Tax farming is a system of organising the financing of government that seems to be as old as civilisation itself.
Awarding
to favourites, or auctioning to the wealthy, the right to collect taxes
almost assumes abuse and exploitation, and Baliati Palace is almost
certainly an illustration of that reality.
The
practice has long, at least up until the advent of real parliamentary
governance, been part of the practice of governance in UK, so it would
come as no surprise that the East India Company.. ‘The Honourable
Company’.. should decide upon the practice as a means of maximising its
income.
So it was that a successful Salt Merchant named Govinda Ram Shaha, sometime in the middle part of the 19th Century, appears to have acquired the office of Zaminder for a part of the fertile and trading area of Manikganj.
Creating
for himself, and for the four sons of his first marriage, then the
three sons of his second, the sprawling, largely neo classical palace at
Baliati, he established for all a lifestyle that leaves even today’s
visitor almost speechless.
Better
preserved, in part, than most... probably due to the occupation by the
Dept of Archaeology of two blocks of the main four.. it is,
nevertheless, like so many such buildings in Bangladesh, already showing
signs that most of the buildings are beyond repair, or even
stabilisation.
Which
is a pity, given the great appeal of such buildings to tourists across
the developed world, as evidenced by the more than 4 million members of
the UK National Trust and the millions of overseas visitors attracted to
buildings in their care. It is such attractions that appeal to so much
of the top end, professional classes of tourist, creating foreign
earnings, and, above all,jobs!
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