Abstract
Till well into the twentieth century, British Government in India was basically an autocracy of hierarchically organized officials headed by the Viceroy and the Secretary of State, while the ultimate Parliamentary control was spasmodic and largely theoretical. Developments after 1858 had in fact considerably enhanced the personal role of the Viceroy-Secretary of State combine, while bringing them into much closer contact with each other through the communications revolution symbolized by the submarine cable and the Suez Canal (1865–69). The East India Company’s affairs had been live political and economic issues in England, and renewals of Charter Acts had provoked intense debates in Parliament. After 1858, the routine annual presentation of Indian financial statements and ‘Moral and Material Progress Reports’ usually quickly emptied the Commons. The Court of Directors had remained influential through its patronage functions; the Council of India set up by Lord Stanley’s Act as a check on the Secretary of State never acquired much importance, as it could be overruled on most matters and by-passed through ‘urgent communications’ or ‘secret orders’ to the Viceroy. In India, too, the railway and the telegraph brought local governments closer to Calcutta, while Coupland reminds us that there was ‘no trace of the federal idea’ before 1919.
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Further Readings
The evolution of British India administrative structure and policies in the late 19th Century may be studied chronologically in S. Gopal, British Policy in India, 1858–1905 (Cambridge, 1965).
Hiralal Singh, Problems and Policies of the British in India 1885–1898 (Bombay, 1963) is a useful survey of policies connected with Indianization of services, Council reform, the Army, and the Congress. Anil Seal, Emergence of Indian Nationalism, Ch. IV, attempts an interesting comparison between Lytton, Ripon and Durfferin;
R. J. Moore, Liberalism and Indian Politics 1872–1922 (London, 1966) outlines some of the inter-connections between British and Indian politics:
see also B. L. Grover, A Documentary Study of British Policy towards Indian Nationalism (Delhi, 1965).
Indian finances have been best analysed in S. Bhattacharji, Financial Foundations of the British Raj (Simla, 1971). Connections between administrative pressures and certain types of Indian politics are explored in C. A. Bayly, Local Roots of Indian Politics, Chs. IV–V, and D. A. Washbrook, Emergence of Provincial Politics, Ch. II.
Interesting data regarding the beginnings of communal separatism in local government is presented by N. Gerald Barrier, The Punjab Government and Communal Politics, 1870–1908’, Journal of Asian Studies (May 1968). Amiya Bagchi, Private Investment in India, 1909–1939, is fundamental reading for the economic dimensions of racism. For Indian political reactions, a valuable indicator is the voluminous Dinshaw Wacha-Dadabhai Naoroji correspondence, part of which has been published in R. P. Patwardhan (ed.), Dadabhai Naoroji Correspondence, Vol. II (Calcutta, 1977).
2
The standard nationalist attack on British Indian economic policies was developed in Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London, 1901);
R. C. Dutt, Economic History of India, 2 vols. (London, (1901, 1903);
and W. Digby, ‘Prosperous’ British India (London, 1901).
The early critics of this approach included L. C. A. Knowles, Economic Development of the British Overseas Empire (London, 1928) and
V. Anstey, Economic Development of India (Third edn. London, 1949).
Bipan Chandra’s Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India is a most detailed and sympathetic survey of nationalist economic ideas; see also, for the drain and related themes, B. N. Ganguli, Dadabhai Naoroji and the Drain Theory (Bombay, 1965);
J. McLane, The Drain of Wealth and Indian Nationalism at the turn of the century, from which I have taken the statistics on p. 25 in T. Raychaudhuri (ed.), Contributions to Indian Economic History, Vol. II (Delhi, 1963);
and, for a revisionist view, K. N. Choudhuri, India’s International Economy in the 19th Century: An Historical Survey, MAS (1968).
The deindustrialization debate was revived in Morris, Raychaudhuri, Chandra, Matsui, ‘Indian Economy in the 19th Century—A Symposium’, reprint from IESHR (1968). More substantial contributions include D. and A. Thorner, ‘Deindustrialisation in India 1881–1931 in Land and Labour in India’ and A. K. Bagchi, ‘Deindustrialisation in Gangetic Bihar 1809–1901’, in B. De, et al. (ed.), Essays in Honour of S. C. Sarkar (New Delhi, 1976).
For an up-to-date survey of the broad structure of Indo-British economic relations, see A. K. Bagchi, ‘Foreign Capital and Economic Development of India’, in Gough and Sharma (eds.), Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia (New York, 1973),
while S. B. Saul, Studies in British Overseas Trade 1870–1914 (Liverpool, 1960) provides valuable data on India’s role in solving British balance of payments problems.
Space permits only very selective references to the vast and growing literature on agrarian history. For Bengal, the numerous articles of B. B. Chaudhuri, particularly ‘Agrarian Economy and Agrarian Relations in Bengal’, in N. K. Sinha (ed.) History of Bengal 1757–1905, (Calcutta, 1967), ‘Growth of Commercial Agriculture’, IESHR (1970), ‘Land Market in Eastern India’, IESHR, (1975), and ‘Process of Depeasantisation in Bengal and Bihar’, IHR (1975),
also Asok Sen and Partha Chatterji’s articles in B. De (ed.), Perspectives in Social Sciences, Vol. II (Calcutta, 1982).
For South India, see A. Sarada Raju, Economic Conditions in Madras Presidency 1900–1950 (Madras, 1941) from which I have taken the comment of the Coimbatore peasant;
N. Mukherji’s article in Frykenburg (ed.), Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History (London, 1969);
Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in Madras Presidency during the 19th Century (Cambridge, 1965), and D. A. Washbrook, Emergence of Provincial Politics, Ch. 3. For U.P., see Bernard Cohn’s valuable study of Benares, Structural Change in Indian Rural Society, in Frykenburg, Land Control and Social Structure; Eric Stokes, Peasants and the Raj;
Elizabeth Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India, Vol I: United Provinces under British Rule 1860–1900 (New Delhi, 1971);
and T. R. Metcalfe, Landlords and the British Raj: Northern India in the 19th Century (Delhi, 1979).
For Bombay Presidency, see Ravinder Kumar, ‘Rise of Rich Peasants in Western India’, in D. A. Low, Soundings in Modern South Asian History. Case studies of the specifics of commercialization include S. Mukherji ‘Imperialism in Action through a Mercantilist Function’, in Essays in Honour of S. C. Sarkar, and Shahid Amin, ‘Peasants and Capitalists in Northern India: Kisans in the Cane Commodity Circuit in Gorakhpur in the 1930s’, Journal of Peasant Studies (April, 1981). Blyn’s findings have been conveniently summarized in D. and A. Thorner, Land and Labour in India, Ch. VII, while the possible deficiencies in the agricultural statistics used by Blyn have been analysed in Clive Dewey, ‘Patwari and Chaukidar: Subordinate Officials and the Reliability of India’s Agricultural Statistics’ in Dewey and Hopkins (eds.), The Imperial Impact (London, 1978).
Jan Breman, Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India (California, 1974), makes fascinating reading on the problem of agricultural labourers. Advanced students should look up the ‘mode of production debate’, mainly in the paper of EPW, turning around the characterization of modern Indian agrarian relations as feudal, capitalist, or connected with a distinctive ‘colonial’ mode.
Hamza Alavi, ‘India and the Colonial Mode of Production’, with its references, offers a summary of the earlier phases of this debate, in Miliband and Saville, The Socialist Register (London 1975);
see also Utsa Patnaik, ‘Class Differentiation within the Peasantry: An Approach to Analysis of Indian Agriculture’, (EPW, 25 September, 1976)
and Jairas Banaji, ‘Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: Deccan Districts in the late 19th Century’, (EPW Special No., August, 1977).
On the closely-related problem of the nature of peasant differentiation and its political implications, see Hamza Alavi, ‘Peasants and Revolution’ in Socialist Register, (London, 1965) and N. Charlesworth’s recent article, ‘The “Middle Peasant Thesis” and the Roots of Rural Agitation in India, 1914–47’, Journal of Peasant Studies, (April 1980). D. A. Wash brook’s recent paper, ‘Law, State and Society in Colonial India’ in Baker, Johnson, Seal (eds.), Power, Profit and Politics raises a number of interesting theoretical issues.
On government economic policies, see S. Bhattacharji, ‘Laissez-faire in India’, IESHR (1965) and A. K. Bagchi, Private Investment, Ch. II. For British investments in India, see Arun Bose, ‘Foreign Capital,’ in,V. B. Singh (ed.), Economic History of India 1957–1956 (Bombay, 1965);
M. Kidron, Foreign Investments in India (London, 1965);
and Bagchi, Private Investment, Ch. VI. Bagchi’s is also the best analysis of the differential growth of Indian capitalism and its roots in the colonial impact. For an alternative view, see M. O. Morris’s review article of Bagchi, Private Investment in MAS, 1974. Specific studies of business communities include Amalendu Guha on Parsis (EPW, 29.8.1970 and 28.11.1970); K. Gillion, Ahmedabad: A Study in India’s Urban History (California, 1968);
T. A. Timberg, The Marwaris (Delhi, 1978), along with his articles on the same subject in IESHR, 1971, 1973;
N. K. Sinha, Economic History of Bengal, Vol. III (Calcutta, 1970): C. P. Simmons, Indigenous Enterprise in the Indian Coal-Mining Industry c. 1835–1939);
IESHR (1976); as well as two works by Soviet scholars, V. Pavlov, Indian Capitalist Class (New Delhi, 1964) and
A. Levkovski, Capitalism in India (New Delhi, 1966).
The economic history of labour is in its infancy, but see M. D. Morris, Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force in India (California, 1965),
and Lalita Chakravarty, ‘Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force in a Dual Economy—British India 1880–1920’, (IESHR, 1978).
The standard work on population remains K. Davis, Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton, 1951). D. and A. Thorner. Land and Labour, Ch. VII, is a critical survey of early national income estimates; the most systematic study so far is S. Sivasubramanian, National Income of India, 1900–01 to 1946–47 (Mimeographed, Delhi University, 1965).
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Sarkar, S. (1989). Political and Economic Structure 1885–1905. In: Modern India 1885–1947. Cambridge Commonwealth Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19712-5_2
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