Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-r5zm4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-17T07:22:34.335Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Regions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

David Ludden
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Get access

Summary

In the fourteenth century, South Asia became a region of travel and transport connecting Central Asia and the Indian Ocean. This redefined the location of all its agrarian territories. In the wake of the Mongols, overland corridors of routine communication extended from the Silk Road to Kanya Kumari and branched out to seaports along the way. Connections among distant parts of Eurasia became numerous and routine. New technology, ideas, habits, languages, people and needs came into farming communities. New elements entered local cuisine. People produced new powers of command, accumulation, and control, focused on strategic urban sites in agrarian space. By 1600, ships sailed between China, Gujarat, Europe, and America. Horses trotted across the land between Tajikistan and Egypt, Moscow and Madurai. Camels caravaned between Syria and Tibet, Ajmer, and Agra. A long expansion in world connections occurred during centuries when a visible increase in farming intensity was also reshaping agrarian South Asia. In the dry, interior uplands, warriors built late-medieval dynasties, on land formerly held by pastoralists and nomads; and sultans established a new political culture, whose hegemony would last to the nineteenth century. Slow but decisive change during late-medieval centuries laid the basis formore dramatic trends after 1500, when agricultural expansion accelerated along with the mobility and the local agrarian power of warriors and merchants. Regional formations of agrarian territory came into being, sewn together by urban networks, during a distinctively early modern period of agrarian history, whose patterns of social power, agricultural expansion, and cultural change embrace the empires of Akbar and the East India Company.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Benson, C., A Collection of Telugu Sayings and Proverbs Bearing on Agriculture, Madras, Government Press, 1897.Google Scholar
Danzig, Richard, ‘The Many Layered Cake: A Case Study of Reform of the Indian Empire’, Modern Asian Studies, 3, 1, 1969.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eaton, Richard M., The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760, Berkeley, 1994.Google Scholar
Edney, Matthew H., Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843, Chicago, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guha, Amalendu, ‘The Medieval Economy of Assam’, in Raychaudhuri, Tapan and Habib, Irfan, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. I, Cambridge, 1982.Google Scholar
Guha, Sumit, ‘Forest Politics and Agrarian Empires: The Khandesh Bhils, C1700–1850’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 33, 2, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guha, Sumit, ‘An Indian Penal Regime: Maharashtra in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present, 147, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Habib, Irfan, An Atlas of Mughal Empire: Political and Economic Maps with Notes, Bibliography and Index, Delhi, 1982.Google Scholar
Hagen, James R., ‘Gangetic Fields: An Approach to Agrarian History Through Agriculture and the Natural Environment, 1600–1970’, Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, 1988.Google Scholar
Heyne, Benjamin, ‘Correspondence to Captain Mackenzie, Superintendent of the Mysore Survey’, National Archives of India, Foreign Miscellaneous Series, No. 94, 1802.Google Scholar
Lieberman, Victor, ‘Transcending East-West dichotomies: State and Culture Formation in Six Ostensibly Disparate Areas’ (The Eurasian Context of the Early Modern History of Mainland South East Asia, 1400–1800), Modern Asian Studies, 31, 3, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mines, Mattison, The Warrior Merchants: Textiles, Trade and Territory in Southern India, Cambridge, 1984.Google Scholar
Moosvi, Shireen, The Economy of the Mughal Empire c.1595. A Statistical Study, Delhi, 1987.Google Scholar
Morrison, B. M., Political Centers and Cultural Regions in Early Bengal, Tucson, 1970.Google Scholar
Mukhia, Harbans, Perspectives on Medieval History, New Delhi, 1933.Google Scholar
Parthasarathi, Prasannan, ‘Weavers, Merchants and States: The South Indian Textile Industry, 1680–1800’, Harvard University dissertation, 1992.Google Scholar
Randhawa, M. S., A History of Agriculture in India, Delhi, 1986, vol. 11.Google Scholar
Rao, C. K. Subba, Tamil Sayings and Proverbs on Agriculture, Madras, Madras Government Agriculture Department Bulletin No. 34, 1896.Google Scholar
Richards, J. F. and Flint, E. P. (Daniels, R. C., ed.), Historic Land Use and Carbon Estimates for South and Southeast Asia, 1880–1980, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Experimental Sciences Division.Google Scholar
Rothermund, Dietmar, ‘A Survey of Rural Migration and Land Reclamation in India, 1885’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 4, 3, 1977.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, Tapti, The Politics of a Popular Uprising: Bundelkhand in 1857, New Delhi, 1994.Google Scholar
Sanyal, Hiteshranjan, ‘Social Aspects of Temple Building in Bengal: 1600 to 1900 AD’, Man in India, 48, 1968.Google Scholar
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay and Bayly, C. A., ‘Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 25, 4, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Talbot, Cynthia, manuscript of chapter 4 of forthcoming book on medieval Andhra and ‘The Making of Andhradesh’, South Asia Seminar presentation at the University of Pennsylvania, 29 October 1997.Google Scholar
Thapar, Romila, ‘The Scope and Significance of Regional History’, in Thapar, Romila, Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations, Hyderabad, 1978.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Regions
  • David Ludden, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book: An Agrarian History of South Asia
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521364249.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Regions
  • David Ludden, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book: An Agrarian History of South Asia
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521364249.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Regions
  • David Ludden, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book: An Agrarian History of South Asia
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521364249.005
Available formats
×