1 Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556-1707, Second Revised Edition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. xvi+547, Rs. 545/-. When the first edition of the book under review appeared in 1963, it was a historic event for Mughal studies. It has been out of print and a new edition was long overdue, revised or otherwise. It was one of the first works to have moved beyond the narrow confines of dynastic history or sectarian typecasting. Satish Chandra’s Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court preceded Habib’s monograph by four years. However, Chandra’s work concerned itself exclusively with the later phase of the Mughal period whereas Habib set for himself a more ambitious agenda. The strength of Habib’s seminal work lay in its attempt to look into the entire ‘agrarian system’ through an investigation of Mughal land revenue administration, agrarian economy and social structure spanning the period from 1556 to 1707. The wealth of source materials, particularly administrative manuals, revenue records and court chronicles that went into the making of the text, helped enforce a new rigour into medieval Indian studies. Indeed, it set the tone for much of the writing in the field for the next twenty-five years or so. Much water and blood has flowed through Mughal historiography since. Particularly contested are Habib’s ideas of extreme centralization of power in the hands of an absolutist monarch, the self-sufficiency of the village economy and the agrarian crisis of the eighteenth century. However, Habib does not take note of these challenges in this revised edition. If anything, he is even more assertive in his conclusions. This is unfortunate. For, the inspiring force of The Agrarian System was not just its wealth of information but also the tentative tenor of the author’s formulations. The contradictions in the revised edition stand more exposed than in the original. To be sure, a number of new sources have been harnessed in this edition. While the sequence and titles of the chapters remain the same, the chapter on the village community has been modified and enlarged considerably. A more nuanced view of the village community has been attempted but over all this does not alter the chief arguments of the