What is the difference between colonialist and nationalist works on Indian economic history?

Early colonial writers about the economy of India did not have to reckon with a critical Indian public and nationalistic opinion. Some of them were free and frank in their criticisms of the effect of the British rule upon the indigenous economy and they were sometimes critical of what they admitted to be a drain of wealth from India to Britain.

They did not deny what a contemporary Persian chronicler named Saiyid Ghulam Hussain Khan observed in The Seir Mutaqherin (1789) with regard to the English habit of ‘scraping together as much money’ in this country as they can, and carrying it ‘in immense sums to the kingdom of England’.

A manuscript official report, entitled ‘Historical Review of the External Commerce of Calcutta from 1750 until 1830’, commented freely on ‘the plunder of the country’. After conquering Bengal, the East India Company ceased to import silver for their purchases of Indian goods for export to Europe, and deployed the revenues of Bengal for the purpose. According to the report, the unrequited exports became the vehicle for the remittance of the fortunes made by individual Englishmen in the country.

As critical Indian opinion emerged in the later nineteenth century, the colonial administration became more concerned to show that economic progress was happening in the country. The Madras administration commissioned a voluminous statistical work by S. Srinivasa Raghavaiangar, entitled Memorandum on the Progress of the Madras Presidency during the last forty years of the British Administration (Madras, Govt. Press, 1893), which constituted a well-documented apology for foreign rule in the country.

The second century of British rule in India was marked by an ongoing controversy between the critics and apologists of empire. Indian nationalists, sympathetic Bruisers and, at a later state, Marxists intellectuals blamed the drain for the impoverishment of India. Colonial officials, at the instance of Lord Curzon, contended that there was no impoverishment at all, and rival estimates of national income were produced on both sides.

Among the works of the period may be mentioned, on the one side, Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London, 1901), an earlier version 1873), and William Digby, “Prosperous” British India: a Revelation from the Official Records (1901); and on the opposite side, F.T. Atkinson, ‘A Statistical Review of the Income and wealth of British India’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, June 1902.

Atkinson, an official under Lord Curzon, sought to show that the national income of India was rising over the years, though somewhat slowly. Naoroji who entertained contrary views, computed the annual drain from India at around £30,000,000 in his own day, and estimated that earlier, around 1800, the figure had stood at about £5,000,000. The debate generated the first general work on the economic history of India.

To Curzon’s annoyance, a retired ICS officer who became President of the Indian National Congress, Romesh Chunder Dutt, drew up a formidable critique of the economic effect of British rule upon India in The Economic History of India under Early British Rule (1757-1837) (London, 1902) and The Economic History of India under the Victorian Age (London, 1904). Dutt dwelt on the heavy land tax upon the peasants, the destruction of the handicrafts, the recurrence of famines, and the annual drain to Britain in his economic critique of British rule.

The British, he said, had given India peace, but not prosperity. Colonial administration did not accept his nationalist contentions, but one claim he made is indisputable: ‘No study is more interesting and instructive in the history of nations than the study of the material condition of the people from age to age.’

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, before he became the Mahatma, wept as he read Dutt’s Economic History and, in the next generation, the doctrine that the most fundamental impact of British rule upon India was a destructive economic impact, became axiomatic with Marxist intellectuals, such as R.P. Dutt. A member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, he wrote a radical critique of colonial rule entitled India Today.

Published by the Left Book Club from London in 1940, it was promptly banned in India. In this book, R. P Dutt sought to show that the industrial imperialism which R.C. Dutt had criticised in his day had since then made a transition to financial imperialism, and that the drain had become more enervating for the economy in the latest phase of imperialism in India.