Historians of early British administration in India have traditionally focused their attention upon the two major ‘systems’ of that administration—the ryotwari and zamindari land revenue settlements, or variations thereof. This is understandable: these systems provide a convenient framework within which to measure variations in administrative policy and consequent social and economic results. This preoccupation seems further justified by the attention that was given to the merits of these systems by officials high in the Company's administration in India and London in the early nineteenth century.

There have been numerous attempts to explain the fall of the Mughal Empire; and I truly feel great hesitation in adding myself to the long list of its exponents. To historians like Irvine and Sarkar, the decline could be explained in terms of a personal deterioration in the quality of the kings and their nobles. The harem influence grew—and women, for some strange unscientific reason, are always supposed to be a bad influence. The kings and nobles became more luxury loving, though no-one has yet established that the Mughals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries enjoyed any less luxurious mode of living than their eighteenth-century successors. Sarkar, in his monumental History of Aurangzib, also elaborated upon the traditionally recognized factor, namely, Hindu–Muslim differences: Aurangzib's religious policy is thought to have provoked a Hindu Reaction that undid the unity that had been so laboriously built up by his predecessors.

One must always bemoan the lack of adequate statistics when discussing population problems in Afghanistan.1 Few nations in Asia, however, have adequate data-collecting procedures: only 9 of the 41 Asian nations, encompassing about 8 per cent of Asia's total population, according to a recent UNO survey.