developing region in India. 98 99


113 80

E.I.C. imports f rom Bengal in pounds (Chaudhuri, The Trading World, pp. 508-510) V.O.C. exports of treasure to Bengal: value in pounds (O.Prakash, The Dutch E.I.C., pp.66-67) Coin incidences: central and eastern mints

500000

value in pounds

400000

70

60

50

300000

40

30 200000 20 100000 10

1760

1756

1752

1748

1744

1740

1736

1732

1728

1724

1720

1716

1712

1708

1704

1700

1696

1692

1688

1684

1680

1676

1672

1668

1664

0 1660

0

number of incidences found in the hoards of the U.P

600000

Fig. 30. Trends in the development of the Bengal trade of the E.I.C. and V.O.C. compared to the trend in silver coin incidences from the central and eastern mints

The questions to be answered of course are, first, which mechanism brought this silver in such massive quantities as far north-west as Agra, Itawa and Delhi/Shahjahanabad and second, why, before being exported, the silver was not turned into Mughal rupees in the Bengal mints of Murshidabad or Rajmahal/Akbarnagar. Revenues from the Ç€lsa remitted from the increasingly wealthy province to the central treasury seem to be the obvious answer to the first question. In 1582 the ³’…n-i Akbar… fixed the amount of revenue to be extracted from the province at 6,34 million rupees. In the middle of the 17th century this sum was increased to 8,76 million and remained unchanged until the fiscal reforms of Mursh…d Qul… {•€n at the beginning of the 1720s when the amount was revised upwards again to the sum of 10,96 million. Apart from this Ç€lsa component, another, but smaller part of the total revenue (approximately one half of the Ç€lsa sum) was assigned to persons who held j€g…rs in Bengal; if these j€g…r-holders were posted outside of the province, the money collected in their j€g…rs left Bengal too.102 However, these additional outflows, augmented by frequent illegal transfers of money by high-ranking mansabd€rs, were a constant phenomenon and do not appear to increase significantly toward the end of the century. The timing of increases in the Ç€lsa sum also do not correspond with the increasing influx of silver to the central regions of the empire suggested by our incidences curve. One possible explanation might perhaps be a change in the ways the payments were made. As long as there was no real scarcity of ready money in the inland north Indian parts of the empire, the 102

O. Prakash, op. cit., pp. 255-256.

114


local bankers could offer their help in transmitting from Bengal the money due to the central treasury by the means of the bills of exchange (hund…s). Coins brought to the imperial treasury would then be mostly of types current in north India, i.e. sums paid out would reflect the composition of the north Indian coin stock; under these circumstances, payments from Bengal did not necessarily mean physical transfers of coins of the Bengali provenance. This hypothesis might perhaps help explain the apparently strange fact that Bengali coins, despite the relative closeness of the province to the central region, and its political and economical consolidation in the second and third part of the 17th century, are so poorly represented in the U.P. hoards: when compared to incidences of coins struck in Surat, a commercial centre of another economically and commercially active but more distant region, the difference is especially striking. In the middle of the 1670s’, however, we are informed about general scarcity of rupees all over India. We have already seen that this crisis coincides with the lowest point in the coin incidences trend - and should remind ourselves that this trend would reflect the development of the volume of the north Indian coin stock (or, to be more exact, of the coin stock existing in the past in the area of the present-day Uttar Pradesh). If this scarcity of coin experienced by the north Indian inland region was relatively more acute than in regions at the periphery of the empire (a real possibility if the silver imported via the Gujarati ports was increasingly deflected from its previous destination in north India to the new imperial centre in Deccan), it may have been difficult for Indian bankers to transfer yearly remittances of the Bengal revenue to the central treasury in Delhi/Shahjahanabad by means of bills of exchange. Long-term monetary balance between the two regions would be also affected if the ability of the central region to attract and keep silver money by active trading was, in the long term, lower than that of Bengal - a not improbable development. Transfers of large sums of money due to the imperial treasury as the Ç€lsa revenue of Bengal then had to be realized increasingly in the form of transports of coined or uncoined silver. We are informed that this mode of money transfers prevailed in the 1720s and 1730s when the Nawabs of Bengal, „Murshid Quli Khan and Shuja Khan were said to have paid an annual tribute of Rs. 10,000,000. In part the remittance was made by bills of exchange drawn by the great Murshidabad bankers, the Jagat Seths, on their house in Delhi. It was presumably possible for the bankers to dispose of bills for such large sums because of the great volume of Bengal textile exports to the cities of northern India. But it seems that bullion was also shipped away from Bengal. An English observer noted that every year ‚almost all the silver, coined or uncoined, which comes into Bengal‘ was sent off to Delhi, so that ‚there is hardly currency enough left in Bengal to carry on any trade or even go to market for provisions and necessaries of life, till the next shipping arrives to bring a fresh supply of silver.‘“103 Numbers of coin incidences of the north Indian provenance - and simultaneous continuing scantiness of Bengali rupees in U.P. hoards - suggest that this pattern of payments may have developed already in the second half of the 1680s. P. J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead. Eastern India 1740-1828. Cambridge 1987, pp. 51-52. The English observer quoted in the passage is J. Steuart, The Principles of Money Applied to the Present State of the Coin of Bengal (1772), pp. 62-63. 103


115

The answer to the second and connected question - why the Bengali silver was not transported in the form of Bengali rupees but rather as bullion (or perhaps coins treated as bullion) which was made into coins only in the inland mints - is to be sought in the peculiar features of the Mughal monetary system. Mughal coins of the same denomination did not possess all exactly the same value: coins issued in the current year were called sikk€ and enjoyed a premium of ca. 2 per cent over those struck in the preceding years of the same reign, called calan…. These, in turn, had a premium of 1 to 3 per cent over the so-called Çaz€n€ coins, i. e. those issued during the previous reign. Moreover, it seems that the exact rate of premium a particular coin enjoyed did not depend solely on its age (and, of course, on the degree of its physical wear) but also on actual balance between supply of and demand for money at a particular place and time. In the words of K. N. Chaudhuri, „the rate of premium charged for freshly minted coins in fact reflected the commercial demand for money supply and therefore the market price of bullion silver. An unduly high rate would obviously cause bullion or the old worn coins to be taken to the mints for recoinage.“104 I. Habib mentions in his article on the Mughal currency system just two cases when a temporary rise or fall in the value of specie reflected its currently felt scarcity or oversupply.105 If the imbalance between demand and supply was a longer-term feature which distinguished one region from another, then it might be profitable, especially when large-scale transfers of money, remittances of taxes etc. had to be made, to turn the bullion into coins at a place where the payer/supplier of silver could realize higher premium, i.e. in a mint located in a region afflicted by a relative scarcity of metallic currency. We still lack hard evidence whether such imbalance existed between Bengal and the inland central regions of the empire; however, there is evidence that rates were different even in two different maritime regions: thanks to a report of English factors at Hugli, we know that in the 1670s different rates prevailed in Bengal and Surat: whereas in Bengal for 100 rix-dollars one obtained 205-210 rupees, in Gujarat the exchange rate was 211 to 214 rupees.106 It is perhaps not unreasonable to expect that the inland mints, lacking direct access to imported silver - an advantage enjoyed by Gujarat and in steadily increasing measure by Bengal - were ready to offer similar, if not better terms than Surat.107 K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World, p. 176. The two cases adduced as examples are a temporary rise in the value of silver coin relative to bullion in Bengal in 1675 due to insufficient turnout of the mint; and a fall in the price of gold muhrs in Ahmadabad in 1628 when the supply of gold exceeded market requirements. I. Habib, The Currency System of the Mughal Empire (1556-1707). Medieval India Quarterly, vol. IV (1960), Pt. 1-2, p. 4, note 1. As far as the author of these lines is aware, a study that would collect scattered data on these changing rates in different parts of the empire and in different periods has not yet been written. The explanation put forward above is therefore only speculative. 106 K. N. Chaudhuri, op. cit., p. 184. 107 Small popularity of Bengal mints among the bullion importers has been commented upon by S. Moosvi in her article The Silver Influx, Money Supply, Prices and Revenue-extraction in Mughal India. JESHO, vol. XXX (1987), pp. 73-74. Indeed, she has been the first historian explaining the presumed imports of silver into the inland regions by differences in the exchange rates: „When the ‚exchange‘ rose owing to large payments made from Bengal to Agra and the Court, it would have been immaterial to the merchants whether they took bullion or minted rupees; and they would have preferred the former course if the Bengal mints were not efficient or not offering sufficiently attractive terms in comparison with the inland mints. This seems the only persuasive explanation of the low level of output of the Bengal mints compared to the large quantities of silver imported into the region.“ 104 105

116


From the second decade of the 18th century another new factor may have contributed to the practice of transporting bullion inland and converting it into coins at the place of its „final“ destination: in different parts of the Mughal India the same sikk€ coins did not enjoy the same premium, as one would expect, but were valued differently depending on whether they were issued by the local mint - in this case they earned the full premium - or by a mint of a different region. In 1712 the English factors in Bengal complained that „the siccas of all other mints though belonging to the King don’t go at the same batta [i.e. premium] as those coined in Bengal, the Surat pass but at 10 per cent batta, the siccas of Dacca, Patna, and Cuttack though of same weight and fineness with those at Muxadavad go at 2 or 3 per cent less at Hugly and the same in other places where not coined, each place takes the King’s revenues in the coin of that mint to encourage it.“108 Even if the seigniorage was as low as 2 1/2 per cent109, minting or reminting of substantial volumes of silver could bring significant profits to local mints and treasuries. Even when compared with peak years of the Multan and Qandahar mints in the 1620s and 1630s, the steadily ascending number of incidences from the central mints looks very impressive and seems to imply a truly massive influx of silver into the inland regions. It is nevertheless probable that coins issued in greater quantities by central mints will be to some extent over-represented in the local coin stock and consequently also in local coin hoards. Over-representation in this context means that these incidences cannot be assumed to be in the same proportion to mint output as the incidences of Gujarati or north-western mints. It would be only natural that coins issued by active local mints would achieve a regional dominance more easily than coins issued in the same quantity by a more distant mint. Consequently, the output of the local mints would appear somewhat higher than it actually was. It is impossible to say how serious this distortion actually is; in any case, from the turn of the 17th century the evidence of incidences cannot serve any more as a basis for estimates of changing relative volumes of silver coin stock in the U.P. What can be stated with a degree of certainty is a growing dependence of central parts of the empire on imports of silver from Bengal in a situation when imports from other parts of the empire steadily decreased. It is however highly probable that this process was a bit less dramatic than the Abstract of Letters Received from Coast and Bay, 7 January 1712, vol.2, para.52, p. 337, cit. in: K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia, p. 183. Exclusive rights of local mints to supply their respective regional money markets with their own coins were recognized as legitimate as late as 1801 when the Banaras Mint Committee recommended in its Account of the working of this mint, written for the Fort William Mint Committee, to keep the Banaras mint in operation; it was pointed out, among other things, that the Calcutta mint was unable to meet the requirements of both the Bengal and Banaras areas and that a Permanent Settlement had been reached with the zam…nd€rs of the Banaras region that they had to pay their taxes in Banarasi coins. At the same time, the Committee had assayed a sample of 500 Banarasi rupees struck between 1776 and 1802 and found out that „even though coined without the supervision of an European officer“, their deviation from the weight and purity standard set by the Calcutta mint never exceeded one per cent. Q. Ahmad, An Unpublished Report on the Functioning and Scope of the Banaras Mint, 1801. Journal of the Numismatic Society of India (JNSI), vol. XXIV, 1962, pp. 115-129 and id., Banaras Mint and the Zari Industry. JNSI, vol. XXV, 1963, pp. 87-92. 109 I. Habib, The Currency System, p.3, note 5. 108

Mints of the Period 1707-1760

117

evidence of coin incidences, considered out of context, would indicate. Growing dependence on silver from Bengal means, in the context of steadily expanding commercial activities of the English and Dutch East India Companies in this region, a growing dependence on direct European silver imports. Only now was a dominant part of silver coin stock, circulating in the central part of the Mughal empire, supplied by European commerce. English and Dutch silver imports into Gujarat were at times certainly substantial but so was the contribution of Indian merchants. As far as the north-western overland branch of long-distance trade was concerned, the share of Indians was clearly dominant. In Bengal, on the other hand, although Indian merchants and shippers were able to hold their own against European Companies, they could hardly compete with them in imports of precious metals.110

6. The Period 1707-1760 In the last period under study, marked by accelerating processes of imperial decentralization and disintegration, the trends which had emerged in the latter part of Aurangzeb’s reign continue to characterize the situation in the central parts of the waning empire: in fact, the predominance of coins of local provenance is even more pronounced than in the previous period. Coins from Thatta, minted at this port city after the death of Aurangzeb, practically disappear from the U.P. hoards record, as do the coins struck in Surat after 1723. In the case of Surat, at least, it cannot be maintained that this absence was caused by some dramatic decline in Surat’s overseas trade or closure of its mint. After the mid-twenties too, the mint in Surat continued its operation and was, as A. Das Gupta writes,111 at times even clogged by incoming silver. The nearly total absence of post-1723 Surati silver coins in U.P. hoards has to be explained rather by an abrupt and almost total loss of effective political control over Gujarat on the one hand and severing of commercial contacts between the inland regions of the empire and Gujarat in consequence of advancing Maratha power in the northern Deccan and Malwa on the other. Until 1722, Gujarat, standing under firm central control, was one of the better administered provinces of the empire. In that year, however, Haidar Qul… {•€n, the newly appointed governor, begun to manoeuvre for a more independent position for himself. His scheme failed and he was promptly replaced. His successor, the powerful Niz€m-ul Mulk, however, was hardly a better choice; after his breach with the Emperor in 1723, he too was recalled. The acting deputy governor Shuj€’at {•€n then had to face an open revolt of Ham…d {•€n, his predecessor in this office, who was supported covertly by Niz€m-ul Mulk and openly by Maratha military aid. In a regular battle Ham…d {•€n prevailed, killed Shuj€’at {•€n and took all parts of the administration of the province in his own hands. In the See, O. Prakash, The Dutch East India Company, pp. 221-234 for a rather conservative assessment of a displacement effect of the V.O.C. activities on the trade carried on by Indian merchants and pp. 67 and 234-35 for the role of the Company as an outstanding importer of precious metals into the region. 111 A. Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat: c. 1700-1750. Wiesbaden 1978, pp. 47-49. 110

118


present context, it is his seizure of all revenue records as well as Ç€lsa lands and j€g…rs that is of special importance. The power of d…w€n, designed by the Mughal system to serve as a counterbalance to the executive branch of the administration, was thus practically destroyed. It can be taken for certain that all revenue payments to the central treasury were henceforward discontinued. Sarbuland {•€n, the new governor sent to Gujarat by the emperor, was able in 1725 to dislodge the rebel; to stop the advance of the Marathas, however, proved to be beyond his strength. Continuous raiding and campaigning must have made the roads through Malwa extremely unsafe; this, in turn, must have further impeded communication between the western maritime and hinterland areas of the empire.

85 80

NORTHWEST GUJARAT AND SINDH MALWA AND RAJASTHAN CENTRAL EAST DECCAN TOTAL

75 70 65 60 55 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10

1759, 1759/60

1757, 1757/58

1755, 1755/56

1753, 1753/54

1751, 1751/52

1749, 1749/50

1747/48, 1748

1744

1745/46, 1746

1742, 1742/43

1740, 1740/41

1738, 1738/39

1736, 1736/37

1734, 1734/35

1732, 1732/33

1730, 1730/31

1728, 1728/29

1726, 1726/27

1724, 1724/25

1722, 1722/23

1720, 1720/21

1718, 1718/19

1716, 1716/17

1714/15, 1715

1712/13, 1713

1710, 1710/11

5 0 1708, 1708/09


90

ye ar of m intage


Once firmly in power, Sarbuland {•€n took collection of tributes from the local zam…nd€rs into his own hands; from huge sums accumulated by him, nothing had been remitted to the central treasury.112 R€j€ Abhay Singh, who took over the office from Sarbuland {•€n in 1730, further reduced the still remaining powers of the d…w€n and made the province fiscally almost completely independent of the centre. Silver coming in ever smaller quantities from the north-west (from the beginning of the 1720s the Lahore mint is represented only sporadically and in most cases by a single 112

Z. U. Malik, The Reign of Muhammad Sh€h 1719-1748. Bombay 1977, pp. 216-217.

Mints of the Period 1707-1760

119

coin per year) could not lessen the now almost complete dependence of the imperial heartland on Bengali silver, minted or reminted almost exclusively in central mints. Punjab during the reign of Muhammad Sh€h certainly belonged, under the leadership of two able governors, Abdul Samad {•€n and his son Zak€riya {•€n, among the better administered provinces of the empire.113 However, its economic prosperity must have been negatively affected by the collapse of the Safavid empire in 1722 and the following disorder and internecine warfare among various contenders for the Persian throne in the second and third quarter of the 18th century.114 As we have already seen, endemic warfare and consequent insecurity of roads usually had a direct and immediate effect on the intensity of the long distance trade passing through the respective area. The declining number of Lahori coin incidences evident in the U.P. hoard record from the beginning of 1720s therefore seems to have been due, at least partly, to similar causes as the already mentioned simultaneous decline and then abrupt disappearance of Gujarati coins. In Punjab in the 1720s however, there were neither open separatist tendencies of independent-minded governors nor were the overland routes connecting the province to the centre blocked by a hostile power. It is more probable that in case of Lahore the small numbers of incidences reflect declining productivity of its mint afflicted by a diminishing influx of silver from the Middle East. In 1720, Abdul Samad {•€n apologised to the Mughal emperor for his inability to aid him militarily in the battle at Hasanpur against the Sayyid brothers. The governor explained that he had no money to pay the salaries of his soldiers.115 Was this only an empty excuse which had to cover up the governor’s unwillingness to take sides in the struggle for imperial succession? In better times, the lack of 400 000 rupees necessary for this purpose would have hardly served as credible apology. After the Mughal disaster in 1739, parts of the territory of the province were annexed to N€dir Sh€h’s empire, while their direct administration was left in the hands of Zak€riya {•€n who was obliged to remit annually two million rupees into the Persian treasury.116 The period following the devastating invasion of N€dir Sh€h was marked by a widespread chaos and anarchy in the province. Mughal power was too weak to curb effectively the growing ambitions of Sikhs and local zam…nd€rs ravaging the countryside. Coin incidences seem to reflect these changes in the political and military constellation in distant Persia and subsequently also in the province itself. Having lost the substantial financial contributions of Punjab and Gujarat, for greater part of the 17th century the two most important suppliers of silver coins, the centre was now almost completely dependent on shipments of silver from Bengal. In the late 17the century Bengal gradually emerged as a single most important Asian trading partner of the Dutch and English East India Companies. Massive imports of silver, the almost only import article which was in constant demand in Bengal, were the main means of settling the trade balances. Ibid., pp. 249-256. P. Jackson, L. Lockhart, The Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods. Cambridge 1986, pp. 324-330 (The Last Safavids by H.R. Roemer). 115 Z. U. Malik, op., cit., p. 251 and fn. 3. 116 Ibid., p. 253. 113 114

120


Moreover, until Al…vard… {•€n’s usurpation of the governorship of the province in 1740, Bengal’s loyalty to the centre under Mursh…d Qul… {•€n (1715-1727) and his successors was truly exemplary. The fact that Mursh…d Qul… {•€n established in his province a rule of a virtual family oligarchy was compensated by meticulous remittances of tribute and occasional extra payments to the money-starved central treasury. The average payment sent regularly every year by Mursh…d Qul… {•€n to the emperor was stated to have amounted to 10 474 705 rupees.117 His son-in-law an successor to the governorship of Bengal, Shuj€’ud d…n Muhammad {•€n (1728-1739), continued the policy of appeasing the centre with money which in Bengal were not in the short supply anyway. (Regular shipments of substantial amounts of silver out of Bengal further inland, mentioned by J. Steuart and quoted above, may have helped to keep the price inflation in the province at a low level despite the huge silver imports from abroad.) At his accession, Shuj€’-ud d…n remitted to the imperial treasury an extra payment of 15 million rupees and then continued sending the usual yearly sums of regular revenue: it has been computed that in the ten and half years of his service he remitted to the central exchequer a total of 113 140 338 rupees.118 The probable mechanism of physical silver transfers inland was described above and, if correct, must have applied in the same if not still greater degree to the post-Aurangzeb… period too. This almost idyllic coexistence came to a sudden end with the invasion of N€dir Sh€h and subsequent further weakening of the central government. Al…vard… {•€n seized the opportunity, killed in a regular battle the officially appointed governor and took the governorship by force in his own hands. Loss of loyal representative in the most prosperous province of the crumbling empire must have looked from the perspective of Shahjahanabad as a real catastrophe. Al…vard… {•€n tried to soften the indignation of the emperor by sending as a present 5 400 000 rupees at his accession and another ten million as a regular tax remittance. However, he did not comply with the emperor’s order to deliver the treasure of the previous governor and to pay the arrears of previous two years. This question was never settled and led to an increasing tension between Al…vard… {•€n and the emperor.119 The relation between Muhammad Sh€h and the governor of Bengal took another turn for the worse in 1742 when the emperor sent to Bengal Bal€j… B€j… R€o, the peœva of Marathas, ostensibly to protect Al…vard… {•€n before the incursion of another Maratha leader, Raghuj… Bhonsle; the governor however felt that the real objective of this move was to put pressure on him. Moreover, from this time on the governor of Bengal was under constant military and financial pressure of the Marathas, a development which culminated in 1751 by granting the chauth of Bengal and Bihar to R€j€ Sh€hˆ.120 No reliable evidence exists on the question of remittances of money from Bengal to the imperial treasury after 1743. Although there are complete accounts of remittances sent by previous governors (registered in the Persian Revenue Records of Bengal), no such Ibid., p. 235. Ibid., p. 239. 119 Ibid., p. 241. 120 Ibid., p. 245. 117 118

Dispersal Patterns of Coins Minted in the Area of the U. P.

121

evidence on payments made to the central treasury by Al…vard… {•€n seems to exist. It was probably this absence of any positive evidence which led Charles Stewart in his History of Bengal to the conclusion that no money was sent at all. According to others (James Grant), the governor of Bengal reduced, owing to Maratha raids, the annual payment to half of the previous sum, i.e. to 5 million rupees. This would correspond well with the evidence of our incidences record in the last twenty years before the terminal date of 1760. From 1744, a substantial decline of incidences of coins struck in central and eastern mints is noticeable in the U.P. hoards record. It is however impossible to ascertain to what extent is this decline due to decreasing supply of silver from Bengal and to what extent is the available evidence distorted by possibly massive remints after 1760 - a year after which coins and consequently hoards too, cannot be dated with the necessary exactness. Moreover, the number of hoards in which coins of later dates can occur is naturally smaller than of those which may contain coins of earlier regnal periods; for example, whereas Sh€hjah€n… coins can appear, albeit as isolated examples, in hoards formed several decades after this emperor’s death (and thus add few points to their respective incidences record), coins of Muhammad Sh€h, and in still greater degree those of Ahmad Sh€h and ³lamg…r II., do not possess this opportunity in an equal degree. Therefore, although the observed trend in the frequency of incidences appears to conform with developments known from other sources, the evidence is, in this particular case, not conclusive.

7. Peculiarities in Dispersal Patterns of Coins Minted in the Area of the U.P. One of characteristic features of monetary developments in the later Aurangzeb… and postAurangzeb… period is the proliferation of mints located in the central area of the empire. Apart from old mints in Shahjahanabad, Agra and Ilahabad which stepped up their production significantly (the last-mentioned appears to have been active only intermittently), perhaps in order to process the increasing flow of silver from the east, new mints were established in Lakhnau, Bareli and Itawa. Second wave of new mint establishments dates to the 1720s: Banaras, Farrukhabad, Kora and Qanauj.121 It is not without interest that five of these mint cities - Banaras, Ilahabad, Kora, Itawa and Agra - are located on the main route which connected Bengal with the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad. Were these mints established in order to process increasing quantities of silver imported from Bengal? Prevailing flows of silver, as far as they could be reconstructed with the help of available evidence, would suggest that it may have been so. Only detailed research focusing on the history of each In the absence of explicit evidence, an approximate date of establishment of a new mint can be estimated on the basis of its earliest extant coins. In this case too, hoard evidence appears to be superior to data in published coin catalogues. Occurrences of earliest coins from the more important Aurangzeb… and post-Aurangzeb… mints are summarized in the following table. (Regnal years, if available, follow the date of hijra and are separated by hyphen). For the sake of completeness, isolated earliest coins from Lakhnau, Itawa and Kora (possibly wrong identifications of dates?) found in hoards, have been included in the last column. 121

122


particular mint and on the merchant community based in the city or town in which the respective mint was located could supply a more definite answer. The analysis of available hoard material can supply at least some hints pointing to the existence of trading networks which carried coins of a particular provenance to a particular destination or area, leaving out completely other tracts or cities, even when these were sometimes geographically closer to the mint in question. With the available hoard evidence it is possible to count incidences of coins struck in mints located in the area of U.P. between the years 1675-1760 and present in hoards buried in in each of its districts after 1675. Of course, numbers of hoards registered in each district and relevant to this analysis differ widely: whereas the district of Jhansi registers 14 hoards containing coins minted in the area of the U.P. between these two dates, Agra lists 11 and Lakhnau 10 hoards, Banaras has only 3, Itawa 2 and Jaunpur, for example, despite the relatively high total number of 14 Mughal hoards discovered in its area, none: all of them belong to pre-1675 period. In some regions, smaller number of hoards may be due, at least partly, to a more restricted availability and circulation of money - this was probably the case of the sub-Himalayan districts of Garhwal, Almora and Nainital. In others, higher incidence of hoards esp. when concentrated in a narrower time span, may have been caused by greater insecurity and turbulence - this is possibly the case of districts which fell within the range of operation of Bundela chiefs in the late 17th and first half of the 18th century (Jhansi, Hamirpur, Banda, Ilahabad). Results arrived at by counting of incidences are therefore not directly quantifiable; still, several mints show certain patterns of coin dispersal which do not seem to be accidental. In the district of Gorakhpur, for example, coins of the earliest in co in catalo g u es L ondon

L a h o re

C alcu tta

earliest in U .P. h o ard s r.y.9=1666/67 in319/UP 1081/14=1671/72 in 1052/UP

L ak h n au

[1103]=1691/92

r.y. 23=1679/80

1087/19=1676

B areli

1107=1695/96

1100/32=1688/89

1101-32=1689 [?] 1097-29=1685/86 in 624/UP

Itaw a

1100=1688/89

1099-31=1687/88

1098=1686/87

r.y.22=1678/78 in 165/UP 1095=1683/84 in 129/UP

F arru k h ab ad 115[5]=1742/43

Fs.,r.y.6=1717/18 1156-25=1743

1129-6=1717 1156-26=1744

Fs.,r.y.6=1717/18 in 624/UP 1148-18=1736/37 in 105/UP

K o ra

1131=1719

1132-1=1719/20

1139-9=1727

1021-3=1709/10 in 318/UP 1031-ahd=1719 in 536, 105/UP

Q an au j

1151=1738/39

1142-12=1730

1143-13=1731

MSh.,r.y.9=1727/28 in 355/UP and 783/UP

B a n a ra s

1150=1737/38

1149-19=1737

1145-15=1733

MSh.,r.y.6=1724/25 in 211/UP

Mughal Silver Coin Stock, 1560 - 1760

123

most productive but also quite distant mint of Shahjahanabad are present in 6 hoards out of total of 9 belonging in the post- 1675 period, whereas in the district of Ilahabad (8 hoards) they were found in only one. The much closer mint of Banaras, on the other hand, is represented in only one of Gorakhpur’s 9 hoards. Banarasi coins are relatively scarce (the local mint was obviously not a big one) but dispersed over a wide area of central and western U.P.: in the district of Bulandshahr (1 hoard of total of 3), Merath (1 of 6), Rampur (1 of 3), Mathura (1 of 5) and Budaun (1 of 7). In the much closer Basti with 7 hoards, on the other hand, they are not represented at all.122 The district of Gorakhpur appears to have been a favourite destination not only of coins minted in Shahjahanabad but also of those struck in Agra and Itawa. In contrast, coins from the Qanauj mint, not very numerous, do not appear to have penetrated to the east of this town and to have remain restricted to Ruhelkhand and few of the southern districts of the U.P. (Kanpur, Banda, Hamirpur, Jalaun, Jhansi, each with a single incidence.) The range of the Farrukhabad mint is very similar. Except of two incidences in Lakhnau and one in Unnao, its coins appear only in the western part of the state. It seems that commercial communities, settled in the above mentioned mint cities and perhaps operating the mints themselves, specialized in trading and financial transactions with particular regions or cities of north India. The exact nature and extent of these ties might constitute an exciting subject of a separate study.

8. Mughal Silver Coin Stock, 1560-1760 On the preceding pages we have analysed coin incidences of selected mints, ordered along temporal axis and reflecting, more or less accurately, changes in their coin output. The result of summation of data on all Mughal mints represented in U.P. hoards is a graphical representation showing changing numbers of the total of all incidences relating to all mints and every year in the period of two centuries from 1556 to 1760. This graph, shown in Fig. 32 below, presents a synoptic view of totals for each regnal period, introduced separately in the incidences section above. A general overview presents an opportunity for more general observations. The time series represented on the graph by a jagged line appears to be formed by two types of influence: there are clearly visible short-term fluctuations and behind them longerterm trends lasting for several decades; in the span of the two Mughal centuries the general trend underwent three clearly discernible reversals: the first one, which occurred in the middle of the 1630s, broke the initial long-term growth and sent the trend line on a downward 122 The dispersal pattern of Banarasi silver coins in western parts of the U.P. corresponds well with C. A. Bayly’s description of Banaras as an important money market and mercantile centre maintaining living commercial contacts with western parts of north India. See his Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, pp. 229-232. For interesting and valuable details on the structure and functioning of the Banaras mint establishments, see the two studies by Q. Ahmad listed in the Bibliography. Unfortunately, similar detailed studies of other important mints are not available.

124


100 95 90 85 80 75 70 65 60 55 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 1556 1560/61, 1561 1565/66, 1566 1570/71, 1571 1575/76, 1576 1580/81 1585 1589/90, 1590 1595, 1595/96 1600, 1600/01 1605, 1605/06 1610, 1610/11 1615, 1616 1620, 1620/21 1625, 1625/26 1630, 1630/31 1635, 1635/36 1639/40, 1640 1644/45, 1645 1649, 1650 1654, 1654/55 1659, 1659/60 1660, 1660/61 1665, 1665/66 1670, 1670/71 1675 1679/80, 1680 1684, 1684/85 1689, 1689/90 1694, 1694/95 1699, 1699/00 1704, 1704/05 1707, 1707/08 1712/13, 1713 1717, 1717/18 1722, 1722/23 1727, 1727/28 1732, 1732/33 1737, 1737/38 1742, 1742/43 1746/47, 1747 1751, 1751/52 1756, 1756/57


course until another turning point was reached in the middle of the 1670s. Then follows a steep rise in registered incidences culminating around the year 1715; after this date a decline sets in, which lasts until 1760. Both the short-term fluctuations and longer-term trends may be caused in each instance by a different type of factor. It will be therefore correct to deal with each instance separately. As far as the shorter-term fluctuations are concerned, influences appear to be of two types. Two major drops in the numbers of incidences at the beginning and end of Jah€ng…r’s rule appear to have been caused primarily not by any dramatic shortage of silver for minting but rather, in the former case, by conscious manipulations of the established system of coin weights, or by an officially decreed and highly selective remintings of parts of the existing coin stock in the latter. Both these remintings have left a deep mark in the incidences record without changing in any significant way the overall volume of the silver coin stock: steep increases in coin incidences following immediately after rejecting of the unsuitable part of the coin stock suggest that greater part of the increased activity of mints was devoted to recoining of parts of the existing stock. In such cases, neither the decrease nor the increase in coin incidences can be interpreted as a sign of declining or growing volume of the silver coin stock. After an elimination of the remint factor, the dramatic fluctuations of coin incidences would be to a great extent evened out.

year of mintage

Fig. 32. Total of all incidences of Mughal silver coins minted in the years 1556-1760 in coin hoards deposited in the area of the U.P.


125

Another type of short-term fluctuation has its origin in genuine disruptions of the trading networks or commercial activity in general due to violent events or natural disasters. Two obvious examples of this type are the total absence in the U.P. hoard evidence of Surati silver coins struck in the year 1662/63 caused by Shiv€j…’s sack of Surat in January 1664 and similar gap in incidences of Lahori silver coins in 1649/50 caused no doubt by fall of Qandahar into Persian hands in 1649 an accompanying disruptions along the north-western routes. This type of fluctuation certainly reflects sudden changes in the output of the respective mint and is therefore relevant in estimations of coin stock volumes. If such disruptions were of only short duration (few months or one year), their influence was only marginal; if, however, the security problems were of longer duration and the consequent disruptions of economic life and mint activity became a common phenomenon - as was the case of Surat in the 1670s - the impact of diminished coin production on the level of circulating coin stock could have been considerable, especially when the afflicted city housed one of the most productive mint in the whole empire. In sum, the reliability of coin stock estimates based on the evidence of incidences depends to a great extent on our ability to identify correctly the real causes of observed fluctuations or, at least, to filter away those cases which reflect the effects of past reminting campaigns. In the case of Jah€ng…r… coinage this is relatively easy; it is much more difficult in the case of suspected remintings of older coins during the reign of FarruÇsiy€r and Muhammad Sh€h. In the absence of positive written evidence, more intensive reminting of coins struck during the reigns of previous emperors can be inferred from the relatively rapid decline of percentual shares of these coins after the accession of the two emperors mentioned above. If the melting and recoining of older coins was not directed against any narrowly defined coin population and did not, therefore, leave a distinct mark in the evidences record, it is difficult or even impossible to distinguish its effects from a longer-term trend of decline caused by altogether different set of causes. An uncertainty regarding the extent of recoinage during the reign of FarruÇsiy€r and especially Muhammad Sh€h makes the application of the incidences method in the post-Aurangzeb… period less reliable than in the previous epoch. It is impossible to explain each of the numerous short-term fluctuations of incidences which are so typical of virtually all Mughal mints; in a number of cases - especially those of smaller mint establishments - purely accidental factors must have distorted the evidence. Accidental factors, however, can be assumed to exercise no particular bias which would consistently tilt the results in a particular direction. The line presented in Fig. 32 which summarizes the activity of all registered mints is based on greater number of incidences where accidental, random factors have lesser weight - this should hold true especially for longer-term trends. Does this mean that longer-term trends are free of all types of biases? Not completely. As has been explained above, longer-term higher level of incidences may be due to generally higher numbers of hoards. This would not be a problem if this higher quantity of hoards means simply easier availability and greater volumes of coined silver. We have seen that

126


apart from this factor, greater incidence of hoards in the 18th century is most probably related also to a generally higher level of violence; in the post-Aurangzeb… period, hoards formed or forgotten as a result of more frequent violent events may have increased the hoard numbers by ten per cent or more. This increase would be in no relation to coin stock volume; from the point of view of coin stock estimates, this is a distorting factor. In the last decades before 1760 another bias influencing the data in opposite direction was at work. This period was relatively close to the time in the first third of the 19th century when the habit of forming and burying hoards gradually disappeared. The narrower was the interval separating a year of the late Mughal period from the time when hoards ceased to be formed, the smaller is the number of hoards formed between the two dates. Smaller number of hoards of course means smaller number of incidences. This natural bias, strengthened possibly by more intensive remintings after 1760, may have distorted, in the late Mughal decades, the frequency of incidences so as to make the coin stock look dwindling away. It is very difficult to assess correctly the net result of mutually opposite biases influencing the incidences record in the postAurangzeb… period. Any serious effort to do this should be not be based solely on the numismatic evidence, but should be supplemented by a careful study of other types of sources. As far as the earlier period is concerned, we may proceed on the assumption that the changing number of incidences corresponds broadly with changing output of Mughal mints. The volume of coin stock in the year n is then understood to be equal to yearly accretion of newly minted coins, represented by numbers of incidences in this year in hoards, plus the volume of stock of the preceding year n-1, which is in turn defined as a sum of volumes and accretions of the preceding years. Before adding the value of new accretion to the older coin stock, it is necessary to subtract from it a certain percentage covering the natural attrition of the stock in consequence of natural losses, wear, etc. and also of export of coins abroad. The rate of loss is not known; informed estimations put the yearly attrition rate for the Middle Ages between one and two per cent (without taking into account the exports of coins to pay for imported commodities).123 Working on these assumptions, we can construct several curves which would represent the development of the Mughal silver coin stock between 1556 and 1760 with the yearly rates of attrition equalling alternatively to 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 per cent. Apart from the natural loss rate of one or two per cent per year we should take into account an export of silver coin to pay for imports. Probably the most important import item during the whole Mughal period were the superior Persian and Central Asian horses hold in high esteem and in constant demand by the Mughal army. An analysis of Central Asian (Uzbek) hoards and coinage in general might throw some light on this aspect of this branch of the long-distance trade. And finally, an unknown share of imported silver was demonetized and turned into jewellery, silver utensils and other objects serving mainly as a means for a long-term storing of value. A not negligible quantity of silver was used for manufacture of silver threads weaved into 123 C. C. Patterson,, Silver Stocks and Losses in Ancient and Medieval Times. The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., vol. XXV(1972), no. 2, pp. 205-233.


127

fine cloth pieces.124 We should keep in mind the fact that most of the imported silver was in the first place turned into coins in order to pay for the commodities acquired for export. Taking all these factors into consideration, we will probably err on the conservative side if we estimate the total yearly loss of silver coins at three per cent of the existing silver coin stock. We may envisage a situation when the total stock is so large that regular imports of silver from abroad are absorbed just to cover this relatively moderate loss rate. Indeed, this might be the mysterious „bottomless pit“ of contemporary observes wondering about the fate of all those huge quantities of precious metals imported every year into India. There are several features of the hypothetical coin stock curves which call for a comment. The two temporary interruptions in the initial steady growth of stock, marking the beginning and end of Jah€ng…r’s reign, are due to the two remintings mentioned above and in all probability have nothing to do with coin stock volumes; if these two influences are filtered away, the rise of the coin stock volume will appear more even and, until the middle of the 1630s, remarkably steady. This growth reflects the initial build-up of Mughal silver coinage during the reign of Akbar, augmented in the beginning by dishoarding of treasures acquired by conquest and from the 1570s increasingly by silver flowing into the subcontinent in consequence of India’s permanently active balance of payments in the expanding long-distance trade. 3500

los s r a te=5% p er y e a r 3000 2500 2000

los s r a te=4% p er y e a r los s r a te=3% p er y e a r los s r a te=2% p er y e a r los s r a te=1% p er y e a r

1500 1000 500 0

Fig. 33. Hypothetical growth of north Indian Mughal silver coin stock (values of yearly increments identical with observed incidences of coins minted in the respective year) adjusted for various yearly rates of coin loss 124 Q. Ahmad, Banaras Mint and the Zari Industry. Journal of the Numismatic Society of India, vol. XXV (1963), pp. 87-92. The manufacturers, a large group of 1200 workmen, who turned silver bullion into thread, were subordinated to the chief, or D€roû€, of the Mint. This arrangement was looked upon as a guarantee that the silver would not be debased in the process of the manufacture. That the trustworthiness of the Banaras mint was well founded was proved beyond any doubt by a British control in 1802 of weight and purity of Banarasi coins. See also, footnote 108 on p.116 above.

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The increase culminates around the middle of the 1630s after eight years of a parallel and substantial growth of output of practically all major mints in the empire. This growth may have been fed partly by reminting of the Jah€ng…r… stock but this cannot serve as a full explanation. The phenomenal activity of the newly opened mint in Multan points to a significant expansion of the north-western trade which must have brought to India substantial amounts of silver from Persia and other countries of the Middle East. As we have seen, around this time the Persian empire faced a problem of massive outflows of silver in the eastern direction; efforts on the part of Persian officials to stop this drain appear to have met with only limited success.125 Unfortunately, the evidence of percentual shares cannot be used to corroborate or disprove this interpretation - the data for the first three pentads of Sh€hjah€n’s reign are either too scarce or completely missing.126 As far as the trends in the following half century are concerned, we are in a somewhat better position. Our graph shows either a stagnation or, with higher rates of losses, even a decline of the silver coin stock volume lasting until the beginning of the 1680s. The period 1660-1680 appears to have been especially poor in fresh coins. The declining trend shown by numbers of incidences is confirmed by the evidence of percentual shares. We have seen that the Sh€hjah€n… coins maintain high percentual shares long after this emperor’s demise and that percentual shares of Aurangzeb… coins remain at an uncommonly low level until the 1680s when the trend is finally reversed, thanks to an increasing activity of the central mints. The fact that the data of percentual shares and data of incidences, each arrived at by a different method of processing of the hoard record, both agree in representing a stagnating or even declining coin stock, perhaps justifies our conclusion that this stagnation was real. Known political events (Shivaji’s guerrilla war in the Deccan disrupting the trade of Surat and of Gujarat in general and contemporaneous blockade of the north-western trade routes by a large-scale uprising of Afghan tribes) can be drawn into the picture to supply concrete historical data in support of the present interpretation. The ascending trend beginning at the end of the 1670s and lasting till the beginning of the 1720s may be explained in its initial phase partly by a revival of the activity of Gujarati and, to a lesser extent, of the north-western mints. Increasingly, however, the sustained upward trend appears to be due to a greatly expanding production of the central mints. On the preceding pages an attempt has been made to relate this phenomenon to massive imports of uncoined silver from Bengal which, apart of being free of the kind of security problems that plagued Gujarat and north-west in the 1670s, gradually rose to a position of a single most important trading partner of the expanding Dutch and English East India Companies. This, however, is only one part of the story. Analysis of the motives of hoarding behaviour, attempted in part Two, Sec. 2 of the present work, suggests that in the period 1710-1760 ten per cent or slightly more of the total number of all extant hoards may have been related to 125 P. Jackson, L. Lockhart (eds.), The Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. VI.: The Timurid and Safavid Periods. Cambridge 1986, pp. 484-485. 126 As shown in the attempt at a reconstruction of the Sh€hjah€n… coin stock on pp. 56-58 and Fig. 10 on p. 57 above.


129

a higher level of violence characterizing the late Mughal era. This factor would necessitate an appropriate downward adjustment of incidence numbers and consequently also of the coin stock curve. Moreover, a steep ascent and an equally steep decline of the FarruÇsiy€r… coin stock and similar steep rise of Muhammad Sh€h… coin shares in hoards in the pentad of 1730-35 should alert us to the possibility of increased rate of reminting of coins of older dates. As this rate and the duration of these probable reminting campaigns is impossible to assess with any degree of certainty, the proper shape of the coin stock volume curve in this period remains unclear - we can limit ourselves to a general statement that the growth in this period was actually slower and the coin stock volume lower than represented by the curve in the graph. The situation is even more complicated in the two or three decades preceding the terminal date of our investigation. Hoards dated into the post-1760 period have been included into the incidences evidence; however, it is impossible to date them exactly and also to assess the impact of monetary reforms introduced by the British on the structure of hoards formed in this late period. Also the number of hoards, which remain in this late phase as possible sources of pre-1760 incidences, is naturally lower than the number which may contain, for example, Aurangzeb… coins. In short, the trend curve representing the development of coin stock volume (and let us emphasize once more, north Indian coin stock volume) can be understood, with several adjustments for the known biases, as showing the general longer-term trends with a sufficient degree of reliability until the end of the 17th century. Its continuation into the 18th century shown on the graph should be seen only as a basis, marked by several types of biases, for further study and interpretation; for this, thorough search for additional, non-numismatic sources of data will be necessary.

Conclusion

In 1961 Parameshwari Lal Gupta, the doyen of Indian numismatics, closed his survey of Indian numismatography with critical words on the present state of the discipline and a broad delineation of tasks for the future: „ ... it would not be wrong to say that whatever work has been done so far in the Medieval Indian numismatography, it is primarily confined to the bringing of coins into light. Little has been done to present them in the form of the source material for history. Most likely for this reason, the historians never took interest in this subject and the interest, in the absence of private coin collectors, is fading day by day and hardly any new generation of numismatists is coming up to take up further work in this branch. It is therefore essential that we should pause for a while and assess the value of all the numismatic material that we have before us as material for history, and focus the attention of historians to their importance. Once the historians realise the value of the coins for their study, the medieval Indian numismatics is bound to take new turn.“1 In 1961, similar judgement could be passed on the state of numismatic studies in other countries as well. As far as Mughal India is concerned, it has been mainly thanks to two Indian historians of the medieval Indian history, Aziza Hasan and Shireen Moosvi, that the medieval Indian numismatics took new turn envisaged by P. L. Gupta. Both historians have been prompted to innovative approaches by two basic considerations: first, that the study of monetary history can yield important data for the economic history of the late medieval India (silver imports, money supply, the problem of the so called „price revolution“ etc.), especially when other, written sources are extremely scarce or non-existent. And second, that the character of Mughal coinage makes it possible to apply statistical methods for processing of the coin material covering a period of one and half century. Apart from exact dating and localization made possible by explicit data on most types of coin legends, Mughal silver coins maintained a stable weight and precious metal purity standards for more than two centuries; this makes them almost ideal, mutually comparable units suitable for statistical processing and a subsequent reconstruction of long term trends. This long term stability of coinage, a rather uncommon phenomenon in the world of pre-modern monetary systems, calls for few comments. In Europe, creeping or even overt devaluation of coins by decreasing their weight or precious metal content or both was often resorted to by emperors, kings or other sovereigns as a measure which was to ease their frequent financial problems. In Mughal India the situation was different and one has to ask whether this was so only because the emperors, reigning over a country with permanently 1 P. L. Gupta, A Survey of Indian Numismatography (Muhammadan Coinage). Journal of the Numismatic Society of India, vol. XXIII (1961), p. 73.

130

Conclusion

131

active trade balance and controlling an efficient system of taxation, did not feel the need to resort to such methods. Silver rupees conforming to imperial models but struck by independent or semi-independent potentates during the second half of the 18th century too maintain the high imperial standards of weight and purity. Indeed, this conformity to the long established standards makes the distinguishing between Mughal and post-Mughal coinages often an arbitrary procedure. Perhaps the degree of control which the Indian ruler exercised over the taxation system supplies a part of the answer: a recipient of taxes collected in cash will take a different attitude towards monetary standards than a sovereign desperately needing money to pay his mounting debts to his creditors and mercenary armies. In Mughal India the interests of rulers appear to have coincided with those of creditors rather than debtors. Moreover, the scrupulous maintaining of established coin standards does not appear to have been limited to Mughal period characterized by, among other things, relative plenty of precious metals. J. S. Deyell discovered similar attitude in pre-Islamic medieval Indian billon coinage, particularly the Gujarati gadhaiy€ coins and the dirhams issued by the Sh€h… dynasty in the Indian north-west.2 Both these coinages, apart from serving as monetary media in their own political domains, were also used in the long distance trade. Local currencies of other states situated at a greater distance from the two main long distance trade routes (the maritime one joining in Gujarat the road leading north into Doab and the overland route connecting north India via Panjab and Afghanistan with central Asia and the Middle East) underwent some debasement over time but this gradual process can be interpreted, according to Deyell, by slow decline in the local silver stock on the one hand and a necessity to keep in circulation a certain volume of coined currency on the other. It seems that a stable currency was one of basic tenets of the Indian commercial world. A combination of these three characteristic features - long term conformity to fixed weight an purity standards, data on place and year of minting - make it possible to study the Mughal silver coinage with methods that could not be applied to European coin material. On the other hand, the great drawback of the Indian numismatic evidence is the habit of museums (formed probably to a great extent by the existing laws regulating the disposition of coin finds) to disperse coin hoards after their registration and description and to keep only few specimens of each type for their numismatic collections. This debars the historian from the opportunity to inspect the mass of physical coins that make up a hoard and to measure exactly some of their important characteristics (exact weight and metallic composition, wear, details of the dies, necessary for the die-count analysis, etc.). Historian studying, for example, heterogeneous coinages of the pre-Islamic period has often to search for hoards in private possession to obtain the data necessary for a more detailed study. With the unified and relatively well documented Mughal coinage the situation is somewhat different and a meaningful analysis can be undertaken on the basis of written evidence of hoards, the Treasure Trove Reports or hoard inventories written and kept in the numismatic departments of Indian museums. 2

J. S. Deyell, Living Without Silver., pp. 238-241.

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For a historian attempting to reconstruct, on the basis of extant coin material, qualitative or quantitative aspects of money use in the past, the surviving coins and hoards serve as a kind of statistical samples which - if processed correctly - allow him to formulate more general conclusions. It is obvious that extant coins or coin hoards are not standard statistical samples drawn in conformity with the established rules of modern statistics. In their present form, hoards contain various inherent biases, qualitative as well as quantitative, accumulated during the process of their formation, forgetting, recovery and final registration. Most of coins which survived to the present day were originally parts of hoards and are therefore affected by these biases. Identification and correct assessment of these biases should form an integral part of each study attempting at a historical interpretation of numismatic material. Discussion of biases that affect the U.P. hoard evidence forms the subject of first part of the present study. There are still other biases which gain their importance when the hoard record is disregarded and statistical procedures are applied directly to coins - as is the case of the approach chosen by S. Moosvi - or the basic context in which the coin material is embedded are not hoards but other units - for example, museum catalogues in the case of method used by A. Hasan. Biases inherent in these two approaches have been discussed in introductory subsections of the first, methodological part. There seem to be two ways of processing numismatic data supplied by the available hoard record: a method which processes incidences of particular types of coins in greater number of hoards (one hoard - one incidence) and a method based on counting of frequencies of particular coin types in each hoard (one hoard - n incidences). For both approaches the hoard context is of cardinal importance; for the full utilization of the latter, a detailed description of hoard content is required. In the case of the present study, such description was not available. What was at hand were, apart from the inventory of coin types, the data on numbers of coins issued by each Mughal emperor and present in each hoard. However, even such broadly defined types have supplied a sufficient base for an approximate reconstruction of relative sizes of coined silver stocks built up by successive Mughal emperors; the result conforms very closely to logical expectations and can be looked upon, inter alia, as a first basic test of the source and a proof that the hoard material in question, if appropriately ordered and processed, represents a set of samples that do contain a meaningful and important information and reflect, more or less accurately, monetary developments of a past age.3 It must be said, however, that each of the two approaches has its own inherent biases. The numbers of incidences are, in the last analysis, dependent on the numbers of hoards from which they have been collected. This is all right if the relation of numbers of hoards to the volume of the respective coin stock is in the long term constant. As I tried to show above, in the case of U.P. hoards this requirement is probably met in the period up to the beginning of the 18th century. In the following period the situation is more complicated: the generally higher level of incidences in the first part of the 18th century is due to a generally greater quantities of hoards; these, in turn, are probably only partly attributable to 3

See, J. S. Deyell’s remark on the necessity to apply deductive reasoning in hoard analysis; op. cit., p. 288.

Conclusion

133

a greater volume of silver in circulation. As the evidence of temporally and spatially defined hoard groups suggests, higher level of violence and catastrophic events may have raised the quantity of hoards by as much as ten percent or even more. It is therefore probably reasonable to desist from direct comparison of incidences levels reconstructed for the 17th century with those of the 18th. Counting coin type frequencies in each hoard selected for this kind of analysis, or - as S. Moosvi has done - coin type frequencies in the total mass of extant coins irrespective of their hoard context, introduces another type of bias: one or a small number of big hoards of a very specific and untypical composition may seriously distort the qualitative as well as the quantitative characteristics of the resulting picture. This drawback could be minimized by conversion of absolute quantities into percentual shares, as has been done in the case of reconstruction of the successive emperors’ coin stocks mentioned above. This labour would be certainly worth the effort and could yield more exact results than simple counting of incidences. This task can be undertaken when the original Treasure Trove Reports containing complete information on quantities of all coin types present in each hoard are available for study. The printed inventory is not detailed enough for this purpose. What then can the data extracted from the mass of hoards, with the help of the methods described above, tell us about history of money in Mughal India? First of all, any closer examination of the sizes and contents of the 530 Mughal hoards, found on the area of the present-day Uttar Pradesh and inventoried by the officials of the State Museum in Lucknow, clearly shows that hoarding of massive quantities of coined silver was not a typical feature of money use in Mughal India. It is true that hoards containing several hundreds of silver coins are proportionately more frequent in the Akbar… and to a lesser extent in the Jah€ng…r… era than in later periods; in absolute terms, however, they are by no means numerous and hoards containing more than one thousand silver rupees are extremely rare. By far the greatest number of hoards contains less than one hundred silver coins (i.e. less than 1 kg of pure silver). Old savings hoards with great share of old coins have been identified, but they do not predominate. Most of the analyzed hoards would fit well into the category of a „first cash reserve“ kept by local merchants, moneylenders and perhaps also better-off peasant families, for the eventuality of occasional unexpected outlays coming up from time to time in the course of their everyday activities.4 Also a near absence in hoards of heavy silver Jah€ng…r… coins, more suitable for longer-term conservation of value but less practicable in ordinary transactions, suggests that these accumulations were meant primarily as current savings destined for clearly defined types of occasions. We do not know exactly how large is the percentual share of the extant hoards in the total of all hoards formed, buried and subsequently recovered in the area of the U.P. informed observers put it somewhere between five and ten percent. If this assessment is 4 A more differentiated picture of hoarding behaviour could perhaps emerge if the available hoard evidence contained particulars about the circumstances and exact location of the finds; this could also help in distinguishing intentional hoards from unintentional losses.

134


correct, the habit of saving coins may have been quite widespread - we should take into account also those hoards or accumulations which were never completely forgotten and were dispersed still in the pre-modern era. Thus, this type of hoarding - saving would probably be a better designation - appears to be an understandable, rational behaviour. It also corresponds well with a description, offered by C. Bayly, of saving habits current among the better-off classes of the population. As far as the Mughal aristocracy is concerned, the financial position of its members was very specific. On the one hand, the Mughal military aristocrats, the mansabd€rs, paid either from the yields of j€g…rs or directly from the imperial treasury, received often very substantial amounts of money; on the other hand, they were forced by the system to spend most of their salaries on the maintenance of military units and on an expensive living style. As their position and rank within the system was not hereditary and their movable property was subject to a specific form of escheat after their death, they often tended to hoard and hide part of their wealth to insure their families against poverty in the future. As the report of F. Pelsaert shows, the law of escheat was sometimes enforced with a considerable degree of brutality.5 Even when it was not, the possibility of the memory of a hidden property being completely lost in the usually large aristocratic household was practically nil.6 The chances of survival and recovery of such aristocratic hoards are therefore very small. Hoards accumulated in imperial treasure vaults by several Mughal emperors and dishoarded by their successors represent, of course, an altogether different case. These imperial cash reserves, kept partly in the central treasury in the imperial capital and partly in provincial treasuries and managed by the provincial d…w€ns, were used especially in emergency situations such as an urgent need to put together quickly a military expedition force, mobilize the army, etc. According to two contemporary sources, at the time of Akbar’s death in 1605, the imperial treasury included, apart from other precious objects, also 100 million silver rupees.7 During his 22 years long reign Jah€ng…r expended between 85 and 90 per cent of this accumulated treasure8 so that Sh€hjah€n, having found at his accession the treasury 5 F. Pelsaert, Jahangir’s India, pp. 54-55. Aurangzeb mitigated somewhat this harsh rule in 1666 by a special order but there is ample evidence the practice continued more or less in the same way as before. A. Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb. London 1966, pp. 63-68. 6 From contemporary accounts we learn that at least the mansabd€rs holding higher ranks had quite large household staffs including also small financial departments with their own treasurers and accountants who looked after keeping the accounts, transferring money from j€g…rs to the j€g…rd€r’s headquarters, etc. A. Ali, op. cit., pp. 161-162. 7 S. Moosvi, The Economy of the Mughal Empire, p. 198. The sources quoted are F. Pelsaert and the chronicler Muhammad Q€sim Firishta. 8 Ibid. The data on the size of the imperial hoard at the end of Jah€ng…r’s reign - ten million rupees - have been taken over from the contemporary historian Am…n Qazw…n…. It is probably impossible to assess with any degree of exactness the percentual share of these imperial reserves in the total volume of coined silver. S. Moosvi in her attempt at quantification of the silver influx and money supply has estimated the size of the Akbari imperial hoard in 1605 at one-ninth to one-seventh of the total coined silver stock. S. Moosvi, The Silver Influx, pp. 81-82, fn. 81. If in the following twenty two Jah€ng…r… years this hoard was gradually dissolved and the silver put back into circulation, our coin stock curves would need only a slight correction in the upward direction.

Conclusion

135

almost empty, had to make a special effort to build up the imperial reserves anew. In this he was successful: during his 30 years long reign he accumulated reserves worth 95 million rupees, half in coin and half in other precious objects.9 This wealth, together with the contents of provincial treasuries and personal holdings of numerous nobles and high officials, was disgorged again during the bloody succession war in 1658-59.10 This huge injection of silver money, predominantly, if not exclusively, of Sh€hjah€n… coinage, may have temporarily raised the volume of coined silver stock - and also the proportion of Sh€hjah€n… coins in circulation during the first decade of Aurangzeb’s reign. Owing to this dishoarding factor, the real decline of the total stock in the 1660s may have been somewhat less pronounced than indicated by the graph of percentual shares of Sh€hjah€n… and Aurangzeb… stocks and by the incidences record. At his death, Aurangzeb left to his successor a treasure totaling 240 million rupees in coined and uncoined silver - again to be spent on costly succession wars that broke out after 1707. It seems, therefore, that from the point of view of the circulating coin stock, this type of hoarding did not cause a definitive and irreversible loss of the monetary metal: we could perhaps see it as constituting a second circuit in which the silver money circulated at a much slower rate - and in a less regular rhythm - than in the first one, driven by everyday commercial transactions, payments and demands of the increasingly monetized revenue system. Another problem connected with this periodical built-up of imperial reserves is the question about the rationale for this type of behaviour. The Mughal tax system, supported by a permanently mobilized imperial military machine, supplied the ruling elite with enormous financial resources, four-fifths of which were redistributed in an extremely unequal way among the Mughal military aristocracy.11 The main task of this group was, of course, to keep in constant readiness the prescribed number of military units necessary for the maintenance of the Mughal order in the vast imperial domains and for external expansion and conquest. The Mughals did not rule over a peaceful, demilitarized society. As a recent study of D. Kolff has shown12, in the pre-modern period there existed in India a vast market of free military labour, ready to be hired and used by those who had the means to pay for it. For the Mughals it was therefore important not only to have enough resources to keep this potentially disruptive force permanently at bay but also to ensure that its potential paymasters, the local rajas and zam…nd€rs, had as little means as possible for the built-up of their own military power. A maxim recorded by the 14th century chronicler Zia-ud-d…n Baran… summarizing this experience appeared to possess equal validity two centuries later: „Money and strife; strife and money - that is the two things are allied to each other.“13 J. F. Richards, The Mughal Empire, p. 139. Ibid., p. 163. 11 Reconstruction of imperial budget and expenditure on the Akbar… military establishment has been attempted by S. Moosvi in her monograph The Economy of the Mughal Empire c. 1595. A Statistical Study. Delhi 1987, pp. 224-247. 12 D. H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy. The ethnohistory of the military labour market in Hindustan, 1450-1850. Cambridge 1990. 13 Zia-ud-d…n Baran…, Later Kings of Delhi or T€r…Ç-i F…roz Sh€h…. [From] The History of India As Told by its Own Historians. The Posthumous Papers of the Late Sir H.M. Elliot. Ed. by J. Dowson. 2. ed., Calcutta 1953, p. 64. 9

10

136


Under such circumstances, withdrawing from the circulation of „superfluous“ money - i.e. money that could be used for organizing power bases independent of or directly hostile to the state - may have been a part of security policy of the imperial government. The available numismatic material does not allow us to tackle the problem of imperial hoards; its more detailed treatment would go beyond the scope of the present study. At this place it should be only said that one should not resort to sweeping judgments about „irrational hoarding“ without taking into account the wider political, social and societal ramifications of this type of money use.14 As far as saving in the form of demonetized silver is concerned, our coin hoards can supply no answer. Testimonies of European observers suggest that the use of silver for personal ornaments and embroideries was very popular and that large amounts of silver were used for these purposes. A British report written in 1801 on the functioning of the Banaras mint confirms this picture. According to the report, only the class of manufacturers of gold and silver threads, connected with the mint, consisted of 1200 workmen. These threads were used in the so called zar… industry producing primarily embroidery works on clothes with threads made out of flattened gold and silver.15 Banaras was perhaps the most important center of this industry in the whole of India but certainly not the single one: nearby Patna had its own flourishing zar… manufactures too.16 The phenomenon of hoarding of non-monetary silver would certainly deserve a separate study based on a different type of source material than that used in the present work. Until a clearer picture of the accumulation and possible uses of this non-monetary silver emerges, we should at least take it into account while assessing the percentage of natural coin loss: apart from the natural attrition, converting of silver coins into precious objects appears to have played an important role. It is therefore probably not unreasonable to add one or two percentual points to the basis of one per cent estimated for the inadvertent losses. As far as the reconstruction of the coined silver stock is concerned, several points have emerged from the preceding analysis. First, a more or less continuous rise of the Mughal coin stock lasting for nearly seven decades and culminating in the middle of the 1630s, appears to have changed from the mid-1640s into a stagnation or even a decline - depending on the actual coin loss rate - that was reversed only at the beginning of the 1680s. Then followed a rise again that lasted until the 1720s. This phase and the last one, characterized by a stagnation A very clear and concise formulation of this requirement has been recently advanced by S. Subrahmanyam: „It is possible ... to argue that the demand for money must be posed in a far larger framework, in which social groups and institutions choose portfolio assets (including money), basing themselves on a variety of considerations, including liquidity, rate of return, levels of risk, as well as the information/degree of control they have over these factors. Since many of these variables, as well as the preferences over them, are behavioural in nature, they would tend to vary from society to society, as well as over historical time.“ S. Subrahmanyam, Precious Metal Flows and Prices in Western and Southern Asia, 1500-1750: Some Comparative and Conjunctural Aspects. In: S. Subrahmanyam (ed.), Money and the Market in India 1100-1700. Delhi 1994, pp. 217-218. 15 Q. Ahmad, Banaras Mint and the Zari Industry. Journal of the Numismatic Society of India, vol. XXV (1963), pp. 87-88. 16 Ibid., pp. 91-92. 14

Conclusion

137

and decline and lasting until 1760, is however much more difficult to interpret as the coin stock curve may be affected to a greater degree than before by various biases. The plateau showed by the incidences record in the third quarter of the 17th century, on the other hand, appears to reflect a real stagnation of the coin stock volume. It should be noted that the methods of A. Hasan and S. Moosvi, although partly objectionable, have discovered the same phenomenon. Our evidence shows that this stagnation or decline cannot be ascribed to a single cause. Part of the explanation is certainly to be sought in the shift of the East India Company from silver imports to those of gold. Huge imports of silver in the 1630s and lesser, but still substantial, influx in the 1640s led to a depreciation of silver in terms of gold from the ratio 1 : 10 in 1620 to 1 : 16 or even 1 : 17 in 1660s and early 1670s.17 In this situation it appeared profitable to make payments in India in gold rather than in silver - in fact, between 1660 and 1690 a substantial portion of the treasure sent by the E.I.C. to India consisted of gold. In the period 1660-1675 the percentual share of gold represented slightly more than 50 per cent of all precious metals exported by this Company to India.18 The Dutch Oost Indische Compagnie pursued similar tactics. The Dutch acquired their precious metals mainly in the intra-Asian trade, especially in their active trading with Japan. In 1668, however, the Japanese government, fearing an uncontrolled drain of silver out of the country, imposed a ban on its export. This led to an immediate shift of foreign traders’ demand to Japanese gold. For the Dutch who financed their Indian trade with the Japanese precious metals, this shift represented no handicap - on the contrary, given the gold to silver ratio prevailing in India, import of gold fetched a good profit.19 This situation was dramatically reversed in 1676 when the Indian money markets experienced a sudden crash in the price of gold: in this year the price of the gold muhr fell from Rs. 15.25 to Rs. 11. Although the price of gold recovered somewhat in the following few years, reaching the ratio 1 : 13, the time of massive substitution of gold for silver was over. In the 1680s and 1690s, the proportion of silver in the total precious metals imports of both companies reached again 70 to 75 per cent.20 These monetary developments, certainly of great importance for the understanding of commercial strategies of the Dutch and English East India Companies, can hardly serve as a sufficient explanation of the stagnation or decline of the silver coin stock noted above. We can assume that in the 17th century Indian merchants still played an important role in the long-distance trade and in the precious metals imports. They certainly dominated the overland north-western branch of the trade with the Middle East and had an important share in the Indian Ocean trade of Surat.21 On the other hand, we are not informed whether these See, K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World, pp.162-163, Tab. A.4. Gold and silver price ratios. Ibid., p. 177 and S. Moosvi, The Silver Influx, p. 67. 19 O. Prakash, The Dutch East India Company, pp.128-130. Whereas the silver shipped to Bengal between 1669 and 1671 was disposed at a loss, imports of the Japanese gold kobans in the same period afforded a profit as high as 37 per cent. Ibid., p. 130. 20 K. N. Chaudhuri, op. cit., p. 177, S. Moosvi, The Silver Influx, p. 67 and O. Prakash, op. cit., p. 67, fn. 36. 21 The data on Surat’s Indian Ocean Trade found in the annual List of Arrivals in the Dutch dagregister, 17 18

138


merchants reacted to the changing gold to silver ratio in the same way as did the European Companies - one may even ask whether they had the same degree of free choice of doing so. Until these questions are answered, the role of the changing gold to silver ratios in the coin stock formation should not be overestimated. Careful reading of the incidences record, reconstructed for major Mughal mints and understood as an index of their output, suggests that the general level of security along the trade arteries played a not negligible role in the intensity of trading and precious metals flows. Classical examples are the relative decline of Gujarati mints in the second and third decade of the 17th century and the simultaneous compensating rise of the Qandahar mint, suggesting a major shift in the long-distance trade with the Middle East from maritime to overland routes; sharp decline of the incidences of the north-western mints at the end of 1640s due to the war over Qandahar; sudden fall in the incidences of Surati coins with dates corresponding to the years 1663 and 1664, caused no doubt by the first Shivaji’s raid and thorough plunder of this city; uncommonly low incidences levels of coins struck at the same mint in the 1670s, after the second plunder of Surat when the city lived in constant fear of another raid. It should be pointed out that this time the troubles afflicting the trade of Gujarat did not lead to a shift to overland routes as was the case forty years earlier. The fall of Qandahar into Persian hands could play a role but can be hardly accepted as a sufficient explanation: in the 1650s the activity of the north-western mints increased in spite of disruptions caused by repeated and unsuccessful Mughal attempts to regain the city. The very pronounced decline of incidences of the north-western mints, dating from the beginning of the 1660s and lasting until the late 1680s, corresponds to observations of declining intensity of the overland Indo-Persian trade in this period;22 actual causes of this decline would deserve closer investigation and probably are to be sought, at least partly, on the Persian side. In any case, volumes of precious metals supplies appear to have been closely related to concrete violent events and to a level of violence along the trade routes and in or around important commercial centers in general. This fact became especially manifest in the 18th century when the north Indian hinterland, cut off from Gujarat by the Maratha expansion and from the north-western approaches by Sikhs and Afghans, became absolutely dependent on the silver supplies from Bengal, the last prosperous and loyal province of the crumbling empire. If we accept the stagnation or even decline of the coined silver stock as a feature characterizing the monetary developments in the greater part of the 17th century, the absence of the so called „price revolution“ on the European model will cause little surprise.23 published by A. Das Gupta in his Indian Merchants and the decline of Surat, c. 1700-1750. Wiesbaden 1979, pp. 290-291, show that between the years 1713 and 1741 (a period for which the data are available) Indian vessels constituted on the average 70 per cent of all ships arriving each year at the port of Surat. See also the author’s explanation of the nature of this data, ibid., pp. 280-289. 22 P. Jackson, L. Lockhart (eds.), The Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. 6.: The Timurid and Safavid Periods. Cambridge 1986, pp. 462 and 470. 23 Data available for the 17th century, most of which show no inflationary trends, have been summarized by S. Subrahmanyam in Money and the Market, pp. 186-218. He argues that „Overall, then, the Indian evidence suggests that price inflation was at best sporadic, and limited to specific regions and specific commodities ...“ Ibid., p. 209.

Conclusion

139

The increase of prices in its first two decades tallies well with rapidly increasing quantities of circulating silver in the same period. The following stability of prices, as far as it can be postulated on the basis of the still fragmentary evidence, appears to have been based on the longer-term stability of the silver coined stock volume. For the Sh€hjah€n… and Aurangzeb… periods we can perhaps draw into the picture still other type of evidence than the incomplete price series. As A. Ali has shown in his monograph on the Mughal nobility in the time of Aurangzeb, the salaries of Mughal mansabd€rs during the reigns of Sh€hjah€n and Aurangzeb were decreased in absolute terms by several administrative measures24 - this policy would be hardly feasible if in the same period money underwent a process of devaluation caused by inflation. From the beginning of the 1680s, the incidences curve turns upward again. It can be maintained with great degree of certainty that this rise was caused by the influx of silver from Bengal, imported into this maritime province in increasing quantities by the English and Dutch East India Companies. As the 18th century wears on, however, the exact volume of these silver imports into the central areas of the empire is increasingly more difficult to assess. New biases (higher level of hoarding, probability of more frequent remints, decreasing number of hoards of late dates) begin to influence the quantity of incidences and make the results qualitatively different from those that have been built on data collected in hoards of the 17th century. Moreover, the relative scarcity of coins of Bengali provenience in north Indian hoards is puzzling. The hypothesis advanced here is that minting of silver in inland regions, which suffered from a relative scarcity of money and therefore offered higher premium on freshly minted coins, was for the remitters more profitable than sending coins minted in Bengal or transferring the payments by means of bills of exchange. To decide whether the minting activity of the central mints - especially of the mint establishment located in Shahjahanabad - was really as extraordinary as is suggested by the incidences record, we should have an idea about the dispersal of these coins in a broader region adjoining the area of the present-day Uttar Pradesh. This brings us to the last, but not least important, point that deserves our attention. All the observations made above apply, strictly speaking, to the core area of the Mughal empire. This was certainly a very important but probably also a specific region: the flow of taxes from the peripheries to the centre may have created a very specific pattern of monetary circulation with a relatively high rate of intermixture of coins of diverse origin. To form a more exact picture of the monetary flows, degrees and rates of intermixture of coins in different regions of the empire, we would need more case studies based on hoard material from other states of India as well as from Pakistan and Bangladesh: the primary silver importing regions of Gujarat, Panjab and Bengal are among the most important ones. Some of these states have published their own treasure trove inventories, which are, however, far 24 A. Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb. London 1966, p. 53. According to the author, „It would, therefore, appear that the net income of the nobles in the time of Sh€hjah€n and Aurangzeb definitely declined, though it is difficult to form a precise idea of the extent of the decline.“ For a description of the complicated system of salary tables and month-scales used for exact computation of a mansabd€r’s salary, see ibid., pp. 38-73.

140


less detailed than the inventory published by the State Museum in Lucknow. It seems that Indian historians, numismatists and museum officials have paid so far only little attention to hoards as primary historical sources containing a great deal of important data, otherwise unavailable to historical scholarship. One of the more important conclusions that may be drawn from the present study should therefore concern the desirability of a more systematic approach to acquiring, description and publication of coin hoards.

Bibliography

A. General

1. Methodological Banderet, A., Application de la statistique mathematique a l´étude d´une trouvaille. Schweizer Münzblätter, vol. 17 (1967), no. 67, pp. 94-97. Berghaus, P., Coin Hoards: Methodology and Evidence. In: P.L. Gupta, A.K. Jha (eds.), Numismatics and Archaeology. 2nd International Colloquium. Nasik 1987, pp. 16-19. Blanchet, A., Les rapports entre les dépots monétaires et les événements militaires, politiques et économiques. Revue Numismatique, vol. 39 (1936), ser. 4., pp.1-70, 205-270. Cole, T., The Lifetime of Coins in Circulation. Numismatic Chronicle, ser.VII, vol.XVI (1976), pp. 201-218. Deyell, J.S., Numismatic Methodologies Which Answer Questions Economists Might Ask. In: A.K. Jha (ed.), Coinage, Trade and Economy. January 8th-11th, 1991. 3rd International Colloquium. Anjaneri 1991, pp.1-15. Grierson, P., The Interpretation of Coin Finds. I. Numismatic Chronicle, vol. 5(1965), ser.7., pp. i-xiii. II. Ibid., vol. 6 (1966), ser. 7., pp. i-xxi. Grierson, P., Numismatics. London 1975. Macdonald, G., Coin Finds and How to Interpret Them. Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, vol. 34 (1903), pp. 282-300. Metcalf, D.M., Statistische Analyse bei der Auswertung von Münzfundmaterialien. Jahrbuch für Numismatik und Geldgeschichte, vol. 9 (1958), pp. 187-196. Patterson, C.C., Silver Stocks and Losses in Ancient and Medieval Times. The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., vol. XXV (1972), no. 2, pp. 205-233. Pflaum, H.G., L´importance des trésors pour la numismatique et l´histoire. Cercle d´études numismatiques. Bulletin trimestriel, vol. 14 (1977), no.1, pp. 1-10. Potin, V., Systematisierung der Münzfunde und ihre Bedeutung für die numismatische Forschung. In: Actes du 8éme Congrès International de Numismatique: New YorkWashington, Septembre 1973. Paris 1976, pp. 13-23. Sarvas, P., Münzschätze und Münzschatzfunde. In: T. Fischer, P. Ilisch (eds.), Lagom. Festschrift für Peter Berghaus. Münster 1981, pp. 3-10. 141

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147

APPENDIX I Hoards arranged by latest coin


Appendix I.1 : Basic Statistics of Silver Coin Hoards of the U.P. 1: Basic statistics of silver coin hoards of the U.P. A. 1536-1605: Type *,O,E,E/O 1-5 Ag coins unspecified,

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Reflected in You

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The New Cambridge History of India, Volume 1, Part 5: The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India)

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