India and the Great Divergence: Assessing the Efficiency of Grain Markets in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century India

Abstract

By analyzing a newly compiled data base of grain prices, this article finds that prior to the nineteenth century the grain trade in India was essentially local, while more distant markets remained fragmented. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that these premodern structures were transformed, and a national grain market had emerged. In theGreat Divergencedebate, theCalifornia School'sclaim that early modern “Asia” reached a similar stage of economic development as early modern Europe is therefore rejected for India.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 99 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.