Guest lecture by Tirthankar Roy, LSE

Asia Research Centre is pleased to invite you to a guest lecture by

Dr. Tirthankar Roy from London School of Economics

 on

The Historical Roots of Economic Resurgence in India

- a discursive but informed speculation on how economic history might enable us to understand present-day India better.

Historians of the Indian economy take it for granted that it is hardly possible to understand modern India without reference to its colonial past. But how is the link to be drawn? How did the past matter to the present-day patterns of economic change in the subcontinent? Simplistic answers to questions like these come in two forms. One of these suggests that the nineteenth century globalization and colonialism had underdeveloped India. And the other proposes that European conquest and colonialism modernized what had been a traditional society. Neither approach is very helpful. To suggest that India became underdeveloped in the nineteenth century does not help us understand a region that has experienced robust industrialization, flourishing entrepreneurial culture, high educational attainments, and a stable democratic state for the greater part of the twentieth century. To suggest that colonialism was a modernizing force does not explain how, amidst such achievements, the region remains home to the world's largest pool of poor and illiterate people. If history is to be useful, it should show, not why India failed, nor why it succeeds, but how such paradoxes could emerge. The talk will address that task.

Tirthankar Roy is Reader in Economic History, London School of Economics, and an economic historian of modern and early modern South Asia. He has published extensively, including a widely used student text, The Economic History of India 1857-1947 from OUP India, the revised third edition of which is now under preparation.