The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720-1800According to widespread belief, poverty and low standards of living have been characteristic of India for centuries. Challenging this view, Prasannan Parthasarathi demonstrates that, until the late eighteenth century, labouring groups in South India, those at the bottom of the social order, were in a powerful position, receiving incomes well above subsistence. The decline in their economic fortunes, the author asserts, was a process initiated towards the end of that century, with the rise of colonial rule. Building on revisionist interpretations, he examines the transformation of Indian society and its economy under British rule through the prism of the labouring classes, arguing that their treatment by the early colonial state had no precedent in the pre-colonial past and that poverty and low wages were a product of colonial rule. The book promises to make an important contribution to the economic history of the region, and to the study of colonialism. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Weavers and merchants 17201760 | 9 |
Agriculture and cotton textiles | 43 |
The cotton cultivation process | 62 |
The cotton trade in South India | 67 |
On the sources for trade 21 | 72 |
Notes on the cloth trade | 73 |
Other editions - View all
The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South ... Prasannan Parthasarathi No preview available - 2007 |
Common terms and phrases
adimai agriculture APSA Arcot Collectorate Records Baramahal Baramahal Records Bayly Bellary District Bengal black soils Board of Revenue British rule Ceded Districts chap cloth merchants cloth prices cloth production cloth quality cloth trade Coimbatore District colonial Commercial Resident Company servant Company's contract cotton cotton cultivation Cuddalore Consultations Cuddalore Council Deccan Delhi demand direct advances Dutch East India Company economic eighteenth-century South India English East India fanams Fort St FSDC FSGDC Godavari District Records grain head weavers incomes Ingeram intensive cultivation investment jagir jati kings laborers late eighteenth century late pre-colonial South longcloth looms Ludden Madapollam Madras Madurai manufactured Masulipatnam Masulipatnam District Records mobility Mysore Northern Sarkars OIOC pagodas pany political authority Prakash pre-colonial South India purchase seventeenth solidarity South Arcot Collectorate South Asia South India South Indian merchants spinning Tanjore textile Tinnevelly Tipu Tipu Sultan Trading World Vijayanagar Vizagapatnam wages weaver protests weaving villages yarn