India in the Rise of Britain and Europe: A Contribution to the Convergence and Great Divergence Debates

Prabir Bhattacharya

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper discusses the role of the British control of India in the rise of Britain and Europe as well as in the convergence in incomes within the Atlantic economy in the late nineteenth century. Britain was at the apex of the world economy throughout most of the nineteenth century. The paper argues that the emergence of Britain as the apex economic and political power depended on her control over India.This control of India then enabled Britain to pursue a set of policies that were of critical importance both for the convergence in incomes within the Atlantic economy and the rise of Europe. The thesis advanced here can be viewed, depending on one's prior position, as being either complementary to or alternative to the views of many of the protagonists of the divergence debate in the literature.

Keywords: India; Britain; rise of Europe; incomes; convergence; divergence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N10 N13 N15 N30 N70 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-05-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/97457/1/MPRA_paper_97457.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:97457

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().