The Big Picture: Measuring the Origins of the Modern World ~ Bishnupriya Gupta & Stephen Broadberry (Great Divergence #5)

2026-05-14

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Was India once an affluent empire, later impoverished by British colonisation? Or was India never rich to begin with? More generally, what does historical data on wages and other economic indicators tell us about the broader story of the making of the modern world – a world with great affluence, but where much of the riches are still concentrated in the Western world.For over 20 years now, Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta have worked to measure the evolution of global living standards from the medieval period o...

Was India once an affluent empire, later impoverished by British colonisation? Or was India never rich to begin with?

More generally, what does historical data on wages and other economic indicators tell us about the broader story of the making of the modern world – a world with great affluence, but where much of the riches are still concentrated in the Western world.

For over 20 years now, Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta have worked to measure the evolution of global living standards from the medieval period onwards.

In this episode, they begin by discussing a comparison between the historical economies of India and Britain. We then continue to a broader story of the living standards of the pre-industrial world. We also discuss different theories of the “Great Divergence” between the West and the rest of the world. We finish by turning our attention to the future, asking if the 21st century will be remembered as the Asian century.

This episode concludes the five-part series on the making of the modern world, produced by CAGE Research Centre and On Humans.

LINKS AND REFERENCES

Do you prefer reading to listening? You can find⁠ a summarised essay ⁠of this conversation, with a bibliography, at our series page:⁠ ⁠https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/podcasts/⁠⁠

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Guests: Bishnupriya Gupta (University of Warwick) and Stephen Broadberry (University of Oxford) ⁠⁠⁠

Contact: ⁠greatdivergencepod@gmail.com

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