An Introduction To India S Economic Development Since The Nineteenth Century

A unique examination of the development of the modern Indian economy over the past 150 years.

This book investigates the roots of rapid economic growth of India in recent decades, by exploring historical processes from the late colonial period. Based upon decades-long archival and field research, this book deals with the period from the late nineteenth century to 2013 and offers an integral viewpoint of the economic history of India. While critiquing the conventional understanding that links recent economic growth only with the development of high-tech, export-oriented service sectors under the liberalised economy, the book suggests deeper and wider roots of development that had a cumulative effect in three stages. First, the agrarian development and rural socio-economic changes from the end of the nineteenth century. Second, the state-led import-substitution industrialisation since 1950 that established the industrial foundations for future economic growth. Third, the economic reforms since 1991 that helped technology-intensive industries find new markets with improved quality of production. For the first time available in English, this book by the late Professor Haruka Yanagisawa, who was a leading figure in the South Asia studies collective in Japan, is an important contribution to the academic tradition of economic history of India. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of social and economic history, sociology, anthropology and economies of South Asia.

This 1971 volume brings together a number of tracts on problems of India's economic development, particularly in relation to the changes taking place in her international trade. The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of important economic transition for India. A vital aspect of it was the rapid expansion in the volume and value of Indian foreign trade, accompanied by fundamental structural changes, which transformed the old eighteenth-century mercantile pattern of India's trade with the West into a system based on an exchange of primary commodities for finished manufactured goods. The papers reprinted here illustrate first the quantitative aspects of Indian trade in this period, and secondly its institutional and policy features. The editor provides a full introduction and tables of statistics.

The history of Indian economic thought provides rich insights into both economic issues and the workings of the Indian mind. A History of Indian Economic Thought provides the first overview of economic thought in the sub-continent. Arguing that it would be inappropriate to rely on formal economic analyses it draws on a wide range of sources; epics, religious and moral texts for the early period and public speeches, addresses, and newspaper articles for controversies from the nineteenth century onwards. What emerges is a rich mosaic reflecting India's different cultures and civilizations. Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam all address economic issues and British colonial rule had a deep impact, both in propagating Western economic ideas and in provoking Indian theories of colonialism and underdevelopment. The author concludes with chapters on Ghandian economics and on Indian economic thought since Independence.