My work has influenced several debates and controversies in Indian economic history, on state, artisans, gender, agriculture, and business history. And it gives shape to two big ideas in comparative development.
The economic legacy of colonial empires is a paradox
Most historians believe the British Empire concentrated power and deepened racial and economic inequality. That broad view of European empires underestimates the differences between colonial areas and overestimates imperial power. Indeed, the Empire was militarily more powerful than the indigenous states. But it had limited capacity to change institutions or spend on development.
My work explores the limits of the colonial state perhaps more than other economic historians studying state capacity have done. I stress the regime’s excessive reliance on markets. Its goal was to encourage the commercial use of resources. Race mattered to it but was secondary to that goal. To do this, colonies in Asia and Africa opened doors to Asian capital and labour.
Openness was good for private enterprise, and fostered knowledge exchange. But openness had little impact on resource-poor farming or a workforce lacking modern skills. The successes and the failures of the empires stemmed from over-reliance on markets, not exploitation or extraction.
Climate shaped long-run growth
A central question in economic history is how regions and countries have become unequal in recent centuries. Most explanations of inequality start by identifying a critical factor that made the West forge ahead and then look for reasons why that factor was absent in the third world. That method usually leads to speculative claims about the economic history of the third world.
A different and better way is to start from the other end and ask, what defines the third world? My attempt to answer that question zeroes in on climate. For hundreds of years, the world’s tropical regions have been poorer than the temperate zone countries. I show that tropicality made the struggle for economic development harder and that success in that struggle entailed conflicts and environmental stress in the vulnerable geography of the arid tropics.
The border between economic history or a search for the deep roots of growth and inequality and environmental history using the geographer’s toolbox remains a mostly unexplored field. My current projects are based here. For a first statement, see “The development of the arid tropics: Lessons for economic history.”