during the reign of the most avaricious and cruel Muslim tyrants, such as the Tughlaqs, Khaljis, Lodhis and Aurangzeb, the people of India’s villages continued in their age old ways of economic production. This is because the Islamic invaders did not tamper with the village economy. It took Britain’s colonial wrecking machine to bring down India.

1993 Belgian economist Paul Bairoch presented a detailed study of the world economy. In Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxeshe said that in the year 1750 China’s share of global GDP was 33 percent, India’s 24.5 percent, and the combined share of Britain and the US was two percent. In order to investigate Bairoch’s claims, the OECD constituted the Development Institute Studies under professor Angus Maddison of the University of Groningen. The data Maddison compiled showed India had the largest economy on the planet for 1700 of the past 2000 years.

From 1 CE to 1000 CE, India had a 32 percent share of global GDP. During the second millennium, Islamic invasions disrupted economic activity, and India yielded the top spot to China. Still, India’s share remained at 28-24 percent between 1000 CE and 1700 CE. By 1947, when India became free, the country’s GDP comprised around three percent of the global economy. Here’s how it happened.

First, let’s look at the steel sector, the backbone of any economy, in which India had been a world leader for millennia. India in the eighteenth century had literally thousands of steel mills. The world’s best steel i.e. wootzoriginated over 2500 years ago in Tamil Nadu where it was known as ukku. The Arabs introduced ukku steel to Damascus, where an entire industry developed for making the legendary Damascus sword. The twelfth century Arab traveller Edrisi mentions the Hinduwani or Indian steel as the best in the world. However, the British banned the production of ukku in 1866 and the process was lost.

Historian Romesh Chandra Dutt explains:

India in the eighteenth century was a great manufacturing as well as a great agricultural country, and the products of the Indian loom supplied the markets of Asia and Europe. It is, unfortunately, true that the East India Company and the British Parliament, following the selfish commercial policy of a hundred years ago, discouraged Indian manufacturers in the early years of British rule in order to encourage the rising manufactures of England. Their fixed policy, pursued during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, was to make India subservient to the industries of Great Britain, and to make the Indian people grow raw produce only, in order to supply material for the looms and manufactories of Great Britain.

 Romesh Chandra Dutt in Economic History of India

Then there was the ‘cost’ of governing India a.k.a. the white man’s burden. Maddison writes in The Economic and Social Impact of Colonial Rule in India

During the period of direct British rule from 1858 to 1947, official transfers of funds to the UK by the colonial government were called the Home Charges. They mainly represented debt service, pensions, India Office expenses in the UK, purchases of military items and railway equipment. Government procurement of civilian goods, armaments and shipping was carried out almost exclusively in the UK

Angus Maddison inThe Economic and Social Impact of Colonial Rule in India

Then there was the ‘cost’ of governing India a.k.a. the white man’s burden. Maddison writes in The Economic and Social Impact of Colonial Rule in India

During the period of direct British rule from 1858 to 1947, official transfers of funds to the UK by the colonial government were called the Home Charges. They mainly represented debt service, pensions, India Office expenses in the UK, purchases of military items and railway equipment. Government procurement of civilian goods, armaments and shipping was carried out almost exclusively in the UK

Angus Maddison inThe Economic and Social Impact of Colonial Rule in India