The history of trade and manufacture in colonial India is dominated by counter-factual questions about the process of industrialisation. The structure and performance of firms and markets for trade and manufacture in colonial India after 1860 were heavily influenced by institutional developments that occurred in the first century of British rule. In the eighteenth century Indian merchant and service-gentry groups played a crucial role as intermediaries between the agricultural economy and the state. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the colonial state in South Asia had largely created its own institutional mechanisms for sustaining itself through revenue collection, expenditure and transfer. By 1913 the cotton textile industry, centred in Bombay and Ahmedabad, was well established as the most important manufacturing industry in India. The colonial administration of South Asia was conditional on the smooth working of a domestic and international economy that could supply adequate tax revenues from production, and a foreign exchange surplus on private account.

This bibliography presents a list of titles that help the reader to understand the nature and course of Indian economy, trade and agriculture. The history of development economics, and the elaborate refinements of classical, Marxian and dependency theories, has spawned large bibliographical accounts of their own. The data on which almost all the estimates of agricultural production in the colonial period are based were gathered as part of the land revenue assessment process, and so a strong suspicion remains that, as Neil Charlesworth has put it, fluctuations in the output figures possibly tell as much about the shifting authority of local administration as about actual agricultural performance. Frank Perlin's important and wide-ranging article, 'Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia' is one of the most suggestive analyses of the eighteenth century manufacturing economy. The cotton industry still holds the centre stage in expositions and explanations of India's industrial progress, or the lack of it, under British rule.

Alivardi Khan's successful usurpation of the throne of Bengal encouraged others to try to establish claims to Bengal's wealth. By the 1750s Alivardi Khan appeared to have come through his tribulations successfully. From 1751 the resources of Orissa were handed over as part of the settlement with the Marathas, although the Nawabs of Bengal continued to nominate the Naibs of Orissa until 1760, when the first Maratha Subedar was appointed as Governor. The quarrel was over British commercial penetration far into the interior of Bengal. In 1757 Mir Jafar had been compelled to concede total freedom of movement for the Company's trade all over Bengal. With the grant of the Diwani, the provinces of the Nawabs of Bengal came not merely under the dominance of the East India Company, but under full British rule. The Marathas and the Mughals had been followed by the British. The Nawabs were swept aside as Calcutta conquered Bengal.

Contemporary British opinion believed that the establishment of a powerful and enduring regime that was capable of imposing order on its subjects was in itself an important agent of change. The peasant could now till his land and the artisan pursue his craft with a security that was entirely new. British administration, however, felt itself unable to conduct detailed 'scientific' surveys and to make minute inquiries into the capacity of cultivators to pay. In the early years of British rule, the most striking shifts in the social contours of Bengal took place in the high hills. Within a few years it was generally conceded that the East India Company's measures aimed at protecting the interests of ryots had been ineffective. With the arrival of Lord William Bentinck as Governor General in 1828, there seemed to be a western intellectual in authority who was willing to engage in dialogue with the more accessible intellectuals among his subjects.

The establishment of British predominance in eastern India was a gradual and protracted process, beginning before 1757. This chapter discusses many different aspects of the British presence in Bengal during the first sixty years of colonial rule. In theory the settlement of 1765 had not established a British Bengal. The Nawabs would still be Nazims, holding court at Murshidabad, from where they would direct the defence of the provinces and the ordering of their internal peace and justice. The dispersal of the Nawab's army had eliminated the main rival to the East India Company's military supremacy. Warren Hastings, Governor, and the first Governor General from 1772 to 1785, embodied the mingling of old practices and new ideals. The period down to 1828 had seen the creation of a largely autonomous British-Indian state that was rather loosely connected with imperial Britain and pursued its own purposes of 'safety' and consolidation.

This chapter emphasizes that despite certain elements of continuity, the pre-British agrarian society and system was not quite the same as that which evolved during British rule. The continuity of the small peasant economy as the basic organization of agricultural production, and the continuities in terms of certain agrarian institutions, and of the numerical sizes of some economic groups, such as sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, concealed a significant process of change. Initially, throughout eastern India, the most decisive influence was the British policy of maximizing land revenue, which gradually lost its first potency, particularly in Bengal and Bihar, with the share of the state in the total agricultural produce eventually shrinking to insignificance. In other parts of eastern India, too, the old order could scarcely be wholly preserved, and the composition of the landed society considerably changed, mainly as a result of the growth of a land market, an altogether new development in the rural society.

Three centuries separate the high point of Vijayanagara authority and the establishment of undisputed British rule in south India. There were also interior towns which came to thrive as the political centres of 'nāyka kingdoms'. The encouragement of foreign trade by the pre-Talikota Vijayanagara rulers was seen to be vital for the access which such trade gave these rulers to horses, firearms, and foreign soldiers. The rise of new centres of power in the macro-region under nāykas and their subordinates, pālaiyakkaras in Tamil, pālegādus in Telugu, and pālegdras in Kannada, 'poligars' to the British - while weakening the Vijayanagara state, did stimulate economic activity and development. Throughout the turbulent period from 1550 to about 1700, there are repeated references to the plunder of accumulated treasure. The traders and some Brahmans emerged as the most active of the great merchants trading with and under the European companies on the Coromandel Coast in the seventeenth century.