In most explanations of history and the historical process, the primary protagonist, the human being, is painted as a unique creature, who sets himself apart from other animals due to his ability to perform complex thought processes. The ideational wellspring of human thought is credited, and often rightly so, for man's scientific inventions and complex social organisations. The arts, the sciences, and civilisation itself, is testimony to what the human thought process is capable of achieving. But, at the same time, various examples in human history also go on to mock and negate the very thought process that is credited for human development. Such discrepancies in human behaviour are sought to be explained away in terms of the innate selfishness and brutish instinct that man inherits. It is in this context that the duality of human nature needs to be acknowledged. But an acknowledgement of this duality raises the problem of whether we can assign primacy to one facet of human nature.

It has been pertinently observed1 that of the 193 living species of monkeys, all save one, is covered by a coat of hair. Terming this as an exception, the naked ape, or the self-named homo sapien, it is interestingly observed that ‘this unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time studiously ignoring his fundamental ones’.

Quite often, when I try to understand history, I am reminded of the fable of the blind men and the elephant. As each blind man came forward and touched a portion of the animal, his understanding and explanation of it differed. So too with history. A new fact or a difference in perspective can paint the past in radically different hues. Which is the best hue? Which colour would paint the past in its most realistic replication? Is it possible at all? These are questions that doubtless assail most thinkers of history.

With these thoughts agitating my mind, I started examining the canvas of the human past. What I discovered was that the dominant brush strokes of most history writings were confined to political narratives in shades of grey, often to the exclusion or neglect of other colours! That this practice succeeded in creating an almost monochrome picture of the past, did not seem to matter. But it certainly did matter to me.

I often thought that a monochromic reflection of the past may have its own charm. But colour certainly added a vibrancy that carried with it the potential of vastly enriching our understanding of the past. Maybe, this need to allow different colours to complete the picture of the past had set in motion the trend of adding newer perspectives to political explanation. Thus, the emphasis on the study of the economy, the society, history from below, social formation, technology, etc., can be seen as an attempt to add different hues that would add to a more comprehensive understanding of the past.

Like most other economies of the time, the Ahom economy too was primarily agrarian. However, one significant difference in the case of the Ahom economy was the striking universality of the agricultural process. As a matter of fact, it may be said that agriculture constituted the primary occupation of all the people during this time. Unlike other parts of India, agricultural activity here was not confined to a particular occupational group. On the contrary, it was common for all sections of the population, including the aristocracy to engage themselves in agricultural pursuits. This fact was succinctly put across in his Observations on the Administration of the Province of Assam by Baboo Anundaram Dakeal Phookun1 where he states, ’… The Assamese, one and all, from the poorest peasant to the nobility of the country, are devoted to agricultural pursuits. In ancient times, the sovereigns themselves had their private farms. In Bengal and other parts of India, tillage is exclusively the occupation of the cultivating class. There is, however, not a single family in Assam that is not engaged in the culture of lands, and every family provides itself by agriculture with almost all the necessaries of life.

Though one may argue that the use of the term mode of production has become somewhat clichéd, at the same time, it is a fact that this broad-based terminology does provide an effective yardstick to examine society and social formations. But before hurtling headlong into an exercise trying to examine the mode of production of a society and its corresponding social relations, one should seek to gain an overview of the nature of the inter-relation forged by man with his environment and the manner in which he utilises his surroundings for survival and progress. At first sight, it may appear that the fundamental factor which determines man's relation with the environment and the nature of resource utilisation is largely determined by geographical realities. Interestingly, the cultural idiosyncrasies of a given society coupled with its technical and scientific knowledge would largely explain the nature of resourse utilisation and its redistributive mechanism. In this vein one may examine the observation made by W.W. Rostow that ‘societies presented by the environment around them with similar investment possibilities, involving ranges of risks and degrees of change in existing productive methods, will exploit those possibilities in differing degree.’ In other words, the basic and fundamental connection between the physical environment and man's reaction to it, the ingenuity applied by the society in question needs to be examined in relation to the level of its knowledge and other cultural factors.

In trying to explain the process of change in nature, one often takes recourse to the theory of evolution. Understanding biological changes in species over the millennia, as also their adaptation to a changing environment, is extremely interesting. With regard to human civilisation, the study of man's biological evolution provides vital inputs to the understanding of history. But in deciphering the past, what is even more crucial is an understanding of the human efforts to use the environment to his own advantage, and the hows, whys and whens of the changes he has wrought on it.

The journey of man through the ages, from the primitive stage to modernity, from a creature who did not know the use of fire to man who split the atom to harness its energy, has been a tremendous journey indeed. Would it be possible to explain this transition? Can generalisations be made and patterns discerned so as to adequately explain the phenomenon of change in human history? In the process, would it be possible to identify the motive force that propels the progression of history? These are some of the questions that have been often debated by students of history.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the process of intellectual development, particularly in Europe, was dictated by the search for scientific truths and for ensuring objectivity of knowledge. In addition to this trend of making the study of history a scientific endeavour, another equally important development, as observed by Barnes, was the adoption of a more historical attitude towards the human past and the gradual rise of an idea of progress.