Suchergebnisse

NITIN SINHA, Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s (London: Anthem Press, Anthem Modern South Asian History), 2012, pp. 272.

DAVID ARNOLD, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India's Modernity, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013, pp. 223.

OM PRAKASH, ed., The Trading World of the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800, Delhi: Pearson Education and Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2012, pp. 684.

AbstractThis paper discusses the rise of the East India Company in the contested political world of eighteenth century India, with reference to the manner in which economic power was deployed to enhance military power. It is shown that there was only one successful model of military-fiscal strategy during this time, and that the Company's success was due to interactions between three factors—taxable resources, the strategies of its rivals, and institutional choices.

Using data on the production and usage of cotton, the paper develops estimates for the production and consumption of cotton cloth in India during 1795–1940, and based on these numbers, revisits three issues central to interpretations of economic change in colonial India. These are trends in levels of living, the correlation between production of textiles and consumption of textiles, and consumption of clothing in India in relation to the rest of the world. Average consumption of cotton cloth in India rose even as production declined, while real income grew more slowly, if at all, than the consumption of clothing.

Recent scholarship has explored the process by which modern commercial and property law came into being in the non‐western world, and has emphasized the role played by colonialism and conquest in this process. Using a case study from colonial India, this article suggests that the coding of commercial law was influenced more by commercialization than by the nature of the state, and was an endogenous response to the failure of local custom and common law to secure frictionless trade.