Social fragmentation and productivity in colonial India

Anirban Mukherjee and Shankhajit Sen
Additional contact information
Anirban Mukherjee: University of Calcutta

No zmfjn, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the role of social environment on firm productivity using the case of textile mills in twentieth century India. During the twentieth century, Indian textile mills were known for lower productivity than the contemporary British, American, or Japanese mills. While most of the existing studies offered explanations by directly making cross-country comparisons, we seek to explain productivity differences across Indian firms. We argue that low productivity of textile mills in colonial India was a result of a failure to generate tacit knowledge which was critical for technology adoption. The process of tacit knowledge creation depended on exchange of knowledge and ideas at the social level and therefore, is a function of demographic factors and ethnic composition of the society. In our paper, we combine input-output data from colonial textile firms with city level demographic characteristics in colonial India and estimate the effect of age structure, religious composition, and caste fragmentation on productivity. We find that the city level Muslim-Hindu ratio and inter-religion conflict negatively affected textile productivity in colonial India. The textile mills in the twentieth century India used a combination of American (ring frame) and British (mule frame) technology. We also find that cities with higher caste fragmentation were more likely to adopt American technology which required less coordination.

Date: 2022-08-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/630626f2f706821890fa302c/

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:osf:socarx:zmfjn

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/zmfjn

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().