here is what was happening to the Indian peasant between 1500 and 1750 while the Englishman was "pulling ahead":
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2072758817667031259
Your three peasants in 1500 is a genuinely elegant framing.
It is also doing something very specific that needs to be named.
It begins the story at a point before European colonialism restructured the global economy.
Which means it can then present the divergence that followed as something that emerged from within European society: from English ingenuity, from Protestant work ethic, from whatever cultural or institutional qualities you might want to attribute it to.
But here is what was happening to the Indian peasant between 1500 and 1750 while the Englishman was "pulling ahead":
The British East India Company was in the process of capturing the most sophisticated textile manufacturing economy in the world.
In 1750, India produced approximately 25% of global GDP.
Its textile industry was so advanced that British manufacturers lobbied Parliament to pass laws banning the import of Indian cloth because they could not compete with it.
Parliament passed those laws.
Then it went further.
It systematically deindustrialized India to turn it into a raw material supplier and a captive market for British manufactured goods.
The Indian peasant did not "fall behind" because the Englishman innovated faster.
The Indian peasant "fell behind" because the British Empire dismantled the industry above his head, extracted the surplus, and wrote the story afterward as a tale of two different levels of ingenuity.
Your starting point of 1500 is not neutral.
It is the last moment before the mechanism of divergence was switched on.
posted by Satish Sharma at
06:20
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