Talk:Economic history of India

Chart request
The wonderful table in the "GDP history of India after Independence" section is a perfect candidate for turning into a graphical chart for easier reading. -- Beland (talk) 04:46, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

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Maddison = major reliable source
I kept the summary of research findings cited to  Angus Maddison. He was a leading scholar and specialist on the economic history of GNP, including India. Wikipedia depends on research of major scholars like him to provide reliable secondary sources that we summarize the OR rules applies NOT to scholars but only to Wiki editors who make new claims not supported by a reliable source. the rule = ''Wikipedia does not publish original thought. All material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable, published source.'' Rjensen (talk) 07:09, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Source only mentions table. We can present table but we cant draw conclusions on our own. We can't summarize table based on a single source because summarization can result in POV pushing just like the section currently is. Orientls (talk) 14:14, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
 * our job as editors is to summarize the RS -- whether it is all in text or numbers or mixed--ity is all verified by Maddison's team as reliable. There is NO Wiki rule against summarizing or paraphrasing facts in the RS. You seem to consider the table as a primary source.  In that case please read the rule about primary sources:  A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge.  (from WP:PRIMARY) That is, Wiki says that fully sourced "straightforward, descriptive statements of facts" are not OR. Rjensen (talk) 15:01, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Still it doesn't change that the source makes no mention of "Mughal", "Delhi Sultanate", etc. so why we are giving them credit when these names haven't been supported by the source? Source only speaks of "Early Medieval India", "Medieval India" and so on. It is not lending credit to particular empires which constitutes WP:OR and misrepresentation of source. Orientls (talk) 04:26, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the. —Community Tech bot (talk) 16:07, 3 July 2019 (UTC)
 * 1 AD to 2003 AD Historical Trends in global distribution of GDP China India Western Europe USA Middle East.png

Request to lock this page as protection from vandalism?
A previous edit to the introduction of this article changed the section on the medieval Indian economy to state: "India experienced per capita GDP recession in the high medieval era after 1000 CE, during the Delhi Sultanate in the north and Vijayanagara Empire in the south, and was still not as productive as 15th century Ming China until the 76th century. By 1760, when most of the Indian subcontinent had been reunited under Aurangzeb, the Mughal Empire through Islamic economics' policies, became one of the least productive and manufacturing power in the world, producing less than one eighth of global GDP, before fragmenting and being conquered over the century."

There are a number of factual errors and inconsistencies in this statement, such as "India experienced per capita GDP recession" (which contradicts the rest of the article) and states that Aurangzeb had reunited the Indian subcontinent by 1760, although Aurangzeb died in 1707. Can this page be protected from such vandalism?

Mughal Economy Problems
I'm just gonna copy from Mughal empire talk page: "Hello, I've read and checked all the sources in Economy section, and I have huge problems with it. Gdp of Mughal empire is reference to Maddison page 256, but the table here says nothing on gdp, it only gives population estimates. I don't doubt it was approximately those figures, but the reference does not back it up. The claim that "Mughal India was the world leader in manufacturing" referencing Parthasarathi p2, but it actually says: "The first was the competitive challenge of Indian cotton textiles, which in the eighteenth century were the most important manufactured good in world trade and were consumed from the Americas to Japan", nothing about Mughal empire being worlds leading manufacture.

Labour section is particularly problematic. The claim that: "Mughal India's workforce had a higher percentage in the non-primary sector than Europe's workforce did at the time" is referenced to Cipolla. But Cipolla says that "Because of lack of statistical data, no one will ever know with any degree of accuracy what percentage of European population was employed in the primary sector". Ciopolla says that even for mid 18 century the data is imprecise. Most importantly neither Cipolla nor Yazdani say that Mughals had higher percentage in the non primary sector then europe. This statement is simply original research, combining two sources to draw conclusion. In fact I've never saw any economic historian saying anything like this.

The claim that "Real wages and living standards in 18th-century Mughal Bengal and South India were higher than in Britain, which in turn had the highest living standards in Europe" is also wrong.Parthasarathi says that: "At the moment, the quantitative data are inconclusive, but the figures for India that have been obtained from primary sources are radically different from the scattered earnings data found in the secondary literature. This indicates that more research is needed on the basis of primary evidence for India". In fact the whole point of his wage analysis, as far as I can see, is that old estimates are probably wrong and more research is needed on India's wages. Neither he, nor Sivramkrishna who is referenced in his book says that indian wages and living standard where higher then British, this is simply original research. Moreover Parthasarathi analysis is mainly on post Mughal India.

I also can't verify the claim that according to Paul Bairoch India have higher gnp per capita the Europe until late 18 century. Similarly I can't varify that "According to Moosvi, Mughal India also had a per-capita income 1.24% higher in the late 16th century than British India did in the early 20th century", since I don't have access to her book. And claim "However, in a system where wealth was hoarded by elites, wages were depressed for manual labour, though no less than labour wages in Europe at the time", referencing Parthasarathi p 39-45.I've read the book and I can't find anything about European wages being depressed by elites.

There are lots of other problems there, like saying that Bengal Subah generated 50% of empire gdp(!!!), using some polemical and non reliable article in some newspaper. I feel this section would benefit from considerable rewriting/cleanup."

This article have lots of the same problems. I'll do cleanup once I have time DMKR2005 (talk) 17:44, 24 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Lots of problems indeed: it's infuriating when secondary speculations like Maddison's GDP or Bairoch's manufacturing estimates are presented as hard data when they're nothing of the sort, rather impressions drawn from qualitative evidence. The Cipolla claim is a classic of the genre: in his (generally excellent) original, "it does not seem absurd to maintain that in the centuries preceding 1700, in every European society, the percentage of population actively employed in agriculture varied, as a rule, between 65 and 90 percent, reaching minima of 55 to 65 percent only in exceptional cases". In the article, this had become "The workforce had a higher percentage in non-primary sectors than Europe at the time; in 1700, 65–90% of Europe's workforce were in agriculture". (In fact the proportion was lower than even Cipolla's 55% minimum in the Netherlands (nearly 40% urban), and levels of 90% are unknown even in the most overwhelmingly agrarian societies, the actual European average being around 65% in 1700-50 (Allen indeed estimates 61.4% in 1700 in nine countries with two-thirds of the population) while in India it was certainly higher, the (usually excellent) Moosvi's quarter in services being quite implausible.
 * The nonsense about one pre-industrial per capita GDP being 1.24% higher than another is more of the same: nobody was counting, Maddison effectively made his pre-C19 numbers up on the basis of a grotesquely excessive subsistence standard, and nobody knows Bairoch's methodology for imputing what he considered to be levels appropriate to past societies, plausible though his numbers tend to be. Moosvi at least works from the source data, but frankly there's not enough of it for anything like these findings, and the caveat about cheaper C19 manufactures (kind of the point of the Industrial Revolution) countering any decline renders the comparison pretty useless.
 * The ludicrous claim for Bengal's GDP was just unsupported by anything when the whole enlarged province contained only a quarter of the subcontinent's population. Bengal's economy was impressive enough without having to make things up. Precisian (talk) 21:41, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

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 * Pumapaparti.N.rao.jpg

mughal economy
mughal economy never mentions gdp per capita nor does it mention anything about income inequality anything about manufacturing. and why arent maratha contributions used and what about the guptas..

gdp per capita
the article stats that gdp per capita only increased after 1000ce even though the sources contradict that. its straight up wrong [unsigned]
 * The graph seems to be wrong - it shows hocky stick growth from 1600 to today of $6000 per capita, but other sources tell me india has only $2250 per capita gdp. Fresheneesz (talk) 22:04, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

gupta empire
added the gupta empire to the line https://books.google.co.in/books?id=I242EL00ieAC&pg=PA260&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false