Introduction -- Economic history and modern India : redefining the link -- Rural labour and colonialism -- Agricultural labour : lessons from wage data -- Was there an industrial decline in India in the early nineteenth century? -- Labour-intensive industrialization -- Women and...

Tirthankar Roy challenges the view that traditional industry was destroyed in the colonial period. Roy argues that while traditional industry did evolve during the industrial revolution, these transformations had a galvanizing effect on manufacturing generally and that the major industries in...