Useful & reliable: technological transformation in colonial India

Tirthankar Roy

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The proposition that Useful and Reliable Knowledge (URK) produced divergent patterns of long-term economic growth implies that such knowledge had weak agency in countries that fell behind. This article rejects such a theory on the evidence of colonial India. Indo-European contacts activated transfer, transplantation, and adaptation in URK; however, the impact was uneven within India. Despite boosting productivity in manufacturing and consumption, large areas were left untouched. These contrasts highlight the differentiated impact of URK on production conditions in India and question its transferability and mode of knowledge exchange under colonialism.

JEL-codes: N15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2021-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro and nep-his
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Published in Technology and Culture, 1, April, 2021, 62(2), pp. 494 - 520. ISSN: 0040-165X

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