Companies, Commerce and Merchants: Bengal in the Pre-Colonial Era

This anthology vastly expands our understanding of the much-misconstructed history of early modern Bengal and seeks to redress the misconception that economic decline in Bengal set in even before the British conquest of the region. Based on original sources from European and Indian archives and libraries, the essays underline that Bengal had a prosperous economy in the mid-eighteenth century and was suffering from neither economic nor political crisis.