retardation thesis

Seen as a story of growth, my criticism of the retardation thesis is not only that it was
irrelevant, but also that it was inadequate. The treatment of commercial expansion during
globalization is a case in point. Indeed, many new types of market inside India linked to
exports were imperfect. Nearly all were unregulated. In many instances the social
‘embeddedness’ of markets reinforced existing inequities rather than weakening these.
And yet, stories of bounded, constricted, inequality-breeding markets cannot represent
the average experience with market participation in colonial India. Agricultural growth
rates recorded in the late nineteenth century and a limited industrialization bear witness to
the positive potentials of the economic globalization process into which India was drawn,
partly because of its status as a British colony. ‘Economic growth from below was
possible’ (Tomlinson, 1995:173) and it was made possible by the fact that
commercialization encouraged exploitation of unutilized resources such as waste land,
search for new resources, better allocation of resources and industriousness.