In this post, we will see the book Agrarian India Between The World Wars A Study Of Colonial Feudal Capitalism by Rostislav Ulyanovsky.

About the book

In this book, the author has tried to present an integral

work studying one of the most critical periods of and a turning

point in the colonial exploitation of India by British imperialism-

that of the pre-crisis “flourishing” and the development

of the world economic crisis from the end of the 1920s

to almost the mid-1930s. The socio-economic anailysis in this

work discloses the evolution of India’s agrarian structure. It

covers chiefly the period between the two world wars, which

was one of persistent and nation-wide anti-imperialist struggle

and, in a number of Indian provinces, also. of an anti-feudal

movement among the peasantry. It should be noted that

it is precisely this period that is covered at best fragmentarily

in contemporary socio-economic literature.

The material the author has managed to utilise is, for the

most part, unique, especiaJly the many volumes of the British

Royal Commission on Agriculture in India ( 1927) and the research

carried out by the Indian Banking Enquiry Committee

for the Central Administrated Areas ( 193 1) . Extensive use of

this material, together with the results of the All-India Population

Census of 1931, has made it possible to recreate clear

types of representatives of exploitative groups, to show quite

clearly the economic policy pursued by British imperiailism in

the Indian countryside, as weH as the differences in the positions

of t he exploitative strata in India in relation to the peasantry

and the land question.

The research is also based ori the use of now rare material

( with which even experts on · the social problems of India are

unfamiliar) on the agrarian question and the condition of the

peasantry, the development of capitalism and class differentiation

in the countryside, the agrarian policy pursued by

British imperiali sm-material that was published by almost all

the leading newspapers and journals in India at the time.

The author suggests that considerable interest will be shown

in his elaboration of such problems as the development course

taken by capitalism, merchant’s and usurer’s capital, the landtax

systems and the attempts made by the British imperialists

to implant junker-type landowner capitalists, in, India.

The work analyses the impact of the world economic crisis

on the position of the immediate producer ( cultivator) , shows

the way Britain robbed agrarian India more and more as the

Great Depression of 1 929-1933 deepened, and also considers

the specific mechanisn1 by which the consequences of the crisis

were transferred from the metropolitan country to colonial

India.

Translated from Russian by Jane Sayer
Designed by Andrei Lisitsin

Published in 1981  by Progress Publishers.
Credits to original uploader.

You can get the book here.
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