ABSTRACT
The temperate land goods, in which Britain was deficient, included foodgrains, timber, iron and naval supplies that were obtained from Continental Europe by substantially re-exporting tropical goods in addition to its own domestic products. Sayera Habib and Utsa Patnaik have estimated the contribution of colonial transfers to capital formation in Britain during the period of Industrial Revolution. The late nineteenth to early twentieth-century period of high imperialism when Britain, the world capitalist leader at the centre of the global payment system was crucially dependent on the rising export earnings of India in particular to sustain the system. Excluding re-exports from trade is incorrect and is not a practice followed by economists or by any international organisation, which always present trade data for all countries according to the concept of general trade. The historians of growth and trade in Britain have never conceptually linked any part of its trade with the property systems that Britain established in its colonies.
