'Prosperous' British India: Difference between revisions

''''''Prosperous' British India''''', more completely titled '''''Prosperous' British India: A Revelation from Official Records''''', was a book published in 1901 by [[British people|British]] author [[William Digby (writer)|William Digby]] that described the economic conditions prevailing in [[British India]] in the latter half of the nineteenth century under [[British Raj|British rule]].<ref name="digby1901">{{Citation | title='Prosperous' British India: A Revelation from Official Records | author=William Digby | year=1901 | publisher=Unwin | url=https://archive.org/details/ProsperousBritishIndiaARevelationWilliamDigby | quote=''... Thus England's unbounded prosperity owes its origin to her connection with India, whilst it has, largely, been maintained - disguisedly - from the same source, from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present time. 'Possibly, since the world began, no investment has ever yielded the profit reaped from the Indian plunder' ...''}}</ref> It used official government statistics to illuminate the falling incomes and increasing impoverishment in India under British administration during that period. The book was influential and, at the time, attracted attention due to the imprinting of the actual falling per-capita income statistics in gold on the spine of the book itself.<ref name="raychaudhuri1983">{{Citation | title=The Cambridge Economic History of India: Volume 2, C.1751-c.1970 | author =Tapan Raychaudhuri | author-link =Tapan Raychaudhuri | author2 =Irfan Habib | author3 =Dharma Kumar | year=1983 | publisher=Cambridge University Press | isbn=9780521228022 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9ew8AAAAIAAJ | quote=''... As Daniel Thorner has remarked, where can one find a more dramatic presentation of conclusions than that of William Digby, who had imprinted in gold on the spine of his book the per capita income of 'Prosperous' British India in 1850 as 2d, 1882 as {{frac|1|2}}d, and 1900 as less than {{frac|3|4}}d? ...''}}</ref> The book also used government statistics to demonstrate that the death-toll and frequency of catastrophic economic disasters in India, such as famines, was growing systematically under British rule.<ref name="vernon2009">{{Citation | title=Hunger: A Modern History | author=James Vernon | year=2009 | publisher=Harvard University Press | isbn=9780674044678 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZPtV4cGU4LIC | page=51 | quote=''... Whereas Dutt used the Famine Commission Reports of 1880 and 1898 to catalogue a melancholy 'record of twenty-two famines within a period of 130 years of British rule in India,' Digby dug deeper into colonial records, to reveal not only that the toll — twenty-six famines in the century preceding 1900 — was even graver, but that the scale and frequency of famines had grown and accelerated ...''}}</ref>