GOLCONDA^157The tyranny of these Muslim rulers—no better or worse than that of
Hindu despots—was aggravated by the measures taken to prevent sedi
tion. This is a classic problem of autocracies: how to prevent lieu
tenants from taking root and creating rival centers of power. In
medieval Europe, the grant of landed fiefs was originally personal, not
heritable, but over time local lords tended to stay put and pass domains
down to their heirs, bonding with the landed elites of the area and cre
ating the fragmented authority we know as feudalism. In Moghul
India, as in other Turkic states, agents of the ruler were moved about.
This limited local power, but also destroyed the official's commitment
to his territory. His aim became to make and take as much as possible
as fast as possible, spending litde on social capital.^13 All take and no
give. In those regions dependent on irrigation, this neglect of com
munal equipment could be disastrous, as the annals of Indian famines
testify.
For similar reasons, the peasant (and indeed all subjects) had no rea
son to improve the land, holding it as he did at the pleasure of the
ruler. There is in this country, wrote François Bernier, a French physi
cian who spent a dozen years in India in the seventeenth century, no
mien et tien (no mine and yours), that is, no right or sense of property.
No one, he wrote, dares to show his wealth, for fear of extortion or
seizure. No one cares to improve ways or tools of production. Hence,
wrote Bernier, the appalling contrast between the opulent few and the
impoverished many; the decrepitude of the houses; the humiliation of
the mass; the absence of incentives to learning and self-improvement.
Hence also severe constraints on credit and on the commercial pos
sibilities that credit makes possible. Much has been made of the bee
hive of trade in the Indian ocean when the Europeans arrived;^14 also of
the wealth of the sarafs, who lent at high rates to peasants and mer
chants alike. But high rates mean high risk. What security could the
borrower offer? How much can a lender afford to lend when the need
to hide assets severely reduces information?^15 India's commercial ac
tivity languished well below its potential.
How, then, did some Indian traders, bankers, and lenders manage to
get rich? The answer is, they laid golden eggs. They paid and bribed,
hoarded and shared; and when they died, the family hid as much
wealth as it could. Here are the observations of an Englishman in
1689:
Their [merchants'] Wealth consists only in Cash and Jewels, the distinc
tion of personal and real Estate is not heard in India and that they preserve