336 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
money ? The difficulties of barter have ever formed an unfailing theme with all economists, including those who have insisted that money is only a cloak. Money is not only necessary to facilitate trade by obviating the difficulties of barter, but is also necessary to sustain production by permitting specialization. For, who would care to specizlize if he could not trade his products for those of others which he wanted ? Trade is the handmaid of production, and where the former cannot flourish the latter must languish. It is therefore evident that if a trading society is not to be out of gear and is not to forego the measureless advantages of its automatic adjustments in the great give-and-take of specialized industry, it must provide itself with a sound system of money.*
At the close of the Moghul Empire, India, judged by the standards of the time, was economically an advanced country. Her trade was large, her banking institutions were well developed, and credit played an appreciable part in her transactions. But a medium of exchange and a common standard of value were among others the most supreme desiderata in the economy of the Indian people when they came, in the middle of the eighteenth century, under the sway of the British. Before the occurrence of this event, the money of India consisted of both gold and silver. Under the Hindu emperors the emphasis was laid on gold, while under the Mussalmans silver formed a large part of the circulating medium.† Since the time of Akbar, the founder of the economic system of the Moghul Empire in India, the units of currency had been the gold mohur and the silver rupee. Both coins, the mohur and the rupee, were identical in weight, i.e., 175 grs. troy‡ and were “supposed to have been coined without any alloy, or at least intended to be so.”§ But whether they constituted a single standard of value or not is a matter of some doubt. It is believed that the mohur and the rupee, which at the time were the common measure
- For the whole of this discussion, cf. H. J. Davenport, The Economics of Enterprise (1913), Chapters II and III.
† Princep, J., Useful Tables, Calcutta, 1834, pp. 15-16.
‡ Robert Chalmers, History of Colonial Currency, 1893, pp. 336, 340.
§ Dr. P. Kelly The Universal Cambist, 1811, p. 115.