When Akbar came to the throne in 1556 the Mughal hold on northern India was shaky. Within a few decades the empire had a tax system regular enough that a visiting official could predict what a village owed. That system is usually credited to Akbar's finance minister, Raja Todar Mal, and it shaped Mughal power for more than a century.
The problem it solved
Land was the main source of wealth, so land revenue paid for the army, the court and the administrators. Earlier rulers, including the Delhi Sultans and Sher Shah Suri, had collected it with varying success. In practice the amount demanded often depended on the local official's judgment, and the gap between what peasants paid and what reached the treasury was wide.
Measuring the land
Under the system known as zabt, officials surveyed cultivated land and classified it by how reliably it produced a crop. Fields that were cultivated every year were treated differently from those left fallow for a season or more. The state then fixed a rate per unit of area for each major crop, based on average yields and prices over a number of years.
In 1580 the administration moved to a ten-year assessment, usually called the dahsala, which averaged output and prices across a decade to set a cash rate for each region. The aim was to give peasants a predictable bill and to smooth out the effect of a single good or bad year.
How much was taken
The commonly cited figure is about one-third of the produce, though actual demand varied by region and period. The state preferred payment in cash, which pushed peasants to sell crops in the market and helped monetise the rural economy. Silver flowing in from the Americas through trade made this workable.
Local intermediaries called zamindars sat between the state and the cultivators. They collected the revenue, kept a share, and often held armed followers. The Mughals needed them, and they were a source of friction whenever the centre was weak.
Tying revenue to the army
The revenue system worked alongside the mansabdari ranking of nobles. Each noble held a rank that set how many troops he had to maintain, and he was paid through assignments of revenue from particular lands. Those assignments were rotated regularly, so that nobles couldn't build up a local power base. It was a clever arrangement, though it gave them little reason to look after the land they'd soon leave.
The limits
Historians such as Irfan Habib have argued that the burden on peasants was heavy and became heavier in later reigns, contributing to unrest in the seventeenth century. Others note that the system's reach was uneven. Some regions were measured carefully while others paid by older, looser methods. The detailed record we have, especially the Ain-i-Akbari compiled by Abu'l-Fazl, describes the intended system and doesn't always show how it worked in a given village.
Even so, the Mughal revenue machinery was among the most sophisticated of its age. The British later inherited parts of it, and echoes of its survey and assessment methods survived in colonial and postcolonial land administration across South Asia.
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