Introduction

It has been widely believed that standards of living in Europe have been superior to those of India at least since 1500. This opinion may be found in the writings of European travellers who, after Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route to India, visited the subcontinent in growing numbers and returned home with accounts of the endemic poverty and misery to be found in the Indian subcontinent.¹ From the late seventeenth century there was increased interest in Indian poverty as Europeans cited it to explain the low prices of Indian products, in particular the cotton textiles that quickly developed a large-scale following in the markets of western, central, and eastern Europe.

In recent years, however, these arguments for the greater prosperity of Europeans have begun to be questioned. Kenneth Pomeranz, on the basis of evidence drawn largely from China, but also from South and Southeast Asia, has argued that life expectancies and consumption of cloth—two measures of the standard of living—were comparable across the Eurasian land mass. I have shown that wages calculated in terms of grain were roughly equal in Britain and South India in the mid-eighteenth century and that Indian labourers were not the victims of unrelenting exploitation and oppression. These calculations are summarized in Table 4.1 (Parthasarathi 1998; Pomeranz 2000).

South India, the region my earlier wage figures were drawn from, had long been a major centre of cotton textile manufacturing. By the eighteenth century, however, Bengal had become the largest textile producing and exporting centre in the Indian subcontinent. Table 4.1 also contains data on the wages of weavers and spinners in Bengal. The returns for both groups fall within the range for those occupations in both Britain and South India.

Household budget data also suggest similar economic conditions for artisans in Britain and Bengal. In 1807 a Bengal artisan in ‘comfortable circumstances’ devoted 49% of his expenditures on food to rice while the figure for a ‘common’

Table 4.1 Wages in the mid-eighteenth century

Notes: The wages for weaving and agricultural labour are given in terms of pounds of grain per week, wheat for Britain and rice for South India and Bengal. For spinning they are given in terms of earnings per pound of yarn spun but with correction for differences in grain prices. For further details see Parthasarathi (1998).

Sources: For Britain and South India see Parthasarathi (1998); for Bengal weavers' incomes were taken from Sinha (1961: Vol. 1, 176), Mitra (1978: 113), and Hossain (1988: 62) and spinners' incomes from Mitra (1978: 128—9). Rice prices for Bengal are from Mitra (1978: 123), Marshall (1987: 28), and Datta (2000: 255).

artisan was 85% (Datta 2000: 193). In late eighteenth-century Britain, according to a recent study, ‘bread was overwhelmingly the chief food, generally accounting for 40—80% or even more of the weekly income, according to family circumstances and the prevailing price of the loaf' (Petersen 1995: 4).

The comfortable economic position of weavers in India is suggested in other ways as well. For instance, there is substantial data that skilled weavers, but by no means the most highly skilled, in various parts of South India owned cattle. These animals were an important source of wealth, as the offspring could be sold in the thriving market for cattle in South India. They also represented a form of insurance as they could be sold in times of economic distress. In addition, the cows would have provided dairy products for the weaver family, which would have represented an important source of protein and fat. A Bengali man who accompanied Francis Buchanan on his tour of South India in 1812 remarked that, although most goods were far more expensive than in Bengal, the price of yoghurt was far lower. This is a sign of the abundant cattle population of southern India. Other suggestions for adequate economic resources come from the fact that weavers in South India paid taxes on their looms to political authorities. In Britain, by contrast, weavers, even in urban areas, were deemed too poor to pay taxes.

2.