IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/wpaper/90409.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Inequality in colonial India

Author

Listed:
  • Roy, Tirthankar

Abstract

A view popular in Indian economic history scholarship claims that the institutional and commercial policy of British India made the rich Indians richer and the poor poorer during colonial rule. The paper shows that the evidence to support the conjecture is weak. Missing data on peasant income makes it hard to generalize on aggregate trends in inequality. But the evidence does question the role of state policy behind trends in inequality. An alternative account starts from the distinction between land-dependent and trade-dependent occupations. The open economy of the nineteenth century affected these two spheres differently. Low and stagnant land-productivity limited the average return that accrued to land-dependent occupations. Occupations directly or indirectly dependent on trading could escape the constraint partially.

Suggested Citation

  • Roy, Tirthankar, 2018. "Inequality in colonial India," Economic History Working Papers 90409, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:wpaper:90409
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/90409/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Shilpi Kapur & Sukkoo Kim, 2006. "British Colonial Institutions and Economic Development in India," NBER Working Papers 12613, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Lucas Chancel & Thomas Piketty, 2019. "Indian Income Inequality, 1922‐2015: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 65(S1), pages 33-62, November.
    3. Dharma Kumar, 1975. "Landownership and Inequality in Madras Presidency: 1853-54 to 1946-47," The Indian Economic & Social History Review, , vol. 12(3), pages 229-261, January.
    4. Vegard Iversen & Richard Palmer-Jones & Kunal Sen, 2013. "On the Colonial Origins of Agricultural Development in India: A Re-examination of Banerjee and Iyer, 'History, Institutions and Economic Performance'," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(12), pages 1631-1646, December.
    5. Latika Chaudhary, 2010. "Land revenues, schools and literacy," The Indian Economic & Social History Review, , vol. 47(2), pages 179-204, April.
    6. Abhijit Banerjee & Lakshmi Iyer, 2005. "History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(4), pages 1190-1213, September.
    7. C. A. Bayly, 1985. "State and Economy in India over Seven Hundred Years," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 38(4), pages 583-596, November.
    8. Alvaredo, Facundo & Bergeron, Augustin & Cassan, Guilhem, 2017. "Income concentration in British India, 1885–1946," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 127(C), pages 459-469.
    9. Lakshmi Iyer, 2010. "Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India: Long-Term Consequences," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 92(4), pages 693-713, November.
    10. Bagchi,Amiya Kumar, 1982. "The Political Economy of Underdevelopment," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521284042, November.
    11. Piketty, Thomas & Chancel, Lucas, 2017. "Indian income inequality, 1922-2014: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj ?," CEPR Discussion Papers 12409, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Roy, Tirthankar, 2014. "Geography or politics? Regional inequality in colonial India," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 88845, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Jordi Caum‐Julio, 2024. "Can colonial institutions explain differences in labour returns? Evidence from rural colonial India," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 77(1), pages 288-316, February.
    3. Chaudhary, Latika & Rubin, Jared & Iyer, Sriya & Shrivastava, Anand, 2020. "Culture and colonial legacy: Evidence from public goods games," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 173(C), pages 107-129.
    4. Colleoni, Marco, 2024. "The long-term welfare effects of colonial institutions: Evidence from Central India," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 166(C).
    5. Jain, Tarun, 2011. "Common tongue: The impact of language on economic performance," MPRA Paper 34423, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Misra, Kartik, 2019. "Does historical land inequality attenuate the positive impact of India’s employment guarantee program?," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 1-1.
    7. Rabah Arezki & Klaus Deininger & Harris Selod, 2015. "What Drives the Global "Land Rush"?," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 29(2), pages 207-233.
    8. Peter Lanjouw & Hai-Anh Dang, 2018. "Welfare dynamics in India over a quarter-century: Poverty, vulnerability, and mobility, 1987–2012," WIDER Working Paper Series 175, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    9. Aswini Kumar Mishra & Vedant Bhardwaj, 2021. "Wealth distribution and accounting for changes in wealth inequality: empirical evidence from India, 1991–2012," Economic Change and Restructuring, Springer, vol. 54(2), pages 585-620, May.
    10. Kumar, Rishabh, 2019. "The evolution of wealth-income ratios in India 1860-2012," SocArXiv sj6h2, Center for Open Science.
    11. repec:dau:papers:123456789/4300 is not listed on IDEAS
    12. Gaurav Datt & Martin Ravallion & Rinku Murgai, 2020. "Poverty and Growth in India over Six Decades," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 102(1), pages 4-27, January.
    13. Gan Jin & Günther G. Schulze, 2024. "Historical Legacies and Urbanization: Evidence from Chinese Concessions," CESifo Working Paper Series 10976, CESifo.
    14. Melissa Dell & Benjamin A Olken, 2020. "The Development Effects of the Extractive Colonial Economy: The Dutch Cultivation System in Java," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 87(1), pages 164-203.
    15. Mazumdar, Surajit, 2020. "The Coronavirus and India’s Economic Crisis: Continuity and Change," MPRA Paper 104969, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 20 Dec 2020.
    16. Thomas Blanchet & Ignacio Flores & Marc Morgan, 2022. "The weight of the rich: improving surveys using tax data," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 20(1), pages 119-150, March.
    17. Liu, Xianda & Hou, Wenxuan & Main, Brian G.M., 2022. "Anti-market sentiment and corporate social responsibility: Evidence from anti-Jewish pogroms," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 76(C).
    18. Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo, 2014. "Under the Thumb of History? Political Institutions and the Scope for Action," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 6(1), pages 951-971, August.
    19. Stelios Michalopoulos & Elias Papaioannou, 2020. "Historical Legacies and African Development," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 58(1), pages 53-128, March.
    20. Bukowski, Paweł, 2018. "How history matters for student performance: lessons from the Partitions of Poland," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 90643, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    21. Pim de Zwart & Jan Lucassen, 2020. "Poverty or prosperity in northern India? New evidence on real wages, 1590s–1870s," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 73(3), pages 644-667, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    colonialism; inequality; British Empire; South Asia;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • N15 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations - - - Asia including Middle East
    • N3 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:ehl:wpaper:90409. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: LSERO Manager on behalf of EH Dept. (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/chlseuk.html .

    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.