Productivity and innovation in traditional agriculture: a comparative study of agricultural development in the Bengal Presidency 1870-1914 and the Forth Valley 1760-1841

Why was there no agricultural revolution in Bengal after the Permanent Settlement of 1793?, The Presidency is compared with the Forth Valley in Scotland where an. agricultural revolution was successful. The theoretical framework'for comparison is provided by the concept of the production function. The first chapter establishes a valid chronology for comparison by applying Boserup's theory that technological change in agriculture is explained by population pressure, besides exploring changes in the environment. The second chapter constructs labour inputs for the major subsistence and commercial crops. Chapter three measures surplus labour and shows that there was no increase in the labour input to Bengal agriculture between 1890-1914. The fourth chapter argues that land tenure cannot explain the absence of capital formation in Bengal agriculture. In chapter five, we compared changes in total factor productivity by means of a Cobb-Douglas production function in the form of a price-dual equation. The results show that Bengal agriculture was not caught in-a high level equilibrium trap, but was capable of technological change. Chapter six compares the costs and returns of innovation and shows that the attempts to raise output per acre with irrigation as the leading input did not give high returns. The last chapter examines the role of agriculture in economic development and'the view that low productivity in Bengal agriculture is explained by an absence of demand. It shows that although the rate of increase in effective demand for food was higher than anywhere else in India, the rate of increase in food supply was actually lower. We conclude that the explanation for the absence of an agricultural revolution in Bengal lies not with the factors of production, but with the producer. Despite rising prices, the utility schedule of Bengal peasant farmers did not encourage them to work harder, perhaps because the marginal productivity was low, but also because they preferred leisure to higher incomes