India today is undergoing economic transformation on an unprecedented scale.
It has stimulated an international academic debate on how to interpret
this change against the traditional understanding of India, in which some
scholars suggest the need for a fundamental rethinking of the economic
history of the country, including its colonial past. The purpose of this
project is to reexamine the historical origins of India’s economic development
and suggest a new perspective.
The English-language historiography of this subject has been overwhelmingly
concerned with the relationship between Britain and India. For example,
both the British view – that British rule brought the benefit of the industrial
revolution to India – and the Indian view, represented in A. K. Bagchi’s
thesis of “deindustrialisation” – that India’s industrial decline was the
other side of the coin of British success – in fact shared the notion that
the influx of Lancashire cotton textiles ruined traditional industries.
However, in recent years Tirthankar Roy had challenged this notion by showing
growth and increases in productivity in the cotton hand-weaving sector
in the early twentieth century. He has also demonstrated the survival of
a number of other labour-intensive industries, including gold thread (jari
), brassware, leather, shawls and carpets, as well as their ability to
respond to technological change and create employment.
One of the key concepts of Roy’s study is the labour-intensive path of
economic development, which has been developed through his academic interactions
with Japanese scholars. Among the members of this project, Sugihara and
Yanagisawa have discussed industrial and agricultural aspects of this path,
respectively, and three of us share the view that the labour-intensive
path, widely observed in Asia, offers a clue to understanding the contemporary
Indian economy. In this project, seven Japanese scholars with established
records of empirical research examine the data, mainly of the colonial
period, to test this perspective.
India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh, a well-known economist and central
figure who pushed the economic liberalization in the 1990s, has advocated
the need to foster the industry which could generate employment; he also
used the term “labourintensive industrialisation” in his 1997 speech. Under
globalisation and the spectacular development of the IT industry in India,
he has consistently reminded those who ignore the significance of rural
employment and the development of appropriate technology of the urgent
need to increase the production of labourintensive goods. It is hoped that
this project will clarify the historical context in which to place such
a pressing issue.
During the first year, three workshops were held in Kyoto to discuss the
present state of scholarship and our analytical framework, while individual
members made research trips to India, Southeast Asia, and Britain to collect
data and other relevant materials. Sugihara reported on his thinking at
international conferences at Helsinki (August 2006) and Washington, DC
(September 2006) and received valuable comments.
