Book Review

Asia

This impressively researched book by Tirthankar Roy perhaps drives the last nail into the coffin of the old nationalist, and sometimes Marxist, assumption that artisanal industries of precolonial India were dealt a death blow in the colonial period when British rule created a market for industrial goods that were either imported or manufactured locally. Roy does not dispute the view that "economic contact between India and industrializing Europe had both a destructive and a creative impact on Indian industry." A long line of economic historians, from Daniel Thorner to A. K. Bagchi, and scores of nationalist writers before them have, however, "tended to overemphasize" the destructive aspect. Roy, in contrast, considers "the creative impact the more important" (p. 3), for colonial rule also resulted in the creation of long-distance markets for artisanal products both inside and outside the country. He seeks to demonstrate with detailed case studies how artisanal industries often survived and adapted to the challenges of long-distance trade and increased competition by making changes internal to their organization and management practices and by utilizing economic, technological, and informational advantages available to them. Unlike the theorists of underdevelopment, then, Roy does not propose any fundamental dissimilarities between the roles played by "traditional industries" in the histories of industrialization in the metropole and the colony. The South Asian story, according to him, belongs to a "larger narrative" of industrialization: "That long-distance trade could transform artisanal enterprise in ways that might enable the latter to raise productivity is a theme common to early industrialization in Europe, and late industrialization in Japan" (p. 8). His approach is a welcome corrective to some of the received views on the history of Indian economy under British rule, but, as we shall see, it is not without its own blind spots.

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