The Economic Development of India under the East India Company 1814–58

This 1971 volume brings together a number of tracts on problems of India's economic development, particularly in relation to the changes taking place in her international trade. The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of important economic transition for India. A vital aspect of it was the rapid expansion in the volume and value of Indian foreign trade, accompanied by fundamental structural changes, which transformed the old eighteenth-century mercantile pattern of India's trade with the West into a system based on an exchange of primary commodities for finished manufactured goods. The papers reprinted here illustrate first the quantitative aspects of Indian trade in this period, and secondly its institutional and policy features. The editor provides a full introduction and tables of statistics.