Inadequate agricultural production lay at the heart of India's development problems in the colonial period. Between 1765 and 1820, the British East India Company created a regime that exercised political domination in most of peninsular South Asia. The most obvious impact of British institutions on the rural economy during the nineteenth century of colonial rule was through the imposition of new systems of land revenue and land ownership. After 1939, the depression of demand and activity in the rural economy was replaced by a sharp expansion fuelled by considerable monetary inflation, which lasted throughout the Second World War and the period of economic reconstruction and political crisis from 1945 to 1950. Many historians of rural South Asia have pointed out that Indian agriculture was consistently undercapitalised throughout the modern period. Opportunities for market-based growth in agriculture were always limited, and were only securely based in ecologically balanced areas growing crops for which there was substantial demand.