6 - Politicizing Decline

Summary

Chapter 6 examines the ways in which reformers and certain colonial agents were engaging with deindustrialization as an anomalous societal calamity. Many believed that prejudicial tariffs had resulted in the country’s exclusion from a system of “real” free trade, which in turn contributed to the near-collapse of the native handloom-weaving sector. Following initiatives first devised by the Bombay administration – which the Government of India quickly overruled – reformers hoped to stimulate alternative industries such as the cultivation and refinement of free-labor sugarcane. To provide immiserated weavers with agricultural employment on “fair” terms, they further advocated for radical tax reductions, challenged the state’s claim to be sole proprietor of all Indian lands, and publicly revealed its torturous revenue extraction practices. Reformers thereby held that mass poverty in a land as fecund as India could only be the result of European avarice and artificial constraints that inhibited trade.