The aim of the present book is to provide a statistical framework for the determinants of private investment in India during the period 1900–39 and to provide an analysis of the data contained within that framework. Some readers may feel that in my impatience to arrive at meaningful conclusions I have not pushed on to perfect statistical series as much as I could have done. The apology I would offer is that selection of the data and their arrangement made sense to me only in reference to the questions I was asking. Hence I stopped refining the series at the point at which further refinement did not seem to have any bearing on the answers to those questions. There was also the danger that the book would not have been finished at all if it had not been finished now.

Like all authors of such an enterprise, I have accumulated a very large, tangible debt to other workers in the field, and to a wide circle of friends and critics. I have given references to the work of other people that I have drawn upon in different places of the book and so perhaps it is unnecessary and invidious to mention a selected few here. My biggest intellectual debt is to Professor Joan Robinson who carefully read the penultimate version and had very valuable comments to make on the theoretical framework.