Was Ambedkar an economist? What did he study?
He was, by training and by his earliest work, an economist before he was anything else in public life. His doctoral study at Columbia University and his later work in London were not on caste but on public finance and currency — the driest and most technical corners of the subject. The man remembered in India for one cause spent his twenties producing scholarship that had nothing to do with it.
The economic work
- The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India, his Columbia thesis, on how revenue was divided between the central and provincial governments — a question at the heart of Indian federalism.
- The Problem of the Rupee: Its Origin and Its Solution, his London thesis on India's currency and exchange system, arguing against the gold-exchange standard then in place.
- A body of testimony and writing on labour, wages and public finance that he drew on throughout his career in government.
This matters for reading the rest of his life. The person who later argued about reservation and the Constitution was not a single-issue campaigner who wandered into economics; he was a trained economist who came to the caste question with a scholar's habits and never lost them. His constitutional proposals on state ownership and land, for instance, are an economist's arguments, not a caste leader's.