Globalisation, factor prices, and poverty in colonial India

Abstract

Analytical accounts of South Asian economic history often suggest that the principal effects of nineteenth century globalisation on the region were deindustrialisation and agrarian expansion, and that deindustrialisation contributed to an increase in poverty despite agricultural growth. Available wage datasets show that artisans did relatively well and rural workers relatively worse in the period in question, suggesting that poverty did increase but deindustrialisation was an unlikely cause. I discuss the wage statistics to show this, and propose that, in order to complete the globalisation story, we need to consider three local factors: limits to deindustrialisation, limits to labour mobility, and limits to agrarian expansion. © Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd and the Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand 2007.