An enduring debate in South Asian economic history concerns the consequences of two centuries of British rule on economic performance and social welfare. Measurement has been a contentious issue: wages, prices, and agricultural yields have been used and criticized by scholars. However, population indicators which are known to have a major influence on economic activity have not featured prominently in this debate. In other preindustrial societies, we know that birth and death rates varied systematically with economic shocks, so we expect to learn more about how an economy like the British Indian economy developed through these demographic parameters. In particular, this proposal revisits the question of the impact major infrastructure provision, i.e., of the rollout of railroads on the welfare of ordinary people as an illustration of this method.
The project will collect and analyze demographic data from British Indian censuses, vital statistics, and economic data from colonial statistical serials from the 1870s through the 1920s. The first contribution of the project will consist of the construction of a new general-use demographic dataset of annual births and deaths at the district level, providing a new and more disaggregated description of the demographic history of South Asia than currently exists. The second contribution is a more thorough understanding of the dynamic interplay between demography and economic factors in this period, such as the causes of the mortality decline and the efficacy of public health expenditures. Finally, this research will employ these data to examine whether or how opening up to trade and the arrival of the railroads affected population growth. Given that theories of trade and Malthusian demography in conjunction imply that gains from trade should be reflected in higher fertility and/or lower mortality, this research will explore theoretically and test empirically a mechanism that could explain how opening up to trade may fail to improve per-capita welfare.
