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  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Economy of Modern India, 1860–1970
  • Cited by 58
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
1993
Online ISBN:
9781139055697
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521362306
Subjects:
Area Studies, South Asian History, Asian Studies, History, Economic History
Series:
The New Cambridge History of India
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Asian History
Information

Book description

In the first comprehensive and wide-ranging account of the modern Indian economy, B. R. Tomlinson considers the history of economic growth and change over the last hundred years. By summarising and expounding on the available literature, the author considers the debates over imperialism, development and under development and sets them in the context of historical change in agriculture, trade and manufacture, and the relations between business, the economy and the state.

Reviews

"Tomlinson's extremely competent book lays out the main strands of this new work (to which he has made his own significant contributions) and draws them together into a relatively coherent whole that is remarkably lucid and satisfyingly undoctrinaire." Morris David Morris, Economic Development and Cultural Change

"...a book of interest not only to South Asianists but also, as Tomlinson points out, to anyone interested in a case study of the difficulties of achieving economic growth and the terrible penalties of misdirected economic policies....Tomlinson provides the reader with a sobering perspective." Blair B. Kling, American Historical Review

"...Tomlinson's arguments...are always engaging...Tomlinson skillfully demonstrates the impact on India of periodic fluctuations in the world capitalist economy from 1824 to 1945 and believes these events largely determined the shape of modern India...required reading for any serious student of India's economy and India's place in development theory." Marc Jason Gilbert, Journal of Developing Areas

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Contents

Contents
  • 1 - Introduction: development and underdevelopment in colonial India
    pp 1-29
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Assumptions about the nature and course of Indian economic history lie at the heart of many analyses of South Asia's recent past. The descriptions and explanations of the apparent lack of growth and development in the Indian economy produced during the colonial period itself were dominated by the nationalist critique of British rule and the imperial response to it. Modern studies of the transition to colonialism in India provide a rather different contrast between the economies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The analysis of dependent underdevelopment contends, like the nationalist critique of the colonial economy before it, that the British conquest was the chief reason for India's development problems over the last 200 years. The underlying characteristics of economic growth and development in colonial and post-colonial India were determined by the nature of the markets that decided how any surplus over subsistence was generated, and then divided it between capital, labour, and the state.
  • 2 - Agriculture 1860–1950: land, labour and capital
    pp 30-91
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The rural sector, comprising agriculture, and ancillary activities such as animal husbandry, forestry and fishing, was the foundation of the colonial economy. In most parts of the country, the peasant mode of production never fully resolved itself into a class structure based on labour and capital. Rich peasants rarely became rentiers; poor peasants did not often suffer full proletarianisation by losing access to land entirely. The creation of a land market in India in the first half of the nineteenth century was identified by nationalist historians as one of the most drastic effects of colonial rule that acted, especially in north India and Bengal, as a mechanism for transferring control of land out of traditional proprietors into the hands of merchants and moneylenders. For the rural poor the disruption of the rural labour market was probably the most severe direct consequence of the depression in agriculture.
  • 3 - Trade and manufacture, 1860–1945: firms, markets and the colonial state
    pp 92-155
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The history of trade and manufacture in colonial India is dominated by counter-factual questions about the process of industrialisation. The structure and performance of firms and markets for trade and manufacture in colonial India after 1860 were heavily influenced by institutional developments that occurred in the first century of British rule. In the eighteenth century Indian merchant and service-gentry groups played a crucial role as intermediaries between the agricultural economy and the state. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the colonial state in South Asia had largely created its own institutional mechanisms for sustaining itself through revenue collection, expenditure and transfer. By 1913 the cotton textile industry, centred in Bombay and Ahmedabad, was well established as the most important manufacturing industry in India. The colonial administration of South Asia was conditional on the smooth working of a domestic and international economy that could supply adequate tax revenues from production, and a foreign exchange surplus on private account.
  • 4 - The state and the economy, 1939–1970: the emergence of economic management in India
    pp 156-213
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The independent India that came into existence on 15 August 1947 was a large, diverse and poor country that inherited many economic problems from its colonial past. The most decisive break with the past that was achieved in economic matters by independent India was in the role of government policy and state agencies in the running and directing of the economy. The most important set of controls that were devised in the late 1940s concerned the development of industry through the rationing of capital issues and planning of future economic development. Since the level of savings and capital investment in agriculture was so low during the 1950s it is not surprising that the growth in agricultural output which took place was largely the result of enhanced labour utilisation on an expanding area of unirrigated land. Between 1939 and 1971 a particular type of economy emerged in India in which official planning and government economic management played a crucial part.
  • 5 - Conclusion
    pp 214-218
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Between 1860 and 1970 the Indian economy was in an underdeveloped state, but the characteristics of this underdevelopment need to be specified with some care. The striking contrast in India between 1860 and 1970 remained the absence of productivity increases, leading to significant underemployment of labour at subsistence wages with low levels of investment in technology and in human capital formation, and depressed demand for basic wage-goods. The more successful application of new technology and increased investment in agriculture led to foodgrain self-sufficiency, and to a fall in the real price of wheat and rice that has benefitted the rural poor. The administrative procedures, ideology and competence of the state have all played a part in reinforcing underdevelopment, with the biggest failing of all being in human capital development and appropriate technical research. After almost two centuries of colonial rule, India was an underdeveloped economy by 1947, and had underdeveloped institutions to match.
  • Bibliographical essay
    pp 219-231
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This bibliography presents a list of titles that help the reader to understand the nature and course of Indian economy, trade and agriculture. The history of development economics, and the elaborate refinements of classical, Marxian and dependency theories, has spawned large bibliographical accounts of their own. The data on which almost all the estimates of agricultural production in the colonial period are based were gathered as part of the land revenue assessment process, and so a strong suspicion remains that, as Neil Charlesworth has put it, fluctuations in the output figures possibly tell as much about the shifting authority of local administration as about actual agricultural performance. Frank Perlin's important and wide-ranging article, 'Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia' is one of the most suggestive analyses of the eighteenth century manufacturing economy. The cotton industry still holds the centre stage in expositions and explanations of India's industrial progress, or the lack of it, under British rule.
References

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