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13 results

  • 8 - European trade and the Indian economy

  • Om Prakash, University of Delhi
  • Book:
    European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    28 June 1998, pp 315-336

  • Summary

    The principal distinguishing feature of Euro-Asian trade in the early modern period was its bullion-based character. The fact that the rate of growth of the Europeans' demand for goods such as textiles and raw silk was almost always greater than the rate at which their output increased turned the market increasingly into a sellers' market. Quite apart from the implications of European trade for real variables such as income, output and employment, there was an important range of issues in the monetary domain which were affected by this trade. A significant feature of the Mughal Indian economy was the rise of banking firms all over the empire dealing in extremely sophisticated instruments of credit. A colonial pattern of trade with agricultural and other raw materials together from the colony to the metropolitan world in exchange for finished manufactured goods produced on the machine did not emerge in the case of India.

  • 5 - Conclusion

  • B. R. Tomlinson, University of Strathclyde
  • Book:
    The Economy of Modern India, 1860–1970
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    06 May 1993, pp 214-218

  • Summary

    Between 1860 and 1970 the Indian economy was in an underdeveloped state, but the characteristics of this underdevelopment need to be specified with some care. The striking contrast in India between 1860 and 1970 remained the absence of productivity increases, leading to significant underemployment of labour at subsistence wages with low levels of investment in technology and in human capital formation, and depressed demand for basic wage-goods. The more successful application of new technology and increased investment in agriculture led to foodgrain self-sufficiency, and to a fall in the real price of wheat and rice that has benefitted the rural poor. The administrative procedures, ideology and competence of the state have all played a part in reinforcing underdevelopment, with the biggest failing of all being in human capital development and appropriate technical research. After almost two centuries of colonial rule, India was an underdeveloped economy by 1947, and had underdeveloped institutions to match.

  • Bibliographical essay

  • B. R. Tomlinson, University of Strathclyde
  • Book:
    The Economy of Modern India, 1860–1970
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    06 May 1993, pp 219-231

  • Summary

    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.

  • 1 - India in the eighteenth century: the formation of states and social groups

  • C. A. Bayly, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 7-44

  • Summary

    In the midst of military conflict and disruption, the eighteenth century witnessed a significant stage in the formation of the social order of modern India. This chapter starts by examining the changes in the imperial hegemony during the eighteenth century, then moves to the petty kingdoms and finally to the magnates of the villages who controlled production. A discussion of the Indian economy and society in the eighteenth century follows. Yet these divisions only constitute a device for organising themes. Developments at all these levels and in all these domains were linked. All powers seeking to establish their rule in eighteenth-century India needed to acquire imperial titles and rights. The spirit and forms of Mughal provincial government changed only slowly. The regional power-holders also inherited the problems of previous Mughal governors. The great non-Muslim warrior states, Marathas Sikhs and Jats, represented something more than simple devolutions of Mughal power to the provinces.

  • 4 - The consolidation and failure of the East India Company's state, 1818–57

  • C. A. Bayly, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 106-135

  • Summary

    This chapter demonstrates how the British maintained their fragile dominance over the subcontinent in the early years of the nineteenth century before considering this economic impasse and the attempts of administrators to escape from it. The Muslim law officers were maintained when the Bengal Regulations were extended to north India after 1793. This was important because it allowed those Muslim learned men who remained neutral on the question of whether Christian rule posed a threat to Islam to argue that some of the basic conditions of Muslim religious life were still preserved. The importance of the political element is even greater when one consider that the most valuable components of India's exports were themselves administrative rather than free trades. The Company's political aims and financial structure deepened the problems for both British and Indian entrepreneurs. The East India Company had penetrated the subcontinent by making use of its buoyant markets in produce and land revenue.

  • X - Foreign Trade and Balance of Payments (1757–1947)

  • from PART II - THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MODERN ECONOMY
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 804-877

  • Summary

    This chapter first outlines the institutional changes relating to trade, which followed from the change of government in 1757, and then examines those particular features of Indian overseas trade which distinguish it from later development. The trends and fluctuations in India's overall foreign trade can be classified into two main components: changes, both relative and absolute, in the demand for commodities, and those relating to the geographical distribution of trade. The chapter argues that the changes in the commodity composition of Indian exports were the induced effects of factors operating through demand. Perhaps no other subject connected with India's international economy has generated so much controversy as the commercial and tariff policy pursued first by the East India Company and then the Indian administration under the Crown. The chapter discusses the mechanism which kept India's balance of payments and foreign exchange rates in equilibrium, given the unilateral transfers.

  • 2 - Railways

  • from VIII - Irrigation and Railways
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 737-761

  • Summary

    Railways had an impact throughout the Indian economy. The Government of India felt that some lines should be built to lower the risk of famine, and using its power to dictate the location of track, it approved so-called famine lines which were constructed for the purpose of transporting grain to poor famine areas in time of need. The monopoly by the East Indian Railway of much of the area between Punjab and Calcutta, a region rich in agricultural and mineral resources, permitted it to earn 34 per cent of all earnings in 1881 even though it owned only 16 per cent of the total length of track. Railways led to increased agricultural output, the growth of modern industry and mining, new jobs, although many jobs were lost, the redistribution of the urban population, higher incomes for some segments of the population, and numerous other economic changes.

  • XIII - The Indian Economy since Independence (1947–70)

  • from PART III - POST-INDEPENDENCE DEVELOPMENTS
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 945-994

  • Summary

    The actual performance of the Indian economy since Independence presents a rather mixed picture. There is little doubt that the country experienced a much faster pace of growth, both in the aggregate and in the major sectors, during this period than in the previous decades. The greater dynamism of agriculture in the post-Independence era is clearly the result of larger, more intensive and better coordinated programmes undertaken as part of the five-year plans. The emergence of a dynamic indigenous entrepreneurial class and a progressive spread of industries away from their traditional locations are also noteworthy features of the post-Independence industrial transformation. During the British rule, private foreign enterprise played an important role in the industrial sector. The steady expansion in the scope and range of economic activities undertaken by government is another significant feature of the post-Independence period.

  • 1 - Irrigation

  • from VIII - Irrigation and Railways
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 677-737

  • Summary

    By the 1920s and 1930s attempts were made to diversify the use of India's water resources, in the direction of hydro-electric power; but the interests of irrigation and the lack of demand for rural electrification militated against such developments for the most part in the agricultural provinces. To estimate the value of irrigation, the Famine Commission was required to go beyond the statements of its financial results and enquire into its general effect, no less, on the character of cultivation in the several irrigation provinces. For northern India, submissions from the governments of Punjab and the North Western Provinces were in agreement that the introduction of canal irrigation had led universally to an increase in cultivation. Unlike the great Punjab canals, the purpose of the Sarda canal system was not to reclaim a wilderness but to replace an existing small-scale pattern of irrigation by a large-scale system in the interest of economy and efficiency.

  • I - The mid-eighteenth-century background

  • from PART I - THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 1-35

  • Summary

    At its height the Mughal empire had imposed on the greater part of the Indian sub-continent a fair measure of political unity. Historians of a later generation have equated the decline of the Mughal empire with sharp downward trends in the Indian economy, and assumed that by the mid-eighteenth century it had reached its lowest ebb. The categories used in the Mughal revenue literature in describing villages are a useful if somewhat indirect source of information on the subject for northern India. The identification of different levels of land rights in India has been hag-ridden by the confused use of terms both in the Persian and the English sources. By the mid-eighteenth century, development of market forces had made deep inroads into the subsistence character of Indian agriculture, though the producer continued to meet all his requirements of food out of his own produce.

  • IX - Money and Credit (1858–1947)

  • from PART II - THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MODERN ECONOMY
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 762-803

  • Summary

    The period 1858-1947, which covers some of the most salient developments in the financial history of India, is still highly germane to many of the contemporary concerns of the sub-continent. The chapter reviews the main monetary and financial developments in India during our period under the following headings: monetary standard and policy, origins and development of commercial banking, evolution of central banking, non-institutional finance and cooperative credit. The origins of modern banking in India go back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the establishment of the European Agency Houses of Bombay and Calcutta. These were primarily trading concerns that had branched out into banking as a sideline to facilitate the operations of their main business. In terms of the overall pattern of internal finance, the unorganized or non-institutional sector of the Indian banking and financial system may be described, conceptually, as a residual sector, usually in combination with trading and other activities.

  • VII - The Growth of Large-Scale Industry to 1947

  • from PART II - THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MODERN ECONOMY
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 551-676

  • Summary

    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.