Indian economy during the British raj

We all know that the British goal in India was to generate a return for themselves. They were an Empire and that was their goal.

This led the Indian economy to struggle permanently.

However can anyone think of steps that the British could have taken in the late 19th and early 20th century to improve the Indian economy without changing the nature of the colonial relationship.

Any sources I can find suggests that Indian agricultural output was stagnant between 1920-1935 despite an increasing amount of agricultural employment and an increased amount of land under cultivation.

The other major sources I can find suggest that many Indian cash crops were being eliminated during the British raj.

Opium was banned in the UK in 1915. Dyes died between 1897 and 1914 (with a resurgence between 1914-1919 as the Germans were the world leaders in synthetic dyes). Jute trade declined in the 1930s temporarily.

There was no control on the Indian currency til the mid 30s. Anyone with silver could mint rupee which resulted in the largest import into British India in the 20th century being silver as British was on the silver standard and silver was declining in value between the 1870s and 1930s.

Could instituting currency control or moving from the silver standard have allow a stronger economy.

Finally was there any points where British industry could have migrated up the value chain and allow more basic industry in India.
 

Deleted member 1487

If anything British colonial rule actually accelerated Indian economic growth IOTL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#Economic_history
They introduced a lot of technologies and systems that were unlikely to have naturally arrived to India in the time frame they did historically without the British introducing them on the scale they did, namely the rail system, which was the 4th largest in the world by the end of 19th century. Despite the trendy view that colonialism was only a system of exploitation, the British invested a lot into India to make it profitable for them and saw them introduce a lot of industry there as soon as it was developing in Britain.

Plus India as a whole was actually also filled with princely states, so trying to impose a total system on everything outside of direct British control wasn't necessarily easy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#Princely_states
A Princely State, also called a Native State or an Indian State, was a British vassal state in India with an indigenous nominal Indian ruler, subject to a subsidiary alliance.[28] There were 565 princely states when India and Pakistan became independent from Britain in August 1947. The princely states did not form a part of British India (i.e. the presidencies and provinces), as they were not directly under British rule.

P. J. Marshall shows that recent scholarship has reinterpreted the view that the prosperity of the formerly benign Mughal rule gave way to poverty and anarchy.[132] He argues the British takeover did not make any sharp break with the past, which largely delegated control to regional Mughal rulers and sustained a generally prosperous economy for the rest of the 18th century. Marshall notes the British went into partnership with Indian bankers and raised revenue through local tax administrators and kept the old Mughal rates of taxation.

The East India Company inherited an onerous taxation system that took one-third of the produce of Indian cultivators.[130]Instead of the Indian nationalist account of the British as alien aggressors, seizing power by brute force and impoverishing all of India, Marshall presents the interpretation (supported by many scholars in India and the West) that the British were not in full control but instead were players in what was primarily an Indian play and in which their rise to power depended upon excellent co-operation with Indian elites.[132] Marshall admits that much of his interpretation is still highly controversial among many historians.[133]

The point of all this is that there wasn't necessarily more that the British could impose on the Indian economy themselves given the divisions of power and the nature of the colonial enterprise, that is getting native buy-in to their efforts to make them actually happen. The Raj wasn't a dictatorship that the British colonial government ran with total impunity, it, like any government, was through the buy in of elites and the willingness of the public at large to go along. So what happened IOTL was potentially a function of all that could be achieved and still keep the increasingly shaky enterprise going.

Plus there is a serious dispute of whether the Raj actually did damage to the Indian economy or actually set it up to be a much more successful economy than it would have evolved into on it's own.
 
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At least in the inter-war period the parts of the Indian economy that struggled the most were the Indian owned bits.

The example I've read on is cotton vs jute. The cotton mills were mostly on the west coast and Indian owned, they had horrific labour problems (8 major industry wide strikes 1918 to 1938) and the owners wouldn't invest in modern production kit - mainly because when they did they faced massive strikes. So efficiency stayed stagnant even though technology was allowing massive improvements elsewhere. As a result the Japanese cotton industry ate them alive.

In contrast Jute was east coast, British owned and while it had labour problems it was orders of magnitude better. Industrial efficiency was on a par with the best plants in the world and it all went well until the global Jute market collapsed after WW2 in the face of plastics and lots of wartime surplus.

Essentially unless it was strategic (railways, etc) or British owned then the Raj tended to stay out of it, they weren't going to expend legitimacy and rare political capital on helping Indian owned companies with their labour disputes. On that basis you could argue that it was a lack of British control of the Indian economy that was the problem, but even if you believe that (not 100% sure I do) that is a massive change which probably requires a pre-1900 POD.

The alternative is to come up with a way for Indian owned companies to do better at negotiating with Indian unions/workers and getting them to accept some job losses in exchange for everyone else getting higher pay (and keeping their jobs). Not sure how Britain can help there, especially given the OTL British record on labour relations. You should also bear in mind that the Japanese tried to do this in OTL (there was a Japanese cotton mill setup in India in the 1930s), they brought over all the modern looms and latest management techniques but could not get the local workforce to accept the required working methods, so they sold up and went back to Japan.

I'm fairly sure there is no quick fix to that, anything big enough to make a difference would have massive butterflies.
 
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