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Historiography OF THE Colonial Economy
Ancient India (HSB654)
Aligarh Muslim University
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HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE COLONIAL ECONOMY
INTRODUCTION
It has been a topic of economic study since the English East India Company began trading with India. According to Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, English economists were well aware of the impact that Indian products would have on Britain's economy. British parliamentarians in the late 18th century were outraged by the rule of the British East India Company in Bengal, which led to the decline in India's wealth. From Dadabhai Naoroji to Mahatma Gandhi, Indian nationalists in the 19th and 20th centuries sharply criticised the negative impact of colonial rule. Also concerned about the colonialization of India were Marxists like R. Dutt and Ramakrishna Mukherjee. The argument has been developed more fully in the work of later scholars."
Economic historians on the liberal and neo-liberal left have recently attempted to alter the criticism of colonial rule in India developed by the left and nationalist Indian historians. Bipan Chandra's India's Struggle for Independence and Sumit Sarkar's Modern India are examples of left-nationalist works. Both Dharma Kumar and Meghnad Desai and Tirthankar Roy's Economic History of India, 1857-1947 are important contributions to the liberal understanding of the Indian economy during the colonial period. Economic historians have recently criticised a left nationalist view of the colonial economy, but they have not fully addressed the more substantive issues raised by this group of historians. MAIN TRENDS The Colonial Viewpoint Colonists and those who ruled India took great pains to point out how British rule brought peace and stability to the Indian subcontinent. With the massive public investment in Britain, Pax Britannica and a modern transport and communications network were established, laying the groundwork for a modern economy. A modern economy in India was built on the foundation of the railway network and irrigation system introduced by the British. The British gave the Indians access to western science and education, paving the way for their eventual self-governance in the long term. Although Vera Anstey and Theodore Morison were willing to admit that Britain's economic relations with India contained an element of tribute, on the whole, British rule was beneficial to the Indian people. In any case, their main goal was to provide a defence against the accusations of colonial exploitation made by nationalists and nationalist economists. The Nationalist View There was a strong belief in the drain of wealth from India to the United Kingdom by nationalist economists like Dadabhai Naoroji and Mahadev Govind Ranade. In Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, Naoroji argued that India's wealth was being drained away. According to these critics, British rule in India resulted in the country's demise, and the Indian economy was subordinated to the British economy. Landless agricultural labour has grown, and employment in the secondary sector of the economy has decreased, due to a policy of free trade. Land revenue policies to meet heavy defence and civil administration spending led to the exploitation of farmers, which resulted in lower per capita incomes during British rule in India. An argument over the nature of colonial rule in India took place between the nationalist and economic historian R. C. Dutt and Viceroy Lord Curzon. In the early years of the twentieth century, Dutt's The Economic History of India published a substantial critique. In 1966, Bipan Chandra published The Rise and Growth of Economic
Nationalism in India, which explored the economic ideas of Indian nationalists. In Indian Economic Thought: Nineteenth Century Perspectives, B. Ganguly used modern economic theory to evaluate the contributions of the nationalists to economic thought. In 1977, Delhi was the capital of India.
It was a result of the rise of commercial agriculture that the peasantry became increasingly reliant on merchants and moneylenders. As a result of the commercialization of agriculture, there was an increase in sharecropping, tenancy, and landlessness among the peasantry. It also led to a rise in famines and a rise in mortality as merchants and moneylenders exploited the poor. Colonization was blamed by many nationalists and nationalist economists for the devastating famines that plagued Europe in the 19th century. In order to benefit British industry, particularly the Lancashire cotton textile industry, the British ruled pursued a policy of free trade in India.
With regard to irrigation and agriculture, and scientific and technical education, nationalists were generally concerned about the lack of public investment in these areas. They argued that the British were trying to turn India into a valuable source of raw materials and a consumer of British manufactured goods in order to make India an extension of the British economy. It was only later in the twentieth century and particularly during the inter-war period that they criticised India's money supply, interest rates, and exchange rates. For the nationalists, tariff protection and how much protection the colonial Tariff Boards actually provided to specific industries like cotton, steel, paper, and sugar were the main points of discussion. In the end, it was British policies in India that slowed the Indian economy, not any shortcomings on the part of Indians. The Marxist Perspective The colonial economy was seen by Marxists as a reflection of broader shifts in the British economy. Britain's stages of capitalist development shaped the features of colonial imperialism. As a result of the merchant capitalist phase of development, non-European world resources were exploited and pillaged. After the battle of Plassey in 1757, the British began to exploit Bengal, which led to a "drain of wealth" for the country in the second half of the 18th century. India's resources made a significant contribution to the capital accumulation necessary for the early stages of the British industrial revolution. Irfan Habib, Ramakrishna Mukherjee and Utsa Patnaik, to name a few, have all espoused similar concepts in their works, though with slight variations.
A destructive phase of colonialism was predicted by Marx to be followed by a period of regeneration during which the colonial economy would be transformed. The majority of Indian Marxists and Indian nationalists agreed that colonial rule had a largely negative effect on India. As a result of colonialism, Indians were subjected to widespread exploitation, resulting in widespread poverty. There were a few Marxists, such as Hamza Alavi and Jairus Banaji, who proposed the colonial mode of production as a new or additional stage in Marx's historical evolution schemata. It was published in Delhi in 1990, edited by Utsa Patnaik. Even Irfan Habib's Indian Marxists didn't believe in an Asiatic production system in India; the colonial mode of production died out within a decade of its appearance. Excessive colonial exploitation of India in the early stages of British capitalism slowed down the Indian economy, according to Bipan Chandra. As a result, the value of India to Britain in the next stage of its history diminished.
O'Brien went so far as to argue that Britain would have been better off abandoning its Empire in 1846 as free traders like Cobden and Bright were arguing at that time.
This new wave of liberalism, sometimes called neo-liberalism, is not just a sober assessment of the imperial economy. The use of economic theory and neoliberal theory to examine the economic issues of an earlier generation of left-nationalist scholars has been widely criticised. Taking a non-Marxist stance based on Adam Smith's ideas, Tirthankar Roy examines the problem of de-industrialization in colonial India. According to Gregory Clark [1987], Indian mills are unable to compete with British imports despite low wages because of a lack of labour productivity. In recent literature, the relationship between economics and social stratification and change is also examined.
The country's economic development was studied by earlier economic historians. A wide range of topics and issues that had previously only received cursory treatment in larger surveys of the colonial economy have seen an explosion in empirical research over time. As a second point, the study of economic issues has seen an increase in the application of economic theory. In addition, new ideas have emerged and the same data has been examined in a new light. Thirdly, the rigour with which statistical data have been used has increased over time as well. In the 1970s, rigorous quantitative economic history began to emerge in the study of western economies.
Using econometrics and statistics, these quantitative historians, known as cliometricians, were able to gain new insights into economic data. Also in the 1980s, the use of counterfactuals to explain economic changes grew. The second edition of The Economic History of Britain Since 1700 in three volumes, published in the mid 1990s, incorporates quantitative techniques and counterfactual arguments to make assessments of British economic performance, the costs and benefits of British imperialism, and the value of British overseas investments. It wasn't until the second volume of Floud and McCloskey's The Economic History of Britain Since 1700 was published in 1981 that these techniques became relevant. Economic Theory, Anthropology and Ecology Krishna Bharadwaj [1974] and Amit Bhaduri's (1999) work on agricultural development in Indian economic history shows theoretical sophistication. According to Omkar Goswami and Shrivastava and Blyn, Heston, and Sivasubramanian's work, the use of quantitative techniques can be found at the regional and national levels. Anthropological evidence has also been used to interpret social and economic change. Gyan Prakash has used the oral Lorik literature of the bhuinyan landless labourers of Bihar in his study of the emergence of bonded labour in the Gaya and Shahabad districts of Bihar. Dipesh Chakravarty has used Marxist and Heideggeran ideas to interpret industrial workers' Vishvakarma puja.
Scholars in ancient India valued environmental and ecological research. Even fifty years ago, scholars of ancient India recognised the importance of geography in the history of India. The importance of ecology and the environment in the study of modern India was not given more than a cursory mention until the last two decades. In the last two decades, a wide- ranging environmental concern has emerged among a wide range of academics, including agronomists and industrial economists. Binoy Bhushan Chaudhuri's study of the commercialization of agriculture in Bengal in the late 1960s included ecological aspects of
poppy and indigo production, but the primary focus was not on ecology and the environment.
Ecosystems were the focus of Elizabeth Whitcombe's Agrarian Conditions in Northern India, published in 1972. In the United Provinces, it examined the negative effects of irrigation's spread. However, Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil made the most significant contribution in This Fissured Land. [1992] A number of academics have been working on these topics in recent years, including Richard Grove, M. Rangarajan, Sumit Guha, and K. Sivaramakrishnan. Attempts at integrating economic, agronomic, and ecological themes can be found in Ludden's Agrarian History of South Asia.
Historiography OF THE Colonial Economy
Course: Ancient India (HSB654)
University: Aligarh Muslim University
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