Economic Change and the Railways in North India, 1860–1914

1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-545 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. D. Derbyshire

M. D. Morris re-opened the debate on late nineteenth-century Indian economic history with a brace of powerful, though conjectural, revisionist articles in 1963 and 1966. He questioned the then prevailing orthodoxy which viewed the late nineteenth century as a period of increasing population pressure on the land (exacerbated by the atrophy of handicraft production), of holding fragmentation, declining per capita food availability, and inimical commercialization of agriculture. This interpretation had seen the position of a narrow mercantile and creditor elite improving, but the position of the mass of the rural population deteriorating, as evidenced by the terrible famines of 1876–80 and 1896–1900. Morris, influenced by D. Kumar's findings, contended that pressure on the soil did not increase excessively; that the influx of imported cloths merely skimmed off the broader increase in textile demand; and that agricultural output per capita increased as a result of extensions to the cropped area, political peace, growing regional specialization, and the increased sowing of valuable, high yielding cash crops.

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Amanda Lanzillo

Focusing on the lithographic print revolution in North India, this article analyses the role played by scribes working in Perso-Arabic script in the consolidation of late nineteenth-century vernacular literary cultures. In South Asia, the rise of lithographic printing for Perso-Arabic script languages and the slow shift from classical Persian to vernacular Urdu as a literary register took place roughly contemporaneously. This article interrogates the positionality of scribes within these transitions. Because print in North India relied on lithography, not movable type, scribes remained an important part of book production on the Indian subcontinent through the early twentieth century. It analyses the education and models of employment of late nineteenth-century scribes. New scribal classes emerged during the transition to print and vernacular literary culture, in part due to the intervention of lithographic publishers into scribal education. The patronage of Urdu-language scribal manuals by lithographic printers reveals that scribal education in Urdu was directly informed by the demands of the print economy. Ultimately, using an analysis of scribal manuals, the article contributes to our knowledge of the social positioning of book producers in South Asia and demonstrates the vitality of certain practices associated with manuscript culture in the era of print.


Author(s):  
Lee Grieveson

Cinema was a product of the second-stage Industrial Revolution. This article examines some aspects of the technological and economic history of cinema and that revolution. It draws on secondary material on the electrical and chemical developments beginning in the late nineteenth century, and on primary research on particular case studies where cinema technology was used to further the economic objectives of industrial and financial organisations.


Author(s):  
Agustina Vence Conti ◽  
Eduardo Martín Cuesta

ABSTRACTThe growth of Argentina’s economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was so great that it was called “The Great Expansion”. This explains the interest of economic historians to observe, analyze and explain the conditions under which such growth occurred. One of the topics is the 1890 crisis, or “Baring Crisis”. This was seen by contemporaries as the worst economic debacle of the nineteenth century. Studies in economic history have seen this crisis both their macroeconomic aspects, and from the impact that would have occurred in the population. Also, in recent years there has been a renewed interest in the production and analysis of series of prices and wages, as key to analyzing economic indicators economy conditions and living conditions and inequality. Given this historiographical renewal, in this article a new series of prices and wages of Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth century are presented. With this new information, and open discussion with previous works, a new perspective on the evolution of prices and wages is provided, with a different perspective on the impact of the 1890 crisis.


1994 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-121
Author(s):  
John Channon

With the advent of Gorbachev, two new words, perestroika (reform) and glasnost' (openness), entered the Western vocabulary. They also served as the bywords for economic and social change that continues to this day. Simultaneously, the search for a solution to the economic ills of the former USSR has led to a rediscovery and a re-examination of the past. In this context, scholars of the successor states to the Soviet Union will find much of interest in the works reviewed here which take us chronologically from the late nineteenth century to the late 1980s.


1963 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-231
Author(s):  
David S. Landes

The terminal dates of this study are the year of the foundation of the Crédit Lyonnais and the year of the transfer of the management from Lyons to Paris. Until 1882, the siège social remained in the south, though from the late 1860's on, the initiative in the larger financial operations lay with the “succursale” in the capital. To satisfy the requirements of what Bouvier calls a two-headed direction, an extensive, daily correspondence was indispensable. The result is one of the richest banking archives ever opened to an inquiring researcher. It is not only their abundance that makes these records of the Crédit Lyonnais so valuable; it is their quality, the subjects they treat, the insights they give into the problems and minds of the directors of the bank. These papers deal with matters that today would be confined to conversation—directly or over that bane of the future researcher, the telephone; they concern not only decisions, but the reasons for decisions and the debates that lay behind them. Even if such thoughts were consigned to paper today, the records would in all likelihood end by being removed from the premises as the personal property of their authors. Given the catholicity of interests of the Credit Lyonnais—its activity in the regional and national economy, its innovations in French banking practice, its wide excursions into the field of international finance—its archives are a broad gateway into the economic history of the late nineteenth century.


2021 ◽  
pp. 137-159
Author(s):  
Manolis Manioudis

This article attempts to illustrate the interrelations between theory and history in John Stuart Mill’s political economy. Mill follows a stages theory from the tradition of the Scottish historical school and viewed history as an essential part in understanding economic phenomena. The article stresses the affinities between Mill and the Scottish historical school while at the same time showing how Mill moves between theory and history to verify his views or to show the limit of his economic analysis. This movement, viewed as a part of his attempt to sketch out a middle way between Ricardianism and inductivism, provided Mill the opportunity to make an extensive use of factual data before the professionalization of economic history proper in the late nineteenth century.


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