Give a critical account of the major trends in colonial historiography?

 Major trends in colonial historiography:

The Colonial Viewpoint:– The men who ruled India and the colonial scholars who assessed that rule were at great pains to emphasize that the advent of British rule had brought peace and good government to the subcontinent.

Pax Britannica and the enormous public investment in the country brought about the development of a modern transport and communications network that laid the foundations of a modern economy. The railway network and irrigation system introduced by the British was the bedrock on which a modern economy was built in India. The British conferred the benefit of western science and education and prepared the Indians for eventual self-government. 

The Nationalist View:– Nationalist economists like Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahadev Govind Ranade, and J.V. Joshi were strong proponents of a theory of drain of wealth from India to Britain. Naoroji developed the argument about the drain of wealth from India in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India.

They argued that British rule led to the impoverishment of India and that the Indian economy was subordinated to meet the needs of the British economy. A policy of free trade led to de-industrialisation and the growth of landless agricultural labour and the decline of employment in the secondary sector of the economy.

The Marxist Perspective:- The Marxist understanding of the colonial economy was that it was linked to broad changes in the British economy.

The phases of capitalist development in Britain determined the features of imperialism in the colonial world. The phase of merchant capitalist development led to the exploitation and plunder of the resources of the non-European world. The exploitation of Bengal, after the battle of Plassey in 1757, was responsible for the ‘drain of wealth’ to Britain in the second half of the 18th century.

Liberal and Neo-Liberal Interpretation:– In the 1980s the counter-revolution’ in economic history gained momentum in the Anglo-American world. The rise of monetarist theories and the growing rejection of Keynesian economics led to a revaluation of major issues in the economic history of Britain and other countries.

The revaluation of imperialism also began in this period and scholars like Cain and Hopkins, Patrick O’Brien, Davis and Huttenback began to question some of the staunchly held views of the Marxist and left-liberal intelligentsia about the nature of colonialism.

Economic Theory, Anthropology and Ecology:- In Indian economic history we find theoretical sophistication in the work of Amit Bhaduri [1999 ] and Krishna Bharadwaj in their discussions of agricultural development. 

The use of quantitative techniques can be found in the work of Omkar Goswami and Shrivastava at the level of the regional economy and the work of Blyn, Heston and Sivasubramanian at the level of the Indian economy as a whole. There has also been the use of anthropological evidence to interpret economic and social change.

In his study of the emergence of bonded labor in the Gaya and Shahabad districts of Bihar Gyan Prakash has used the oral Lorik literature of the bhuinyan landless labourers to reconstruct the past and understand the kamiamalik relations in the region. Dipesh Chakravarty has used ideas of Marx and Heidegger to interpret the Vishvakarma puja by industrial workers.

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