Which foreign traveler describes “the lack of private property” in India?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → Francois Bernier
Francois Bernier, a French doctor and traveller of the seventeenth century, compared Mughal India with Europe at every step. For him one of the biggest differences was the lack of private property in land in India: he believed that the emperor owned all the land and gave it out to his nobles. Because landholders could not pass their land on to their children, Bernier argued, nobody invested in improving it, and agriculture was ruined.
NCERT (2025-26): “6.1 The question of landownership … According to Bernier, one of the fundamental differences between Mughal India and Europe was the lack of private property in land in the former. He was a firm believer in the virtues of private property, and saw crown ownership of land as being harmful for both the state and its people. He thought that in the Mughal Empire the emperor owned all the land and distributed it among his nobles, and that this had disastrous consequences for the economy and society. This perception was not unique to Bernier, but is found in most travellers’ accounts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Owing to crown ownership of land, argued Bernier, landholders could not pass on their land to their children. So they were averse to any long-term investment in the sustenance and expansion of production. The absence of private property in land had, therefore, prevented the emergence of the class of ‘improving’ landlords (as in Western Europe) with a concern to maintain or improve the land.…” |