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A
Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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Okay.
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B
Hello.
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A
A very warm welcome to you all to the lse. I'm Sarah Horrell, a professor in the Department of Economic History and I'm very pleased to introduce Bishnupriya Gupta as our speaker tonight who will be talking about her book, Economic History of India. The book will be available for purchase and signing after the event. There's also a reception just outside, as you've probably seen, to which you're all very warmly invited. So please do come along after that. Now, before I properly introduce Vishnu, I just need to do a few housekeeping duties. The rules of engagement, we are a hybrid event, so. So it's being recorded. We've also got an online audience at the moment, so we're going to keep questions until the end of the talk, if that's okay. We are on social media. There is a hashtag lsevents. So if you do want to put anything on social media, please feel free. And can I ask you to silence your phones as well just in case anyone hasn't remembered to do that? So as I say at the end, we'll take questions. Those will be both online, so I'll take ones from people that are online and in the room, but so people can hear you and it goes onto the recording. If you're online in the room, could you wait until you get the microphone before you ask your question? If you don't mind. There's microphones that be brought round to you at that point.
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Okay, so the main event, let's move on to that. It's my absolute pleasure to introduce Vishnu.
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B
Priya Gupta to you.
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A
She's a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, is a research director at cage, the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and currently the editor of the Journal of Economic History, one of our main field journals.
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She's a leading scholar in economic history and economic development with a particular focus as we're going to hear tonight, on India's long run development. I think you've worked on industrial entrepreneurship, gender norms in India, looking at missing women and looking at women's labour market participation.
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Separately. The great divergence between Europe and Asia over the long run, particularly focusing on differences in productivity, GDP and welfare living standards. She's written extensively in the top economic history journals, co edited a book with in fact one of the audience Members Tathanka Roy, who's here tonight on a new economic history of colonial India and did a lecture on Indian GDP before 1870 as the tourney lecturer at the Economic History Society conference a few years back.
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In this book and I've read through it from front to back, it is a really excellent read. I do recommend buying it and reading it. It's a lot of thought provoking stuff in there that we find really interesting. And here she's assimilated a huge body of her own and other people's research produce a very compelling account of the consequences of colonization for India's economic development.
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So let me hand you over to Vishnu Priya to talk about an economic history of India. Thank you.
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B
Thank you for coming to this talk at this hour of the evening and thank you to the department for inviting me to do this lecture. It's a great honor and I'll be very happy to take your questions at the end. So how did it all start? It's kind of putting together my work over several decades now and eventually trying to think of India's long run development. And it's taken a while but I don't think I could have actually had a view of India's long run development which I actually believed firmly until a few years ago. And it started with the Tony lecture which Sarah talked about in 2019 and then it developed into, into this book. The on the left hand side you have a map of India. So this is these are the British states and the princely states and on the right hand side you have.
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A picture of the book. And what I wanted to kind of.
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Communicate through the picture was.
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Modernization and tradition going side by side in colonial India. And some of the things that I'm going to say today is going to touch on that.
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So what is the book about? So the, the book essentially takes a historical approach to India's long run development. There's often a tendency to start.
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At the time of independence or to end at the time of independence. And you see history as differently from today, but from a lot of work, including the work of Nobel Prize winners Asima Guli, Johnson Robinson. We know that history has a long shadow and this book very much picks up on that theme to try to understand how India developed and why it is the way it is today. So today we know that it's one of the fastest growing economies of the world.
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In 1947 that wasn't the case. In fact, if you look at this graph, the red bar is per capita GDP of India in 1950 and.
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If you look at the different countries there, they are all being colonies at some point. The lowest income countries are the colonies in Asia and Africa. And on the right hand side you see the colonies by 19th century, mostly independent, the colonies in Latin America. So India clearly was a very poor country and it used to be known as the jewel in the crown. So the question clearly is that didn't the imperial connections and globalization serve India well? So I'm going to take a long view, as I said before. So the next step is to think of the first government of independent India, which broke away from this global connection and India became one of the most regulated economies of the world today. You often hear of the Nehruvian policies in a very kind of derogatory way, especially by the Indian government today, that this was a failure. And what I want to talk about in this lecture is that, you know, taking a view of India starting in 1950 is not the right approach. One has to look at the policies of the first three decades in a historical context and then try to understand why the policies were that of regulation rather than globalization. So the first three decades India grew at a fairly slow rate, which was 2, 2% per year. And that's quite, quite low in comparison to the fast growing economies of East Asia. But when you look at it in the context of India's long term trend, it was actually a break from its past stagnation.
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So I want to emphasize that I'm going to take a much more positive view of the first three decades of Indian independence and, and Nehruvian policies in particular. And then after 1980 there was liberalization of the Indian economy and growth has been much faster since then. But here is a graph that might look very interesting to you. You have hundreds of years of stagnation right up to 1950, and then what do you see?
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You see this slight increase. It's not as fast as the, as the growth after 1980, but still it is growth nevertheless. So I want to argue that saying anything about today, one has to look back to the past.
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So the question in the book is there are several questions in the book. So one of the first questions that I'm going to ask is how did India get to the point where it was in that red bar that I showed you?
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So did colonization lead to decline and stagnation or is it that the decline of the traditional textile industry, we hear a lot about deindustrialization of India. Is that the main reason?
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And then finally I'm going to come back to the post independence policies. There are three takeaways here. The first point I'm going to make is the idea of deindustrialization is not wrong, but it is not what was driving Indian stagnation. So I do not see de industrialization as the main problem in colonial India. Instead I'm going to emphasize that it was agricultural stagnation, low investment in physical and human capital which were the main factors.
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Which can explain the stagnation. So I don't want to.
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Let colonization off the hook. I'm going to take a totally different approach and look at the largest sector of the Indian economy, which was agriculture, and see what was going on there.
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I'm also going to take a different view from many of the discussions on Nehru's policies and say this was a turning point in India's long run development. And finally I'm going to talk a little bit about.
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You know, why India has this big advantage in the service sector and why do we think of India's growth as being led by the services sector? Okay, so let me just move on. One of the main approaches to Indian any colonial development is to think of access to the British capital market, to think of globalization as always something that generates growth. So this is a book by Nile Ferguson, the famous historian.
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How Britain Made the Modern World. And the argument here was that access to the British capital market, building of the railways, all this did a lot of good for not just India, for any colony that you can think of. But here is a quote in the same book which is that average incomes rose by 14% between 1757, which is the starting point of colonization, to 1947. So over 200 years it increased by 14%. British incomes at the same time increased by 347%.
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And then he goes on to say that, okay, I agree, Indian incomes didn't rise, but they might have been much worse had the British not been in power. And that is a statement I find it hard to believe. Because what is it based on? Is it based on what he thought? Is it based on what he wanted to think? You know, it's confusing. So I'm going to take some issue with this particular statement. The other statement which goes in the opposite direction. This is from a book by Shashi Tharoor. Many of you probably have read it or have heard about it. It's done very well in terms of selling and its reach.
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Here the argument is just the opposite, that free trade destroyed India's industry. And he talks about the textile. Britain's industrial revolution was built on the destruction of Indian textile industries. And then you can see how it talks about deliberate destruction of this industry and then turning India into an agricultural producer again. You know, I struggle to find evidence to say why he thinks that. And this is something much closer to my work. So I have looked at a lot of records of the weaver's contracts with the East India Company. I've looked at the trade data. I was struggling to see why he thought this. And I think the only way to understand what was going on is to look for evidence. And that's the thing I've tried to do in this book, is to try to find answers by looking at data and evidence.
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So what are the evidence that you can think of in the Indian context or any, any looking at any country? So there are both qualitative data and quantitative data. So there are some very rich descriptive accounts of.
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Urban India. The wealthy nobility, the rich traders, and the vibrant commercial sector.
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That was visible in the cities and towns of pre colonial colonial India. And based on the evidence on trade, India was clearly one of the big exporters of cotton textiles. In fact, India dominated the global markets market in textiles.
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But what about quantitative evidence? If we go looking for data, we get a somewhat different picture. India was actually an agricultural. So just looking at the urban sector doesn't really tell us anything about the average person in 18th or 19th century India. Traditional industry, which includes the textiles, was a very small part of the economy. And therefore what happened in this sector only impacted a very small share of the population. What mattered, and that's where I'm going to go with this book, is to look at what was going on in agriculture. And it is the low investment in agriculture which led to low productivity in agriculture, low production of food. And that's the problem of colonial India. And that's where colonial policy could have had an impact. After all, Britain had the first agricultural revolution. So why not bring some of it to the colonies? So let's start by looking a little bit on the textile trade. It began in the 17th century.
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When the European companies began to arrive in India to buy textiles. Remember, cotton cloth was not produced in Europe. It was some, mostly and definitely not in Britain. It was something which had a lot of advantage. And the Indian textile producers produced these massively, you know, these exquisite cloth at a very low wage cost. So on the right hand side, you, you see a picture of one of the fancy textiles which was sold in Europe.
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The advantage was the skills that, that were handed over from generation to generation and the low cost and the low wage cost of the weavers. The design quality was one of the big advantages. But this advantage, I'm going to argue.
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Changed with the Industrial revolution in Britain. Why is that so? On the left hand side you see a picture of an Indian weaver.
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Indian spinner, spinning thread. For the weaver to produce a cloth, it took 10,000 operative hours to spin hundred pounds of cotton. Right. On the right hand side you'll see the first machine of the Industrial revolution, the spinning mule. This machine used 2,000 operative hours to spin the same amount of cotton. Therefore you can immediately look at the productivity difference between the two. So once the spinning mule was in place, the Indian spinning wheel did not stand a chance. And the first people who switched to the British thread were the Indian weavers. The Indian weavers stopped using their own produce and started to buy the imported thread which was produced in the British factories. Here is a picture of the costs. Right. So one of the main costs was buying raw cotton. And India produced raw cotton and therefore had an advantage. So if you look at the cost of all the inputs, wage cost plus material costs, British costs were twice as high as Indian costs. And British prices were also twice as high. Now in 1770 you see that British input costs were even higher.
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Prices were twice as high. But now look at post industrial revolution, the costs were higher, but the British prices were only 35% of the Indian prices. And that's because of the efficiency of the machines of the Industrial revolution and what the economists call total factor productivity. So that changed the market in textiles completely. From India having an advantage in the international market, it changed to Britain having an advantage in the market. You could tell me that, isn't it the case that there were no tariffs? And that is absolutely true. The British products coming into India did not face any tariffs. While tariffs were imposed by almost all countries, France, Germany, the United States, to grow, to develop, develop their own textile industries and India was not allowed to have it. But I want you to think of the price difference. If Indian cloth was so much more expensive than British cloth, what would the tariffs have to be? And here I'm thinking of a ballpark of the Trump tariffs on China. And then the next question is, would that be beneficial from the average person living in India? So that's a kind of thought experiment. And Titankar Roy's work shows that the per capita consumption of cloth increased with the import of British textiles. Because they were so much cheaper, people could just buy more.
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So in this book I'm going to suggest that the decline of the clothes textile industry was as a result of the superior Technology of the British Industrial revolution.
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It did have an effect on employment. But how large was this effect? Employment in the exports industry in Bengal was roughly around 11%. If you look at overall India, it was around 15%. So, so the decline in employment, which has been estimated to be somewhere between 28% and 50%, was large, but it was only a small part of the whole economy. So overall, it's hard to argue that deindustrialization was the main cause of India's low income at the time of independence.
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Here's a picture of trade. What did happen is that.
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Trade, the composition of trade, shifted from India exporting textiles, as you can see from the first column, to shift to exporting opium, indigo and raw cotton. So India did become.
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An exporter of primary products.
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But what also happened is a new industry began to develop, which is a local modern industry which began to compete with British imports and the products of the Indian textile industry. And this industry was set up importing British machinery. So all kinds of things were going on in colonial India. And de industrialization is only a small part of the story.
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So what does the GDP data set? If we look at the data on GDP per capita going back to 1600, what do we find in 1600? India's per capita GDP was $682, which was well above subsistence. And it was 60% of British GDP per capita at that time. But since then, something changed. Here's a picture of Indian GDP per capita. You can see the slow decline over time. And the white line is the decline relative to Britain. And that's what reflects the great divergence. The great divergence is positive partly due to the decline in India gdp, but largely due to the growth in the British economy. So there is a little bit of both. India declined and Britain grew. And relative to Britain, India began to fall behind big time.
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Now let's just look at the sectoral evidence. What was driving the change in gdp? We know that GDP began to decline before colonization. This, the blue line is the per capita output of industrial exports.
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And you can see this increased massively. The orange line is the per capita output of exported agriculture. This was increasing gradually in the 19th century. And now when you see the white line, you can see where GDP per capita was moving. It was not moving in line with the growth in textiles at all. It was moving more in line with what was going on in agriculture. And this you can see in this graph. The blue line is per capita GDP and the orange line is the per capita agricultural output. And the white line is per capita industrial output. So industrial output had very little to do with India's long term decline under colonial rule.
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After 1870, Indian per capita income stagnated until 1947. So if not deindustrialization, what explains it? And here I'm going to argue that it is the, the stagnation in yield per acre in agriculture which was the biggest problem for the Indian economy under colonial rule. So on the left hand side you can see the output in 1910 relative to output in 1600. And almost in every crop it is less than 1, which means the output in 1600 was greater than the output in 1900. So clearly there was a decline in all kinds of crops except sugar cane and raw cotton. So you can see some crops did well over the colonial period and these happen to be cash crops. But in most food crops you can see a decline in yield per acre. And this is the right hand side graph. The black bar is showing you the decline in food grain yields. And the non food grains show a different, slightly different trend. Some of the, you know, there's some increase in some periods.
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So you can see the non food grains there in the last period growing at more than 1% per year.
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So why did agriculture stagnate? And here I want to emphasize the low investment rate in colonial India. We think of 20% investment rate as being slightly low. Today.
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Less than 7% is a number that is almost unheard of in modern day. But that was the rate of investment in colonial India. And agriculture received less than a quarter of this. So you can think of investment in agriculture as being so low that it was impossible to do anything about land productivity.
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So what type of investment could have happened in agriculture? And here clearly it is irrigation. Most of the investment in irrigation at this time was canals. The British government in India built some canals in some parts of the country, particularly in northwestern India. But irrigation covered only, only 20% of the total agricultural land. Where there was irrigation output per acre was higher, as you can see from the right hand side table. But the share of land that was irrigated was so small that it was impossible to have a big effect on total agricultural output. Less than 10% of the investment in the, the railways went to irrigation. And this was one of the main contentions of the nationalist historians in the 19th century. They argued that the British wanted the railways to bring their goods to the port and import British goods to India. So here, look at the right hand side graph and you can see that the railway lines did connect ports to the interior. Right. So they were connecting Bombay to the cotton growing regions. And if you just look at this graph, there's ground and ground to say that yes, this is true.
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The railway network really connected ports to the interior and therefore turned India into an agricultural producer. But now look at 1909 and the railway network. This network is a lot more dense than it was in 1870. So over time, the railway network was not just connecting the ports to the interior, it was connecting the interior as well. And as a result, the markets were integrated. The incidence of famines in colonial India declined and there were so many social savings for the economy. So the railways, I would not put up the railways as a strawman of the handmaiden of colonialism. The railways did a lot of good for the Indian economy. What they did not do is they did not have an effect on agricultural productivity. And it did not create the same incentives for industrialization because all the railway stock was imported from for Britain. So in that sense, its effect was limited. But there was still a positive effect of the railways in India.
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As far as industry is concerned, I want to take a very different view from the argument of deindustrialization. I'm going to think of industry as modernization and I'm going to think of the service sector also as being part of the modernization. I'm going to argue that industry in colonial India is actually one of the success stories. And why do I say that? A modern industry began to develop from the middle of the 19th century.
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This was tea and Jude with British capital.
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It was.
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A cotton textile industry, A modern cotton textile industry with Indian capital.
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And these, the Indian capital came from the rich merchants who had made a lot of wealth in cotton trade and opium trade and now began to set up cotton mills in western India, in Bombay and the surrounding regions and then in Ahmedabad and Gujarat.
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This picture shows you the total investment in 1914 in London and in India. So the blue bar that you see is the sterling investment in India. So the companies were registered in London. The orange bar is the. Is the companies set up with rupee capital in India. They did not necessarily have to be Indian owned. They could be British owned as well, but they were registered in Indian stock market. You will see from this graph that the blue line, most of the tea companies were registered in London and they were clearly British companies. On the other hand, most of the cotton textile companies were set up in India and they were mainly Indian owned. So Indian industrial sector was doing reasonably well compared to other developing countries at this time.
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Industry in colonial India was one of the fastest growing Sectors. If you look at the right hand side table, you see that productivity or output per worker in industry grew at a rate of more than 1% per year all through the colonial period. On the other hand, you look at agriculture, you see 0.4% growth before 1900 and 0% growth after 1900. Service sector also showed some growth after 1900. So the picture of Indian industry is not one of decline. In fact, some of the big industrial houses in India today originated in this period. Tata is one example. Tata set up cotton textile firms in the 19th century. They made money in opium trade and cotton trade and set up cotton mills in Bombay. They diversified into other sectors in the 1930s and became this big industrial house after independence. Tatas were not the only group. There were the Marwaris, there were the Bhatias, there were the Gujarati Baniyas. There are a whole lot of Indian merchants who made a lot of wealth in industrialization. They also had links with the Indian independence movement. In fact, Gandhi was called to Ahmedabad to talk to the workers, not not to go on strike. Many of them donated to the Indian National Congress. They also talked to the Congress about plans to how to industrialize India after independence. So the links between the congress and Indian industrial interest became strong as independence approached.
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So why did product, you know, why was there this product productivity growth in Indian industry? The graph here will tell you the story. The orange bar is the traditional sector or the small scale sector. And you can see this was the largest part of the industrial sector in 1900. But it began to shrink. The blue bar, which is the modern industrial, the modern industries, they began to grow much faster. And at the time time of independence, they were roughly the same share. So the growth, the faster growth of the modern sector explains the growth in output per worker in industry during the colonial period. And here.
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Is an interesting picture because 1939 is still the colonial period. You see Tata Amongst the top 10 industrial houses based on assets even at that time. It's not just Tata. Edi Sassoon is an Indian firm which is also in the top 10 in 1958. It's Tata, Birla, Bangur, Thapar, Singhanya, Sriram Dalmia. All these Indian companies are already amongst the top 10.
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Industrial houses by 1958. So it's difficult to argue based on evidence that Indian industry was killed by British colonialism. And it's a much more complex story of a decline of a traditional industry and the rise of a modern one. Okay, I want to say a little bit about India's service sector. Advantage. And here, let me just go over this slide very quickly. As the share of agriculture began to decline even in output, began to decline even in the colonial period, the share of industry changed a little, but the share of the service sector changed a lot. So the service sector was growing very fast. And here you can see that.
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In terms of output per worker, that is productivity of a sector, the service sector, which is the Green Line, was way higher than either industry or agriculture. So the service sector in India had a traditional advantage. And you can think of, where does this advantage come from? And I'm going to throw out a kind of speculative view which I'm going to back up with some data later on, is that within the caste system, the castes which are most literate were those in the service sector, like the Brahmins and the priests or the traders. They were all literate. And these cast castes were all in the service sector and giving this sector an advantage in productivity.
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So is there a role of the modern education system or often, you know, India, Britain gave India English education.
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What were the benefits of the English education? So a modern education system system was introduced. From the middle of the 19th century, many Indians also wanted a Western education based on science rather than religious education. The British government certainly wanted it. They wanted to create a class of Indians who could enter the civil service. They opened up industries in the metropolitan cities. So already by 1960s, there were three industries in three universities in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. The question is that who were educated? How many people could avail of this education system? So here's the literacy rate. In 1931, less than 10% of the Indian population was literate. There was a large gap between male and female literacy. 17% of men and 3% of women were literate. There was a large gap between the castes. So a few high castes, mainly in the service sector, only in the service sector were most literate compared to the rest of the population. Public investment in colonial India was one of the lowest in the world. So I think of investment in education as one of the failures of colonial policy and one of the serious failures of colonial policy. It failed to create a working class which was literate. Primary education was never a priority, even when it became compulsory in Britain, it was never even discussed in the Indian context. And that I find surprising because the labor laws in India got transported. Labor laws in Britain got transported to India almost instantaneously because Lancashire lobbied to get all the labor laws in place in India to see that the Indian workers did not have any advantage.
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A
On.
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B
The right hand side you'll see a table where you see the share of secondary and tertiary education in total education spending. And India right from the 19th century spent 60% of its total spending on secondary and tertiary education. So conditional on getting some education, you were very likely to go to a secondary school and then go to college. So India developed this big advantage in tertiary education very early on and you can see that even Japan did not spe spend anything as much on secondary and tertiary education compared to India. And this to me is the beginning of India's service sector advantage, what we also see today. So the Western education opened new doors to new occupations. And this was then taken. You know, the people who could take advantage of this were the upper castes who already had education, could now go to secondary school and to college. These were the Brahmins and the traders.
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They entered new occupations and services, so medicine.
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Civil service, law, all these new occupations which became became a part of the occupational set of the Indian elites. These were typically the high castes. Also in industrial management, the average worker in industry or in agriculture remained uneducated all the way up to independence and even after independence because the higher educational bias in the Indian education system continued way after Indian independence.
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So now let me move on to. I have 15 minutes.
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A
Yes, you do.
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B
So.
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Let me move on to the transition from a colonial economy. Before I do that, let me just say the two things, the three points I wanted to make in the earlier section that I don't think deindustrialization was the main cause of India's economic stagnation. I think as agriculture was the main problem. And the second policy failure was lack of education.
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A
Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.
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B
So transition from a colonial economy was actually quite dramatic because the globalized economy of India, India was one of the most globalized economies in 1947, hadn't done very well. So the vision of Nehru as the first prime minister was to move away from global connections to become self sufficient. Now, Nehru was not alone in this. Most of the newly independent countries took the same view. They all wanted to develop their own industries, become self sufficient. This is not just a problem of the the developing countries. We know that Alexander Hamilton.
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Had said the same thing in the US in the 19th century.
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So trying to develop an industry to gain national prestige is not a new idea. And that's where all these countries wanted to go. Industrial sector was seen at the core of this development.
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So India, India moved from being a very open economy to an extremely closed economy. So it put the exchange rate at a fixed point, which is artificially created. It stopped trade in most goods and it created these five year plans with developmental gold. The first five year plan was introduced in 1990, 1950. It focused on building agricultural infrastructure and other types of infrastructure structure. The second plan was the main plan for industrialization. And the second plan from 1956 adopted the Soviet style planning to develop what was known as the machinery industry. And the idea was, if you want to increase the investment rate, you need to have a machinery sector, because investment is machinery. So who invested in this? The Indian private sector at the time was very happy to let the government take the lead. So the public sector became the driver of industrialization. At this point, many state enterprises were set up in these industries, the basic and the heavy heavy industries. Trade became extremely regulated. Private investment in industry became extremely regulated.
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So if the private sector wanted to invest in a particular industry, they had to get a license. So the strategy paid off. For a short period, you'll see high growth for a short buy. But it did come.
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With problems. And I'm going to come back to it in a minute. So if you look at the narratives of post independence growth, we hear a lot about this, especially today, that India was stuck at this low growth of 2% per year. And in comparison. So the question is, is this true? Yes, it is true. It was low compared to the fast growing economies in East Asia, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia. In comparison to other developing countries, no, India was really the average. In comparison to its long term trend, India was actually showing a structural break. So 1952 is when Indian income start growing from almost close to zero. So independence was a reversal of fortune. And here you can see that, just to remind you, you can see this very clearly in this graph. So what changed? What changed? What policies had this big impact? So one, the first policy I want to talk about, because that was what I discussed in the context of colonial India, is agricultural productivity. In this graph you'll see that after 1950, agricultural productivity in all the three countries, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh began to rise. And it began to rise because irrigation expanded. Other types of agricultural infrastructures were built. A green revolution happened in India after 19, after, from the end of the 1960s. And there were also institutional Change such as land reforms and building credit institutions, rural credit institutions.
- [47:02]
So now if you look at the rates of growth of different sectors on the right hand side you can see capital goods and basic goods were the fast growing sectors after independence. Whereas consumer goods were growing at a fairly slow rate. Investment rate rose from 7% of GDP in 1940 to 17% in 1960. And then it continued to rise. So Indian investment rate has never been as high as 35% as in several East Asian countries. But it has been above 20%. Public sector accounted for over 40% of this investment.
- [47:45]
So were there any costs of this regulation? Clearly there was. There was an efficiency cost of regulation. As you would expect, Indian industries became extremely isolated. They had no incentive to increase productivity.
- [48:03]
There was a huge foreign exchange crisis. Crisis because the whole system built an anti export bias. So India suddenly faced a big shortage of foreign exchange in the 1960s.
- [48:18]
So was it, you know, why do we then see a rise in the rate of growth? Delong argued in 2001 that if you look at all the developing countries at this time, it is the rise in investment rate which compensated to some extent the efficiency cost. So although TFP was negative, the investment rate was high enough to compensate for the negative efficiency cost.
- [48:48]
The other positive impact of the Nehruvian policies was a big decline in inequality. And I'll come back to that, that in a few slides. After 1980 the Economic Policy began to change. There were significant economic reforms in the 1980s. The main reforms were pro business. So it took away the regulation on industrial investment. Now private sector could invest in anywhere it wanted. And this made a big difference in investment by the private sector and growth in the industrial sector. There were pro market reforms from the 1990s. Devaluation and opening up to foreign investment. Here is a long term growth picture of The Indian Economy 1914-1945. The Empire Stage. You'll see its stagnation. There is no, no growth at all. 1950-1980, 1.4 GDP per capita growth per year. This is a low rate but it is still 0 to 1.4 is a big change. And then after 1980, the first decade is 3% per year and the next decade is 4% per year. And India has been growing roughly at that rate for now several decades.
- [50:17]
Here is a picture I wanted to show you because this is from Banerjee and Piketty.
- [50:25]
They use Indian.
- [50:28]
Urban income. So income tax is only collected on urban incomes. So this evidence comes from. This shows the share of income of the top 0.1% and 0.001%. And you can see it was very unequal during the colonial period and that inequality declined sharply during the Nehruvian phase. The role of the public sector becoming important had a big effect on declining the high share of a few in a urban incomes. But since liberalization this has been rising. But it's nowhere close to what inequality was in colonial India. But what I find interesting in this data which comes from Alvarado and his co authors, is that the top point 1%, the top share of the income was not only British accounted for by the British in India, but many Indians were up there. And there is a big regional split as well in Bombay and Maharashtra. In Bombay region and Maharashtra in general and Gujarat, which were the Bombay presidents in colonial India, the share of Indians in the top incomes was very high. The other most industrial region was Bengal. Their British incomes dominated. So the big advantage of Maharashtra and Gujarat today has a historical origin. I mean we talk about the Gujarat model, but Gujarat was always one of the richest states in India, as was Maharashtra. And that advantage has continued to stay. So looking at history gives us a very different, different picture of what we see today. I'm just going to say a little bit about structural change and the unusual pattern of India's development. The service sector has been the fastest growing sector in India. And here India differs massively from East Asia and China. If you look at this graph, you'll see that.
- [52:51]
The industrial sectors, the red bar is the large scale industries. This has the share of this sector has grown, but not that massively. What has grown massively over this time is the purple bar which is the share of the service sector in gdp. So today the service sector leads economic growth in India. This is where most of the the GDP is. This is where most of the productivity growth is. And now if you look at another picture of the great divergence, which is the relative productivity of the sectors vis a vis the uk, you'll see that India falls behind the UK almost in everything. But it's been catching up in services. So the service sector in India today in 2000 was about 33% of the productivity level of the British service sector. And that's not a small achievement. So where does the service sector advantage come from? Here I'm going to argue again that it is the concentration of education in the high caste which gave the the service sector an advantage to start with. And if you look at the proportion of workers with the most education today, I mean here the picture I'm showing you is 2001. You'll see that it is the service sector. So public administration, finance, trade, all these sectors have the highest concentration of workers with secondary and tertiary education. Whereas most of the workers in agriculture, mining, but also in manufacturing are without any kind of literacy even in 2000. So although primary education has expanded in India, the older workers, many of them have no education.
- [54:52]
So to conclude, Indian income declined from 6, 16, 50 before the beginning of colonization. The economy did not prosper under the global connections of the British Empire. And this was not due to the decline in the traditional industry, this was due to agricultural stagnation and the reversal began under the policies of regulation. So what looks like a failure compared to growth in recent time was actually a structural break when we look at colonial India.
- [55:34]
This book provides an evidence based analysis of why history matters in understanding the present. Thank you.
- [55:48]
A
Thank you very much for an absolutely excellent presentation there. That's introduced all sorts of really quite thought provoking challenges to the traditional narratives of Indian development under colonisation and subsequently under independence.
- [56:05]
Floors now open to questions. So if you do have a question, could you raise your hands please and we'll bring the microphone to you. You might have stopped that person over there just yet. Right next to you there.
- [56:18]
B
Hi. Thank you. I was wondering, you mentioned the agricultural stagnation.
- [56:25]
During colonial rule, but you also mentioned at the same time an increase in export of raw materials to Britain, like the cotton and the grains and things like that. So how do you reconcile the agricultural stagnation and decline with the rise in the exports to British. To the British state?
- [56:46]
That's a good question. Oh, sorry, yeah, that's a good question. So you have to think in terms of.
- [56:55]
How much was exported. Right, and what was exported. Very little food was exported. It was mainly raw cotton, opium and indigo and tea. But the most of the agricultural output was food grains and that's where the stagnation was. So if you separate them out, you'll see that, you know, there's growth in output per acre. And there has been a claim that where the British built irrigation, this was to grow cash crop. I've looked at the data now, I don't see that. So in all the irrigated areas there was wheat grown as well as cotton, so and where there was irrigation, there was increase, but it's just that it was a very small part.
- [57:45]
A
A gentleman at the front here.
- [57:50]
C
Commonwealth Studies. I think your presentation and book is really a masterful reminder of the importance, importance of history and the long view. I wanted to ask you to elaborate a little bit on the Just the development, not just of economic performance, but economic thought in terms of the, the interwar period. Yeah, I'm thinking In particular the 1931 Karachi session of the Indian National Congress, which really laid the pathway for the path dependent ideological foundations for the post colonial Indian state. But also in that period, as you know, that also coincided with the Empire struggling to make sense of that period, you know, with the Ottawa Agreements as well, where India was represented. So can I ask you to elaborate a little bit on, in parallel with the economic performance, how do you see the evolution of the Indian take on its economic future taking shape in particular in that interwar period?
- [58:47]
B
Thank you for that question. So the main interaction that I mentioned between the Indian National Congress and the industrial interests, it began in the late 1920s and.
- [59:06]
These groups lobbied for tariffs. And the British government by that time is not averse to India. British government in India is not averse to industrialization. Contrary to the claims many people have made that the British government did not want India to industrialize. They did because they had been stuck during the First World War. They needed Indian industrial production. And the Indian industries had at that time bargained that if you win the war, you give us tariffs. So there was a tendency to renege, but it didn't really happen. So Indian industries did get tariffs by the end of the 19, by the late 1920s. So the 1930s is really bringing together the thinking of the Congress, the Indian industrialists. And there's a paper which is. Well, I don't think it's a paper yet, but. But there's work, a project on letters to Gandhi by Indian industrialists and Gandhi writing back to them from Gandhi's archives. And they look at these connections to see how these industrial interests later on could benefit as well. So you see a lot of thinking between Congress and the Indian industrialists about the future of India when independence arrives. I don't know whether that answers your question.
- [60:36]
A
I think I had someone at the back in the middle. Was there. Yeah, sorry. Chosen someone to go. Right.
- [60:46]
C
Thank you for your talk. You mentioned how inequalities rose post globalization. And. But they were nowhere near to the inequalities in the British era.
- [60:55]
B
Can you speak up a bit, please?
- [60:58]
C
You mentioned how inequalities rose post globalization, but they were nowhere compared to the inequalities in the British era. However, Piketty's research in 24 found out that the distribution distributed income had the inequality has in fact is now more than it was in the British era. I wanted to know your opinion on it. And my second question is that can we safely conclude that post globalization structural inequalities, particularly caste inequalities have been reproduced.
- [61:35]
B
Caste inequalities have been reproduced.
- [61:40]
So if Piketty is saying it is higher, I will agree. I haven't looked at that def data but when you look at the data I showed you from their earlier work, you do see that it is much lower. And the graph I showed you is from, from Piketty's work. In terms of caste inequality, I will tell you an interesting.
- [62:05]
Point. Like I've recently written a paper with Kaiwan Munshi.
- [62:12]
On affirmative action in India. And you know how that has and its relationship with meritocracy. So you can think of the caste system being anti meritocratic because it doesn't allow certain people to even get into the sphere of showing their talent.
- [62:31]
What was surprising is that.
- [62:36]
When you look at affirmative action and education educational outcomes, the difference between high cost and low cost have become much smaller over time. Because the affirmative action in education and jobs in the public sector has had a big impact on the scheduled cost and scheduled tribes. I'm only talking about the scheduled cost and scheduled tribes. And you see that also occupation is less clear but certainly in terms of education. But in terms of skills you also see that gap closing. So the affirmative action from 1952 for the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes have had a huge impact. I was surprised by that finding, but it is. Yeah.
- [63:20]
A
Thank you. I'm just going to take one from online here before coming back to the floor. So to what extent could you argue Nehru built back the economy of India after the colonial period and in what ways? I think you've covered some of this in the lecture but maybe you could sort of just summarize one or two points.
- [63:39]
B
So to me Nehru was a visionary and he his vision was that of an industrial society. So he brought in the Soviet style industrialization plan. I'm not trying to say everything about it was good because a lot of this was.
- [63:56]
Did stifle growth in India for a long time. But it still it built that base which was lacking.
- [64:05]
I didn't show you those slides but I in the book there are some comparisons with South Korea and Taiwan and at the time of independence like South Korea and Taiwan became independent from Japan in around the same time. Their share in of the industrial sector was not that different from India in 1950. But then you see them doing. And they also followed input substitution in the 1950s. But by 1960s they had opened up and they had started to follow Strategies which were more export oriented. And I think that's where there is a failure of the Nehruvian policies that they didn't stop the, they didn't open up early enough to make the economy more attuned with the rest of the world.
- [64:55]
A
Thank you. Question from the floor. Yes, thank you. Hi, thank you for your time today.
- [65:01]
B
Professor Gupta. So my question is, given the long run stagnation under colonial rule, do you think the British deliberately hindered economic development for imperial interest or wants to slow growth more an unintended outcome of colonial institutions and global market forces? And also considering that India is now the largest economy out of the three former colonial regions with significantly higher GDP per capita than Pakistan and Bangladesh, to what extent do you think these post independent divergences reflect different differences rooted in the colonial period? Thank you.
- [65:41]
It's a big question. Yes. I don't think there was clear thinking about let's stagnate Indian agriculture. The thinking was more like how can we benefit? And this came from certain aspects like let's build the railways, let's reduce the incidence of famine. So contrary to the, to the view that nothing was done for the, to stop famines in India, there is a lot of discussion in all the British reports on how to reduce the famine, the famines for two reasons. One is humanitarian but the other one is financial. That the Brit, the British government in India was talking about the cost of famine relief, the cost of intervening in a famine and therefore doing something which would be better from a revenue perspective. So there was a lot done to prevent famines or to kind of stop the incidence of famine in colonial India. So I don't, so I think there were all these objectives but it's not that it's, let's starve agriculture, it's just that not thinking about it and that I found surprising given that Britain, Britain did have an agriculture cultural revolution. So developing, you know, developing an industrial sector and shrinking the employment in agriculture was not an unknown thing in, in the British context. And this was never kind of thought through very clearly. Having said this about famine, I also want to say that I do think that Churchill's policy during the Bengal famine was.
- [67:22]
Not for India's benefit. It was just how, you know, let's, let's feed the soldiers. I don't really care about what's happening to the Indian population. So that I think is a completely outlier in the context of all the other famines after let's say 1870, when the incidence of famine did go down.
- [67:45]
A
I'm actually going to take one from this side of him, I thank you.
- [67:50]
Hi, I'm a sixth form student and.
- [67:53]
B
I'm currently writing an EPQ about how.
- [67:58]
Indian independence led to its growing economy.
- [68:04]
A
So I was wondering about how you said after it became independence how India decided to have more of a color self sufficient economy.
- [68:15]
B
To what extent do you think that this was the right sort of tactic to take instead of staying open with the global market, such as how China's open door policy allowed it as a modern economy to grow a lot as well.
- [68:31]
A
And when do you think that when.
- [68:33]
B
It did open up to the rest of the world, how much that played a factor in growing its.
- [68:40]
Thanks for that question. So.
- [68:44]
So I think almost every country which industrialized has followed a period of import substitution, including China, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Malaysia less so but and Singapore, except with few exceptions, the United States, States, Germany, they all have followed policies of input substitution.
- [69:09]
The problem with the Indian policy was that it continued for too long. So the balance is to see when do I stop? And the problem becomes that there are some interest groups that develop with any kind of licensing system who then don't want that advantage to be taken away. So India remained on the in the system for a bit too long and I think that was the main problem. I don't think it staying global would have helped it because that short phase of import substitution was needed for to develop the industrial sector. I think it could have opened up a lot earlier.
- [70:00]
Hi, it's a fairly simple question.
- [70:01]
C
Was there a difference between performance of princely states and non princely states in economic terms? I'm just thinking about the impact of.
- [70:10]
B
Colonial policy in the development. Yes, so there is now work on.
- [70:18]
Exactly these kind of questions. So one is on literacy and I think there, there is a difference between literacy in the princely states and the Indian states. There are some other, there are some other dimensions where I think the princely states are behind. So there is work, new work.
- [70:38]
There are differences that are historical.
- [70:43]
Especially in the provision of public goods goods. There are differences. So. And there are papers on this. I just, I forgot to answer your question on exports. And I think India has done a lot really well in exports of services like software, whereas not on exporting goods which where China kind of dominates.
- [71:06]
A
Yeah, I'll take on a line.
- [71:12]
Did the Indian merchants who got rich from the opium trade or their descendants face any backlash from the countries they were involved in? China, UK or elsewhere?
- [71:24]
B
I haven't seen anything on that.
- [71:30]
During the opium wars they like Tatas, many of them had offices in Shanghai and, and Hong Kong and so on. I haven't seen anything about backlash. The backlash came to the jet trs. There was backlash against them in Burma, Myanmar today where they helped. They gave a lot of loans to the agriculturalists and during the depression when they couldn't repay, the land passed from the locals to the Chettyyars. So they were then kicked out of Burma at that time.
- [72:08]
So that's a backlash I know about. I haven't seen anything against the opium merchants.
- [72:13]
A
There's a question right at the back. Is that right in the center? Yep.
- [72:17]
B
Thank you.
- [72:19]
C
Hi. You talked about how there was a. There's a historical context to the service sector advantage that India has. I wanted to ask a couple of questions on this. First is that was it a recognition of this comparative advantage in the 1950s and secondly following on from that how much of the policy of industrialization is down to trying to fight this advantage of green services sector and the. And the interest groups of various industrialists at the time. We know for example that BIRLA was a huge like ideological effort in time trying to push the industrialization efforts forward. So how much of it can be attributed attributed to not recognizing the service sector advantage and how much of it is attributed to the efforts of industrial in industrialization?
- [73:04]
B
I don't think there was a clear recognition that this is where the advantage was by the government. But the society was structured in a way that the upper castes were in the service sector. They were the most educated. They could move in into the modern sectors and do very well. And I think the big issue for me is that or a failure in the Nehruvian strategy was not to make primary education compulsory because that that would have educated the workers, the industrial workers, the agricultural workers. If you look at India's difference with South Korea for example, or Japan or China, primary education is 100% in these countries. All the workers are educated. And I think that's where India lost a chance. I don't think they deliberately recognize they have this advantage. They continue to fund secondary and tertiary education in a very significant way for a long time.
- [74:08]
A
Thank you.
- [74:10]
C
Thank you. I just wanted to ask how you think the recently implemented four new labor codes in India are going to impact the economic trends that you've highlighted here.
- [74:22]
B
Say that again.
- [74:25]
C
How do you think the BJP's government recently announcement of the condensing of 29 labor codes into four labour codes is going to impact the economic trends that you have highlighted here?
- [74:37]
B
So I think one of the reasons they give is this firm staying small to avoid labor legislations. Right. And removing that may allow firms to become bigger and therefore, you know, get some advantage. That's possible. I think this is a problem for industrial workers. I am not.
- [75:03]
I'm not in favor of removing labor legislations, but I think the way they operate in India today incentivizes firms to stay very small simply because they don't want unions. And I think that might be some benefit of removing it. Thank you.
- [75:23]
A
Shall I take gentlemen at the front here?
- [75:27]
B
Thank you. Amazing talk. I was looking at your final bullet point, history matters and understanding the present. And I might be stretching the point a little bit, but given all that you've understood about the history of India, if you were asked to advise the current British government on its industrial policy.
- [75:43]
C
What would you say to him?
- [75:45]
B
Don't ask me that question. Don't ask me that.
- [75:48]
A
You're not obliged to British policy.
- [75:56]
B
Answer.
- [75:57]
A
Or should we skip that one?
- [75:58]
B
No, I mean.
- [76:01]
I honestly don't know what to say.
- [76:06]
I don't have expertise on that. Let me put it that way.
- [76:09]
A
I think it's a big stretch, that one.
- [76:11]
B
Yeah.
- [76:12]
A
Question over at the back there.
- [76:17]
C
How will AI affect the Indian economy?
- [76:24]
A
Another crystal ball question.
- [76:26]
B
I think this is a much more serious concern because.
- [76:30]
You know, one of the sectors where India has done really well is the service sector jobs, right. And one of that is.
- [76:40]
Data entry. Half the data entry firms, me as an economic historian as well use. They're all in India. We send them a data set, we send them some pictures which they then put on Excel files. And I have had the suspicion for a while is that they use AI to extract the data and then they check everything really, really well and they give us a fantastic product back. That advantage is going to go because we are, are learning these AI techniques and we are going to do this ourselves. So I think it is definitely going to have an impact on several service sector industries in India. I don't know the magnitude of it, but I can see some concrete examples where they'll be effective.
- [77:30]
A
Should I take one there questioned.
- [77:34]
Come back over the seat.
- [77:37]
C
Lovely talk today. I've got one question for you and it's can you drain. Can the drain of wealth be quantized and how reliable are the estimates by historians?
- [77:48]
B
I can't hear you. Sorry.
- [77:49]
A
Can you speak up?
- [77:51]
C
Can the drain of wealth be quantized and how reliable are the estimates by historians?
- [77:59]
B
So that is a very good question and I feel this is my next challenge. I'm not sure I'll ever do it, but the estimates of grain of wealth on India are have been very simplistic, Right. So if you take balance of payments and you look at everything that is coming in and everything that is going out and get a number and say this is drain, that's not a good estimate. Because if Indian firms or companies borrow in the British market, they're paying some interest back. Right. Then there are issues of all kinds of.
- [78:41]
Advantage you might be getting by this relationship with the colonial country. How do you measure all those and take it out of the very simplistic calculations of drain? So I don't think as at this point in time there's a very good estimate of the drain from India.
- [79:03]
Somebody might do it. That'll be amazing. But it has to be done carefully. So what is clearly a drain to me is when the East India Company occupied Bengal, they got revenue from Bengal, Right? Right. And then they began to pay for the textile imports by this revenue rather than bringing in bullion from Britain. Right. They used to pay for the textile they sent to Britain by importing bullion. They completely stopped that when they became the rulers of Bengal. And they just paid it with revenue that I think is drained. But everything else that you look at in the balance of payments and make a simple calculation is not necessarily drain. So this is a calculation that has to be made very, very carefully. And I haven't got seen a good estimate yet.
- [79:57]
A
Thank you.
- [79:59]
For question there.
- [80:02]
Yeah, sorry, the gentleman's hand up there.
- [80:05]
C
Thank you for the lecture. So my question was, I wanted to ask how much of a role do you think that these historically wealthy families like Tata and Villa played in, like increasing the divide between the rich and the poor? And we see like a lot of the divide today. So I wanted to ask like, how much overall do you think they played in like increasing that alongside the COSTA cost system that we have?
- [80:38]
B
Look, if you are an industrialist, you make profit, right? If you're a capitalist, that's what you do. And the. I know that the Tatas as an organization are very paternalistic. So they have good policies, they have housing for their workers, etc. I'm not so sure the Billahs do exactly that. But it's for the government of India to tax them and it's for the government of India to have a taxation system which redistributes income from the rich to the poor. And I think that's where it's a government failure. So I don't want to blame the capitalists for making money because that's what they do. I think it's A problem that the Indian government hasn't taxed them, whichever government you think of enough to redistribute wealth.
- [81:27]
A
So I go there. Thank you.
- [81:32]
C
Thank you for the lecture. I have a question on regulation and investment and the relationship there in my work. I work on investment into India from foreign companies and that experience has definitely been made more difficult by the regulation that's not unique to India, but different compared to other countries. And I wanted to ask to what extent you think that the regulation that was in place in the post independence era was aligned with the goals of the country at the time and to what extent they're still relevant to the goals of the country today.
- [82:05]
B
So the regulation during.
- [82:09]
The first, during.
- [82:10]
C
The post independence era.
- [82:14]
B
So I think the post independence regulation was something completely, completely different. Right. From whatever red tape you see today. It was like you, any firm that, so the government regulated which are the sectors where a private sector could invest. So lots of sectors were out of bounds for the private sector. Right. And if you wanted to set up a firm, you had to get apply for a license. And this license was then decided by some by, by a bureaucrat. So it was extremely inefficient in some ways that you. But initially the private sector didn't mind it so much because they were not willing to set up firms in the aircraft industry. The government did, the public sector did. So the regulation today is much more of a red tape. So the legacy of that has. So you know, it's like history remains what, whatever you do, and the legacy of that initial regulation has remained, but it's nothing in comparison to what it is today. When I first, when I went back to India after my PhD, I went back for a few years.
- [83:27]
Every item that I owned, including a camera, I had to be registered at the point of entry. It was that kind of regulation. That's not along with the kids.
- [83:38]
A
Should we take another one from the online viewers? In describing the legacy of the colonial period, how important has been the legacy of the English language, particularly for the service industry?
- [83:54]
B
It's an interesting question, but when we think of the service sector, you know, it's not just financial services. Financial services are a small part of the service sector. It's trade, it's, it's all kinds of services which are, you know, trade is very large. So I think for all that those sectors, language doesn't matter, English language doesn't matter. But of course the software industry, English language does matter. So it has had a role. But I don't think it drives the, the service sector growth.
- [84:29]
A
And I think. One final question. Yes.
- [84:33]
C
Thank you. Is it possible to measure the economic impact of partition?
- [84:40]
B
So there is some work already which looks at, you know what. So it's done by comparing censuses. So you look at 1931 censuses and you look at the district level data from the 1931 census and you look at 1951, because there's no census in 1941. I mean, it's very limited. And you see how many people were literate. That gives you a comparison of the impact of.
- [85:12]
Partition on literacy rate. And this work emphasizes that.
- [85:21]
The literacy increased in the Indian side because a lot of the traders, Hindu traders, the traders have historically been very literate. They have to, after all, maintain their account books. They moved from the Pakistan side to the Indian side and the people who moved were the agricultural workers. So you have this kind of impact on literacy because of the partition. So there's some work on that. There are other work which is about green revolution, which. So there are papers on it, not a book or, you know, not a substantive work looking at all dimensions.
- [86:05]
A
Thank you. Well, thank you very much indeed for an excellent discussion and enlarging our thinking, I think, on the whole of Indian history, but also the difference between colonisation and post independence strategies and policies. And also thank you all, audience for some great questions. We've enjoyed answering these too. Do join us for a drink outside in the reception area and thank you very much.
- [86:42]
Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favourite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.ukevents to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.