十七世紀後半-十九世紀前半 北インドにおける都城と市場町 (村) の形成

Abstract

The towns (qasbas) under the Mughals were the state capitals and county (pargana) headquarters in the states of Rajasthan and in the state of Kota in particular. These towns later became the centre of commerce and crafts as well. Besides these towns, a lot of new towns and market towns (villages) with a suffix of "ganj" (market) came to appear in the Kota State from the latter half of the 18th century according to the contemporary Rajasthani revenue records preserved at the Rajasthan State Archives, Bikaner, India. New towns evolved generally from very big villages on their way to which created several small villages (dakhil) and made most of them independent (asli), and continued the same process even some time after their formation. Most of these towns were commercial and/or industrial in their character. On the other hand, market towns (or villages) were either established very near an old town by patels (village headmen), merchants or the state by acquiring lands from its neighbouring villages, or they developed from a small village that was attached to an old town. Thus the formation of new towns and market towns (or villages) denotes clearly that old towns of Kota region had already attained the peak of their commercial and/or industrial activity around the middle part of the 18th century and had no capacity of further development within their existing framework of economic and social organisation. However, it seems that up to the middle part of the 19th century, the activity of establishing new villages had almost stopped, and they had to adopt some new methods of agricultural and industrial production to realize further the economic development of this region. The economic and social structure of towns and market towns (villages) not discussed here is left as a topic to be studied later.