ABSTRACT
John Shore replied to James Grant’s treatises in a monumental minute on June 18, 1789. In brief Shore abandons Grant’s proposal that the highest Mughal assessment should be adopted as the standard; he abandons as impracticable the principle that one-fourth of the gross produce should form the basis of the revenue, and accepts the experience of the twenty-four years of British administration. This experience he accepts with important limitations, as will be seen in his controversy with Lord Cornwallis. Shore opens by pointing out that there were two schools of thought – the one headed by Philip Francis the other headed by Grant, who insisted that Bengal was capable of paying a higher revenue. Shore points to the calamities that had fallen on Bengal since the grant of the Dewani, the terrible famine of 1770, which had carried away one-third of the population, and the great, if less disastrous, famines of 1784 and 1787.
