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South Asia and the ‘Great Divergence’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

C.A. Bayly
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Extract

Indian nationalism was born out of the notion that India's poverty and backwardness was not a natural result of technical inferiority or inefficient use of resources, but that it was a consequence of colonial rule. Even before the development of scientific nationalist economics in the 1890s, the moralists of Young Bengal had called for a protectionist ‘national political economy’ on the lines advocated by Friedrich List in Germany, whom they had read as early as 1850. Bholanath Chandra asserted in 1873 that India had once been the greatest textile producer in the world and had initiated the industrial revolution. By 1970,.he predicted, Britain would be eclipsed by the United States and by India as the greatest industrial producers. This would be brought about by rigorous protectionism and by the growth of what he called ‘moral hostility’ to the consumption of foreign goods which had even polluted the materials used in the making of the sacred threads of orthodox Hindus. This emphasis on the culture of consumption and the structure of external economic relations was central to different varieties of Indian nationalist thought as they developed from Dadhabhai Naoroji through to Mahatma Gandhi.

Type
Conference: European Miracle
Information
Itinerario , Volume 24 , Issue 3-4 , November 2000 , pp. 89 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2000

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References

Notes

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