Romesh Chunder Dutt CIE (Bengali: রমেশচন্দ্র দত্ত; 13 August 1848 – 30 November 1909) was an Indian civil servant, economic historian, translator of Ramayana and Mahabharata.

His parents were Thakurmani Devi and Ishwar Chandra Dutt, a Deputy Collector in Bengal, whom Romesh often accompanied on official duties.

After his father's untimely death in a boat accident in eastern Bengal, his uncle, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, an accomplished writer, became his guardian in 1861.

For a long time, before and after 1853, the year the ICS examination was introduced in England, only British officers were appointed to covenanted posts.

His grandsons were Indranarayan Bora, Modhu Bose and Major Sudhindranath Gupta, who retired as the first Indian Commercial Traffic Manager of the BNR.

In 1898 he returned to England as a lecturer in Indian History at University College, London where he completed his famous thesis on economic nationalism.

[citation needed] He served as the first president of Bangiya Sahitya Parishad (Bengali: বঙ্গীয় সাহিত্য পরিষদ) in 1894, while Rabindranath Tagore and Navinchandra Sen were the vice-presidents of the society.

[10] This book was presented by Thacker, Spink & Co. in Calcutta and Archibald Constable in London in 1895, but the idea had formed earlier in Dutt's mind while he managed famine relief and economic recovery operations in Dakhin Shahbazpur.

[11]He also directed attention to the deepening internal differentiation of Indian society appearing in the abrupt articulation of local economies with the world market, accelerated urban-rural polarisation, the division between intellectual and manual labour, and the toll of recurrent devastating famines.

[12] According to Tirthankar Roy, while Dutt’s ideas influenced Marxist and “left-nationalist” thinking into the 1980s, their salience declined as historians studying Indian economic history established that these were at odds with empirical evidence and data.