ABSTRACT
This chapter develops the story of colonial India's external economic relations against these broad backdrops. It deals with the vexed issue of the 'drain' and its impact. The chapter provides changes in the institutional arrangements, principally of trade, currency, and banking, through which the subcontinent's external transactions flowed and its effects transmitted. It places these arrangements in the multilateral framework of the late-nineteenth-century world economy. The chapter focuses on contemporary patterns of commerce and entrepreneurship linking India to inland Asia and the Indian Ocean rim. It is often supposed that a dominant north Atlantic capitalism, turbo-charged by colonialism, imposed itself on established patterns of Asian commerce in the nineteenth century. Modern international money, multilateralism, and the world economy as people know it were, in short, joint products of a particular late-nineteenth-century conjuncture. The chapter discusses labour, mobility, and migrations from colonial India. Colonial India's economic links with its immediate region were complex, variegated, changing, and changeable.
