Suchergebnisse

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.

Peter Sutoris, Visions of Development: Films Division of India and the Imagination of Progress, 1948–1975, London: Hurst and Company, 2016, 318 pp.

Amit Kumar Gupta, Crises and Creativities: Middle Class Bhadralok in Bengal c. 1939–52, Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2009, 320 pp. Parimal Ghosh, What Happened to the Bhadralok, Delhi: Primus Books, 2016, 200 pp. Tanika Sarkar and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, eds., Calcutta: The Stormy Decades, Delhi: Social Science Press, 2015, 474 pp.

C.J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan, Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-class Caste, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014, 278 pp.

Richard B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2014, p. 378

Banking experienced large growth in colonial India along with a process of commercialization of agriculture. Yet, the rate of aggregate saving or investment remained low. This article is an attempt to resolve this paradox. It suggests that traditional forms of banking were helped by the formalization of indigenous negotiable instruments, but that transactions between bankers, merchants, and peasants were characterized by a limited use of legal instruments. The limited circulation of bills in this sphere is attributed, among other factors, to high seasonality in the demand for money. Seasonality-induced distortions in the organization of the money market made indigenous banking an unsuitable agent to promote saving and finance industrialization.

The review article onEconomic History of Early Modern India(Routledge, London, 2013;Economic Historyfrom now on) by Shami Ghosh is both a review of the book and a series of arguments about how eighteenth-century Indian history should be interpreted. These arguments suggest a few hypotheses about the pattern of economic change in this time (1707–1818), which are presented as an alternative to what the book thinks it is possible to claim, given the current state of knowledge. In pursuing the second objective, which is to seek fresh interpretation, Ghosh recommends reconnecting Indian regions with global economic history more firmly than is in evidence in the book. Overall, the article subjects the book to a close reading, and outlines a research programme that will surely help further the discourse on the eighteenth century.