IBH MID TERM

NAME- ARYAN KAPOOR

ENROL.NO – M20BBA064S

For the following two millennia, from the end of the first millennium BC until the
commencement of British administration in India, India was one of the world's
greatest economies. The Mahajanapadas struck silver coins with punch marks
around 500 BC. Except for Tamilakam, which was controlled by Three Crowned
Kings, allies of the Mauryas, by 300 BC, the Maurya Empire had unified much of
the Indian subcontinent. For the majority of the period between the 1st and the
18th centuries, the Indian subcontinent had the biggest economy of any place on
the planet. By 1700, the Indian Subcontinent had surpassed Qing China and
Western Europe as the world's greatest economy, with a population of 24.2
percent and a quarter of global production. Up until the early 18th century, India
accounted for around 25% of world industrial production.During the Mughal
Empire, India's GDP surged, outpacing the previous 1,500 years of expansion.
The Mughals were in charge of constructing a vast road network establishing a
consistent currency, and bringing the kingdom together. The rupee, introduced by
Sur Emperor Sher Shah Suri, was accepted and standardised by the Mughals.
Until the 1720s, the Mughals struck tens of millions of coins, all of which were at
least 96 percent pure. India's agricultural and industrial products were in high
demand across the world, therefore the empire catered to it. Cities and towns
flourished under the Mughal Empire, which had a high degree of urbanisation (15
percent of its inhabitants resided in urban areas), making it more urban than
Europe at the time and British India in the nineteenth century. [80] Agra (in Agra
Subah) had a population of up to 800,000 people[81], while Dhaka (in Bengal
Subah) had a population of over one million. [82] The primary sector (which
includes agriculture) employed 64 percent of the workforce, while the secondary
and tertiary sectors employed 36 percent of the workforce. [83] In 1700, a bigger
percentage of the workforce worked in non-primary industries than in Europe;
65–90% of Europe's workers worked in non-primary sectors. According to Jeffrey
G. Williamson, India experienced deindustrialization in the second part of the
18th century as a result of the Mughal Empire's fall, and that British occupation
caused additional deindustrialization. According to Williamson, the decline of the
Mughal Empire reduced agricultural productivity, which increased food prices,
then nominal wages, and finally textile prices, costing India textile market share
even before Britain developed factory technology, though Indian textiles
maintained a competitive advantage over British textiles until the nineteenth
century. Several post-Mughal states, according to Prasannan Parthasarathi, did
not decline. Other colonial nations' imperialism was more pragmatic than
Britain's. It was driven by financial considerations rather than religious
convictions. There were numerous types of British interests. The primary goal
was to acquire a monopoly trade position at initially. Later, it was thought that a
free-trade policy would turn India into a significant market for British goods and a
source of raw resources, but British businessmen who invested in India or
supplied banking or shipping services there continued to enjoy monopolistic
advantages. A significant percentage of the British upper middle class found
exciting and lucrative work in India, and the remittances they brought home
contributed significantly to the economy. Britain's balance of payments and
saving capacity. After all, control of India was a key element in the world power
structure in terms of geography, logistics, and military personnel. The British
were not averse to Indian economic development as it expanded their markets, but
they refused to help in areas where they saw a conflict with their own economic
interests or political security. Therefore, they refused to provide protection to the
Indian textile industry until its main competitor became Japan instead of
Manchester, and did next to nothing to further develop technical training. They
introduced some British concepts of property, but did not take them too far when
they learned Western self-interest capitalism. The beneficiaries of these new
rights varied in 4,444 different parts of India. The top layer of Mughal property,
the Jagir, was abolished (except in the autonomous princely states) and most of
the former aristocracy of warlords was expropriated. Its 4,444 former land income
and that of the Mughal state have now been allocated by the 4,444 Britons as
property tax. However, under the Bengali Presidency (i.e. modern Bengal, Bihar,
Orissa and Madras part ) the second tier of Mughal property rights of Mughal tax
collectors (zamindars) was strengthened (20). All zamindars in these areas now
had hereditary status provided they paid their property taxes in and their judicial
and administrative functions disappeared (21). In the Mughal period of , the
Zamindars normally kept a tenth of the land's income, but at the end of British rule
in , their rental income was many times the taxes they paid to the state. In Bihar ,
for example, five sixths of the total up to 1950 were rentals and only one sixth was
income. However, the Zamindars were not really the equivalent of Western
landowners. The ruling families in each village remained their "tenant chief" and
continued to enjoy many of the old customary rights, i. Lower caste families used
to be subtenants of the tenant chief and not 4,444 direct tenants of the zamindars.
Often times, there were multiple changes between the actual cultivator and the
Zamindar. Subtenants had less security and less defense against renting shelves
than 4,444 head tenants. It is worth noting that when Zamindari rights were
abolished around 1952 and the 4,444 old Zamindar leases were converted to state
revenue, that amount only accounted for about 2. percent of farm income in
relevant areas of India. This suggests that at the end of the colonial period, the
Zamindars were unable to squeeze as much excess from their main tenants as is
sometimes suggested. The typical Zamindari estate at the end of the British rule
looks very different from the one at the end of the 18th century. In Bengal, "the
total number of owners, which did not exceed 4,444 at the beginning of the
Hastings government in 1772, increased from 4,444 to 154,200 over the course of
a century." In 1872 there were 154,200 properties, of which “533, or 0.34 percent,
are only 4,444 large properties with an area of 20,000 acres or more; 15,747, or
10.21 percent, ranges from 500 to 4,444 20,000 acres of land; while the number of
lands under 500 acres is not less than 4,444,137,920, or 89.44 percent of the total
The British were more concerned with arrangements that would secure their
income and would not cause too much political unrest than to increase
productivity or introduce capitalist institutions. The utilitarians who dominated
Company from 1820 to 1850 would have liked to have been pushed in that
direction, but they were driven out by the paternalistic conservatives of the Raj
Empire in the mid- century. However, there were some economic consequences
of the new legal situation. Due to the appearance of 4,444 clear titles, it was now
possible to pledge land. The status of lenders also improved with the change
from Muslim to British law. There were moneylenders in Mughal times in , but
their importance grew considerably under British rule, and over time a
considerable amount of land changed hands through foreclosures Irrigation, there
was considerable private investment and was covered until , the Britain's end to
rule private investment in irrigation of nearly 25 million acres in British India.
Improvements in transportation facilities (especially railways, but also
steamboats and the Suez Canal) helped agriculture by allowing a certain degree
of specialization in cash crops. This increased yields a bit, but most of the land
was devoted to subsistence farming. The 4,444 plantations were developed for
indigo, sugar, jute, and tea. These items contributed significantly to the exports,
but they were not very important in the context of the Indian agriculture as a
whole. The biggest change in the British social structure was to replace the
aristocracy of the warlord with an efficient bureaucracy and army. The
traditional system of the East India Company was to pay their servants relatively
modest salaries and have them supplement their income with private transactions.
This arrangement worked quite well before the conquest of Bengal, but it was
inefficient in rewarding the officials of a sizeable territorial empire because (a) too
too much profits went into private hands rather than into the coffers of society, and
(b ) a predatory short-term policy of more than damaged the productive capacity
of the economy and probably incited local populations to rebel, which went
against the long-term interests of society. From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British
demonstrated a strong drive to transform India's social institutions and
Westernize India.5 They eradicated the murder of children and the ritual burning
of widows (sati). They abolished slavery and cleared dacoits (religious thugs)
from the roads. They legalized the remarriage of widows and allowed Hindus
converts to Christianity to claim their share of 4,444 common family estates.
They took steps to introduce a penal code (the code was actually , which was
introduced in 1861) based on British law, which helped instill some notions of
equality. According to your old Hindu law , a Brahmin murderer should not be
killed, while a Sudra who lived with a high-profile woman would be executed
automatically. Under the new law, the Brahmins and Sudra were punished in the
same way for the same crime. The Macaulay Education Act, which dates back to
1835, was a decisive influence on British educational policy and is a classic
example of a Western rationalist approach to Indian civilization. Before the
British took power, the language of the Mughal court was Persian, and the
Muslim population of 4,444 used Urdu, a mixture of Persian, Arabic, and
Sanskrit. Higher education in was primarily religious and emphasized mastery of
Arabic and Sanskrit. Various Indian authors have argued that British rule
resulted in the deindustrialization of India. RC Dutt argued, “India was a great
industrial and agricultural country in the 18th century, and the Indian loom
products supplied the markets of Asia and Europe. It is sadly true that in the early
years of British rule, the East India Company and the British Parliament,
following the selfish trade policy of a hundred years ago, discouraged Indian
manufacturers from promoting England's flourishing manufactures. His firm
policy, in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the
nineteenth, provides material for the looms and manufactures of Great Britain.
Mughal India had a larger industry than any other country that became a European
colony in and was unique in that it was an industrial exporter in pre-colonial
times. Much of Mughal industry was destroyed in during British rule. They
peaked in 1798 and still amounted to £ 2 million in 1813, but fell rapidly in (52).
Thirty years later, half of India's imports were cotton textiles from Manchester.
This collapse of India's major exports created a problem for the company, which
had to find ways to convert its rupee income into resources transferable to the UK.
Therefore, company promoted the export of raw materials on a larger scale,
including sugar, silk, saltpeter, and indigo , and greatly increased exports of
opium, which were traded in exchange for Chinese tea. These drug trafficking
efforts led to the Anglo-Chinese War of 1842, which greatly expanded access to
the Chinese market. In the mid-19th century, opium was by far the largest
exporter in India. There has been much controversy among statisticians regarding
the income growth in India during the colonial period. The argument is politically
colorful and the statistics are bad. there could not have been much net progress in
real per capita income before the development of railways, modern industry,
irrigation and the great expansion of international trade, and there are reasons to
believe that there was some decline has been. However, there were significant
changes in the social structure and in the pattern of production in . The social
pyramid was shortened because the British cut off most of the top three tiers of the
Mughal hierarchy, that is, the Mughal court, the Mughal aristocracy and the quasi-
autonomous prizes (of which a quarter have survived), and the local chiefdom
(zamindars who have survived in about 40 percent of India). In place of these
people, the British installed a modern bureaucracy that took on a smaller 4,444
share of the national income. The newcomers had a more modest lifestyle than the
Mughals, , but took much of their savings out of the country and offered almost no
market for India's luxurious handicrafts. The modern industrial sector they created
produced only 7.5% of the national income at the end of British rule and therefore
did little more than replace the old luxury crafts and some of the village's textile
production. The British lowered the tax burden on agriculture and turned warlords
into landowners, but the new order had little dynamism. Much of the old
vagueness of property rights remained, and owners were still largely parasitic.
The greatest zamindars copied the Mughal lifestyle by maintaining hordes of
servants and huge mansions, the ambition of the smallest landowner was to quit
working and improve his ritual purity by establishing a shabby kindness. Very few
incentives have been given for investment and almost nothing has been done to
promote technical changes in agriculture. At the bottom of society, the position of
tenant farmers and landless peasants remained miserable. In urban areas a new
westernized "middle class" of Indians emerged and became the biggest challenge
for the British Raj.