The monograph surveys the developments within the Indian economy during the period of the high tide of colonial domination between the 1857 Rebellion and the First World War. Its various sub-chapters deal with population, gross product and prices; tribute, imperialism of Free Trade, and the construction of railways; peasant agriculture, plantations, commercialization of agriculture and its impact on rents, peasant incomes and agricultural wages; and rural de-industrialization, modern industries, tariff and exchange policies; banking and finance; and fiscal system, tax-burden and the rise of economic nationalism. There are extracts from contemporary comments and reports; technical notes on such matters as computing national income, counterfactual analysis, etc., and short bibliographies accompanying each of the five chapters.
Review
The analytical handling and the objective treatment of the topic makes the book very scholarly and a useful sourcebook for further research... the historical perspective given in the book helps us to appreciate the hard effort put in by our forefathers in building up our economy to what it is today. -- Edwin Rodrigues Indica (Journal of the Heras Institute of Indian History and Culture)
About the Author
Irfan Habib, professor emeritus at the Aligarh Muslim University, is the author of The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556-1707 (1963; revised edition 1999), An Atlas of the Mughal Empire (1982), Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception (1995), Medieval India: The Study of a Civilization (2007), Economic History of Medieval India, 1200-1500 (with collaborators) (2011) and Atlas of Ancient Indian History (with Faiz Habib) (2012). He is the general editor of the People's History of India series, and has authored six volumes and co-authored two volumes in the series. He has co-edited The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I (1982), UNESCO's History of Humanity, Vols. 4 and 5, and UNESCO's History of Central Asia, Vol. 5.