IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jechis/v34y1974i03p662-684_07.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Railroads, Prices, and Peasant Rationality: India 1860–1900

Author

Listed:
  • McAlpin, Michelle Burge

Abstract

In the literature on India's economic history, there has been a long debate on the influence of railroad development on the welfare of Indian farmers. Some economists and historians have argued that rail development increased welfare by providing new markets for agricultural products and permitting rising rural incomes. Others have argued that railroads had detrimental effects on welfare because, by encouraging cultivation of non-food crops (like cotton) and export crops (like wheat), they reduced the domestic food supply. Those who have stressed the adverse effects of railroads have seen these effects as a consequence of imperialist economic relations between Britain and India. In this view, the combination of British land revenue policy and rail construction transformed the rural economy. The need to pay the land revenue in cash forced fanners to grow some crop for sale; the railroads permitted non-local (or even non-Indian) demand to influence the prices at which different crops could be sold.

Suggested Citation

  • McAlpin, Michelle Burge, 1974. "Railroads, Prices, and Peasant Rationality: India 1860–1900," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 34(3), pages 662-684, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:34:y:1974:i:03:p:662-684_07
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0022050700079845/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fenske, James & Kala, Namrata, 2021. "Linguistic Distance and Market Integration in India," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 81(1), pages 1-39, March.
    2. Arora, Saurabh & Sanditov, Bulat, 2009. "Caste as Community? Networks of social affinity in a South Indian village," MERIT Working Papers 2009-037, United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT).
    3. Fenske, James & Kala, Namrata & Wei, Jinlin, 2023. "Railways and cities in India," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 161(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:34:y:1974:i:03:p:662-684_07. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jeh .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.