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The Price of an Empire: Alauddin Khalji's Market Regulations
Paperback
Series: Narrative History
General World HistoryIndian & South Asian History
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ISBN13: 9798199880091
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 3 2026
Pages: 318
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.79 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 3 2026
Pages: 318
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.79 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
ABOUT THE BOOK
For thirteen years at the turn of the fourteenth century, the Sultan of Delhi did what almost no ruler of the pre-modern world managed and what most who attempted it failed to achieve: he fixed the prices of an entire urban economy and made the fixing hold. Grain and cloth, horses and cattle, slaves and sugar, and the whole miscellany of the bazaar down to caps and needles - all were brought under a single comprehensive schedule, policed by an apparatus of surveillance and terror, and held steady through good harvests and bad, through war and peace, in the largest city of its world. Then, within months of the Sultan's death, the whole system collapsed, and the prices sprang free.
For thirteen years at the turn of the fourteenth century, the Sultan of Delhi did what almost no ruler of the pre-modern world managed and what most who attempted it failed to achieve: he fixed the prices of an entire urban economy and made the fixing hold. Grain and cloth, horses and cattle, slaves and sugar, and the whole miscellany of the bazaar down to caps and needles - all were brought under a single comprehensive schedule, policed by an apparatus of surveillance and terror, and held steady through good harvests and bad, through war and peace, in the largest city of its world. Then, within months of the Sultan's death, the whole system collapsed, and the prices sprang free.
The Price of an Empire is the full story of that extraordinary experiment: the market regulations of Alauddin Khalji. It is a book about how the system worked - the extraction from a squeezed countryside that fed the cheap city, the granaries and the bound grain-carriers, the financed merchants who kept the controlled markets stocked, the three independent channels of spies who watched every transaction, the savage punishments that made evasion unthinkable. It is a book about why the system existed - the Mongol threat that demanded a great standing army, and the cheap prices that alone could make that army affordable. And it is a book about what the system meant - for the soldier who lived well on his fixed wage, for the merchant who traded under the shadow of the knife, for the peasant whose half-harvest underwrote the whole, and for our understanding of what states can and cannot do in the economy.
Written for the general reader and grounded throughout in the medieval sources and the modern scholarship, the book reckons honestly with both the achievement and its cost. It tells of a marvel of administration that astonished its age and anticipated, by six centuries, the command economies of the modern world; and it tells of the suffering, the coercion, and the concentration of power on which that marvel rested. It follows the system from its birth in the besieged capital of 1303 to its swift collapse and its long afterlife, and it draws from the whole a lesson about power and its price: that what is command dies with the commander, while what is genuine technique endures. This is the story of the most regulated economy of the medieval world - a demonstration of what control can accomplish, and of what it costs.
Written for the general reader and grounded throughout in the medieval sources and the modern scholarship, the book reckons honestly with both the achievement and its cost. It tells of a marvel of administration that astonished its age and anticipated, by six centuries, the command economies of the modern world; and it tells of the suffering, the coercion, and the concentration of power on which that marvel rested. It follows the system from its birth in the besieged capital of 1303 to its swift collapse and its long afterlife, and it draws from the whole a lesson about power and its price: that what is command dies with the commander, while what is genuine technique endures. This is the story of the most regulated economy of the medieval world - a demonstration of what control can accomplish, and of what it costs.
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