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.

Irrigation development in British India is widely cited as a main achievement of the Raj. The hydraulic projects, which built upon indigenous practice and evolved through ‘learning by doing’, were impressive engineering constructs that brought water to extensive areas of the subcontinent. They permitted expanded agricultural production and exports, bolstered public finances and protected the population from famine. However, the colonial context of the developments has produced contention among historians as to their role and value. This chapter discusses the different forms of irrigation in operation, and the impact of the increasingly large and integrated new systems in changing the pattern of investment and benefits between geographical regions from 1800 to 1947. Taking account of the changing technological and management aspects of the systems over time, and the way cultivators reacted to them, a broad assessment is made of the irrigation inheritance at independence.

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.

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.

This chapter deals with the aspects of political economy in British India from c. 1850 to c. 1950, focusing on the major debates and controversies about economic policies, which concerned the role of the colonial state and its implications for British imperial policies. British India had wider economic relations with surrounding Asian and African regions, located as it was within dense regional trading networks, as a hub of transactions of goods, money, people (migration), services and information. Through the development of global economic history, new works and interpretations are presented as a new paradigm against the traditional Eurocentric approach. Using recent works by Asian and Japanese scholars, this chapter analyses a changing economic shift from trade to finance in British India and the transformation of the economic international order of Asia and the role of India in the interwar years, with a special focus on the drastic impacts of the Second World War.

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.

In socio-technical transitions research, growing attention is given to politics and governance. However, there remains significant scope to deepen analyses of power relations to understand who wins, who loses, how, and why under prevailing governance arrangements and socio-technical configurations. Political economy approaches can be refined to reveal how dominant socio-technical systems reflect broader social and economic structures, while disruptions from transitions reshape power dynamics. Using India’s energy transition, we examine jurisdictional power struggles, resource conflicts, and producer coalitions that influence transition speed and inclusivity. The chapter concludes by outlining future research directions, emphasizing the need to account for different forms of state power, justice implications, global-local political economies, ecological perspectives, and the everyday expressions of power in knowledge, cultures, and ideologies.

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.

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.

By the end of the nineteenth century, British-ruled India faced an ecological crisis due to the extension of cultivation, deforestation and desiccation. Famines since the 1870s had led to a decline in population in some regions. While colonial authorities attributed the famines to climatic factors, others held taxation, institutional reforms and economic policies responsible for these disasters. Colonial science emerged as a significant tool in managing and monitoring environments at the same time. The chapter examines the interlinked economic and ecological history of India in these times and the responses by the British imperial authorities and scientists to the perceived crisis.

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.

During British rule, almost half of the subcontinent’s area and a quarter of its population were governed by Indian princes and chiefs, subject to varying amounts of control by the Crown. These rulers varied greatly in their stature, legitimacy and political vision. This chapter provides a brief history of how the princely states emerged, evolved and differed in their social policies. Despite their lower revenue potential on average, many of the larger states incurred higher social spending than British Indian districts in their proximity. We focus especially on the two states of Baroda and Travancore, and on their education policies. These states introduced free and subsidized education well before most of the Western world. These policies had large and lasting effects on the welfare of their populations.

Chapter 8 extends the analysis beyond South Africa to explore the activities of protest brokers in other contexts. While previous chapters focused exclusively on South Africa to develop and test the theory in depth, this chapter argues that protest brokers are not unique to that setting. Drawing on original data from Ghana and Malawi, as well as secondary evidence from Argentina, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda, it demonstrates that intermediaries who organize protest on behalf of elites can be found globally. The chapter presents three main findings. First, individuals who function as protest brokers – connecting elites to communities – exist in a variety of countries. Second, these brokers differ in their relationships with elites and communities in ways consistent with the typology developed earlier in the book. Third, variation in broker characteristics correlates with predictable differences in protest across these different contexts. While not offering a comprehensive cross-national study, this chapter provides initial comparative evidence that protest brokers are a widespread phenomenon, suggesting that the theoretical framework developed here has broad relevance for understanding global patterns of protest mobilization.

This chapter examines the applicability of the term “cosmopolitanism” to Indian Ocean contexts through the question of language, asking: How does one represent a multilingual past using the medium of historical fiction? It examines the use of multilingualism and translation in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994), novels that draw on multilingual nineteenth-century sources to tell stories of cross-cultural encounters in the Indian Ocean. These novels use various textual strategies, such as direct inscription of multiple languages or indirect description of linguistic difference, to portray a multilingual Indian Ocean encounters. Closely examining these textual moments alongside the novels’ sources reveals the limits of liberal cosmopolitanisms constructed both within and through the texts. They articulate a politics of language that shapes cosmopolitan intercourse in the Indian Ocean, and in doing so, self-reflexively critique the Anglophone text as a medium of cosmopolitan exchange today.