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The Political Economy of the Raj: The Decline of Colonialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

B. R. Tomlinson
B. R. Tomlinson
Affiliation:
Lecturer in the Department of Economic and Social History, University of Birmingham, P.O. Box 363, Birmingham B15 2TT, United Kingdom.
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Abstract

Taking a fresh look at the institutions of economic management in colonial India explains much about the history of the last decades of the raj. The concept of political economy—the interaction of economic forces and political choices—provides a useful approach to the study of government economic policy and practice that can give a new perspective on the history of the late British Empire as a whole.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 133 - 137
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1982

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References

1 For more on this see Hopkins, A. G., “Imperial Connections” in The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India, ed. Dewey, Clive and Hopkins, A. G. (London, 1978).Google Scholar

2 This problem is not confined to imperial economic history: as Paul Uselding has recently reminded us, economic historians as a whole are “once again resort[ing] to the incorporation of social and institutional factors in their interpretation of events in the tableau of the economichistorical past”; Uselding, Paul, ed., Research in Economic History, Volume 5, 1980 (Greenwich, Connecticut, 1980), p. vii.Google Scholar

3 Golant, W., “Review Article: Imperialism and India,” History, 66 (02 1981), 65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 As Lord Canning pointed out in the early 1860s, “I would rather govern India with 40,000 British troops without an income tax than govern it with 100,000 British troops with such a tax”; quoted in Gordon, A. D. D., Businessmen and Politics: Rising Nationalism and a Modernising Economy in Bombay, 1918–33… (New Delhi, 1978), p. 11.Google Scholar

5 See Drummond, I. M., British Economic Policy and the Empire 1919–1939 (London, 1972) chap. 4.Google Scholar

6 See Prasad, B., Defense of India: Policies and Plans (Calcutta, 1963), chap. 1.Google Scholar

7 Ray, Rajat K., Industrialization in India: Growth and Conflict in the Private Corporate Sector 1914–47 (Delhi, 1979), p. 7.Google Scholar This characterization is based on the “financial imperialism” that some authors have seen at work in India in the interwar years; see Dutt, R. Palme, India Today (Bombay, 1940).Google Scholar

8 Sir Samuel Hoare to Lord Willingdon, 20.10.32, in Templewood Papers, vol. 2, India Office Records.Google Scholar

9 As an India Office official pointed out late in 1930, “the financial stake of His Majesty's Government and the British people in India remains, for all practical purposes, as a permanent obstacle to anything that could reasonably be termed financial self-government”; private note by K[isch], C.12 1930 in India Office Finance Department file L/F/7/2396, Finance Collection 381, India Office Records.Google Scholar

10 For more on this aspect of government remittance policy see Tomlinson, B. R., “Britain and the Indian Currency Crisis, 1930–32,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 32 (02 1979), 88–99Google Scholar and “Britain and the Indian Currency Crisis, 1930–2: A Reply,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 33 (05 1981), 305–07.Google Scholar

11 On this see Baker, Christopher J., The Politics of South India 1920–1937 (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 170–84.Google Scholar For a survey of recent approaches to the problem of relating political mobilization to economic change in this period see Tomlinson, B. R., “Congress and the Raj: Political Mobilisation in Late-Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies (forthcoming).Google Scholar

12 For parallel treatments of some of the themes that follow see Christopher Baker, “Colonial Rule and the Internal Economy in Twentieth Century Madras” and Washbrook, D. A., “Law, State and Society in Colonial India” in Power, Profit and Politics: Essays on Imperialism, Nationalism and Change in Twentieth-Century India, ed. Baker, Christopher et al. (Cambridge, 1981) reprinted from Modern Asian Studies, 15 (07 1981).Google Scholar