Content area
Full Text
The Economic History of India, 1857-1947. By Tirthankar Roy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 336 pp. Tables, maps, bibliography, index. Cloth, $24.95. ISBN 0-195-65154-5.
This new book by Tirthankar Roy of the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development in Mumbai was written as a successor to the massive Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume II, c.1757-1970, edited by Dharma Kumar and published in 1982. Roy has provided an updated, simplified tome designed to be suitable for an undergraduate text in Indian or Asian economic history. He condenses the information of the Cambridge history (CEHI), which runs to over 1,000 pages, and updates the scholarship. For the most part, he follows the framework of the original, with its chapters on agriculture, large-scale industry, irrigation, railroads, government policy, and population, but he adds one on macroeconomic variables such as national income, foreign trade, and price movements. His coverage of industry is more extensive, in that he has appended one chapter on banking, plantations, and mines, and another devoted to handicrafts. These topics were not covered in much detail in the CEHI. To condense the information of 1,000 pages into 300, however, required cutting out quite a bit of the information. While the CEHI is rich in detail, the current text is more appropriately described as a sketch of the relevant facts.
Given the complexity of Indian economic history, both the condensation and the updates will be useful to students and scholars. Roy covers most of the major themes of Indian economic history. Each chapter concludes with a generously annotated bibliography of both the relevant classic texts and more current work. Although he does not provide a full discussion of any topic, the basic arguments are there, and the student is directed to other relevant literature.
One advantage this text has over the CEHI is unity of voice. Though...