1In the post-World War II period, development economics emerged as a distinct field of economic theory defined by its focus on structural transformation in economies characterized by surplus labour, low savings rates, capital scarcity, and institutional constraints. Associated with figures such as Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, W. Arthur Lewis, Peter Bauer, Hla Myint, and Gunnar Myrdal, this body of work revived a number of analytical themes more commonly associated with classical political economy than with the neoclassical-Keynesian synthesis that dominated mainstream economics at the time (Lewis, 1954; Meier and Seers, 1984). As Albert Hirschman argued, its distinctive features included a rejection of “monoeconomics”—the view that a single theoretical framework can explain economic change across all contexts—along with an openness to the possibility of mutually beneficial relations between developed and developing countries (Hirschman, [1979] 2015). This raises a broader historical question: Why did classical political economy come to serve as a key analytical resource for this intellectual project? How was an older European tradition adapted to generate conceptual tools for the study of underdeveloped economies in the twentieth century?

2It is with this question in mind that I turned to Maria Bach’s Relocating Development Economics, which seeks to situate the origins of development economics in the writings of early Indian nationalist economists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book advances two closely related claims: first, that development economics predates its conventional post-war origins, and second, that its intellectual foundations must be geographically “relocated” beyond Europe (17). In making this argument, Bach draws on recent work in the history of science, which emphasizes the circulation and transformation of knowledge across different sites rather than its emergence from a single point of origin (Raj, 2007). The book thus positions itself against readings that treat early nationalist thinkers primarily as political actors or as derivative consumers of European economic ideas, and instead seeks to recover them as contributors to economic thought in their own right.

3The book focuses on a group of nine early Indian nationalist thinkers, including Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahadev Govind Ranade, and Romesh Chunder Dutt, whose writings form the core of the analysis. Many of the political and economic debates explored in the book have already received substantial attention in earlier historical scholarship, most notably in Bipan Chandra’s The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India. However, existing scholarship has tended to interpret these debates primarily through the lens of economic nationalism and the ideological construction of India as a national economic space (Chatterjee, 1993; Goswami, 2004). Bach’s project departs from this literature by treating early Indian nationalist thinkers not as contributors to economic nationalism as a political ideology, but as economists whose writings sought to theorize the dynamics of development under conditions of colonial underdevelopment. Bach therefore undertakes the task of reinterpreting early Indian nationalist thought as an attempt to formulate a historically specific political economy of development, and of reconstructing the general principles underlying it.

4Bach situates the “birth of Indian Economics” within the social and intellectual context of late nineteenth-century colonial India, marked by deepening poverty, recurrent famines, and deindustrialization (chapters 1 and 2). The discussion is organized thematically, beginning with their engagement with stadial theories of civilization and their critique of linear accounts of progress (Chapter 3), and moving to their diagnosis of economic decline under colonial rule, particularly through analyses of poverty, drain, and capital scarcity (Chapter 4). Subsequent chapters reconstruct their proposals for economic transformation, including an emphasis on balancing agriculture and industry through taxation reform, tariffs, and expanded public investment in infrastructure and human capital (Chapter 5). The final chapter extends these arguments to a global plane, suggesting that these thinkers articulated a vision of development that rejected static international divisions of labour and instead imagined a more broadly industrialized world economy (Chapter 6).

5Indian nationalists’ rejection of universalism in political economy, and their emphasis on the historical and institutional specificity of Indian economic conditions, play a central role in Bach’s analysis. Highlighting the widespread resonance of stadial theories of civilization in nineteenth-century intellectual discourse, Bach argues that these thinkers interpreted India’s “difference” in terms of its distinct trajectory, since Indian society had regressed after an earlier period of economic vitality. This possibility of economic and civilizational regress is treated as a distinctive contribution of Indian nationalist thought to political economy. Drawing on the experience of industrial newcomers like Germany and the United States, Indian nationalists believed that India too could pursue “balanced growth” between industry and agriculture in defiance of the nineteenth-century international division of labour. Anti-colonial political economy therefore became deeply suspicious of the classical dogmas of free trade and laissez-faire, along with the fiscal implications of colonial rule. These themes are articulated most explicitly in the writings of Mahadev Govind Ranade, whose discussions of industrialization, state intervention, and stages of civilization form the clearest foundation for Bach’s broader reconstruction.

6However, Bach’s presentation often renders the policy preferences of early Indian nationalist thinkers more palatable to the modern reader than a more critical reading of the texts would allow. For instance, Bach reproduces favourable nationalist assessments of the Permanent Settlement in Bengal without informing the reader that such landlord-based land tenures have generally produced weaker developmental outcomes in the long run (108-109). Similarly, Bach reproduces Ranade’s favourable account of the Dutch cultivation system in colonial Java, even suggesting that it “decreased poverty and inequality,” while downplaying coercive features such as forced labour and monopsonistic procurement that Ranade himself identified as sources of concern (66). At other moments, Bach attributes to early Indian nationalist thinkers theoretical positions that are difficult to substantiate from the cited material. This is most evident in the repeated suggestion that early nationalists “realised the need for greater demand” to sustain industrialization and capital accumulation, though the passages cited point instead to more conventional concerns about savings and capital scarcity (134-136). Absent a proto-Keynesian theory of demand-led growth, Bach’s argument that Indian nationalists advanced a “win-win model” for global prosperity is difficult to sustain. Politically motivated and at times polemical critiques of colonial rule are therefore transformed into more coherent and normatively attractive theories of development than the evidence itself supports.

7The difficulty of theoretical reconstruction from these early debates on colonial policy becomes evident in Bach’s discussion of Dadabhai Naoroji’s national income estimates. When Naoroji estimated India’s national income in the 1870s at only 40 shillings per capita, one of his more controversial decisions was to exclude the money value of railway services on the grounds that these were already embodied in the prices of agricultural commodities transported by rail (83-85). This was arguably an accounting problem stemming from Naoroji’s use of gross agricultural output as his starting point, since there was no straightforward way to isolate value added in agriculture. However, Bach’s discussion conflates this accounting problem with (a) classical debates associated with the Physiocrats over whether non-agricultural sectors are capable of generating value, and (b) questions about the developmental impact of railways, including whether railway infrastructure served to promote industrialization or to reinforce India’s dependence on agriculture. These are analytically distinct questions, and their conflation obscures important differences in the arguments being made, while attributing a degree of analytical rigour that is not present in the original texts.

8It is certainly the case that Indian nationalist thinkers shared certain broad attitudes, such as skepticism toward the universal applicability of the English tradition of political economy, and a shared conviction that India required some form of industrial transformation. Whether these shared commitments amounted to significant theoretical engagement with classical political economy, however, remains less clear. Such theoretical departures are worked out most explicitly only in the case of Ranade, who advances a relatively clear argument that political economy must vary with the stage of economic development, thereby aligning his analysis with a more interventionist, Listian framework. By contrast, Naoroji’s analysis of poverty centres primarily on the problem of economic drain under colonial rule rather than on the need for an interventionist state. One might even read Naoroji’s argument through Quesnay’s Tableau économique, insofar as economic drain disrupted the circulation of surplus within the domestic economy. Romesh Chunder Dutt, meanwhile, combined aspects of both Ranade’s and Naoroji’s critiques of colonial policy with an emphasis on village self-sufficiency as an antidote to dislocations caused by colonial trade, thereby anticipating themes later associated with Gandhian economics. However, these possibilities are not explored in comparable depth in the book. While Bach takes Ranade’s explicit theorization seriously, the implicit theoretical content of figures such as Naoroji and Dutt is not subjected to the same level of reconstruction.

9As a result, the book’s methodological commitments are not fully realized in practice. While Bach draws on approaches in the history of science and intellectual history to emphasize the circulation and transformation of knowledge, there is relatively little sustained examination of such processes in the analysis itself. Existing scholarship by historians such as Ranajit Guha (1963), Eric Stokes (1959), and S. Ambirajan (1978) has already demonstrated the uneven and contested ways in which classical political economy informed colonial governance in India. Bach’s analysis does not systematically trace how different strands of nationalist thought emerged through engagement with colonial debates. Nor does she consult archival sources that might document exchanges between the nine Indian economists, such as the proceedings of the Indian National Congress. Meanwhile, thinkers who complicated the nationalist-developmentalist trajectory described in the book, such as the pro-British administrator S. Srinivasa Raghavaiyangar or later anti-industrial critics like Mahatma Gandhi, are kept outside the scope of the analysis. Consequently, the book does not fully convey the density of intellectual exchange within which these strands of nationalist thought emerged.

10Finally, Bach’s engagement with the intellectual history of “development” and “progress” ultimately blurs an important distinction between development economics and development thought more broadly. Cowen and Shenton (1996), whom Bach cites approvingly, had already traced the history of broader doctrines of development to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including their reiteration in the Indian context. However, post-World War II development economics bore a distinct relation to this broader body of thought: while it shared a skepticism toward universalism, it retained the commitment of mainstream political economy to abstract modelling and deductive reasoning. The question, then, is not whether development doctrines existed earlier, but whether they cohere into something that can be meaningfully described as “development economics.” As Jayasankar Krishnamurty (2011) observed in his compilation of early twentieth-century Indian economic writings (Towards Development Economics,), one can identify emerging concerns with surplus labour, terms of trade, economies of scale, and structural change without thereby claiming to relocate the emergence of the field to a different time or place. Bach’s argument, by contrast, promises precisely such a relocation, but achieves this result only by redefining the boundaries of the field.

11Despite these concerns, Relocating Development Economics is an ambitious and thought-provoking work that draws attention to a significant episode in the history of economic thought. By bringing together the ideas of early Indian nationalist thinkers and situating them within broader debates on development, Bach highlights the wider significance of their engagements with questions of poverty, industrialization, and economic change. The book thus makes a valuable contribution by encouraging a reconsideration of the intellectual history of development beyond its conventional post-war framing. At the same time, the argument would have been strengthened by a more clearly defined conception of development economics, a more systematic reconstruction of theoretical claims from the texts, and a fuller engagement with the historical and intellectual contexts in which these ideas emerged. As it stands, the book raises important questions about the genealogy of development thought, even if its central claims about the contributions of early Indian nationalists remain only partially established.