Beyond Divergence: Rethinking the Economic History of India

Abstract

The interest of global historians in the non-western world tends to be driven by a desire to explain growing international economic inequality between 1800 and 2000. A preoccupation with the question, when the third world fell behind, results in a neglect of important characteristics of the economic history of the third world itself. A theory of international inequality can explain neither the recent economic resurgence in the economies of Asia and Africa, nor the highly uneven pattern of transformation within the larger nations like India. The paper suggests, with the Indian example, how these issues might be brought back into the discourse.

Keywords:

• globalisation
• development
• divergence
• India

JEL classification:

• N01
• N15

Notes

²For further discussion of the historiography, see Roy 2011.

³For one statement of this perspective with a strong focus on India, see Bagchi 1982.

⁴Called “staging points in the chain of [global] exploitation” by Colin Leys (1974, p. 18), the idea of the enclave had more proponents among experts on Africa and Latin America than among those on South Asia. See also Frank (1969, p. 220), who called the formation of enclaves ‘satellitization’, and Cardoso and Faletto 1979.

⁵I explore these gender-sensitive labour market choices in Rethinking Economic Change in India: Labour and Livelihood, London: Routledge, 2005.