Was there a Crisis in Mid-eighteenth Century Bengal?

In recent years several noted historians have propounded the thesis that there was a ‘crisis’ in Bengal in the mid-eighteenth century which ultimately brought in the British. Earlier the ‘crisis’ was seen only in Bengal’s body-politic but it is now being said that this was the case in the economic sphere too. The ‘crisis’ in Bengal politics is explained with emphasis on the breakdown of the ‘new class alliance’ of military aristocrats, merchant-bankers and zamindars which sustained the nawabi regime from Murshid Quli to Alivardi Khan. As an indication of the economic ‘crisis’, it has been pointed out that prior to Plassey (1757), economic conditions deteriorated, trade and industry languished, merchants were impoverished, prices of different commodities sky-rocketed, and the exports of the English Company declined – all presumably because of the disastrous impact of the Maratha incursions in the 1740s. The aim of this paper† is to examine this thesis in the light of new evidence found in European and Indian archives.