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About
My research investigates the impact of geography, policy and commerce on lives and livelihoods in the past. My work explores Asia, with a particular focus on South Asia, from 1800 to the present day.
I am currently working on two large projects. For more information on my published and ongoing work, visit my personal website: www.maaniknath.com
Capital Markets
My book, Capital Shortage (Cambridge University Press, 2023), constructs a new and adaptable historical framework to show that a tripartite set of risks including climate, laws and political objectives constrained rural credit markets in colonial and postcolonial India. The lack of access to affordable credit, I argue, affected private investment and perpetuated rural underdevelopment in the colonial and postcolonial periods. My book won the Economic History Association’s Lindert-Williamson Prize for an Outstanding Book in Global Economic History in 2025 and the Economic History Society Book Prize in 2024. Sections of this work are published as journal articles.
I have expanded this work by looking at credit cooperatives as risk-sharing institutions. Using a novel dataset of participation in credit cooperatives at the district-level in Interwar India, my co-authors and I are currently investigating whether climate uncertainty induced cooperative behaviour, and whether pre-existing social norms were barriers to this form of cooperation.
Recently, I have shifted my attention away from the rural towards looking at the development of stock markets in the short- and long-run. The Bombay Stock Exchange is Asia’s oldest registered securities exchange. And yet, we know little about the historical development and performance of equities listed on the exchange. In new work, my co-authors and I construct datasets that allow us to estimate annual returns from 1900 to today.
Climate, Railways and Canals
The colonial period was one of economic stagnation in South Asia. The average household in rural India remained poor with little change between 1850 and 1950. However, this is puzzling given it was a period in which investments in major infrastructure grew. Railway expansion being a particularly important target for colonial policymakers, and canal irrigation receiving some public funding too. In ongoing work, I examine the impact of major public investments on agricultural production and growth across Indian districts during the colonial period.
In concurrent work, I have begun to explore health indicators as measures of development. We know relatively little about the effects of transport connectivity on disease transmission and mortality across colonial India. Accordingly, my co-authors and I have constructed a new database of mortality by disease across 1000 towns between 1875 and 1912, a pivotal period in the expansion of the railways. We show that the relationship between railroad expansion and mortality varied by region and type of disease.
Shifting focus towards Southeast Asia, I look at the drivers of rural development in Java and Taiwan during the first half of the twentieth century. My work investigates the impact of extreme weather events on agricultural output, as well as the adaptation strategies that helped farmers manage the risk of recurring weather shocks in the past. My collection of ongoing work points to divergences in economic performance across colonised parts of Asia, with Taiwan’s agricultural and industrial growth sitting in stark contrast to other parts of South and Southeast Asia.
Recent Publications:
Nath, Maanik. Capital Shortage: Credit and Indian Economic Development, 1920–1960. Cambridge Studies in Economic History - Second Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Nath, Maanik, Chung‐Tang Cheng, and Vigyan D. Ratnoo. "Water and development in the Asian tropics, 1900–1939." Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review 64, no. 2 (2024): 145-168.
Nath, Maanik. "Credit risk in colonial India." The Economic History Review 75, no. 2 (2022): 396-420.
Nath, Maanik. "Do institutional transplants succeed? Regulating Raiffeisen cooperatives in South India, 1930–1960." Business History Review 95, no. 1 (2021): 59-85.