Daniel Thorner(1915-1974) was an American born
economistAn economist is an expert in the social science of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...
known for his work on
agricultural economicsAgricultural economics originally applied the principles of economics to the production of crops and livestock — a discipline known as agronomics. Agronomics was a branch of economics that specifically dealt with land usage. It focused on maximizing the yield of crops while maintaining a good soil...
and Indian economic history. He is known for the application of historical and contemporary economic analysis on policy and influenced agricultural policy in India in the 1950s through his association with the Planning Commission.. Along with
D. D. KosambiDamodar Dharmananda Kosambi was an Indian mathematician, statistician, historian, and polymath who contributed to genetics by introducing Kosambi's map function. He is well-known for his work in numismatics and for compiling critical editions of ancient Sanskrit texts...
and R.S. Sharma, he brought peasants into the study of Indian history for the first time.
He graduated from
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
in the 1930s and served in
IndiaIndia, officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the west, and the Bay of Bengal...
during
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
Daniel Thorner(1915-1974) was an American born
economistAn economist is an expert in the social science of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...
known for his work on
agricultural economicsAgricultural economics originally applied the principles of economics to the production of crops and livestock — a discipline known as agronomics. Agronomics was a branch of economics that specifically dealt with land usage. It focused on maximizing the yield of crops while maintaining a good soil...
and Indian economic history. He is known for the application of historical and contemporary economic analysis on policy and influenced agricultural policy in India in the 1950s through his association with the Planning Commission.. Along with
D. D. KosambiDamodar Dharmananda Kosambi was an Indian mathematician, statistician, historian, and polymath who contributed to genetics by introducing Kosambi's map function. He is well-known for his work in numismatics and for compiling critical editions of ancient Sanskrit texts...
and R.S. Sharma, he brought peasants into the study of Indian history for the first time.
Early life
He graduated from
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
in the 1930s and served in
IndiaIndia, officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the west, and the Bay of Bengal...
during
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. He completed his thesis on the conditions of the
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
railway and steam ship enterprise in India in 1950 from the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and is one of several institutions that claims to have been the first university in America...
, later published as a book. He subsequently joined the
University of Pennsylvania South Asia Regional Studies Program to teach Indian economic history.He married Alice Thorner, who was a collaborator and co-author of many of his works on India.
Return to India
During the 1950s, under Senator
Joseph McCarthyJoseph Raymond McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
, there was a
witchhunt for leftist economists, and Thorner would not divulge the names of his leftist friends. Thus he lost his job and a government-funded fellowship for a project in India. He borrowed money from his parents and left for Bombay in 1952 along with his wifeHe travelled extensively in Indian villages and continued to work on agricultural economics.
Academic work
His stay in India resulted in three books on Indian agriculture. The first one,
The Agrarian Prospect in India published in 1956, was based on his direct observations and interactions with villagers in several parts of India. His two subsequent books were published after he left India and were
Agricultural cooperatives in India, a collection of papers on agriculture and economic history and
Land and Labour in India. Both were analytical works, examining the impact of policy on Indian farmers and boldly questioned existing statistics, reports and data, where they were poor or unreliable.
In Bombay, he built a large circle of friends and admirers and contributed to the
Economic and Political WeeklyThe Economic and Political Weekly, published from Mumbai, India, is a journal/ magazine published from Mumbai, India.The journal/ magazine was first published in 1949 as the Economic Weekly and since 1966 was re-christened the Economic and Political Weekly, EPW...
. He also lectured at the
Delhi School of EconomicsDelhi School of Economics, started in 1949, is a conglomerate of three departments, under the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Delhi.-History:Shortly after independence, a group of visionaries led by Professor V.K.R.V...
. His interactions with
PC MahalanobisPrasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, FRS was an Indian scientist and applied statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure. He made pioneering studies in anthropometry in India...
resulted in his contributions to the Planning Commission to refine the tabulations of the 1961 census.The previous tabulations for the 1881 and 1911 Indian census developed by
Colin ClarkColin Grant Clark was a British economist and statistician who worked in both the United Kingdom and Australia, and who pioneered the use of the gross national product as the basis for studying national economies....
showed a significant decline in the share of Indian workforce in various industrial sectors implying drastic deindustrialization. Thorner reexamined the census data and convincingly argued that the tabulations used by Clark were misleading.He concluded from the data that de-industrialization in India was very modest in the twentieth century, and any de-industrialzation had occurred in the late nineteenth century, contrary to prevailing belief.
Later life
Due to desire to return to a university and partially due to economic reasons, he left India in 1962 after spending ten years, to take up an academic position at
SorbonneThe name Sorbonne is commonly used to refer to the historic University of Paris in Paris, France or one of its successor institutions , but this is a recent usage, and "Sorbonne" has actually been used with different meanings over the centuries...
. He edited the works of Harold H. Mann, an economist and
Alexander ChayanovAlexander V. Chayanov was a notable Soviet agrarian economist and rural sociologist.He was a proponent of agricultural cooperation, but was skeptical with respect to the indiscriminate introduction of large-scale farms...
. He was instrumental in introducing Chayanov's work to the English-speaking scholars.He continued to visit
South AsiaSouth Asia, also known as Southern Asia, is the southern region of the Asian continent, which comprises the sub-Himalayan countries and, for some authorities , also includes the adjoining countries on the west and the east...
often and helped with the escape from persecution of some intellectuals from
DhakaDhaka , is the capital of Bangladesh and the principal city of Dhaka District. Dhaka is a megacity and one of the major cities of South Asia...
during the
Bangladesh Liberation WarThe Bangladesh Liberation War
was a civil war in Pakistan resulting in the separation of Bangladesh and West Pakistan . The war broke out after Sheikh Mujibur Rahman declared Bangladeshi independence on 26 March 1971...
After a brief period of illness, he died in 1974.