The Economic History of India, 1857-2010

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tirthankar Roy
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Emerging Market ◽  
Internal Factors ◽  
The Past ◽  
Long Run ◽  
World Markets ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
External Forces ◽  
Key Questions

From the end of the eighteenth century, two global processes began to transform livelihoods and living conditions in the South Asia region. These were the rise of British colonial rule, and the integration of the region in the emerging world markets for goods, capital, and labour services, or globalization. Two hundred years later, India was the home to many of the world’s poorest people. India was also one of the fastest-growing emerging market economies of the world. Does a study of the past help to explain the paradox of growth amidst poverty? The book claims that the roots of the paradox did go back to India’s colonial past, when internal factors like geography and external forces like globalization and imperial rule created prosperity in some areas and poverty in others. This revised edition of a popular textbook sets out the key questions that a study of long-run economic change in India should begin with, shows how historians have answered these questions, and where the gaps remain. An essential guide for students of economics, history, and development studies, and a profitable read for anyone interested in India’s economic past.

On the Lives of Modern State Law

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Samera Esmeir
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Modern State ◽  
State Law ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Intimate Life ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Key Questions

Modern state law is an expansive force that permeates life and politics. Law's histories—colonial, revolutionary, and postcolonial—tell of its constitutive centrality to the making of colonies and modern states. Its powers intertwine with life itself; they attempt to direct it, shape its most intimate spheres, decide on the constitutive line dividing public from private, and take over the space and time in which life unfolds. These powers settle in the present, eliminate past authorities, and dictate futures. Gendering and constitutive of sexual difference, law's powers endeavor to mold subjects and alter how they orient themselves to others and to the world. But these powers are neither coherent nor finite. They are ripe with contradictions and conflicting desires. They are also incapable of eliminating other authorities, paths, and horizons of living; these do not vanish but remain not only thinkable and articulable but also a resource for the living. Such are some of the overlapping and accumulative interventions of the two books under review: Sara Pursley's Familiar Futures and Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria. What follows is an attempt to further develop these interventions by thinking with some of the books’ underlying arguments. Familiar Futures is a history of Iraq, beginning with the British colonial-mandate period and concluding with the 1958 Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a history of “French Algeria” that covers a century of French colonization from 1830 to 1930. The books converge on key questions concerning how modern law and the modern state—colonial and postcolonial—articulated sexual difference and governed social and intimate life, including through the rise of personal-status law as a separate domain of law constitutive of the conjugal family. Both books are consequently also preoccupied with the relationship between sex, gender, and sovereignty. And both contain resources for living along paths not charted by the modern state and its juridical apparatus.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 275-278
Author(s):  
Yoni Furas
Keyword(s):  
Educational Administration ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Native Population ◽  
Tel Aviv ◽  
The Past ◽  
Definite Answer ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Late Ottoman

While working on this book at a library in Tel Aviv University, a librarian asked me to sum up my research in one sentence and remarked that knowing how to do it was essential to all researchers. Giving her a definite answer was a challenging task then and it remains so now while summing up this book. Initially, it is a book about the Mandate period, but while writing the history of education, the late Ottoman period appears not only as background but as the essential foundations of the postwar reality. This was not confined to the educators that filled the ranks of Arab and Hebrew educational administration during the Mandate. The institutionalization of educational segregation and inability or reluctance to challenge it started before the first British soldier set foot in Palestine. This is a book about the British colonial project in Palestine and its grave repercussions in the field of education for its native population. The colonial Department advocated a policy of educational restraint, articulated in a history syllabus that sought to cleanse history itself from collective lessons, national ethos, and political agency. But the colonial angle tells only a partial story because this policy was met with a growing community of Palestinian educators and students who (naturally) found in the past a space in which they could ask questions about the present, and events or people that served as inspiration and possible models for the future....

Labor shares and inequality: insights from Italian economic history, 1895–19701

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Gabbuti
Keyword(s):  
Income Distribution ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Italian History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Self Employment ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Functional Distribution ◽  
Distribution Of Income

Abstract This article develops theoretical and practical motivations for studying the functional distribution of income in the past. Italy is adopted as a case study, because of the availability of long-run estimates on personal inequality and of the long-lasting incidence of self-employment. New labor shares for 1895–1970 show Italian workers accruing a low share of income until 1945; by the end of the 1950s, they rapidly converged to the European average. Italian history shows that functional income distribution deepens our understanding of long- and short-run distributional trends and makes a compelling case for approaching inequality by combining diverse sources and methodologies.

scholarly journals Productivity Growth and Machinery Investment: A Long-Run Look, 1870–1980

1992 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Bradford De Long
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Productivity Growth ◽  
Rapid Growth ◽  
History Of Technology ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Long Run ◽  
History Of ◽  
Good Proxy

Over the past century in six major economies, economic growth has been strongly associated with machinery investment, as is the case for a larger group of nations since 1950. Both macroeconomic patterns and narratives of the history of technology suggest that this association is causal—that a high rate of machinery investment appears to be a necessary prerequisite for rapid long-run growth—and points away from possibilities that rapid growth is the cause of high machinery investment or that a high rate of machinery investment is a good proxy for other factors that are important causes of growth.

Industrialization and Stabilization Dilemmas in Latin America

1959 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 584-599
Author(s):  
David Felix
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Industrial Growth ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
General Recognition ◽  
Salient Features ◽  
State Subsidies ◽  
Latin American Countries

Industrial growth and chronic, in many cases severe, inflation are two salient features of the past-war economic history of the larger Latin American countries. There is general recognition that the two phenomena are related, at least in the sense that industry has been one of the major recipients of state subsidies and inflationary credit. But beyond this, analysis divides into the usual demand inflation and cost-push categories.

The Long Space Age

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Space Exploration ◽  
Development Program ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Private Funding ◽  
Large Space ◽  
Human Spaceflight ◽  
Long Run ◽  
History Of

The early years of the twenty-first century have seen the rise to prominence of private-sector American spaceflight. The result is a new phase of space development—one where human spaceflight is no longer the exclusive domain of governments, but an activity increasingly driven by the interests and motivations of individuals and corporations. In order to understand this phenomenon, we need to examine the long-run economic history of American space exploration. This book examines three critical phases of that history. The first phase is the financing and construction of American astronomical observatories from Colonial America to the middle of the twentieth century. The second is the career of Robert Goddard, the American father of liquid-fuel rocketry, whose efforts constituted the world’s first spaceflight development program. The third is the American political history of the Cold War ‘Space Race’ and subsequent NASA human spaceflight initiatives in the twentieth century. Examining these episodes from an economic perspective results in a new view of American space exploration—one where personal initiative and private funding have been dominant long-run trends, where the demand for impressive public signals has funded large space exploration projects across two centuries, and where government leadership in the field is a relatively recent phenomenon.

How Should We Approach the Economy of ‘Early Modern India’?

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 1606-1656 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHAMI GHOSH
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Endogenous Factors ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Specific Manner ◽  
History Of ◽  
Other World

AbstractTirthankar Roy's recent synthesis on the economic history of early modern India claims to provide a new, overarching narrative placing this period within the broader sweep of the history of what Roy defines as ‘capitalism’ in India in the very long term. This article provides a detailed critique of Roy's monograph, suggesting that it suffers from some serious methodological deficits, arising not least from a future-oriented paradigm that imposes anachronistic concepts on this period, including the very notion of ‘India’. Furthermore, Roy's view of the economy as being fundamentally driven forward by the rise of a coastal polity, expanding inwards from Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, sits awkwardly with his repeated claim that colonialism was of little significance for Indian economic history. Finally, this article suggests that this period might be more fruitfully approached not only by abandoning thetelosof what we know of India's future, but also by adopting both regionally focused and comparative approaches, turning away from long-distance trade as the primary lens through which to view the economy, and instead examining endogenous factors in the economies of individual regions and enriching our understanding of them by reference to studies of other world regions with comparable patterns of development in the same period. More nuanced ways of approaching economic change in the very long run, including the importance of developments in modes of consumption and market- and profit-oriented economic behaviour, are suggested as a better means of understanding both the economies of the late pre-colonial centuries in the Indian subcontinent and the development of capitalism, which should also be understood in a more specific manner than Roy allows.

Some problems in interpreting Anglo-Saxon coinage

1976 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 173-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart Lyon
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Dividing Line

This discussion of Anglo-Saxon coinage attempts to look beyond the detail of numismatic classification in order to consider the relationship between the underlying variations and the economic life of the times. Those parts of it which deal with the classification of the coinage and analyse the observed metrology are intended to be a critical summary of the numismatic research carried out in the past thirty years. Other parts, in which I seek to relate the metrology to such documentary evidence as is known to me – and thus trespass across the vague dividing line between numismatics, of which I have some knowledge, and economic history, of which I have little – are aimed at stimulating awareness and discussion of the problems involved. Finally, a section is devoted to numismatic methods because it is important that their use and limitations be generally understood.

scholarly journals Height and the High Life: What Future for a Tall Story?

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Leunig ◽  
Hans-Joachim Voth
Keyword(s):  
Health Status ◽  
Family History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
Reliable Indicator ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Developed World

This chapter discusses height as a reliable indicator of health status and standard of living. It also suggests that mapping from height to other measures of well-being has attracted the attention of economic historians. The history of heights may prove to be a useful means by which economic historians can better explain the past. The first area is social history, and in particular family history, in the developed world. The second is the economic history of those countries or areas with limited amounts of other data.

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