British Colonial Institutions and Economic Development in India

To extract revenue from its colony, the British implemented two major land tax systems and fundamentally altered the nature of existing property rights in India. In some regions, property rights and taxes were assigned to zamindars or landlords whereas in others they were assigned to ryotwars or cultivators. Because a few elites were able to accumulate significant economic and political power in the zamindari as opposed to the ryotwari areas, there is strong a priori reasons to believe that the local political structures diverged across these two types of areas. Although the zamindari areas were historically more developed than ryotwari areas, it appears that the introduction of these British institutions reversed the fortunes of these regions over time.