Chapter 1 provides a long view of the living standards and economic growth from the Mughal Empire to the end of British rule, followed by economic changes in independent India. Living standards are measured in terms of income categories such as average wages and estimates of per capita incomes. I show that Indian per capita GDP was 60 percent of British level in 1600. But Indian per capita GDP began to decline from the seventeenth century, well before the conquest of Bengal by the East India Company. It stabilized in the nineteenth century and stagnated until the end of colonial rule. The economy moved from stagnation to positive economic growth after independence until the policies of regulation and import substitution. Although the rate of growth was low compared to recent decades, it marked a structural break with its historical trend and set India on the path of modern economic growth.

The artes of the early Roman Empire are much more than manuals or handbooks intended to communicate the elements of practical expertise: they are vehicles for the articulation of Roman understandings of nature, knowledge, and society. This intellectual culture is premised on a theoretically sophisticated notion of ars that developed in the late Republic. It deserves to be regarded as a scientific culture because inter alia the artes elaborate different theories of nature and knowledge, draw upon many branches of ancient scientific inquiry, and employ methods characteristic of ancient scientific thought and practice. The artes Romanize specialized knowledge insofar as they plot their scientific contents along the geographic and temporal axes of Roman power. Ultimately, the artes constitute a unified intellectual phenomenon and should be studied as a part of the scientific culture to which they belong.

Chapter 5 focuses on four different aspects of economic and social inequality. There were historical differences in level of economic development across provinces and there is persistence. The Bombay Presidency was one of the richest parts of colonial India. Maharashtra and Gujarat today are among the richest provinces in India. The poorer regions in colonial India, such as the United Provinces and the Central Provinces rank among the poorer regions today. Income inequality was high in the 1930s and 1940s. The first decades after independence saw a decline in inequality following the policies of public sector led development. Since the economic reforms of 1980, income inequality has increased, but it is not as high as in the colonial period. There is continuity in caste inequality in many dimensions, but also changes. Upper castes were heather and more literate in colonial India. Today lower castes have better access to education and jobs due policies of affirmative action, big differences remain. Finally, one aspect of gender inequality that is specific to India is sons preference. The regional variation in male biased sex ratio continues today.

The wheels came off the Japanese economy in the early 1990s, throwing into question the expos that had emerged from and contributed to the previous two decades of growth. The first casualty was the Tokyo World City Expo, planned in the late 1980s and cancelled in 1995. By the end of the decade, there was a wave of nostalgia for Expo 70, as middle-aged creatives mourned the betrayal of its promises, or bemoaned its continuing hold on the present. But expos continued to have their uses. Alongside the laments, this chapter explores how the national bureaucracy and local authorities continued to use a new system and new kinds of expos to coordinate and foster development in the regions. It argues that the complicated genesis and unexpected success of Expo 2005 in Aichi, which evolved from a spur for regional development to the first eco-expo recognized by the United Nations, shows how expos remain a tool in the armory of development, even if observers in the West and intellectuals in Japan think their time has passed.

The economic history of colonization of India is a contested field. Nationalist historiography emphasized the drain of wealth and deindustrialization. Imperialist historiography point to the globalization of the economy, construction of the railway network and access to the international capital market. This book brings together empirical evidence over four centuries to assess India’s long run development from 1600 and emphasizes the decline and stagnation in agriculture and the failure of colonial policy to increase productivity in this sector.

This chapter is the first of two focused on the period between 1919 and 1947 bookended by, on the one hand, India’s membership of the new International Labour Organisation in 1919 and, on the other, the birth of independent India in 1947. Together these chapters chart the origins of a social insurance-led model for a future Indian welfare state directed towards an industrial working class. The chapter also documents how - facing rising industrial unrest - the newly elected provincial government of Bombay, the historic centre of India’s textile industry, began to experiment with social insurance. Limited decentralisation under successive Government of India Acts had provided greater autonomy to provinces in the field of labour policy. Bombay was the first to introduce maternity benefits. It then became the first to support sickness insurance for industrial workers as a means of labour force stabilisation. However, given fierce inter-regional competition within India’s textile industry, the adoption of sickness insurance did not proceed because without national coordination Bombay would have been disadvantaged in competition with regions without labour regulation.