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3 - Why Was British India a Limited State?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2019

By
Tirthankar Roy
Edited by
Ewout Frankema  and
Anne Booth
Ewout Frankema
Affiliation:
Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
Anne Booth
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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Summary

This chapter asks three questions about the British state in India. Why was it poor? How did fiscal capacity matter? What was colonial about the colonial fiscal state? The chapter shows that the poverty of the state had owed to reliance on land revenue. Although reforms in property rights in land delivered a boost to the revenues between 1800 and 1860, the effect wore off. The puzzle is, British India had relatively easy access to the London money market, but reduced its reliance on debt from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that the restrained use of debt was a response to the nationalist attack on the ‘drain.’ Weak state capacity did not affect business adversely, but limited the ability of the state to transform a resource-poor agriculture. British India shared with many other colonial territories some of these features; the politics of the public debt made the Indian story somewhat distinct.

Keywords

British IndiaColonial Fiscal StatePublic DebtPoverty
Type
Chapter
Information
Fiscal Capacity and the Colonial State in Asia and Africa, c.1850–1960 , pp. 77 - 109
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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