Despite the fact that Mahadev Govind Ranade was one of the first major economic thinkers of modern India, his seminal economic writings were not easily available for the last 70 years or so. Some of his economic essays were brought together in a book in 1898, which was reprinted in 1906 and 1920. The totality of his economic writings have been available only to those few who had access to the rare issues of the Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha where nearly all of them were published. The non-availability of his articles, addresses and reviews on economic problems has been widely felt in recent years as there has been renewed interest in the works of Ranade, Dadabhai Naoroji and other nationalist economists of the 19th century.
I have reproduced in this volume all but one of the essays from the earlier collection. The omitted essay dealt with "Local Government in England and India". I have included in the present volume his remaining nine economic essays, three book-reviews and two of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha memoranda on the Deccan Agriculturists Bill drafted by him. His only major economic writings which could not be included in this volume either because of lack of space or because of their non availability were: (i) A Revenue Manual of the British Empire in India: An Epitome of the Fawcett Committee Report of 1877; (ii) "Lectures on Trade and Commerce", delivered at Poona, 1873; (iii) Minute of Dissent to the Report of the Finance Committee, 1886; (iv) A Note on the Decentralization of Provincial Finance, 1894; (v) "Plea for Protection: Indian Sugar Industry", three articles contributed by Ranade to the Times of India, May-June 1899.
Article number 15 in this volume, "A Protest and a Warning Against the New Departure in the Land Assessment Policy", is incomplete since its last nine pages were missing from the Journal's issue available to me.
All articles, essays or book-reviews are given in the chronological order in which they were published.
In view of the wide diversity then and now, I have kept the spelling, punctuation, italics, capitalization of words, and place names as in the original in the text as well as in the quotations from the text in my introduction. Footnotes in the main text are as in the original. Also all page references within brackets in the introduction are to this volume.
In the end, I would like to express my thanks to Professor Sulabha Brahme, Professor Ravinder Kumar and Sucheta Mahajan for their help in acquiring xeroxed copies of some of the articles in this volume. My thanks are also due to Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee for helping in various ways and to Shri Baweja for typing the introduction. I am grateful to Professor J.S. Grewal and the Institute for Advanced Studies, Simla, for enabling me to stay at the Institute while drafting part of the introduction. As usual, Usha Chandra has contributed in multiple ways, including the editing of the introduction and the checking of the page- proofs of the entire manuscript.
This volume has been a labour of love for its publisher, Mr. B.P. Garg, and thanks are due to him for making this work available to the students of the intellectual, political and economic history of modern India.
British colonialism in India was fully structured during the 19th century-Indian economy was integrated with the British and world capitalist economy in a subservient position and India became a classical colony. Early 19th century Indian intellectuals took note of the many negative features of British rule. But ignoring these features and swallowing their patriotic pride and feelings, they supported British rule in the hope that Britain, economically the most advanced country of the world, would transfer its advanced science and technology and production techniques, its fast growing capital and its capitalist economic structure, organization and enterprise to India thus ushering in the industrial revolution and the development of its agriculture and industry. It was this potentiality of creating a modern industrial India which made many of them acclaim British rule as 'providential' for nearly 100 years and to support the British rulers during the Revolt of 1857.
But the consequences of colonialism were very different. India was gradually underdeveloped and impoverished. Its traditional handicrafts were ruined; modern industrial growth was delayed and stunted; Indian agriculture first stagnated and then entered a prolonged period of decline and ruin; large sectors of Indian economy-foreign trade, banking, plantations, transport, energy, modern industry and mining- came under foreign control. At the same time, an indigenous capitalist class did emerge during the second half of the 19th century even though it was cribbed and confined. What was perhaps more important, a nationalist intelligentsia took root during the same period.
The nationalist intelligentsia devoted its energies to diverse fields: politics, social and religious reforms, literature. But it was in the economic field that it excelled, for it was convinced that economic development constituted the essence, and the chief measure, of a nation's progress, that on economic progress depended progress in other fields.
The long-term trends and the inner contradictions of colonial economy began to mature and become apparent during the last quarter of the 19th century. The earlier expectations of the nationalist intellectuals remained unrealized. What is worse, instead of progressing the country appeared to regress economically. The intellectuals now began the effort to understand the reasons for these apparently strange and unexpected phenomena.
The nationalist intelligentsia set out to examine through the method of 'the concrete study of the concrete reality' the economic situation of the country, the nature of colonial rule and its impact on the Indian economy, and the quantitative and structural changes being brought about in it-in other words, to try to understand and analyses the causes of India's poverty, the nature of colonial exploitation and their relation to the structure of colonial economy and its inner dynamics. In this inquiry they fully utilized the historical experience of other countries as also contemporary economic theories. Gradually they developed a powerful critique of the economic condition of India and the role of British rule in its making, and of the primary or central contradiction between colonialism and the interests of Indian people.
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