In the aftermath of the Opium War of 1839–42, China was continuously subjected to increasing Western political and economic penetration. The Treaty of Nanjing was only the first of a series of unequal treaties which led to the opening of over 100 treaty ports along the coast and in the interior of China. In many of these ports Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, Japan and other imperialist powers set up concessions under their administration and outside Chinese jurisdiction. There their nationals could freely trade, invest in banking, industry and construction, and engage in missionary and other cultural activities. Thus, although China never completely fell under the direct control of any imperialist power, the treaty ports were functionally similar to the port cities of Western colonies as linkages to the metropolitan countries.Did these treaty ports serve as beachheads of imperialism which facilitated foreign extraction of raw materials, exploitation of a cheap labor market, and displacement by cheap imports of native handicrafts left unprotected by the loss of tariff autonomy, as neo-Marxist historians charge? Or, as the revisionist scholars contend, were they centers of political and economic modernization where Western ideas and institutions were communicated to the Chinese, and where Western entrepreneurship and capital not only pioneered in modern industry, but also prompted imitative responsesfrom Chinese entrepreneurs? And yet, did the ports fail to have any major impact at all on Chinese political organization and socio-economic development, as Chinese mercantile interests thwarted Western attempts to penetrate the economy?

When Le Myre de Vilers arrived in Saigon in mid-1879 as the first civilian to be appointed governor of Cochinchina after nearly two decades of rule by admirals, he carried a letter of instructions in which the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, Admiral Jaureguiberry, outlined his mission: to endow the colony with the institutions of a civilian government and administration.In his instructions, Jaureguiberry noted the desirability of giving the Vietnamese a role in running the affairs of Cochinchina.

The British Empire established itself and expanded largely through its incorporation of existing indigenous political structures. A single British Resident or Political Agent, controlling a regional state through ‘advice’ given to the local prince or chief, became the norm for much of the Empire. India's princely states, where from the mid-eighteenth century the British first employed and developed this system of indirect rule, stood as the conscious model for later imperial administrators and politicians who wished to extend the Empire without the economic and political costs of direct annexation. In dealing with Malaya, East and West Africa from the mid-nineteenth century onward, officials in the field and notables in London sought to justify imperial expansion and to establish indirect rule efficiently by drawing upon the Indian example.Thus, during a century of empirical learning from relations with India'sprincely states, the British established a body of theory and policies about indirect rule which then spread throughout the rest of the Empire.

An extensive body of literature has grown up in recent years devoted to the analysis of the causes of what is certainly the most pressing economic issue of our time: the unequal distribution of the world's wealth and income, and in particular what in shorthand may be called ‘the underdevelopment of the Third World’. Tremendous progress has been made by radical as well as more conventional social scientists, and our understanding of the processes of interaction, economic as well as otherwise, between the metropolitan core of western colonial powers and indigenous societies in the periphery has benefited commensurately. Naturally, the debate has tended to focus on the major sectorsinvolved in the processes of economic growth and modernization, agriculture and industry, with infrastructure a poor third. Nevertheless, it is somewhat surprising to observe that what to many students ofEuropean expansion has appeared to constitute the essential element intheir ability to explore, gain access to, and exploit the periphery, hasbeen completely neglected: ocean transport, or to put it differently, themain body of the infrastructure of the world economy. In some ways, no dependence is felt to be so absolute as that of the country that sees itscoastal traffic dominated and its exports carried by foreign-owned ships.

A cornerstone of Wallerstein's (1974) theory of the capitalist world system is that economic development occurs in certain (core) regions of the world system at the expense of development in other (peripheral) regions. This thesis, accepted in one form or another by scholars following a dependency, neo-Marxist, or unequal exchange conception of economic development (as, for example, Amin 1976 or Laclau 1971; see discussion in Foster-Carter 1973 and Kahn 1980: 203ff) provides the foundation for their avowal of the ‘development of underdevelopment.’ The development of the core industrial capitalist nations required, so they argue, the distorted and repressed economic development of the third world.

My main concern in this article is with statistics relating to such basic matters as the sizes of farm-holdings, the output and yield of crops, household income and expenditure, occupational statistics, cattle ownership, the sizes of villages, etc.—though I shall also range more widely. While the distinct and professional field of demographic statistics is necessarily outside my scope, I shall criticize some features of the Karnataka population census.Although since 1953 most of my fieldwork has been undertaken in the West African countryside, I am obliged to take most of my examples of bad statistics from south India, since West African statistics, which were never abundant, are now scantier than ever. Throughout my discussion I take it for granted that the lack of reliable statistics gravely impairs our understanding of the working of tropical rural economies.