01959nam a22001577a 4500999001900000008004100019100005000060245007800110260005200188300003600240520133700276773005201613906001801665942000701683952011101690  c525196d525196240214b           ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d  aAndrabi, T., Bharat, S. Kuehlwein, M. 949953  aInformation and price convergence: Government telegraphs in British India  aThe Indian Economic and Social History Review    a60(3), Jul-Sep, 2023: p.301-334  aIn contrast to the abundant literature on railways, there are few studies of the impact of telegraphs—another revolutionary nineteenth-century technology—on price convergence. Most measure the impact on international commodity-price differences between developed countries given an efficient form of transportation: ocean shipping. This article estimates the impact of government telegraphs within a major developing economy—British India—which lacked efficient pre-railway transportation. We use data from almost 200 districts, collected for the period between 1862 and 1920, when over 13,000 district pairs were linked by government telegraphs. We estimate that before the introduction of railways, the presence of telegraphs reduced grain-price dispersion by 7%–13%. There were also spill-over effects on neighbouring districts, the timing of which strongly suggests causation from telegraphs to prices. The results imply that telegraphs played their own important role in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century market integration in the developing world. Like railroads, telegraphs in British India significantly contributed to linking geographically dispersed commodity markets to each other to create a more unified economy. – Reproduced 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00194646231183371
  aThe Indian Economic and Social History Review    aCOMMUNICATION  cAR  00102ddc40709400245aIIPAbIIPAd2024-02-14h60(3), Jul-Sep, 2023: p.301-334pAR131032r2024-02-14yAR