Income concentration in British India 1886-1922

FACUNDO ALVAREDO; AUGUSTIN BERGERON; GUILHEM CASSAN

Tokyo

Congreso; World Economic History Congress; 2015

World Economic History Association

Little is known about the evolution of inequality in pre-industrial times in general and under colonial rule in particular. We use a novel income tax data set to present evidence on the evolution of income concentration in the last 60 years of British India. These data allow us to study both the yearly evolution of income concentration as well as its geographical repartition, a dimension that has been ignored in the top income literature. We uncover the following patterns: (1) the evolution of income concentration in British India was non linear, following a U shape, (2) this pattern of increasing in- come concentration during the 1920s and 1930s is specific to the Indian setting and may be linked to contemporaneous institutional changes, (3) most of the top income earners were Indians, and (4) the geographical location of top income earners changed over time with the province of Bombay gaining more and more in importance in the XXth century.