The British Raj had favoured open trade and a small state. Economic development was not a major priority. This changed after independence. State expenditure as share of GDP increased in both India and Pakistan, with the goal of reducing poverty and inequality. Still, the trajectories of India and Pakistan and then Bangladesh varied. Especially in India, policymakers favoured inward-looking economic policies, and were sceptical of trade and foreign investment. The private sector was constrained by regulation. After 1991 Indian economic policy shifted sharply, deregulating and becoming more open to the global economy. Bangladesh and Pakistan moved in the same direction, but less sharply, partly because they were less statist to begin with. Other factors mattered besides government policy: the Internet boom and the service exports it facilitated; substantial remittances by migrants to the Middle East; and the protests of workers, women and other marginalized groups. In this chapter we highlight key elements of these narratives and flag the chapters that discuss them.

This chapter describes the history of the industrial labour force as it emerged in South Asia, mostly in current India, since the middle of the nineteenth century. New export-oriented industries created employment for many workers, mostly migrants from often remote rural areas, and mostly men. Despite this growth, the labour force structure did not ‘transform’. Industry never employed more than 10% of the labour force, only a small proportion of that was employed in large-scale enterprises, and many workers remained circulatory migrants. The chapter shows that it is imperative to understand this industrial labour force and forms of worker organization that emerged in the interaction of the nature of capitalist production with a large agrarian and impoverished economy, and of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ social relations and identities.

With a study of the Punjab, which experienced phenomenal agricultural growth from the late nineteenth century thanks to the vast canal colonies, the chapter cautions against reading Indian economic history through averages. Even within regions, patterns of economic change were often a mixture of expansion and contraction. The emergence of the largest canal irrigation system in the world sharpened inequality between areas reliant on irrigated versus rain-fed agriculture. Based on its pattern of exports and imports, Punjab was a colony of Britain until the First World War and then of the rest of India. As the province exported grain to food-deficit zones in the rest of India and cotton to western India, major industrial centres such as Bombay partly deindustrialized the region. The capacity of the provincial government to redress inequalities and promote growth fell as inflation eroded the value of the land revenue. Yet standards of living and consumption rose and interdependence developed between the transport business and agriculture. The chapter suggests parallels between Punjab and other areas of northern India where commercial agriculture advanced in the colonial period.

This chapter notes that British law was hybrid in character, and also novel, standardized and sometimes ill-matched with India, but nonetheless adopted by many Indians as well as for official policy and purposes. The discussion mostly excludes criminal law but gives accounts of how civil law was applied. First described are codifications of Hindu and Muslim law, the evolving civil court system and laws on landed property and agrarian debt – with impact on production as well as social norms, alongside continuing sociopolitical dominance. Next considered are labour, contract and company laws, with limited range and effect, applying mostly to Western-style enterprises rather than to more substantial indigenous practice. Banks and currency were similarly regulated, with direct Indian influence only in the last decades of British rule. Such comprehensive, uniform law impinged more on some aspects of society and economy than on others, but did gradually and permanently reshape Indian practice.

Internal migration in India since 1850 was greatly facilitated by the revolutions in transport and communications and led to a widening of labour markets; the growth of large cities, canal colonies, mines and plantations; social and national movements; and the creation of remittance economies. This chapter describes the data and ways in which internal migration is measured and understood in the Indian subcontinent and analyses the migration trends over space and time. It also provides an outline of the broader historiography and research themes on internal migration, including periodization, economic theories of migration, causes and consequences of work-related migration, contractors and migration networks, caste, and nativism and anti-migration rhetoric and policies. A central theme of internal migration in India has been that of ‘circular migration’ and the remarkable persistence of the migration hotspots that developed in the colonial period and continue even today.

This chapter explores small-scale industries during the colonial period. Rather than seeing these industries as a traditional holdover from earlier times, it regards them as a large, vital and dynamic element in the colonial economy. The chapter explores two particularly important industries in depth. Handloom manufacture undoubtedly declined as a portion of the overall economy during the nineteenth century, but by 1880 it had started to grow, forging new markets, introducing new technologies and undergoing shifts in social organization. The production of medicines expanded by adopting new forms of marketing, particularly newspaper advertising. A range of other small-scale industries also grew during the later colonial period. Associated with these developments were the rise of a diverse set of small-scale entrepreneurs, new products and marketing methods; the introduction of small, ‘everyday’ forms of technology; changes in workshop organization; and the construction of new ‘business communities’. But these industries were also characterized by low wages, social dependence and precarity of employment.

Before the emergence of British imperial rule, India consisted of regions ruled by different states and frequently representing somewhat different ecologies and economic bases. The historiography of economic change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, therefore, has developed as a set of regional studies. It is a rapidly evolving literature. What are its key concerns? One shared theme is the need to have a credible prehistory of colonial expansion, which should help to better understand the pattern of change that came after. With two case studies, Gujarat and Bengal, and attention to livelihoods, connections and varieties of capitalism, the chapter offers tentative conclusions on what this historiography tells us.

The chapter, along with a discussion on India’s population size, and estimates of mortality based on the decennial censuses from 1872 to 1951, reviews at length the factors that explain virtual stagnation in population size during most of the decades. Lack of growth in India’s population from 1872 to 1921 was a result of high mortality due to the spread of epidemics such as cholera, plague and malaria. Their etiology and spread were not fully understood. As a result, the measures taken by the British Raj could not bring deaths under control. Also, recurrent famines – widespread or localized – caused food shortages that resulted in starvation deaths and the spread of water-borne infections during post-famine periods when rains arrived. The period between 1921 and 1951 witnessed modest population growth and the onset of slow but steady decline in death rates. The decline is attributed to control over famines, mass vaccination against smallpox, some improvement in sanitation and an increase in health facilities, mostly in urban areas. However, malaria and diarrheal diseases continued to take a heavy toll when India became independent in 1947.

When colonial rule began in the mid-nineteenth century, India and Britain were both poor by modern standards, although Britain was somewhat richer. In 1947, when colonial rule ended, the gap between the two was gigantic. Britain was a sophisticated and wealthy economy where per capita income, health and education had improved dramatically, whereas India was still exceedingly poor on all these metrics. India’s economy changed over 200 years: it was far more engaged in international trade, a modern industrial sector had developed and railways criss-crossed the country. At the same time, productivity was low in all sectors of the economy, especially in agriculture. Life was precarious: as late as 1943, a devastating famine took millions of lives in Bengal, a horror that indicted colonial rule. We introduce the reader to this complex story of transformation without enrichment, briefly commenting on how each chapter fits in the narrative.

Trade and finance together formed the third-largest livelihood type in colonial India. These two activities were interdependent because banks and moneylenders mainly financed commodity trade. The combined share of the two activities rose significantly in national income in the early twentieth century. Behind this growth, the expansion of transport infrastructure and an open economy with few barriers to foreign trade were responsible. It was not, however, a business without friction. A great deal of the historical scholarship around these activities asks how environmental risks, information asymmetry, law and politics shaped the decisions of merchants, lenders and firms, as this chapter shows.

The chapter emphasizes three aspects. First, it points out that, in the colonial period, Indian entrepreneurs were able to establish industrial enterprises in the cotton, jute and iron and steel industries that competed successfully in domestic and overseas markets. Second, it argues that the fact that Indian industrialization emerged from the bazaar economy facilitated the entrance of Indian capitalists into manufacturing and provided them with an advantage for accessing interior markets. The chapter also explores why Indian enterprises failed to engage in highly specialized areas such as the electrical or the pharmaceutical industries or the manufacture of cars, ships or aeroplanes until the mid-twentieth century. Third, the chapter argues that it would be short-sighted to merely focus on the subcontinent or on Indo-British relations when examining the economic development of India in the colonial period. Rather, it points out that Indian economic history needs to be examined within a global framework.

Located on a large delta, eastern India confronted a series of ecological challenges in the previous centuries – from the filling up of marshy lands to deforestation. But its developed state of agriculture and handicrafts placed it at the forefront of the country’s economic development, attracting foreign traders to settle therein, and finally to establish their rule in this region. But the question is: how did its economy perform during colonial rule? Indeed, the economic environment that it confronted was not always conducive. Initially, it received a boost from the trading activities of the Company. But later on, an uncongenial environment followed, ruining its age-old industries. Also, many opportunities emerged, thereby giving rise to many modern industries. The chapter seeks to highlight how eastern India’s economic development was shaped during colonial rule. Apart from agriculture and industry, it discusses the development of transport facilities, and also demographic issues, including migration.

This chapter discusses the employment of poor and labouring women between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth. In this period, they suffered first a loss of their independent occupations in manual manufacturing and then exclusion from mechanized large-scale industry. This marks the beginning of a persistent and long-term pattern of low female workforce participation in India. The discussion is organized around multiple themes of marginalization, quantitative and qualitative: first, the question of numerical decrease in household industry, craft production and the small-workshop sector; second, the ideological exclusion from mills and mines, which were emerging as preserves of adult men earning family wages; third, resistance to women’s long-distance employment on contracts in plantations, which was perceived as a challenge to familial control over their labour; fourth, commercialization of women’s reproductive work in sectors such as midwifery, domestic work and sex work, providing increasing employment but under stigmatized conditions. These themes are linked to questions of regulation by family, caste, community and the state.

This chapter documents the long-run pattern and changes in sectoral labour productivity in India. It explores factors that can explain the historically high labour productivity in services. Literate upper castes in service sector occupations gained from modernization from the late nineteenth century and moved into new high-skilled occupations mainly in services. Colonial education policy prioritized secondary and tertiary education and the higher education bias that continued after independence increased labour productivity in skilled occupations, most of which were in services.

Soon after the establishment of British colonial authority, south India underwent institutional changes in the administrative, military, educational and other spheres. In the countryside, the furthest-reaching of these changes was the introduction of the raiyatwari and zamindari land settlements, which granted a particular class of people in rural society exclusive landownership. The period covered in this chapter, 1850–1950, saw the consequences of these early institutional changes unfold and the emergence of new processes in the urban and service economies, including in transport, trade, finance and industry. The chapter discusses these general trends, paying particular attention to the countryside.

The chapter describes colonial India’s unique urbanization story. In 1750 India had big urban centres such as Hyderabad and Delhi and urbanization was close to the global average. While urbanization in India increased over the next two centuries, the increase was small compared to the rest of the world and Indian urbanization had fallen significantly below the global average by 1950. Yet the modest temporal change masks the important shift in urban centres from inland in the 1700s to the eastern and western coasts by the 1900s. As British rule expanded, the port cities of Bombay and Calcutta emerged as the new centres of administration, trade and commerce. More generally, cities close to railways grew faster than cities close to rivers. Unlike rural India, colonial towns and cities were characterized by more educated residents, more industrial and service sector jobs, male-biased sex ratios and growing political influence.

The Indian economy has grown rapidly since it began to liberalize in the 1990s, but industrial growth has fallen short of expectations. Curiously, Indian industry did not perform particularly well even during the colonial period, when the state’s approach was close to laissez-faire. How can we explain this? This chapter first shows that colonial India’s industrial stagnation is well represented by the slow progress of labour productivity of leading industrial sectors, which coincided with slow capital formation and slow total factor productivity growth. The chapter then shows that the slow growth of capital and total factor productivity were related to inflexibility in policy choices under the laissez-faire economic policy framework, and the shortcomings of institutional and organizational settings.

This chapter unpacks the DEIPAR social justice framework, which accounts for intersectionality, power and antiracism, in relation to supervision, leadership and power-sharing. The discussion of antiracism details the connection between racism, colonialism, and anti-Blackness, to create clarity regarding the colonial dynamics and hierarchy of supervision. Building on these connections, a pathway is provided for developing socially just power-sharing using the DEIPAR framework in the context of supervision.

Chapter 3 delves into King’s deepening engagement with the international liberation of African-descended peoples from March 1957 through early 1961. Central to this discussion is King’s sermon “The Birth of a New Nation,” delivered after his return from Ghana’s independence celebrations – a moment that profoundly shaped his worldview. The chapter chronicles King’s subsequent travels to Nigeria at the invitation of Governor-General Nnamdi Azikiwe, further solidifying his identity as an “Africanist.” His active participation in the American Committee on Africa (ACOA) and collaboration with prominent activists such as George Houser and Bayard Rustin are examined as pivotal to his organizational and ideological maturation. This period marks the crystallization of King’s Beloved Pan-Africanism, as he forged powerful connections between domestic and international struggles for justice.