Intellectual Contributions of Amiya Kumar Bagchi

In his academic writings spanning over six and a half decades, Amiya Kumar Bagchi straddled several areas among which economic history and political economy of development/ underdevelopment attracted his abiding interest. He drew his insights generally from Marx and Keynes and illuminated the problems of underdevelopment with his own analytical perspective seeped in history. A good number of his important articles appeared in EPW. In this article we take an in-depth look at the huge scholarly output that Bagchi has left for us. The major thematic areas in which we have tentatively classified his works are (1) industrialisation, the behaviour of investment, and the role of state in a mixed economic system; (2) colonialism and its connection with the growth of global capitalism; and (3) conceptualizing a global history of capitalism from the perspective of human development. Besides these three areas, he also worked on a number of other themes, including the history of the State Bank of India and critical reappraisals of different stands of thought in political economy, which we briefly touch upon.

Capitalism · Colonialism · Perspective (graphical) · Politics · State (computer science) · Underdevelopment · Indian Economic and Social Development · Political Economy and Marxism · Social and Economic Development in India