A central problem for comparative economic history is the rise in international economic inequality from the nineteenth century, when Western Europe industrialized and populous regions like India and China saw little economic growth. In an older view, cultural and institutional characteristics such as scientific spirit or property rights made the West a better candidate to experience modern economic growth. A different view gained ground from 2000. New research on India and China claimed that levels of living were similar between Asia and Europe in the eighteenth century, and concluded that in institutional and cultural terms too, these regions had been similar on the eve of industrialization. Global economic divergence, therefore, cannot be explained by these seemingly exceptional traits of Europe.

Prasannan Parthasarathi is one of the architects of the revisionism. He first stated his views in an article on South India, and followed it up with compatible pieces on the cotton textile industry and on Bengal. The book under review collects these building blocks of the critique, and presents the argument more fully.

The argument is that early modern Europe was indeed different from Asia, but not in the way we think. The difference cannot be found in scientific spirit, property rights, or factor prices. Where Europe differed was the presence of states that came to the aid of industry, whereas the priority of the Asian states had been prevention of famines. There are four parts to the evidence illustrating the thesis. First, it is shown that the invention of mechanical devices in British cotton textiles was induced, more than we realize, by competition from Indian cottons. That is, the inventions were more an outcome of exogenous factors than endogenous ones. Second, India was the workshop of the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Europeans could enter this advanced trading-manufacturing world thanks to their fortuitous access to American silver. Third, new technologies in cotton and iron in Britain would not have been possible without state aid in the form of protection afforded to domestic textiles and encouragement given to the mass use of coal. Fourth, turning to Asia, evidence is assembled to show that in the 1700s, levels of living were similar between India and Britain, markets were integrated and property rights protected in India, and India had an energetic intellectual life, in particular, science and technology were of sophisticated order and received state sponsorship.

The author is aware that the thesis is likely to be controversial, and is usually balanced in dealing with possible criticisms. In my mind, there are five major areas of disputation.

First, there are questions about the reading of European industrialization. Why protection should spur innovation rather than rent-seeking, it is not clear from the argument. The theory of exogenous pressure is exposed to the objection that many of the inventors were more motivated by the profits to be had from new ideas than the losses to be suffered from not having them. Second, attributing European success in the Indian Ocean to American silver obscures three other factors behind the success, knowledge of interoceanic navigation, matching ships and guns, and the joint stock company. None had a counterpart in Asian trade. Each points to an area where Europeans had made early strides.

Third, the arguments of the book are made with reference to the more commercial and urban coastal and riparian plains of India. There were also the arid interior and the forested uplands, which had little wheeled traffic, few roads, little long-distance trade, and few towns until the mid-nineteenth century. These zones do not fit the picture of commercial and intellectual efflorescence. Even the so-called “advanced” regions were much more diverse internally than the author thinks. The book mentions the dry lands only once, to suggest that the famines that were frequent here were not a problem because the starving population could leave the areas of scarcity and travel (costlessly?) to the areas of plenty. This is hardly enough to account for the environmental risks and geographical differences that remain features of South Asia even today. Fourth, the evidence moves confusingly between India, China, and the Ottoman Empire. India was often called as a witness in a case for China in the early divergence literature. Parthasarathi calls China as a witness for India. Such a method produces misleading parallels between very different entities.

Fifth, it is strange that a book that insists on the high intellectual achievements of Indians must rely heavily on English writings and European archives to make the case. A few hundred foreigners, it appears, disseminated more information about a society of 125 million people (1750) than did that society itself. Why was the Indian agency in disseminating knowledge and information so weak? We should, of course, reject the early imperialist answer to this question, which was that the quantity of Indian knowledge was small to begin with. Parthasarathi's own answer to the question is a rehash of the nationalist and postcolonial mythology that the colonists destroyed indigenous knowledge. That leaves us with a third answer: means of transaction in knowledge were less developed in India than in Europe. Equivalents of the Encyclopédie or the Hortus Malabaricus written in Bengali and printed for sale to the public would be unthinkable in the 1700s. What the book calls sophisticated knowledge was typically written in archaic Sanskrit over palm leaf, and stored in temples and monasteries that restricted access to the boys of Brahmin families. Such knowledge may have been sophisticated, but it did not reach the society at large.

Such debates will not end soon. There is no doubt, however, that the book serves its aim, which is to reopen, the divergence debate with Indian data. This is an unusually bold piece of scholarship, erudite to boot, and will stimulate historians for a long time to come.