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Native Capitalists and Laissez-Faire Bureaucrats?—India 1858–19I4 British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914. By P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction 1914–1990. By P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins. Longman: London and New York, 1993. Pp. xv, 504 and xiv, 337.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
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1 This review article had its origins in a paper presented to a seminar in San Francisco in January 1994.
2 Also, n.b. ‘landed wealth steadily gave way to wealth generated in the service sector in the course of the nineteenth century, which is when our subject and our study begin to expand.’ (1, 27) Again, ‘… it is worth stressing at this point that the most senior British officials, at home and abroad, were drawn largely from the ranks of those whose ties were with landed, rentier or service-sector wealth rather than with industry.’ (1, 29).
3 The analysis of the ‘drain’ strikes me as particularly old-fashioned. K. N. Chaudhunri's brief discussion is still the best summary available, Chaudhuri, K. N., ‘Foreign Trade and Balance of Payments.’ Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 11, p. 877. This whole topic needs fresh analysis. I myself am writing a paper which compares foreign transactions in Mughal and British India.Google Scholar
4 Thus, they cite approvingly Irfan Habib's review of the Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 11.Google ScholarThis review is basically a plea to return to William Digby, R. C. Dutt and D. R. Gadgil, authors dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries! A detailed refutation of Habib's criticisms is given in Dharma Kumar, ‘The Danger of Manicheanism’, in the same issue of Modern Asian Studies, (1985), which, rather oddly, Cain and Hopkins do not cite.Google Scholar
5 Moreover, not all of this work is new; see in particular the pioneering works by D. R. Gadgil: ‘Business Communities in India,’ mimeo, New York, 1951, and ‘Origins of the Modern Indian Business Class: an Interim Report,’ (mimeo, New York, 1959).Google Scholar Guides to the fast growing literature in this field can be found in Tripathi, Dwijendra, ed. Business and Politics in India, New Delhi: 1991Google Scholar, and Ray, Rajat K., ed. Entrepreneurship and Industry in India, 1800–1947, Delhi: 1994.Google Scholar
6 Desai, Ashok V., ‘The Origins of Parsi Enterprise’, Indian Economic and Social History Review IV, 4 (1965).Google Scholar
7 One source for Indian activity abroad is histories of the host countries. For example, it is possible that material on the South Indian business community of Chettiars will be found by historians of Burma.
8 Indians also subscribed to the East India Company's war loans although to a lesser extent than British residents in India, Ward, J. R., ‘The industrial revolution and British Imperialism, 1750–1850’, Economic History Review, XLVII (1994), pp. 47, 50.Google Scholar
9 Jones, Charles A., International Business in the Nineteenth Century, (Brighton: 1987), p. 81.Google Scholar
10 On one well known business community, the Marwaris, see Timberg, T. A., The Marwaris: from Traders to Industrialists, New Delhi, 1978.Google Scholar
11 Dasgupta, Ashin, ‘Indian Merchants in the Age of Partnership, 1500–1800,’ in Tripathi, Dwijendra, ed., Business Communities of India, Delhi: 1984.Google Scholar
12 The importance of access to bureaucrats and of racial affinity has been stressed by Bagchi, A. K., Private Investment in India, 1900–1939, (Cambridge: 1972) but Omkar Goswami has argued that this argument is overemphasized, e.g.CrossRefGoogle Scholarin ‘Sahibs, Babus and Banias: Changes in Industrial Control in Eastern India, 1918–1950,’ Journal of Asian Studies, 1989.Google Scholar
13 Cain and Hopkins exaggerate the importance of Ripon's policy, citing an essay by Sen, S. K., but not his comprehensive study of Government purchasing policy, Studies in Economic Policy and Development of India, 1848–1939, 2nd edn., Calcutta: 1972.Google Scholar
14 There is a large literature on infrastructure; the best discussion on the railways is Hurd, John, ‘The Railways’, in Dharma, Kumar, ed. The Cambridge Economic History of India, Cambridge; Vol. II, 1984.Google Scholar
15 Morris, Morris David, ‘The Growth of Large Scale Industry’ in Kumar, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 11, p. 535.Google Scholar
16 On a matter of emphasis again, it is possible to argue that Cain and Hopkins underplay the influence of Manchester in policy, even in the third period; see e.g. Chatterji, Basudev, Trade. Tariffs and Empire: Lancashire and British Policy in India, 1919–1939, Delhi, 1992. This book is substantially based on the author's 1978 Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation, readily available to Cain and Hopkins.Google Scholar
17 See, for example, A. K. Sen (Amartya Sen), ‘The Pattern of British Enterprise in India, 1858–1914,’Google Scholar reprinted in Ray, Rajat K. ed., Entrepreneurship and Industry in India. This is an abbreviated version of a paper written by Sen in 1962. Sen discussed the two major fields in which Indian enterprise was successful, cotton textiles, and iron and steel, and suggested that in both cases British entrepreneurs and civil servants were inhibited from competing with Indians by the social ethos in the U.K., and also that investment in iron and steel was helped by a favourable change in government policy in the twentieth century. His speculation about the importance of the social ethos in the U.K. has been criticized, but the problem he raised, of the reasons for regional differences in the success of Indian entrepreneurs, remains important not merely to Indian economic history, but also to understanding the behaviour of British investors. Again, his discussion of social ethos is particularly pertinent for British Imperialism.Google Scholar
18 See, e.g. Chattopadhyaya, R., ‘The Idea of Planning in India, 1930–51,’ D. Phil. thesis, Australian National University, 1985.Google Scholar
19 The best general introduction to this vast and complex terrain is still Stokes, Eric T., The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford, OUP, 1959. On conflicts between officials in the PunjabGoogle Scholar, see Van den Dungan, P. M. H., The Punjab Tradition, London, 1972.Google Scholar
20 Evangelists can hardly be said to share the gentlemanly ethic. Clive Dewey describes the ideology of a powerful Evangelist, Brayne, F. L., in the Punjab in Anglo-Indian Attitudes, London, 1993.Google Scholar
21 E.g. Bhatia, B. M., Famine in India; a study in some aspects of the economic history of India, 1860–1965, 2nd ed.Bombay: 1967;Google ScholarRavallion, M., ‘Trade and Stabilization: Another Look at British India's controversial Food Grain Exports,’ Explorations in Economic History, 1987.Google Scholar
22 Moosvi, Shireen, The Economy of the Mughal Empire, c. 1595, Delhi, 1987.Google Scholar
23 Maddison, Angus, Class Structure and Economic Growth, London, 1971.Google Scholar
24 Mathias, Peter and O'Brien, Patrick, ‘Taxation in Britain and France, 1917–1810: A Comparison of the Social and Economic Incidence of Tax Collections by the Central Government,’ Journal of European Economic History, Vol. 5, no. 3, 1976.Google Scholar
25 Goldsmith, Raymond W., Premodern Financial Systems, Cambridge: 1987, p. 108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 Kolff, Dirk H. A., Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, Cambridge, 1990.Google Scholar
27 Kumar, Dharma, ‘The Fiscal System,’in Dharma Kumar, ed. The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. II, p. 926.Google Scholar
28 Davis, Lance E. and Huttenback, Robert M., Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860–1912. Cambridge: 1987, pp. 227–8.Google Scholar
29 Existing studies of land markets do not go into these questions, but they are touched upon in Sumit, Guha, ‘The Land Market in Upland Maharashtra, 1820–1960’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 1987, vol. 24, Nos. 2 and 3.Google Scholar
30 That Indian businessmen understood the value of speedy and accurate information is shown by their organization in western India of methods of collecting and transmitting information. For instance, opium futures were sent by runner and heliographed to Rajasthan in the 1830's;Google ScholarShankar, Girija, Marwari Vyapari, Bikaner, 1988.Google Scholar
31 I am grateful to Sumit Guha for providing much of the information in this paragraph.
32 India's demographic history used to be a mere appendage to the debate about British rule: one school of thought saw famines and epidemics, especially the former, as avoidable consequences of British policies, while others saw rapid population growth as the cause of India's poverty, rather than imperialism. This obsession with judgements on imperialism led to the neglect of complex issues such as the causes of different diseases, not to mention the role of public health policies. Whatever the causes of the stability of India's population in the nineteenth century, and its rapid acceleration in the twentieth, population density is vital to understanding such questions as the distribution of rural incomes, levels of wages, emigration, and even exports.
33 Roy, Tirthankar, Cloth and Commerce: Essays on Textiles in Colonial India (forthcoming) brings together several articles which have appeared in the Indian Economic and Social History Review on handlooms.Google Scholar This collection includes a pioneering study of the consumption of textiles: Yanagisawa, H., ‘The handloom industry and its market structure: The case of the Madras Presidency in the first half of the twentieth century,’ Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. XXX no. 1, 1993.Google Scholar
34 Maizels, Alfred, Industrial Growth and World Trade, Cambridge, 1963.Google Scholar
35 Unfortunately, India is barely noticed in Wiener, Martin J., English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.Google Scholar