Since its publication in 1949 Fernand Braudel's La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II has been received as a major addition to the literature of early modern history. In France, the excitement over this eleven-hundred-page work has centered on what would appear to be its revolutionary innovations in historical method. Lucien Febvre, for example, in an article in the Revue historique, after describing the book as more than a “perfect work of an historian with a profound grasp of his métier” and even more than a “professional masterpiece,” declared that the book introduces a revolution in the mode of conceiving history. “It marks,” said Febvre, “the dawn of a new time, of that I am certain.” His article concluded with this charge to youth: “Read, re-read, and meditate on this excellent book. … Make it your companion. What you will learn of things, new to you, about the world of the sixteenth century is incalculable. But what you will learn simply about man, about his history and about history itself, its true nature, its methods and its purposes—you cannot imagine in advance.” Braudel himself devoted an article in the Revue économique to elaborating the method used in his book and presented it to economic historians for their consideration.

A Striking disparity exists between India's ranking as a railway power and its ranking by any other modern economic category, such as coal mined, iron and steel produced, power generated, value added by all manufacturing, or national income received per capita. Throughout the twentieth century India has had one of the world's five largest railway systems, but by most other modern categories India's economy has been among the world's weakest and least developed. I propose to begin by recounting the way in which India's railway system was developed under British leadership in the century after 1850; then I intend to turn to some possible connections between the special types of railway organization that Britain sponsored in India and the relative lack of development of other sectors of India's economy, particularly modern industry.

For at least three quarters of a century the Devil of Declining Growth has been present at French council tables, at policy-making conferences, and in the minds of strategically situated decision makers. The Devil has not always been present in the flesh, since that is not the way of devils. But he has always been at the shoulders of the holders of power, and they have usually taken him into account implicitly when not explicitly.

Today there is a plethora of pessimistic literature on the population problems of densely settled agricultural areas. It is matched, if not exceeded, in quantity by the optimistic writings of those who see economic development as a panacea for demographic ills. There is research, too, but the definitions of problems, the analytical approaches, and the conclusions reflect the cleavages of academic specializations. Demographers deprecate the realistic possibilities for economic development and so project present populations into future situations that must be catastrophic if the cynicism concerning economic expansion is justified. Economists analyze the potentialities for development and assume some mystical force in human reactions that automatically reduces rates of population increase as the material basis of living becomes more abundant. Analysis of the relations between population increase and economic development is notably deficient. The difficulty lies deeper than the naïveté of social scientists. That quantitative research for which they are prepared requires statistical materials, but those materials exist primarily for the advanced industrializing economies of Western origin. These are precisely the economies in which the relations between people and economy have been or are in process of being rationalized through controlled human reproduction. The techniques of the historian and the anthropologist must be combined with those of the economist and the demographer for the analysis of social, demographic, and economic relations within prestatistical cultures.