The paper tries to present an entire picture of the internal trade of Bengal in late colonial period on the basis of a series of annual reports titled Report on the Internal Trade of Bengal, which was later renamed as Report on the Trade carried by Rail and River in Bengal, etc. Major findings of this paper may be summarized as follows. 1) By 1876, total value of the entire Internal Trade of Bengal amounted to 500 million rupees or very roughly 50 million sterling pounds. Of which, British cotton textile & cotton yarn occupied 25.1%, food-grains 17.1%, oil-seeds 11.0%, salt 9.4%, jute 8.1%, indigo 6.2%, tea 5.9%, and so on. In other words, colonial goods, i.e., machine-made cotton textile, jute, indigo, tea and salt formed at least 54.7% of the total value of the internally traded goods. This simple fact shows us definitely the depth of the colonial globalization in Bengal. 2) Means of transportation of marketed goods consisted of country boats, steamers and railways. The colonial commercial goods, which were closely related to the British colonial interest, were largely transported by the steamers and railways constructed and exclusively owned by Britisher, while most of the goods internally manufactured for local consumption were carried by numerous country boats which were mostly owned and run by the indigenous merchants, large and small. The latter, in fact, carried nearly 80% of the total weights of the marketed goods (94,076,000 maunds. Maund is an Indian unit of weight equaling to about 37 kg.), of which food-grains occupied more than 50%. 3) Thus, indigenous traders still continued to function, and, more or less, retained their commercial network and financed the vital flow of non-colonial consumer goods such as rice, oil-seeds, handwoven textiles, etc. In Bengal, there were numerous commercial centers, and some of which helped connect distant Indian markets such as the Upper Ganges regions, Madras, Bombay and Assam with Bengal producers, especially rice farmers. Combination of certain distant Indian local markets and particular Bengal markets strongly suggests the active role played by local traders. 4) Depth and nature of penetration of market economy greatly differed from region to region in Bengal. A theoretical model is presented in this paper in order to explain this regional variation of local economies within Bengal, quantitatively and qualitatively.
