The purpose of this short discussion paper is to raise some general questions concerning the current state of the historiography on the industrialization of pre-Independent India. Although triggered off by a close reading of Professor Morris's contribution to the recent Cambridge Economic History of India, volume 2, it is not my intention to review the essay in a detailed and systematic manner; rather I seek to place it in the wider context of what is, in my view, the unsatisfactory state of our accumulated knowledge. The paper is organized in the following way. Section II contends that all too little is known about a seemingly crucial sector—a vacuity that is not confined to India alone among the Third World economies—and that this tends to distort accounts of the general functioning of the international economy. In Section III I try to pinpoint the major areas of weakness, and then go on to suggest the main reasons for this somewhat surprising situation. Finally, in Section IV, I argue that Morris's study reflects the problems I identify but does not take us further down the road towards their resolution.

Models of industrialization and social change, whether Marxist or functionalist, have been derived largely from the historical experience of Western Europe and, especially, of Britain. Social theories came to be constructed upon a specific reading of a particular, and in some respects, unique, historical development. These theories or models, now deepseated in our historiographical consciousness, increasingly offer yardsticks against which industrial development elsewhere in the world is measured. On closer examination, universal postulates thus derived have appeared to generate a large number of special cases. Vast expanses of the globe are seemingly littered with cases of arrested development or examples of frustrated bourgeois revolutions.

The history of economic growth and industrial development in Meiji Japan has long attracted the attention of economic historians of India, especially those who are concerned with the question of industrial development. There is as yet no consensus as to the message of any comparison between Japan and India, and the battlefield between different analyses of the Meiji economy has proved a useful source of pillage to dress up conflicting interpretations of the Indian economy in this and later periods.

Undivided colonial India experienced an accelerated rate of economic change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Official policies and funds combined with private entrepreneurial energies and investment to intensify India's linkages with the world market in trade, industry, agriculture, and natural resource extraction. Slow, but in the long term steady, population expansion accompanied this trend. After 1947, economic development accelerated under five-year plans in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and transformed the earlier colonial economy. Population figures have similarly shot up since partition and independence. These two linked trends have accompanied steadily intensifying human intervention in the natural environment of the subcontinent over the same time. One effect, among others, has been dramatic alteration in land use and vegetation cover. Comparing Francis Buchanan's early nineteenth-century descriptions of the countryside in both north and south India with the appearance of these areas today suggests just how sweeping these changes have been. The landscape of today in virtually every Indian district is very different from that seen two hundred or even hundred years ago.