CAMBRIDGE ECONOMIC HISTORY 29 large scale industry, C N Gooke on banking, and Pramit Chaudhuri on the Indian economy in recent times. Such omissions are probably as much the fault of the individual authors as of the editors. However that may be, the volume cannot be recommended as a useful bibliographic reference. The editors claim that they have refrained from imposing any thematic unity on the authors. The contents must be judged in terms of the quality of individual chapters. It seems that a revisionist view of Indian history is peeping out of a straggly empiricism in many of the chapters. Essentially according to this view, it is possible to ignore the presence of a foreign power as rulers in India before 1947 and write India's history as just that of a primitive, semicommercialized economy. In the zeal to father such a view, some authors have fallen seriously short of the usually accepted standards of scholarship. Alan Heston's chapter on national income is perhaps the best exemplar of this genre. He has produced a fantasy of figures and called it a national income series. On the basis of the argument that official statistics underestimate the growth of agriculture (an argument he had faHed to clinch in his debate withAshok Desai), he simply assumes the positive growth of per capita income he wants the figures to generate, despite the contrary evidence of ecological degradation, decline of handicrafts, and devastating famines. Dharma Kumar's section on the economy of south India suffers similarly from her inability to believe the plentiful evidence of decline in most areas of economic life during the period covered. A successful revisionism would have to be built on more hardy materials than an unconquerable optimism about the modernity ushered in by the colonial regime. In some of the other, better researched chapters a different perspective on Indian economic history emerges. Tapan Raychaudhuri presents a perceptive chapter on the eighteenth century background. The late Eric Stokes follows with a very readable and reliable section on agrarian relations in northern and central India. Then there are competent contributions by B Ghaudhuri and H Fukazawa on agrarian relations in eastern and western India respectively. Sabyasachi Bhatta-charya has presented a well-rounded picture on the changes in the regional economy of eastern India from 1757 to 1857. Leela Visaria and Pravin Visaria, in an excellent chapter on India's population growth, have summarized the hazards to which the population was exposed in different periods. Elizabeth Whitcombe gives an authoritative account of the development of irrigation works. The accounts of railway development and price movements by John Hurd and Michelle McAlpin, respectively, have been competently executed. (I wish, though, that they had used the excellent Ph D thesis of A K Ghosh, prepared as long ago as 1949 for the London School of Economics, on India's price movements.) One or two chapters have been rendered somewhat out of date