Barbara Harriss-White
Barbara Harriss-White (born 4 February 1946) is an English economist and emeritus professor at the University of Oxford. Trained in geography, agricultural science and economics, she taught herself development economics and helped build development studies as an interdisciplinary field at Oxford.
Her work centers on India’s rural economy and its informal sector. Through long-term field studies, she has shown how rural markets extract resources, exploit labor, and spur changes in farming. She has conducted work in South India, North India and West Bengal, among other places, using what has been called field economics.
Her notable books include India Working (2003), which looks at the socially regulated informal economy, and Rural Commercial Capital (2008) on West Bengal. She also co-authored a long-term study of a small Indian market town with anthropologist John Harriss, and published The Economic Biography of Middle India in 2016.
Career-wise, she began at Cambridge’s Centre of South Asian Studies (1972–79), then joined the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (1980s), before moving to Oxford in 1987. As director of Queen Elizabeth House (1993–2007), she helped strengthen development studies at Oxford and launched a multidisciplinary Master’s program in Indian studies in 2008.
In retirement, she has held roles as a visiting professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, a professorial research associate at SOAS, and an emeritus fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. She has advised several UN agencies and governments and continues researching the informal economy, nutrition, gender, caste and tribal issues, as well as climate and energy policy.
Personal life includes two marriages—John Harriss (1969–1987) and Gordon White (1991–1998)—and two daughters, Kaveri and Elinor. She was elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2013. By 2018 she had co-authored 15 books, edited 21, and published numerous chapters and articles.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 05:27 (CET).