In 1600, as Shakespeare worked on his great tragedies, the Mughal Empire, stretching across modern South Asia, was arguably the wealthiest place in the world. It produced about a quarter of the world’s manufactured goods and dominated the global textile industry. As British historian William Dalrymple put it, “for their grubby contemporaries in the West, stumbling around in their codpieces, the silk-clad Mughals, dripping in jewels, were the living embodiment of wealth and power – a meaning that has remain impregnated in the world ‘mogul’ ever since.”
Then, something happened to reverse this flow of wealth. India became a paradigmatic impoverished nation. In its place, European nations – and their settler colonies – ascended. By the middle of the twentieth century, a clear hierarchy had emerged, with the wealthy nations of the ‘west’ at the very top.
How can we explain this reversal? Even today,
