72 SOCIAL SCIENTIST "Whatever attempts might be made to avoid direct contact with agriculture some such entanglement was inevitable in an environment where the land was the prime source of wealth: on this ...the government (depended) for its revenue and the investors for their dividends.?>2 The author seems to have been taken in .by the semantic falsifications spread by the colonialists to hide their main aim of appropriation of all the surplus available in Indian agriculture. Technical evidence however discloses what the colonizers concealed. Irrigation helped in stepping up production of only commercial crops such as indigo, sugar, wheat and cotton, while the staple food supply took a downward turn. The author also elaborates how the whole system of rural credit, advances, and takavi loans had the self-same effect. One searches in vain why the supply of the food for the masses had dwindled. A couple of times the word 'export9 crops up, but it is not clear whether the grain was being exported to Europe or to other scarcity-ridden provinces. Built-in Limitations The use of a wider range of sources and a broader framework would have put the valuable material collected by the author in the proper historical perspective. It would have given us some interpretation and not merely a compilation of evidence. IfWhitcombe was acquainted with the works not only of the classical school of economists but of the (Marxist and other) economists and historians of the century she would have obtained a deeper insight into the times and events she is writing about. The development of waterways and railways provides a good example of this deficiency. Why was it that in this region where for the essential crops an efficient irrigation system had been in existence for centuries, ten times more capital was invested on canals than on railways while the rest of India gives the very opposite picture? Why were the pucca and kaccha wells not improved, the inundation canals neglected and only flush and no lift irrigation introduced? Is it not possible that the concentration on the canals was meant to develop a network of waterways, although some studies have suggested that (here was a decline in the water transport of certain commodities? The author's hidden hypothesis is that the colonial power did its utmost to develop agricultural resources but the Indian ryot was unresponsive. She wants us to overlook the fact that it was the colonial and later imperialist penetration which caused the utter neglect of the traditional canal irrigation system and the deterioration of the agricultural conditions: land was going out of cultivation while trade developed. The author has diplomatically bypassed the question whether trade and transport were considered more important by the British authorities than irrigation and the development of farm productivity. Exports caused a rise in prices all along the canal banks: "Bulk stores at railway stations^