Syllabus and Assessment Scheme for Economic History of India

This course will look at the points of convergence between economic policies and the politics of
knowledge production in British India. The objective of the course is to explore and examine
how the colonial experience shaped and got shaped by the developments in the discipline of
political economy (and later economics). In that sense, it has a double purpose of introducing the
students to the histories of economic thought and the modes of economic governance in India.

Weeks 1 and 2: Property in the Colony

 Ranajit Guha, A Rule of property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement
(Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2017).
 Philip Francis, Original Minutes of the Governor-General and Council of Fort William on the
Settlement and the Collection of the Revenues of Bengal: With a Plan of Settlement, Recommended to the
Court of Directors in January, 1776 (London: J. Debrett, 1782).
 Eric Stokes, English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959).

Week 3: Disciplining Colonialism

 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (ElecBook
Classics, ND).
 Mark Donoghue, ‘Adam Smith and the Honourable East India Company’, History of
Economics Review (2020), 1-19.
 David Williams, ‘Adam Smith and Colonialism’, Journal of International Political Theory, Vol.
10, No. 3 (2014), 283-301.

Week 4: Numb and Number

 Bernard Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’, The
Bernard Cohn Omnibus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 224-54.
 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Number in the Colonial Imagination’ in Carol A. Breckenridge and
Peter van der Veer (eds.), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South
Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 314-39.

Week 5: The Space of the Economy

 Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Weeks 6 and 7: Discovery of an Indian Economy

  Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London: Swan Sonnenschein &
Co., 1901).
 M. G. Ranade, Indian Political Economy (New Delhi: Indian Economic Association Trust
for Research and Development, 2000 [1892]).
 Ajit Dasgupta, Gandhi’s Economic Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).

Week 8: Capitalism and Colonialism

 Report of the Indian Industrial Commission, 1916-18 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery
Office, 1919).
 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business strategies and
the working classes in Bombay, 1900-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Weeks 9 and 10: ‘The Working Class’ of India

 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986 [1887]).

 Sukomol Sen, Working Class of India: History of Emergence and Movement, 1830-1970
(Columbia, Missouri: South Asia Books), 1977.
 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890-1940 (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989).
 Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India (Calcutta: Government of India, Central
Publication Branch, 1931).

Assessment Scheme:
The course will have three assessments:
1. Class participation and presentation: 20 marks
2. Mid-term examination (mid-October): 40 marks
3. End-term examination (November-end): 40 marks