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.

Industrial development in India has been part of the very broad movement which had its origins in Western Europe. This chapter describes the growth of India's modern industries, the forms within which they developed and the character of the labour force that emerged. During the first half of the nineteenth century the industrialization process was taking deep hold in Britain and in other parts of the North Atlantic region but in India the new technology and novel processes had only a trifling impact. Most of what was introduced came as a product of official concern, civilian and military. The history of large-scale private factory enterprise between 1850 and the First World War is associated almost entirely with developments in three industries such as jute, cotton, and iron and steel industries. The development of the three industries reveals a great deal about the complexity of economic response on the sub-continent.