Abstract
Until now, the study of Mughal money was dictated either by the concerns of numismatic analyses or by the need to define its position in a given economic structure. While the former was confined to the technical aspects of specie- money, the latter was preoccupied mostly with the theoretical implications of monetary movements on an aggregate scale. In both cases, the historical conditions responsible for shaping the monetisation of the Mughal economy remained understudied. This essay examines the concepts and framework derived from the quantity theory of money and deployed in recent approaches to the study of the Mughal monetary economy. By offering a critique of the methodology adopted to evaluate money supply and price movements, it stresses the need for an inductive study of historical material in order to refine the current picture and to extend existing knowledge of the subject beyond macro-economic modelling.
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