Do you think that new economic reforms of British rule have disrupted the old economic system of India? Substantiate your answer with suitable examples

Land and surplus

Permanent Settlement (Bengal, 1793), ryotwari and mahalwari turned revenue into a rigid claim. Zamindars and the colonial state captured surplus that had been negotiated in a more layered agrarian order. Peasants faced cash rent, debt and eviction. Commercial crops—indigo, opium, cotton, jute—tied the field to Manchester and China. A. R. Desai treated this as the making of a colonial social formation: agriculture subordinated to metropolitan industry.

Craft, town and drain

Deindustrialisation of handloom and urban craft is the classic thesis of R. C. Dutt and nationalist historians: Lancashire cloth, tariffs, and the destruction of courtly demand hollowed artisan towns. Revisionists note some regional weaving survival and later mill growth in Bombay and Ahmedabad. The sociological truth sits in between: occupational castes of weavers, spinners and metal workers lost secure patronage; many became agricultural labour or slum labour. Railways moved grain to ports in famine years (a Dadabhai Naoroji / later Mike Davis point about Victorian holocausts) even as they integrated markets.

The drain of wealth (unrequited exports, Home Charges) is a macro story with micro effects: thinner local demand for artisans, a new comprador and professional middle class, and a peasantry that met the world market without industrial absorption at home. Famine codes and grain exports in bad years made the new market morally visible to nationalists.

Disruption was not total erasure. Jajmani-like ties, village moneylenders, and caste-based crafts adapted. Dharma Kumar and later Tirthankar Roy warned against a golden-age village and stressed regional variation, credit, and some craft dynamism. That caution is useful. It does not cancel A. R. Desai’s point that the colonial state re-geared surplus toward the metropolis. Socially, weaving jatis, salt and forest communities, and tribal shifting cultivators met the Forest Act as an economic reform by another name.

Still, the direction of reform—private landed property, free trade in manufactures, forest enclosure—broke the old articulation of field, craft and little kingdom. A mill proletariat appeared in Bombay and Kanpur; it was too small to absorb those pushed off the loom and the occupancy holding.