In 1901 who has published the book 'Poverty and Un-British Rule in India' ?

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Correct — D, Dadabhai Naoroji. Poverty and Un-British Rule in India was published in London in 1901 by Dadabhai Naoroji, the Grand Old Man of India, and it gathered into one volume the papers, speeches and evidence he had been producing since the 1870s. Its argument is the drain of wealth theory, the most influential piece of economic reasoning the early national movement produced. Naoroji held that a large, continuous and unrequited transfer of India's wealth to Britain was the root cause of Indian poverty — unrequited because India received nothing in return for it. He located the transfer in specific channels: the Home Charges, that is the sums remitted annually to London for the interest on public debt raised in England, the salaries and pensions of European officials, the establishment of the India Office, the guaranteed returns paid to British railway investors, and Indian military expenditure incurred outside India. To make the scale visible he did something nobody had done before: he estimated India's national and per capita income, putting the latter at about twenty rupees a year in 1867-68 — the first such calculation for India, and a figure meant to shock. The word 'Un-British' in the title is the political move that makes the book what it is. Naoroji was not arguing that British rule was foreign and therefore wrong; he was arguing that it violated Britain's own professed principles of justice and good government, and so appealing to British liberal opinion in its own language. He carried the same argument into British politics itself, becoming in 1892 the first Indian elected to the House of Commons. He was Congress President three times — 1886, 1893 and 1906 — and it was from the chair at the Calcutta session of 1906 that he declared self-government, Swaraj, to be the Congress's goal.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The closest possible distractor, and a genuine member of the same school. Romesh Chunder Dutt, a Bengali who entered the Indian Civil Service and later presided over the Congress in 1899, wrote The Economic History of India in two volumes in the early 1900s — one on the early period of British rule and one on the Victorian age — and it is the fullest documentation of the drain argument that exists. But that is a different book with a different title, and it is the classic swap on this question.  (b) Pherozeshah Mehta was one of the founders of the Moderate Congress and the dominant figure in Bombay's public life, known as the Lion of Bombay, and he presided over the Congress in 1890. His work was as a lawyer, municipal reformer and parliamentarian of the legislative councils rather than as an economist, and he wrote no book of this kind.  (c) Surendranath Banerjea founded the Indian Association in 1876, edited The Bengalee, led the anti-partition agitation in Bengal and presided over the Congress twice. The book associated with his name is his autobiography A Nation in Making, published in 1925 — a memoir of the movement, not an economic critique, and published a quarter of a century after the date in the stem.

Concept: The economic critique of colonialism was the Moderates' most durable achievement, and Naoroji, Dutt and Ranade were its authors. Their case had three linked parts. First, India was being drained: a share of its annual product left the country every year as remittances with no equivalent flowing back, which no independent economy has to bear. Second, the drain was the reason India's capital formation stayed low and its famines recurred, so poverty was a product of policy rather than of climate or character. Third, British commercial policy had deindustrialised India — free trade in manufactures destroyed Indian handicrafts while tariffs and excise protected British textiles, turning India into a supplier of raw materials and a market for finished goods. Because the argument was made in the language of British political economy and addressed to British opinion, it could not be dismissed as sedition; it became instead the intellectual foundation on which later, more radical demands were built.

State PCS 2025 Q23 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q23 — History PYQ with Answer