In contrast, for industrial groups involved in import substitution, it might even imply a gain. For commercial groups, involved in the export of primary products to the imperial power, trade disruption would imply a cost. However, such disruption would affect different colonial groups differently. The argument goes as follows: because empires were trade-enhancing institutions, trade disruption would be one of the costs of rebelling against them. This analysis is based on a classical argument on the role of commercial versus industrial colonial groups in supporting or opposing imperialism, which has been reformulated recently by Bonfatti (2017). In the second part of the article, we exploit this exogenous increase in industrialisation levels to ask whether more industrialised districts lent greater support to the anti-imperial movement in the 1920s and 1930s. We exploit the exogenous collapse in trade generated by World War I – which, as shown in Figure 1, more than halved Indian imports from Britain in real terms – to show that districts exposed to a greater 1913-17 decrease in imports from the UK experienced faster industrial employment growth in 1911-21, placing them on a higher level of industrialisation which is visible to these days (2011). In Bonfatti & Brey (2020), we attempt to answer these questions empirically, in the context of early 20th century colonial India. From the colonies, however, two additional questions arise: did colonial trade limit industrial growth in the colonies? And did it reduce the colonies demand for independence, by making them dependent on trade with the imperial power? Accordingly, in the colony, this likely benefited consumers of manufactured products, and producers of primary products. The imperial powers encouraged this specialisation, which simultaneously benefited their consumers of primary products, producers of manufactures, and investors in colonial plantations and mines (see e.g. This resulted in a pattern of specialisation whereby the colonies exported mainly primary products and imported mainly manufactures. One common feature of European empires was the prominence of trade between the colonies and imperial power.
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