A decade into the economic reforms, India had earned the right to be called an “emerging economy.” “Emergence” is a comparative term with explicit reference to trade and competitiveness in the world market. But it raises more questions than it answers. From the perspective of world history, when did India’s emergence really begin? And what depths of stagnation and obscurity did Indian business emerge from? Did emergence begin with the rise of the modern knowledge economy in the 2000s? Did an offbeat industrialization in the nineteenth century mark the moment of emergence? Did it happen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when Indian textile artisans sold cloth all over the world? Or should we push back the beginning of emergence even earlier, in Indo-Roman trade of the first century CE perhaps?

Equally vexing is “underdevelopment,” as well as the theories that once sought to discover the historical origins of poverty in the long-term pattern of trade and investment. When and where should the roots of poverty and underdevelopment be found – the feudalism of late antiquity? the deindustrialization of the nineteenth century? the British Empire? or, the insular and statist development paradigm of the 1960s and the 1970s? Arguments can be found to show that each one of these moments of transition was the real break, and arguments can be found to show that it was a break for the better or for the worse.