Money and social inequality: The views of Abū’l Faẓl

Abstract

In his major works, Å’īn-ī Akbarī and Akbarnāma, Akbar’s minister, Abū’l Faẓl enters many comments of a philosophical and sociological nature. He believes in a hierarchical order of society, but in a manner more sophisticated than that of his predecessors; and he has also a profounder sense of the role of money, not as a dissolvent, but as an instrument of a differentiated society.