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 Rethinking Economic Change in India
South Asia, home to a quarter of the world’s workforce, has in recent years experienced
economic growth and unprecedented levels of global integration. Despite this, there
continues to be a large disparity in income. Rural poverty remains acute and extensive
and manual labourers still constitute the majority of India’s poor.
Rethinking Economic Change in India explores the historical roots of India’s high
levels of poverty by placing labour history in the context of economic change within the
region. Roy departs from the commonly used political-economic approach to the labour
history of India, and considers the role of markets and resources in shaping the condition
of rural labour, the transition in the economic position of women, the condition of
informal labour in Indian industry and labour-intensive industrialization
This highly original, thought-provoking book will prove invaluable to students
studying labour economics, economic history and economic development in
contemporary India as well as for academics interested in the field.
Tirthankar Roy has established himself as the leading contemporary economic
historian of India and his 2000 book, The Economic History of India, 1857–1947 has
proved to be hugely influential.
Routledge explorations in economic history
1 Economic Ideas and Government Policy
Contributions to contemporary economic history
Sir Alec Cairncross

2 The Organization of Labour Markets

Modernity, culture and governance in Germany, Sweden, Britain and Japan
Bo Stråth

3 Currency Convertibility
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4 Britain’s Place in the World

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5 France and the International Economy

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Frances M.B.Lynch

6 Monetary Standards and Exchange Rates

M.C.Marcuzzo, L.Officer and A.Rosselli

7 Production Efficiency in Domesday England, 1086

John McDonald

8 Free Trade and its Reception 1815–1960

Freedom and trade: volume I
Edited by Andrew Marrison

9 Conceiving Companies
Joint-stock politics in Victorian England
Timothy L.Alborn

10 The British Industrial Decline Reconsidered

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11 The Conservatives and Industrial Efficiency, 1951–1964

Thirteen wasted years?
Nick Tiratsoo and Jim Tomlinson
 12 Pacific Centuries
Pacific and Pacific Rim economic history since the 16th century
Edited by Dennis O.Flynn, Lionel Frost and A.J.H.Latham

13 The Premodern Chinese Economy

Structural equilibrium and capitalist sterility
Gang Deng

14 The Role of Banks in Monitoring Firms

The case of the Credit Mobilier
Elisabeth Paulet

15 Management of the National Debt in the United Kingdom, 1900–1932

Jeremy Wormell

16 An Economic History of Sweden

Lars Magnusson

17 Freedom and Growth

The rise of states and markets in Europe, 1300–1750
S.R.Epstein

18 The Mediterranean Response to Globalization Before 1950

Sevket Pamuk and Jeffrey G.Williamson

19 Production and Consumption in English Households 1600–1750

Mark Overton, Jane Whittle, Darron Dean and Andrew Hann

20 Governance, The State, Regulation and Industrial Relations

Ian Clark

21 Early Modern Capitalism

Economic and social change in Europe 1400–1800
Edited by Maarten Prak

22 An Economic History of London, 1800–1914

Michael Ball and David Sunderland

23 The Origins of National Financial Systems

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24 The Russian Revolutionary Economy, 1890–1940

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Vincent Barnett
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Edited by Stanley L.Engerman and Jacob Metzer

26 An Economic History of Film

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27 The Foreign Exchange Market of London

Development since 1900
John Atkin

28 Rethinking Economic Change in India

Labour and livelihood
Tirthankar Roy
Rethinking Economic Change in
India
Labour and livelihood

Tirthankar Roy

LONDON AND NEW YORK

 First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York,
NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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© 2005 Tirthankar Roy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been
requested

ISBN 0-203-02310-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-34989-3 (Print Edition)

For Morris David Morris
 Contents

List of figures x
List of tables xi
Preface xiii

1 Introduction 1
2 Economic history and modern India: redefining the link 23
3 Rural labour and colonialism 44
4 Agricultural labour: lessons from wage data 74
5 Was there an industrial decline in India in the early nineteenth century? 92
6 Labour-intensive industrialization 103
7 Women and industrialization 116
8 Women in the crafts 131
9 Labour and power: a critique of ‘subaltern studies’ 143
10 Conclusion 154

Notes 158
References 165
Index 174
 Figures

1.1 Wage labour in India, 1901–2001 8

2.1 Land and real agricultural income (1865=100) 41

2.2 Real yield per acre and person (1865=100) 42

3.1 The hypothesized relationship between density of population and 60

labour-ratio

3.2 Density (acres) and labour-ratio (%), 1901–31 72

3.3 Density (acres) and labour-ratio (%), 1951 72

4.1 Average wage (Rs/month) 76

4.2 Wage rates, 1920–51 81

4.3 Agricultural labourers: number and earning, 1950–64 (1950=100) 82

 Tables

2.1 Employment, 1901–91 28

2.2 Production and wages 31

2.3 Growth rates of Net Domestic Product (NDP) and Population, 37

1868–69 to 1946–47

2.4 Sources of growth in real GDP, 1900–47 42

3.1 Labour-ratio, 1881–1931 53

3.2 Labour-ratio of women (%), 1901–31 54

3.3 Labour-ratio by major region, 1901–51 55

3.4 Labourers and labour-ratio in the Indian Union, 1951–91 57

3.5 Land-population ratios, 1891–1931 63

3.6 Diverse transitions consistent with increase in labour-ratio 70

4.1 Money and real wage in agriculture, 1873–1951 76

4.2 Real wage in major provinces, 1873–1912 77

4.3 Major factors affecting demand for and supply of agricultural 83

labour

4.4 Share of wages in agricultural income 85

4.5 Shares in employment and income: agricultural labour and the 86

artisan sector

4.6 Weighted average money and real wage of agricultural labourers 91

in British India
6.1 Measures of industrialization in India, 1901–39 106

6.2 Contributions of large scale and small scale in Indian 107

industrialization, 1901–39

7.1 Women workers, 1901–91 119

7.2 Gender and industrial organization, 1961 120

7.3 Women-worker ratio (%) in manufacturing, 1961 121

 Preface

South Asia, home to perhaps a quarter of the world’s workforce, has seen rapid economic
growth in some spheres and persistence of poverty and underdevelopment in others. The
poor, almost without exception, live on manual labour, which continues on a large scale
in the region. What factors account for poverty in this sphere? What conditions enable
attempts to escape poverty? This book tries to answer these two questions. It presents a
brief general history of labour-intensive occupations in South Asia c. 1870–1970, with
specific reference to rural labour, artisans and women workers.
Any general narrative on labour needs to be a historical narrative, for occupational
structure in South Asia has changed rather slowly in the long run. Economic historians in
the region have often attributed the inertia in conditions of labour to various forms of
inequality and repression, including, and especially, those sustained by colonialism. Such
an approach, besides being overly political, underestimates the capacity of individuals to
make a difference by utilizing opportunities offered by expanding market transactions.
This book follows a different route. It explains the stable element in the labour
experience with reference to resource endowments. The balance between natural
resources and labour, and the prospect of diminishing returns to labour, can explain the
low average earnings in which large numbers of the working poor remained trapped for a
long time. The dynamic element is explained with reference to a process of marketization
of labour. This latter process encouraged attempts to break out of poverty and raise
returns to labour by reallocating work between places, occupations and institutions.
The roots of these ideas go back to 1999, when I began writing a textbook on the
economic history of India. I embarked on the task with a broadly sceptical attitude
towards the then-dominant political narratives of Indian economic history. I made a
somewhat clearer statement of the issues in an article published in the Journal of
Economic Perspectives in 2002. The article forms the raw material for Chapter 2. The
editors and readers of the journal who handled the article contributed greatly to
sharpening its style and content. A more recent opportunity to polish these ideas
presented itself when I taught, for the second time, a course in economic history at the
Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics. I was now armed with a typescript and a
captive audience on which to practise. The graduate students who took the course
probably regretted the decision; at any rate, the exercise produced a second attempt at
summing-up that appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly.
Chapters in this book, or fragments thereof, were presented in seminars at the
University of Iowa, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Osaka University, the
International Congress of Historical Sciences at Oslo, Labour History Association of
India, Overseas Development Group of the University of East Anglia and the
International Congress of Economic History at Buenos Aires. I wish to thank my hosts in
these institutions, and colleagues and co-panelists who took part in the exchange of ideas
on these occasions. In particular, I am grateful to Paul Greenough, Santhi Hejeebu,
Jiürgen Kocka, Prabhu Mohapatra, Nitya Rao, Kunal Sen, Ajit Sinha and Kaoru
Sugihara. André Gunder Frank, Ramachandra Guha, Douglas Haynes, G.N.Rao, Suresh
Tendulkar and Michael Twomey read specific chapters or the whole typescript and made
extensive and painstaking comments. Their response to the work encouraged me, but also
made its limits more apparent. Discussions with Alice Thorner on the history of women’s
work were illuminating. Her gracious invitation to me to deliver the Daniel Thorner
memorial lecture in 2000 was in a way the genesis of Chapter 5. Uma Kelekar provided
valuable support as research assistant.
Finally, I am grateful to Sudakshina Roy and Mrinmoyee Roy for forgiving me, most
of the time, for returning late from the office on the excuse of writing this book. They
make this labour worthwhile.
Tirthankar Roy
Pune
January 2005
 1
Introduction

The aim of the book

For some time past, the traditionally slow-moving South Asia has engaged the attention
of development economists for having achieved appreciable economic growth. Along
with respectable rates of growth, the region has seen unprecedented globalization with
respect to consumption, capital, knowledge and information. The economist’s response to
these events and the rapidity of the change is usually positive, even celebratory. In the
process, those livelihoods are often overlooked in which the journey from poverty to
well-being, from tradition to modernity, has been agonizingly slow.
For example, manual labour, which provides living to millions of individuals in
agriculture and manufacturing, has not seen significant growth in average earnings. Rural
poverty remains acute and extensive. The work that women perform in the informal
labour market is usually manual and low paying. Possibly as much as a quarter of the
workforce, in this way, is engaged in poorly paid work. Individuals with poor
endowments of capital or knowledge crowd these markets. Many amongst these
individuals are women, and many are to be found in rural India. Not only has this sphere
not shrunk, through much of the twentieth century it expanded. It expanded during a
time-span that saw a veritable revolution in development strategy—from market-led in
colonial India, to state-led during a long socialist interlude, and back to the market at the
end of the twentieth century.
So tenacious and so resistant to the devices of experts and ideologues, this sphere has
not been passive after all. On the one hand, manual labour and poverty remained
impervious to a whole basket of interventions because there were forces working towards
intensification. These forces were too strong for the state or the civil society to master.
But, on the other hand, the subjects themselves adapted to these forces by means of a
variety of strategies, sometimes political, usually market-mediated.
A coherent narrative of this complex process must be a historical narrative. If we
cannot answer the question why poverty persists in South Asia without investigating
conditions of labour, then we cannot investigate conditions of labour without going back
to the past. Over much of the twentieth century, the more things changed in terms of new
income opportunities, the more they remained the same in terms of the structure of
employment. Manual, unskilled, unorganized, insecure, informal and earning a wage that
changes slowly and is not indexed—these characteristics seem to define the rural
labourer, the worker in small-scale industry, and the majority of women workers, in 2000
almost as well as in 1880. The factors that shaped India’s occupational structure were at
work over that long a period.
But even as the standards of living of ordinary workers changed little in the long run,
labour institutions changed. If we take a sufficiently long view, they changed
 Rethinking economic change in India 2

dramatically. The proportion of wage-labourers in the workforce increased through much

of the twentieth century. Landlessness increased. The proportion of women among rural
labourers increased, and that among manufacturing workers fell. The family as a work-
unit weakened both in agriculture and in industry. From the early twentieth century, a
traditional bond between agricultural labour and a range of rural services began to break
up. Likewise, the customary forms of attached labour and long-term contracts began to
weaken. Occupational choice became more market-driven. Spot markets for labour came
to rule the countryside by the third quarter of the twentieth century. In short, through the
long run, even as manual, unskilled and poorly paid labour dominated the working
situation in India, the work-sites, work arrangements and modes of labour allocation by
families changed. These movements were not always a matter of choice. But sometimes
they did have the character of deliberate attempts to resist marginalization.
Why does manual labour persist in India? Why have wages, and therefore average
standards of living, changed slowly? Why does poverty persist? What factors account for
changes in employment conditions? What are these changes? This book contains a set of
chapters that try to answer these questions and offer a coherent story on labour. The
chapters are held together by the argument that whereas the balance between land and
labour explains to a large extent the persistence of poverty, a growing market for wage
labour enabled attempts to escape resource constraints by means of reallocation of work
between places, occupations and institutions. Within the world of the rural labourer, there
were cases of gainful shift even as the aggregate resource conditions turned adverse.
Among other groups, the artisans of interwar India represent a significant example of
gainful reallocation. Cultural factors shaped access to new opportunities, however. This is
most clearly seen in the difference between the experiences of men and women. This
book also argues that Indian historiography, either of economic change or of labour, does
not answer these questions adequately. And it investigates the reasons behind this
deficiency.
I use the term ‘labour’ in this book to refer to the worker, to labour time and, perhaps
most frequently, to occupations intensive in manual labour, according to context. Each of
these senses is quite broad. However, the groups of people who figure in this story are
more well-defined. Three overlapping groups dominate this narrative: rural wage
labourers, artisans and women workers in agriculture or industry. When trying to describe
the big picture, the reference period is approximately a century marked on one side by the
1870s when significant agrarian expansion began in the region, and on the other side the
1970s when a second agricultural revolution took shape. British Crown rule in India
(1858–1947) overlapped with the period of study to a large extent, so that colonialism
enters this narrative frequently. However, when dealing with parts of the detailed picture,
the reference period varies and is specified according to the context. I use the terms
‘South Asia’ and ‘India’ inter-changeably if the reference is to a time prior to 1947. But
these terms mean different regional units if the reference is post-1947.
Few sources of occupational statistics now extensively used in the region have a long
memory. The key stylized facts of the book are gathered from a source that has been
neglected, even discredited, in recent economic and historical scholarship—the
occupational statistics of the Indian censuses. Started in 1881, the decennial censuses
yield data that a historian of occupations cannot afford to miss. But problems of
definitional changes between censuses have led to their remaining underused, perhaps
 Introduction 3

increasingly so. The problems are not trivial. But having had a random and transient
character, these problems are not good arguments for dismissing observed patterns of
change that lasted a century or nearly that long. Furthermore, in some cases, big stylized
facts drawn from the censuses can be partially cross-checked with other datasets. The
case for a return to the census, and making use of its long recall, is a sound one.
The rest of this chapter is divided into three sections. The first takes up the principal
stylized facts and explanations thereof, that is, outlines the ‘big picture’ of economic
change and what role manual labourers played in it. The second section presents a
selective overview of existing historiography. And the third contains a chapter summary.
Since some of the chapters were originally written as independent essays, and yet all the
chapters are driven by a single research agenda, by linking them, the third section
performs more than a cosmetic role.

The narrative

Why poverty continued

From as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, conditions of work in India
began to change, possibly at a more rapid pace and on a larger scale than at any time
before. Conditions of work changed under the influence of two largely exogenous forces:
globalization and institutional change. How did these two forces reshape levels of living
and modes of working? In reviewing the effects of globalization on labour, it is useful to
distinguish between three periods of time: 1820–70, 1870–1930 and 1930–70.
Integration of India in the expanding world economy had mixed effects on the labour-
intensive occupations: decline of traditional industry on the one hand and expansion of
agriculture on the other. India experienced the Industrial Revolution at first in the form of
a long decline in the average price of manufactures. In principle, this should depress
demand for labour in industry, increase supply of labour to agriculture, and depress
wages in both sectors.1 The few studies that exist on real wages of agricultural workers in
the period 1820–70, the peak period of ‘de-industrialization’, have not found a
discernible trend (Chapter 4). Nevertheless, relative returns may have changed. If real
wages did remain roughly stable in the middle two quarters of the nineteenth century, the
wage-rental ratio began to fall. For, real rates of land rent (and land prices which
maintained a roughly stable relationship with rent) increased in most regions of India
throughout the colonial period.2 Such a trend, if it occurred, would be consistent with the
fact that India was a relatively land-rich and capital-scarce economy. On the other hand,
the stable trend in real wages, despite growth in land-intensive exports, probably derived
from the limited penetration of the labour market in rural areas in this period.
From the middle of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution began to exercise
more positive effects. Demand for agricultural exports from India increased substantially,
and new sources of demand for labour, such as mills, plantations, public works and
emigration overseas, had emerged. According to the best estimates available, agricultural
income grew at an average rate of 1.1 per cent per year between 1865 and 1910, which
was close to the average that contemporary industrializing economies experienced.3 To
meet the agrarian expansion, either more land was necessary or more investments were
 Rethinking economic change in India 4

necessary to raise the yield of land. Yield per acre changed little in India as far as we can
gather (Blyn, 1966, the dataset refers to 1891–1946). But idle land there was in the late
nineteenth century. The reduction in demand for labour and capital in some segments of
the economy, and the growth in demand in some others, meant that capital and labour
needed to become more mobile, which they could in the late nineteenth century because
of the growth of railways and communication network. The infrastructure revolution
reduced the costs of reallocation of inputs in this period.
Did the negative effects outweigh the positive ones and thus trigger impoverishment?
Although some datasets suggest an absolute wage depression in rural India between 1870
and 1910, the evidence is unreliable (Chapter 4). Employment intensity of work surely
increased in this time-span due to expansion in land area. More reliable data show that
between 1900 and 1927–28, real wages of non-agricultural workers increased
substantially (Sivasubramonian, 2000:264–78), and so did agricultural wages (Chapter 4).
At least for a substantial part of the period 1870–1930, the net effect was positive for
labour. Significantly, the major difference between the mid-nineteenth century and the
late-1920s was in the extent of marketization of labour. The choices before the casual
worker in the rural areas were considerably greater towards the end of the period than at
its beginning, which may have rendered wages increasingly more flexible and less
custom-bound. Wage-rental ratio does not appear to have changed much in the first
quarter of the twentieth century. These trends would imply two things: (a) a substantial
increase in demand for labour in agriculture, and (b) a slowdown in the decline in
demand for labour in industry. It is even possible that the first caused the second, at least
partly.
Consolidation of property rights in land through a series of ‘settlements’ was the other
major exogenous factor shaping rural economic change in colonial India. In pre-colonial
India, rights in relation to land had at least four distinct layers: rights to own, rights to
control or collect taxes, rights to cultivate and rights to the commons. Of these four
layers, British reforms recognized and greatly privileged one layer, proprietary rights,
while suppressing, or at best leaving poorly specified, the others. The reforms, in other
words, potentially increased the insecurity of tenure for many while at the same time
making some rights to assets secure, saleable and creditworthy. It encouraged
participation of peasants in markets for land and credit, and increased the vulnerability of
many to market risks. More exposure to the world market or the local (largely informal
and imperfect) capital market increased aggregate risks.
Did these risks intensify poverty in India? In perhaps the mainstream view of history,
shared by Indian historians as well as some members of the colonial bureaucracy, the
risks of credit default were indeed unsustainable and led to increasing land transfers from
the poor peasants to the rich (see Chapter 3 for discussion and references). Increased
asset inequality should lead to growing landlessness, which did occur in colonial India.
But did increasing asset inequality also depress wages and thus lead to growing poverty?
Although the new owners of land would still need the same quantity of labour, in reality,
their monopolistic control of consumption credit might lead to more adverse terms for the
new wage workers. Yet, the significance of institutional change and credit-based
exploitation is perhaps overstated and misunderstood in historical scholarship. Land
transfers occurred at both ends of the distribution, and not only from the poor to the rich.
Legal reforms, for example, de-recognized rights to control land, which affected some
 Introduction 5

members of the pre-colonial landed elites adversely. Further, while landlessness did
increase, it increased long after commercial expansion began and, curiously, affected
women more than men.
The beginning of the rise in landlessness coincided with the exhaustion of land supply
and demographic transition in India, approximately in the decade 1921–31. Population
growth rates accelerated and continued to accelerate until 1971–81. From the 1920s until
the 1970s, real wages of agricultural workers changed rather little, and wage-rental ratio
for both urban unskilled and rural labourers declined.4 Late in the interwar period,
however, formal and informal sector wages began to diverge somewhat because of
greater organization of the urban mill workers and administrative workers. Their power
increased substantially because of the convergence of the trade union movement with the
nationalist movement. These trends are revealed in the significant increase in real wages
of mill workers in these decades. The divergent trends continued after independence from
colonial rule in 1947, when the formal sector workers were granted numerous legal
privileges.
Diminishing returns in agriculture was clearly the turning point in the genesis of
Indian poverty. And yet, what is perhaps remarkable about Indian agriculture in the last
subperiod, 1930–70, is not that it witnessed a fall in land-labour ratio, but that the change
in wage-rental ratio did not induce technical change in agriculture, in the manner in
which it did in parts of contemporary East Asia. Growth in yield per acre and yield per
person in the interwar period was practically absent, even negative in regions like Bengal
that experienced the most precipitous fall in land-labour ratio. The Malthusian scenario
described above is perhaps interesting only so far as it enables asking why it proved so
hard for Indian peasants to overcome it. Why Malthusian land-constrained growth was
not replaced, if not by capital accumulation, by land-intensification, or by induced ‘land-
saving’ innovation, is perhaps the key question in modern Indian economic history.5
In standard economic history scholarship on India, the question has been answered
with reference to political economy (see ‘the retardation thesis’ below, and Chapter 2).
Landowners and cultivators represented distinct classes, when lands were owned by rent-
earners or rural creditors. In Bengal, where the distinction between owners and peasants
was institutionalized in the zamindari settlement, this might have been the reason why
investments in land productivity did not occur. The risk-free income from rent and
interest provided adequate living to the landowners, and made them lose interest in and,
under certain arrangements like share-cropping, even hostile to land improvements.
While there is an element of truth in this approach, it cannot evidently be generalized to
all regions of India. Total output growth varied between regions, but the stagnation in
yield affected nearly all regions more or less.
The vast literature on induced innovation in agriculture suggests several hypotheses
why technical change might be constrained in certain societies. Movements between one
‘innovation possibility curve’ and another, representing a more efficient method of
production but one more biased towards the input that became more abundant in the
meantime, can be inordinately slow, or never happen. For, such movements require
institutional change, cultural change, conditions that facilitate collective action, research
and development expenditure, public investment when switching to the new technique
requires public goods such as common irrigation or technical education, and efficient
capital markets (and perhaps intellectual property rights protection) when the new
 Rethinking economic change in India 6

technique depends on private investment. We do not know which of these scenarios were
particularly applicable to interwar India.
It does appear, however, that the literature underrates the environmental barriers to
technical change. Within this region, the incidence of poverty has had a strong apparent
association with arid climates and the absence of man-made irrigation. Based on this
association, my preferred version of barrier to technical change in Indian agriculture
would give more-than-usual weight to climate and the physical resource endowment,
though not in exclusion of the other potential barriers such as culture blocks or public
spending.
The greater part of the Indian subcontinent combines three months of monsoon rain
with extreme aridity in the rest of the year, which dries up much of the surface water. The
rains make growing one crop relatively easy, but growing another crop dependent on
irrigation that requires, precisely because of the great scarcity of surface water in the dry
seasons, expensive systems of harvesting, storage or relocation. These systems typically
try to address two tasks simultaneously—seasonal and spatial transfer of water—because
season affects space so much. In other words, the monsoon in a tropical region made
earning subsistence rather easy, but making improvements in living standards
exponentially difficult. Further, the dependence on a natural supply of water increased the
risk of crop failure, and single-cropping reduced security against the failure of the
monsoon crop. El Niño-type disturbances of the tropical oceanic atmospheric systems
could aggravate matters. High risk of famine and crop failure was part of the cycle of
agricultural production. This twofold scenario, relatively high capital cost of irrigation
and uncertain returns, would have constrained investment in agriculture even in the
absence of capital market imperfection, absence of collective action or dysfunctional
cultural traits. Public investment in irrigation eased the barrier, but only marginally.
The diminishing returns crisis in rural India broke out from the time of the Great
Depression. It was too powerful a phenomenon to be offset by the better performance of
industry in the interwar period. The preceding decade had seen an active land market,
growing exports and a great deal of conspicuous consumption stimulated by easy credit.
Facing a large deflation, these debts and rise in real wages squeezed the marginal
peasantry hard. There was recovery after the mid-1930s, but the good times did not
return. Economists and administrators now began to take serious note of the dynamic by
which small farms were progressively subdivided because of population growth, had to
support the same or a larger workforce and were losing productive power because of
scarcity of water or overexploitation of land. Landlessness was rising far more rapidly
than before. The downslide revealed itself in the stagnation of real wages that set in from
early in the second quarter of the twentieth century. The ability of globalization to
engender growth seemed to have come to a halt in rural India. And it remained impaired
for nearly four whole decades through which agricultural real wages changed little. The
inertia ended when a biological revolution reached Indian agriculture in the late-1960s,
and was offered together with a whole package of input subsidies. Average real wages
responded to productivity, albeit with a considerable lag.6
In the interwar period, the diminishing returns scenario affected only agriculture and
was largely absent from manufacturing. This is perhaps not surprising for modern
industry which could accumulate capital relatively easily. The small but robust mill
industry in textiles could overcome its disadvantage in capital because it used natural
 Introduction 7

resources abundantly available in India, used easily accessible technology and technical
knowledge from Britain, and received capital and enterprise from groups prominent in
foreign trade. More surprisingly, however, diminishing returns was absent even in
traditional industry, which suffered a much greater disadvantage in accessing capital, and
had earlier declined because of competition from imports. Chapter 6 argues that the
productivity growth in traditional industry was made possible not by capital
accumulation, but by a combination of a specific consumption pattern, and more efficient
deployment of labour.

Why modes of working changed

If we go underneath these broad generalizations and look at work-sites and work-
arrangements, communities and families, the colonial period appears as an era of turmoil.
Economic growth created numerous local shortages of labour. The very prospect of
diminishing returns engendered ever more energetic attempts to look for new
opportunities and new resources. Some of these movements had nineteenth-century
antecedents and external causes, such as migration overseas. Others took shape later,
such as internal migration of peasants and rural labourers, or a change in the organization
of work in small-scale industry. These movements split up the history of male workers
from that of female workers, which had been largely integrated earlier, for migration had
a pronounced male bias. To a more limited extent, there was migration and re-
employment of capital as well. Peasants sometimes moved to new territories with
abundant land, as in the canal colonies of late-nineteenth century Punjab, and capitalist
artisans relocated business near new industrial towns (Chapter 6). Regional agrarian
studies have explored some of these movements, but usually piecemeal. Agrarian history
has not yet produced a consistent story that can accommodate the central tendencies as
well as the variations around these.
The central piece in the story is ‘proletarianization’, or growth of wage labour in rural
and urban India. We see this happening in the rising proportion of wage-labour in the
rural workforce (Figure 1.1). We observe this in the steady dissolution of household
industry (Figure 1.1), that is, in a weakening and transformation of the family as a work-
unit. In agriculture too, the average family weakened, as wage-labour was often
accompanied by the migration of males. Wage-labour increased in extent because of a
combination of factors. In agriculture, competition for land and titles to land intensified
because of population pressure, leading to widespread abandonment of owner-cultivation
and tenancy for labour, towards one end of the land distribution. In small-scale industry,
a competition between the household and the wage-workshop led to the decline of the
former. Commercialization increased the importance of capital, information, modern
transport and communication systems and technology, and perhaps ‘networks’ of various
kinds, as factors of production. The urban factory was better situated than the rural
household in accessing these inputs.
There was another level of proletarianization and another mechanism for the growth of
wage labour. The average duration of employment contracts reduced in rural India,
increasing labour turnover and casual hiring.
 Rethinking economic change in India 8

Figure 1.1 Wage labour in India,

1901–2001 (sources for all figures are
the Indian censuses, occupational
statistics. In all cases, figures for
1901–31 refer to British India and the
States, and figures for 1961–91 to the
Indian Union. 1941 did not have a
census. 1951 occupational data are not
reliable. Both years are excluded from
the graph.)
‘Farm servant’ was the census term for long-term contracts. The percentage of farm
servants in agricultural labour households was in decline in the first half of the twentieth
century. In Madras, where farm servant contracts were particularly prevalent, the fall in
percentage was sharp. Migration played a role in reducing the employers’ need for
‘labour-hoarding’ in traditional agriculture (see Chapter 3 for more discussion). Since
annual contracts involved predominantly males, its decline facilitated entry of women in
agrarian labour markets. Mediated by a new type of market relationship based on credit, a
different form of long-term contracts spread in rural areas at the same time. But debt-
bondage too, which was always spatially restricted, began to weaken in the last quarter of
the twentieth century.
Along with farm servants, another older form of ‘attached’ labour was the
commitment to supply diverse services for the village, to which some rural labour castes
were subject. The term ‘general labour’ was used in the early censuses (given up in the
later ones) to refer to such people, who performed not just field labour, but across-the-
board labour services for the village, usually on terms that were not negotiated often.
There was a powerful hierarchical element in these services, in that the labourers had few
choices regarding what tasks they would prefer to do or what payments they could ask
for. This category of work tended to disappear from the late nineteenth century. Rural
 Introduction 9

labourers asserted their freedom to choose the employer, and the right to receive a wage
for any service supplied. There were many reports of conflict within the village over
obligatory labour services and about choosing occupations (Chapter 3). These acts of
resistance merged into the anti-caste and social emancipation movements unfolding at the
same time.
The break-up of these customary contracts had the effect of pushing individuals out of
a portfolio of services and to either specialize or shift to a different portfolio. Earlier,
these portfolios often included some handicrafts and some labour. In the case of industrial
production, the market was usually a local one. As these portfolios broke up, artisan-cum-
labourers tended to give up production and move towards labour. The market economy
weakened the bond between local production and local consumption, encouraged long-
distance trade, and made capital and information key to success in trade. These
requirements weakened the rural artisan-cum-labourer and favoured the more resourceful
artisan castes. For, the former had poorer access to capital markets relative to the more
specialized producer groups. But even as the rural artisan-cum-labourer left production
and moved into labour, the types of labour they supplied changed in composition. A
traditional form of occupational mix dissolved into a more market-driven occupational
one.
These great transfers of population between occupations could not have taken place
without equally large transfers between places. Large streams of migration began from
the mid-nineteenth century, aided by the railways and the telegraph after 1850, to
facilitate this huge reallocation of labour. Men increasingly had to leave home for careers
elsewhere. And as competition for land intensified, those with inferior rights to land had
to do so more often than before. They went to the mills, the mining towns, urban small-
scale industries, overseas, public works, plantations, urban services or the railways. These
shifts, which I call ‘reallocation’, were not just transfers of population between locales
and jobs, but involved transfers between labour institutions. When rural artisan-cum-
labourers left the village for work, they left almost always to take part in wage labour.
Therefore, migration gave a significant push towards the break-up of customary terms of
employment.
Reallocation often required more than just a wage incentive. Transaction costs were
important too. Much of the movement of labour into the modern sectors relied on
‘contractors’ and foremen (better-known as sardars in the context of recruitment into the
cotton and jute mills) who could communicate with both the workers and the employers,
and frequently took advantage of information asymmetry on both sides. Despite the
unreliable intermediary, employers in the towns often found it hard to gather a large
number of hands without some help from the former. Labour markets with sufficient
depth to supply mill-hands on a large scale did not exist in the mid-nineteenth century,
except briefly during famines.7 After 1900, voluntary internal migration increased.
Eventually several types of transaction costs involved in hiring labour fell. A range of
skills became available for hire in one place. Potential workers came to the millgates
rather than wait for the sardar to take them there. The power of the intermediaries,
consequently, declined. The contractor in later years was not so ubiquitous any more, and
a great deal of hiring could take place via spot markets. Mill managers in the interwar
years reported that they hired their daily hands from the ‘mill gates’ breaking with past
 Rethinking economic change in India 10

practice, whereas it was only the new factories and new divisions that still relied on the
agent.8
By contrast with the mills, how labour was reallocated in agriculture and traditional
industry is much less known. There had been large shifts within and out of agriculture in
the nineteenth century. Once again, these were often accompanied by a prominent role
for contractors. However, little research exists on the intermediary outside the formal
sector of the mines and the mills. Studies on the artisans suggest that migration was an
important part of their history too in the early twentieth century. Skilled artisans,
however, did not necessarily migrate to join labour markets. Unlike the rural artisan-cum-
labourer, the skilled artisan often migrated to resettle elsewhere as an entrepreneur.
These processes had a gender bias. In the ensuing market for manufacturing labour, it
was often harder for women to take part than it was for men. However, in the spot market
for agricultural labour, women did take part in an increasing extent. We cannot say
whether or not these two tendencies always occurred together. To some extent they did.
Earlier, some households had combined cultivation and industry. The men in these
families took lands on rent or owned plots that they cultivated along with the women.
Sometimes, these households also performed industrial work on the side. The nineteenth-
century censuses recorded women thus engaged as either ‘cultivator’ or ‘manufacturer’
depending on how the families saw themselves. But when the men left home in search of
work elsewhere, the whole family’s engagement with industry on one side and with own-
cultivation on the other declined. The family as a work-unit invariably weakened when
the men went from home. For, when the men left home, the women who remained behind
rarely could continue or take up production work on their own, because women workers
in industry or agriculture, who often commanded high degree of skills, had poor access to
capital and marketing. Relative to men, women took part far less in contracting and in the
wider and complex interactions that it required. Internal migration in South Asia involved
a disproportionate number of men, a feature spanning colonial and post-colonial periods.
This situation pushed a disproportionate number of rural women into agricultural wage-
labour. In early twentieth-century rural India, that meant casual labour in agriculture.
Also as mentioned before, the end of long-term contracts facilitated greater absorption of
women in farm labour.
Both cultivation and handicrafts experienced relocation of workers. But there was a
difference in the result. Whereas average income in the crafts grew in the twentieth
century, it stagnated in agriculture. New research has shown the conditions that made
expansion in the crafts possible, despite often unbridgeable cost differences between the
crafts and mechanized production (Chapter 6). This research has stressed the role of
consumption and culture in sustaining traditional labour-intensive industry, the strengths
of such industry deriving from scope for product-differentiation or design innovation and
a variety of adjustments that made incremental productivity gains possible in this sector.
The term ‘industriousness’, to mean a more efficient deployment of labour resources
within labour-intensive industry, is a useful description of what happened in the crafts.
Induced accumulation of human capital via education and training was conspicuously
weak in this dynamics of intensified labour, both before and after 1947. Students enrolled
in schools of all levels as the proportion of population of school-going age increased from
3–4 per cent in 1891 to 7–9 per cent in 1931. These conditions changed only slowly after
1947. A quarter century later, the proportion of scholars in the relevant age group was
 Introduction 11

still low at 20–25 per cent. Only about a fifth of the students who started school in
colonial India reached secondary levels. The British government in India had neither the
money nor any serious intent to supply universal education and health care in effective
quantity. The numerous Indian-ruled states, with only a few exceptions, echoed that
indifference. Private funding was slow to shed the biases that had long confined
education to only a few groups and to the men within these groups.
These biases point to one final ingredient in the story, namely, cultural and social
filters through which labour reallocation progressed. Culture enters this account via two
principal routes. The first relates to an element of intellectual inertia that could sustain a
very inadequate level of social effort in education and training for the poor. And the
second relates to the conditions that made women vulnerable players in the labour
market. Both these themes await further development than that contained in this book,
though the second receives a somewhat detailed treatment in Chapter 7. Both illustrate
the idea now all too familiar to social scientists that modernization processes have
exclusions built into them.

Chronology
This study spans approximately a century between the 1870s and the 1970s. The key
processes that form the subject-matter here took shape in this time-span. These are,
increasing land-scarcity and diminishing returns, marketization of labour, and
reallocation and industriousness that overcame resource-barriers, if temporarily. But
these three processes did not overlap in time.
The tendency of conversion of family or attached labour into casual wage labour was
weak and localized until late in the interwar period, picked up pace from then on and
quickened after independence. Roughly the same characterization of rate of change can
apply to the exit of women from manufacturing, decline in household industry and
casualization in the urban labour market. Indeed, a number of factors cascaded by mid-
twentieth century to create conditions for a decisive transition in modes of employment
of manual labour. Examples are opportunities of migration, growth of local labour
markets, and scarcity and competition for land.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, several of these trends had begun
already. But for a long time afterward, they were only loosely connected, almost
disparate. One connecting thread through them was commercialization of the product
market (especially between 1870 and 1924) that created regions of rapid agricultural
growth and spheres of excess demand for labour. The limited upheaval that this caused in
the rural labour markets had at least the effect of loosening a variety of customary labour-
tying arrangements. Partial decline of cotton spinning and weaving between 1820 and
1880 in competition with British textiles also pushed groups of artisans into labour, or
quasi-artisans to specialize in labour. Between 1870 and 1920, the railway network grew,
and facilitated long-distance migration of labourers. There followed a many-sided
process of inter-sectoral and spatial movements of manual labour. Until about the
beginning of the 1920s these large movements were partly motivated by wage
differentials between the traditional sector and the modern sectors such as the railways,
plantations, mines, mills, public works, pockets of agrarian growth and overseas. Rural
wages were consistently below, if only a little below, wages in modern sectors. However,
 Rethinking economic change in India 12

from late in the interwar period, conditions began to change. Spheres of excess demand in
agriculture were fewer. The modern sectors were not doing well, or not growing rapidly.
And the rate of labour supply accelerated with population growth, the effect only slightly
modified by a marginal fall in participation rates.
The year 1931 marked the transition point. The good times for the peasantry were
over, and a rural crisis broke out. The subsequent forty years saw a strengthening of the
four conditions that made the 1930s such a setback—exhaustion of opportunities in
agriculture, weakening of market incentives, relatively small growth of non-agriculture
and demographic transition.
All this entails a rather different narrative from what the mainstream historiography in
South Asia has usually described in relation to either labour or economic history. This
book, thus, is necessarily an argument in historiography.

Historiography

A general economic history of manual labour should possess two attributes. First, since
manual labour straddled different worlds, the history should be able to connect
experiences across gender, sector, region and regime. Second, since conditions of labour
and conditions of production were closely tied, it should be able to connect the labour
experience with long-run economic change. In the three sections that follow, I offer an
assessment of labour scholarship against these two benchmarks.

The retardation thesis

The bond between economic history and labour history was strong in India until about
1980. Until then, more or less the only general story available on economic change, a
post-colonial blend of Marxism and economic nationalism, saw nineteenth-century
globalization as a phenomenon that had induced distortions. Power—colonial power,
class power or a compound—played an instrumental role in this process. Markets in the
colonial condition were manipulated by those in control of political power. A specific
configuration of power and the unequal exchange relations that these entailed pushed the
peasants and artisans of India towards poverty during British colonial rule.
Commercialization bred inequality rather than growth. The increasing extent of wage-
labour and casual labour illustrated this general pattern of economic retardation (Patel,
1952; Patnaik, 1983). In the 1970s many economists and historians were interested in
proletarianization as a phenomenon illustrative of a transition in the ‘mode of production’
in Indian agriculture. The historical understanding displayed in this neo-Marxist debate
was broadly consistent with the thesis that colonialism created rural labour and poverty. I
refer to this entire perspective as the ‘retardation thesis’.
The principal sign of retardation was ruralization of economic activity. While Britain
herself experienced industrialization and urbanization, potentials to industrialize were
destroyed in India. Unemployment and poverty in rural areas deepened. And potentially
beneficial economic changes such as commercialization strengthened inequality. The
‘unholy trinity’, to borrow a term from Surendra Patel, was a contributor to the
retardation story and consisted of ‘subjugation’, ‘ruralization’ and ‘retardation’ (Patel,
 Introduction 13

1992:57–8). India’s colonial status induced a ‘forced’ commercialization on the

peasantry, and ensured a speedy destruction of the handicrafts. Indeed, according to
Bipan Chandra (1966:61), Indian industry was ‘so readily, so easily destroyed because
the British had used their political control’. In Jawaharlal Nehru’s words, ‘the burden on
the land grew, with it, unemployment and poverty’. And India failed to industrialize,
despite ‘all the ingredients and conditions of industrialization [being] present’ (cited by
Joshi, 1967:453). In short, rural labour and rural poverty represented a process of
politically induced economic retardation in a region otherwise ripe for industrialization
and economic growth.
These ideas originated in the writings of the Indian nationalists D. Naoroji, G.V.Joshi,
R.C.Dutt, G.Subramaniya Aiyar, and others, c. 1900.9 They believed that India was
becoming poorer in their time, and poverty was a creation of British colonial rule. In the
interwar period, Nehru restated these ideas in his writings on Indian history, and
R.P.Dutt, Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, recast these ideas in a
Marxist mould. From the 1970s, the retardation discourse also drew on a more global
source: theories of underdevelopment. The argument was that economic policies and
processes that created growth in one part of the world created underdevelopment in
another (Frank, 1975; Bagchi, 1982). Nehru and his predecessors had argued the same
point in almost the same language. Economic historians working in the USSR, who took
a keen interest in India and were influential on a section of the Indian academia, took a
very similar line, though employing rather different historiographic tools. In the 1980s,
the paradigm of economic change in modern South Asia, now also inspired by theories of
imperialism and underdevelopment, was essentially the nationalist story with minor
changes.10
Apart from these intellectual roots, the retardation thesis drew strength from a deep
symbiosis between history and policy making. The belief in politically induced market
failure served as a strong link between the past and the present in the autarkic and
dirigiste policy regime in force in India between 1950 and 1985. Economists and
historians both invested ‘market failure’ with foundational status in their respective
analytical systems. Practitioners in both fields believed that a broad identity of interest
between the colonial and the local economic elite had been responsible for market failure
in the past. Economists and historians agreed that markets and the open economy were
instruments that needed to be restrained, if used at all. Economic history of modern India
became a discourse of impairment, inflicted in the past by colonial policies of free trade
and a minimalist state, and redressed in the present by a strategy that was emphatically
isolationist and interventionist. Historians thereby gave meaning to a socialist policy
regime that intervened heavily to restrain market forces and international relations.
The retardation thesis was questioned from time to time. But before a serious re-
examination could begin, an ideological upheaval made the model irrelevant. Economic
nationalism began to lose out to the appeal of globalization in the ex-colonies. From the
late 1980s, economists began to change their minds about the universality of market
failure and the virtues of an interventionist state. With the obsolescence of political
economy in the new regime, economic history, which remained committed to market
failure, faced obsolescence. The premise that retardation and market failure were
embedded in globalization could not inspire economists any more. Since the end of the
socialist experiment and the return of economic liberalism in the academia, the pro-
 Rethinking economic change in India 14

market sentiments of economics and the anti-market sentiments of orthodox economic

history have made the two fields and their languages drift apart.
To end this impasse and bring history back into the discourse on economics, to make
the past regain substance and signiflcance for discussions on the present, we need a
different historiography. To succeed, the project needs to unlink stylized facts in Indian
economic history from specific configurations of power, and re-link these with themes on
which economics and history can share a dialogue without necessarily sharing an
ideology. Two such points of reference for this book are resource endowments and the
agency of the market.11
Seen as a story of growth, my criticism of the retardation thesis is not only that it was
irrelevant, but also that it was inadequate. The treatment of commercial expansion during
globalization is a case in point. Indeed, many new types of market inside India linked to
exports were imperfect. Nearly all were unregulated. In many instances the social
‘embeddedness’ of markets reinforced existing inequities rather than weakening these.
And yet, stories of bounded, constricted, inequality-breeding markets cannot represent
the average experience with market participation in colonial India. Agricultural growth
rates recorded in the late nineteenth century and a limited industrialization bear witness to
the positive potentials of the economic globalization process into which India was drawn,
partly because of its status as a British colony. ‘Economic growth from below was
possible’ (Tomlinson, 1995:173) and it was made possible by the fact that
commercialization encouraged exploitation of unutilized resources such as waste land,
search for new resources, better allocation of resources and industriousness.
Seen as a labour history, while the retardation thesis gave rise to a poor-getting-poorer
story, it was not efficient at fitting together the fragments that made up the overall labour
experience. One of the prerequisites for a larger story on labour is equal attention to
agriculture and industry, men and women, family work and wage work, for these worlds
were necessarily connected in the decisions of many working poor. Such an integrated
story remained missing. The heavy accent on politics made the economic history too one-
dimensional. Wage labour tended to be studied in isolation from forms of contract,
occupational mix, earnings and gender. The role of the labour market in effecting
reallocation was over-looked. Accent on particular modes of power such as colonialism
did not live easily with the persistence of labour market trends into the post-colonial
times.

Subaltern studies and the new labour history

The Marxist-nationalist narratives on labour went out of fashion in the early 1980s.
Thereafter for some time the historiography of the poor in colonial South Asia was
dominated by the group of historians known as ‘subaltern studies’. The subaltern studies
were partly reacting to the Marxist economic history that had subjected the experience of
the peasants and workers to the imperatives of class formation and partly trying to rewrite
the history of the Indian nationalist movement (Chapter 9). Their message was that the
poor could bring about change by resisting colonial power. That message turned out to be
influential, but it made the discourse on agency overly political, insofar as it ignored
market-mediated forms of agency.
 Introduction 15

Subaltern studies transformed themselves in the 1990s to a form that was distant from
both economics and the rural poor. Under the influence of French post-structuralism,
‘power’ detached itself from property relations and made knowledge its new habitat (see
Chapter 9). An entire generation of historians repositioned their world-views from
political to cultural domination, retaining through this change a belief in the centrality of
power. The new faith was instinctively historical. But economics had no clearly defined
role in it. Economic questions troubled it, and were shut out of it.
Still, the early subalterns rekindled interest in labour and research flourished.12 And in
a short time, labour history emerged as a well-organized and energetic enterprise, with a
Labour History Association of India based in Amsterdam and Delhi. Partly in reaction to
the submergence of economic and political processes into the cultural and partly in a need
to incorporate cultural processes into mainstream labour research, the new labour history
moved in a number of directions. Its interest in the constitution of the ‘working class’
connected it to Marxist historiography. Colonialism and popular resistance continued to
be a key thematic, connecting it to the early subalterns. But workers’ consciousness was
now seen in terms that were cultural, with explicit attention paid to ethnicity and
everyday forms of resistance, connecting the new trend to post-Marxist labour history
and the late subalterns. In the process, the new scholarship also contributed to the
narrative history of labour against the backdrop of industrialization and nationalism, in a
tradition represented by another, older line of scholarship (Morris, 1960, 1965; Newman,
1981).
While thus reinventing itself, labour history also acquired weaknesses. The new
scholarship neglected rural labour, as if at a loss for words after the subalterns had had
their say on the subject. Deeply impressed by the sweep and radicalism of post-
structuralism, it passively imbibed the latter’s distrust for ‘grand narratives’. There was,
thus, a deliberate retreat from attempts to connect labour history with the economic
history of colonial India. The interest in ‘class’ entailed a quest for group identity at some
neglect of the larger economic context, indeed at a near-total neglect of the labour
market. The emphasis on groups and group politics induced a fixation for work-sites
where crowds could be found. Too much attention, thus, fell upon the mill and the mining
town. To an equal extent, the new labour history overlooked workers such as the artisans
who were neither tied nor concentrated; overlooked work-sites such as the households
that did not involve an assemblage of wage-earners; and overlooked groups such as
women that straddled several worlds. Sometimes, the invocation of ethnicity had an
artificial quality. The ethnicized worker looked like a device to remedy the pitfalls of
‘class’. In some cases, the search for ethnicity introduced a bias for studying groups that
were insignificant in terms of their economic presence. The new history also tended to
emphasize regional particularities at some cost of regional similarities and connections,
that is, at the cost of a pan-regional narrative on labour.
These criticisms apply with particular force to the history of manual, semi-skilled,
unregulated, informal labour in India, in which sphere barriers along gender, sector and
regional lines dissolved away in a fluid, encompassing mix of decisions. These decisions
involved choices between domestic and paid work, remaining sedentary and migrating,
casual and contractual labour, agriculture and industry, industry and service, and
production and labour. Most individuals and families divided their time between several
uses of time. The changing mix of these uses merits serious consideration in any history
 Rethinking economic change in India 16

of work in the region. Further, the task requires paying attention to the manner in which
commercialization of labour encouraged market-participation in some spheres and
discouraged participation in some others. Labour history scholarship by and large
remained too focused, too politicized and too segmented to handle these connections.
The weakest point of new labour history was perhaps its refusal to engage in general
economic history. It was a labour history that was sensitive to differentiation within
labour, but did not try to locate the average and did not try to explain the persistence of
manual labour and poverty cutting across occupations. The retardation thesis did not have
this flaw, for it had made colonialism the bridge between labour and economy. It could
explain changes in the sphere of work and general economic history by a single analytical
device—exploitation. But if the new labour history failed to situate labour in a context of
overall economic change, the retardation thesis did so in a manner that failed to convince.
Where does that leave us?
From the early twentieth century, the economic history of India was the site of a
contest between two rival approaches. The academic mainstream in post-independence
India was represented by the retardation thesis, which believed in a broad identity of
interest between colonialism and the local economic elite, and held that alliance
responsible for retardation of the Indian economy in the colonial period. This approach
held that the Indian economy on the eve of colonialism had the potentials to industrialize
and experience rapid economic growth, but these potentials were destroyed by
colonialism. Doing labour history in this perspective would mean charting out how
repression engendered poverty.
The other and the more marginal school believed that structural weaknesses
constrained economic growth in India. These weaknesses of the economic system it
traced to society, demography or environment. In part, these weaknesses showed up as
resource imbalance and shortages. And, in part, the weaknesses showed up as persistently
low levels of efficiency of labour. Doing labour history in this perspective would mean
showing how these systemic forces and the labour market unfolded in mutual interaction.
The former approach I have discussed earlier in this section. The time has come to take a
serious note of the latter.

Antecedents
Persistence of poverty and unemployment in the South Asian context had long been
bound up with the persistence of manual labour. The history of low wage and
proletarianization, therefore, was also a history of technological stasis. It was a history of
the difficulty of transforming traditional agriculture, traditional accumulation pattern and
traditional ways of life. Until the 1940s, economists and administrators did sometimes
explain Indian poverty and labour in these very terms, that is, in terms of inadequate
capability to adapt rather than as an outcome of colonial politics. The accent fell
sometimes on inadequacy of investment funds relative to labour, sometimes on
incentives, sometimes on a low-level technological equilibrium.
They observed that Indian levels of output-per-worker were far below the standard
even in labour-intensive societies. In 1931, average rice yield per acre was 1,400lbs in
India and 2,800lbs in Japan. A similar disparity occurred in rice yields between India and
Egypt. International disparities in labour productivity in cotton mills were along the same
 Introduction 17

direction, and often equally large. In 1930, an average worker in the spinning department
of an Indian mill looked after 180 spindles. A similar worker in the USA looked after
1,140, and one in Japan 240 spindles. Not only were these gaps not closing in the
interwar period, but possibly even widening. Such massive disparities called for
investigation into what appeared to be a systemic inertia to improve efficiency.
British administrators often held on, in good or bad faith, to a makeshift
Malthusianism when making sense of economic change in India. However, as the
economics profession grew, a parallel discussion on this theme emerged among
university professors and academics not closely connected with, even mildly dismissive
of, economic nationalism. The discourse was insightful, but not a very orderly one. Nor
was there a well-developed public sphere in which economists could effectively
communicate with the literate middle classes. The nationalists wrote in newspapers and
pamphlets that had a wide reach. The administrators gave speeches attended by powerful
persons. The professors wrote books in English that patiently waited for readers in the
recesses of university libraries. Nevertheless, this discourse on efficiency revolved
around a few positions that not only made sense, but also proved to have a long life.
Gilbert Slater, professor at the University of Madras, asked what factors accounted for
the poverty of the Indian peasants in comparison with their English counterparts. He
dismissed the nationalist concern with excessive land tax, a tax that had been fixed in
nominal terms and was no more than a small proportion of gross output value in 1918
when he was writing. His explanation revolved on the relatively ‘small number of
working days in a year’ in India. The combination of tropical heat and monsoon rains
imposed on the greater part of the region an extremely uneven natural supply of moisture
and, consequently, enforced idleness on the peasants during one-third of the year or more.
Idleness was pervasive not only among peasants and rural labourers, but also among
artisans. Indeed, the average number of working days in a year was usually so limited in
South Asia that no historical comparison of earnings seems to make sense without
knowledge of employment intensity. Climate provided livelihood, but constrained
utilization of labour, in this view (Slater, 1918–19:145). Slater did not ask, however, why
employment intensity could not rise via more labour-using technical change in
agriculture in the presence of enormous quantities of idle and low-wage labour time.
Radhakamal Mukherjee, professor of economics at Lucknow University, wrote about
land degradation as a result of population growth in some of the more advanced agrarian
zones in interwar India. He had statistics on his side. Throughout the interwar period, the
land-labour ratio fell and yield-per-acre was depressed. There was an institutional angle
and an ecological angle to the story. Population pressure and inheritance practices led to
steady subdivision of plots into ever-smaller units, as well as their scattering, so that
economies of scale could not be utilized. Intensive cultivation on small and scattered
plots required intensive harvesting of water. Pressure on groundwater increased, surface
water was often wasted and water simply became costlier to mine. Extension of
cultivation frequently took a toll on cultivable ‘wastes’, a part of which was pastures. The
pastures were not always good quality land, and their destruction weakened the livestock.
In turn, the slide in profitability pushed many smaller farmers to bankruptcy and,
eventually, to labour. Mukherjee argued this story in a series of works on his home
region, also the most populous region of north India, United Provinces (see essays in
Mukherjee, ed., 1939; Chapter 3, this volume).
 Rethinking economic change in India 18

The administrative discourse on the peasants often accused them of ‘improvidence’. In

good times, the peasant spent lavishly on a daughter’s marriage and on gold jewellery. In
bad times, the peasant had to mortgage land at high interest rates. Net gold and silver
transactions took a toll of 2 per cent or more from the potential aggregate
investment/income ratio. Since little of this gold came to the mortgage market, these
savings did not convert into investment. The more astute observers understood that there
was an element of insurance behind such ‘improvidence’. Climatic risks were excessive,
and affected expected consumption. In the absence of insurance markets, precious metals
were the best available stores of value. Because these metals were traded globally, their
prices varied in a narrower band than the prices of nearly everything that sold in the
villages. On the other hand, as the Secretary of Agriculture Edward Buck wrote in 1884,
‘a great deal of the improvidence with which the Indian cultivator is charged is simply
due to the impossibility of being provident. How can he look forward when there is no
certain prospect for him?’ (cited in Hall-Matthews, 2002:104). In other words, climatic
risks depressed expected incomes from investment projects and, thus, reduced the
demand for productive investment. In turn, the situation reduced the potential demand for
local labour.
The British economist Vera Anstey belonged to a small set of writers who believed
that Indian poverty arose from, among other factors, poor education and the consequent
poor capacity of the masses to absorb knowledge. Many nationalists too brought into
focus the British colonial government’s appalling record on creating ‘human
development’. But unlike them, Anstey believed that lack of education was to a
significant degree a social failure. Education was not supplied because those having a say
on the matter within local societies believed there was no demand for it: The danger spot
appears to be women’s education, for which it is often said there is no effective demand’
(Anstey, 1929:471–2). In 1900, for every ten literate men, there was one literate woman.
And education was not the only resource to which women had grossly disproportionate
access. Such deprivation continued long after independence, which confirms Anstey’s
belief that it was Indian society that ensured the exclusion of women from access to good
health and education by sanctioning an appallingly low average age of marriage, high
fertility and enforced domesticity.13
The theme of exclusion connects with a later discourse on the interaction between
economic development and cultural change. There are perhaps two general ways that this
interaction can be conceptualized. One of these involves observing how strongly market
participants respond to market stimuli, and explains the quality of response in cultural
terms. The other would involve observing differential capability of producers to
participate in market exchange, and explains the ease of entry and barriers to entry in
cultural terms. The former approach is associated with Max Weber, who proposed that
the cultural disposition of merchants and artisans in India made them deficient as
entrepreneurs. The idea was expounded in scholarship that developed around the
‘modernization theory’ of the 1950s and 1960s, and Indian cases played an important role
in this enterprise. Critiques of ‘modernization’ in the 1970s and the 1980s, again using
Indian evidence, pointed out significant levels of response of entrepreneurs to profits and
risks, thus rejecting the conjecture. Marxist historiography too came down heavily on the
notion that the poor were poor because of a deficient mindset.14 Neither criticism,
however, was sufficient rejection of the second of the two positions. Culture can matter
 Introduction 19

also by excluding groups from participation in the market. The spirit of enterprise is a
characteristic of those groups already inside the market. It is market-exchange that
reveals the spirit of enterprise. Both Weber and his South Asianist critiques studied
groups such as the capitalists, who were insiders, and overlooked groups such as women
or lower castes, who were often excluded from market transactions. These exclusions
alert us to the prospect that culture is neither a passive nor a benign variable in explaining
economic growth and stagnation.
To cut the story short, nature on the one hand and society on the other constrained
technical possibilities in India, according to these views. Nature was unreliable. And the
society had a range of exclusions built within. The actions of the state were relevant, of
course. And yet, state failure was evenly matched, even reinforced, by culture blocks.
These concerns with structural constraints, though long overshadowed, have proven
lasting. In current economic history thinking, the adverse role of population pressure,
inheritance practices and diminishing returns have been emphasized again (Kaiwar, 1992,
for example). Any discourse on caste in colonial India sensitive to caste as an economic
category cannot fail to observe the powerful influence of caste on entry into and exit from
occupations. The accent on ‘capability’ stands for a whole approach to development. And
there is a powerful gender angle to capability failure and culturally induced exclusion
(Nussbaum, 2000; Sen, 1999).15
The preoccupation in these early schools of economic thought with resource
endowment and efficiency was reborn in a later academic tradition. Among early
characterizations of peasant economies in the post-war development discourse, two
became particularly influential. The first arose from the model of industrialization
proposed by Arthur Lewis (see Lewis, 1954; Ranis and Fei, 1961; Jorgenson, 1961), and
the second derived from the model of agricultural change proposed by T.W.Schultz
(Schultz, 1964). Lewis described a prototype rural economy that was inefficient, in that it
contained unemployed labour. Schultz’s prototype economy was efficient in using
resources, but these resources had poor capability. Both prototypes were consistent with
poverty and its persistence, but they gave rise to rather different prescriptions. Lewis
proposed transfer of workers from rural to urban occupations. Schultz advocated raising
agricultural productivity, instead of a patient wait for industrialization and migration.
The first twenty years of post-independence Indian development strategy was strongly
Lewisian in its single-minded reliance on industrialization and transfer of population
from agriculture to industry. But the one condition for the model to work—rapid labour-
intensive industrialization—was missing from the scene. The stasis was broken by
rekindling investment in agriculture, the way poinίed out by Schultz. And yet, writing at
a time when parts of rural India were sliding towards violent peasant uprising, many
Indian economists reacted to the idea of an efficient equilibrium with spontaneous
scepticism. V.M.Dandekar (1966) gave that reaction the form of an argument.16 In
Schultz’s ahistorical world, Dandekar inserted history via exogenous population growth
and a fall in the land-labour ratio. Through demographic pressure, the peasant family
farm entered a crisis of inadequate savings. Though Dandekar did not cast his arguments
in terms of technical change, he was in effect asking why the small farm might fail to
attain a land-saving investment as demography changed resource costs.
Schultz’s book, Transforming Traditional Agriculture (1964), endorsed a
contemporary rethinking of agrarian policy. Soon after the book appeared, parts of Indian
 Rethinking economic change in India 20

agriculture did begin to transform themselves through a state-induced biological

revolution. If the solution worked, it worked then in relatively small pockets such as
Punjab that already had access to water for the dry seasons. A much bigger part of
traditional agriculture displayed signs of gathering distress and political unrest and no
green revolution in sight, such as Eastern India or the arid Deccan plateau. For some of
these poorer regions of India, a remedy came in the 1980s. The resource that sustained
this second biological revolution was groundwater, a common property the new regimes
in rural states deliberately allowed to be harvested beyond sustainable levels.
Beleaguered small-farm economy could finally lift itself from the spectre of diminishing
returns, but now at a grave ecological cost.
Both Transforming Traditional Agriculture and its principal critic in India, Dandekar,
shared a diagnosis of Indian poverty in terms of structure rather than power. Neither
author took colonialism or class seriously. Nor did the specialists on colonialism and
class take much interest in these structural theories of stasis. The shared emphasis in the
former body of thought on resources and efficiency provides the framework in which the
present work can be located. Like these works, the labour history proposed here looks
closely at traditional resources such as land and labour in accounting for poverty and the
persistence of manual labour.
That being said, the book is different from the older literature on several fronts.
Neither model of ‘traditional agriculture’ was explicitly historical. Therefore, neither
model allowed room for changes in labour institutions, markets and transfer of resources
within agriculture or within industry. By contrast, this work is not only an attempt to
explain poverty and labour, it is also an attempt to explain change in modes of working.
The book emphasizes the capacity of individuals to break through poverty and stasis, and
recognizes that it was the growing market for wage-labour that provided them with the
principal means for doing so. It takes an essentially disaggregated view of the rural
economy and the labour market. The numerous segments and fissures within the
immense world of manual labour created opportunities and incentives for gainful transfer
of population from surplus to shortage segments throughout modern history even as
aggregate production conditions turned adverse to labour. It looks beyond rural labour to
small-scale industry, which provides an important counterexample to diminishing returns.
And lastly, this work is aware of the existence of culture blocks that decided who could
effectively play the market game and who could not.

The chapters

Chapter 2 presents an overview of the field. The reader wishing to get into the analysis
directly can skip this scene-setting chapter. The narrative project behind this book is also
restated here. The six chapters that follow implement the project with reference to
agricultural labour, the artisans and women. The three specific transitions examined are,
de-peasantization or growing landlessness (Chapters 3 and 4), de-industrialization or the
artisans’ loss of livelihood (Chapters 5 and 6) and de-feminization of the industrial
workforce (Chapters 7 and 8).
As we have seen, in debates about colonialism, the experience of the rural labourer has
been a central theme. But the empirical content of these debates is rather sketchy. Studies
 Introduction 21

on regional agrarian history contain valuable information on labour, but do not link easily
with a general account. A return to the rural labour theme, therefore, is useful. Chapter 3
re-examines a well-known thesis that peasants turned into wage-labourers on a large scale
in colonial India. The tendency was attributed to colonial policies that led to loss of
access to land and livelihood. The chapter explores the relevant data and scholarship, and
finds that the incidence of labour did increase, but in a way that calls for a different
explanation. Two processes were particularly active: fragmentation of land and changes
in occupational mix that drove a large number of general rural labour into dependence on
agricultural labour.
Growing landlessness can lead to depression in real wages in the long run. Chapter 4
explores the data and concludes that the trends in wages were not uniformly downward.
In fact, there is evidence of a rise in real wages during the first quarter of the twentieth
century. There were periods of wage depression both before and after this phase.
Between these periods, however, there was a significant difference. In the late nineteenth
century, depressed wages derived from fixed money wage and rising prices. In the 1930s,
depression derived from flexible money wages adjusting to prices with a lag. The fixed
and flexible money wages represented different labour regimes. The latter was a market
in which money wages were actively negotiated, the former one in which there was an
element of custom in wage payments. If this reading is accepted, the long trends in real
wages tell us a story of institutional change.
Chapters 5 and 6 consider the experience of the artisans. In the retardation thesis,
artisans lost livelihood and crowded into agriculture, adding to landlessness. That many
artisans did lose their traditional living throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century is
beyond question. What that process means for industrialization, however, is open to
question. There can be two meanings attached to this trend: a quantitative one of a large
decline, and a qualitative one of a destruction of the potentials to industrialize. The
quantitative sense is not a serious matter, for a decline in the artisanate was a global
phenomenon and was consistent with industrialization, not contradictory with it. The
qualitative sense is more serious and worth a closer look.
If ‘industrialization’ means rising share of industry in national income, a simple test of
qualitative decline would be the share of artisans in national income. Between 1900 and
1935, the test rejects the qualitative decline thesis. Artisans broadly maintained their
presence in the national economy in the early twentieth century. For the nineteenth
century, we cannot conduct the test because we have no income data. We have some
employment data, but employment is not a sufficient test. At best, some informed
speculations are possible. Chapter 5 carries out such an exercise and concludes that,
while a decline in employment did occur in the nineteenth century, it was more evenly
distributed over time than has been believed, and was part of a process that entailed more
income gain than loss. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the forces of
decline had spent themselves. If we take a long view from that point on, artisans not only
survived but also contributed to industrialization in the twentieth century. In national
income terms, they contributed to increasing average product in manufacturing in the
same extent as capital-intensive industry. I call this process ‘labour-intensive
industrialization’. Chapter 6 investigates the conditions that made such industrialization
possible, and describes several features of an ‘industrious revolution’.
 Rethinking economic change in India 22

Transformation of family and customary labour to casual wage labour was powerfully
and persistently gender-biased. The scholarship on the history of women’s work in
industry focuses on both barriers to entry into paid work, as well as barriers to exit from
the family. Chapter 7 reviews the literature and develops the notion of a specific barrier
to exit related to the quality of training received. Chapter 8 pursues these themes further
through a descriptive survey of women artisans in colonial India.
The last chapter addresses the progressive decline of economic questions within South
Asian labour history. In the last twenty years, the study of rural labour in South Asia has
taken a decidedly political turn under the influence of the subaltern studies collective.
Partly in reaction to Marxist historiography in which ‘agency’ was submerged in
‘structure’, subaltern studies focused on more abstract and ubiquitous forms of power, as
well as resistance to power. This accent on the ability of deprived peoples to make their
own history endured, but in the process, subaltern studies itself imposed a structure on the
way this ability was conceived and discussed. Chapter 9 offers a critical appraisal of the
contribution of subaltern studies from the standpoint of economic history.
It is possible to enter the theme of labour and livelihood from any of these points—
decline of peasantry, change in women’s work, labour-intensive industry, or indeed, the
polemic over historiography. But a general contour of the time and space seems
appropriate before we get to the specifics.
 2
Economic history and modern India
Redefining the link

British rule in India formally lasted between 1857 and 1947. How large, of what nature
and how lasting was the impact? These questions have long guided the study of the
economic history of India. The imperialist or ‘orientalist’ belief was that the empire
heralded modernity in India. Karl Marx shared that belief with many of his
contemporaries, although he also observed that modernity came with a cost. Twentieth-
century writers on imperialism and development emphasized these costs, and argued for
an enduring link between colonialism and underdevelopment.
The view that impediments to development were inherited from the damages of
colonial rule, and not home-grown, was a key premise of Indian nationalist thought as
well (see also Chapter 1). It was articulated, among others, in the writings of Jawaharlal
Nehru himself about the origins of modern India. In 1947, this diagnosis of Indian
poverty held that it was a product of ‘laissez-faire’ policies of the colonial regime,
exploitation by foreign capital, and the non-interventionist stance of the Indian
government under the British raj. In this view, the channels of influence in global, even
local, economic exchanges were essentially political. In turn, these ideas supported the
two key planks of India’s development strategy: strong sentiment against foreign trade
and investment, and statism. Indian big business in 1947, the principal backers of the
Indian National Congress, eagerly embraced the former and, somewhat uneasily, the
latter.
These policy stances now have few takers in the nations of South Asia. Since 1990, if
not earlier, the world-view that habitually warns against globalization has been in decline.
Faith in statism has diminished too. The study of India’s economic history has been
affected by this shift. Scholarship continues along the imperialism-underdevelopment
axis, albeit on a smaller scale than in earlier years. The belief that British rule created
misery persists in amateur history. But this stance looks increasingly dated and
disoriented, especially at a time when economic liberalization in India itself is drawing
upon the tenets of classical political economy on which British policy in India was
founded. Another reaction is to sidestep questions of India’s economic history and to
focus instead on issues of recent decades. Indeed, the study of the economy history of
India is at risk of losing wider relevance, audience and funding.
This chapter argues that in order to restore the link between economic history and
modern India, a different narrative of Indian economic history is needed. An exclusive
focus on colonialism as the driver of India’s economic history misses those continuities
that arise from economic structure or local conditions. The power of colonialism to
impair productive capacity has been overstated in standard narratives on Indian economic
history. In fact, market-oriented British imperial policies did initiate a process of
 Rethinking economic change in India 24

economic growth based on the production of goods intensive in labour and natural
resources. However, productive capacity per worker was constrained by low rates of
private and public investment in infrastructure, excessively low rates of schooling, social
inequalities based on caste and gender, and delayed demographic transition and the
resultant demographic burden placed on physical capital and natural resources.
The end of colonialism did not see a dramatic break in these conditions. In fact, the
demographic burden became heavier in the post-independence period. Economic policy
between 1950 and 1990 attempted harder than the raj to raise the quality of labour and
rates of investment. A striking success of the new economic policy was the rise in
agricultural yield per acre and per head. Still, economic growth continued to be intensive
in semi-skilled labour. On the other hand, whereas British policy believed in exploitation
of comparative advantage in trade, independent India turned firmly away from
participation in the world economy, precisely at a time that the world economy
experienced a boom as never before. Traditional resources like labour improved in
quality to some extent but also lost a large potential market. When economic reforms in
the 1990s re-integrated India in the world economy, the major beneficiaries were
manufactures intensive in semi-skilled labour, in a late but welcome reversion to the
colonial pattern of growth.
This chapter begins with a descriptive tour of India’s economic history based on recent
research. It returns later to the long-term continuities between colonial and post-colonial
India, especially in resource endowments.

A descriptive tour: 1757–1947

It was a century from 1757, when the English East India Company established its
supremacy in Bengal, to 1857, when the Crown took over administration of India. British
Crown rule over India lasted ninety years, from 1857 to 1947.
The period of British colonial rule was long enough to defy any simple summary.
However, in discussing this period it is useful to focus on three features. First, structural
features include the overwhelming importance of natural resources and labour to
economic growth, fluctuations and welfare. Agriculture and labour-intensive industry and
services were the main livelihoods throughout this period and beyond. Second, global
features consider the fact that India’s economy was more open during this period
compared to periods before and after colonialism. India participated in a global
revolution in transport and communication, which for India includes especially the Suez
Canal, the railways and the telegraph. The third set of features can be called colonial
features. For example, that India was a colony imposed certain peculiarities on its balance
of payments, like large remittances paid by the government to Britain. Being a colony,
however, was not necessarily a fiscal burden. The ratio of investment to government
expenditure was apparently much higher in British India than in Mughal India.
The structural features of India’s economy changed rather slowly. For example,
India’s economy was primarily agrarian before, during and since colonialization.
However, the global and the colonial features shifted dramatically after 1947. Industry in
colonial India had strong global ties, whereas after 1947 the policy of ‘self-reliance’
 Economic history and modern India 25

involved a deliberate and drastic reduction in the influence of global factors on the
domestic economy.

Setting the stage: the century before British control

An orientalist cliché, with adherents as great as Karl Marx and Max Weber, held pre-
colonial South Asia to be stagnant and backward in political-economic terms. A corollary
of this cliché was that economic modernity in South Asia began with European
involvement in the region. Later research has proven this idea to be a myth. South Asia
was already a major player in world commerce, and possessed a well-developed trading
and financial world, when Europeans discovered it. Interestingly enough, the Indian trade
at its peak involved an exchange of goods, not for goods, but for bullion. The
sustainability of the trade depended on plentiful supply of precious metals from Spanish
America. In this way, Indian trade helped to establish what Immanuel Wallerstein and
other historians call a ‘world system’.
Currently, the picture of the early-modern Indian economy derives significantly from
research on the Indian Ocean trade. From the 1960s, the Indian Ocean trade in the
seventeenth and the eighteenth century and, connectedly, the coastal economy, textile
production and export trade, has been a major field of historical research. One clear
thread has emerged in this scholarship that undermines any essential connection between
the Empire and economic modernization. This is the centrality of India in the global
network of trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Indian merchants were not
only long prominent in international trade, there was also compatibility rather than
contradiction between the interests of the European companies and Indian traders until
the mid-eighteenth century.
The counterpart argument is that the Indian merchants retreated thereafter because of
political intervention. Going further, one can argue that Empire, in fact, damaged
prospects of an endogenous capitalist development. In different ways, such a sentiment
shows up in comparative histories linking maritime trade with development.1 But radical
claims in world history scholarship, such as the one made recently by André Gunder
Frank that the centre of early modern world economy was Asia rather than Europe, are
not reliable (Frank, 1998). For, such claims usually involve rather exaggerated
assumptions about the share of regional commercial blocs in world trade, and the size of
the export economy relative to the more subsistence-oriented economy within these
regions. Notwithstanding the importance of export trade for some coastal areas of India,
the significance of the Indian Ocean for the regional economy as whole was rather small,
even negligible. At any rate, strong claims in this regard are often not strongly
substantiated. Whatever data one can gather on the subject suggest the marginality of the
trade, a point that was expressed somewhat brusquely by the ‘imperialist’ historian
William Moreland (1920): The total trade of India going overseas in Akbar’s time could
be accommodated in a couple of the cargo vessels leaving Calcutta port in the time of
Minto’.2 Akbar’s time may not be a fair comparison. But even at its height (the late
eighteenth century), export by the English and Dutch East India Companies was a
minuscule percentage of probable regional, even sub-regional, incomes.
The late eighteenth century political realignment in land and sea saw the retreat of the
Indian merchants and ascent of the English East India Company as a territorial power.
 Rethinking economic change in India 26

This transition remains critical to the significance of the eighteenth century for a historian
of the imperial India. The standard view here is that the English used their political power
to suppress Indian entrepreneurs and former collaborators. But there is a minority view
that suggests that the Indian merchants declined because of the intrinsic weakness, even
absence, of mercantile organization (Das Gupta, 2001).
The century before 1857 was a time of territorial consolidation. In the early eighteenth
century, Europeans dominated India’s maritime trade with Europe. By 1757, the English
East India Company commanded political power in Bengal. The transition from trade to
direct rule can be explained partly by the needs of trade itself. The mercantilists criticized
the payment of bullion for Indian textiles. Local political circumstances that enabled the
British to command land revenues of Bengal came as a less controversial means of
payment. The local circumstances included the support of the elite disaffected by the
local rulers. When the Company’s monopoly in trade ended in the early nineteenth
century, it was seriously committed to building an empire. By 1857, the boundaries of
colonial India, which were the basis on which nations were carved out in 1947, had been
defined.
A more or less uniform administrative system came in place in this time-span. In the
economic sphere, there were several major changes. Agrarian ‘settlements’, which were
contracts between the state and the cultivators on property rights and revenue
commitments, were drawn. The British wanted to create a class of cultivators with secure
property rights who would yield more revenue to them by pursuing profit-oriented
cultivation. In effect, property rights often went to non-cultivating classes because of
mistaken identity, imperfect information or political compulsions. The legal recognition
of a property right, conditional on payment of land revenue, went along with the erosion
of many customary rights over usage of land or what it produced. These rights were
poorly understood, oversimplified or irreconcilable with private property right. Tenancy
rights and rights to the use of common lands were victims of this confusion. Ultimately
these settlements transformed rural institutions on resource use, restructured classes and
had mixed effects on growth, the mix being variable over time and space. One universal
effect of introducing secure property rights was the extension of markets in land. Since
greater security for some rights inevitably increased insecurity for other rights-holders,
the move also contributed, more silently, to the extension of a labour market.
Another set of changes had their origin in foreign trade in an increasingly integrated
world. Trade expanded quickly, and saw significant changes in pattern and composition.
At the close of the Napoleonic wars, the market for Indian textiles had shrunk as a result
of tariffs on Indian goods in England, which were steeply raised between 1797 and 1814.
At the same time, technological change in weaving, most decisively Horrock’s power-
loom, reduced the difference in cost of production, ending cotton textile’s pre-eminence
as exportable from India though not ending the trade completely. The East India
Company’s commercial monopoly ended in 1813. Already, many former employees and
other individuals had established partnerships with Indians to carry on export of cotton,
indigo, opium and sugar. Profits of these trades sustained new commercial-cum-port
towns such as Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, helped some Indian groups accumulate
capital that later found its way into industrial ventures and built close trading links
between India and China, which was a market for Indian opium and a source for tea.
These trades dwindled in the second half of the nineteenth century. Natural indigo was
 Economic history and modern India 27

steadily displaced by synthetic indigo. Lancashire ‘discovered’ Indian cotton during the
American Civil War, but subsequently more cotton was used by the newly established
Indian mills themselves. The Sino-Indian opium trade began to dwindle from 1906, in the
wake of worldwide anti-addiction movement. If bullion was India’s principal import in
the eighteenth century, the composition of import began to change towards manufactures,
notably British textiles from the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
It is not easy to read in this period, roughly 1800–60, a general trend. We do not have
the basic data to make an assessment of growth, stagnation or decline in the early
nineteenth century. Nevertheless, there is a widely shared belief that the consolidation of
British power in the economic sphere saw a violent and uncompensated disturbance. The
fact of a decline, the period, the regions and the causes, remain imprecise.
One thing we do know is that India’s traditional cotton textile industry declined
between 1820 and 1880. At first an export market for Indian cloth disappeared. Later,
hand-spun cotton yarn and hand-woven cloth suffered because of the import of yarn and
cloth from the mills in England. The decline seems dramatic if seen against India’s earlier
dominance in world textile trade. This single example of decay appears to have generated
the ‘deindustrialization’ thesis, which at its narrowest holds that early British rule
introduced a violent shock to India’s economy, and at its broadest holds that colonialism
destroyed the potentials to industrialize. Both the narrow and broad inferences, however,
are deeply controversial for three reasons. First, the decline was apparently restricted to
cotton textiles. Second, the decline of the textile industry did not continue through the
rest of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century as British colonial rule
strengthened, which calls into question any connection drawn between politics and the
potentials to industrialize. Third, a decline in cotton textiles was not capable of causing
economy-wide distress. The pro portion of textile export in total textile production was
very small, at its peak not more than 1–2 per cent. Further, losses for the Indian textile
producers were largely balanced by large gains in consumers’ and producers’ surplus. To
illustrate the gains, by 1880, prices of ordinary cloth and yarn were about 20 per cent of
what they were by 1800. On the side of loss, many of the jobs lost because of competition
with mechanized textiles consisted of poorly paid domestic workers with rather small
implicit wages arising from small opportunity costs.
A second and more plausible source of a regress was taxation. The new regional
governments collected taxes more thoroughly than the regimes before them in areas
where direct contract between the state and the cultivator (or ryotwari) was in existence,
reportedly causing a decline in peasant production and demand in the 1830s and 1840s.
This process was not present in all regions. It was absent in eastern and northern India
where the state did not collect tax from the peasant directly. Further, the timing and
intensity of the crisis remain imprecise. So far, more or less the only ‘evidence’ cited to
show widespread distress is a rather dubious one, price depression (see also Chapter 5,
note 3).

The central role of agriculture in India’s economic history

Agriculture has been the predominant sector for India’s workers for the last two
centuries, right up to the present. As shown in Table 2.1, about 70
 Rethinking economic change in India 28

Table 2.1 Employment, 1901–91 (millions,

percentage share of main occupational classes in
brackets)
1901a 1931a 1991b
Population 285.2 338.1 846.0
Workers 131.6 (100.0) 139.1 (100.0) 278.9 (100.0)
c
Agriculture and allied occupations 89.3 (67.8) 98.8 (71.0) 186.2 (66.7)
Modern industryd 0.6 (0.4) 1.6 (1.2) 8.3 (3.0)
e
Traditional industry and construction 13.3 (10.1) 9.8 (7.0) 20.1 (7.2)
f
Services 18.9 (14.4) 20.8 (15.0) 57.1 (20.5)
Others (mining and unspecified) 9.5 (7.3) 8.1 (5.8) 7.2 (2.6)
Sources: Heston (1983), Sivasubramonian (2000), and the Statistical Abstracts of India, various
years.
Notes
a Undivided India.
b Indian Union.
c The main occupations were cultivation, livestock rearing, plantations, forestry and fishing.
d Represented by officially regulated factories.
e Represented by units outside officially regulated factories.
f The main occupations were transport and communication, commerce, public administration,
professions and liberal arts.

per cent of India’s employment was in the primary sector in the first few decades of the
twentieth century. By the start of the twenty-first century, after fifty years of state-backed
effort to industrialize, the share of the primary sector in GDP fell from over one-half at
the time of independence to about one-quarter at present. Nonetheless, the majority of
workers in post-colonial India continued to be engaged in the primary sector. Its share in
employment fell only to about 60 per cent in the 1990s. Thus, conditions for agriculture
have been a primary determinant of the well-being of most of India’s people.
The typical weather pattern in most of India is nine months of dry weather and three
months of monsoon season, which refers to the seasonal shift in wind direction between
June and September that brings 90 per cent of total rainfall in the region. Rainfall during
the monsoon season is usually adequate to raise one or two food crops in the months
following the monsoon. But rainfall is rarely adequate for winter crops and marginally
adequate in some of the drier regions, even for the main food crop.
High risk, therefore, was a constant feature of economic life in most parts of India
throughout history. If the monsoon rains failed even slightly, starvation was widespread
and sudden. In the short run, famines affected all parts of the economy via violent shifts
in consumption and labour force. For example, in Madras Presidency the great famine of
1876–78 took three and a half million lives, or 10 per cent of the population, and a larger
percentage of workers.
 Economic history and modern India 29

The work by Amartya Sen and others have changed historians’ approach to famines
considerably. Famines are now seen more as processes rather than as accidents of nature.
The great nineteenth-century famines, in 1876–78 and 1898–99, do illustrate such a view.
The impact of famines depended on administrative failure, market failure and social
failure. The state relied—in good or bad faith—too heavily on the market mechanism.
But there was market-failure because transaction costs were high during famines. In turn,
the state’s own refusal to compensate for missing markets added to the intensity of the
famine. Social failure was revealed in the fact that certain castes, particularly the rural
labourers, figured prominently among those who died. The roots of these failures were
already present, perhaps even gathered strength, when a devastating weather shock
occurred. That being said, nineteenth-century famines were also powerfully ecological
phenomena. The regularity of the famines, the degree of crop failure, cannot be
understood without reference to monsoon ecology, especially the conditions of the
Deccan plateau. Some regions were far more prone than others because of their harsh
agrarian environments. The probability of a weather shock was distributed very unevenly
across space, and was correlated with the probability of a famine. The most vulnerable
region was the vast arid Deccan tract.
Weather-induced famines, remarkably, disappeared after 1900, to be replaced by more
localized scarcities and ‘droughts’ What caused this change? The state had set up a relief
system by then, but its reach was limited. And as the Bengal famine of 1943 displayed,
the capacity of the state to manipulate grain markets had a menacing aspect. A more
plausible explanation is the efficiency of the market mechanism itself especially after the
full development of the railway network by 1920. Thereafter, droughts in India have had
a tendency to localize in regions particularly ill-served by mass transportation.
As a result of famine mortality, population growth in the first half of the nineteenth
century was low (0.4–0.5 per cent) and subject to high fluctuations. Steady rise in
population from 1921 was partly an outcome of the rarity of famines, along with better
health care and possibly nutrition. Between 1914 and 1946, the rate of population growth
was 1.2 per cent per year.
In the long run, two observed tendencies seem attributable to pervasive and endemic
risks. First, rates of private investment in India have generally been low. Instead, Indians
who held assets displayed a marked preference for precious metals, which tended to be
more stable in value, but generated smaller return than productive investment. Second,
the high risk of famine mortality was possibly a reason why birth rates also tended to be
high. During the interwar period, when mortality began to fall, the high birth rate led to a
dramatic rise in population growth.
In this primarily agricultural society, cultivation patterns and livelihood risks
depended on the distribution of rainfall. Mean annual rainfall in India ranges from more
than seventy inches on the western coast and Bengal delta to thirty inches or below in
large parts of the interior. Areas with high rainfall tended to grow rice; those with low
rainfall focused on coarser grains or millets. Rice and rainfall were generally associated
with high population densities and low ratios of land to labour—because the combination
of rice and rainfall normally meant lighter impact of famines and greater requirement for
farm labour.
The eastern coastal areas where British colonial rule first established itself had
abundant water, fertile land, dense populations, well-developed foreign trade and
 Rethinking economic change in India 30

relatively hierarchical societies. Land in these areas could sustain high rents, and thus a
prosperous rent-earning class, who were rarely peasants themselves. From a mistaken
identity, the British administrators conferred on them ownership rights under the
Termanent Settlement’, overnight turning the direct producers into mere tenants. The
interior regions conquered later were drier, more sparsely populated and cultivated
coarser and sturdier grains. Peasantry here was less hierarchical with powerful kinship
units, and these units tended to control land collectively. Farming here co-existed with
extensive raising of livestock. In a large part of this region, property rights were granted
to direct producers. From a mix of ecological and political reasons, the government
invested heavily in extending canal irrigation in the drier interior regions. Coastal
Madras, a rice region that saw canal construction on a large scale, was an exception.
Between 1885 and 1938, cultivable area increased by sixty million acres, of which over
half was irrigated.
The latter half of the nineteenth century saw agrarian commercialization driven by
trans-local markets. Between 1880 and 1925, the real volume of trade to and from India
doubled. The value of exports quintupled between 1870 and 1914. More that half of
Indian exports now consisted of agricultural goods such as grains, seeds, raw cotton and
raw jute. The age of the artisan had ended, and the age of the peasant arrived. Close to
half of Indian imports consisted of manufactured consumer goods, chiefly cotton textiles.
The ratio of trade to national income increased from less than 10 per cent in the 1860s to
about 20 per cent in 1914.
British industrialization influenced the composition of trade, but the scale was also
influenced by internal and external changes in the costs of trade. Ocean freight rates on
bulk goods from India became one-third between 1873 and 1893. By the latter date, two-
thirds of exports from India passed Suez. Early in the nineteenth century, India’s product
markets were constrained by a multiplicity of weights and measures, backward and risky
transportation systems and extensive use of barter. Administrative reforms and political
consolidation of British colonial rule weakened these constraints and enabled closer
integration of local, regional and global markets.
Between 1870 and 1914, agricultural prices consistently rose. Transactions costs fell.
Land sales, land prices and rents increased. Credit transactions expanded. Labour became
more mobile and more market-oriented. Millions went overseas. Profit opportunities led
to changes in resource use. For example, in what had been the drier millet zones, after
irrigation, a basket of ‘cash crops’ became common, examples are wheat, cotton,
oilseeds, sugarcane and tobacco.
The three conditions that had made agrarian expansion possible in the late nineteenth
century—surplus land, investment in irrigation and growing exports—all weakened in the
interwar period. As shown in Table 2.2, production of food crops was essentially
unchanged from the early 1900s to the late 1940s, even though production of non-food
crops and large-scale industrial production increased more rapidly. One interpretation of
this slowdown in agriculture is that the resource-based trade-driven growth had reached
its limits. Cultivable waste lands became scarce, investment in water slowed, and so did
the world economy. Some growth continued in cotton and wheat, but increasingly
dependent on yield-per-acre rather than acreage, in other words, dependent upon seeds
developed or adapted in government laboratories rather than on wider access to water.
 Economic history and modern India 31

That said, the principal source of agricultural stagnation was a crop and a region that
had participated in a rather limited way in the whole transition—rice in Bengal. Thus,
historians have also looked for other hypotheses for the slowdown with Bengal in mind.
One theory focuses on class structure. In densely populated, rain-fed, rice-based areas
like Bengal, the British had conferred property rights upon formerly rent-earning groups,
perpetuating their power and blocking the way for basic restructuring in rural society. In
the drier millet-based regions where ‘land was plentiful and hands few’, the state made
revenue arrangements directly with the peasants, creating a positive incentive for private
investment.3 Another explanation, complementary rather than competing with the former,
can be resource-endowments. In the Bengal delta, income from rice had to be shared
between too many people dependent on land. By early in the twentieth century,
population growth in this region had led to the cultivation of inferior land. The rice areas
that did well commercially, such as coastal Madras, had lower population densities and
received canal irrigation that made it possible to combine rice with dry-season crops.
Whatever factors were behind the stagnation of agricultural output, they were long-
lasting. The regional pattern of agricultural growth and stagnation since independence has
been similar to the regional pattern of growth and stagnation before independence.
Pockets of rural poverty today emerged as pockets of rural poverty in the latter half of
colonial rule. Eastern India was prominent among these. Areas that experienced a ‘green
revolution’ in the 1970s and 1980s were already advancing during the British rule.
Northern and parts of Western India were examples. Land has been scarce in an absolute
sense from about 1900. By and large, success in breaking the resource barrier after 1947
has depended on
Table 2.2 Production and wages
Index of production Index of real of Index of real wages
income in
Food Non- Modern Modern Non-agricultural,
traditional
crops food industry Industry outside modern
industry
crops industry
Skilled Unskilled
1900–01 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
to
1904–05
1934–35 103 146 293 127 185 160 151
to
1939–40
Sources: Sivasubramonian (2000: tables 4.28, 4.40, 4.41, 6(g)); Blyn (1966: appendix 4~). Modern
industry real wages are simple average of three indices, Bombay cotton mills, Ahmedabad cotton
mills and Calcutta jute mills. The wage indices were estimated by Mukerji (1959,1960,1961).

irrigation, seeds, chemical fertilizers and, to some extent, exploitation of common

property resources such as forests and pastures.
How did the new regime of rights and markets contribute to standards of living?
Curiously enough, most general estimates of inequality in land-holdings reveal an
 Rethinking economic change in India 32

absence of change. But underneath this aggregate stability, there was quite massive
reshuffling. There was decline of aristocracy, rise of rich and middle peasants, and
gathering vulnerability at the lower end. Generally, the pre-colonial landed aristocracy
declined, or left the village to pursue urban occupations. In Eastern India, where the pre-
colonial elite were granted property rights, the decline was a more long-drawn affair, but
happened all the same. An immediate cause of decline of the older elite was
dispossession of sovereign powers. A more long-term factor was commercialization—
possibilities of intensive cultivation and profit opportunities that gave rise to a new class
of rich peasants and sub-landlords. Increasingly, they commanded more political as well
as economic power than the older elite.
Agricultural income indices are generally patchy. Between 1890 and 1950, no marked
change in average real wages seems to have occurred. Real agricultural income per
worker seems not to have changed much either. But inequality may have increased. At
one end, non-wage incomes represented the earnings of the ‘small peasant’, who relied
mainly on family labour and tilled land barely enough for subsistence, and usually had
insecure property rights. At the other end were ‘rich peasants’ who had secure property
rights, controlled enough land to generate a surplus, employed labourers, had better
access to credit or were creditors themselves. As a rule, rich peasants gained from
commercialization. That is, returns to capital increased. The evidence on small peasants
is mixed. In some cases, they did well; in other cases, they gained in the nineteenth
century but regressed in the twentieth. On a limited scale the small peasant turned into a
labourer. Instances of the peasant losing land have received exaggerated importance in
academic debate on the impact of colonialism. In one extreme view, such instances
symbolized a general rural decline and dislocation caused by colonialism. In another
view, stories of such reversal were neither very general, nor attributable to colonialism.
After all, in the long run, the Indian small peasant faced steady fall in land-person ratio
because of population pressure. Chapter 3 returns to this theme.
Although there is no strong evidence to suggest the labourers became on average
better off with the commercialization of agriculture, wages did rise in the major cash crop
regions. Further, colonialism brought changes in the labourer’s social position. In pre-
colonial India, labourers came from castes whose primary duty was to perform labour.
Many were akin to serfs, and some at least were actually saleable. In the colonial period,
this serfdom or slavery declined. The element of compulsion and force in employment
weakened. Various forms of social oppression, such as enforced dress codes and codes of
conduct with respect to upper castes, weakened too. The possibility of migrating to the
cities and to other British colonies made occupational choice more diverse. The decline
of attached labour was partly induced by the widespread exit of these castes from
agricultural labour, and entry into plantations, mines, urban services, public works and
government utilities.

Industry
India’s workforce is not significantly more industrial today than it was a century ago. In
1901, 13.9 million industrial workers formed 10.5 per cent of the workforce, as shown in
Table 2.1. In 1991, 28.7 million workers made up 9.4 per cent of the workforce. The
share of industry in national income has grown modestly from 11.1 per cent in 1900–10
 Economic history and modern India 33

to 16.4 per cent in 1940–46, to 27 per cent in 2000. India’s independence in 1947 did not
represent any marked break in the pace of industrialization as measured either by
employment or share of national income.
In describing industrialization in colonial India it is necessary to begin with a
distinction between traditional and modern industry. Modern industry (or large-scale
industry) had two characteristics: use of machinery, and factories subject to some form of
regulation and modern managerial practices. By contrast, in ‘traditional’ industrial firms,
machinery, size and hierarchical management played no significant role. Both traditional
and modern industry shared one feature: intensive use of labour and/or locally available
raw materials. The main examples of large-scale industry were cotton and jute mills.
Examples of traditional industry include handloom textiles, leather manufactures, metal
utensils, pottery, carpets and shawls, etc. Large-scale industry employed 2–3 per cent of
India’s industrial workers at c. 1900 and a little over 10 per cent at 1947. Its share of the
national income generated in manufacturing increased from less than 10 per cent to 40
per cent over this time.
Factory employment in the colonial period was overwhelmingly dominated by the
textile industry: mills for cotton and jute spinning and weaving; cotton ginning firms and
jute presses; and a few isolated large firms in wool and silk spinning and weaving. The
other mechanized industries were paper, sugar, matches, cement and steel. Technology
and the capital goods were imported, but Indian mills used a far higher proportion of
labour to capital than the comparable factor-proportions in the same industries in Britain.
These modern factories were concentrated in two provinces: Bombay and Bengal. These
provinces were not particularly industrial. Their attraction, especially the pull of the cities
of Bombay and Calcutta, derived from their position as ports, railway termini, financial
centres and commercial hubs.
Modern industry was essentially a product of the times and a product of India’s
contact with Britain. In cotton and jute mills, the idea of a mill, the technical knowledge,
the equipment, a part of the capital and a section of the engineers at first came from
Britain. The higher capital-intensity, new origin and dependence on British precedence
led to ways of organizing work that did not exist before. It gave rise to cities such as
Calcutta or Bombay, shaped urban labour markets, encouraged the growth of railways,
ports, laws, banks and technical schools, and was a force behind the modernization of
services.
At the start of colonial rule in the 1850s, India’s capital market institutions were
totally inadequate for channelling household savings to industrial investment. The real
cost of capital was astronomical. It is not surprising that the pioneers in modern industry
came almost entirely from communities that had specialized in trading and banking
activities—that is, those who could raise money more easily than, say, an artisan or a
farmer. By and large, fixed capital in modern industry came from its own sources of
funds, or from borrowings from within a small set of people known to each other. They
included both Europeans and Indians.
Factory labour was a new form of work in India in the middle of the nineteenth
century. Machinery, migration, urbanization and discipline were new ingredients in the
workers’ lives. Did these changes improve income and welfare? From the early 1900s to
the late 1930s, real wages of mill workers did increase quite substantially in the cotton
mills of Western India, and marginally in the jute mills of the east (as shown in Table
 Rethinking economic change in India 34

2.2). Still, most workers earned wages that were too little or too insecure to think of
growing roots in the city and giving up connections with land and agricultural labour.
However, the chances of occupational and income mobility were greater in the cities than
in the villages. The city-dwellers never suffered the threat of famine in the way the rural
population, and especially the lowly born within them, did.
Historians have asked why modern industry remained limited in India. Two points of
view exist on this question. Morris (1983) suggests that the scale of the home market was
small for goods that used machinery. Bagchi (1970) suggests that the home market was
shared by Indian and imported manufactures, and the colonial government did not protect
Indian industry sufficiently from low-cost imports. For example, India never developed a
capital goods sector, and did not see the kind of boost to machinery production associated
with railway construction in mid-nineteenth-century United States. India’s railroads, the
largest railway system in Asia, imported nearly all its equipment until the interwar
period. Behind this policy, there was an explicit encouragement from the government to
‘buy British’, and possibly a disregard for experiments because the government
guaranteed rates of return on private investment in the railways. The ‘buy British’ policy
led to acute shortages during World War I, and changed in the interwar period, which
saw some tariff protection for modern industry.
By focusing on the extent of demand for products of modern manufacturing, both
arguments sidestep the issues of resource-endowments and high cost of capital in India.
Wider usage of machinery, whether for home or export markets, was not cost-effective
because of the high cost of capital and the scarcity (and cost) of skilled labour. Machinery
was used in those exceptional industries which processed raw materials abundantly
available in India, and for which the machines and technicians could be easily imported.
If we look away from this segment, the general situation was exactly as resource
endowments would permit, that is, a vast world of traditional manufacturing, consisting
of tool-based industrial production performed in homes or small workshops.
Standard narratives of Indian industrialization have often neglected traditional industry
from a mistaken belief that imports and modern industry killed it. Research on national
income first challenged such a view, showing that income-per-worker increased quite
significantly in this sector between 1900 and 1947, as shown in Table 2.2.
Sivasubramonian finds that real product per worker in small-scale industry increased by
about 60 per cent between 1900 and 1930, but fell in the next decade. Later work on
specific industries showed evidence of a large rise in output per worker as well
(Sivasubramonian, 2000: table 7.19).
A different perspective that has taken shape more recently argues that the key
dynamics in traditional industry was not that it became obsolescent, but rather that it was
affected by commercialization in product and input markets (Roy, 1999).
Commercialization involved a number of shifts: increasing integration of the market for
the products of traditional manufacturing; and a shift away from production for own use
or use as gifts and tributes to production for market; and a shift from local to longer-
distance trade. These shifts led to changes in consumer and producer behaviour. As the
market integrated, competition within the crafts intensified. There was decline of older
institutional forms and the rise of new ones that used labour more efficiently. In
particular, there was a decline in two types of non-specialized workers: women working
in household industry and a group the early censuses called ‘general labour’, which
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unless it was of equal value to the members of the white race by
whom they were surrounded.
As this thought got hold in my mind and I began to see further into
the nature of the task that I had undertaken to perform, much of the
political agitation and controversy that divided the North from the
South, the black man from the white, began to look unreal and
artificial to me. It seemed as if the people who carried on political
campaigns were engaged to a very large extent in a battle with
shadows, and that these shadows represented the prejudices and
animosities of a period that was now past.
On the contrary, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to
me that the kind of work that I had undertaken to do was a very real
sort of thing. Moreover, it was a kind of work which tended not to
divide, but to unite, all the opposing elements and forces, because it
was a work of construction.
Having gone thus far, I began to consider seriously how I should
proceed to gain the sympathy of each of the three groups that I have
mentioned for the work that I had in hand.
I determined, first of all, that as far as possible I would try to gain
the active support and coöperation, in all that I undertook, of the
masses of my own race. With this in view, before I began my work at
Tuskegee, I spent several weeks travelling about among the rural
communities of Macon County, of which Tuskegee is the county seat.
During all this time I had an opportunity to meet and talk
individually with a large number of people representing the rural
classes, which constitute 80 per cent. of the Negro population in the
South. I slept in their cabins, ate their food, talked to them in their
churches, and discussed with them in their own homes their
difficulties and their needs. In this way I gained a kind of knowledge
which has been of great value to me in all my work since.
As years went on, I extended these visits to the adjoining counties
and adjoining states. Then, as the school at Tuskegee became better
known, I took advantage of the invitations that came to me to visit
more distant parts of the country, where I had an opportunity to
learn still more about the actual life of the people and the nature of
the difficulties with which they were struggling.
 In all this, my purpose was to get acquainted with the masses of
the people—to gain their confidence so that I might work with them
and for them.
In the course of travel and observation I became more and more
impressed with the influence that the organizations which coloured
people have formed among themselves exert upon the masses of the
people.
The average man outside of the Negro race is likely to assume that
the ten millions of coloured people in this country are a mere
disorganized and heterogeneous collection of individuals, herded
together under one statistical label, without head or tail, and with no
conscious common purpose. This is far from true. There are certain
common interests that are peculiar to all Negroes, certain channels
through which it is possible to touch and influence the whole people.
In my study of the race in what I may call its organized capacity, I
soon learned that the most influential organization among Negroes is
the Negro church. I question whether or not there is a group of ten
millions of people anywhere, not excepting the Catholics, that can be
so readily reached and influenced through their church organizations
as the ten millions of Negroes in the United States. Of these millions
of black people there is only a very small percentage that does not
have formal or informal connection with some church. The principal
church groups are: Baptists, African Methodists, African Methodist
Episcopal Zionists, and Coloured Methodists, to which I might add
about a dozen smaller denominations.
I began my work of getting the support of these organizations by
speaking (or lecturing, as they are accustomed to describe it) to the
coloured people in the little churches in the country surrounding the
school at Tuskegee. When later I extended my journeys into other
and more distant parts of the country, I began to get into touch with
the leaders in the church and to learn something about the kind and
extent of influence which these men exercise through the churches
over the masses of the Negro people.
It has always been a great pleasure to me to meet and to talk in a
plain, straightforward way with the common people of my own race
wherever I have been able to meet them. But it is in the Negro
churches that I have had my best opportunities for meeting and
getting acquainted with them.
 It has been my privilege to attend service in Trinity Church,
Boston, where I heard Phillips Brooks. I have attended service in the
Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, where I heard the
late Dr. John Hall. I have attended service in Westminster Abbey, in
London. I have visited some of the great cathedrals in Europe when
service was being held. But not any of these services have had for me
the real interest that certain services among my own people have
had. Let me describe the type of the service that I have enjoyed more
than any other in all my experience in attending church, whether in
America or Europe.
In Macon County, Ala., where I live, the coloured people have a
kind of church-service that is called an “all-day meeting.” The ideal
season for such meetings is about the middle of May. The
churchhouse that I have in mind is located about ten miles from
town. To get the most out of the “all-day meeting” one should make
an early start, say eight o’clock. During the drive one drinks in the
fresh fragrance of forests and wild flowers. The church building is
located near a stream of water, not far from a large, cool spring, and
in the midst of a grove or primitive forest. Here the coloured people
begin to come together by nine or ten o’clock in the morning. Some
of them walk; most of them drive. A large number come in buggies,
but many use the more primitive wagons or carts, drawn by mules,
horses, or oxen. In these conveyances a whole family, from the
youngest to the eldest, make the journey together. All bring baskets
of food, for the “all-day meeting” is a kind of Sunday picnic or
festival. Preaching, preceded by much singing, begins at about eleven
o’clock. If the building is not large enough, the services are held out
under the trees. Sometimes there is but one sermon; sometimes
there are two or three sermons, if visiting ministers are present. The
sermon over, there is more plantation singing. A collection is taken—
sometimes two collections—then comes recess for dinner and
recreation.
Sometimes I have seen at these “all-day meetings” as many as
three thousand people present. No one goes away hungry. Large
baskets, filled with the most tempting spring chicken or fresh pork,
fresh vegetables, and all kinds of pies and cakes, are then opened.
The people scatter in groups. Sheets or table-cloths are spread on the
grass under a tree near the stream. Here old acquaintances are
renewed; relatives meet members of the family whom they have not
seen for months. Strangers, visitors, every one must be invited by
some one else to dinner. Kneeling on the fresh grass or on broken
branches of trees surrounding the food, dinner is eaten. The animals
are fed and watered, and then at about three o’clock there is another
sermon or two, with plenty of singing thrown in; then another
collection, or perhaps two. In between these sermons I am invited to
speak, and am very glad to accept the invitation. At about five o’clock
the benediction is pronounced and the thousands quietly scatter to
their homes with many good-bys and well-wishes. This, as I have
said, is the kind of church-service that I like best. In the
opportunities which I have to speak to such gatherings I feel that I
have done some of my best work.
In carrying out the policy which I formed early, of making use of
every opportunity to speak to the masses of the people, I have not
only visited country churches and spoken at such “all-day meetings”
as I have just described, but for years I have made it a practice to
attend, whenever it has been possible for me to do so, every
important ministers’ meeting. I have also made it a practice to visit
town and city churches and in this way to get acquainted with the
ministers and meet the people.
During my many and long campaigns in the North, for the purpose
of getting money to carry on Tuskegee Institute, it has been a great
pleasure and satisfaction to me, after I have spoken in some white
church or hall or at some banquet, to go directly to some coloured
church for a heart-to-heart talk with my own people. The deep
interest that they have shown in my work and the warmth and
enthusiasm with which coloured people invariably respond to any
one who talks to them frankly and sincerely in regard to matters that
concern the welfare of the race, make it a pleasure to speak to them.
Many times on these trips to the North it has happened that
coloured audiences have waited until ten or eleven o’clock at night
for my coming. This does not mean that coloured people may not
attend the other meetings which I address, but means simply that
they prefer in most cases to have me to speak to them alone. When at
last I have been able to reach the church or the hall where the
audience was gathered, it has been such a pleasure to meet them that
I have often found myself standing on my feet until after twelve
o’clock. No one thing has given me more faith in the future of the
race than the fact that Negro audiences will sit for two hours or more
and listen with the utmost attention to a serious discussion of any
subject that has to do with their interest as a people. This is just as
true of the unlettered masses as it is of the more highly educated few.
Not long ago, for example, I spoke to a large audience in the
Chamber of Commerce in Cleveland, Ohio. This audience was
composed for the most part of white people, and the meeting
continued rather late into the night. Immediately after this meeting I
was driven to the largest coloured church in Cleveland, where I
found an audience of something like twenty-five hundred coloured
people waiting patiently for my appearance. The church building was
crowded, and many of those present, I was told, had been waiting for
two or three hours.
As I entered the building an unusual scene presented itself. Each
member of the audience had been provided with a little American
flag, and as I appeared upon the platform, the whole audience rose to
its feet and began waving these flags. The reader can, perhaps,
imagine the picture of twenty-five hundred enthusiastic people each
of whom is wildly waving a flag. The scene was so animated and so
unexpected that it made an impression on me that I shall never
forget. For an hour and a half I spoke to this audience, and, although
the building was crowded until there was apparently not an inch of
standing room in it, scarcely a single person left the church during
this time.
Another way in which I have gained the confidence and support of
the millions of my race has been in meeting the religious leaders in
their various state and national gatherings. For example, every year,
for a number of years past, I have been invited to deliver an address
before the National Coloured Baptist Convention, which brings
together four or five thousand religious leaders from all parts of the
United States. In a similar way I meet, once in four years, the leaders
in the various branches of the Methodist Church during their general
conferences.
Invitations to address the different secret societies in their
national gatherings frequently come to me also. Next to the church, I
think it is safe to say that the secret societies or beneficial orders
bring together greater numbers of coloured people and exercise a
larger influence upon the race than any other kind of organization.
One can scarcely shake hands with a coloured man without receiving
some kind of grip which identifies him as a member of one or
another of these many organizations.
I am reminded, in speaking of these secret societies, of an occasion
at Little Rock, Ark., when, without meaning to do so, I placed my
friends there in a very awkward position. It had been pretty widely
advertised for some weeks before that I was to visit the city. Among
the plans decided upon for my reception was a parade in which all
the secret and beneficial societies in Little Rock were to take part.
Much was expected of this parade, because secret societies are
numerous in Little Rock, and the occasions when they can all turn
out together are rare.
A few days before I reached that city some one began to make
inquiry as to which one of these orders I belonged to. When it finally
became known among the rank and file that I was not a member of
any of them, the committee which was preparing for the parade lost a
great deal of its enthusiasm, and a sort of gloom settled down over
the whole proceeding. The leading men told me that they found it
quite a difficult task after that to make the people understand why
they were asked to turn out to honour a person who was not a
member of any of their organizations. Besides, it seemed unnatural
that a Negro should not belong to some kind of order. Somehow or
other, however, matters were finally straightened out; all the
organizations turned out, and a most successful reception was the
result.
Another agency which exercises tremendous power among
Negroes is the Negro press. Few if any persons outside of the Negro
race understand the power and influence of the Negro newspaper. In
all, there are about two hundred newspapers published by coloured
men at different points in the United States. Many of them have only
a small circulation and are, therefore, having a hard struggle for
existence; but they are read in their local communities. Others have
built up a national circulation and are conducted with energy and
intelligence. With the exception of about three, these two hundred
papers have stood loyally by me in all my plans and policies to uplift
the race. I have called upon them freely to aid me in making known
my plans and ideas, and they have always responded in a most
generous fashion to all the demands that I have made upon them.
It has been suggested to me at different times that I should
purchase a Negro newspaper in order that I might have an “organ” to
make known my views on matters concerning the policies and
interests of the race. Certain persons have suggested also that I pay
money to certain of these papers in order to make sure that they
support my views.
I confess that there have frequently been times when it seemed
that the easiest way to combat some statement that I knew to be
false, or to correct some impression which seemed to me peculiarly
injurious, would be to have a paper of my own or to pay for the
privilege of setting forth my own views in the editorial columns of
some paper which I did not own.
I am convinced, however, that either of these two courses would
have proved fatal. The minute it should become known—and it
would be known—that I owned an “organ,” the other papers would
cease to support me as they now do. If I should attempt to use money
with some papers, I should soon have to use it with all. If I should
pay for the support of newspapers once, I should have to keep on
paying all the time. Very soon I should have around me, if I should
succeed in bribing them, merely a lot of hired men and no sincere
and earnest supporters. Although I might gain for myself some
apparent and temporary advantage in this way, I should destroy the
value and influence of the very papers that support me. I say this
because if I should attempt to hire men to write what they do not
themselves believe, or only half believe, the articles or editorials they
write would cease to have the true ring; and when they cease to have
the true ring, they will exert little or no influence.
So, when I have encountered opposition or criticism in the press, I
have preferred to meet it squarely. Frequently I have been able to
profit by these criticisms of the newspapers. At other times, when I
have felt that I was right and that those who criticised me were
wrong, I have preferred to wait and let the results show. Thus, even
when we differed with one another on minor points, I have usually
succeeded in gaining the confidence and support of the editors of the
different papers in regard to those matters and policies which
seemed to me really important.
 In travelling throughout the United States I have met the Negro
editors. Many of them have been to Tuskegee. It has taken me twenty
years to get acquainted with them and to know them intimately. In
dealing with these men I have not found it necessary to hold them at
arm’s-length. On the contrary, I am in the habit of speaking with
them frankly and openly in regard to my plans. A number of the men
who own and edit Negro newspapers are graduates or former
students of the Tuskegee Institute. I go into their offices and I go to
their homes. We know one another; they are my friends, and I am
their friend.
In dealing with newspaper people, whether they are white or black,
there is no way of getting their sympathy and support like that of
actually knowing the individual men, of meeting and talking with
them frequently and frankly, and of keeping them in touch with
everything you do or intend to do. Money cannot purchase or control
this kind of friendship.
Whenever I am in a town or city where Negro newspapers are
published, I make it a point to see the editors, to go to their offices,
or to invite them to visit Tuskegee. Thus we keep in close, constant,
and sympathetic touch with one another. When these papers write
editorials endorsing any project that I am interested in, the editors
speak with authority and with intelligence because of our close
personal relations. There is no more generous and helpful class of
men among the Negro race in America to-day than the owners and
editors of Negro newspapers.
Many times I have been asked how it is that I have secured the
confidence and good wishes of so large a number of the white people
of the South. My answer in brief is that I have tried to be perfectly
frank and straightforward at all times in my relations with them.
Sometimes they have opposed my actions, sometimes they have not,
but I have never tried to deceive them. There is no people in the
world which more quickly recognizes and appreciates the qualities of
frankness and sincerity, whether they are exhibited in a friend or in
an opponent, in a white man or in a black man, than the white people
of the South.
In my experience in dealing with men of my race I have found that
there is a class that has gained a good deal of fleeting popularity for
possessing what was supposed to be courage in cursing and abusing
all classes of Southern white people on all possible occasions. But, as
I have watched the careers of this class of Negroes, in practically
every case their popularity and influence with the masses of coloured
people have not been lasting. There are few races of people the
masses of whom are endowed with more common-sense than the
Negro, and in the long run these common people see things and men
pretty much as they are.
On the other hand, there have always been in every Southern
community a certain number of coloured men who have sought to
gain the friendship of the white people around them in ways that
were more or less dishonest. For a number of years after the close of
the Civil War, for example, it was natural that practically all the
Negroes should be Republicans in politics. There were, however, in
nearly every community in the South, one or two coloured men who
posed as Democrats. They thought that by pretending to favour the
Democratic party they might make themselves popular with their
white neighbours and thus gain some temporary advantage. In the
majority of cases the white people saw through their pretences and
did not have the respect for them that they had for the Negro who
honestly voted with the party to which he felt that he belonged.
I remember hearing a prominent white Democrat remark not long
ago that in the old days whenever a Negro Democrat entered his
office he always took a tight grasp upon his pocket-book. I mention
these facts because I am certain that wherever I have gained the
confidence of the Southern people I have done so, not by opposing
them and not by truckling to them, but by acting in a straightforward
manner, always seeking their good-will, but never seeking it upon
false pretences.
I have made it a rule to talk to the Southern white people
concerning what I might call their shortcomings toward the Negro
rather than talk about them. In the last analysis, however, I have
succeeded in getting the sympathy and support of so large a number
of Southern white people because I have tried to recognize and to
face conditions as they actually are, and have honestly tried to work
with the best white people in the South to bring about a better
condition.
From the first I have tried to secure the confidence and good-will
of every white citizen in my own county. My experience teaches me
that if a man has little or no influence with those by whose side he
lives, as a rule there is something wrong with him. The best way to
influence the Southern white man in your community, I have found,
is to convince him that you are of value to that community. For
example, if you are a teacher, the best way to get the influence of
your white neighbours is to convince them that you are teaching
something that will make the pupils that you educate able to do
something better and more useful than they would otherwise be able
to do; to show, in other words, that the education which they get
adds something of value to the community.
In my own case, I have attempted from the beginning to let every
white citizen in my own town see that I am as much interested in the
common, every-day affairs of life as himself. I tried to let them see
that the presence of Tuskegee Institute in the community means
better farms and gardens, good housekeeping, good schools, law and
order. As soon as the average white man is convinced that the
education of the Negro makes of him a citizen who is not always “up
in the air,” but one who can apply his education to the things in
which every citizen is interested, much of opposition, doubt, or
indifference to Negro education will disappear.
During all the years that I have lived in Macon County, Ala., I have
never had the slightest trouble in either registering or casting my
vote at any election. Every white person in the county knows that I
am going to vote in a way that will help the county in which I live.
Many nights I have been up with the sheriff of my county, in
consultation concerning law and order, seeking to assist him in
getting hold of and freeing the community of criminals. More than
that, Tuskegee Institute has constantly sought, directly and
indirectly, to impress upon the twenty-five or thirty thousand
coloured people in the surrounding county the importance of
coöperating with the officers of the law in the detection and
apprehension of criminals. The result is that we have one of the most
orderly communities in the state. I do not believe that there is any
county in the state, for example, where the prohibition laws are so
strictly enforced as in Macon County, in spite of the fact that the
Negroes in this county so largely outnumber the whites.
 THE HOUSE IN MALDEN, W. VA., IN WHICH MR. WASHINGTON LIVED
WHEN HE BEGAN TEACHING

Whatever influence I have gained with the Northern white people

has come about from the fact, I think, that they feel that I have tried
to use their gifts honestly and in a manner to bring about real and
lasting results. I learned long ago that in education as in other things
nothing but honest work lasts; fraud and sham are bound to be
detected in the end. I have learned, on the other hand, that if one
does a good, honest job, even though it may be done in the middle of
the night when no eyes see but one’s own, the results will just as
surely come to light.
My experience has taught me, for example, that if there is a filthy
basement or a dirty closet anywhere in the remotest part of the
school grounds it will be discovered. On the other hand, if every
basement or every closet—no matter how remote from the centre of
the school activities—is kept clean, some one will find it and
commend the care and the thoughtfulness that kept it clean.
 It has always been my policy to make visitors to Tuskegee feel that
they are seeing more than they expected to see. When a person has
contributed, say, $20,000 for the erection of a building, I have tried
to provide a larger building, a better building, than the donor
expected to see. This I have found can be brought about only by
keeping one’s eyes constantly on all the small details. I shall never
forget a remark made to me by Mr. John D. Rockefeller when I was
spending an evening at his house. It was to this effect: “Always be
master of the details of your work; never have too many loose outer
edges or fringes.”
Then, in dealing with Northern people, I have always let them
know that I did not want to get away from my own race; that I was
just as proud of being a Negro as they were of being white people. No
one can see through a sham more quickly, whether it be in speech or
in dress, than the hard-headed Northern business man.
I once knew a fine young coloured man who nearly ruined himself
by pretending to be something that he was not. This young man was
sent to England for several months of study. When he returned he
seemed to have forgotten how to talk. He tried to ape the English
accent, the English dress, the English walk. I was amused to notice
sometimes, when he was off his guard, how he got his English
pronunciation mixed with the ordinary American accent which he
had used all of his life. So one day I quietly called him aside and said
to him: “My friend, you are ruining yourself. Just drop all those frills
and be yourself.” I am glad to say that he had sense enough to take
the advice in the right spirit, and from that time on he was a different
man.
The most difficult and trying of the classes of persons with which I
am brought in contact is the coloured man or woman who is
ashamed of his or her colour, ashamed of his or her race and,
because of this fact, is always in a bad temper. I have had
opportunities, such as few coloured men have had, of meeting and
getting acquainted with many of the best white people, North and
South. This has never led me to desire to get away from my own
people. On the contrary, I have always returned to my own people
and my own work with renewed interest.
I have never at any time asked or expected that any one, in dealing
with me, should overlook or forget that I am a Negro. On the
contrary, I have always recognized that, when any special honour
was conferred upon me, it was conferred not in spite of my being a
Negro, but because I am a Negro, and because I have persistently
identified myself with every interest and with every phase of the life
of my own people.
Looking back over the twenty-five and more years that have passed
since that time, I realize, as I did not at that time, how the better part
of my education—the education that I got after leaving school—has
been in the effort to work out those problems in a way that would
gain the interest and the sympathy of all three of the classes directly
concerned—the Southern white man, the Northern white man, and
the Negro.
In order to gain consideration from these three classes for what I
was trying to do I have had to enter sympathetically into the three
different points of view entertained by those three classes; I have had
to consider in detail how the work that I was trying to do was going
to affect the interests of all three. To do this, and at the same time
continue to deal frankly and honestly with each class, has been
indeed a difficult and at times a puzzling task. It has not always been
easy to stick to my work and keep myself free from the distracting
influences of narrow and factional points of view; but, looking back
on it all after a quarter of a century, I can see that it has been worth
what it cost.
 CHAPTER III
SOME EXCEPTIONAL MEN AND WHAT I
HAVE LEARNED FROM THEM

There are some opportunities that come to the boy or girl who is
born poor that the boy or girl who is born rich does not have. In the
same way there are some advantages in belonging to a disadvantaged
race. The individual or the race which has to face peculiar hardships
and to overcome unusual difficulties gains an experience of men and
things and gets into close and intimate touch with life in a way that is
not possible to the man or woman in ordinary circumstances.
In the old slavery days, when any of the white folks were a little
uncertain about the quality of a new family that had moved into the
neighbourhood, they always had one last resource for determining
the character and the status of the new family. When in doubt, they
could always rely on old “Aunt Jenny.” After “Aunt Jenny” had
visited the new family and returned with her report, the question was
settled. Her decision was final, because “Aunt Jenny” knew. The old-
fashioned house servants gained, through their peculiar experiences,
a keen sense for what was called the “quality.”
In freedom also the Negro has had special opportunities for
finding out the character and the quality of the white people among
whom he lives. If there is a man in the community who is habitually
kind and considerate to the humblest people about him, the coloured
people know about that man. On the contrary, if there is a man in
that community who is unfair and unjust in his dealings with them,
the coloured people know that man also.
In their own way and among themselves the coloured people in the
South still have the habit of weighing and passing judgment on the
white people in their community; and, nine times out of ten, their
opinion of a man is pretty accurate. A man who can always be
counted on to go out of his way to assist and protect the members of
an unpopular race, and who is not afraid or ashamed to show that he
is interested in the efforts of the coloured people about him to
improve their condition, is pretty likely to be a good citizen in other
respects.
In the average Southern community, also, it is almost always the
best people, those who are most highly cultured and religious, who
know the coloured people best. It is the best white people who go
oftenest into the Negro churches or teach in the Negro Sunday-
schools. It is to individual white men of this better class that the
average coloured people go most frequently for counsel and advice
when they are in trouble.
The fact that I was born a Negro, and the further fact that I have all
my life been engaged in a kind of work that was intended to uplift the
masses of my people, has brought me in contact with many
exceptional persons, both North and South. For example, it was
because I was a poor boy and a Negro that I found my way to
Hampton Institute, where I came under the influence of General
Armstrong, who, as teacher and friend, has had a larger influence
upon my life than any other person I have ever known, except my
mother. As it was in my boyhood, so it has been in a greater degree in
my later life; because of the work I was trying to do for the Negro
race I have constantly been brought into contact with men of the very
highest type, generous, high-minded, enlightened, and free. As I
have already suggested, a large part of my education has been gained
by my personal contact with these exceptional men.
There have been times in my life when I fear that I should have
lost courage to go forward if I had not had constantly before me the
example of other men, some of them obscure and almost unknown
outside of the communities in which they lived, whose patient,
unwavering cheerfulness and good-will, in spite of difficulties, have
been a continued inspiration to me.
On my way to Tuskegee for the first time I met one of the finest
examples of the type of man I have tried to describe. He was a
railroad conductor and his name was Capt. Isaiah C. Howard. For
many years he had charge of a train on the Western Railroad of
Alabama, between Montgomery and Atlanta. I do not know where
Captain Howard got his education, or how much he had studied
books. I do know that he was born in the South and had spent all his
life there. During a period of twenty years I rarely, if ever, met a
higher type of the true gentleman, North or South.
I recall one occasion in particular when I was on his train between
Atlanta and Montgomery during the Christmas holiday season, when
the rougher and more ignorant of my race usually travel in large
numbers, and when owing to the general license that has always
prevailed during the holiday season, a certain class of coloured
people are likely to be more or less under the influence of whiskey.
After a time a disturbance arose in the crowd at the lower end of
the car. When Captain Howard appeared, some of the men who had
been drinking spoke to him in a way that most men, white or black,
would have resented. In the case of some men, the language these
Negroes used might easily have furnished an occasion for a shooting,
the consequences of which it was not difficult for me to picture to
myself. I was deeply touched to see how, like a wise and patient
father, Captain Howard handled these rough fellows. He spoke to
them calmly, without the least excitement in his voice or manner,
and in a few moments he had obtained almost complete order in the
car. After that he gave them a few words of very sensible advice
which at once won their respect and gratitude, because they
understood the spirit that prompted it.
During all the time that I travelled with him I never saw Captain
Howard, even under the most trying circumstances, lose his temper
or grow impatient with any class of coloured people that he had to
deal with. During the long trips that I used to make with him,
whenever he had a little leisure time, he would drop down into the
seat by my side and we would talk together, sometimes for an hour at
a time, on the condition and prospects of the Negro in the South. I
remember that he had very definite ideas in regard to the white
man’s duty and responsibility, and more than once he expressed to
me his own reasons for believing that the Negro should be treated
with patience and with justice. He used frequently to express the fear
that, by allowing himself to get into the habit of treating Negroes
with harshness, the white man in the South would be injured more
than the Negro.
 I have spoken of Captain Howard at some length because he
represents a distinct class of white people in the South, of whom an
increasing number may be found in nearly every Southern
community. He possessed in a very high degree those qualities of
kindness, self-control, and general good breeding which belong to
the real aristocracy of the South. In his talks with me he frequently
explained that he was no “professional” lover of the Negro; that, in
fact, he had no special feeling for the Negro or against him, but was
interested in seeing fair play for every race and every individual. He
said that his real reason for wanting to give the Negro the same
chance that other races have was that he loved the South, and he
knew that there could be no permanent prosperity unless the lowest
and poorest portion of the community was treated with the same
justice as the highest and most powerful.
I count it a part of my good fortune to have been thrown, early in
my life in Alabama, in contact with such a man as Captain Howard.
After knowing him I said to myself: “If, under the circumstances, a
white man can learn to be fair to my race instead of hating it, a black
man ought to be able to return the compliment.”
In connection with my work in Alabama, I early made the
acquaintance of another Southern white man, also an Alabamian by
birth but of a different type, a man of education and high social and
official standing—the late J. L. M. Curry.
It was my privilege to know Doctor Curry well during the last
twenty years of his life. He had fought on the side of the Confederacy
during the Civil War, he had served as a college professor and as
United States Minister to Spain, and had held other high public
positions. More than that, he represented, in his personal feelings
and ways of thinking, all that was best in the life of the Southern
white people.
Notwithstanding the high positions he had held in social and
official life, Doctor Curry gave his latter years to the cause of
education among the masses of white and coloured people in the
South, and was never happier than when engaged in this work.
I met Doctor Curry for the first time, in a business way, at
Montgomery, Ala. While I was in the Capitol building I happened to
be, for a few moments, in a room adjoining that in which Doctor
Curry and some other gentlemen were talking, and could not avoid
overhearing their conversation. They were speaking about Negro
education. One of the state officials expressed some doubt about the
propriety of a Southern gentleman taking an active part in the
education of the Negro. While I am not able to give his exact words,
Doctor Curry replied in substance that he did not believe that he or
any one else had ever lost anything, socially or in any other way, on
account of his connection with Negro education.
“On the other hand,” Doctor Curry continued, “I believe that Negro
education has done a great deal more for me than I have ever been
able to do for Negro education.”
Then he went on to say that he had never visited a Negro school or
performed a kindly act for a Negro man, woman, or child, that he
himself was not made stronger and better for it.
Immediately after the Civil War, he said, he had been bitterly
opposed to every movement that had been proposed to educate the
Negro. After he came to visit some of the coloured schools, however,
and saw for himself the struggles that the coloured people were
making to get an education, his prejudice had changed into
sympathy and admiration.
As far as my own experience goes—and I have heard the same
thing said by others—there is no gentler, kindlier, or more generous
type of man anywhere than those Southern white men who, born and
bred to those racial and sectional differences which, after the Civil
War, were mingled with and intensified by the bitterness of poverty
and defeat, have struggled up to the point where they feel nothing
but kindness to the people of all races and both sections. It is much
easier for those who shared in the victory of the Civil War—I mean
the Northern white man and the Negro—to emancipate themselves
from racial and sectional narrowness.
There is another type of white man in the South who has aided me
in getting a broader and more practical conception of my work. I
refer to the man who has no special sentiment for or against the
Negro, but appreciates the importance of the Negro race as a
commercial asset—a man like Mr. John M. Parker, of New Orleans.
Mr. Parker is the president of the Southern Industrial Congress, and
is one of the largest planters in the Gulf states. His firm in New
Orleans, I understand, buys and sells more cotton than any other
firm in the world. Mr. Parker sees more clearly than any white man
in the South with whom I have talked, the fact that it is important to
the commercial progress of the country that the Negro should be
treated with justice in the courts, in business, and in all the affairs of
life. He realizes also that, in order that the Negro may have an
incentive to work regularly, he must have his wants increased; and
this can be brought about only through education.
I have heard many addresses to coloured people in all parts of the
country, but I have never heard words more sensible, practical, and
to the point from the lips of any man than those of an address which
Mr. Parker delivered before nearly a thousand Negro farmers at one
of the annual Negro Conferences at the Tuskegee Institute. Mr.
Parker has for years been a large employer of Negro labour on his
plantation. He was thus able to speak to the farmers simply and
frankly, and, even though he told them some rather unpleasant
truths, the audience understood and appreciated not only what was
said, but the spirit in which it was uttered.
The hope of the South, so far as the interests of the Negro are
concerned, rests very largely upon, men like Mr. Parker, who see the
close connection between labour, industry, education, and political
institutions, and have learned to face the race problem in a large and
tolerant spirit, and are seeking to solve it in a practical way.
A quite different type of man with whom I have been thrown in
frequent contact is Col. Henry Watterson, of the Louisville Courier-
Journal. Colonel Watterson seems to me to represent the Southern
gentleman of the old school, a man of generous impulses, high ideals,
and gracious manner. I have had frequent and long conversations
with him about the Negro and about conditions in the South. If there
is anywhere a man who has broader or more liberal ideas concerning
the Negro, or any undeveloped race, I have not met him.
A few years ago, when a meeting had been arranged at Carnegie
Hall, New York, in order to interest the public in the work of our
school at Tuskegee, we were disappointed in securing a distinguished
speaker from the South who had promised to be present. At the last
moment the committee in charge telegraphed to Colonel Watterson.
Although (because of the death of one of his children) he had made
up his mind not to speak again in public for some time, Colonel
Watterson went to New York from Louisville and made one of the
most eloquent speeches in behalf of the Negro that I have ever heard.
He told me at the time that nothing but his interest in the work that
we were trying to do at Tuskegee would have induced him to leave
home at that time.
Whenever I have been tempted to grow embittered or discouraged
about conditions in the South, my acquaintance with such men as
Mr. Parker and Colonel Watterson has given me new strength and
increased my faith.
I have been fortunate also in the coloured men with whom I have
been associated. There is a class of Negroes in the South who are just
as much interested as the best white people in the welfare of the
communities in which they live. They are just as much opposed as
the best white people to anything that tends to stir up strife between
the races. But there are two kinds of coloured people, just as there
are two kinds of white people.
There is a class of coloured people who are narrow in their
sympathies, short-sighted in their views, and bitter in their
prejudices against the white people. When I first came to Alabama I
had to decide whether I could unite with this class in a general
crusade of denunciation against the white people of the South, in
order to create sympathy in the North for the work that I was seeking
to carry on, or whether I would consider the real interests of the
masses of my race, and seek to preserve and promote the good
relations that already existed between the races.
I do not deny that I was frequently tempted, during the early years
of my work, to join in the general denunciation of the evils and
injustice that I saw about me. But when I thought the matter over, I
saw that such a course would accomplish no good and that it would
do a great deal of harm. For one thing, it would serve only to mislead
the masses of my own race in regard to the opportunities that existed
right about them. Besides that, I saw that the masses of the Negro
people had no disposition to carry on any general war against the
white people. What they wanted was the help and encouragement of
their white neighbours in their efforts to get an education and to
improve themselves.
Among the coloured men who saw all this quite as clearly as myself
was Rufus Herron, of Camp Hill, Ala. He was born in slavery and had
had almost no school advantages, but he was not lacking in practical
wisdom and he was a leader in the community in which he lived.
Some years ago, after he had harvested his cotton crop he called to
see me at the Tuskegee Institute. He said that he had sold all of his
cotton, had got a good price for it, had paid all his debts for the year,
and had twenty dollars remaining. He handed me ten dollars and
asked me to use it in the education of a student at Tuskegee. He
returned to his home and gave the other ten to the teacher of the
white school in his vicinity, and asked him to use it in the education
of a white student.
Since that day I have come to know Rufus Herron well. He never
misses a session of the annual Tuskegee Negro conference. He is the
kind of man that one likes to listen to because he always says
something that goes straight to the point, and after he has covered
the subject he stops. I do not think that I have ever talked with him
that he did not have something to suggest in regard to the material,
educational, and moral improvement of the people, or something
that might promote better relations between white people and black
people. If there is a white man, North or South, that has more love
for his community or his country than Rufus Herron, it has not been
my good fortune to meet him. In his feelings and ambitions he also is
what I have called an aristocrat.
I have no disposition to deny to any one, black or white, the
privilege of speaking out and protesting against wrong and injustice,
whenever and wherever they choose to do so. I would do injustice to
the facts and to the masses of my people in the South, however, if I
did not point out how much more useful a man like Rufus Herron
has made his life than the man who spends his time and makes a
profession of going about talking about his “rights” and stirring up
bitterness between the white people and coloured people. The
salvation of the Negro race in America is to be worked out, for the
most part, not by abstract argument and not by mere denunciation of
wrong, but by actual achievement in constructive work.
In Nashville there is another coloured man—a banker, a man of
education, wealth, and culture. James C. Napier is about the same
age as Rufus Herron. I have been closely associated with him for
twenty years. I have been with him in the North and in the South; I
have worked with him in conventions, and I have talked with him in
private in my home and in his home. During all the years that I have
known him I have never heard Mr. Napier express a narrow or bitter
thought toward the white race. On the contrary, he has shown
himself anxious to give publicity to the best deeds of the white people
rather than the worst. During the greater part of my life I have done
my work in association with such men as he. There is no part of the
United States in which I have not met some of this type of coloured
men. I honour such men all the more because, had they chosen to do
so, they could easily have made themselves and those about them
continually miserable by dwelling upon the mean things which
people say about the race or the injustices which are so often a part
of the life of the Negro.
Let me add that, so far as I have been able to see, there is no real
reason why a Negro in this country should make himself miserable or
unhappy. The average white man in the United States has the idea
that the average Negro spends most of his time in bemoaning the fact
that he is not a white man, or in trying to devise some way by which
he will be permitted to mingle, in a purely social way, with white
people. This is far from the truth. In my intercourse with all classes
of the Negro, North and South, it is a rare occurrence when the
matter of getting away from the race, or of social intermingling with
the white people, is so much as mentioned. It is especially true that
intelligent Negroes find a satisfaction in social intercourse among
themselves that is rarely known or understood by any one outside of
the Negro race. In their family life, in the secret societies and
churches, as well as other organizations where coloured people come
together, the most absorbing topic of conversation invariably relates
to some enterprise for the betterment of the race.
Among coloured farmers, as among white farmers, the main topic
of discussion is naturally the farm. The Negro is, in my opinion,
naturally a farmer, and he is at his very best when he is in close
contact with the soil. There is something in the atmosphere of the
farm that develops and strengthens the Negro’s natural common-
sense. As a rule the Negro farmer has a rare gift of getting at the
sense of things and of stating in picturesque language what he has
learned. The explanation of it is, it seems to me, that the Negro
farmer studies nature. In his own way he studies the soil, the
development of plants and animals, the streams, the birds, and the
changes of the seasons. He has a chance of getting the kind of
knowledge that is valuable to him at first-hand.
 In a visit some years ago to a Negro farmers’ institute in the
country, I got a lesson from an unlettered coloured farmer which I
have never forgotten. I had been invited by one of the Tuskegee
graduates to go into the country some miles from Tuskegee to be
present at this institute. When I entered the room the members of
the institute were holding what they called their farmers’ experience
meeting. One coloured farmer was asked to come up to the platform
and give his experience. He was an old man, about sixty-five years of
age. He had had no education in the book, but the teacher had
reached him, as he had others in the community, and showed him
how to improve his methods of farming.
When this old man came up to the front of the room to tell his
experience, he said: “I’se never had no chance to study no science,
but since dis teacher has been here I’se been trying to make some
science for myself.”
Thereupon he laid upon the table by his side six stalks of cotton
and began to describe in detail how, during the last ten years, he had
gradually enriched his land so as to increase the number of bolls of
cotton grown upon each individual stalk. He picked up one stalk and
showed it to the audience; before the teacher came to the
community, he said, and before he began to improve his land, his
cotton produced only two bolls to the stalk. The second year he
reached the point where, on the same land, he succeeded in
producing four bolls on a stalk. Then he showed the second stalk to
the audience. After that he picked up the third and fourth stalks,
saying that during the last few years he had reached a point where a
stalk produced eight bolls.
Finally he picked up the last stalk and said: “This year I made
cotton like dis”—and he showed a stalk containing fourteen bolls.
Then the old fellow took his seat.
Some one in the audience from a distance arose and said: “Uncle,
will you tell us your name?”
The old fellow arose and said: “Now, as you ask me for my name,
I’ll tell you. In de old days, before dis teacher come here, I lived in a
little log-cabin on rented land, and had to mortgage my crop every
year for food. When I didn’t have nothin’, in dem days, in my
community dey used to call me ‘Old Jim Hill.’ But now I’se out o’
debt; I’se de deeds for fifty acres of land; and I lives in a nice house
wid four rooms that’s painted inside and outside; I’se got some
money in de bank; I’se a taxpayer in my community; I’se edicated my
children. And now, in my community, dey calls me ‘Mr. James Hill.’”
The old fellow had not only learned to raise cotton during these ten
years, but, so far as he was concerned, he had solved the race
problem.
As one travels through the Southland, he is continually meeting
old Negro farmers like the one that I have described. It has been one
of the great satisfactions of my life to be able from time to time to go
out into the heart of the country, on the plantations and on the farms
where the masses of the coloured people live. I like to get into the
fields and into the woods where they are at work and talk with them.
I like to attend their churches and Sunday-schools and camp-
meetings and revival meetings. In this way I have gotten more
material which has been of service to me in writing and speaking
than I have ever gotten by reading books. There are no frills about
the ordinary Negro farmer, no pretence. He, at least, is himself and
no one else. There is no type of man that I more enjoy meeting and
knowing.
A disadvantaged race has, too, the advantage of coming in contact
with the best in the North, and this again has been my good fortune.
There are two classes of people in the North—one that is just as
narrow and unreasonable toward the white man at the South as any
Southern white man can be toward the Negro or a Northern white
man. I have always chosen to deal with the other white man at the
North—the man with large and liberal views.
In saying this I make an exception of the “professional” friend of
the Negro. I have little patience with the man who parades himself as
the “professional” friend of any race. The “professional” friend of the
Chinese or Japanese or Filipino is frequently a well-meaning person,
but he is always tiresome. I like to meet the man who is interested in
the Negro because he is a human being. I like to talk with the man
who wants to help the Negro because he is a member of the human
family, and because he believes that, in helping the Negro, he is
helping to make this a better world to live in.
During the twenty-five years and more that I have been
accustomed to go North every year to obtain funds with which to
build up and support the Tuskegee Institute, I have made the
acquaintance of a large number of exceptional people in that part of
the country. Because I was seeking aid for Negro education, seeking
assistance in giving opportunities to a neglected portion of our
population, I had an opportunity to meet these people in a different
and, perhaps, more intimate way than the average man. I had an
opportunity to see a side of their lives of which many of their
business acquaintances, perhaps, did not know the existence.
Few people, I dare say, who were acquainted with the late Mr. H.
H. Rogers, former head of the Standard Oil Company, knew that he
had any special interest or sympathy for the Negro. I remember well,
however, an occasion when he showed this interest and sympathy. I
was showing him one day the copy of a little Negro farmers’
newspaper, published at Tuskegee, containing an account of the
efforts the people in one of our country communities were making to
raise a sum of money among themselves in order that they might
receive the aid he had promised them in building a schoolhouse. As
Mr. Rogers read the account of this school “rally,” as it was called,
and looked down the long list of names of the individuals who in
order to make up the required sum, had contributed out of their
poverty, some a penny, some five cents, some twenty-five, some a
dollar and a few as much as five dollars, his eyes filled with tears. I
do not think he ever before realized, as he did at that moment, the
great power—and the great power for good—which his money gave
them.
During the last years of his life, Mr. Rogers was greatly interested
in the building of the Virginian Railway, which was constructed upon
his own plans and almost wholly with his own capital, from Norfolk,
Va., to Deep Water, W. Va. One of the first things he did, after this
new railway was completed, was to make arrangements for a special
train in order that I might travel over and speak at the different
towns to the coloured people along the line and, at the same time,
study their situation in order that something might be done to
improve their condition. From his point of view, these people were
part of the resources of the country which he wanted to develop. He
desired to see the whole country through which this railway passed,
which, up to that time, had remained in a somewhat backward
condition, made prosperous and flourishing and filled with thriving
towns and with an industrious and happy people. He died, however,
just as he seemed on the eve of realizing this dream.
For a number of years before his death, I knew Mr. H. H. Rogers
intimately. I used to see him frequently in his office in New York;
sometimes I made trips with him on his yacht. At such times I had
opportunity to talk over in detail the work that I was trying to do. Mr.
Rogers had one of the most powerful and resourceful minds of any
man I ever met. His connection with large business affairs had given
him a broad vision and practical grasp of public and social questions,
and I learned much from my contact with him.
In this connection I might name another individual who
represents another and entirely different type of man, with whom I
have frequently come in contact during my travels through the
Northern states. I refer to Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the
New York Evening Post. Mr. Villard is not primarily a business man
in the sense that Mr. Rogers was, and his interest in the education
and progress of the Negro is of a very different kind from that of Mr.
Rogers; at least he approaches the matter from a very different point
of view.
Mr. Villard is the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, the
abolitionist. He is a literary man and idealist, and he cherishes all the
intense zeal for the rights of the Negro which his grandfather before
him displayed. He is anxious and determined that the Negro shall
have every right and every opportunity that any other race of people
has in this country. He is the outspoken opponent of every institution
and every individual who seeks to limit in any way the freedom of
any man or class of men anywhere. He has not only continued in the
same way and by much the same methods that his grandfather used,
to fight the battles for human liberty, but he has interested himself in
the education of the Negro. It is due to the suggestion and largely to
the work of Mr. Villard that Tuskegee, at the celebration of its
twenty-fifth anniversary received the $150,000 memorial fund to
commemorate the name and service of Mr. William H. Baldwin to
Tuskegee and Negro education in the South. Mr. Villard has given
much of his time and personal service to the work of helping and
building up some of the smaller and struggling Negro schools in the
South. He is a trustee of at least two of such institutions, being
president of the board of trustees in one case, and takes an active
part in the direction and control of their work. He has recently been
active and, in fact, is largely responsible for the organization of the
National Association for the Advancement of the Coloured People, a
sort of national vigilance committee, which will watch over and
guard the rights and interests of the race, and seek through the
courts, through legislation, and through other public and private
means, to redress the wrongs from which the race now suffers in
different parts of the country.
Perhaps I ought to add in fairness that, while I sympathize fully
with Mr. Villard’s purposes, I have frequently differed with him as to
the methods he has used to accomplish them. Sometimes he has
criticised me publicly in his newspaper and privately in conversation.
Nevertheless, during all this time, I have always felt that I retained
his friendship and good-will. I do not think there has ever been a
time when I went to him with a request of any kind either for myself
personally or to obtain his help in any way in the work in which I was
engaged that he has not shown himself willing and anxious to do
everything in his power to assist me. While I have not always been
able to follow his suggestions, or agree with him as to the methods I
should pursue, I have, nevertheless, I think, profited by his criticism
and have always felt and appreciated the bracing effect upon public
sentiment of his vigorous and uncompromising spirit.
I have learned also from Mr. Villard the lesson that persons who
have a common purpose may still maintain helpful, friendly
relations, even if they do differ as to details and choose to travel to
the common goal by different roads.
Another man who has exercised a deep influence upon me is
Robert C. Ogden. Some months after I became a student at Hampton
Institute, Mr. Robert C. Ogden, in company with a number of other
gentlemen from New York, came to Hampton on a visit. It was the
first time I ever saw him and the first sight of a man of the physical,
mental, and moral build of Mr. Ogden—strong, fresh, clean, vigorous
—made an impression upon me that it is hard for any one not in my
situation to appreciate. The thing that impressed me most was this:
Here was a man, intensely earnest and practical, a man who was
deeply engrossed in business affairs, who still found time to turn
aside from his business and give a portion of his time and thought to
the elevation of an unfortunate race.
 Mr. Ogden is a man of a very different type from either Mr. Rogers
or Mr. Villard. He does not look at the question of uplifting the Negro
as a question of rights and liberty exclusively: he does not think of it
merely as a means of developing one of the neglected resources of
the South. He looks upon it, if I may venture to say so, as a question
of humanity. Mr. Ogden is intensely interested in human beings; he
cannot think of an unfortunate individual or class of individuals
without feeling a strong impulse to help them. He has spent a large
portion of his time, energy, and fortune in inspiring a large number
of other people with that same sentiment. I do not believe any man
has done more than Mr. Odgen to spread, among the masses of the
people, a spirit of unselfish service to the interests of humanity,
irrespective of geographical, sectarian or racial distinction.
Perhaps I can in no better way give an idea of what Mr. Ogden has
accomplished in this direction than by giving a list of some of the
activities in which he has been engaged. Mr. Ogden is:

President and only Northern member of the Conference for Southern Education,
President of the Southern Education Board,
President of the Board of Trustees of Hampton Institute,
Trustee of Tuskegee Institute,
Trustee of the Anna T. Jeans Fund for Improvement of the Negro Common
School,
Member of the General Education Board.

From this it will be seen that Mr. Ogden is directly connected with
almost every important movement for education in the South,
whether for white people or for black people. In addition to that he is
president of the Board of Directors of the Union Theological
Seminary of New York, member of the Sage Foundation Board, and
of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions. In all these different
directions he has worked quietly, steadily, without stinting himself,
for the good of the whole country. Many of the sentiments which he
has expressed in his annual addresses at the meetings of these
different organizations have in them the breadth of view of a real
statesman. His idea was that in giving an equal opportunity for
education to every class in the community he was laying the
foundation for a real democracy. He spoke of the educational
conference, for instance, as “a congress called by the voice of
‘democracy’”; and again he said of this same institution, “Its
foundation is the proposition that every American child is entitled to
an education.”
In spite of what he has done in a multitude of ways to advance
education, I have heard Mr. Ogden say, both in public and in private,
that he was not an educated man. Perhaps he has not gotten so much
education in the usual, formal, technical matter out of books as some
other people. But through the study of books, or men, or things, Mr.
Ogden has secured the finest kind of education, and deserves to be
classed with the scholars of the world. So far as I have studied Mr.
Ogden’s career, it is of interest and value to the public in three
directions:

First: He has been a successful business man.

Second: More than any other one individual except Gen. S. C. Armstrong, he has
been the leader in a movement to educate the whole South, regardless of race or
colour.
Third: In many important matters relating to moral and religious education in
the North, Mr. Ogden is an important leader.

I know of few men in America whose life can be held up before

young people as a model as can Mr. Ogden’s life.
It would be difficult for me to describe or define the manner and
extent to which I have been influenced and educated by my contact
with Mr. Ogden. It was characteristic of him, that the only reason I
came to know him is because I needed him, needed him in the work
which I was trying to do. Had I not been a Negro I would probably
never have had the rare experience of meeting and knowing
intimately a man who stands so high in every walk of life as Mr.
Robert C. Ogden. Had Mr. Ogden been a weak man, seeking his own
peace of mind and social position, he would not have been brave
enough and strong enough to ignore adverse criticism in his efforts
to serve the unfortunate of both races in the South, and in that case I
should probably not have made his acquaintance.
 The men that I have mentioned are but types of many others, men
intellectually and spiritually great, who, directly and indirectly, have
given comfort, help, and counsel to the ten millions of my race in
America.