Journal of Economic PerspectivesVolume 16, Number 3Summer 2002Pages 109 130

Economic History and Modern India:

Redefining the Link
Tirthankar Roy

ritish rule in India formally lasted between 1858 and 1947. How large, of
what nature and how lasting was the impact? These questions have long
guided the study of the economic history of India. The imperialist, or
orientalist, belief was that the empire heralded modernity in India. For example,
Karl Marx shared that belief with many of his contemporaries, although he also
observed that modernity came with a cost. In contrast, twentieth-century writers on
imperialism and development believed in an enduring link between colonialism
and underdevelopment.
The view that impediments to development were inherited from the damages
of colonial rule, and not homegrown, became a key premise of Indian nationalist
thought articulated by, among others, Jawaharlal Nehru himself. In 1947, this
diagnosis of Indian poverty held that it was a product of laissez-faire, exploitation
by foreign capital and the noninterventionist stance of the Indian government
under the British raj. In turn, these ideas supported the two key planks of Indias
development strategy: strong sentiment against foreign trade and investment and
statism. Indian big business at 1947, the principal backers of the Indian National
Congress, eagerly embraced the former and, somewhat uneasily, the latter.
These policy stances now have few takers in the nations of south Asia. Since
1990, if not earlier, the worldview that habitually warns against globalization has
been in decline. Faith in statism has diminished, too. The study of Indias economic
history has been affected by this shift. Scholarship continues along the imperialismunderdevelopment axis, albeit on a smaller scale than in earlier years. But this
stance looks increasingly dated and disoriented, especially at a time when economic
liberalization in India is drawing upon the tenets of classical political economy on

y Tirthankar Roy is Professor, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune, India. His
e-mail address is [email protected].

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which British policy in India was founded. Another reaction is simply to sidestep
Indias economic history and to focus instead on recent decades. Indeed, the study
of the economy history of India is at risk of losing wider relevance, audience and
funding.
This paper argues that to restore the link between economic history and
modern India, a different narrative of Indian economic history is needed. An
exclusive focus on colonialism as the driver of Indias economic history misses those
continuities that arise from economic structure or local conditions. In fact, marketoriented British imperial policies did initiate a process of economic growth based
on the production of goods intensive in labor and natural resources. However,
productive capacity per worker was constrained by low rates of private and public
investment in infrastructure, excessively low rates of schooling, social inequalities
based on caste and gender and a delayed demographic transition to lower birthrates and the resultant heavy demographic burden placed on physical capital and
natural resources.
The end of colonialism did not see a dramatic break in these conditions.
Economic policy between 1950 and 1990 attempted much harder than had the
British to raise the quality of labor and rates of investment, but Indias economic
growth continued to focus on semiskilled labor. On the other hand, whereas British
policy believed in exploitation of comparative advantage in trade, independent
India turned firmly away from participation in the world economy, precisely at a
time that the world economy experienced a boom. When economic reforms in the
1990s reintegrated India in the world economy, the major beneficiaries were
manufactures that were intensive in semiskilled labor, in a late but welcome
reversion to the colonial pattern of growth.
This essay begins with a descriptive tour of Indias economic history based on
recent research. But the ultimate focus is on the long-term continuities between
colonial and postcolonial India, especially in resource endowments.

A Descriptive Tour of Indias Economic History

Before Independence
It was a century from 1757, when the English East India Company established
its supremacy in Bengal, and 1858, when the Crown took over administration of
India. British Crown rule over India lasted 90 years, from 1858 to 1947.1
The period of British colonial rule was long enough to defy any simple
summary. However, in discussing this period, it is useful to focus on three features.
Structural features include the overwhelming importance of natural resources and
labor to economic growth, fluctuations and welfare. Agriculture and labor-intensive

The descriptive sections draw on Roy (2000), which contains a detailed list of readings on specific
themes.

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111

industry and services were the main livelihoods throughout this period and beyond.
Global features focus on the fact that Indias economy was more open during this
period compared with periods before and after colonialism. India participated in a
global revolution in transport and communication, which for India includes especially the Suez Canal, the railways and the telegraph. The third set of features can
be called colonial features. For example, Indias status as a colony imposed certain
peculiarities on its balance of payments, like large remittances paid by the government to Britain. However, the ratio of investment to government expenditure was
apparently much higher in British India than in earlier Mughal India.
The structural features of Indias economy changed slowly. For example,
Indias economy was primarily agrarian before, during and since colonialization.
However, the global and the colonial features shifted dramatically after 1947.
Industry in colonial India had strong global ties, whereas after 1947, the policy of
self-reliance involved a deliberate and drastic reduction in the influence of global
factors on the domestic economy.
Setting the Stage: The Century Before British Control
An orientalist cliche , with adherents as great as Karl Marx and Max Weber,
held precolonial south Asia to be stagnant and backward in political-economic
terms. A corollary of this cliche was that economic modernity in south Asia began
with European involvement in the region. Later research has shown that cliche to
be a myth. South Asia was already a major player in world commerce and possessed
a well-developed trading and financial world when Europeans discovered it. However, radical claims in world history scholarship, such as the one made recently by
Frank (1998), that the center of early modern world economy was Asia rather than
Europe, are not reliable. Such claims usually involve rather exaggerated assumptions about the share of regional commercial blocs in world trade and also about
the size of the trading economy relative to the primarily subsistence-oriented
economy within these regions.
By 1757, the English East India Company commanded political power in
Bengal. The transition from trade to direct rule can be explained partly by the
needs of trade itself. British mercantilists criticized Britains payment of bullion for
Indian textiles, the most important item in this trade. Local political circumstances
that enabled the British to command land revenues of Bengal came as a less
controversial means of payment. The local circumstances included the support of
the elite disaffected by the local rulers. When the companys monopoly in trade
ended in the early nineteenth century, it was committed to building an empire. By
1857, the boundaries of colonial India, which were the basis on which nations were
carved out in 1947, had been defined.
A more or less uniform administrative system came into place in this time span.
In the economic sphere, there were several major changes. Agrarian settlements,
which were contracts between the state and the cultivators on property rights and
revenue commitments, were drawn. The British wanted to create a class of cultivators with secure property rights who would yield more revenue to them by pursuing

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profit-oriented cultivation. However, property rights often went to noncultivating

classes due to mistaken identity, imperfect information or political compulsions.
The legal recognition of a property right, conditional on payment of land revenue,
went along with the erosion of many customary rights over usage of land or what it
produced. These customary rights were poorly understood, oversimplified or irreconcilable with private property rights; for example, tenancy rights and rights to the
use of common lands were victims of this confusion. Ultimately, these settlements
transformed rural institutions and restructured classes. Also, one universal effect of
introducing secure property rights was the extension of markets in land.
Another set of changes had their origin in foreign trade in an increasingly
integrated world. Trade expanded quickly. Indian exports had been dominated by
textile manufactures in the eighteenth century. The composition of exports
changed toward nonmanufactured goods and that of import toward manufactures,
notably British textiles. The early nineteenth century saw the rise of new commodities in trade, such as indigo, opium and cotton. Profits of these trades sustained
new commercial-cum-port towns, such as Calcutta, Bombay and Madras.
It is not easy to read in this period a general trend. We do not have the basic
data to make an assessment of growth, stagnation or decline in the early nineteenth
century. Nevertheless, there is a widely shared belief that the consolidation of
British power in the economic sphere saw a violent and uncompensated economic
disturbance. The fact of a decline, the period, the regions and the causes remain
imprecise.
One thing we do know is that Indias traditional cotton textile industry
declined between 1820 and 1860. At first, an export market for Indian cloth
disappeared. Later, handspun cotton yarn and handwoven cloth suffered due to
import of yarn and cloth from the mills in England. The decline seems dramatic if
seen against Indias earlier dominance in world textile trade. This single example
of decay appears to have generated the deindustrialization thesis, which at its
narrowest holds that early British rule introduced a violent shock to Indias economy, and at its broadest holds that colonialism caused underdevelopment. Both the
narrow and broad inferences, however, are deeply questionable for a number of
reasons. First, the industrial decline was apparently restricted to cotton textiles.
Second, the decline of the textile industry did not continue through the rest of the
nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century as British colonial rule
strengthened, which calls into question whether the fundamental cause was the rise
of colonial rule in the first place. Third, a decline in cotton textiles was not capable
of causing economy-wide distress. The proportion of textile export in total textile
production was very small, at its peak not more than 1 to 2 percent. Fourth, losses
for the Indian textile producers were largely balanced by gains for the consumer,
which were large. By 1850, prices of ordinary cloth were about 20 percent of what
they were by 1800. Finally, many of the jobs lost due to competition with mechanized textiles consisted of poorly paid domestic workers with low opportunity costs.
A second and more plausible source of an economic regress in some areas was
taxation, mainly because Indias government of the time collected taxes more

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113

Table 1
Employment
(millions, percentage share of main occupational classes in brackets)

Population
Workers
Agriculture and allied occupationsc
Modern industryd
Traditional industrye and construction
Servicesf
Others (mining and unspecified)

1901a

1931a

1991b

285.2
131.6
(100.0%)
89.3
(67.8%)
0.6
(0.4%)
13.3
(10.1%)
18.9
(14.4%)
9.5
(7.3%)

338.1
139.1
(100.0%)
98.8
(71.0%)
1.6
(1.2%)
9.8
(7.0%)
20.8
(15.0%)
8.1
(5.8%)

846.0
278.9
(100.0%)
186.2
(66.7%)
8.3
(3.0%)
20.1
(7.2%)
57.1
(20.5%)
7.2
(2.6%)

Notes: a Undivided India. b Indian Union. c The main occupations were cultivation, livestock rearing,
plantations, forestry and fishing. d Represented by officially regulated factories. e Represented by units
outside officially regulated factories. f The main occupations were transport and communication,
commerce, public administration, professions and liberal arts.
Sources: Sivasubramonian (2000, Table 2.4), Statistical Abstracts of India, various years.

thoroughly than before in areas where direct contract with the cultivator was at
work.
The Central Role of Agriculture in Indias Economic History
Agriculture has been the predominant sector for Indias workers for the last
two centuries, right up to the present. As shown in Table 1, about 70 percent of
Indias employment was in the primary sector in the first few decades of the
twentieth century. By the start of the twenty-first century, after 50 years of statebacked struggle to industrialize, the share of the primary sector in GDP has fallen
from over one-half at the time of independence to about one-quarter at present.
Nonetheless, the majority of workers continued to be engaged in the primary
sector. Thus, conditions for agriculture have been a primary determinant of Indias
economic progress and the well-being of most of its people.
The typical weather pattern in most of India is nine months of dry weather and
three months of monsoon season, which refers to the seasonal shift in wind
direction between June and September that brings 90 percent of total rainfall in the
region. Rainfall during the monsoon season is usually adequate to raise one or two
food crops in the months following the monsoon. But rainfall is rarely adequate for
winter crops and marginally adequate in some of the drier regions even for the
main food crop.
High risk was a constant feature of economic life in most parts of India
throughout history. If the monsoon rains failed even slightly, starvation was wide-

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spread and sudden. In the short run, famines affected all parts of the economy via
violent shifts in consumption and labor force. For example, in Madras Presidency,
the great famine of 1876 1877 took between 5 and 8 million lives, or about a
quarter of the population of that region. In the long run, two observed tendencies
seem attributable to endemic risks. First, rates of private investment in India have
generally been low. Instead, Indians who held assets displayed a marked preference
for precious metals, which tended to be more stable in value, but generated smaller
return than productive investment. Second, the high risk of famine mortality was
possibly a reason why birth rates also tended to be high. Due in large part to high
mortality from recurrent famines, Indias population growth between 1800 and
1921 was low (0.4 to 0.5 percent) and subject to high fluctuations. But mortality
rates began to fall in the early twentieth century as a result of fewer famines, better
health care and possibly improvements in nutrition. However, high birth rates did
not decline. As a result, between 1914 and 1946, Indias rate of population growth
climbed to 1.2 percent per year.
In this primarily agricultural society, cultivation patterns and livelihood risks
depended on the distribution of rainfall. Mean annual rainfall in India ranges from
more than 70 inches on the western coast and Bengal delta to 30 inches or below
in large parts of the interior. Areas with high rainfall tended to grow rice; those with
low rainfall focused on coarser grains or millets. Rice and rainfall were generally
associated with high population densities and low ratios of land to labor because
the combination of rice and rainfall normally meant lighter impact of famines and
greater requirement for farm labor.
The eastern coastal areas where British colonial rule first established itself had
abundant water, fertile land, dense populations, well-developed foreign trade and
relatively hierarchical societies. Land in these areas could sustain high rents and,
thus, a prosperous rent-earning class, who were rarely peasants themselves. The
interior regions conquered later were drier and more sparsely populated. Peasantry
here was less hierarchical, kinship units powerful, and these units tended to control
land collectively. Farming here coexisted with extensive raising of livestock. From
a mix of ecological and political reasons, the government invested heavily in
extending canal irrigation in the drier interior regions.2 Between 1885 and 1938,
cultivable area increased by 60 million acres, of which over half was irrigated.
The latter half of the nineteenth century saw agrarian commercialization
driven by translocal markets. Early in the nineteenth century, Indias product
markets were constrained by multiplicity of weights and measures, backward and
risky transportation systems and extensive use of barter. But global technological
advances and British administration weakened these constraints and enabled closer
integration of markets. Agricultural prices consistently rose. Transactions costs fell.
Land sales, land prices and rents increased. Credit transactions expanded. Labor
became more mobile and more market oriented, and millions went overseas. Profit

Coastal Madras, a rice region that saw canal construction on a large scale, was an exception.

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Table 2
Production and Wages

Index of production
Food crops
Nonfood crops
Modern industry
Index of real income in traditional industry
Index of real wages
Modern industry
Nonagricultural, outside modern industry
Skilled
Unskilled

190001 to 190405

193405 to 193940

100
100
100
100

103
146
293
127

100

185

100
100

160
151

Sources: Sivasubramonian (2000, Tables 4.28, 4.40, 4.41, 6(g)), Blyn (1966, Appendix 4c). Modern
industry real wages are simple average of three indices, Bombay cotton mills, Ahmedabad cotton mills
and Calcutta jute mills. The wage indices were estimated by Mukerji (1959, 1960, 1961).

opportunities led to changes in resource use. For example, in what had been the
drier millet zones, after irrigation, a basket of cash crops became common, like
wheat, cotton, oilseeds, sugarcane and tobacco. The value of Indias exports
quintupled between 1870 and 1914. Agricultural goods accounted for 70 to
80 percent of the exports.
In the decades after 1900, the momentum for growth in agricultural output
slowed. As shown in Table 2, production of food crops was essentially unchanged
from the early 1900s to the late 1940s. By contrast with foodgrain production,
production of nonfood crops and large-scale industrial production increased more
rapidly.
The three conditions that had made agrarian expansion possible in the late
nineteenth century all weakened in the interwar period. Cultivable waste lands
became scarce, investment in water slowed and so did the world economy. One
interpretation of this slowdown is that the resource-based, trade-driven growth had
reached its limits. Some growth continued in cotton and wheat, but it was increasingly dependent on yield-per-acre rather than acreage, in other words, dependent
upon seeds developed or adapted in government laboratories rather than on wider
access to water. That said, the principal source of agricultural stagnation was a crop
and a region that had participated in a rather limited way in the whole transition
specifically, rice in Bengal. Thus, historians have also looked for other hypotheses
for the slowdown with Bengal in mind.
One theory focuses on class structure. In densely populated, rain-fed, ricebased areas like Bengal, the British had conferred property rights upon formerly
rent-earning groups, perpetuating their power and blocking the way for basic
restructuring in rural society. In the drier millet-based regions where land was
plentiful and hands few (Stokes, 1994), the state made revenue arrangements
directly with the peasants, creating a positive incentive for private investment.

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Journal of Economic Perspectives

Another explanation, complementary rather than competing with the former,

involves resource endowments. In the Bengal delta, income from rice had to be
shared between too many people dependent on land. By early in the twentieth
century, population growth in this region had led to the cultivation of inferior land.
The rice areas that did well commercially, such as coastal Madras, had lower
population densities and received canal irrigation that made it possible to combine
rice with dry season crops.
Whatever factors were behind the stagnation of agricultural output, they were
long lasting. The regional patterns of agricultural growth and stagnation since
independence have been similar to the regional pattern of growth and stagnation
in the colonial period. Pockets of rural poverty today emerged as pockets of rural
poverty in the latter half of colonial rule. Areas that experienced a green revolution in the 1970s and 1980s were already advancing during British rule. Land in
India has been scarce in an absolute sense from about 1900. By and large, success
in breaking the resource barrier after 1947 has depended on irrigation, seeds,
chemical fertilizers and, to some extent, exploitation of forests and pastures.
How did the commercialization of agriculture under colonialism contribute to
standards of living? Between 1890 and 1950, no marked change in average real
wages seems to have occurred. But real income per worker increased, which
suggests that nonwage incomes must have risen. At one end, nonwage incomes
represented the earnings of the small peasant, who relied mainly on family labor,
tilled land barely enough for subsistence and who usually had insecure property
rights. At the other end were rich peasants, who had secure property rights,
controlled enough land to generate a surplus, employed laborers, had better access
to credit or were creditors themselves. As a rule, rich peasants gained from
commercializationthat is, returns to capital increased. The evidence on small
peasants is mixed. In some cases, they did well; in other cases, they gained in the
nineteenth century, but regressed in the twentieth. On a limited scale, the small
peasant turned into a laborer. Instances of the peasant losing land have received
exaggerated importance in academic debates on the impact of colonialism. In one
extreme view, such instances symbolized a general rural decline and dislocation
caused by colonialism (Patel, 1952). In a more sober view, stories of such reversal
were neither very general nor attributable to colonialism. After all, in the long run,
the Indian small peasant faced a steady fall in land-worker ratios due to population
pressure.
Although there is no strong evidence to suggest the laborers became better off
overall with the commercialization of agriculture, wages did rise in the major cash
crop regions. Further, colonialism brought changes in the laborers social position.
In precolonial India, laborers came from castes whose primary duty was to perform
labor. Many were akin to serfs, and some were actually salable. In the colonial
period, this serfdom or slavery declined. The element of compulsion and force in
employment weakened. Various forms of social oppression, such as enforced dress
codes and codes of conduct with respect to upper castes, weakened, too. The
possibility of migrating to the cities and to other British colonies made occupa-

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117

tional choice more diverse. The decline of attached labor was partly induced by the
widespread exit of these castes from agricultural labor and entry into plantations,
mines, urban services, public works and government utilities.
Industry
Indias workforce is not significantly more industrial today than a century ago.
In 1901, 13.9 million industrial workers formed 10.5 percent of the workforce, as
shown in Table 1. In 1991, 28.4 million workers made up 10.2 percent of the
workforce. The share of industry in national income has grown from 11.1 percent
in 1900 1910 to 16.4 percent in 1940 1946, to 27 percent in 2000. Indias independence in 1947 did not represent any marked break in the pace of industrialization as measured by employment or share of national income.
In describing industrialization in colonial India, it is necessary to begin with a
distinction between traditional and modern industry. Modern industry (or largescale industry) involved use of machinery, regulation and factories subject to some
form of modern managerial practices. By contrast, in traditional industrial firms,
machinery, size, regulation and hierarchical management played no significant
role. Both traditional and modern industry shared one feature: intensive use of
labor and/or locally available raw materials. The main examples of large-scale
industry were cotton and jute mills. Examples of traditional industry include
handloom textiles, leather manufactures, metal utensils, pottery, food processing,
woodwork and carpets and shawls.
Large-scale industry employed 23 percent of Indias industrial workers about
1900 and a little over 10 percent at 1947. Its share of the national income generated
in manufacturing increased from less than 10 percent to 40 percent over this time.
Factory employment in the colonial period was overwhelmingly dominated by
the textile industry: mills for cotton and jute spinning and weaving; cotton ginning
firms and jute presses; and a few large firms in wool and silk spinning and weaving.
The other mechanized industries were paper, sugar, matches, cement and steel.
Technology and the capital goods were imported, but even significant Indian mills
used a far higher proportion of labor to capital than the comparable factor
proportions in the same industries in Britain. These modern factories were concentrated in two provinces, Bombay and Bengal. The attraction of these provinces,
especially that of the cities of Bombay and Calcutta, derived from their position as
major centers of transportation and large settlements of maritime traders.
Modern industry was essentially a product of Indias contact with Britain. In
cotton and jute mills, the idea of a mill, the technical knowledge, the equipment
and capital intensity, a part of the capital and a section of the engineers at first came
from Britain. The dependence on British precedence led to ways of organizing
work that did not exist before. It gave rise to cities such as Calcutta or Bombay;
shaped urban labor markets; encouraged the growth of railways, ports, laws, banks
and technical schools; and was a force behind the modernization of services.
At the start of colonial rule in the 1850s, Indias capital market institutions
were inadequate to channeling household savings to industrial investment. The

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real cost of capital was astronomical. It is not surprising that the pioneers in
modern industry came almost entirely from communities that had specialized in
trading and banking activitiesthat is, those who could raise money more easily. By
and large, fixed capital in modern industry came from its own sources of funds or
from borrowings from within a small set of people known to each other.
Factory labor was a new form of work in India in the middle of the nineteenth
century. Machinery, migration, urbanization and discipline were new ingredients in
the workers lives. Did these changes improve income and welfare? From the early
1900s to the late 1930s, real wages of mill workers did increase quite substantially
in the cotton mills of western India and marginally in the jute mills of the east (as
shown in Table 2). Most workers earned wages that were too little or too insecure
to think of growing roots in the city and giving up connections with land and
agricultural labor. However, the chances of occupational and income mobility were
greater in the cities than in the villages. The city dwellers never suffered the threat
of famine to the same degree as the rural population.
Historians have asked why modern industry remained limited in India. Two
points of view exist on this question. Morris (1983) suggests that the scale of Indias
home market was small for goods that used machinery. Bagchi (1970) suggests that
the home market was shared by Indian and imported manufactures and that the
colonial government did not protect Indian industry sufficiently from low-cost
imports. For example, India never developed a capital goods sector and did not see
the kind of boost to machinery production associated with railway construction in
mid-nineteenth century United States. Indias railroads, the largest railway system
in Asia, imported nearly all its equipment until the interwar period. Behind this
policy, there was an explicit encouragement from the government to buy British
and possibly a disregard for experiments because the government guaranteed rates
of return on private investment in the railways.
By focusing on the extent of demand for products of modern manufacturing,
both arguments sidestep the issues of resource endowments and high cost of capital
in India. Wider usage of machinery, whether for home or export markets, was not costeffective due to the high cost of capital and the scarcity (and cost) of skilled labor.
Machinery was used in those exceptional industries that processed raw materials
abundantly available in India and for which the machines and technicians could be
easily imported. If we look away from this segment, the general situation was exactly
as resource endowments would imply, that is, a vast world of traditional manufacturing,
consisting of tool-based industrial production performed in homes or small workshops.
Standard narratives of Indian industrialization have often neglected traditional
industry from a mistaken belief that imports and modern industry killed it. Research on
national income first challenged such a view, showing that income per worker increased quite significantly in this sector between 1900 and 1947, as shown in Table 2.3
Later work on specific crafts showed evidence of a large rise in output per worker, as
3

Sivasubramonian (2000, Table 7.19) finds that real product per worker in small-scale industry increased by about 60 percent between 1900 and 1930, but fell in the next decade.

Tirthankar Roy

119

well. Part of Indias textile industry did become obsolete, but this theme cannot be
generalized.
A different perspective that has taken shape more recently argues that the key
dynamic in traditional industry was not that it became obsolescent, but rather that
it was affected by commercialization in product and input markets (Roy, 1999).
Commercialization involved a number of shifts: increasing integration of the
market for the products of traditional manufacturing; a shift away from production
for own use or use as gifts and tributes to production for market; and a shift from
local to longer-distance trade. As markets integrated, competition within the crafts
intensified. There was decline of older institutional forms and the rise of new ones
that used labor more efficiently. In particular, there was a decline in two types of
nonspecialized workers: women working in household industry and a group the
early censuses called general labor, which performed a variety of laboring tasks in
the villages and some manufacturing on the side.
Leather manufacture gives an example of how commercialization affected
traditional manufacturing. This was originally a rural craft performed mainly by
rural serfs. In most places hides were bartered, but even where a market formally
existed, servitude arose both from caste hierarchy and the interlocking of
marketsthe fact that the main customer of the leather artisan was also the
peasant-employer. By the 1870s, an export market had arisen for leather, along with
a need for different kinds of processing. These changes weakened the serfdom of
leathermakers and enabled the rise of migrations into the city, the merchant-owned
urban factory and wage labor. The case of handloom weaving is more well studied.
Competition between traditional handloom manufacturing and the modern power
loom manufacturing was acute, and the share of traditional manufacturing eroded
steadily throughout the nineteenth century. However, hand and powerweaving
also served segmented markets, and those segments of hand-weaving that did not
compete with modern textile manufacturing saw a pattern of expansion in demand, commercialization and urbanization, along with technological and organizational change. A range of traditional manufacturing industries intensive in
craftsmanship carpets, shawls, engraved metals or silkswere always urban and
commercial. But the extent of urban concentration increased, and there was a
qualitative change in clientele from powerful local patrons to exports. If Bombay
and Calcutta with their large-scale factories represent one face of industrialization
in India, numerous medium-sized towns, such as Agra, Benares, Moradabad, Sholapur, Madurai or Jaipur, illustrate the strength of labor-intensive industry that
arose from traditional roots.
Wages in real terms increased in traditional industry in the first half of the
twentieth century, the rise being higher for the skilled artisan, as shown in
Table 2. Craftsmanship was a resource contributing to industrialization in India. In
the largest industry, handlooms, wages did not rise for the ordinary weaver. But
earnings of the skilled weaver probably increased, and rates of profit were high,
possibly rising, in the two decades or so before the Great Depression. We again have

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a scenario where returns to semiskilled labor are uncertain, but returns to capital
and craftsmanship increased.
This process illustrates industrialization based on utilizing labor more productively, rather than on replacing labor by machinery. In that respect, colonial India
was not fundamentally dissimilar to early industrialization elsewhere in the presence of surplus labor, such as protoindustrialization in eighteenth-century Europe or industrialization in twentieth-century east Asia. Commercialization started
the process. There was persistence, even strengthening, of traditional organization
in the short run. But underneath that stability, a movement toward a labor market
slowly began. In one respect, colonial India was different from these other cases. In
Europe, modern industry had indirect roots in traditional industry. In India, the
two developed side by side.
Global Flows of Trade and Capital
India was a more open economy in the colonial period relative both to the
eighteenth century and to the first 40 years of its independence. Before the
nineteenth century, foreign trade was a negligible activity for Indias economy as a
whole, though it was significant for certain regions. The ratio of trade to domestic
product increased from 1 to 2 percent around 1800 to a little less than 10 percent
in the 1860s to 20 percent by 1914. After 1947, the trade-GDP ratio in India steadily
fell. It was 8 percent in 1970, but has more recently risen to 13 percent in 1985,
16 percent in 1990 and 20 percent by the mid-1990s.
International flows of income and capital were also relatively larger in the
colonial period than before or after. Net income from abroad formed 12 percent
of national income in India before World War I. Net income from abroad was well
below 1 percent of national income between 1950 and the mid-1980s. Until the
Great Depression, India typically ran merchandise trade surpluses. In addition,
India received financial investment from abroad in industry, commerce and infrastructure. In the international accounts, these two net receipts were balanced by
three items of net payment: purchase of gold and silver, remittances made by the
private sector and remittances made by the government. Government transactions
were closely connected with the balance of payments. Indias government during
the colonial period borrowed heavily abroad to finance its investment and other
commitments. Repayment of these loans, along with regular remittance on account
of charges made by Britain for costs of the administration of India, was a large net
payment item in Indias foreign transactions.
The money supply in colonial India was mainly influenced by the balance of
payments. The primary objective of monetary policy was to stabilize the exchange
rate. Stabilization of prices and outputs was meant to happen automatically. However, when Indian interests and Britains interests came in conflict, stabilization in
Britains external account was usually in the minds of those who decided Indian
affairs.
One of the most striking features of colonial India, and an enduring puzzle, is
the extremely low rates of investment. Net investment was 2 4 percent of national

Economic History and Modern India: Redefining the Link

121

income. Investment in machinery accounted for about half a percent of national

income. The low rate of investment has been attributed to colonialism. In an
accounting sense, the relatively large remittance abroad on the government account implied a lower capacity to importand the period was one when a great
deal of the machinery and raw materials needed by industry was imported.
Critiques of colonialism emphasized payments on government account, infamous as drain. These remittances held an element of transfer, in that some of the
services for which payments were due were overpriced. The British administrative
elite, for example, was paid as grandly as its counterpart in precolonial Mughal
India. However, a great deal of government expenditure was made for services that
India needed but could not supply on its own, such as pensions to teachers and
engineers or payment of debts raised to finance railways and irrigation. After all,
Britain and India were worlds apart in their technical, scientific and managerial
capabilities. Drain, therefore, is extremely difficult to separate out from legitimate factor payments. Even before separation, the scale of government remittances, typically 0.51 percent of national income, may not appear large enough to
bear the drain theory.
Explanation of low rates of investment has tended to focus on these colonial
features. But it is hard to explain the low level of private investment as a result of
remittances abroad from Indias government. A climate of high uncertainty took a
toll on the desire to invest. The hunger of Indians for gold and silver took a toll on
productive investment. The slow pace of institutional development on the financial
side was also a negative factor. The traditional system normally did not deal in
deposits and was thus inadequate in channeling household savings into productive
uses. Such a development had to await joint stock banks, which expanded only late
in the interwar period, that too in a highly unsteady fashion.
Indias Growth During the Colonial Period
Indias pattern of economic growth during the colonial period is summed up
by Table 3. The early colonial period between 1858 and 1914 saw positive economic
growth for India. The rate of growth was small by modern standards, but not trivial
by contemporary standards. Indias real national income grew at over 1 percent
between 1868 and 1914, per capita income at a little less than 1 percent. These
growth rates appeared to be rising late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth
century. One estimate shows that real national income grew at 1.8 percent and per
capita income at 1.2 percent between 1865 and 1885, close to what Britain experienced in the last quarter of the century (Mukherjee, 1935, p. 65).
By contrast, the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s was a difficult time, for
the world economy, for India, for Britain and for India-Britain relations. On the
positive side, Indias market for modern and traditional industry grew, in the case
of the former owing to limited tariff protection. There was growth too in nonfood
crop production. On the negative side, there was acute stagnation in food production. Macroeconomic policy, the most infamous element in which was a slightly
overvalued exchange rate that hindered Indias exports, caused political and

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Journal of Economic Perspectives

Table 3
Growth Rates of Net Domestic Product (NDP) and Population, 1868 1969 to
1946 1947
(year-to-year growth rates, percentage annual)

18681898
18821898
19001914
19141946

NDP

Population

Per Capital NDP

0.99
1.29
1.85
0.61

0.40a
0.51b
0.61c
1.18d

0.59
0.78
1.24
0.57

Notes: a Growth rate for the period 18721901. b 18811901. c 19011921. d 19011946.
Sources: For 1868 1898, Heston (1983, Table 4.3A). For 1900 1946, Sivasubramonian (2000, Table 6.4).

economic stresses. World depression and excess capacity led to strains in businessgovernment relations and in interfirm relations. A combination of much slower
growth in output and much more rapid growth in population meant that average
levels of living stopped improving, or even declined, and the poorer sections of the
agricultural population in particular faced harder conditions.
Indias economic nationalism arrived at a difficult time for Indias economy
and the world economy. General assessments of the impact of British rule on the
lives of ordinary people have been overly influenced by the gloomy economic
experience of the interwar period. It is easily forgotten that the first 60 years or so
of British colonialism delivered economic growth and a rising standard of living.

The Changing Narrative of Indias Economic History

Until quite recently, most economic history research in India was conducted
within a paradigm that saw development and underdevelopment, industrialization
and deindustrialization, as two sides of the same coin. According to this informal
consensus, markets and institutions built under the colonial situation retarded
India and enriched Britain. Indian society and economy without colonialism, it was
suggested, was capable of doing better than it actually did. Economic backwardness
was identified with low levels of mechanized industry, a formulation that pervaded
both Indian nationalist thought as well as leftist historiography.
This thesis was based on five subtheses, which have been described or implied
by the earlier discussion.4 The first thesis concerned external transactions. In the
leftist-nationalist formulation, the totality of colonialism was defined in terms of
integration of India in world capitalism in a subservient position, unequal exchange and drain. The second thesis offered an argument that the social surplus

For general statements of the orthodox position covering some or all of the five theses, see Chandra
(1968, 1992), Habib (1975, 1985), Sarkar (1983) and Bagchi (1982).

Tirthankar Roy

123

went to the wrong hands. Perhaps the best-known version of this argument is
forced commercialization, which suggested that peasants, when shifting from
subsistence to market, fell into domination by moneylenders who were averse to
productive investments. The third thesis can be called perilous commercialization, the idea that the shift from food to nonfood crops intensified famines. The
fourth thesis was deindustrialization, the proposition that industrialization in
Britain imposed large uncompensated costs upon India in the form of a decline in
traditional industry. The fifth thesis was a position on public goods. The railways
and the telegraph were seen as exploitative because they were introduced to aid
imperial defense or foreign capital.
Generations of writers on political economy and development used Indias
ruin by the British as grist to their respective mills. This orthodoxy had tremendous raw appeal. It gave an easily intelligible explanation for poverty and stagnation. It had a reassuring message for politicians of all hues. It easily bridged the past
with the present and with the philosophy of self-reliance.
The orthodoxy faced its first serious challenge in 1963 when Morris D. Morris
proposed a more positive view of nineteenth-century Indian development. The
main message was that economic growth in nineteenth-century India was constrained by productive capacity rather than by politics, which played a benign or
positive role. A symposium that followed around Morriss essay set out the basic
issues. Two decades later, the uncompromisingly empiricist Cambridge Economic
History of India was published under the editorship of Dharma Kumar. Thereafter,
a burst of detailed research disputed almost every premise of the orthodoxy.
Irrespective of the difference in their political status, British and Indian
economic fortunes were complementary rather than in contradiction. For example,
GDP growth rates in India and Britain moved broadly in the same direction. Both
were relatively high in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and decelerated
in the interwar period. Commercialization had a positive correlation with productivity growth. The vision of moneylender power in forced commercialization was a
fiction. The thesis of perilous commercialization exaggerated the shift in cropping
pattern, presumed knowledge about intensity of famines in precolonial period, was
inconsistent with data and underplayed the fundamentally climatic origin of famines. Deindustrialization seems an inapt description for a region where millions of
artisans continued in business and saw rise in output per worker. The uses and
benefits of public goods, such as the railways or the telegraph, were not restricted
to ethnic groups.
The 1980s saw many debates on these kinds of issues. By the end of the 1980s,
the field was ripe for remaking the link between history and the present, and for
going beyond the imperialism fetish. However, such a reengagement did not
happen. Instead, historians studying south Asia seemed to lose interest in questions
of economic growth. Moreover, economic history research lost priority in the
Indian academic scene.
The three major new themes of economic history research in the 1990s were

124

Journal of Economic Perspectives

the environment, traditional industry and factory labor.5 Outside these areas, and
even within these areas, research has tended to focus on political and cultural
history rather than more on questions of economic growth. The almost deliberate
abstention from growth reflected a larger shift in historiography itself. In a
well-known book on the impact of colonialism, the psychologist Ashish Nandy
(1983, p. 63, emphasis added) asserted that colonialism is first of all a matter of
consciousness. In the 1990s, an increasing number of historians wrote from that
worldview. The idea that colonial domination was the source of all relevant processes of change was still the center of historiography. But the idea of domination,
having found the economic sphere uncongenial, made culture its new habitat.
Economics became uninteresting, even politically incorrect, for historians studying
colonialism. A deeper root of this trained disinterest in economics seems to be the
notion of progress, a concept much disputed in postmodern cultural history, but
entrenched in economic history.
Within India, economic history went bankrupt, literally. After 1990, jobs,
research grants and seminars dried up. The central government, the sole authority
in charge of funding research and seminars, cut down spending on the softer
contents of higher education. Within about six years, history practically disappeared from economics research and had maintained only a token presence in
undergraduate teaching. In 2002, a curriculum development committee formed
by the University Grants Commission eliminated economic history altogether from
prescribed economics curriculum in Indian universities. In publishing, the main
vehicle of quality new research, the Delhi branch of the Oxford University Press,
brought out a number of nostalgic readings, but few fresh works.

Toward a Rethinking of Indias Economic History

A useful starting point for rethinking Indias economic history would be to
acknowledge that development and underdevelopment were not necessarily two
sides of the same coin. Rather, Britain and India in the nineteenth century were two
different coins. They were influenced by global factors and by mutual interaction,
but also by their differences. To expect India to have followed the same path as
Britain, but for colonization, is implausible.
The difference that seems to matter above all is resource endowments. India in
1800, 1900 and south Asia as a region as late as in 1970 or 1980 shared a common
feature: an abundance of poorly equipped labor engaged in occupations subject to
high climatic risks. Economic growth, both in colonial and postcolonial India, has

For a selection of writings on environment, see Arnold and Guha (1995). For examples of recent
research on traditional and small-scale industry, see Roy (1999) and Haynes (2001). On factory labor,
Chandavarkar (1994) calls into question standard categorizations used in analytical work on labor
politics.

Economic History and Modern India: Redefining the Link

125

Table 4
Sources of Growth in Real GDP, 1900 1947
(percentage per annum)

Growth
Contributions of
Labor
Capital (including land)
Total Factor Productivity
Productivity/Growth (%)

Agriculture

Nonagriculture

0.44

1.69

0.33
0.08
0.03
7

0.31
0.90
0.57
34

Source: Sivasubramonian (2000, Table 7.21), Mukherjee (1973). Contributions are products of base
period factor shares and rates of growth of factor inputs.

responded to this situation by focusing on labor-intensive methods of production

and by a preference for investments with safe, if low, returns.
In the nineteenth century, Indias growth was shaped by factors tied to laborintensive growth. Public investmentin irrigation, railways and other public
works extended the production frontier by bringing new land under cultivation.
The expansion of trade and commercialization, both between regions and internationally, took advantage of the public investments. There was also a great
reallocation of labor away from settled agriculture and handicrafts to new lands and
new occupations, such as plantations, mines, public works or migration overseas.
The received interpretation of colonialism tends to see this process as one of pure
labor displacement. But more realistically, after the reallocations, overall labor
demand increased in the nineteenth century.
Already by 1900, the opportunities for expanding acreage had been largely
exhausted, and new land was scarce. Further growth in agriculture was based wholly
on labor input. The period 1858 1920 saw only a modest increase in the supply of
workers. Thereafter, the growth rate of population and the supply of labor accelerated, as documented in Table 3. In modern industry, expansion was based on
growth in both capital and labor inputs. In traditional industry, there was very little
growth in capital and a fall in labor input. The main source of growth was
institutional changes leading to increased total factor productivity.
These trends show up in productivity statistics of this time, shown in Table 4.
Over the period 1900 1947, agricultural growth was almost wholly accounted for by
expansion in labor input. In nonagricultural sectors, the share of growth from
capital investment and total factor productivity was relatively large. These figures
include modern industry, traditional industry and services. In modern industry,
output, capital and labor input grew at similar rates. In traditional industry, labor
input fell, capital increased marginally and net output rose by 60 percent between
1900 and 1930. In this sector, total factor productivity growth played a large role.
One element of the more effective use of labor in traditional industry was
change in industrial organization, enabling a rise in hours per worker. The most

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Journal of Economic Perspectives

Table 5
Share of Women and Household Industry in Manufacturing Workforce
(percentage)

1911
1921
1931
1961
1971
1981
1991

Women

Household

34
32
30
27
13
15
16

60
37
31
24

Source: Census of India, 19111991.

noticeable change was a decline in household production and rise in wage labor.
Table 5 supplies some evidence on this. More detailed evidence is available from
recent research on traditional industry. On the assumption that rise in real income
in traditional industry derived only from rise in hours per worker, the latter
increased by about 34 percent between 1900 and 1947. In reality, the extent of rise
was somewhat smaller than this, but large and positive.
This outcome was a result of markets and organizational change. When the
products of traditional industry became more commercialized in the colonial
period, two things happened. First, some low-productivity segments in handicraft
textiles were destroyed by foreign competition. Secondly, and somewhat later, there
was increasing competition within the domestic handicrafts. As a result, the traditional household organization tended to decay, because it was incompatible with
elements of commercial production like the division of labor, economies of scale,
monitoring costs and the opportunity cost of family labor. This trend can be
quantified for the last several decades, as shown in the second column of Table 5.
The mobility of labor increased, as well. In India, reallocation of labor has
often required more than just a wage incentive. Much of the reallocation of labor
into sectors like modern industry, mines, plantations and to a small extent railways
relied on contractors, who could communicate with both the workers and the
employers and frequently took advantage of asymmetric information. After about
1900, voluntary internal migration increased, and labor became increasingly commercialized. Eventually, several types of transactions costs in hiring relatively skilled
labor fell. For example, the power of intermediaries declined. A whole range of
skills became available for hire in one place. Access to training became wider
compared to that under older institutions, such as families or close-knit apprenticeship systems.
The study of this reallocation of labor has often focused on changes in modern
industry. How labor was reallocated in agriculture and traditional industry is much
less studied. There had been large reallocations within and out of agriculture in the
nineteenth century. The change from local farm labor attached to a particular

Tirthankar Roy

127

piece of land to unattached migrant farm laborer was noticeable in the interwar
period. It continued long after 1947. Studies on traditional industry suggest that
migration was an important part of their history, too, in the early twentieth century.
Conspicuously weak in this dynamic of intensified labor, both before and after
1947, was induced accumulation of human capital via organized education and
training. Students enrolled in schools of all levels as proportion of population of
school-going age increased from 3 4 percent in 1891 to 79 percent in 1931. These
conditions changed only slowly after 1947. A quarter-century later, the proportion
of students in the relevant age group remained low at 20 25 percent. Only about
a fifth of the students who started school in colonial India reached secondary levels.
The British government did not build an effective mass education system. Private
education funding was slow to shed the biases that had long confined education to
only a few groups and to the men within these groups.
Reallocation of labor had a gender bias, too. In the ensuing market for labor,
it was often harder for women to take part than it was for men. Because most
women tended to participate in paid work along with performance of domestic
duties, it was difficult for them to continue in the former if the job required
full-time work, migration or long-distance commuting. The roots of this difficulty
were partly cultural, an aversion to working outside home that seems to be weakening only recently.
Womens presence in manufacturing fell steadily and significantly between
1881 and 1971, as shown in Table 5, and started rising very slowly thereafter. An
earlier scholarship dealing with the occupational statistics of the censuses of
colonial India discussed the fall (Krishnamurty, 1983; Thorner, 1962). The most
widely known hypothesis advanced in this literature is that it is basically a reporting
error. The early censuses, it is argued, overestimated as workers many women who
contributed to commercial work rather marginally. Later censuses, by implication,
corrected that error. Ironically, in the 1990s, another body of experts argued that
the most recent censuses underestimate women workers. The reporting error hypothesis is not very satisfactory. Both versions of it are conjectural. Moreover, the
sorts of structural changes discussed here seem to provide a plausible working
explanation of the gender imbalances.
Since independence, the main factors in Indias economic growth remain
those that are important in a labor-intensive society. A series of green revolutions
succeeded in breaking the barrier of no additional land, as the modern parallel to
the irrigation projects of the early colonial period. The relative abundance of labor,
its allocation and mobility, continue to be of keen importance. All these variables
represent points of continuity between colonial and postcolonial India. A useful
approach to Indias economic history can put labor at its center. After 1947, the
marketization process for labor gathered strength in every sector, except in those
under regulation. The persistence of surplus labor, increasingly owing to population growth, did not, however, permit rapid rise in wages or earnings. In the long
run, India has experienced a growth rate in average earnings consistent with its
endowments, with or without colonialism.

128

Journal of Economic Perspectives

There is at least one key difference between colonial and postcolonial development patterns. Colonial development was based on the classical principle that
nations should grow by utilizing their endowments in a free world market. However, postcolonial development was based on an attempt to reshape the impact of
resource endowments with restrictions on trade. There were some gains and some
costs involved in that shift. The biggest gain, perhaps, was a boost to local technological development. The cost was missed opportunities in trade. For Indias
leaders at independence, looking back from the 1940s at the slow growth and
collapsing international trade of the 1930s, the loss of international trade seemed
of little consequence. However, the world economy greatly revived after 1950.
Conceivably, if independent India had followed the colonial pattern of resource-led
growth, it could have achieved substantial growth in labor-intensive manufacturing,
as it did so dramatically in the few years after trade liberalization in the 1990s.
Conceivably, carrying over the colonial pattern of growth would have raised labor
demand fast enough to generate strong upward pressure on real wages, despite
rapid population growth. Conceivably, higher real wages might have helped to hold
down population growth, too.

Conclusion
Until the 1980s, the principal use for economic history in India was to supply
a critique of colonialism, which formed the ideological basis for an economic policy
of self-reliance. That kind of history has lost its intellectual vitality and its political
purpose. The center of the discipline of Indias economic history needs to shift.
A first step toward a useful alternative approach would be to replace imperialism with economic structurethat is, the constraints and opportunities that took
shape under resource endowment patterns that took time to change. In a labor
surplus economy facing persistent high risks, conditions of manual labor and
behavior toward risks must be the principal links between the past and the present.
Indeed, economic change in colonial India can be seen as a process wherein
resource constraints were temporarily overcome by reallocation and increasingly
industrious labor. Such a labor-intensive growth process, while it continued after
1947, was somewhat repressed by the policy regime. Those who decided colonial
policies were explicitly committed to the exploitation of Indias comparative advantage in land and labor. The postcolonial state was not, and it chose to close
Indias economy at exactly the time that world trade was undergoing a remarkable
expansion. One intriguing clue to this shift away from a labor-intensive growth
process is that while rates of income growth were low before 1947 relative to those
after 1947, estimates of total factor productivity growth were higher before 1947
than after. This difference, so far largely unstudied, deserves a proper interpretation.
A final lesson from this discussion is the importance of restoring the links
between economic history and culture. In labor-centered narratives such as this
essay advocates, culture can enter in at least four ways. First, certain exclusionary

Economic History and Modern India: Redefining the Link

129

processes seem to underlie large and drawn-out reallocations of labor. These

processes determined who would enter what new jobs. In India, gender was
evidently one axis for such processes. Caste may well have been another. Second, a
relatively high population growth rate maintained for over 80 years is crucial to any
narrative that has labor as its center. Fertility response to changing mortality risks
has been exceptionally slow in south Asia. Persistence of norms about family and
gender roles might help to explain why. Third, many discussions of colonial India
tend to see the low investment rate as a government failure. In fact, the rate of
private investment was low, as well. To be sure, risks were high in the colonial
economy and available assets and institutions limited. But a residue of cultural
agency may have remained. For example, it is plausible that the hierarchical society
discouraged private spending on public goods. Fourth, recalling a well-known
proposition about why the whole world isnt developed (Easterlin, 1981), the
exceptionally slow pace of formal schooling in south Asia before and after 1947
needs to be addressed. For British India, the inertia can be blamed on a lack of
government resources. For independent India, the inertia is not easily attributable
to fiscal pressures. Economic history of India, one hopes, would begin to notice
these processes once it shifts its center from power to labor.

y I wish to thank Michael Waldman, Brad De Long and Timothy Taylor for comments and
suggestions on an earlier draft that led to substantial changes and greatly improved the quality
of the draft.

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