British Classical Economists and Underdevelopment in India

Abstract

At least since W. Arthur Lewis’s pathbreaking contribution — “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour” (1954) — modern students of development economics have required no reminder that economists in the classical tradition were fundamentally concerned with problems of long-term economic growth. The “composite” classical model he then presented drew on their insights to illuminate the dynamics of expansion in the setting of economic dualism.¹

A number of the points treated in this essay have been elaborated at considerably greater length in William J. Barber, British Economic Thought and India, 1600–1858 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).