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18962 results in Cambridge Histories

Page 887 of 949

  • X - Foreign Trade and Balance of Payments (1757–1947)

  • from PART II - THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MODERN ECONOMY
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 804-877

  • Summary

    This chapter first outlines the institutional changes relating to trade, which followed from the change of government in 1757, and then examines those particular features of Indian overseas trade which distinguish it from later development. The trends and fluctuations in India's overall foreign trade can be classified into two main components: changes, both relative and absolute, in the demand for commodities, and those relating to the geographical distribution of trade. The chapter argues that the changes in the commodity composition of Indian exports were the induced effects of factors operating through demand. Perhaps no other subject connected with India's international economy has generated so much controversy as the commercial and tariff policy pursued first by the East India Company and then the Indian administration under the Crown. The chapter discusses the mechanism which kept India's balance of payments and foreign exchange rates in equilibrium, given the unilateral transfers.

  • V - Population (1757–1947)

  • from PART I - THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE
    • By Leela Visaria, Sardar Patel Institute of Economic and Social Research, Ahmedabad, Pravin Visaria, Sardar Patel Institute of Economic and Social Research, Ahmedabad
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 463-532

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the growth of population in the Indian subcontinent during the period 1757-1947 and the determinants of the observed growth rates including mortality, fertility and migration. Even prior to the censuses conducted during 1867-72, enumerations of populations and houses were attempted in different parts of the country and in cities like Benares, Dacca, Bombay. A brief examination of these regional data provides a rough guide to the pre-census growth of population. The censuses conducted between 1867 and 1872 actually paved the way for the uninterrupted series of decennial censuses in the Indian subcontinent, which have been the major source of information on trends in population and its characteristics. The census data have been compiled for territorial units down to at least the district level, and in some cases to taluka or tehsil level. The chapter discusses the rate of growth, sex ratio, the age composition of the population and fertility and mortality estimates derived from the census data.

  • 2 - Railways

  • from VIII - Irrigation and Railways
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 737-761

  • Summary

    Railways had an impact throughout the Indian economy. The Government of India felt that some lines should be built to lower the risk of famine, and using its power to dictate the location of track, it approved so-called famine lines which were constructed for the purpose of transporting grain to poor famine areas in time of need. The monopoly by the East Indian Railway of much of the area between Punjab and Calcutta, a region rich in agricultural and mineral resources, permitted it to earn 34 per cent of all earnings in 1881 even though it owned only 16 per cent of the total length of track. Railways led to increased agricultural output, the growth of modern industry and mining, new jobs, although many jobs were lost, the redistribution of the urban population, higher incomes for some segments of the population, and numerous other economic changes.

  • 3 - Western India

  • from III - Regional Economy (1757-1857)
    • By V. D. Divekar, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Poona
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 332-352

  • Summary

    Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, agriculture in Western India was the only means of livelihood for the overwhelming majority of the population. The steady though gradual expansion in cultivation in most parts of western India was checked towards the closing years of the Maratha rule, and during the first fifteen years or so after the East India Company took over the political power. Transport facilities were perhaps more meagre and expensive in western India than in any other part of the country. This affected severely not only the cotton economy but the process of agricultural development as a whole. The condition of the western Indian agriculturist, which had been made grievous by the calamitous fall in the prices of grain in the first half of the nineteenth century, also started to improve gradually with the increase in agricultural trade and the rise in agricultural prices after the 1850s.

  • XIII - The Indian Economy since Independence (1947–70)

  • from PART III - POST-INDEPENDENCE DEVELOPMENTS
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 945-994

  • Summary

    The actual performance of the Indian economy since Independence presents a rather mixed picture. There is little doubt that the country experienced a much faster pace of growth, both in the aggregate and in the major sectors, during this period than in the previous decades. The greater dynamism of agriculture in the post-Independence era is clearly the result of larger, more intensive and better coordinated programmes undertaken as part of the five-year plans. The emergence of a dynamic indigenous entrepreneurial class and a progressive spread of industries away from their traditional locations are also noteworthy features of the post-Independence industrial transformation. During the British rule, private foreign enterprise played an important role in the industrial sector. The steady expansion in the scope and range of economic activities undertaken by government is another significant feature of the post-Independence period.

  • 2 - Eastern India

  • from III - Regional Economy (1757-1857)
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 270-332

  • Summary

    The Ganges river system, together with the Brahmaputra further east, shaped the human geography and economic life of eastern India. In some parts of eastern Bengal the river was the only channel of communication and bulk transport of commercial goods. A notable development in the agricultural history of eastern India during our period was the growth of commercial agriculture. Though the cultivated area under cash crops remained, till the end of the period, too small appreciably to affect the peasant economy of the region as a whole, the effects of the growth were far from negligible, and its study would also indicate the factors in the decision of peasants to change over from the traditional subsistence crops to cash-crops. The growth of commercial agriculture, even where it did not lead to the emergence of a distinct export sector, necessitated a great deal of adjustment in the old organization of the small peasant economy.

  • XIV - The Pakistan Economy since Independence (1947–70)

  • from PART III - POST-INDEPENDENCE DEVELOPMENTS
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 995-1026

  • Summary

    On 14 August 1947 the Indian sub-continent was partitioned, and Pakistan was carved out of the north-western and north-eastern parts of British India. An account of the Pakistan economy since Independence has to begin with its initial endowment and the effects of Partition. To describe and analyse the broad trends in the economy since Independence one has to use Pakistan's national income accounts and other such available data, although the statistics may not be accurate. Between 1949-50 and 1969-70 the economy made considerable progress in industrial, commercial, and also agricultural development. In contrast to the relative stagnation during the period from Independence to 1959-60 when nothing except nascent large-scale manufacturing grew faster than population, the period from 1959-60 through 1969-70 is one of quite remarkable growth of the Pakistan economy. In the immediate post-Independence period the major portion of imports consisted of manufactured consumer goods.

  • 1 - Irrigation

  • from VIII - Irrigation and Railways
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 677-737

  • Summary

    By the 1920s and 1930s attempts were made to diversify the use of India's water resources, in the direction of hydro-electric power; but the interests of irrigation and the lack of demand for rural electrification militated against such developments for the most part in the agricultural provinces. To estimate the value of irrigation, the Famine Commission was required to go beyond the statements of its financial results and enquire into its general effect, no less, on the character of cultivation in the several irrigation provinces. For northern India, submissions from the governments of Punjab and the North Western Provinces were in agreement that the introduction of canal irrigation had led universally to an increase in cultivation. Unlike the great Punjab canals, the purpose of the Sarda canal system was not to reclaim a wilderness but to replace an existing small-scale pattern of irrigation by a large-scale system in the interest of economy and efficiency.

  • 2 - Eastern India

  • from II - Agrarian Relations
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 86-177

  • Summary

    This chapter emphasizes that despite certain elements of continuity, the pre-British agrarian society and system was not quite the same as that which evolved during British rule. The continuity of the small peasant economy as the basic organization of agricultural production, and the continuities in terms of certain agrarian institutions, and of the numerical sizes of some economic groups, such as sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, concealed a significant process of change. Initially, throughout eastern India, the most decisive influence was the British policy of maximizing land revenue, which gradually lost its first potency, particularly in Bengal and Bihar, with the share of the state in the total agricultural produce eventually shrinking to insignificance. In other parts of eastern India, too, the old order could scarcely be wholly preserved, and the composition of the landed society considerably changed, mainly as a result of the growth of a land market, an altogether new development in the rural society.

  • I - The mid-eighteenth-century background

  • from PART I - THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 1-35

  • Summary

    At its height the Mughal empire had imposed on the greater part of the Indian sub-continent a fair measure of political unity. Historians of a later generation have equated the decline of the Mughal empire with sharp downward trends in the Indian economy, and assumed that by the mid-eighteenth century it had reached its lowest ebb. The categories used in the Mughal revenue literature in describing villages are a useful if somewhat indirect source of information on the subject for northern India. The identification of different levels of land rights in India has been hag-ridden by the confused use of terms both in the Persian and the English sources. By the mid-eighteenth century, development of market forces had made deep inroads into the subsistence character of Indian agriculture, though the producer continued to meet all his requirements of food out of his own produce.

  • IX - Money and Credit (1858–1947)

  • from PART II - THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MODERN ECONOMY
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 762-803

  • Summary

    The period 1858-1947, which covers some of the most salient developments in the financial history of India, is still highly germane to many of the contemporary concerns of the sub-continent. The chapter reviews the main monetary and financial developments in India during our period under the following headings: monetary standard and policy, origins and development of commercial banking, evolution of central banking, non-institutional finance and cooperative credit. The origins of modern banking in India go back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the establishment of the European Agency Houses of Bombay and Calcutta. These were primarily trading concerns that had branched out into banking as a sideline to facilitate the operations of their main business. In terms of the overall pattern of internal finance, the unorganized or non-institutional sector of the Indian banking and financial system may be described, conceptually, as a residual sector, usually in combination with trading and other activities.

  • VII - The Growth of Large-Scale Industry to 1947

  • from PART II - THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MODERN ECONOMY
  • Edited by Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    10 March 1983, pp 551-676

  • Summary

    Industrial development in India has been part of the very broad movement which had its origins in Western Europe. This chapter describes the growth of India's modern industries, the forms within which they developed and the character of the labour force that emerged. During the first half of the nineteenth century the industrialization process was taking deep hold in Britain and in other parts of the North Atlantic region but in India the new technology and novel processes had only a trifling impact. Most of what was introduced came as a product of official concern, civilian and military. The history of large-scale private factory enterprise between 1850 and the First World War is associated almost entirely with developments in three industries such as jute, cotton, and iron and steel industries. The development of the three industries reveals a great deal about the complexity of economic response on the sub-continent.

Page 887 of 949