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When Marx in 1853 denounced the exploitation of India under British rule and wrote of 'The British intruder who broke up the Indian handloom' he laid the foundation for an economic critique which has endured to the present day. In the twentieth century, the fate of the Indian handloom weaver has been at the center of the controversy over the concept of the 'deindustrialization' of India on which there is now a substantial body of literature. Did the handloom industry collapse in face of competition from manufactured British imports as proponents of this thesis contend? Or were the handloom weavers able to survive the competition and at least retain (and, as has recently been argued, perhaps even improve) their position, as demand for cloth rose with risingper capitaincome, the fall in cloth prices was offset by the cheaper price of machine-spun yarn, and the handloom weavers diversified into higher-valued products and adopted new technologies? This paper is intended as a further contribution to this debate. It examines what happened to the handloom industry in one part of India (the region that from 1861 was called the Central Provinces) over a period of roughly one hundred and fifty years. It is in four parts. The first part studies the changes that occurred in the nineteenth century as British power spread throughout the subcontinent. This is the period when deindustrialization is said to have occurred to a significant extent.

In the opening chapter of his study ofAgricultural Trends in India, 1891–1947, George Blyn explains the double significance of determining crop production trends in a society where agriculture is the largest single sector of the economy. Firstly, crop trends reveal the nature of changes in production and provide the basis for estimating changes in consumption. Secondly, since availability of crops for consumption depends not only on output but also on foreign trade, changes in cropping patterns provide a basis for estimating the pace and direction of commercialization of the economy. Blyn's study covers the fifty-six years before Indian independence and provides detailed analysis of such topics as aggregate crop trends for the eighteen crops that constituted most of India's agriculture. More recently, there have been a number of studies concerned with the agricultural history of nineteenth-century India. My own work is concerned with the social and economic history of the Central Provinces for the period 1861–1921. Within this broad subject an important specific topic is that of cropping patterns. This paper provides data on crop trends in this part of India for a period of fifty-four years from 1867 to 1921 and evaluates and analyzes this data. Its object is to establish the broad trends in cropping patterns and to shed some light on methods of agriculture in the Central Provinces in the later nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century. (Provincial data are given in Tables 1.1 and 1.2 at the end of the paper.)