ABSTRACT
Attempts to explain India’s poverty and lack of modern economic growth before 1947 generally fall into two categories. There are those, like Marx in his famous essays on India, who emphasize India’s social structure, culture, and values as the barriers to economic growth and modernization. In this formulation, English imperialism is said to have fulfilled a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of traditional society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia. The other more recent and now much more widely held interpretation, subscribed to by many Indian as well as by non-Indian scholars, is similar to the “dependency” theory initially developed from Latin American experience. It views the impact of the West as largely negative—limiting, distorting, or even actively destroying indigenous capacities for modern economic development.
