A Contribution to the Description of the Socioeconomic Structure of India on the Eve of the Colonial Conquest: (Handicraft Production from the 17th to the Early 19th Century)

Abstract

Problems of the country's economic history have always been central to the attention of progressive Indian historiography. The history of India, wrote one of the democratically minded ideologists of the national liberation movement in India at the turn of the present century, R. C. Dutt, is not the history of the British and French wars, but the history of the people, of its material and spiritual position, its crafts, industry, and agriculture. (1) Not only for historians but also for the majority of India's major political figures who have sought to take a truly patriotic position in the national liberation movement, the question of the level of the country's economic development on the eve of colonial enslavement has always been one of major importance indeed.