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The Seventeenth-Century Crisis in South Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

John F. Richards
John F. Richards
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Extract

In several of the world's regions a ‘general crisis’ seems to have occurred in the first half of the seventeenth century. At that time in each region, political instability and war, population decline and urban stagnation, economic crises marked by falling prices and depleted stocks of precious metals, and dramatic climatic shifts converged. These symptoms have been detected in western Europe, in the Ottoman lands, and even in China and Japan. Their causes have been attributed in part to the effects of the price revolution, partly to climate change, and in part to rising populations which begin to outstrip agricultural production. The latter tendency in particular seems to have caused a fiscal crisis for the absolutist agrarian states characteristic of Eurasia in this period. Other analyses stress the effects of a tightening linkage in the emerging capitalist world economy in which precious metal flows served to mark newly imposed interdependencies.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , October 1990 , pp. 625 - 638
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Association for Asian Studies Annual General Meeting in Washington, D.C., in March 1989.

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