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On the colonial origins of agricultural development in India: a re-examination of Banerjee and Iyer, ‘History, institutions and economic performance’

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  • Vegard Iversen
  • Richard Palmer-Jones
  • Kunal Sen

Abstract

Banerjee and Iyer (henceforth, BI) (American Economic Review, 2005) find that districts which the British assigned to landlord revenue systems systematically underperform districts with non-landlord based revenue systems, especially in agricultural investment and productivity and mainly after the onset of the Green Revolution in the mid-1960s. On this basis, BI claim there were long-lasting effects of the institutions established in British India on a variety of development outcomes after independence. We correct a miscoding of the land revenue system in Central Provinces, which BI characterise as mostly landlord based, when reliable historical evidence suggest that this region should have been attributed to a mixed landlord/non-landlord based revenue system. Using a more appropriate classification of the land revenue system of the Central Provinces constructed from documented archival research, we find no evidence that agricultural performance of Indian districts in the post-independence period was adversely affected by the colonial landlord land revenue system. Our results demonstrate that the key BI argument that the more ‘oppressive’ landlord-based colonial land revenue systems mattered for post-independent agricultural development in India rests on fragile historical and statistical foundations.

Suggested Citation

  • Vegard Iversen & Richard Palmer-Jones & Kunal Sen, 2012. "On the colonial origins of agricultural development in India: a re-examination of Banerjee and Iyer, ‘History, institutions and economic performance’," Global Development Institute Working Paper Series 17412, GDI, The University of Manchester.
  • Handle: RePEc:bwp:bwppap:17412
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    Cited by:

    1. Lal, Apoorva, 2019. "Land Tenure and Missing Women: Evidence from North India," SocArXiv 6vdf7, Center for Open Science.
    2. Abhijit Banerjee & Lakshmi Iyer, 2013. "Response to 'A Re-Examination of Banerjee and Iyer' by Iversen, Palmer-Jones and Sen," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(12), pages 1647-1650, December.
    3. Roy, Tirthankar, 2014. "Geography or politics? Regional inequality in colonial India," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 88845, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    4. Park, Albert Sanghoon, 2017. "Does the Development Discourse Learn from History?," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 96(C), pages 52-64.
    5. Misra, Kartik, 2019. "Does historical land inequality attenuate the positive impact of India’s employment guarantee program?," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 1-1.
    6. Roy, Tirthankar, 2018. "Inequality in colonial India," Economic History Working Papers 90409, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History.
    7. Shree Saha, 2019. "Historical institutions and electoral outcomes the case of India after decolonization," Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai Working Papers 2019-033, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India.

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