losses were balanced by gains to consumers. By 1850 prices of ordinary cloth
had declined by 80 per cent from their 1800 levels (Roy, 2002).
There are similar arguments for Africa, but not backed by the good statistics
of the Indian example. Prior to European colonialism most African societies
fulfilled their own needs for a wide range of farming equipment, weaponry and
clothing. In Katanga, Sierra Leone and Zambia local copper was long
preferred to imported items. There was a famous brass and bronze industry in
Benin and a glass and bead industry in Nupe (now Northern Nigeria) (Rodney,
1972). These nascent industries were destroyed by competition from imported
manufactured goods. Rodney argues that the abandonment of traditional iron
smelting in most parts of Africa was probably the most important instance of
technological regression. These losses of industry and skills in Africa were
extremely small if measured from the viewpoint of modern scientific achieve-
ments or by the standards of eighteenth-century England, though once lost it
was impossible to progress further (1972:105). Darity (1992) (recall his argu-
ment from the Introduction) emphasized instead the role of the slave trade in
diverting energies from productive endeavour.
Others argue that colonial infrastructure did not promote economic growth.
The construction of the railways, in this pessimistic view, produced few posi-
tive wider growth links to the Indian economy. Apart from ballast for railway
tracks and coal,ev erything needed for railways right down to sleepers had to
be imported from Britain. Railway materials and stores accounted for 7.3 per
cent of total Indian merchandise imports in 1897–98 (Rothermund, 1993;
Habib,2006). The value of India’s exports quintupled between 1870 and 1914
with agriculture providing 70–80 per cent of the total, but per capita output and
consumption of food crops remained unchanged or even declined from the
early 1900s to the late 1940s (Bagchi,1982; Chandra, 1982; Roy, 2002; Habib,
2006:84; Mukherjee,2007). In Africa the pattern of infrastructure, in particu-
lar roads and railways, was based around the extent to which particular regions
needed to be opened up to import–export activities or the likely need to move
troops (Rodney, 1972:209). The means of communication did not facilitate
internal trade in Africa; there were no roads connecting different colonies. Of
the railway system in Latin America, Galeano wrote: ‘The tracks were laid out
not to connect internal areas one with another, but to connect production
centres with ports. The design still resembles the fingers of an open hand: thus
railroads, so often hailed as the forerunners of progress, were an impediment
to the formation and development of a national market’ (2009:199).
A big problem with all these arguments related to deindustrialization is that
there was a general tendency for indigenous industrial growth to increase
during the late colonial era, and this is difficult to reconcile with the thesis of
an unchanging extractive colonial state. The years after 1858 saw the emer-
gence of modern industry in India, including paper mills, breweries, flour
mills,cotton and jute presses, engineering, timber mills, coffee plantations and
railway companies. By 1911, of 129 spinning, weaving and other cotton mills
owned by companies in the Bombay Presidency 92 had only Indian directors
200 Patterns and Determinants of Economic Growth