One morning in 1988, I accompanied my musician uncle to a friend of his in Kolkata. I did not know the person but casually offered to go with my uncle. On the way, he explained that the friend was an accomplished sitar player but had stopped playing. Why? He realized that no matter how hard he practised, he could never play as well as Vilayat Khan. What was the use of trying? At the time, I laughed. Later, the bizarre logic set me thinking. What do we want to happen when we listen to or play classical music?

2024 is the birth centenary of K.N. Raj, an economist who established the Centre for Development Studies (CDS) in Kerala, India, in the 1970s (where I did a doctorate). Raj, his friends, and CDS hold a special place in the history of social science education in India. Why? In the 1950s and 1960s, Indians with a doctorate (or just any degree) from Oxford or Cambridge easily got a top university teaching job if they returned to their country. The famous case was Amartya Sen, who joined Jadavpur University, Calcutta, as a full professor at 22.

The great debate in economic history for 20 years is almost dead, and it is instructive to ask why. The Great Divergence debate (phrased after a book title) re-examined Douglass North and R.P. Thomas's question in the 1970s: why are some countries rich and others poor? They were not the first. In another form, the question has existed since Karl Marx's time. 19th-century thinkers like Marx and Weber explored the origin of “capitalism” by asking why it emerged in Europe and not in Asia. Their facts were wrong, and answers obsolete by 1980.

Most social media discussions on the history of European colonialism in Asia and Africa are not about real history but about legends. A ‘legend’ is not history. It is a ‘normative definition’ of history (Bill Ellis), a statement about what the past must have been. A legend is not verifiable by facts. It draws its power from selective use of facts, not admitting contradictory facts and a belief about the past.

The root of the South Asian Miracle. Check these graphs, and note that an U-shaped path in relative performance was present across South Asia Most India experts think the economic growth resurgence in India since the 1990s happened because of policy shifts. In fact, a resurgence happened across South Asia and all countries, and these countries followed very different economic policies when it happened.

Reading now, Melvin Moses Knight’s classic article “Water and Empire in North Africa” (Quarterly Journal of Economics 1925). Melvin Knight, sometimes referred to as the economist Frank Knight’s brother, taught economic history at the University of California. With experience of the world thanks to service during World Wars, he specialized on the French Empire in Africa publishing a magnificent 50-page article in QJE. This was a time when econ journal editors could see the economics that really mattered to understanding material life.

The opinion that European imperialism was an evil political system imposed on Asia and Africa to exploit the people living there is a dangerous distortion of history. It is dangerous not because it is wrong but because it devalues the worth of honest historical research. How does it devalue scholarship? Friedrich von Hayek said in a speech to LSE students (1944) how economics in his time perverted discourses with ‘very strong views about subjects we do not understand.’

Who caused the Bengal Famine of 1770? British tax policy – say authors of best-selling history books. None in that set of writers is a serious historian or has reliable knowledge of Bengal’s history. Some passively recycle the anti-EIC rhetoric popular in the 1770s. Those who say a government caused the disaster have a primitive idea of why disasters happen. With a few exceptions, disasters do not happen because of the evil intentions of governments but (as in Covid), governments do not have the data, knowledge, and infrastructure to cope.

Published in India by Penguin The book shows how, vast quantities of monsoon rainwater were recycled in India in the last 150 years, reducing deaths from diseases and famines and sustaining agricultural and urban growth, at a significant cost to the environment.

Reading now: Maanik Nath, Capital Shortage: Credit and Indian Economic Development, 1920–1960 (Cambridge UP 2023). Answers why, despite the best efforts of the state to make credit cheap, peasants could make only limited investments in land improvement. From the nineteenth century, credit institutions changed in the Indian countryside in response to agricultural commercialization. For some, the changes were disturbing, and credit became a field of legislation and regulation.

Read Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson’s Slavery, Capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution (Polity, 2023). Two top historians tackle a fundamental and much-debated question in economic history: Did slavery contribute to the British Industrial Revolution? What is the debate about? On one side stand scholars who answer with a ‘yes’. The classic is the Trinidadian writer Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery. Williams made two points. First, economic calculations were overriding behind political (imperial) support for slavery in the British West Indies.

Finished Trevor Burnard’s magnificent Planters, Merchants, and Slaves (Princeton 2015). Most works in this crowded field study regions. The book sees the plantation system in the Atlantic ‘as a coherent whole, with close connections and structural similarities’ between regions. The British Empire in the Atlantic was committed to maintaining the slave trade since the mid-17th century. The American Revolution weakened the commitment while distancing Americans from increasingly negative British views on the trade.

Tamoghna Halder criticized one of my writings on 19th c Indian famines. (see developingeconomics.org). Halder’s text that distorts the debate on Indian famines, misreads data, wrongly implies I suppressed data, and does not cite earlier research. It demands a response. What is the famine debate about? There is a theory, call it A, that British colonial rule caused famines via its indifferent attitude to Indian suffering. Left-nationalist historians believe that story, some calling these events genocide. The story does not fit two facts.

Of all European accounts of India in 17-18 c., I find Thomas Bowrey’s the most interesting. Like others, Bowrey commented on Indian religion. That’s not novel. As a ship captain, he had first-hand knowledge of work, crafts, ports, prices, and trading places. That was novel. Little is known about Bowrey’s (1650-1713) early life. He may have been related to other better-known mariners. He was a ship captain (sailing master). Between 1669-1688, he commanded ships carrying Borneo pepper, and goods from Burma, Malaya, and Ceylon, into Madras.

Some people say that English education in India began in 19th c as an act of colonial social engineering designed by Thomas Macaulay, who said in an 1835 “minute” that the purpose of state aid to schools was to create a class who were Indians in looks but English in thoughts. Amateur writers cite this statement to suggest that colonialism created inequality by producing an Anglicized elite. This is wrong. Zareer Masani’s biography of Macaulay shows that the minute appeared when Indian elite wanted English education. They also led investment in schools

In 1944, a group of businessmen including JRD Tata and GD Birla, supported by an economist, published a plan for economic development of India for use when India became independent, which was imminent. The document became known as the “Bombay Plan.” The Plan outlined a “vision”. The key elements were higher investment rates, industrialization, infrastructure building, and a more prominent role for the state (“central directing authority”) in the development process. None of these was a new idea in the 1940s.

The discussion on Indian famine history keeps relapsing into a sterile debate on the mentalities of states. Did the British care? Did indigenous states care more? This is a useless set of questions for research. Mentalities of states cannot be defined. Mentalities did not matter. And we cannot test if it mattered with precolonial data or data on indigenous states. Only the British in India compiled enough information. Others did not.

Trade history is under-researched in India. Economic historians of India lived for a long time with the illusion that trade was bad, industrialization good. De-industrialization made them sad. They missed noticing a huge transformation in 20th c India – “de-commercialization”. In 1938, India was mainly a trading economy and a major trading power in the world. Asia was its main partner then. The ratio of India's trade to Asia’s trade was 1:10. The share of Indian export in Asian imports was possibly 20-30 %.

Text of a 5-minute talk recently. Will say more on the occasion later. The talk was around the question: How should we debate the British Empire? What is the debate about? A narrative in the media says that the empire’s aim was to repress and exploit its subjects, and it caused genocide in the process. Pay reparations! A historian who says “that story doesn’t quite fit the facts” faces a backlash: “Ah, apologist of evil, you love imperialism!”

Hickel’s “response” makes their claim that British colonial rule caused famines in India even weaker than it was before. Since a fuller critique is expected to appear in History Reclaim, I will discuss three points the longer article does not deal with. The strongest part of the response is that in the last quarter of the 19th c, death rate rose, and some of that rise was not due to the Deccan famines. The proximate cause was contagion. Common diseases (cholera and “fever”) and uncommon ones (plague) took a steadily heavier toll

Rural credit is an intriguing topic in economic history. Globalization in 19th c led to immense growth in demand for trade credit to move agricultural goods. That growth troubled administrators in British India, vexed economic historians, and left a legacy of unresolved problems. Banking grew. Laws regulated some firms. Others were called indigenous bankers. Indigenous banking was diverse. At the top end were reputed Marwari and Chettiar firms: urban, with rich clients, took deposits, did bills business with corporate banks, and charged modest interest