‘Agricultural Revolution’ in 18th century Britain: A Myth
Two of the notable features of the two centuries of British rule in India were the changes in the production structure due to commercialization of agriculture and transformation of property rights. In the Mughal era the peasants were the owners of land; they paid a share of their produce or its money value to the state through the overlord, but British rule diminished these peasants to mere labourers or tenants whose means of earning livelihood was to sell labour-power in return for wages. The zamindars, rajas, talukdars who had prior claims on surplus generated by peasants, were deemed as the ‘real proprietors’ of land, established as overlords and taxed moderately. This change in the social structure brought into question the legal ownership of mortgaging and transferring land, payment of revenue, ownership of output as well as the total revenue generated. The zamindari system was prevalent in Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, United Provinces and Madras. In the Raiyatwari System, prevalent in other parts of India, the state held the ultimate sovereignty of land. There was a departure from the centralized revenue assessment on peasants to mere tenants. In the two or three decades following the permanent settlement in 1793, there were significant expansions in population and cultivated area in Bengal. But the main reason for a rise in production was a normal recovery from the famine of 1770 and clearing of wastes and jungles. The land owners enjoyed the legal powers without any legal obligations. The depopulation of land in the 1770s led to a decline in the revenues fetched by the zamindars. The British rulers quoted the prices they received then, as too low. Thus most of the traditional zamindaris fell into arrears and lands were passed on from one owner to another, thus giving rise to the ‘monied class’ whose sole motive was to seek rent without investing in agricultural infrastructure. There was no improvement in irrigation tanks, channels, and flood controlling embankments and thus per capita productivity did not rise at all. The apathy of the village landlords drove the village commons to a state of despair.
In the 19th century, traders and moneylenders began extending conditional loans to producers to grow commercial crops for exports. The zamindars had begun to maintain a larger margin between money value of rent collected from an estate and the fixed revenue that they had to pay, thus enjoying the money they earned to live luxurious lives in urban areas. At that time, industrial revolution in England and the growth of textiles led to a high demand for primary products. Traders and financers unleashed brutal atrocities on the indigo planters so that they accept advances for indigo production, which ultimately culminated in the Indigo Riots of 1859. The tenancy acts of 1859 and 1885 imposed further inhuman conditions on the peasants, leading to agrarian disorders. Extorting most of the peasant’s income as rent and leaving them with no investible funds, traders gave them conditional loans to grow high value cash crops. Accumulation of peasant’s debts in the cotton cultivating areas ultimately led to the Deccan Riots of 1875. The Annual Report of Superintendent of Government Farms of 1876 shows that the prices paid to the producers of these commercial crops were abysmally low, while the prices obtained by the traders were quite high. As per the Ricardian concept of ‘wages’ and ‘profit’, these prices left the peasants with not only no profits, but also no wages. Traders acted like merchant capitalists and altered the production structure. The estimates of the Famine Commission prove that at least a quarter of cultivators lost their land since 1875. Extensive peasant indebtedness and transfer of land ownership led the government to pass the Punjab Land Alienation Act in 1901 that forbade the non-agriculturists to acquire land in debt settlement.
The organic links between internal revenue collection, commercialization and outflow of income have not been discussed by economic historians. The most striking feature of the 19th century was the rapid conversion of India from a country producing and exporting manufactured textiles to one importing cloth and exporting commercial crops. According to KN Chaudhuri, the concept of ‘Foreign Trade and BoP’ explains this phenomenon. He attributes the changing pattern of trade to differential factor productivity that led to a comparative cost advantage for India in exporting commercial crops. From his perspective, a country encounters unfavourable shift in foreign demand for its export products owing to unfavourable costs thus leading to exportable becoming importable and vice-versa. However, Prof. Utsa Patnaik has pointed out that there has been confusion between cost of production and their market prices, arising from a total neglect of commercial crops.
Despite imposing high tariff on Indian textiles, Indian products enjoyed a competitive advantage on imports. As rates of protective tariffs rose, smuggling of Indian textiles began. Finally, in 1700, a ban was imposed on Indian and Persian cotton good to protect the British woollen industry. Thus protectionist commercial policies of Britain led to high profitability of import substitution industries. Although consumption of Indian textiles was banned in India, the East India Company kept trading in Indian textiles throughout 18th century. Phyllis Dean pointed out that Indian textile constituted valuable re-exports to European continents. With the introduction of cost reducing techniques Britain invaded Indian textile markets and ousted Indian goods from commercial markets as well. Thus the development of the cotton textile industry in Britain was not a comparative cost advantage enjoyed by Britain, but the cumulative advantages they had derived from their mercantilist policies from 1700 to 1780, protectionist policies they provided to British industries, trade wars and the destruction of the manufacturing industries in their colonies by wiping out these industries and informal control over produces in countries they colonized. While Britain pursued extreme measures to protect its industries over the eight decades, India remained an open economy under British rule. Britain had used stringent navigation acts and commercial aggression to wipe out Portugese cloth industries as well.
The taxes collected from India, instead of being spent in India were being taken abroad by converting rupee into sterling. The actual drainage from India even larger as the exports were undervalued and imports were overvalued relative to exports. Moreover, unnecessary and forceful British imports in India were rising with time. India was obligated to import capital to bridge the gap between unilateral transfers and export surplus, thus expanding its future burdens.
A feature in every part of British India from 1890 to 1940, was a stark reduction in production of food grains and rising commercialization of cash crops that were being grown in these areas. From the statistics provided by Chambers and Mingay (1970), it can be seen that there was an increase of 37.5% in wheat production and 43% for all cereals from 1700 to 1800 in Britain. Prof. Utsa Patnaik used the Lee and Schofield indices and observed empirically that output declined for every population index by varying degrees, the highest being a decline of 17.4% in late 18th century. Overton, an advocate of agricultural revolution in England in the 18th century is of the view that average rate of growth of population was 0.26% per annum, while that of agricultural output was even higher. However in reality, agricultural output declined in Britain between 1750 and 1800, remained stagnant from 1800 to 1820 and in the1850s, it reached the lowest in a century. Towards the second half of 18th century, when it is claimed that ‘improvements’ occurred in the agricultural productivity of Britain, agricultural productivity had actually declined. Thus, a failed agricultural revolution in Britain was covered up by imports and the drainage of resources by England from its colonies.
Prof. Utsa Patnaik opined that ‘agricultural revolution’ in England was a myth- there had been revolutions in the social relations of production but the capitalist organisation in the production process was hardly successful in meeting the demands of industries by raising land and labour productivity to the extent required. Food shortage was a bottleneck to the growth of industries leading to agitation for free food imports. Britain suffered from food deficits in 1790s during the initial phases of industrial revolution. The most important raw material for British textile industries — cotton, did not even grow in Britain. It was cultivated in India and taken abroad. By 1840s, British imports of primary products exceeded what was produced within the country. The 50 years of struggle for abolition of Corn Laws indicate the failure of domestic agriculture to sustain food requirements within the country. Britain was importing food from its nearest country Ireland and raw materials for its industries from West Indies and India. This was possible since the imports were costless for the British and ‘paid for’ by the colonised producers themselves as slave rents or peasant taxes. The misconception of ‘agricultural revolution’ in England was promoted by northern historians ignoring the one-sided import dependence of advanced countries on the developing economies.
It was international trade and the exploitation of British colonies in the 18th century that made up for the low productivity of English farms and fed the expanding British population after the 1800s. The working class suffered from food shortage as English farms failed to keep pace with the rising population. English workers did not receive any extra food from the parliamentary enclosures and farm amalgamations in the second half of the 18th century. The concept of agricultural revolution does not simply imply an increase in output, but also an increase in productivity. Estimates of output growth and inputs used by farmers in the late middle ages and 19th century, imply substantial productivity growth before 1700 and stagnation in the 18th century Britain. As per the Ricardian approach, movements in the rent of land would reveal the pattern of change in agricultural produce if prices of inputs and outputs remained constant. As per Ricardo’s theory of real rents, empirical evidence from British India showed than rent equalled surplus. The claim of northern countries that an ‘agricultural revolution’ preceded the phase of ‘industrial revolution’ in Britain can be refuted on the basis of these grounds.
(Trisha Chandra is an MPhil Economics student at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, JNU and a member of the Rethinking Economics India Network. The author can be reached at chandratrisha1996@gmail.com)
