Of course a nation with a high population will have a high GDP in a mostly agrarian society. Per capita, there’s no indication India was ever the richest. They did fall behind massively due to an inability to compete during industrialization though. The attached source even mentions deindustrialization started in the waning years of the Mughals. Due to industrialization, the West’s GDP per capita simply outpaced India and China significantly, to the extent western nations even had higher nominal GDPs.
> Of course a nation with a high population will have a high GDP in a mostly agrarian society.
It was more industrialised than many or likely most western countries at the time with more advanced and valuable crafts, so in relative terms this seems rather suspect as a reason for dismissal. The original claim in the GP comment was that it was "one of the richest", which seems more than plausible given that it was likely higher than average GDP per capita pre-global industrialisation.
> The attached source even mentions deindustrialization started in the waning years of the Mughals. Due to industrialization, the West’s GDP per capita simply outpaced India and China significantly, to the extent western nations even had higher nominal GDPs.
The article mentions the 18th century, which is when the East India Company began its campaign to take over more land and resources. There is a significant amount of evidence that the EIC and later the British systematically deindustrialised areas that they colonised [1], and it's thought that the European industrial revolution depended on this rebalancing. I agree that the West's GDP per capita outpaced India's as a result of that, and this massive reduction in wealth and resources was the original point.
There is some information here about the British East India company pretty much destroyed the Indian textile industry through tarifs and other measures. Turning Indian from a leading textile manufacturer into a (much less profitable) producer of raw cotton for Britain's mills:
This article starts out insightful but ends up preaching to maintain the status quo. Europe tried to dangle economic cooperation as a carrot in front of an increasingly aggressive Russia, so how will that tactic work any better with China? If China goes for Taiwan, they will do so with the assurance that economic sanctions cannot harm their war machine, same as with Russia. Decoupling with China after a war starts would be pointless.
I don’t know if I can stand duplicitous neoliberals pretending like they were hawks the whole time for yet another war.
It will probably be kinder to him than to the neoliberals who thought that giving trillions to an authoritarian regime would somehow make them a liberal democracy.
Immigrants from the Global South definitely have it worse in his examples, the Denmark and Netherlands, where even liberal parties have turned against immigration. The Republicans want to deport illegal immigrants, starting with those who have criminal records, they haven’t pursued anything as perverse as Denmark’s “Ghetto Law”. PVV’s platform in the Netherlands is self-explanatory.
China definitely prefers the status quo. With both countries’ rapidly aging demographics, a peaceful reunification might actually be feasible later this century. If Putin and Kim Jong Un are any indication, Xi is more likely to act if he thinks the status quo will be interrupted.
Trump has long boasted that he could have gotten semiconductor investments without subsidies. He would see it as a win if TSMC did the same thing, or even more, for free.
The US is pivoting from Europe to the Pacific precisely to better protect the likes of Taiwan. The Trump admin is filled with China hawks. Taiwan doesn’t have trillions of dollars and hundreds of millions of people to fund its own defense, Europe does.
