Ans. Cities are indicators of economic growth and social changes, mean different things in different historical periods and regional contexts. Though, the nomenclatures of city and town are used for all historical periods by many without much time-wise distinction, historians know for certain that the content of city and town changes over time. Historians realised that there were different types of medieval towns that emerged in the west and that they were not of the same economic and political value in effecting the transition from feudalism. Straight jacketing the medieval towns into one category has proved to be erroneous. Henri Pirenne identified two different categories of medieval towns:
(A).
Towns of Liege type, and
(B).
Towns of Flemish type.
The
Liege type of town was primarily political or seat of bishop or of his court,
where the main people were ecclesiastical gentry, administrators with a few
artisans and servants providing them with finished goods. The Flemish type of
city was principally an economic unit, which when military profession was
hereditary and linked with land tenure, the new regime recruited fighting force
out of the working class of the towns. The Turkish co-shares of power drew
their military force, workers for karkhanas, artisans, personnal servants, musicians,
dancing girls, etc. from the large bulk of work force available in the towns.
Scholars
like B.D. Chattopadhyaya and R. Champakalakshmi have traced the origins of
medieval Indian towns back to 9th century onwards. B.D. Chattopadhyaya,
focusing on North-West India, has highlighted the emergence of townships in
Indio-Gangetic divide, the Upper Ganga basin and the Malwa region, thanks to
the forces emitted by trade. He examines the nodal economic points of these
geographies and shows that before their emergence as full-fledged urban centres
under the Gurjara Pratiharas, they were pivotal points in local trade. He
estimates the appearance of 20 towns in Gujarat, 131 in Rajasthan, 78 in
Karnataka during the 11th century and 70 in Andhra during the period between
1000AD to 1336AD. Though the origins of many of these towns were caused by
trade, a considerable number of them were loci of power for the regional
rulers.
Shireen
Moosvi focuses more on the major manufacturing towns of North India, which then
experienced intense labour processes. In her recent work she has used details
concerning the urban tax-income from different subas and citites for examining
the degree of Urbanisation in Mughal India. She says that the Suba of Gujarat,
which had participation in long-distance trade and craft production, had the highest
urban taxation (at 18.654% of the jama) and was the most urbanised region in
the empire, and it was followed by the Suba of Agra, where urban taxation was
15.712% of the jama.
Now
there is an increasing desire among the urban historians to move away from the
study of towns as descriptive categories and look into the value attached to
medieval towns. Everybody knows that this is not as simple as it may appear to
be. The causative factors for the emergence and sustenance of the medieval
towns varied from time to time, causing changes to happen in their functional
roles. There were cases when towns like Agra, which emerged mainly because of
political reasons, had accumulated lot of economic meanings in course of time
and later grew as one of the most thriving commercial centres of North India
even after the shifting of the power base of the Mughals to Delhi and
elsewhere.
Conclusion
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