Trade Routes, Market Towns, and the Political Economy of the Delhi Sultanate, 1206-1398 CE

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between long-distance trade networks and urban formation in the Delhi Sultanate between the early thirteenth and late fourteenth centuries. Drawing on Persian administrative chronicles, Arabic geographical texts, numismatic evidence, and the archaeological surveys conducted by Irfan Habib, Simon Digby, and the Archaeological Survey of India, the study traces how the sultans of the Slave, Khalji, and Tughlaq dynasties deliberately reorganized existing trade corridors inherited from the Rajput period to consolidate fiscal extraction, provision military garrisons, and sustain the expanding population of the imperial capital. The article argues that urban growth in the sultanate period was not primarily a product of commercial spontaneity but of three interlocking political mechanisms: the sultan's control over grain markets (mandis) through the grain price regulations of Alauddin Khalji, the integration of Hindu merchant communities (mahajans and banjaras) into the sultanate fiscal apparatus, and the monetization of agrarian surplus through the silver tanka currency system introduced under Iltutmish. The case of Multan as a transit entrepot connecting the subcontinent to Central Asian and Persian Gulf trade circuits demonstrates that commercial urbanism under the sultanate was inseparable from the political management of exchange. The article also examines the disruption caused by Timur's invasion of 1398, which severed the northern trade arteries of the sultanate system and precipitated an urban contraction whose effects persisted into the early Mughal period, reshaping the geography of medieval Indian commerce in ways that colonial-era scholarship systematically underestimated.