australian journal of international affairs (assortment)

234 Pages·2012·1.17 MB·English

by  i. d. derbyshire

Modem Asian Studies, 21, 3 (1987), pp. 521-545. Printed in Great Britain.
Economic Change and the Railways in North India, 1860-1914
I. D. DERBYSHIRE
University of Cambridge
M. D. MORRIS re-opened the debate on late nineteenth-century Indian economic
history with a brace of powerful, though conjectural, revisionist articles in 1963
1
and 1966. He questioned the then prevailing orthodoxy which viewed the late
nineteenth century as a period of increasing population pressure on the land
(exacerbated by the atrophy of handicraft production), of holding fragmentation,
declining per capita food availability, and inimical commercialization of
agriculture. This interpretation had seen the position of a narrow mercantile and
creditor elite improving, but the position of the mass of the rural population
deteriorating, as evidenced by the terrible famines of 1876— 80 and 1896—
2
1900. Morris, influenced by D. Kumar’s findings, contended that pressure on
the soil did not increase excessively; that the influx of imported cloths merely
skimmed off the broader increase in textile demand; and that agricultural output
per capita increased as a result of extensions to the cropped area, political peace,
growing regional specialization, and the increased sowing of valuable, high
yielding cash crops.
During the last two decades there has been a tremendous growth in studies of
Indian economic history, an increasing refinement in the tools of analysis and
narrowing of individual fields of study. The application of economic theory and
econometric methods has been most popular in the United States, the use of
sociological and structural concepts in
1
See M. D. Morris el al., Indian Economy in the igth Century: A Symposium (New Delhi, 1969); and M.

D. Morris, ‘Economic Change and Agriculture in 19th Century India’, Indian Economic and Social History

Review [IESHR], 3 (June 1966), 185-209. The most recent foray into the ‘Nationalist-Immiserationist’
(Neo-Marxist) and ‘Imperialist-Meliorist’ debate has been by Peter Robb proposing an empirical, non-

ideological ‘middle way’—P. Robb, ‘British Rule and Indian “Improvement” Economic History Review,
2nd Series, XXXIV, 4 (November 1981), 507-23.
2
D. Kumar, Land and Caste in South India (Cambridge, 1965), which first raised serious doubts
concerning de-peasantization and the creation of a novel pool of landless labourers.
0026-749X/87/0202-0907S05.00 © 1987 Cambridge University Press
India and Britain. Almost all provinces of the subcontinent have been the subject
3
of detailed scholarly studies. These works have necessitated a drastic re-
interpretation of the period between 1860 and 1914, and one which moves
significantly away from the immiserationist orthodoxy of Digby, Dutt and
4
latterly Bhatia and Whitcombe, and towards the meliorist allusions of Morris,
while noting the still slow rate of growth in India compared to that recorded in
Europe and the ‘late developing nations’, the impediments of the colonial nexus,
and the structural barriers to development that remained.
In short, it appears that per capita income improved perceptibly between 1860
and 1914 in most provinces of India—the seminal work of Moni Mukherjee put
5
the rise at 42% (0.64% per annum) —with the real value of agricultural
production per capita and per acre increasing. This was a period of expanding
commerce both inside India and with overseas markets—a ‘high noon’ period for
foreign merchants before mofussil agencies were boarded up during the later
1920s and the fly of
3
For South India, C. J. Baker, An Indian Rural Economy, i88o-ig$5—The Tamilnad Countryside (Oxford,

1984). For Bengal, B. B. Chaudhuri, Growth of Commercial Agriculture in Bengal: ty^y-igoo (Calcutta,

1964) and subsequent articles, and M. M. Islam, Bengal Agriculture 1920-46: A Quantitative Study

(Cambridge, 1978). For North India, E. Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India (Berkeley,

1971), and I. Stone, Canal Irrigation in British India (Cambridge, 1984). Western India, the locus for
Gandhi’s 1918 Kaira satyagraha, has been a particularly popular area for study, with M. B. McAlpin,

Subject to Famine (Princeton, 1983), and N. Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule: Agriculture and

Agrarian Society in the Bombay Presidency, 1850-1935 (Cambridge, 1985) important recent monographs.
In addition there are a large number of recent unpublished British and American theses which touch on
aspects of late 19th century economic change in the various provinces—Western India (S. Prakash, S. C.
Guha), Bengal (S. Bose), Central Provinces (C. Bates), United Provinces (P. J. Musgrave, S. Commander),
Bihar (C. Fisher), Punjab (S. Mishra). This ignores the even greater number of recent Indian theses. Only
the ‘Native States’ of Rajputana have been seriously neglected.

* W. Digby, Prosperous British India (London, 1901), R. C. Dutt, The Economic History of India in the
Victorian Age (London, 1906), B. M. Bhalia, Famines in India (Bombay, 1967), Whitcombe, ‘Agrarian

Conditions’. It was the findings of D. Kumar and the work ofB. S. Cohn and R. Frykenberg (Gunthur

District 1788-1848. Oxford, 1965, and Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History. Madison,

1969) on institutional structures, and of D. Thorner (Land and Labour in India. New York, 1962) on ‘de-
industrialization’ which first led to a questioning of the degree of economic transformation which occurred
during the 19th century. Then the crop production and national income studies of G. Blyn (.Agricultural

Trends in India, i8gi-ig4j. Philadelphia, 1966) and M. Mukherjee (National Income of India: Trends and

Structure. Calcutta, 1969) suggested amelioration between i860 and 1920, which encouraged more detailed
research by subsequent economic historians.
5
Mukherjee, National Income, p. 61.
overseas commerce was removed from an increasingly introspective and
1
protected Indian company.
Three key factors contributed towards this amelioration and the burgeoning of
commerce, which began tentatively after 1850, but which gained particular
momentum after 1880 and again after 1900. Firstly, there was the transformation
of the Raj from a fragile, expansionary ‘military occupation’ to a settled
governance over a pacified and consolidated subcontinent. An increasingly
effective and sophisticated administration, gradually reaching down to the
village level (with the training of patwaris) exceeded even that witnessed at the
seventeenth-century zenith of the Mughal empire. Peace (after 1857), improving
law and order, and the removal of petty internal tolls freed and decentralized
commerce, stimulated longdistance interregional transactions and fostered
agricultural expansion. Revenue jumma levels were lowered in real terms and
2
revenue distribution was improved as accumulated wisdom spread. The inam
perks of the traditional elite were progressively resumed, so that some
broadening of income distribution at its upper level was witnessed.
Secondly, there was the exogenous stimulus of a burgeoning market for
agricultural raw materials in industrializing Europe, which with the
contemporary iron and steam shipping revolution and the opening of the Suez
3
canal (1869) could now be supplied from an extended periphery.
Thirdly, there were infrastructural innovations within the subcontinent. Canal
irrigation gave life to a number of desiccated tracts in the Western Punjab and
Sindh, and augmented production in areas of existing agriculture in South India,
4
the United Provinces, the Eastern Punjab and the Deccan. Elsewhere, there is
evidence of growing state (famine year) and private investment in permanent
10
masonry wells, particularly after 1895. On land the spread of metalled roads
and bullock carts improved short-distance haulage, while the construction of
railways revolutionized longdistance transportation. By 1915 Rs 50,841 lakh had
been invested in an all-India track mileage of 34,235 miles, which surpassed the
rail networks of the African continent and China put together. The United
Provinces possessed 5,000 miles of railway track at this date—almost as many
miles of line as existed in the whole of contemporary China—and a network
11
density among the highest in the periphery. It is with the impact of railways
upon the rural economy of this large interior province that this article is
concerned.
♦ * *
It should first be noted, however, that before railways were introduced into the U
nited Provinces in 1860, there were already signs of expanding commerce,
population growth and cultivated acreage extensions, particularly from the mid-
1840s. Market connections with the recently annexed Central Provinces and the
Punjab were improving, bullock carts were replacing pack animals, canals were
being introduced into the western Doab and steamboats on to the Ganges below
12
Allahabad.

Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol 2, 1750-igyo [CEHI] (Cambridge, 1983), for the all-India
development of the canal network; C. Prabha, ‘District-Wise Rates of Growth of Agricultural Output—East

and West Punjab’, IESHR, 6, 4 (December 1969), 33350; and Stone, Canal Irrigation, for the impact of
canals in the Punjab and United Provinces (UP).
10
For example, see the comments of W. H. Moreland in the UP Season and Crop Report 1910/11 p. 4.
11
All-India railway mileage and capital investment figures are drawn from C. B. Dudley and M. D.
1
Morris, ‘Selected Railway Statistics for the Indian Subcontinent: 853— 1946/7’, Artha Vijnana 17
(September 1975), 187-298; the UP track mileage has been calculated from the Government of India

Publication, History of Indian Railways Constructed and in Progress (Simla, 1923); and African and
Chinese network totals from the Railway Yearbook (1916), pp. 48-g.
12
The Permanent and Temporary Settlement (A. Colvin, Allahabad, 1873) enquiry’s district reports

clearly bring out the expansionary nature of this period. The 1847 Select Committee Report on Sugar and

Coffee Planting in the East and West Indies and Mauritius (.Parliamentary Papers—PP—1847-8 XXIII);

and the 1855 North-Western Provinces Government’s [NWP] Report on a Project for a Railway in

Rohilcund (Selections from Records of Government, NWP, New Series, Misc. No. 12) outline the
expansion in the internal sugar and salt trade. Evidence on the switch from pack bullocks to carts is

available in W. P. Andrew, Indian Railways and their Probable Results (London, 1848). For the

introduction and spread of Ganges steamboats, see H. T. Bernstein, Steamboats on the Ganges (Bombay,

i960), and A. Brame, The India General Steam Navigation Company (London, 1900).
Secondly, it should be noted that the United Provinces formed a long settled and
densely peopled ‘perennial’ region of peasant farm production and commerce.
Patterns of cropping and marketing were inherited which varied both
subregionally and on individual farms with respect to holding sizes and family
numbers. In i860 the most ‘advanced’ subregion was the East UP, which lay
astride the Ganges river route to Calcutta and which enjoyed higher and more
reliable rainfall levels than the west of the province. Population densities, cash
crop ratios and commercial activities were thus highest in the eastern corner of
the province during the first half of the nineteenth century. The introduction of
railways—and of canal irrigation—to the Western Doab was dramatically to
reverse these positions during the half century after i860. It should be stressed,
however, that the ‘petite culture’ nature of agricultural production in North India
and the high prevailing demographic densities—with population increasing by
over 30% between 1840 and 1880—-meant that a very large proportion of
production remained subsistence orientated, with around 85% of the cropped
area placed under grains, and that room for manoeuvre remained limited.
Railways did, however, promise dramatically to disturb any equilibrium in North
Indian agricultural production by opening up a number of new marketing
possibilities and by exposing the economy to outside economic pressures. Pre-
rail North Indian commerce had previously been constrained both spatially and
temporally by the slow speed, seasonality and the high cost of traditional
transport technologies.
Only riverboats offered a cheap enough mode of carriage (see table
TABLE I
Average Transportation Charges (Per Maund Mile)
Carriage Capacity 1840s and 1850s 1870s 1900s
2.5 pies
Pack bullock 2 mds NA NA
1.0 pies *1.75 pies
2 bullock cart 20 mds NA
0.8 pies *1.25 pies
4 bullock cart 40 mds NA
River boat 100-1,000 mds
0.4 pies
(upstream) NA NA
0.25 pies 0.15 pies
(downstream) NA
0.65 pies 0.24 pies
Steamboat NA NA
3.500-7,500 mds
Railway train — 0-35 Ples 0.18 pies
* These returns refer to 1930 and are drawn from T. Prasad, The Organisation of the Wheat Trade in the

North-Western Region of the United Provinces (Allahabad, 1932), pp. 12-15.
5
i) to allow for substantial interregional trading in low value commodities.
Access to this mode of transportation was, however, spatially limited—
concentrated in particular in the East UP, where the chief navigable waterways
(the Ganges and Gogra rivers) were located. Upstream above Allahabad the
construction of the Ganges and Agra canals seriously reduced water levels in the
Jumna and Ganges rivers, rendering navigation in the western half of the
provinces increasingly difficult. Riverboat carriage was in addition risky,
seasonal (carriage being difficult at the height of the monsoon and during the
early summer ‘dry season’ in many places) and excruciatingly slow. Progress
was swiftest downstream, when at 40 miles a day, it would take only 20 days to
reach Calcutta from Allahabad. Upstream against the current boats needed
rowers and towing from along the bank, with the Calcutta to Allahabad journey
lasting—at 10 miles a day—between two and three months.
Overland transportation was equally slow and seasonal, but also extremely
costly. Pack bullocks, capable of carrying only two maunds and travelling at less
than ten miles a day, were the least efficient mode of pre-rail transportation. But
with political peace, declining pasturage and improving road communications
carriage by this means rapidly dwindled after 1840 and the great peripatetic
banjara transporters of the early British era took to settled agriculture in their
terai homelands, to local distribution and hawking around the increasingly
important periodic market network, or to the increasingly sophisticated internal
6
cattle trade. The use of pack animals became limited to parochial commerce in
backward tracts, such as the East UP and Central Oudh, or in the form of camels,
to the arid borderlands of Rajasthan. The speedier, more capacious and more
efficient bullock cart replaced the pack bullock for internal commerce within the
province and for longdistance carriage into Central India and the Punjab along
15
the recently constructed trunk roads . Cart carriage still, however, represented a
tardy and mostly costly transportation mode when compared with railways,
which were to follow. Carrying at rates of around one pie per maund mile, the
economic transportation of low and medium value commodities over long
distances was precluded.
In such circumstances pre-rail North Indian commerce remained constricted in
both time and space. There was first an eight-month trading season between
October and May, which encompassed the two principal kharif and rabi harvests,
but which avoided the tail of the ‘hot-dry season’ and the summer monsoons,
when both waterways and roads were in a treacherous condition, and during
which period both men and bullocks were required to till the fields as husbandry
demands peaked. Secondly, the United Provinces’ regular commercial relations
were limited to a semi-circle which extended just over one hundred miles into
Western Rajasthan, the Punjab, Central India and the Bihar, with a longer tongue
stretching eastwards down the Ganges to Calcutta. Commercial contact
westwards was severely constricted by high overland freight costs, as was the
marketing of low and medium value commodities, such as grain, oilseeds and
raw sugar. Thirdly, slow speed and the seasonality of trading dulled and limited
the possibility of responses by traders to temporary commercial opportunities in
distant markets.
These conditions fostered a commercial environment dominated at its higher
levels by large traders involved particularly in the more valuable trading lines,
16
but diversified and operating through chains of intermediaries. Price levels
varied substantially between different subregions, particularly for low value
crops; and specialization in such crop production remained limited. Railways
promised dramatically to alter this situation by offering cheap overland
transportation commencing in the fertile heart of doabs and cutting westwards
through Central India to Bombay and Karachi. In addition, they offered the
novelty of speed and the possibility of monsoon shipment, which might open up
new types of trading and encourage the development of a less stratified trading
community. Railways promised to have the most dramatic
15
For the relative efficiency of carts vis-a-vis pack bullocks—with the savings in daily loading and
unloading, wastage and fodder—and the 1840s ‘bullock cart revolution’ see, A. Guha, ‘Raw Cotton of

Western India: Output, Transport and Marketing, 17501850’, IESHR, 9, 1 (March 1972), 1-42.
16
These corresponded to the ‘great firms’ delineated by T. Timberg, The Marwaris: From Traders to

Industrialists (New Delhi, 1978), ch. 5. W. A. Hoey, A Monograph on the Trade and Manufacturers in

Northern India (Lucknow, 1880), part 2 gives the most detailed description of 19th century indigenous
commerce.
impact upon the western half of the United Provinces, which had previously
been landlocked, and upon low value commodities, for which it was able to offer
bulk shipment at specially low tariff schedules.
In practice railways faced a difficult first two decades of operation in North India
between i860 and 1880, meeting with competition from Ganges boatmen in
particular, who cut their freights (see table 1), with the situation being
17
exacerbated by the high rating policy of the early railway management. By the
mid 1880s, however, the last vestiges of competition from traditional
transporters in longdistance commerce has been overcome and railway freight
rates had fallen to low levels. By this date railways were exerting a considerable
influence over economic changes in the province.
The first and most visible influence of railways was upon provincial and regional
price levels for medium and low value goods. Spatial differences in regional
price levels narrowed as the UP economy was integrated and as all-India markets
18
in grain, oilseeds, sugar and cotton became established. Shipments of these
commodities were made over considerable distances in response to varying
harvest fortunes and cropping specializations. The creation of wide new markets
for lower value crops raised their prices disproportionately within interior
production areas. Thus during the period between i860 and 1914 there was a
broad upward movement in the Indian and North Indian price level, which
resulted partly from monetary factors, but also from this market expansion. The
prices of grain and oilseeds rose by over 60% in the United Provices between the
1860s and 1900s, those of raw sugar (gur) by 24%, poppy by 20%, and cotton,
which had enjoyed a pre-rail market outlet to Calcutta via the Ganges river, by
only 10%. Price rises were even higher within isolated subregions, such as North
Oudh, where the price of grain increased by 90% compared with only a 45% rise
19
in the already market connected East UP.
The opening up of new markets in and competition from suppliers in
17
See I. D. Derbyshire, ‘Opening up the Interior: The Impact of Railways upon the North Indian
Economy and Society, 1860-1914’ (PhD Cambridge, 1985), ch. 2.
18
The studies ofj. Hurd, ‘Railways and the Expansion of Markets in India, 18611921’, Explorations in