BOOK REVIEW 71 canal irrigation was implemented for the benefit of agriculture. But one cannot but have serious doubts about the motives behind, no less than the relevance of, the whole project. For the administration does not seem to have ^hown aw concern aboot the upsets in the €c Lacking in Economic Perspective As it i^, the author, starting from the premise that "every generation has its own^ interpreters", tries to comment on the public works and the prevailing conditions through the words of contemporary observers who, we are told, made a "contribution to scientific knowledge39. While giving "us mfoymation on the currents and cross-currents of British policy, this naet^odology is fraught with deplorable drawbacks. For instance, although Nonh-Westero Province and Oudh arc not isolated cases, never, not even in the footnotes are these territories referred to in (his survey of colonialism in north India. The topic of course is 'agriculture', but how can agriculture be dealt with in a vacuum? In the so-called blooming 'Garden of India% agricultural surplus had declined to such low levels as to jolt the vforld svkpply structure. At the end of the century the 'garden9 was so utterly depleted that India ceased to be an exporter of food. Only from a broader perspective could it be explained why this development did not upset the cokmial machinery though there was alarm in certain quarters when, for instance, the harvest in the Meerut division changed from "abundant39 to "poor99 and then to ^very poor99 in a matter of two decades. The absence of economic perspective, a characteristic not confined to the Hmeteenth-century historians, leads to such assertions as: