From the early twentieth century, a big part of the world--the arid tropics--began extracting, storing, and recycling vast quantities of water to sustain population growth and economic development. These regions worked on water to deal with seasonality, or the rotation between extreme aridity for a part of the year and a concentrated period of rain. The idea of storing water in the wet season to use it in the dry season was not a new one in this geography. Indeed, it was an intrinsic part ...

Historians explain the eighteenth-century origin of European colonialism in Asia either with the profile of the merchants or an argument about uneven power. This Element suggests that the environment was an important factor, too. With India (1600-1800) as the primary example, it says that the tropical monsoon climatic condition, extreme seasonality, and low land yield made the land-tax-based empires weak from within. The seaboard supplied a more benign environment. Sometime in the eighteen...

This new edition of An Economic History of Early Modern India extends the timespan of the analysis to incorporate further research. This allows for a more detailed discussion of the rise of the British Empire in South Asia and gives a fuller context for the historiography.In the years between the death of the emperor Aurangzeb (1707) and the Great Rebellion (1857), the Mughal Empire and the states that rose from its ashes declined in wealth and power, and a British Empire ...

How interventions to mitigate climate-caused poverty and inequality in India came at a cost to environmental sustainability.In the monsoon regions of South Asia, the rainy season sustains life but brings with it the threat of floods, followed by a long stretch of the year when little gainful work is possible and the threat of famine looms. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a series of interventions by Indian governments and other actors mitigated these cond...

From the end of the eighteenth century, two distinct global processes began to transform livelihoods and living conditions in the South Asia region. These were the rise of British colonial rule and globalization, that is, the integration of the region in the emerging world markets for goods, capital, and labour services. Two hundred years later, India was the home to many of the world's poorest people as well as one of the fastest growing market economies in the world. Does a study of the ...

Cross-cultural exchange has characterized the economic life of India since antiquity. Its long coastline has afforded convenient access to Asia and Africa as well as trading partnerships formed in the exchange of commodities ranging from textiles to military technology and from opium to indigo. In a journey across two thousand years, this enthralling book, written by a leading South Asian historian, describes the ties of trade, migration, and investment between India and the rest of the wo...

As author of the hugely influential The Economic History of India 1857-1947, Tirthankar Roy has established himself as the leading contemporary economic historian of India. Here, Roy turns his attention to labour and livelihood and the nature of economic change in the Subcontinent. This book covers:economic history of modern Indiarural labourlabour-intensive industrializationwomen and industrialization.Challenging...

In recent decades, private investment has led to an economic resurgence in India. But this is not the first time the region has witnessed impressive business growth. There have been many similar stories over the past 300 years. India's economic history shows that capital was relatively expensive. How, then, did capitalism flourish in the region? How did companies and entrepreneurs deal with the shortage of key resources? Has there been a common pattern in responses to these issues over the...

This Palgrave Pivot revisits the topic of how British colonialism moulded work and life in India and what kind of legacy it left behind. Did British rule lead to India’s impoverishment, economic disruption and famine? Under British rule, evidence suggests there were beneficial improvements, with an eventual rise in life expectancy and an increase in wealth for some sectors of the population and economy, notably for much business and industry. Yet many poor people suffered badly, with agric...

This book presents a comprehensive history of handloom weaving industry in India to challenge and revise the view that competition from machine-produced textiles destroyed the country’s handicrafts as claimed by historians until recently. It shows that skill-intensive handmade textiles survived the competition on a large scale, and that handmade goods and high-quality manual labour played a positive role in the making of modern India. Rich in archival material, The Crafts and ...

This book explores the historical roots of rapid economic growth in South Asia, with reference to politics, markets, resources, and the world economy. Roy posits that, after an initial slow period of growth between 1950 and the 1980s, the region has been growing rapidly and fast catching up with the world on average levels of living. Why did this turnaround happen? Does it matter? Is it sustainable? The author answers these questions by drawing connections, comparisons, and parallels betwe...

An essential history of India's economic growth since 1947, including the legal reforms that have shaped the country in the shadow of colonial rule.Economists have long lamented how the inefficiency of India's legal system undermines the country’s economic capacity. How has this come to be? The prevailing explanation is that the postcolonial legal system is understaffed and under-resourced, making adjudication and contract enforcement slow and costly.Taking...