Breaking down the question

The question asks whether the new economic reforms of British rule — the land-revenue settlements, commercialisation, free-trade policy and the wider reorganisation of the economy — disrupted the old economic system of India, and it demands examples in support. The word disrupted invites you to show that colonial intervention did not merely modify but fundamentally dislocated the pre-colonial economic order.

The old economic system is the pre-colonial rural order: a largely self-sufficient village economy resting on the jajmani exchange of goods and services, subsistence agriculture, communal or customary rights in land, and a flourishing artisanal and handicraft sector integrated into world trade. The task is to demonstrate how British economic policy dismantled each of these pillars.

A first-class answer takes a clear position — that disruption was real and deep — while retaining sociological balance: some new structures (a market economy, private property, a modern class system) were also created, so disruption and transformation went together. The examiner rewards concrete illustration over generalisation.

For the historical and sociological framing, draw on the note on the social background of Indian nationalism.

How to approach it

State your thesis at the outset, then substantiate it pillar by pillar with specific examples.

  • Sketch the pre-colonial economic order — the self-sufficient village, jajmani exchange, thriving handicrafts.
  • Examine the new land-revenue systems and their disruption of customary land relations.
  • Examine deindustrialisation and the ruin of the artisan.
  • Examine commercialisation of agriculture and the drain of wealth.
  • Weigh what was destroyed against what was newly created, and conclude.

Model answer

The pre-colonial economic order in India rested on a largely self-sufficient village economy. Agriculture and handicrafts were integrated within the village through the jajmani system, in which artisans and service castes exchanged their products and labour for a customary share of the harvest. Land was held under communal and customary rights rather than as freely alienable private property, and India possessed a flourishing handicraft sector — its cotton and silk textiles were prized across world markets. British rule, through a series of far-reaching economic reforms, disrupted each of these pillars.

The first great disruption came through the new land-revenue systems. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 in Bengal converted revenue-collecting zamindars into absolute proprietors of land, transforming a web of customary rights into private ownership and reducing actual cultivators to tenants at will. The Ryotwari and Mahalwari settlements elsewhere fixed heavy cash revenue demands on individual cultivators. The common effect was to make land a saleable commodity, to introduce the moneylender and the market where custom had ruled, and to breed indebtedness and the transfer of land from cultivators to non-cultivating rentiers. The old communal relation to land was decisively broken.

The second and most dramatic disruption was deindustrialisation. British free-trade policy flooded India with cheap machine-made textiles from Lancashire while Indian exports faced tariffs, and the abolition of court patronage removed the artisan's traditional market. The ruin of the great weaving centres — the decline of Dhaka's famed muslin is the classic example — threw artisans back onto the land as agricultural labourers. This deurbanisation and the swelling of the agrarian population reversed India's earlier industrial standing; the country was converted from an exporter of manufactures into an exporter of raw materials and an importer of finished goods.

Third, the commercialisation of agriculture reoriented cultivation from subsistence to the market. Peasants were induced or compelled to grow cash crops — indigo, cotton, jute, opium — for export and for British industry rather than food for local consumption. While this integrated the village into a wider economy, it exposed cultivators to price fluctuations and, by displacing food crops, aggravated vulnerability to famine. The self-sufficient village was drawn into, and made dependent upon, the colonial and world market.

Fourth, the economy was subjected to the drain of wealth. Dadabhai Naoroji and R. C. Dutt documented how a large share of India's surplus was transferred to Britain through home charges, remittances and unrequited exports, depriving the country of capital for its own development. This drain ensured that the disruption of the old order was not accompanied by compensating industrial growth on Indian terms.

Sociologically, these reforms did not merely alter the economy — they remade the social structure. A. R. Desai, in his materialist analysis, showed how colonial capitalism produced new classes: a landlord class created by the settlements, a class of moneylenders and traders, an emerging bourgeoisie, and a growing mass of landless labour. Ramkrishna Mukherjee likewise traced the dissolution of the self-contained village community under the pressure of colonial economic forces.

It would be one-sided, however, to speak only of destruction. The same reforms created the framework of a modern market economy — private property, a monetised exchange system, railways, a national market and, eventually, a modern class structure and an Indian capitalist class that would later finance the nationalist movement. Disruption and transformation were two sides of the same process.

On balance, the answer is clearly yes: British economic reforms profoundly disrupted the old economic system. They dismantled the self-sufficient village, ruined the handicrafts, commodified land and drained the surplus — while simultaneously laying, on colonial and exploitative terms, the foundations of a modern capitalist economy.

Examiner's perspective

Examiners want a candidate who takes a clear stance and then substantiates it with named examples — the Permanent Settlement, the decline of Dhaka muslin, indigo and cotton, the drain of wealth. Vague assertions that the British exploited India earn little; concrete illustration of how the old order was dismantled earns much.

The strongest scripts connect economic disruption to social-structural change, invoking Desai's class analysis and Naoroji's drain theory, and then add the mature qualification that colonial reform also created a market economy and new classes. This double movement — destruction of the old, forced creation of the new — signals sociological control. Weak answers lapse into nationalist economic history without the sociology, or list policies without showing their disruptive effect on the village economy.