ABSTRACT
An international symposium on The State, Decentralisation and Tax-Farming: The Ottoman Empire, Iran and India was held at Munich on 25 May 1990 under the auspices of the Nahost-Institute of the University. Georg Berkemer then added another dimension with observations on how, among Northern Sircars in the eighteenth century, a major contradiction in political development had been played out in terms of the confrontation between Islam, which became the religious and ideological instrument of consolidating central government, and Hinduism, to which local elites clung in opposing such centralisation. Ideology, in other words, was also used as a global vocabulary and instrument of control over the decentralisation potential inherent in any fief-distribution or tax-farming situation. The point is that there are no grounds for absolutising or even fetishising such differences, which need to be pursued in comparative perspective across the full spectrum of all medieval social formations.
