In a country as large and diverse as India, governance meant a welter of institutional and customary arrangements, particularly in the agrarian sector. Globally, the early modern state’s fiscal well being depended on agriculture. In India, the demands of an expanding maritime commerce made this more complex. Contrary to prevalent views of the state as an economic predator, this article shows how the sixteenth-century initiated novel and creative techniques of agrarian governance, which enabled it to consolidate power, extract revenue and protect diversities at the same time. This was a new dispensation, which cannot be explained by seamless notions of the ‘medieval’. These new strategies of governance can only be understood in the frame of an early modernity, which was a shared global experience. For India, agrarian governance involved, inter alia—the consolidation of private property and transactions based on contractual obligations. These were some of the important ways in which the state facilitated the making of an early modern economy in sixteenth-century India.
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