Cotton cultivation under colonial rule in India in the nineteenth century from a comparative perspective

Klas Rönnbäck and Dimitrios Theodoridis

Economic History Review, 2022, vol. 75, issue 2, 374-395

Abstract: India has played an important role in recent debates on the development of agriculture during colonial rule, and on the performance of US cotton plantations during the nineteenth century. The debates suffer from a lack of quantitative evidence on the productivity of Indian cotton cultivation. In this article, we examine levels of land and labour productivity in cotton cultivation in nineteenth‐century India, and compare this data with corresponding productivity figures from the US. Average yields in India were much lower than previous research would suggest, and trends were generally stagnant or even negative. The difference between the cost of labour in India and the US was also lower than previous research would suggest.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13094

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ehsrev:v:75:y:2022:i:2:p:374-395

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0013-0117

Access Statistics for this article

Economic History Review is currently edited by Stephen Broadberry

More articles in Economic History Review from Economic History Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().