Arrested development in India

Arrested Development in India contains a selection of the papers delivered at an Anglo-German workshop at Heidelberg in July 1985. The workshop was organised under the joint auspices of the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council and the Deutsches Forshungsgemeinschaft; the host was the Sudasien Institut of the University of Heidelberg. The theme of the papers is the most important and the most controversial problem confronting Indian economic and social historians: the problem of the historical roots of India's present poverty. All the contributors to the book share a common dissatisfaction with the conventional bogeymen of Indian economic history: the 'anarchy' supposedly obtaining before the coming of the British, and the 'imperialist exploitation' which supposedly succeeded the indigenous chaos. The first section of the book contains papers criticising the entire concept of 'arrested development'; the second re-examines the role of the state in the development of the Indian economy;
the third treats the interaction between agrarian structure and agricultural output; while the fourth and final section deals with the work force in the textile industry, traditional and modern.
As the participants in the workshop included a clear majority of the scholars working on India's economic and social history in the U.K., the selected papers reflect the present 'state of the art' better than any other collection currently in print. Some of them will undoubtedly make a permanent mark on the discipline, and all of them advance more sophisticated interpretations (based on
extensive archival research) of fields as hackneyed as the fate of the hand loom weavers or as novel as the multiplier effects of military expenditure.