The rise and fall of Indian wheat in international trade

It is a well-known fact that with a significant fall in trade costs between 1860 and 1885, Indian wheat exports rose, and the prospect of selling wheat abroad encouraged the expansion of cropped areas, especially in new agrarian zones like Punjab. It is not so well-known that the export boom ended soon after World War I, with no change in the conditions sustaining the earlier boom. This chapter connects the two phases of the Indian wheat trade to suggest that the institutions and the logistics geared to trade that took shape since the nineteenth century reoriented to serving the home market and shows what some of these institutions were.