Do you think that new economic reforms of British rule have disrupted the old economic system of India? Substantiate your answer with suitable examples. (2025)
Yes, but precisely. These were not reforms of an existing system; they substituted an order of private property, contract, cash and the world market for one of custom, status and reciprocity. Structural disruption is demonstrable; universal impoverishment from a single cause is not.
Land: from customary right to transferable property
- The Permanent Settlement (1793) fixed revenue in perpetuity and vested proprietary right in the zamindar; ryotwari (Madras and Bombay, from the 1820s) settled with the cultivator, mahalwari (Regulation VII of 1822) with the village estate. Identical in effect: a layered bundle of customary claims — cultivator, village servant, headman, temple — became one saleable title carrying one fixed cash demand.
- This turned a status relation into a contractual one: land became alienable, default the ordinary route to dispossession. A. R. Desai reads the outcome as the birth of new agrarian classes — zamindar, tenant-at-will, sharecropper, landless labourer.
- The jajmani order lost its patron base once the zamindar’s obligations shrank to rent-collection and cash displaced grain payment for hereditary service.
The artisan, the market and deindustrialisation
- Commercialisation redirected cultivation to indigo, opium, cotton and jute, tying the cultivator to prices set in Liverpool and Canton rather than to local subsistence.
- David Clingingsmith and Jeffrey G. Williamson estimate India’s share of world manufacturing output falling from roughly 25 per cent in 1750 to about 2 per cent in 1900, industrial employment from some 15–18 per cent of the workforce in 1800 to about 10 per cent in 1900, and weavers’ yarn supply from 419 million lb in 1850 to 221 million lb in 1900.
- Romesh Chunder Dutt, The Economic History of India (1901–03), argued policy destroyed handicraft and drove labour back on to land; Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), named the unrequited transfer the drain of wealth.
- Modern industry then arrived as an enclave — cotton at Bombay (1854), jute at Rishra (1855), steel at Jamshedpur (1907) — a small new working class, not absorption of the displaced artisan.
Debt, famine and an infrastructure built for extraction
- A fixed cash demand on a fluctuating harvest made the moneylender structural. The Deccan riots of 1875 in the ryotwari districts, and the Deccan Agriculturists’ Relief Act, 1879 that followed, are the state’s own admission of what its settlement produced.
- Railways from 1853 linked interior to port and moved grain out of famine districts; the famines of 1876–78 and 1896–1900 occurred inside a market economy, not for want of one.
- Forest law (Indian Forest Acts 1865, 1878, 1927) criminalised gathering, grazing and shifting cultivation, severing tribal subsistence from the forest.
The revisionist counter-case
- Tirthankar Roy is the leading revisionist. Handicraft reorganised rather than vanished: handlooms held a large share of cloth production by shifting to finer fabrics woven with mill yarn, output per weaver rose even as weaver numbers fell, and decline was regionally very uneven. He also insists pre-colonial India was no prosperous, stable order, and that low productivity explains Indian poverty better than transfer alone.
- Clingingsmith and Williamson themselves attribute the first phase (1750–1810) to Mughal decline raising grain prices and wages — a domestic supply-side shock — British factory competition dominating only from about 1810.
- Morris D. Morris questioned the artisanal employment evidence in 1963; Utsa Patnaik‘s estimate of some $45 trillion transferred between 1765 and 1938 is methodologically contested — a claim, not a datum.
Conclusion
Disruption is established — as institutional substitution, not annihilation — and its deepest mark is where labour was stranded. The PLFS Annual Report 2025 finds 43.0 per cent of workers still in agriculture, down only from 44.8 per cent a year earlier: the sector into which colonial policy pushed the artisan, and which industry has still not absorbed.