Modern historian s’ efforts to identify and interpret monetary phenomena have grown under the powerful influence of two streams of thought regarding the precise nature of money and its ability to function in an exchange economy: one emphasizing the essential neutrality of money, and the other ascribing to it the capacity to produce real economic changes. In this paper, the treatment of two major themes in the historiography of Mughal money, that is, money supply and price movements, is subjected to critical scrutiny with the help of textual and numismatic material. The purpose of this criticism is to suggest that monetary theory is way ahead of our empirical knowledge about the money economy, and unless monetization as a cultural and commercial phenomenon also becomes a major focal point for historical attention, the domain of monetary history is likely to shrink down to mere macro-economic modeling.
