The passage is from a London Times editorial of 1900, a commentary on the travels of George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India, through Assam and Burma in March of that year. The colonial province of Assam roughly corresponds with today's Northeast India (NEI). The idea that the region is on a path to ‘future prosperity,’ that it would leave its ‘undeveloped’ past behind – one fraught with ‘chronic’ and ‘ineradicable’ violence – is a familiar trope in Indian policy discourse on NEI these days. Evidently, the same trope was used more than a century ago under very different political conditions.

What was behind the optimism about Assam's development in 1900? The province saw exceptional economic growth during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, thanks to the expansion of the tea industry and the discovery of oil. The period is the focus of economic historian Amalendu Guha's article ‘A Big Push without a Take-Off.’ Between 1871 and 1901, railways and tea plantations expanded significantly in Assam. The coal, oil and timber industries also grew. Tea production went up from 6.2 million pounds to 72 million pounds in those three decades. Yet Assam's economy did not experience a ‘take-off.’ Guha argued that it was because the economic policies pursued by the colonial government were designed exclusively to serve metropolitan interests. The railways, for instance, were ‘aligned wastefully … to the utter neglect – even detriment of local development interests.’ He compared the growth of tea exports from Assam to that of raw silk from Japan during the same period.