Railways' Economic Impact on Uttar Pradesh and Colonial North India (1860–1914): The Iron Raj by Ian D. Derbyshire

Abstract

Reviewed by: Railways' Economic Impact on Uttar Pradesh and Colonial North India (1860–1914): The Iron Raj by Ian D. Derbyshire David Arnold (bio) Railways' Economic Impact on Uttar Pradesh and Colonial North India (1860–1914): The Iron Raj By Ian D. Derbyshire. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022. Pp. x + 601. Of all the innovative technologies introduced into India under colonial rule, the impact of the railways has been the most widely discussed and hotly debated. Controversy has raged over whether they were beneficial, not merely to the British who built, financed, and ran them but to the population at large; or, conversely, whether they were hugely detrimental and a salient factor in rural impoverishment, environmental degradation, and the recurrent famines of the mid to late nineteenth century. In a substantial reworking and updating of a doctoral thesis presented in 1985, Ian Derbyshire examines in singular detail, with the aid of more than a hundred maps, figures, and tables, the evidence relating to the North-Western Provinces, subsequently known as the United Provinces and now Uttar Pradesh. He opens his discussion not with the railways themselves but with conditions in the province before their construction began, emphasizing the constraints that poor transport and limited networks of commercial communication imposed on the economy of most of the region, apart from the eastern areas served by the Ganges and the riverine route to Bengal. He then discusses over the course of several chapters the creation [End Page 643] and expansion of the rail system, its operational and management systems, the undercutting of alternative modes of transportation, and the significance of the feeder lines and road links that, by the end of the period, had greatly augmented the railways' impact. Of particular interest is the reiteration of an argument Derbyshire first made in the 1990s about the "syncretic" nature of the construction techniques employed by railroad engineers, including the adaptation of indigenous well-sinking methods, rather than pile driving, to support the foundations for the bridges that spanned the region's wide and unstable riverbeds. More generally, Derbyshire examines the changing cycles of peasant production, tracing significant shifts in the cultivation, pricing, and sale of specific commodities from food grains to opium and oilseeds, noting in particular how the railways (and the concurrent expansion of irrigation canals) benefited the previously backward and relatively arid western districts, giving them increased access to external markets and the ports of Bombay and Karachi. While many of the eastern towns, like Mirzapur on the Ganges, declined or stagnated, those in the west tended to prosper and to exploit crops with greater market value. Many obstacles remained, or indeed were created by the unsystematic nature of railway construction, such as the failure to agree on a single gauge of track, but Derbyshire has no doubt that the impact of the railways was profound, far-reaching, and, ultimately, advantageous. On the central issue of famine, he argues that once the railways had become fully established, they helped to save the province from extreme subsistence crises and to facilitate the remedial movement of foodstuffs within and from beyond the immediate region. By the end of the period, famine was no longer the widespread and destructive force it had formerly been. There is much to appreciate in Derbyshire's account. The examination of the statistical evidence is painstaking, especially with respect to individual cash-crop commodities and significant subdivisions within the United Provinces. Although the author's principal concern is with economic change, he does address the technological opportunities and constraints of railway construction and operation and the social consequences of the railways, for instance in terms of different caste communities and the emergence of Kanpur as a railroad town and industrial center. To some degree, Derbyshire's discussion remains rooted in the scholarly controversies of the 1970s and 1980s, some of which have lost their urgency forty years on, but he constructively engages with the more recent historiography and the widening social and environmental discourse around India's railway history. That said, though, the book has some significant lacunae: the sheer volume of data and the repeated division of the text through numerous subheadings makes this more a...