Tirthankar Roy
Biographic Data
| ID | 3686694 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tirthankar Roy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tirthankar |
| FAMILY NAME | Roy |
| SIGNATURE | ROY T |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6279-8447 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 67 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 153 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 64 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Cambridge Economic History of Modern South Asia
South Asia's economies, as well as the scholarship on their economic histories, have been transformed in recent decades. This landmark new reference history will guide economists and historians through these transformations in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Part I revisits the colonial period with fresh perspectives and updated scholarship, incorporating recent research on topics such as gender, caste, environment, and entrepreneurship. The cont…
The Cambridge Economic History of Modern South Asia
South Asia's economies, as well as the scholarship on their economic histories, have been transformed in recent decades. This landmark new reference history will guide economists and historians through these transformations in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Part I revisits the colonial period with fresh perspectives and updated scholarship, incorporating recent research on topics such as gender, caste, environment, and entrepreneurship. The cont…
Introduction to Part 2
The British Raj had favoured open trade and a small state. Economic development was not a major priority. This changed after independence. State expenditure as share of GDP increased in both India and Pakistan, with the goal of reducing poverty and inequality. Still, the trajectories of India and Pakistan and then Bangladesh varied. Especially in India, policymakers favoured inward-looking economic policies, and were sceptical of trade and foreig…
Constructing a colonial state
The paper reinterprets the East India Company’s state-building effort in late eighteenth‐century Bengal by foregrounding the intertwined evolution of fiscal capacity and institutional reform. It argues that the Permanent Settlement of 1793 emerged not from a desire to follow Indian or English precedent, but from the Company’s struggle to concentrate fiscal powers. A debate on the need to obtain information on taxpayers, which delayed the reform, …
A Global Firm in a Small Town
This paper examines Harrisons and Crosfield’s Quilon operations in interwar South India to highlight the role of site specificity in shaping global firms. Unlike most British companies headquartered in major colonial port cities, Harrisons and Crosfield established its Indian base in Quilon, a small town with strategic access to estates and backwaters but limited infrastructure. Situating the case within debates on multinational enterprise and co…
Numerical representation of turbulent fluxes during the March 2019 Nebraska rain-on-snow event
Rain-on-snow (ROS) events—during which liquid precipitation falls on an existing surface snowpack—are highly impactful to society, with severe flooding being the primary hazard. ROS events remain a highly challenging hydrometeorological problem in several aspects of land surface model development, pushing the limits of land-atmosphere, snowpack, and runoff modeling. In particular, the representation of turbulent fluxes during these events is crit…
The Colonial Era
In neither Asia nor Africa did European rule (1800–1960) start a series of top-down interventions and revolutionary changes. In some significant respects, they did differ from premodern states. These regimes altered the relationship between ecological zones by shifting the direction of long-distance trade and sometimes investing in water and transport to support that agenda. Further, many European administrators believed the arid landscape could …
Origins of Colonialism
Historians explain the eighteenth-century origin of European colonialism in Asia either with the profile of the merchants or an argument about uneven power. This Element suggests that the environment was an important factor, too. With India (1600-1800) as the primary example, it says that the tropical monsoon climatic condition, extreme seasonality, and low land yield made the land-tax-based empires weak from within. The seaboard supplied a more …
Water and Development
From the early twentieth century, a big part of the world—the arid and semi-arid tropics—began extracting, storing, and recycling vast quantities of water to sustain population growth and economic development. The idea was not a new one in this geography. It was an intrinsic part of ancient culture, statecraft, and technology. Most ancient projects, however, were local and small in scale. The capability of water extraction on a scale large enough…
Kerala, 1956 to the Present
'Kerala is different, but not in the way we think.' Economic change in this southern state has fascinated economists. Most studies focused on the state's unusual human development, asked how a poor and economically stagnant state could achieve high levels of education and healthcare and pointed to politics and government policy to answer the question. Little of that scholarship took history seriously. History, this book says, shows that the found…
Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy
Reassessing Fera
The Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, introduced in India in 1973, was the culmination of efforts to ‘Socialise’ economic policies and ‘Indianise’ corporate ownership. It resulted in a flight of foreign capital as Multinational Enterprises exited India to avoid these risks, finally driving out long-established British commercial interests. This article uses new sources to reassess how British businesses perceived the threats of Indianisation and a…
Useful & Reliable
The proposition that Useful and Reliable Knowledge (URK) produced divergent patterns of long-term economic growth implies that such knowledge had weak agency in countries that fell behind. This article rejects such a theory on the evidence of colonial India. Indo-European contacts activated transfer, transplantation, and adaptation in URK; however, the impact was uneven within India. Despite boosting productivity in manufacturing and consumption,…
Water, Climate, and Economy in India from 1880 to the Present
Theories of economic growth based on Western Europe are inadequate when applied to India because the two areas are incommensurate in their geographies and their resources. Because its initial conditions were different from those in, say, Europe and North America, India could arrive at economic growth only by solving different problems-preeminent among them being reliable access to clean water. The actions taken by the state, scientists, and socie…
The Economic History of India, 1857-2010
From the end of the eighteenth century, two global processes began to transform livelihoods and living conditions in the South Asia region. These were the rise of British colonial rule, and the integration of the region in the emerging world markets for goods, capital, and labour services, or globalization. Two hundred years later, India was the home to many of the world’s poorest people. India was also one of the fastest-growing emerging market …
Transition to Colonialism
The eighteenth-century economy of the Indian subcontinent was an uneven one. On the one hand, there were present a rich indigenous commercial tradition; territorial states that respected private property in land and trade; a literate elite running the fiscal administration; and rich cities that were home to highly skilled artisans. But much of that wealth was confined to the riparian, deltaic, and seaboard regions. The greater part of peninsular …
The Princely States
The princely states were the kingdoms that British India did not annex to itself. The states lived under an agreement with British India. The two main points of the agreement were that they would keep trade open and would not raise an army. How were the states affected by colonialism? Was their economic history significantly different from that of British India or more similar than different? Did their relationship with British India affected the…
The Economic History of Colonialism
Debates about the origins and effects of European rule in the non-European world have animated the field of economic history since the 1850s. This pioneering text provides a concise and accessible resource that introduces key readings, builds connections between ideas and helps students to develop informed views of colonialism as a force in shaping the modern world. With special reference to European colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth ce…
Music and Society in Late Colonial India
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian classical music was in transition. Most readings of the transition stress the choices of the professional musicians, as these musicians and the institutions in which they functioned were caught up in political and economic movements such as nationalism and commercialization. This article studies a different type of transition: when a small-town professional group with a strong associati…
Transfer of Economic Power in Corporate Calcutta, 1950–1970
Between 1950 and 1970, the ownership of some of the largest business conglomerates in India changed from British to Indian hands. Almost without exception, the firms formerly under the management of British conglomerates saw bankruptcy, nationalization, relative decline in corporate ranking, and on rare occasions, reinvention of identity. In Indian business history scholarship, this episode is underresearched, even though hypotheses on the transf…
The British Empire and the Economic Development of India (1858-1947)
Interpretations of the role of the state in economic change in colonial (1858-1947) and post-colonial India (1947-) tend to presume that the colonial was an exploitative and the post-colonial a developmental state. This article shows that the opposition does not work well as a framework for economic history. The differences between the two states lay elsewhere than in the drive to exploit Indian resources by a foreign power. The difference was th…
Sven Beckert. Empire of Cotton
Centuries before mechanized cotton mills inaugurated the Industrial Revolution in Britain, cotton textile producers in the Indian subcontinent traded throughout the world. Approximately five thousand years ago, the cotton plant was domesticated independently in several parts of the tropics. A number of successful innovations in weaving technique and in dyeing prompted India to take the lead in long-distance trade in cotton textiles. By 1600, cott…
The Mutiny and the Merchants
The historiography of the Indian mutiny (1857–8) suggests that livelihood classes responded to the episode differently, but pays more attention to the agricultural classes than the urban commercial ones in studying the response. This article revises the economic history of the rebellion by showing that commercial interests were influenced by concerns over security of property, and that they, as much as landed interests, shaped the course of the r…
A New Economic History of Colonial India
Communism in India
The Communist Party of India was established in 1925. At its beginning, the communist movement was connected to political movements fighting to end British colonial rule in India. That connection received endorsement from Moscow and Lenin. It also received support from some members of the Indian National Congress who felt unhappy with the retraction of the ‘non-cooperation movement’ in 1922. Increasingly, as Congress began receiving the support o…
How India Clothed the World
Cloth has always been the most global of all traded commodities. It is an illuminating example of the circulation of goods, skills, knowledge and capital across wide geographic spaces. South Asia has been central to the making of these global exchanges over time. This volume presents innovative research that explores the dynamic ways in which diverse textile production and trade regions generated the 'first globalization'. A series of experts con…
Sardars, Jobbers, Kanganies
A figure in part a foreman, in part a headman, and in part a recruiting contractor, formed an indispensable part of labour organization in mills, mines, ports and plantations in nineteenth-century India, and in the tropical colonies where Indian emigrants went for work. Historians have explained the presence of such a figure by the needs of capital for intermediaries, or needs of labour for familiar relationships in an unfamiliar environment. The…
Conceiving mobility
Economic History and Modern India
This paper argues that to restore the link between economic history and modern India, a different narrative of Indian economic history is needed. An exclusive focus on colonialism as the driver of India's economic history misses those continuities that arise from economic structure or local conditions. In fact, market-oriented British imperial policies did initiate a process of economic growth based on the production of goods intensive in labor a…
Transfer of Economic Power in Corporate Calcutta, 1950–1970
Between 1950 and 1970, the ownership of some of the largest business conglomerates in India changed from British to Indian hands. Almost without exception, the firms formerly under the management of British conglomerates saw bankruptcy, nationalization, relative decline in corporate ranking, and on rare occasions, reinvention of identity. In Indian business history scholarship, this episode is underresearched, even though hypotheses on the transf…
State, society and market in the aftermath of natural disasters in colonial India
How did South Asian societies rebuild their economies following natural disasters? Based on five episodes from colonial India, this article suggests that between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century, the response to disasters changed from laissez-faire to more state intervention. Despite this change, post-disaster rebuilding was complicated by unspecified rights to lost property, conflicting claims to property, asymmetric information …
Rethinking the Origins of British India
This paper discusses the rise of the East India Company in the contested political world of eighteenth century India, with reference to the manner in which economic power was deployed to enhance military power. It is shown that there was only one successful model of military-fiscal strategy during this time, and that the Company's success was due to interactions between three factors-taxable resources, the strategies of its rivals, and institutio…
Economic Conditions in Early Modern Bengal
This article contributes to the debate on relative levels of living in the early modern world by estimating the income and probable range of income growth in Bengal before European colonization. The exercise yields two conclusions, (a) average income in Bengal was significantly smaller than that in contemporary Western Europe, and (b) there is insufficient basis to infer either growth or decline in average income in the eighteenth century
Indigo and law in colonial India
Recent scholarship has explored the process by which modern commercial and property law came into being in the non-western world, and has emphasized the role played by colonialism and conquest in this process. Using a case study from colonial India, this article suggests that the coding of commercial law was influenced more by commercialization than by the nature of the state, and was an endogenous response to the failure of local custom and comm…
Acceptance of innovations in early twentieth-century Indian weaving
The experience of the handloom weaver has been seen either as an example of the destruction of traditional industry in response to competition from mechanized industry, or as one of survival. The significance of technology in these debates has been under-explored. The article argues that technological change in weaving was significant, and was not a response to declining competitiveness, but part of a transition in markets and organizations that …
Capitalism and community
Size and structure of handloom weaving in the mid-thirties
The Economic History of Colonialism
Debates about the origins and effects of European rule in the non-European world have animated the field of economic history since the 1850s. This pioneering text provides a concise and accessible resource that introduces key readings, builds connections between ideas and helps students to develop informed views of colonialism as a force in shaping the modern world. With special reference to European colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth ce…
Music as artisan tradition
This paper attempts to explain three widely-held 'stylised facts' about the recent history of north Indian classical music. First, in the precolonial period, music and musicians were patronised by the courts. Second, from the early colonial period patronage declined and music tended to be commercialised. And third, in the process, accumulated knowledge and the quality of crafts manship decayed. In a received view in music scholarship, the transit…
Financing the Raj
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, India was a major player in the London money market. The India Office in London raised money on behalf of the government in India, balanced India's in
Factor markets and the narrative of economic change in India, 1750–1950
This article revisits an argument that land, labour and credit market transactions in India were restructured by colonialism and globalization, in a manner that left peasants and labourers worse off than before. It shows that the process of change was more diverse than this approach considers, and that it was shaped also by social institutions. I argue further that growth and welfare outcomes of the process cannot be fully understood in terms of …
Did globalisation aid industrial development in colonial India? A study of knowledge transfer in the iron industry
The article explores the link between international economic integration and technological capability in colonial India. The example of the iron industry shows that many new ideas and skills flowed into India from Europe, but not all met with commercial success. The essay suggests a reason why. In those fields in which the costs of complementary factors were relatively low, the chance of success was higher. This condition was present in the craft…
Changes in Wool Production and Usage in Colonial India
The paper shows how production, marketing and uses of wool changed in colonial India (1858-1947). The changes involved location, products, people, and nature of the firm, and were induced by two circumstances, one arising from the raw material side, and the other from the consumption side. There were limitations on access to common grazing lands, a theme that takes us to those of herding, customary rights, and the economics of wool production. Th…
Madras handkerchiefs in the interwar period
Home Market and the Artisans in Colonial India
Studies on Indian artisans in the recent times have tended to be guided by the notion of a world market which, it is believed, drove them towards obsolescence through changing tastes or productivity. This framework, however, is not without problems. First, the presence of older industries in modern India, or their long continuance, tends to be seen in terms of 'survivals' or 'revivals', which terms deny them any inherent dynamics. On the other ha…
Price movements in early twentieth-century India
Foreign trade and the artisans in colonial India
Reassessing Fera
The Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, introduced in India in 1973, was the culmination of efforts to ‘Socialise’ economic policies and ‘Indianise’ corporate ownership. It resulted in a flight of foreign capital as Multinational Enterprises exited India to avoid these risks, finally driving out long-established British commercial interests. This article uses new sources to reassess how British businesses perceived the threats of Indianisation and a…
The British Empire and the Economic Development of India (1858-1947)
Interpretations of the role of the state in economic change in colonial (1858-1947) and post-colonial India (1947-) tend to presume that the colonial was an exploitative and the post-colonial a developmental state. This article shows that the opposition does not work well as a framework for economic history. The differences between the two states lay elsewhere than in the drive to exploit Indian resources by a foreign power. The difference was th…
Out of Tradition
This paper explores the context in which skilled artisans introduced innovations in India around 1900 and suggests that such steps carried the potential for conflicts between the innovator and those affected by his actions. Conflicts could arise over the protection of knowledge, over the right to make a change, in the form of resistance, or as a choice between maintaining and diluting quality. Conflicts were absent when the mediation of social an…
Share of Industrial Wages in Value-Added 1960 to 1980
Size and structure of handloom weaving in the mid-thirties
Money supply and asset choice in inter-war India
Foreign trade and the artisans in colonial India
Price movements in early twentieth-century India
The role of the state in initiating development
Home Market and the Artisans in Colonial India
Studies on Indian artisans in the recent times have tended to be guided by the notion of a world market which, it is believed, drove them towards obsolescence through changing tastes or productivity. This framework, however, is not without problems. First, the presence of older industries in modern India, or their long continuance, tends to be seen in terms of 'survivals' or 'revivals', which terms deny them any inherent dynamics. On the other ha…
Capitalism and community
Indian Handlooms in the 20th Century
Music as artisan tradition
This paper attempts to explain three widely-held 'stylised facts' about the recent history of north Indian classical music. First, in the precolonial period, music and musicians were patronised by the courts. Second, from the early colonial period patronage declined and music tended to be commercialised. And third, in the process, accumulated knowledge and the quality of crafts manship decayed. In a received view in music scholarship, the transit…
Conceiving mobility
Madras handkerchiefs in the interwar period
Economic History and Modern India
This paper argues that to restore the link between economic history and modern India, a different narrative of Indian economic history is needed. An exclusive focus on colonialism as the driver of India's economic history misses those continuities that arise from economic structure or local conditions. In fact, market-oriented British imperial policies did initiate a process of economic growth based on the production of goods intensive in labor a…
Acceptance of innovations in early twentieth-century Indian weaving
The experience of the handloom weaver has been seen either as an example of the destruction of traditional industry in response to competition from mechanized industry, or as one of survival. The significance of technology in these debates has been under-explored. The article argues that technological change in weaving was significant, and was not a response to declining competitiveness, but part of a transition in markets and organizations that …
Traditional Industry in the New Market Economy
Introduction Handloom Weaving as Traditional Industry Some Issues Handloom Weaving in India in the Twentieth Century A Review Government Policy and Perceptions Handloom Weaving in Andhra Prades Recent Trends Weaving Centres of Andhra Pradesh A Profile Weavers and Marketing Channels The Economics of the Handloom Sector Why do Weavers' Cooperatives Fail? The Apex Society and Primary Cooperatives Government Programmes An Evaluation Conclusion Refere…
Changes in Wool Production and Usage in Colonial India
The paper shows how production, marketing and uses of wool changed in colonial India (1858-1947). The changes involved location, products, people, and nature of the firm, and were induced by two circumstances, one arising from the raw material side, and the other from the consumption side. There were limitations on access to common grazing lands, a theme that takes us to those of herding, customary rights, and the economics of wool production. Th…
Out of Tradition
This paper explores the context in which skilled artisans introduced innovations in India around 1900 and suggests that such steps carried the potential for conflicts between the innovator and those affected by his actions. Conflicts could arise over the protection of knowledge, over the right to make a change, in the form of resistance, or as a choice between maintaining and diluting quality. Conflicts were absent when the mediation of social an…
State, society and market in the aftermath of natural disasters in colonial India
How did South Asian societies rebuild their economies following natural disasters? Based on five episodes from colonial India, this article suggests that between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century, the response to disasters changed from laissez-faire to more state intervention. Despite this change, post-disaster rebuilding was complicated by unspecified rights to lost property, conflicting claims to property, asymmetric information …
Sardars, Jobbers, Kanganies
A figure in part a foreman, in part a headman, and in part a recruiting contractor, formed an indispensable part of labour organization in mills, mines, ports and plantations in nineteenth-century India, and in the tropical colonies where Indian emigrants went for work. Historians have explained the presence of such a figure by the needs of capital for intermediaries, or needs of labour for familiar relationships in an unfamiliar environment. The…
Preliminary Material
How India Clothed the World
Factor markets and the narrative of economic change in India, 1750–1950
This article revisits an argument that land, labour and credit market transactions in India were restructured by colonialism and globalization, in a manner that left peasants and labourers worse off than before. It shows that the process of change was more diverse than this approach considers, and that it was shaped also by social institutions. I argue further that growth and welfare outcomes of the process cannot be fully understood in terms of …
Did globalisation aid industrial development in colonial India? A study of knowledge transfer in the iron industry
The article explores the link between international economic integration and technological capability in colonial India. The example of the iron industry shows that many new ideas and skills flowed into India from Europe, but not all met with commercial success. The essay suggests a reason why. In those fields in which the costs of complementary factors were relatively low, the chance of success was higher. This condition was present in the craft…
How India Clothed the World
Cloth has always been the most global of all traded commodities. It is an illuminating example of the circulation of goods, skills, knowledge and capital across wide geographic spaces. South Asia has been central to the making of these global exchanges over time. This volume presents innovative research that explores the dynamic ways in which diverse textile production and trade regions generated the 'first globalization'. A series of experts con…
Company of Kinsmen
This volume examines the history of enterprise and entrepreneurial South Asian communities from the beginning of the 18th to the mid 19th century. It examines how these communities adapted to globalization and colonial law and analyzes forms of merchant organization in pre-colonial and colonial India
Economics (36 works) · Political science (35 works) · History (33 works) · Colonialism (28 works) · Law (26 works) · Geography (23 works) · Economy (21 works) · History (19 works) · Ancient history (16 works) · Politics (16 works)