Revenue extraction in colonial South Asia

Abstract

The extraction of revenue in India has historically been a pillar of Indian sovereignty and state capacity. The Mughals, as the last precolonial rulers, established a paper-bound and sophisticated system of taxation that grew in intensity over the seventeenth century. This was sped up by eighteenth-century successor kingdoms in their drives to maximise revenue and build up their authority, raise armies, and serve as religious patrons. The East India Company harnessed these extant trends to assert its fiscal sovereignty, starting in Bengal after 1765, and increasingly up-country and inland after the early 1800s. Utilising extant scribes and forms of fiscal knowledge, the British altered fiscal practice by welding it to an inflexible legal procedure and novel norms of taxation. The East India Company forged the modern Indian state through a ruthless building up of fiscal capacity, though one that still was markedly shaped by existing precolonial norms.