4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST yal of eighteenth-century in its own distinctive image independently of the phenomenon of Mughal decline, and to see it as a consequ-ence of a continuing process of economic growth in seventeenth century. According to this thesis the disintegration of Mughal empire did not produce destabilising effects on the country's trade and commerce, its markets, towns and monetary system; but on the contrary generated forces of regeneration and growth throughout India. Through distribution of urban economies and collaboration of Indian merchants, bankers and traders with the East India Company the agricultural and industrial production was further stimulated. The continuity in the economic development was thus maintained without being interrupted by the establishment of British imperial power in the latter half of the eighteenth century.1 Frank Perlin, in his laboriously researched monograph,2 has viewed the problem of India's pre-colonial past in the context of international commercial capitalism of which, he claims, it had become an essential part even during the seventeenth century. Local merchant capitalism emerged independently in India as in Europe but 'within a common international theatre, and societal and commercial changes'.3 He hastens to add: 'But by the eighteenth century the process of integration is of an altogether different scale and character'.4 Another author has tried to discover elements of elements of continuity between seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the system of polity and governance. He states that under the Mughals no state had come into being or grown to the full stature of nation state so as to decay or wither away later. The Mughal state should not be seen as a consolidated territorial entity with geographically fixed boundaries, comprising within its limits a homogeneous community of people. One should not be overawed by anarchic conditions prevailing in eighteenth-century because such a state had always existed in the preceding one in which Mughal state expanded and thrived.5 J.P. Marshall has attempted to identify features of change and continuity in most aspects of agrarian systems existing in the pre-colonial and post-British periods of eighteenth century Bengal. He concludes: Thus there was an apparent continuity between the old Mughal regime and the new British one.6 But in this vision of eighteenth-century the centre is blank. No study has focussed on the position occupied by the actual tillers of the soil and producers of artisnal goods as crucial elements of the internal economic structure and activity. The questions how the agricultural and professional classes were materially benefited, and in what manner their living conditions were improved by the continuing productivity have not been dealt with on the basis of statistical data to complete the picture of general economic prosperity. Irfan Habib remarks that 'the primary method of surplus-extraction throughout India had come to be the levy of land revenue on behalf of or, in the name of, the