Open Access
Subscription Access
Open Access
Subscription Access
Did Indians Import Gold Only for Hoarding? A Re-Examination of Gold Flows in British India Between 1861 and 1919
Subscribe/Renew Journal
An inadequate understanding of the nature of the colonial economy of India characterised by tax-financed transfers to Britain coupled with the incomplete nature of trade data in the Statistical Abstracts of British India, has led economic historians to wrongly conclude that India imported gold only for hoarding. Using Council Bills data to define India’s commodity export surplus more accurately, this paper offers a retrospective re-classification of British India’s gold flows from 1861 to 1919 into Commodity and Financial gold and shows that a substantial proportion of gold imported towards the end of the nineteenth century was for financial purposes.
Subscription
Login to verify subscription
User
Font Size
Information
- Balachandran, G. (1996), John Bullion’s Empire: Britain’s Gold Problem and India Between the Wars, Curzon Press.
- Banerjee, A.K. (1963), India’s Balance of Payments: Estimates of Current and Capital Accounts from 1921-22 to 1938-39, Asia Publishing House, Bombay.
- Banerjee, D. (1999), Colonialism in Action, Orient Longman, Delhi.
- Dadachanji, B.E. (1934), History of Indian Currency and Exchange, D.B. Taraporewala Sons and Co., Bombay.
- de Cecco, M. (1984), The International Gold Standard: Money and Empire, Francis Pinter, London.
- Dutt R.C. (1902), The Economic History of India Under Early British Rule: From the Rise of the British Power in 1757 to the Accession of Queen Victoria in 1837, Volume I, Kegan Paul, London.
- ---------- (1904), The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age: From the Accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 to the Commencement of the Twentieth Century,Volume II,Kegan Paul, London.
- Farooqui, A. (2004), Colonialism and Competing Addictions: Morphine Content as Historical Factor, Social Scientist, 32(5/6): 21-31, May-June.
- ---------- (2014), The Establishment of British Rule 1857-1813, Vol. 23 of Peoples’ History of India Series, Tulika Books, Delhi.
- Gallagher, J. and Anil Seal (1981), Britain and India Between the Wars, Modern Asian Studies, 15(3): 387-414.
- Habib, I. (2006), Indian Economy: 1858-1914, Volume 28, People’ History of India, Tulika Books, New Delhi.
- Habib, S. (1975), Colonial Exploitation and Capital Formation in England in the Early Stages of Industrial Revolution, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Aligarh.
- Hilgerdt, Folke (1943), The Case for Multilateral Trade, The American Economic Review, 33(1): 393-407, Part 2, Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Fifty-fifth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, March.
- Iyer, V. (2020), Commodity Export Surplus, Council Bills and Sterling Debt, Social Scientist, 48(3-6): 55-66, March-June.
- Kindleberger, C.P. (1973), The World in Depression 1929-1939, Allen Lane, London.
- Lenin, V.I. (1999), Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Resistance Books, Australia.
- Naoroji, D. (1901), Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, Swan Sonnenschein and Co. Ltd, London.
- Pandit, Y.S. (1937), India’s Balance of Indebtedness, 1898-1913, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., London.
- Patnaik, U. (1984), Tribute Transfer and the Balance of Payments in the Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. II, Social Scientist 12(12): 43-55, Reprinted in U. Patnaik (1999) The Long Transition - Essays on Political Economy, pp. 305-322, Tulika Books, Delhi.
- ---------- (2006), The Free Lunch: Transfers from the Tropical Colonies and their Role in Capital Formation in Britain during Industrial Revolution, in Jomo Kwame Sundaram (Ed.) Globalization under Hegemony: The Changing World Economy, Oxford University Press, Delhi.
- ---------- (2017), Revisiting the ‘Drain,’ or Transfers from India to Britain in the context of Global Diffusion of Capitalism, in Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik (Eds.), Agrarian and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, Tulika Books, Delhi.
- ---------- (2019), The Revenue Impact on the Indian Masses of Exchange Rate Changes in the Context of the Drain of Wealth, 1871 to 1901, Social Scientist, 47(11-12): 3-21, Nov-Dec.
- Saul, S.B. (1960), Studies in British Overseas Trade 1870-1914, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool.
- Shah, K.T. (1921), Sixty Years of Indian Finance, Bombay Chronicle Press, Bombay, Digitized by www.archive.org (2007).
- Tomlinson, B.R. (1979), Political Economy of the Raj 1914-1947: The Economics of Decolonization in India, Macmillan Press, London.
Abstract Views: 811
PDF Views: 3