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Santosh Kumar Rai, Weaving Hierarchies: Handloom Weavers in Early Twentieth Century United Provinces. Primus Books, 2021, 540 pp.

Peter Robb, Ideas Matter: Debating the Impact of British Rule on India. New Delhi: Primus Books, 2020, 305 pp.

AbstractThat geography shapes long‐run economic change is almost an axiom in economic history, but there is neither adequate understanding nor much agreement about how this influence works. This article is an attempt to contextualise Indian economic history against what we now know of this influence. It is also an attempt to define the geographical condition of the South Asia region in a manner compatible with the purpose of economic history, which is to explain the deep roots of economic growth and inequality.

Gagan D. S. Sood, India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-century World of Circulation and Exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, 338 pp.

The paper re‐examines the role of the state in economic change in colonial India (1757–1947), by paying attention to fiscal capacity. This capacity was larger than that of the precolonial states, and based on different foundations, such as centralisation of finance and securitisation of public debt. Nevertheless, the effort to raise finance hit a barrier, which had owed to the separation of debt from revenue operations. Did the barrier matter? By keeping markets open, the colonial state served private enterprise, but its failure to sustain growth in fiscal capacity compromised public investment in infrastructure and social development.