Urbanization in India During the British Period (1857–1947)

Dipsikha Sahoo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000196368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Urban history is a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field of research. The rate of urban growth in the twentieth century has also stimulated interest in the city as an object of socio-historical inquiry. Some historical studies on individual Indian cities like Bombay, Calcutta, Cawnpore, Delhi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Surat and Madras have primarily explored the growth of urban centres by tracing their histories under colonial rule. This study offers a macro picture of the urban process under British administration, giving an understanding of how colonial capitalism shaped and imposed urban patterns in India. It contextualizes the urbanization of India in the world capitalist system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, explaining the multifaceted historical conditions in 1857, just before the imposition of direct Crown rule. Sahoo examines the socio-economic developments and demographic changes in India under British rule and analyzes the impact of the world capitalist economy, the pattern of urbanization under British rule, and the contribution of railways to urbanization. This volume is a profile of India's primate cities, identifying the core, the periphery and the underdeveloped hinterlands.

1 Introduction

An Overview of the Study

The present study provides a historical analysis of urbanization in the context of colonial capitalist development in India during the British period. The thesis argues that India under the British served the metropolis as a periphery. Colonial port cities in India became the pivots of India and emerged as the satellite primates of their respective hinterlands. There were many alterations in the size and distribution of urban centres and the structure of the urban population due to the impact of colonial rule. The city-hinterland relationship was reoriented under the colonial capitalist phase of India. The development of modern industry and the political unification mark the formation and development of a specific environment, which constituted the main spatial component of the process of urbanization and development of the port cities. The new forms of production organization such as the factory system, economic organization, trade unions and social organization came into existence in an urban system. The penetration of colonial capital altered the forms of the feudal mode of production and relations of production in the field of agriculture. Other forces which affected urban growth comprised improvements in transportation (overland and water) and technological developments, powered by the innovation of the steam machine. Modern means of transportation brought the isolated areas into the regular exchange of goods and services, while reducing time and space. The four port cities of India, viz. Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and Karachi, emerged as major nodes of colonial control, surpassing the cities of the pre-British era. The colonial port cities served as places for exchange of British manufactured goods to India and sources of raw materials from the country. As the capitalist class engaged in trade, commerce entered the immediate hinterlands through negotiating with the local landed gentry for the supply of raw materials, food and labour.

Demographic, ecological and political economy approaches have been used in this work to study the process of urbanization during the British period. The demographic changes in the urban population include growth in size, character and mobility of the urban population. The ecological approach throws light on the physical forms of growth in the urban areas. The political economy approach examines the role of economy and polity in the concentration of the urban population. The most debated urban problems in the literature on urbanization of various countries in the late nineteenth century are over-urbanization, economic stagnation and disparities among regions, and between urban and rural areas. The present study argues that urban problems in India are rooted in the British colonial history. The urban structure of India was characterized by the economic and political dominance of regional primate cities and the underdevelopment of rural hinterlands. The study assumes that urbanization in India under British rule was the spatial manifestation of the industrial capitalist investment and the disintegration of a pre-capitalist economic domain.

The period 1857–1947 could be divided into two distinct phases in light of industrial developments and political changes in India: (1) the pre-war period (1857–1914) and (2) the post-war period (1914–1947). This temporal division of the British period based on World Wars I and II in India is significant for industrial development and economic changes. The period also witnessed many mass movements pertaining to industrial development and economic changes. There was an urgent demand from national leaders for Indianization of industrial production and investment.

Framework of the Study

This research is based on the ‘world-system’ approach to studying urbanization during the British period as presented by Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank’s dependency approach. Insights from this approach have been used wherever necessary to explain the ‘imposed urbanization’ process during British rule.

Urban systems and urban centres are a reflection of the role played by the state in the capitalist world-system. In most of the developed and developing societies, a dual social structure emerged as a pattern of development since the inception of capitalist society. These two societies reflect differences in the social organization of work, lifestyle, sources of income and so on. The differential patterns of development led some scholars to view that areas under the control of the capitalist world had become modern or reasonably developed while the other area was traditional or underdeveloped. The urban areas in the developed world under colonial capitalist control centred on industries, public services and the production of export commodities in plantations. The rural areas in the underdeveloped world had an agricultural subsistence economy, a low level of technological development and an under utilized labour mass.

The world-system theory and the dependency theory are useful in explaining the genesis of underdevelopment in a particular society. These theories could be used to understand the pattern of urbanization in India as part of the capitalist world economy. Urbanization triggered by the British (which included the development of primate cities, administrative, commercial and industrial cities, railway junctions, etc.) mainly served the metropolis (Britain). The main purposes for developing these cities included the effective administration of provinces and princely states, export of raw materials and food grains from the hinterland through the ports, import and distribution of finished products in the hinterlands, and the movement of army, minerals, forest produce, raw materials, finished products, food grains and people by the railway. Urbanization that took place in the princely states was of a different type. The princely states were interested in developing their own states rather than acting as peripheries of the core (Britain), but they were not given a completely free hand in this process. To some extent, pressure was exerted on them to serve British interests. As a result, their urbanization was to some extent affected indirectly by British interests.

India was a self-sufficient economy when the East India Company started its rule. Over a period of time, various acts of the British Government, including dumping of British manufactured goods, imposition of heavy land tax and other taxes, export of raw materials, famines and neglect of villages had led to pauperization of the artisans, due to decay of the handicrafts industry, peasants and others, their migration to urban areas in search of employment and the presence of a large underemployed and unemployed population in urban areas. Gradually India turned into an undeveloped economy.

The world-system theory and the dependency theory share many points with the earlier Marxist theories of imperialism by V. I. Lenin. Lenin’s (2000) work Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline attributes the war of 1914–1918 to imperialist forces. It was a war for the partition and repartition of colonies. Capitalism’s main objective is the enormous growth of industry and the rapid process of concentration of production in ever-larger enterprises. The growth of internal and international exchange is a characteristic feature of capitalism. The uneven development of individual enterprises, individual branches of industry and individual countries is inevitable under the capitalist system. The post-World War I period was a time of monopolist capitalism, which Lenin called the latest phase of capitalist development. Monopolies are cartels, syndicates and trusts. The banks grow from being modest intermediaries into monopolies with control over the money capital of all the capitalists. This transformation is one of the fundamental processes in the growth of capitalism into capitalist imperialism. There was a departure from the old type of capitalism, where free competition dominated, to new capitalism, where a monopoly reigned. To make greater profits than the home market, the banks and industrial cartels merged to raise funds for investment in underdeveloped economies. Banks grew up as powerful institutions controlling the finance capital employed by industrialists. The concentration of production, the monopolies arising therefrom and the merging of banks with industry tell the history of the rise of finance capital. Imperialism is the domination of finance capital and the highest stage of capitalism, where finance capital reigns supreme over other forms of capital such as the predominance of the rentier (a person living on income from property or investments) and of the financial oligarchy. The export of goods is unique to old capitalism when free competition holds, but the export of capital is typical of the latest stage of capitalism. Export of capital to backward countries is possible when they have been drawn into world capitalist intercourse. The capital-exporting countries divided the world among themselves, but actually it was the financial capital that divided the world.

Under this phase of imperialism, the world is divided among the monopolistic capitalist associations (cartels, syndicates and trusts). The export of capital increased as the spheres of the big monopolistic capitalist associations expanded. The world was divided among capitalist associations and colonial possession of the great powers—Great Britain, Russia, France, Germany, the United States and Japan. Great Britain had 22.5 million square kilometres of colonial possession, which increased to 33.8 million square kilometres by 1914, followed by Russia and France. Lenin in his concluding remarks maintains that imperialism emerged as the direct continuation of fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general.

The World-System Perspective

Immanuel Wallerstein has authored three volumes on world-system, titled The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century(1974), The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750(1980), and The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840s (1989). The first volume traces the rise of capitalist world economy up to the sixteenth century and change in the form of the endless search for accumulation of capital, which was the basis of the capitalist world economy since the beginning of that century. It narrates the struggle of the Dutch with France and England till 1689. During that period the peripheral areas (Eastern Europe and the Caribbean) experienced some contracting economic opportunities, as did semi-peripheral areas(Spain, Sweden and Prussia). The book explains Britain’s eventual success in terms of state support for exports. The second volume deals with the long stagnation and crisis of the seventeenth century. The third volume examines the expansion of the capitalist world economy from1730 through the 1840s.

The world-system analysis as a perspective originated in the early 1970s as a protest against the version of development theory that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s. The generalizations previously developed in Europe/North America of the Third World could not be applied to the Third World. The modernization theory looks at society with a uniform evolutionary vision of social, political and economic development. The process of development ends at modernity. The stages of development varied among the theorists, but the general idea remained the same. Not all states are similar. The theory was designed to explain the historical development in the West as well as the underdevelopment in the non-Western societies. The modern world-system theory was a conceptual break away from the modernization theory, says Immanuel Wallerstein (1998) in his paper ‘The Rise and Future Demise of World-Systems Analysis’. The four thrusts of world-system are globality (world-system as a unit of analysis rather that state/society), historicity (entire history of the system is crucial to understand the present state of the system), unidisciplinarity (processes could be separated into distinguishable streams such as economic, political and socio-cultural arenas) and holism (rejects the historically constructed divides in the social sciences) (Wallerstein, 1998). Ferdinard Braudel had great impact on Wallerstein’s approach to the study of historical developments. The world-system theory is designed to investigate the origin and development of capitalism and industrialism. The world system which was located in only a part of the globe (in parts of Europe and the Americas) expanded over time to cover the whole globe. That was and had been the world economy. World economy is a “large geographic zone within which there is a division of labor and hence significant internal exchange of basic or essential goods as well as flows of capital and labor”, remarks Wallerstein (2004: 23) in his book World-System Analysis: An Introduction. World economy is not bounded by a unitary political structure; rather there are many political units inside the world economy as an inter-state system containing many cultures and groups. There is no political and cultural homogeneity in a world economy. World economy is unified by the division of labour. The modern world economy extended itself beyond the political boundaries of any empire through the methods of modern capitalism, which was not operative before. In the earlier empires, the flow of economic goods from the periphery to the centre was directed by a system of government through commercial monopolies with the combined use of force. Empires maintained and controlled specific political boundaries through an extensive bureaucracy and a standing army.

[Capitalism]is not the mere existence of persons or firms producing for sale on the market with the intention of obtaining a profit. Such persons or firms have existed for thousands of years all across the world. Nor is the existence of persons working for wages sufficient as a definition. Wage-labour has also been known for thousands of years. We are in a capitalist system only when the system gives priority to the endless accumulation of capital.

(Wallerstein, 2004: 24, emphasis original)

The world-system perspective is a macro-sociological perspective developed to understand the dynamics of capitalist world economy based on inter-societal systems. The European world economy came into existence in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. The world-system is an invention of the modern world which is essentially capitalist in character. The capitalist world-system followed the crisis of the feudal system. A capitalist world economy is a collection of many institutions, such as markets, firms, multiple states within the inter-state system, households, classes and status groups. A virtual market exists in the world economy as a whole. This virtual market works as a magnet for all producers and buyers whose pull is a constant political factor in the decision-making of institutions of the world economy. The world economy influences all decision-making. The theory argues that the endless accumulation of capital generated the need for constant technological change and expansion of horizon, such as geo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• 1 Introduction: An Overview of the Study
• 2 India During the East India Company’s Rule
• 3 Socio-Economic and Political Causes of Urbanization in India During the British Period
• 4 Pattern of Urbanization in India During the British Period
• 5 Contribution of Railways to Urbanization in India
• 6 Growth of Satellitic Primates and Other Major Cities in India
• 7 Conclusion
• Index