INDIA and CHINA : AN ESSAY IN COMPARATIVE POLITICAL ECONOMY

India and China are two of the oldest and still extant civilizations. For Europeans, they were legendary seats of immense wealth and wisdom right up to the eighteenth century. Somewhere between the mid-eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries, both these countries became, in the European eyes, bywords for stagnant, archaic, weak nations. For China, this happened between the adulation of Voltaire and the cooler judgment of Montesquieu; in India’s case, it was the contrast between Sir William Jones’s desire to learn things Indian and James Mill’s dismissal of Indian history as nothing but darkness.