An outstanding piece of work in political economy, Ashok Mitra’s Terms of Trade and Class Relations was originally published in London in 1977 but has been unavailable for over twenty years. The book presents a novel analysis and a historical account of a crucial phase of India’s post-Independence development. At a deeper level, the book puts forward the general proposition that social distribution of income, and hence by implication the process of economic growth, is determined by relative class strength manifested both in the economic and political domains which in turn closely interact with one another. In the new Introduction for this edition in the Chronicle Classics Series, the author reflects on the agenda he had in mind when he wrote this work and the implications of the changes which have been seen in the Indian economic landscape since then. Ashok Mitra is among the foremost economists of India. He taught economics at Lucknow University, Delhi School of Economics, Indian Institute of Management and Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta. He was Chairman, Agricultural Prices Commission, Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India and Finance Minister of West Bengal. While a National Fellow of the ICSSR and a visiting professor at the University of Sussex, he wrote the Terms of Trade and Class Relations. His other noteworthy work is The Share of Wages in National Income. Apart from his academic writings, he is well known for his column ‘Calcutta Diary’ in the Economic and Political Weekly. An essayist of Stature in Bengali, he has received several awards for the quality of his Bengali prose, including the Sahitya Akademi award.
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