Notes Towards Understanding Economic Changes in Medieval Kerala

This article looks at aspects of the economic developments in medieval Kerala such as in land use, agriculture, craft production, trade, rise of urban centres and the use of money. These resulted, among other things, in the emergence of a new sensibility and the (re)invention of media to express it. Placing them in the larger context of the peninsula, it seeks to raise questions about their implications for understanding a transition from the ‘medieval’ to a later formation and discuss various possibilities. It concludes with the observation that ‘Whether or not one can, or has to, call what would be in store a capitalist formation, one thing is clear: changes were on the cards. The forces and processes of this transition, its character and direction as well as its causality call for detailed studies’.