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In the nineteenth century, industrial empire brought new force into the transformation of agrarian regions. Britain controlled the corridors of mobility in southern Eurasia. English became the imperial language. A new rupee homogenised the money supply. In 1800, cowry shells from the Andamans were the currency in Sylhet, and dozens of different silver, gold, and copper coins filled markets from Surat to Chittagong. Money changers worked every corner. But in the 1820s, the Company's silver rupee set the monetary standard and market prices began a tumble that lasted thirty years. In these hard decades, markets contracted along routes of imperial expansion, real taxation increased, seasons of scarcity were common, and overseas cloth exports died. The Act of 1793 had established a permanent settlement with no survey, no records of rights, and no definite method of assessment; after 1820, zamindari settlements required the recording of rights, annual assessments of cultivated land, and periodic reassessments. Almost everywhere, routine revenue collections provoked struggles and dislocations. When indigo stocks crashed on the London exchange, Bihari peasants lost their income and tenants lost their land. The Torture Commission in Madras reported routine beatings by revenue officers. Company critics multiplied in London but could not quite topple the old regime before rebellions killed the Company in 1857. Crown rule ended an imperial crisis. Prices had begun moving upward again by 1855, and decades of inflation then steadily lowered the real cash burden of revenue and rent. Land became more attractive for investors as a veneer of modernity covered British India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of human history in South Asia is a feature of life on the land, but most documents that we use to write agrarian history concern the state. Kautilya's Arthasastra set the tone by putting farming and herding under the heading of state revenue. Hundreds of thousands of stone and copper inscriptions appear in the first millennium of the Common Era (CE). Scattered across the land from Nepal to Sri Lanka, they documented agrarian conditions, but their purpose was rather to constitute medieval dynasties. After 1300, official documents narrate more and more powerful states. In the sixteenth century, Mughal sultans built South Asia's first empire of agrarian taxation, and their revenue assessments, collections, and entitlements produced more data on agrarian conditions than any previous regime. In 1595, Abu-l Fazl's Ai'n-i Akbari depicted agriculture in accounts of imperial finance. After 1760, English officials did the same. After 1870, nationalists rendered the country as part of the nation, and since 1947 agriculture has been a measure of national development. For two millennia, elites have recorded agrarian facts to bolster regimes and to mobilise the opposition, so we inherit a huge archive documenting agrarian aspects of historical states. Over the centuries, however, agrarian history has also moved along in farming environments, outside the institutional structure of states, almost always connected in one way or another to state authority, but embedded basically in the everyday life of agricultural communities. Dynasties expand into agrarian space. Empires incorporate farm and forest, using various degrees and types of power, gaining here, losing there, adapting to local circumstances and modifying state institutions to embrace new regions of cultivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of colonial India have been puzzled lately by the mismatch between the rapid expansion of commodity production for a capitalist world market on the one hand, and low levels of productive investment in agriculture and an apparent continuity in non-capitalist agrarian social structures on the other. The sense of bewilderment is itself a scholarly advance from ‘traditions’ set in the later nineteenth century which saw markets, agricultural investment and agrarian relations as themes fit for separate enquiry. Needless to say, this led to ‘debates’ about the economic results of colonialism marked by a peculiar absence of dialogue. Yet even the more perceptive scholars have continued to harbour teleological assumptions about capitalist transformation. This has led some to declare that the ‘ultimate’ dominance of capitalism denotes, willy-nilly, some form of capitalist mode of production in agriculture. Others, convinced that what they see in the rural areas is a ‘semi-feudal’ or simply a ‘peasant’ mode of production, have been concerned with identifying the ‘obstacles’ or ‘impediments’ in the way of capitalism bearing full sway. Consequently, the much-needed probe into the analytics of the relationship between capitalist ‘development’ under colonialism and agrarian continuity or change has been almost always slightly off the mark. Arguments about continuity in agrarian relations during colonial rule have rested generally, if not purely, on descriptive rather than analytical categories. It has been found acceptable to compare, for instance, levels of peasant differentiation or landlessness at the beginning and at the end of the colonial era. The descriptive approach has tended to obscure subtle but very real processes of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In employing a series of controlled comparisons in the previous chapter, it was necessary to consider several factors to which, eventually, little weight could be attached as contributory causes for the economic success of the Karāva elite. Without altogether jettisoning the eclectic approach which has been favoured so far, in this chapter I propose to sharpen my lines of discriminatory emphasis and to distinguish the more vital factors, and thereafter to dwell upon some of the implications arising from these factors. Assigning weightages in this fashion is ultimately intuitive. This is all the more so when, as the previous sections should have made clear, some of the reasoning is constructed upon speculative foundations. The assessment must also operate within the constraints of a research design which has focused on channels of upward social mobility. For a fuller understanding of the processes of elite formation it would be useful to have similar information on families that experienced downward mobility. A priori it is possible that the advent of the Western colonial powers or the penetration of capitalism may have had depressive effects on certain sectors of the indigenous economy. The emergence of a new economic elite in a locality may have been rendered possible by the decline of certain local elites who were adversely affected by such processes. It is without the benefits of such finely grained local and regional histories that this concluding survey is attempted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book describes and analyses the emergence of an elite of capitalists and Western-educated men and women among the Karāva people in Sri Lanka during the colonial era. It seeks to explain how the Karāva caste produced a significant proportion of the Sinhalese elite and the Sinhalese capitalist class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many of these Karāva families rose from relative obscurity. In pre-British times only a handful of Karāva mudaliyars, or chief headmen, possessed a significant degree of status and power. The principal indigenous landholders and officials in the Kotte Kingdom as well as the Portuguese and Dutch colonial states had been drawn from the aristocratic ranks of the Goyigama caste – a caste which not only commanded the highest ritual status among the Sinhalese, but also enjoyed a numerical superiority and a monopoly of access to the highly influential Buddhist monastic Order, the Sangha. In common with such castes as the Salāgama and Durāva, the Karāva possessed the mixed disadvantage of being mostly made up of relatively recent Dravidian migrants. Their position contrasted with that of other non-Goyigama castes whose specialist functions involved ritual services to the Goyigama caste people or to the local temple. In further contrast, it would appear that, initially, they did not control much wet paddy land and were not involved in rice cultivation to the same degree as either the Goyigama or the other non-Goyigama castes. Nevertheless, they were slotted into the structure of caste-regulated corvée services known as rājakāriya (king's service) and came to be regarded as Sinhalese castes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Astrakhan stands at the mouth of the river Volga, on an island formed by two of its branches … in the middle of the town is the principal square, about two hundred yards wide N. and S., and one hundred E. and W. On the east are the houses of the Governor and the Vice-Governor. Opposite is the house occupied by the [Scottish] missionaries. On the south is the Gostenoi Dvor, a range of shops, which, being uniform, have a pleasing and grand appearance … The natives of every country enjoy religious toleration here. The town is full of temples of Hindoos and Kalmucks, of the mosques of the Mahometans, and of the churches of different Christian sects. Astrakhan is considered as the see of the Armenian Archbishop in Russia. The Indian mercantile settlement of Astrakhan represented a bridgehead of the Indian world economy into the most underdeveloped or “peripheral” European state in the early modern era. Primarily an extension of the substantial Indian commercial presence in Iran, the Indian community came to exercise significant economic influence in the Volga basin by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Using the family firm as the nucleus of their businesses, Indians successfully combined commercial and financial activities to accumulate substantial amounts of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When spring-time flushes the desert grass, Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass. Lean are the camels but fat the frails, Light are the purses but heavy the bales. As the snowbound trade of the North comes down To the market-square of Peshawur town. Panjabi Khattris, Pushtuns or Afghans and Marwaris were the principal merchant groups from Mughul territories who conducted business in Iran or Turan in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Given the size, complexity and sophistication of the Indian economy they or other merchants from India's western and northwestern provinces are likely to have visited or resided in marketing centers of these contiguous regions for centuries or even millennia prior to Akbar's reign. Inclusion of the Kabul region in many powerful Indian states from as early as the reign of the Mauryas of Magadha (324–183 BC) to the Hindu Shahi dynasty of the ninth and tenth centuries AD make such commercial migration even more likely. Cities such as Balkh probably functioned as commercial outworks of these north Indian states, as is suggested by the report of the Arab geographer al-Maqdisi, who wrote in the twilight of Hindu Shahi rule that one of the city's gates was known as the bab-i Hinduwan, the gate of the Indians. In records of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries the largely allusive references to Indian mercantile activity outside of South Asia which are the commonplace of earlier sources give way to eyewitness accounts and documentary evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previously there were favorable conditions for trade from India to Russia and merchants comfortably went [abroad]. Each year about two hundred exported … goods, and then when disturbances occurred in Persia and passage became difficult because of robbers the number of merchants declined year by year. Now exceedingly few came, less than eighty. When Anbu Ram Mulin petitioned Peter the Great in January 1723, asking permission to expand his trade to St. Petersburg, Archangel and beyond Russia to the German state and eastwards to China, he unknowingly represented the apogee of the Indian mercantile diaspora. Not only did Anbu Ram himself fail to advance the diaspora a stage further and make direct contact with European and Asian markets, but the Indian business community rapidly declined after 1723 both in terms of its numbers and its economic influence. Already in 1747 the census showed that the Indian merchant population in the city had fallen to less than half of its former size, and when P. S. Pallas visited forty Indians who still lived in the city in 1793–94 he reported, based upon his knowledge of an earlier visit, that “Everything here … appeared in a more miserable state than formerly, since a part of this people have abjured the religion of their ancestors, and have been incorporated among the citizens of Astrakhan.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

And these merchants and ambassadors are given leave to go to India … And when they arrive at the first Indian town they should tell its ruler that they are ambassadors of the great Tsar and great prince, Aleksei Mikhailovich, autocrat of all the Russias and ruler of many states, to their ruler, his majesty Shah Jahan. Russian annexation of the Astrakhan khanate in 1556 gave the expanding Muscovite state a vital “window on the East,” and for more than a century and a half the port of Astrakhan, located on the Volga's Caspian estuary, functioned as one of Russia's two most important links with the outside world. The other was the port of Archangel in the Russian arctic. Russian officials and merchants sought to use Astrakhan to gain direct access to Asian products to augment the state's customs revenue and to acquire silver for its currency. They tried to achieve these goals by inviting Indian and other Asian merchants to settle and trade in the city as well as through the dispatch of commercial-diplomatic missions to the Mughul court, along with others that were sent to Iran and the Uzbek khanates of Turan. In so far as their relations with Indians were concerned Russian governments were only moderately successful in attaining their economic goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1860 India was locked into a pattern of imperial subordination which was to be essentially maintained, despite formal constitutional changes, until 1935. The Indian Army had rid itself of the troublesome Hindi-speaking villagers of the Gangetic plains. The post-Mutiny army, furnished with a steady supply of Punjabi recruits, now carefully segregated on grounds of caste and religion, was forged into a reliable mercenary force for internal security or protection of the North-West Frontier against the supposed Russian threat. Indian troops were also dispatched with more confidence to East and South Africa, South-East Asia and ultimately, in 1914, to Europe itself. Detachments of troops from quiescent native states added to the paper strength of this large land army. Most pleasing of all to the new India Office in London and to the British Treasury, Indian taxation, which had been reorganised after 1857, continued to bear the cost of this expensively re-equipped force. A more satisfactory imperial economic relationship – from the British point of view – had also emerged after the 1840s, though this was somewhat obscured by the bloody drama of 1857. Exports of British-manufactured textiles picked up sharply, despite a lull in the 1860s. Indian merchants created an excellent inland retailing system for Lancashire goods in eastern and southern India and they were now linked to the sea-ports by railway lines. It was calculated that one-third of the demand for moderate and finer cloth in Bengal and Bihar was met by British imports by 1860. Raw material exports to the developed world had also achieved a more stable trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accession to office of the Congress in seven provinces in July 1937 changed the pattern of its relationship with big business. The business class became one of the interest groups competing for the favours of the new ministries. It was the most powerful of all and seemed to be in the position of getting rewarded for the services it had rendered to the Congress during the years of struggle. But the Congress possibilities of rewarding past services were severely limited by financial constraints, as central finances remained solidly in British hands and provinces had largely inelastic sources of revenue. There were also political constraints, the growing populist pressures which forced the party to take into account, if not the interests of the broad masses, at least those of specific categories such as the working class or sections of the peasantry. Social unrest was on the increase in mid-1937 in the countryside as well as in the towns and cities. This created anxieties in business circles about the future course of policy of the Congress ministries, which explain that the joy manifested by Birla when he heard that Congress had accepted office was not shared by all businessmen. Birla and his Marwari friends had the bulk of their interests in Bengal and in the Indian States. They would not be directly affected by the policies of the Congress ministries and could afford to take a long-term view of the developments. Those capitalists (and they were the majority) who had their interests in the Congress-ruled provinces were more interested in the concrete measures the Congress ministries would take and the possible impact on their business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work has shown that during the 1930s the political attitude of Indian capitalists was characterized by sudden shifts and sharp turns. Three major phases can be distinguished: a phase of relative unity in 1930–1931, a phase of open split in 1932–1936 and a new phase of greater unity in 1936–1939. During the first phase the onset of the depression and the nature of the governmental response to it led most interest groups and factions in Indian business to give some support to Gandhi's political campaign against the Raj, while at the same time they tried to limit the scope of the movement. Many businessmen obviously hoped that a mass campaign would force the British at least to make some changes in a financial and monetary policy which tended to aggravate the impact of the depression. But as early as the end of 1931 it was becoming clear that the government had no intentions of changing its policy and was waiting for an opportunity to crush the Civil Disobedience movement. This caused a gradual split in the ranks of Indian big business. An important group, led by the Tatas and comprising most of Bombay's industrialists, sought to exploit as much as possible the benefits which, in a time of depression and restriction of world trade, the imperial connection could bring to Indian capitalists – namely an easy access to the British market and some protection against non-British competitors on the Indian market. They were drawn towards openly opposing the Congress, accepting imperial preference as embodied in the Ottawa agreement and even concluding a pact with Indian industry's arch-enemy, Lancashire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent works on the history of Indian nationalism, there is a perceptible shift away from ideological generalizations towards detailed studies of the political processes on an area basis. One school of historians has emphasized the role of the local and regional elites in the growth of political organization and tended to question traditional assumptions about the existence of a unified nationalist movement cemented by a common ideology. Other historians have sought for a broader concept of nationalism encompassing the specific politics of the non-elite elements in society, the ‘subaltern’. Most of the research done by both schools has been focused around the politics of the rural areas, a fact which is easily accounted for by the predominantly agrarian character of the Indian colonial economy. The specific politics of the urban areas and in particular the role of the capitalist strata have not yet received all the attention they deserve. One of the few in-depth studies of urban politics, by Bayly, is concerned with Allahabad, a city with practically no modern industries, whose wealth was largely based on regional trade and the exploitation of links with the neighbouring countryside. The politics of the more industrialized urban areas in the twentieth century have been a neglected field of study. Some attention has recently been paid to the urban working class and its political attitude but only Gordon's work on Bombay deals with the interventions of Indian businessmen in the political life. Given the increasing role played by these businessmen in the Indian economy, it appears that a more general and systematic study of their political behaviour is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between July 1937 and October 1939 the political attitudes of Indian businessmen were determined by a complex interplay of national and provincial factors. The advent of Congress governments in the majority of the provinces gave crucial importance to the provincial arena of politics and provincial trends directly influenced the overall relationship between Indian big business and the Congress. However, developments on the all-India scene also contributed to shaping the politics of business. These developments mainly related to the economic and commercial policy of the Government of India which met with growing opposition from Indian business circles. Of particular importance was the negotiation of the Indo-British trade agreement which started in July 1937 and was concluded in March 1939. Indian business and the Indo-British trade agreement When the negotiations started in London between the two governments, the Indian advisers adopted a policy of offering concessions to Lancashire (the exact shape of which remained undisclosed) in return for a complete acceptance of the rest of their demands by the Board of Trade. This approach suited the Government of India well, since it was anxious to placate both Lancashire and Indian business and was less preoccupied with other British interests. The Indian delegation took a hard line at the outset of the negotiations, asking for a surrendering of five-sixths of the preferences enjoyed by British goods in India, the free entry of jute and other Indian manufactures into the UK, plus some extra concessions. Understandably the Board of Trade, which had to take into consideration a variety of British interests, took a very different position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although some of India's major business families can trace their ancestry as far back as to the Moghul period, the origins of the modern Indian business class are unmistakably colonial. Its rise is closely linked to developments which took place in the Indian economy in the post-1850 period. The following section is a brief sketch of the rise and growth of this class. The rise and growth of an Indian business class (1850–1930) After 1850 there occurred a big spurt in the internal and external trade of India, due to the growth of commercial agriculture, and the first beginnings of a large-scale mechanized industry were witnessed. In clear contrast to the case of most other European colonies in Asia and Africa, in India indigenous businessmen were capable of exploiting some of the new opportunities offered by the development of trade and industry. While foreign trade itself was largely monopolized by European commercial firms, the financing and forwarding to the ports of the commercial crops (mainly cotton and jute) as well as the redistribution of imported goods within the interior offered a vast field to indigenous merchants and bankers. Some trading communities of Western and Northern India showed a remarkable ability to seize on these opportunities. Among them were: the Parsis, who had developed a special relationship to the British, firstly in Surat and later in Bombay where they had played the role of junior partners in the China trade; other communities of Western India, such as the Bhatias of Cutch or the Khojas, and the Marwaris of Rajasthan, whose spread throughout Northern, Eastern and Central India had received a new impetus from the establishment of the Pax Britannica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1930 and 1933, the Indian economy as a whole was severely affected by the world depression while the post-1933 recovery had only a limited impact on India. However, the industrial sector was spared the worst consequences of the crisis and its expansion continued at a more rapid pace than in the 1920s. In spite of the overall depression in the economy, there were thus opportunities for Indian capitalists to expand. The impact of the world depression The world depression hit India in full force between 1930 and 1933. Table 4 shows that the fall in wholesale prices between 1929 and 1933 was more pronounced in India than in the industrial countries. The fall in the prices of agricultural commodities was even greater. On the basis of 1928 = 100, the index of agricultural prices stood at 48 in 1933. But the impact of the fall in prices on the internal economy was cushioned by the fact that the bulk of agricultural output was not produced for the market. As foodgrains production responded only marginally to price fluctuations and more to weather conditions, given a normal rainfall it did not show a downward trend during the depression years. The impact of the depression on the external position of the Indian economy was, in contrast, very great. The bulk of Indian exports consisted of agricultural commodities while imports were mostly manufactured products. Therefore during the depression years India's terms of trade deteriorated considerably, as shown in Table 5. The consequence was a considerable reduction in India's trade surplus on merchandise transactions. Whereas during the 1920s the surplus on merchandise transactions averaged Rs 100 crores, between 1929–1930 and 1933–1934 it averaged only Rs 40 crores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1927 and 1934 a direct confrontation opposed Indian nationalism and British imperialism. It culminated in the two successive Civil Disobedience movements of 1930–1931 and 1932–1934 separated by a truce which lasted from March 1931 to January 1932. Following the abandonment of Civil Disobedience by the Congress in April 1934 there was a return to constitutional politics, and the reformed Constitution adopted by the British Parliament in August 1935 redefined the rules of the political game. These were years of turmoil during which the political resources of Indian businessmen were put under heavy strain, leading to an open split in their ranks. In this chapter, attention will be focused primarily around the origins and course of such a split. Although the detailed story will be taken up only from the time of the Gandhi–Irwin pact of March 1931, an analysis of the trend during the 1927–1931 period is necessary to an understanding of subsequent events. Indian business, the Congress and the Raj November 1927–March 1931 The direct confrontation between the Congress and the Raj was sparked off in November 1927 by the visit of the Indian Statutory Commission. While political tension was mounting, the relations between the government and Indian big business were also reaching their lowest ebb for many years. This deterioration was due to several causes – the obstinate refusal of the government to devalue the rupee in spite of an active campaign for devaluation launched by Indian business circles, the continuing conflict around the reservation of coastal traffic to Indian shipping companies and the rejection by the government of the recommendations in the report of the 1927 Indian Tariff Board for a rise in the duty on imported cotton goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]