Mughal Land Revenue Records and the Problem of the 'Standard' Assessment
A researcher is reconstructing the revenue demand of a pargana in the Deccan for a fifty-year window spanning the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. She has three sources: (i) a Mughal administrative manual describing assessment procedure in general terms; (ii) a set of local revenue papers giving annual figures for roughly a dozen scattered years, with gaps; and (iii) a Persian chronicle that praises the emperor for lightening the burden on the peasantry in one specific year. The annual figures in (ii) vary by up to 40 per cent between recorded years. Her supervisor wants a single 'average demand' figure for the whole half-century, with a footnote on the chronicle. You must advise her before she writes the chapter.
1. Why is a single average demand figure for the whole fifty-year window methodologically unsound here, given the source mix?
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The average would fuse incomparable things.
The figures are not a time series. Twelve scattered years across fifty is not a sample of the whole; it is a set of surviving snapshots, and survival is not random. Years with disrupted administration, war, or famine are precisely the years whose papers are least likely to survive - so the gaps are biased, not neutral.
The 40 per cent variation is the finding, not noise to be smoothed. Revenue demand moved with assessed crop, harvest, military campaigning, and reassessment. Averaging away that variation destroys the information the chapter exists to explain.
The manual describes procedure, not outcomes. An administrative text states how assessment ought to be done; it cannot supply the missing annual values, and using it to fill gaps imports an idealised norm as if it were data.
The chronicle is panegyric. A praise notice about lightening the burden is a claim about royal virtue, not a fiscal record; it can corroborate a direction of change at best.
A better output is a table of the recorded years with their provenance, an explicit statement of what the gaps are, and a range rather than a mean.
2. How should the chronicle's claim about the lightened burden be used in the chapter - what evidentiary weight, and in what position?
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Treat it as a claim requiring corroboration, not as a datum.
Its weight is low for the fiscal figure itself: panegyric routinely attributes relief to the sovereign regardless of who ordered it or whether it was implemented. But it has real value in two narrower uses.
- As a pointer to an event. If the chronicle names a year, that year becomes a hypothesis to test against the revenue papers: is there a visible dip, a remission entry, or a change in assessment unit? If yes, the chronicle and the papers corroborate each other and the claim gains standing. If the papers show no change, the chronicle records an intention, not an outcome.
- As evidence of administrative discourse. Even an unfulfilled claim tells you what the court wished to be seen doing, which matters for a chapter on legitimacy as much as revenue.
Positionally, it belongs in the text as a qualified statement - 'the court chronicle presents the year as one of relief; the surviving papers do not permit confirmation' - not in a footnote. Burying a contested claim in a footnote hides the reasoning from the reader. The footnote convention should be reserved for bibliographic detail, not for unresolved interpretive problems.