Slavery and agricultural bondage in South India in the nineteenth century

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Abstract
A vast amount of important source material is available to the student of Indian economic history, and, for the period from about 1860 onwards, it is almost always possible to see how the information available in the government records and the official reports came to be acquired. The government officers who took part in the inquiries made into the social and economic structure of India were generally eloquent about the methods by which they had collected their information, the rules laid down for the incorporation of the facts in later reports, and the purposes for which the inquiries had actually been undertaken. All this is very useful for the research student who will not, as a result, experience too many difficulties in judging the value and the limitation of the facts presented. But when we move further back, and try to explore the economic history of India in the first century of British rule, matters become more complicated. Few of the officials took the trouble to explain how they had arrived at their knowledge. As a result we find that the few historians who have tried to cope with the early period can be divided into two groups: those who accept the information provided in the official records without further inquiry, and those who discard it altogether on the assumption that it was probably collected in the traditional Indian way by minor civil servants who were not particularly interested in elucidating the truth.

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