This book investigates the roots of rapid economic growth of India in recent decades, by exploring historical processes from the late colonial period. Based upon decades-long archival and field research, this book deals with the period from the late nineteenth century to 2013 and offers an integral viewpoint of the economic history of India. While critiquing the conventional understanding that links recent economic growth only with the development of high-tech, export-oriented service sectors under the liberalised economy, the book suggests deeper and wider roots of development that had a cumulative effect in three stages. First, the agrarian development and rural socio-economic changes from the end of the nineteenth century. Second, the state-led import-substitution industrialisation since 1950 that established the industrial foundations for future economic growth. Third, the economic reforms since 1991 that helped technology-intensive industries find new markets with improved quality of production. For the first time available in English, this book by the late Professor Haruka Yanagisawa, who was a leading figure in the South Asia studies collective in Japan, is an important contribution to the academic tradition of economic history of India. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of social and economic history, sociology, anthropology and economies of South Asia.

The first systematic attempt to introduce a full range of Japanese scholarship on the agrarian history of British India to the English-language reader. Suggests the fundamental importance of an Asian comparative perspective for the understanding of Indian history.

Examining agrarian societies in colonial India, the papers in this collection include analyses of late 18th-century records on South India and North Bengal, and a look at the late colonial period. Statistical examinations provide a basis for a revised understanding of social mobility and land transfer, while a study of technology and labour absorption, a demographic approach to famines and epidemics, and a socio-political perspective of tenancy acts blend history and social science. Four chapters compare the Indian experience with those of Japan and other Asian countries, which the editors use to argue for the historical presence of internal forces of change in Indian agriculture, which has not been fully recognized in either Western or nationalist historiography. They suggest the fundamental importance of an Asian comparative perspective for the understanding of Indian history.