We missed this one when it came out last fall:
Law and the Economy in Colonial India (University of Chicago Press, 2016), by
Tirthankar
Roy (London School of Economics) and
Anand V. Swamy (Williams College). A description from the Press:
Since the economic reforms of the 1990s, India’s economy has grown
rapidly. To sustain growth and foreign investment over the long run
requires a well-developed legal infrastructure for conducting business,
including cheap and reliable contract enforcement and secure property
rights. But it’s widely acknowledged that India’s legal infrastructure
is in urgent need of reform, plagued by problems, including slow
enforcement of contracts and land laws that differ from state to state.
How has this situation arisen, and what can boost business confidence
and encourage long-run economic growth?
Tirthankar
Roy and Anand V. Swamy trace the beginnings of the current Indian legal
system to the years of British colonial rule. They show how India
inherited an elaborate legal system from the British colonial
administration, which incorporated elements from both British Common Law
and indigenous institutions. In the case of property law, especially as
it applied to agricultural land, indigenous laws and local political
expediency were more influential in law-making than concepts borrowed
from European legal theory. Conversely, with commercial law, there was
considerable borrowing from Europe. In all cases, the British struggled
with limited capacity to enforce their laws and an insufficient
knowledge of the enormous diversity and differentiation within Indian
society. A disorderly body of laws, not conducive to production and
trade, evolved over time. Roy and Swamy’s careful analysis not only
sheds new light on the development of legal institutions in India, but
also offers insights for India and other emerging countries through a
look at what fosters the types of institutions that are key to economic
growth.
A few blurbs:
“Although
colonial institutions have been blamed for wealth and poverty around the
world, no one has analyzed how they developed over the entire history
of colony—no one, that is, until Roy and Swamy. Their novel research in Law and the Economy in Colonial India
lays bare the political and administrative problems that shaped the
evolution of Indian legal institutions, with major economic consequences
that persist to this day.” -- Philip T. Hoffman
“Indian civil
courts are notorious for a backlog of cases and a slow process of
dispute resolution—arguably a major retardant to India’s economic
growth. Yet, at the same time, Indian courts draw upon British legal
origins, particularly the common law, which has been credited for being
relatively responsive and flexible to contractual needs in cross-country
comparison. By incorporating cutting-edge concepts and debates in the
economic literature on law and development with a rich historical
discussion of the law in the Indian context, Roy and Swamy go a long way
toward explaining this paradox. This is an interesting and well-written
work on a very important topic.” -- Saumitra Jha
More information is available
here.
