Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not

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Review Essay

Parthasarathi, Prasannan. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not. Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2011. xiv, 365 pp. Ill. Maps. £55.00; $90.00. (Paper: £17.99; $29.95.)

Between 1700 and 1850 Europe managed to usurp China and India as the centres of global production. Parthasarathi sets himself the task of explaining how the West succeeded in doing so - not by trying to grasp the entire Asian experience, but by focusing on cotton cloth. Summarized in a few sentences, his argument goes like this: the British economy, which had become demographically and ecologically increasingly unsustainable, managed to reverse the trend by resorting to coal and colonies. In the process, Britain captured the global market for cotton cloth from India, which for centuries had produced the finest cloth in the world. Rather than economic and technological superiority, it was mercantilist policies and the protection of the infant cotton industry that were the key to British success. The author combines the Great Divergence theme of Asian-European equivalence prior to the Industrial Revolution with another well-known narrative about the destruction of Indian cotton manufacturing by the British textile industry. The deindustrialization theme dates from the times of the drainage debate initiated by Romesh Dutt and Dadabhai Naoroji, and it has since been integrated into India's nationalist discourse. It has also been contested, however, most notably by Tirthankar Roy.¹

Parthasarathi's combination of Great Divergence and deindustrialization has resulted in a bold argument, which does not seem, however, to have convinced today's leading economic historians. Reviews have appeared by Joel Mokyr, Jan de Vries, Peer Vries (the most extensive so far), and Tirthankar Roy, expressing strong reservations, while at the same time praising Parthasarathi's open-minded and erudite scholarship.²They also agree about the importance of his comprehensive attempt to broaden the Great Divergence debate by introducing India, which makes this book a must-read for those who are interested in the social-economic trajectory of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century India. Yet they hardly address what in their view is really new in Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not, perhaps because Parthasarathi's argument was already known from his earlier publications.

In my view, the main value...