India remains, in the popular imagination, a nation of farmers and programmers, but not one of industrialists or entrepreneurs; Sumit K. Majumdar sets out to show that this view has long been out of date. In his new book, he takes on the twin tasks of explaining why India's industrialization has been so long in the making, and of arguing that manufacturing must play a key role in India's development.

Majumdar begins with a bird's-eye view of his explanandum (chapter 1), using an engaging mix of anecdotes and statistics to recount the story of Indian industry in the late twentieth century. He then presents abbreviated accounts of British and American experiences with industrialization (chapter 2), emphasizing what he calls the “democratization” of invention and markets. He moves on to a survey of Indian enterprise history (chapters 3 and 4), beginning with craft industries and shipbuilding in the Indus Valley 4,500 years ago and moving swiftly to the colonial period, where he identifies the first green shoots of an indigenous industrial movement in the ventures of the Tatas and the Birlas, among others. Majumdar then returns to comparative history (chapter 5), this time looking at the late industrializers of East Asia for lessons in catching up.

The remainder of the book focuses on India in more recent times, examining post-independence industrial policy and performance (chapter 6) and the contemporary industrial landscape (chapter 7). Majumdar then turns to the role of services in India's economic ascent (chapter 8), entering the contentious debate with a flag planted firmly in the manufacturing-first camp with the subsequent chapter, “A Paean for Manufacturing” (chapter 9). The book concludes with a whirlwind tour of advice for Indian policymakers and entrepreneurs, touching on themes from energy usage to industrial consolidation (chapter 10).

For many economic historians, the primary material of interest will lie in the early chapters, on which I focus in this review. Given the ambitions of the book in terms of scope, the author has done remarkably well to synthesize major historical phenomena into digestible themes, trends, and episodes. The discussions of the policy debates in the early twentieth century and in the post-independence era are especially strong, as are the portraits of Indian entrepreneurs and businesses over the last two centuries. Nevertheless, an unfortunate consequence of the compression is an occasional drift outside the realms of academic consensus in service of a unified narrative.

This appears most broadly in Majumdar's privileging of political and cultural factors over deeper structural ones: his story of India fits into the revisionist view that sees the subcontinent's economic trajectory as promising, interrupted only temporarily during the colonial encounter (though here, that interruption extends through the dismantling of the License Raj in 1991). The discussion of the colonial period itself occasionally veers off-topic: more time is spent on the East India Company's early political maneuvering than is perhaps relevant and the fraught literature on deindustrialization is mentioned only in passing. However, once the scene moves towards the last half-century before independence, the thread is picked up with a concise examination of a constellation of industrial actors, from Scottish managing agencies to Bengali consumer goods firms.

The same pattern appears in Majumdar's discussion of historical industrial revolutions: the primary causes of the British Industrial Revolution, one learns, were the possession of superior science and an ideology of material gain. Absent from this account is a discussion of the role of Britain's Agricultural Revolution which buttressed its Industrial Revolution, or the consequent consideration that India's belated industrialization may have as much to do with the Green Revolution of the 1960s as it does with policy reforms. Similar lacunae include analyses of the roles of demographic transitions, political economy or international trade in supporting industrialization. The oversight of the continental catchers-up is notable, with potential parallels to be drawn for India today from Germany's emphasis on technical education to the lessons of small-scale firms in la Terza Italia.

In the remainder of the book, Majumdar looks more closely at India's present industrial landscape and prognosticates on its future: the discussion here is filled with the insight and judgment of years of academic and professional engagement with Indian business and policy circles. Bucking the prevailing emphasis on service-sector growth, he marshals evidence historical, theoretical, and empirical in support of an argument that India must refocus policy attention on manufacturing in order to grow. The claims sometimes extend beyond the reach of his evidence base, for instance when operations-research methods are applied to macroeconomic data to demonstrate service-sector inefficiency (pp. 226–29), but nevertheless skeptics should expect to find their views robustly challenged.

Overall, the book's shortcomings are minor in comparison to its strengths: measured against a wave of recent books about India's economic takeoff, Majumdar's work is impressive in its historical and comparative approach and in its synthesis of broad swathes of literatures across multiple disciplines. Readers will undoubtedly find it a compact and bracing guide to India's industrial past and present.