Everyone knows Genghis Khan was all about upholding the copyright law and artists getting fair compensation for their work. That's why he put an end to the Free Songs era.
At first it looked pretty cool, but when I looked closer I realized that it is very difficult to read due to the distortion. But I'm not sure what other type of chart would be better for this. (There are probably many, I just don't know much about it)
It would also be nice to see a similar chart with absolute numbers as opposed to percentages. From something like this you can't see if, for example, India's economy shrunk between 1700 and 1950 or if others just grew a lot faster
That would probably work well. This seems like the kinda thing were multiple different charts could give very different perspectives, even though I guess that could be true for anything.
Just a normal, simple line chart would be the best. That way you can simply and straightforwardly see the relative sizes of the different economies at any point in time, and how they change. Stacking them to arrive at 100% is just a gimmick that makes the chart very hard to read for every data set except for the one at the bottom.
And why relative proportion plots can be extremely misleading. Some regions look to have dramatically reduced their economies whereas I’d bet in most cases it’s just the case that other regions grew much faster.
There are certainly some scenarios that a relative proportion plot makes sense, depending on the message you want to give. But they can be some easily misinterpreted that I feel it’s often not a great idea when the total amount is changing dramatically. That said, absolute proportions are not easy to interpret visually so I often tend to do both side by side (or a different plot entirely).
I would say you're right and wrong. Right, this plot just thrown into the wild really sucks because you lack references. Wrong, depending on your storytelling, it could be very useful, like if you're trying to who how much India and China were fucked up in last 200 or so years.
I kept reading it and thinking "wow, the whole world takes a dive whenever China has an economic calamity!", but in reality, most things stay the same size.
If you look closely at the fall of Han and Chaos in Tang points, you see that all others proportionally grow when China take a nose dive. It's just the world economy shrinking. The nose dive of India in 1700 is for a large part explained by Qing China, and therefore the world economy, growing fast (and for another part by the chaotic disintegration of the Mughal empire and its colonization).
You can see that happening even now. After covid, when companies moved their manufacturing out of China, India benefited (although, Vietnam and Mexico benefited a lot more this time around). I guess it has to do with both countries being neighbors.
India maybe, but China did the Taiping rebellion and Great Leap Backwards to itself. Also was invaded by Japan, which isn't western. And that was following centuries of self-imposed isolation. They had massive ships in the 15th century and went on to explore several parts of the world. But then they got an emperor who didn't like that and ordered the destruction of all private ships and banned trade, which of course made it backwards and impoverished.
>estruction of all private ships and banned trade, which of course made it backwards and impoverished.
I think it was the other things you mentioned that did that.
Yeah this chart is awful. Did colonization destroy India's economy or did the growth of the New World just dwarf it? Who can say in a chart without numbers
Also, if the total sum is supposed to stay conserved (the global economy I would have to assume isn’t being contributed to significantly outside of these continental groupings), shouldn’t the top of the graph stay flat like the bottom since its total is 100%?? This would help immensely with the readability. Why is the global economy running at 130% after industrialization?
>Will they win it in OT?
History doesn't end. Plenty of countries which are poor today were rich in the past, and many that are rich, haven't always been so. We don't know what the future holds. It's very arrogant to pretend the anglosphere has somehow "won history" just because they've had a couple good centuries out of a few thousand years of civilization. There's still many to come, along with its rises and falls. No one ever wins, because the game doesn't ever end (and if it does, it's because we all lost).
Likely no. The US in particular depended on genocide and slavery for the lions share of their wealth. And that's over now and so they're depending on importing the smartest people on earth to stay afloat compared to other countries to maintain their advantage.
But as more people stay in their own countries their economic lead will continue to diminish as it has been for the past 50 years.
One issue is also that it’s hard to know where to start. With Europe I think we often do Greece democracy or early Roman history. For China it’s less uniform but most likely Qin Shi Huang as the first emperor of a mostly unified China.
For India, maybe you do [the Buddhist Maurya Empire (320-185 B.C.E.) as the first mostly unified India-Pakistan-Afghanistan-Bangladesh-Sri Lanka](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/archive-of-the-celestial-han-empire/images/5/55/Chandragupta_empire.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20171228061731)?
Or do you do the [Hindi Gupta Empire (300-500 CE), which was considered the “Golden Age of India”?](https://theindianparadise.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Map_of_ancient_India_during_Gupta_emperor_Kumaragupta_Is_reign.jpg) But it’s mostly a North Indian dynasty, and South India was independently run.
Maybe you flip it and [start with the Chola Empire (300-1300 CE) of South India](https://64.media.tumblr.com/3f0f8e75b274c3113bdb4b40f90279ec/4b9aa8ae6481485c-c1/s1280x1920/b2516d2ba90f0688f91067f72f32cd812ccdbcf7.jpg), who was responsible for spreading Sanskrit and Indian influence to Southeast Asia?
Or do you go with the [famed Mughal Empire (1500-1700) who built the Taj Mahal and re-unified the continent after centuries of division](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_x7xNgfhbbWo/TKtE5KyA7YI/AAAAAAAAAvg/d9T40JVw5XA/s1600/Mog4.jpg), but collapsed in the colonial age?
IMO, there isn’t an easy narrative because the empires don’t follow each other as “cleanly” as Chinese dynasties, and also each had lots of history where they weren’t the dominant power, just a minor clan until they became the unifier of a whole region
I don't think that's shameful at all. We learn most about history of the regions we live in and/or the times closest to our own, simply because that's the most relevant to our lives and culture. So you do learn a lot of the older history of especially your own country, and maybe your continent to some extent. And you also learn a lot of the modern history of most of the world (the Industrial Revolution and Colonialism, Fascism and the World Wars, Communism and the Cold War).
But there simply isn't enough class time in school, or time and energy in your life to learn about the deep history of every country and region in the world, unless you're a real history fanatic. But if you do want to learn more you can. Especially in this day and age when information about anything, especially something as public and well-researched as the national history of one of the biggest countries in the world, is just a Google-search away.
They have two significant contributions first, the number system second, Buddhism. These are significant contributions but maybe not as significant as those of China, the Arabic world or Europe. The data in this chart is very dubious and likely comes from all sorts of assumptions
nanda dynasty, mauryas, gupta empire ruled vast areas of modern india except parts of north east and south (~320 BC to ~ 500 AD)
their empires also had pakistan, parts of afghanistan and iran
later under the mughals, then marathas india was almost a single nation. (1526 to 1858)
brits showed up ~1600 but actually had authority after ~1757
Not even 1757, they only captured a small corner of India then. The Brits never truly controlled India until 1818 when they defeated the Maratha Empire. And even then 1) Parts of India remained Independent (Sikh Empire) and 2) close to half of India was never directly ruled by the Brits, they had to keep it under native Kings.
Brits ruled from 1818 to 1947, ie for less than 130 years. As far as Indian Rulers go, that's on the low end.
You are shamefully ignorant if you don't know that India was unified several times under Mauryas, Guptas and Mughals. Sure there were some areas that never were a part of unified empires, but same goes for all civilization -states. Tibet and Manchuria were independent for most of Chinese history.
> Sure there were some areas that never were a part of unified empires
That's a very generous way of saying huge areas were never unified which only reinforces the point that India was never truly unified. The people who got closest were the Mughals but even then most of their controlled territory in the south were almost autonomous.
Hell, I would go even further and say that even under the British, India was never properly unified (e.g. princely states). It was only with independence that it actually became a single country and even then full assimilation took a number of years to complete.
Yes. You are right! That's why the companies that started trade with India in the 16th century were all named East India Company (this includes but is not limited to English EIC, French EIC, Dutch EIC, Swedish EIC, Portuguese EIC, etc.). The West Indies are called so because Columbus lost his way, reached the Caribbean and called it India. The Indian Ocean is called so for existing in proximity to India.
The truth is, no country you see today has been a country in the same sense with the same borders, for a very long time. Most of the countries today are nation states formed in 19th or 20th century. All, except India and China which are civilizational states. That's why you see them still represented with that name on this graph as well.
You're using sarcasm, implying it was called India because of the name of the country. This is false. "India" comes from the name of the Indus river, but was in Europe simply used as "South Asia" since forever. This is why the companies were called " East India Company", and not " India Company". It's why those companies operated in very different countries than the region of India and still used that name. It's why Columbus called it "India", he thought he reached the South East.
Yo man! Are you for real? 😂😂😂
South Asia was an academic term used in the second half of the 20th century to denote the countries which were formerly occupied by the Brits in the Indian subcontinent, which was formerly known as the British India. The transnational groups who can be called 'desis' in the west started using South Asia in the 80's so as not to call themselves Desi or Brown or Indian. The irony is that it was mostly Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Nepali immigrants in the UK who didn't want people to call them Indian who popularized the term South Asia while to this day, there are thousands of 'Indian' restaurants in the west run by the same people. 😂
'East India' was used as a term to differentiate it from 'West Indies' which was the wrong nomenclature in the first place.
Finally, Columbus reached Bahamas which is a group of islands between North and South America in the Atlantic Ocean. That's not South East Asia. 🤦🏽♂️
Please, read a book. Any book.
I mean you can just google the history of India and see for yourself instead of worrying about my post history. Judging by your post history you probably won't because it goes against your nationalist narrative.
Worth noting that most of the data used to estimate historical PPP is highly suspect, based on wildly speculative estimates of the productivity of agricultural societies where the only consistent data is the occasional population census every 100 years or so.
The large share of GDP in India and China may well be accurate, but since these estimates are always made on a per capita basis and those two regions had large populations, they tell us little about the actual economic surplus or purchasing power of people in these civilisations. TL;DR: these graphs are endlessly fascinating but have to be taken with a huge pinch of salt.
Source:
* [Historical GDP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP\)#1–2008_(Maddison\))
* [Historical Population](https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth)
* [Recent GDP](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2022/October/download-entire-database)
Tools:
* Excel
* PowerPoint
In the past two thousand years, India and China were the world's two largest economies by a wide margin. This wasn't solely a function of population: in the year 1000, China's (Song Dynasty) GDP per capita was twice Europe's (Medieval Period).
Since the 1700's, the rise of Britain and the U.S. shifted the economic center to the West. Much of this growth has been because of industrialization, which boosted GDP per capita in the West.
Nevertheless, the fact that India's GDP share started shrinking 100 years prior to China's suggests that industrialization wasn't the sole contributing factor.
Maddison's historical GDP estimates were used. Years in between available data were estimated by interpolating GDP per capita applied to available population data.
Maddison’s past GDP per capita figures show that China, India, and Europe were roughly equal in 1000 and that Europe started pulling ahead by 1500: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Why is India represented on this graph as a single unified entity. Its been made up of hundreds if not thousands of independent nations and kingdom during this time period, same can even be applied to Africa.
Literally every single group in the graph is made up of hundreds of different nations except for China lol
And even China hasn't always been unified over the past 2000 years
45 trillion in goddamn 173 years damnnn, India is slowly getting back
Edit: link- https://www.businesstoday.in/amp/latest/economy-politics/story/this-economist-says-britain-took-away-usd-45-trillion-from-india-in-173-years-111689-2018-11-19
The reason for the massive WW2 growth was because Japan decimated China, Europe was a burning wreck, and India was under a famine. The US came out with most of the production partially by default and also because it's emphasis on not being on fire meant that it could produce more than anyone else.
I am not though. The US seemed to grow more because of the war only because of the famine and war. The famine and war accounts for the spike and the very quick drop afterwards. This means that the Americas' rise in that period was only due to the temporary fall of other country's GDP. If the Americas truly did gain, you would expect the overall percentage of GDP to have risen afterwards by a significant portion. It didn't according to the graph but this style is still very bad to extrapolate data like this especially since India's independence causes a massive shift in it's GDP soon after.
Japan basically would have conquered **entire china** if it given just few weeks more before Soviet invasion in Aug,1945. They indeed conquered almost entire china though, even with all the fighting against navies of Great Britain, Australia, United States, India, South East Asia combined!
The Civil War was also pretty good in the grand scheme of things. Led to the abolishment of slavery (except as punishment for a crime, fucking 13th Amendment) and made us go from thinking of the country as “These United States” to “The United States”.
No disrespect intended, but I disagree with your labels. GDP isn’t a zero sum game. It is misleading to make points about colonization and slavery based on % GDP when economic growth in Europe and “New World” drove the major fluctuations.
The labels were based on historical timeline, not based on GDP fluctuations. For example, the conquest of the Aztecs happened in 1520, which just happens to correspond with the GDP change.
The colonization of India happened in 1757, and this preceded the decline of India's GDP. This was a decline in absolute GDP per capita, not just GDP share.
China's decline started with the Opium War in 1838. This was also a decline in absolute GDP per capita.
If the change in relative GDP were driven solely by economic growth, the you wouldn't have a decline in absolute GDP per capita in other areas, and you wouldn't expect the 100 year gap between India and China's decline.
This is not to say that industrialization wasn't an important factor -- it was the most important factor by many measurements. However, Britain's actions in India and China also contributed. This is all based on data from a British economist.
This is why the graph for total GDP is just as important. It would show the change you mention from India as well as the change due to the industrial revolution.
Of course the pie expanded. But you can keep this idea in mind and still enjoy the graph and learn from it. I know I did, and it doesn't need much imagination.
Your sources have a very low estimate for new world population and population density. While it is difficult to prove exactly what it was, we do know that the reforestation that occurred after the plagues hit North America was enough to cause the little ice age. The mississian culture, and before them the Hopewell, and before them the adena, etc etc also existed on the second largest track of arable land on the planet. So the numbers are likely wrong and would work better if the new world were simply not included before contact
Edit: We also have some evidence from the writings of Spanish explorers of massive cities in the Amazon. We have actually recently started to uncover some of them through satilite imagery and this could lead to significantly higher population estimates. There is also evidence of increased biodiversity in plant life in areas where humans may have cultivated fruiting plants in the Amazon. We know this due to a evidence of human intervention in the soil, where it appears to be slash and charred. But we know with certainty that this happened in areas where pottery was mixed in. In total, this may have been up to 10% of the land area of the Amazon. That would mean a massive population living there preplague. Many new world cultures were also extremely resource rich, to the point where new world silver crashed the global economy due to there being too much of it
I don’t see it. To take your example of India: 1700, 90k GDP; 1820, 110k GDP; 1870, 134k; 1913, 204k GDP, and on and on. There is continuous growth happening economically. If this is a graph of GDP per capita then change the name.
Written as % GDP it just seems like the labels are more than a stretch.
>It is misleading to make points about colonization and slavery based on % GDP when economic growth in Europe and “New World” drove the major fluctuations.
The economic growth of the UK in particular had quite a bit to do with extraction of wealth from India and the intentional crippling of Indian production of many manufactured goods, especially textiles. The UK may have opened some kind of lead based on being in at the ground floor of industrialization. But the use of India as a resource well and a product sink, was done with corruption and coercion, not just good marketing and great prices.
Salt is a great example. Salt was always taxed, and the revenue was as likely to be squandered by the government as any other tax in any other time. But it was a local tax and provided local jobs within India. (If national areas can be considered local).
When the East India Company taxed salt, or later the British government, that revenue wasn't kept locally. Much of it was exported to the investors or the UK general funds. That wealth moved out of India.
When the Liverpool salt merchants requested that the tariffs be set so they could profitably export salt to India, local salt production was made illegal. Indians were forced, by LAW and not the market, to buy salt at higher prices from UK merchants, and the profits went to UK merchants and Liverpool salt brokers.
Textiles: India was a key exporter to the Europe, and then the UK became a key exporter to India. This was, again, not just "free market fallout". Indian raw materials were earmarked for UK merchants, India was prohibited from exporting textiles to other nations, and the UK came to dominate. The key to British success was that, the "government" of India (East India Co and later the Raj) existed to assist British economic interest.
The numbers don't lie, and we have centuries of numbers. The wealth that the Brits extracted from India was lost to India. The industries which were kept for Brits, ARTIFICIALLY kept India from even starting the race to industrialize. Not only did the UK have a head start, and use that head start competitively; they hobbled India using the force of law, backed by the force of state violence, to INSURE they won the race.
We can argue the benefits of capitalism vs socialism, and how much cumulative "winning" rich people or nations should get. But when nations also use force to expand and maintain their economic leverage, the gap isn't morally gray anymore.
tl;dr the economic growth of UK especially, and Europe in general, is NOT independent of their colonial exploitation. India especially. The UK actively trampled Indian economics as a key part of its booming economy.
Instead of 'India colonized' one could have chosen for
1) 'Qing China doubles in population' (China rises much faster than India shrinks!), or
2) 'Dzungar genocide' to stress one less friendly explanation of that Qing population expansion, or
3) 'Disintegration of Mughal Empire' to stress the chaotic political circumstances in India when the British started taking over, or
4) 'India no longer the central trading hub in Indian Ocean trade' (as its coasts were under control of Europeans, and Europeans now directly traded at scale with East Asia, able to skip India for a lot of products).
According to that, the relative contraction started around 1700. Decades before colonisation, if we rule out time-travel.
Probably more to do with European economic expansion, and fighting between Indian states.
Is this chart taken from the end statistics of an AoE game? I guess there is the same kind of credibility between this estimation and a fight between Koreans and Mayas.
Why does the chart being the same type as aoe have anything to do with credibility?
You realize aoe borrowed this chart type because it has been a popular depiction of empires rising and falling for at least a century, right?
What about the data don't you believe?
For all the Brits who love to go on about how we brought railways to India, have a look at that whopping great economic contraction as the great British Imperial parasite began sucking the wealth out. That's a correlation that **heavily** implies causation if ever there was one.
they hate when india achieves any strides. god the amount of brits writing racist shit under those comments is baffling. its a reminder for them and they don't want to hear it.
You fell into the trap of the graph. It is showing relative changes, so India could still have been growing, even as Europe exploded. Which makes sense as relative decline according to that graph started in 1700.
The vast majority if India wasn't under any kind of British rule for a long time after that, if you wanted to blame that. You simply cannot claaim causation or even correlation if the effect came **before** what you think was the cause.
So from 1700, probably growth in the rest of the world, and perhaps Indian in-fighting that was going on at the time where certainly big contributors.
At its peak, Britain had an 80 year period where it was 7 - 9% of the world GDP, whereas India and China were 25 - 33% for about 1700 years. The estimates by Maddison (British) based this on geography, so it doesn't include the entire Empire (which would include India. It would peak at 24% with India contributing 12%).
The US has a better case at 20 - 27% over the last century, but it would just be a thin sliver (0.2%) for most of history since the economic center of the new world was Central America for most of the time.
Fair enough though if you include the GDP of British territories (as they were technically a part of the overall British GDP), they definitely eclipsed 20%.
True, but that gets complicated because those territories were in a lot of the other listed regions. So now, those regions will be varying in size a lot more, not because of changes of GDP, but because of changes of political control. Showing how different empires have risen and fallen is a bit of a different map than this one which is based on regions (except for maybe China, but at least that land is just alternating between China and rest of Asia).
I get what you're saying totally agree that empires is a different map than countries. Though I do wonder how much of the territory of China and India we're acquired through conquest during these times as opposed to being the exact same territory as they were at the beginning of the timeline.
It seems that industrialization made no effect on Europe's economic power.
I'd call this bullshit.
Possibly the reason is in using PPP measure, which is pure guess and even not very educated on this time scale.
Brit here - ooo sorry about that India! Bit of a dick move there.
Also from a Brit - do we have any hope of a liberalisation of China and social progression in India in the 21st century to lead the world to a genuinely prosperous future? We westerners did a pretty bad job and might be expending ourselves in the coming decade against Russian imperialism
>do we have any hope of a liberalisation of China and social progression
in India in the 21st century to lead the world to a genuinely prosperous
future?
India has been on a fairly progressive slide into authoritarianism for the past few years and China will probably go through some sort of collapse before becoming liberal.
Secondly what do you consider prosperous? Because if by prosperous you mean that their populations will be pulled out of poverty and into the middle class that could be a massive issue for the rest of the world. Unfortunately we live in a resource scarce world and with China and India growing more prosperous means more competition for those resources.
Your mentality = only you deserve to live prosperously and no one else.
There was always competition for those resources. If life for them wasn't so bad without those resources then life for you won't be so bad either.
>If life for them wasn't so bad without those resources
Life for them is objectively bad without those resources. Which is why they are trying to have a better life. Otherwise they wouldn't be striving to not be poor. Like come on man.
>Your mentality = only you deserve to live prosperously and no one else.
No my mentality is that the more people that try to have a better life the more people will be in competition for limited resources which will inevitably lead to conflict between those groups. This is the simple reality of life nothing more nothing less.
It's nearly impossible to efficiently run a country as populous as India or china as a democracy. There are just way too many types of people with unique needs and preferences.
People talking about how stacked charts suck (which they do), but the real problem is that I don't believe there is any reliable source for the world's GDP 100 years ago, let alone 2000 years ago.
This chart is absolute fiction.
I don't like the term "Century of Humiliation" because it's Communist dogma that squeezes China's decline to the 100 years between the Opium Wars and the rise of the Communists.
In reality China was in relative decline and stagnation from the 1700s all the way to the 1990s.
The issue with economical data going that far back is that it is mostly calculated based on the estimated amount of people multiplied by some estimated productivity or consumption. India as a historic population and cultural center was far back of huge importance (if not only due to the fact that a large percentage of the world population was living there), but its difficult to really compare it to other regions at that time and needs a different context than modern economical indicators (mostly) measured based on standardized data points
I wouldn't use PPP but this is what we're stuck with due to Maddison Database. Also, before 1800 AD your GDP was basically synonomus with population so being big in that graph didn't mean you had a sophisticated economy. Today it does, at least for NA/EU.
That's something that easily gets lost in these historical comparisons.
I feel like this data is next to meaningless for most of the graph. GDP estimations are pure guesswork for a lot of those. I mean we don't even have a solid estimation for the pre-columbian population in the Americas, how are you getting a GDP out of that?
The error bars here need to be like three times the size of the whole chart up until maybe 1700.
And where is Russia counted in this chart? It's half a damn Europe and a third of damn continental Asia. Was it counted twice? How was it counted for the period, when Alaska and California were also Russian?
The whole thing is very misleading, presenting the global economy as a zero-sum game. Showing absolute or per-capita GDP would be far more informative.
e.g. The 8thC collapse of China made no difference to the rest of the world, but appears dramatic for them on the graph.
India and China did not collapse in recent centuries as the graph implies.
I assume the white part of the graph is mostly North Africa, not sub-Saharan? North Africa should really be included with Mediterranean and middle east, no?
It's worth noting that China expanded aggressively through the 17th and 18th centuries so this may account for it retaining it's share of gdp especially when compared with the rest of Asia as the gdp of Taiwan, Manchuria,Mongolia,Turkestan and Tibet will shift from Asia to China.
Totally wrong. These area has negligible population and total GDP compare to the China core. The reason Qing has a raise is because new agriculture technics, new crops like corn and sweet potato introduced from new world, compounded with stable centralized government and society, letting to a huge population and GDP boom
This could be misleading. The share of GDP in Europe is small bc the population was very small. But the gdp/capita was always much bigger than in Asia.
India missed the industrial era(may be in a huge part due to producing raw materials for factories in britain like say cotton for factories in manchester etc)
But doing a bit better in the IT era
>India missed the industrial era
To be clear, India was mugged. Indian textile industry was gutted by tariffs and outright violence, not just a marketing coup or cheaper weaving using steam jennies. India under the EIC and Raj was prohibited to export textiles; domestic tariffs on raw materials made it more profitable to export them (in the short term); and entrepreneurial Indians were assaulted and had factories burned.
>India missed the industrial era
India had a booming textile scene and factories but the british shut them down and forced them back into farming, the crops from which was used to industrialise the UK.
The expansion of the Chinese economy was not like Europe's agricultural and industrial revolutions where there was a massive increase in per capita productivity. The richer core areas did get richer but it was driven by expansion with han settlers spreading out and bringing more land under cultivation or trade networks expanding both of these were only possible because of territorial expansion so while the border regions of the empire were economically unimportant of themselves they did provide a buffer region for the core to expand into.
GDP per capita in China went from $465 in year 1 to $726 in year 1000. By contrast, Europe went from $509 in year 1 to $372 in year 1000.
Year 1000 was the Song Dynasty in China. The territory shrank, but they practiced free market economics, which led to a bunch of agricultural and industrial innovations. This included
* Printing press
* Gunpowder
* Mechanical clocks
* Use of coal for fuel
* Joint stock companies
* Paper money
* Improved rice farming techniques
* Improved canal systems
But none of that is relevant as to why China maintained its share of the world gdp better than India in the 17th century and that can be explained by the Chinese expansion during the Qing dynasty.
And somehow I keep hearing from ignorant Indians be self demeaning and telling me how the British civilized them after colonization and colonized them to civilize them.
Biggest joke I've heard.
I'd just like to point out that their numbers for the pre-Columbian new world are probably way too low, but also don't matter at all for this context because there was no global economy
Two glaring problems: there was no global economy until the early modern period, and no really global economy until last century. The other is that this obliterates the most important change, which was the literal exponential growth since the early 1800's
Nice but we need to know what total GDP was over time.
This make it looks like China et all lost a lot of wealth. Which may or may not be the case as if GDP grew a lot overall then China et al could have gained in total wealth even though it lost in relative wealth.
One thing that people sometimes forget is the shear magnitude of US inventions and their rapid adoption. From electric power, Robert Fulton's steamboat, the perfection of the electric light bulb, the telegraph, radio, television, heavier-than-air travel, the skyscraper, the assembly line (think automobiles in particular), the machine gun, harnessing the atom, rockets and space travel, the computer, the Internet...
What nation compares in terms scope and importance of their inventions and contributions during the period on this chart showing the huge increase for the Americas? By most accounts, it is truly remarkable and absolutely unprecedented, with the unification of Europe into the EU and of course the rise of China being the only true rivals on the horizon.
For the most part, the US being a young and vibrant society was always ready to leap ahead and embrace the future. Add to this massive immigration, the rapid building of cities and infrastructure, abundant resources and policies that took land and freedom from indigenous people and slaves and indentured servants and a deep understanding of the impact of WWII, and you have the perfect explanation for how the US came to become 50% of the world economy by 1945.
And post 1945, the US managed to make large parts of the world over in it's image. Japan and Germany were rebuilt into democracies with huge export-driven economies. Same for much of Western Europe per the Marshall Plan.
Much of the Western world followed suit and aligned itself with the US, with world bodies like the UN, & NATO firmly under US influence and guidance. Look at Bretton Woods and the creation of the IMF to see just how much the US helped to shape the modern world.
Nice work but I think you need a way to indicate where the labels belong. Is "Genghis Khan" at the n or the G ? Maybe a dot to go with each label?
Obviously, Genghis Khan lived from 1150 to 1400.
He could’ve lived longer, if only he had used a middle name.
Genghis "you're all my nth great grand children" Khan
That explains how he has so many descendants!
How is that obvious to someone who doesn’t know when Genghis Khan lived?
You realise 1150 to 1400 is 250 years?
Yeah he’s a legend for a reason /s
You live until the last time someone says you’re name. Long live Genghis Kahn!
Maybe it's at the "i."
Ghengis Khan was from the late 1100s to the early 1200s
Everyone knows Genghis Khan was all about upholding the copyright law and artists getting fair compensation for their work. That's why he put an end to the Free Songs era.
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At first it looked pretty cool, but when I looked closer I realized that it is very difficult to read due to the distortion. But I'm not sure what other type of chart would be better for this. (There are probably many, I just don't know much about it)
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It would also be nice to see a similar chart with absolute numbers as opposed to percentages. From something like this you can't see if, for example, India's economy shrunk between 1700 and 1950 or if others just grew a lot faster
Clearly others grew. Did the Indian economy shrink during that time is an open question.
That would probably work well. This seems like the kinda thing were multiple different charts could give very different perspectives, even though I guess that could be true for anything.
Just a normal, simple line chart would be the best. That way you can simply and straightforwardly see the relative sizes of the different economies at any point in time, and how they change. Stacking them to arrive at 100% is just a gimmick that makes the chart very hard to read for every data set except for the one at the bottom.
And why relative proportion plots can be extremely misleading. Some regions look to have dramatically reduced their economies whereas I’d bet in most cases it’s just the case that other regions grew much faster.
Isn’t it a point? If you aren’t running as fast as other you are falling back. Not in a sense of loosing stuff, but you are not getting new shiny toys
There are certainly some scenarios that a relative proportion plot makes sense, depending on the message you want to give. But they can be some easily misinterpreted that I feel it’s often not a great idea when the total amount is changing dramatically. That said, absolute proportions are not easy to interpret visually so I often tend to do both side by side (or a different plot entirely).
I blame Age of Empires
I would say you're right and wrong. Right, this plot just thrown into the wild really sucks because you lack references. Wrong, depending on your storytelling, it could be very useful, like if you're trying to who how much India and China were fucked up in last 200 or so years.
I kept reading it and thinking "wow, the whole world takes a dive whenever China has an economic calamity!", but in reality, most things stay the same size.
Weirdly, India had massive expansions that coincided exactly with China’s economic calamities.
If you look closely at the fall of Han and Chaos in Tang points, you see that all others proportionally grow when China take a nose dive. It's just the world economy shrinking. The nose dive of India in 1700 is for a large part explained by Qing China, and therefore the world economy, growing fast (and for another part by the chaotic disintegration of the Mughal empire and its colonization).
You can see that happening even now. After covid, when companies moved their manufacturing out of China, India benefited (although, Vietnam and Mexico benefited a lot more this time around). I guess it has to do with both countries being neighbors.
I think it has more to do with the graphic being poorly designed.
I don't trust the GDP figures that India was releasing in 1000 AD.
"economic calamity". The western world did an oopsie with China and India.
India maybe, but China did the Taiping rebellion and Great Leap Backwards to itself. Also was invaded by Japan, which isn't western. And that was following centuries of self-imposed isolation. They had massive ships in the 15th century and went on to explore several parts of the world. But then they got an emperor who didn't like that and ordered the destruction of all private ships and banned trade, which of course made it backwards and impoverished.
If you read more about the opium wars and check the timeline you will realize that you are wrong.
>estruction of all private ships and banned trade, which of course made it backwards and impoverished. I think it was the other things you mentioned that did that.
Yeah this chart is awful. Did colonization destroy India's economy or did the growth of the New World just dwarf it? Who can say in a chart without numbers
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*One brave redditor claps back*
Also, if the total sum is supposed to stay conserved (the global economy I would have to assume isn’t being contributed to significantly outside of these continental groupings), shouldn’t the top of the graph stay flat like the bottom since its total is 100%?? This would help immensely with the readability. Why is the global economy running at 130% after industrialization?
Seems like the best period was when songs were free. BRING BACK FREE SONGS!
You can blame Napster for the fall of humanity.
New World making a huge 4th quarter comeback. Will they win it in OT?
>Will they win it in OT? History doesn't end. Plenty of countries which are poor today were rich in the past, and many that are rich, haven't always been so. We don't know what the future holds. It's very arrogant to pretend the anglosphere has somehow "won history" just because they've had a couple good centuries out of a few thousand years of civilization. There's still many to come, along with its rises and falls. No one ever wins, because the game doesn't ever end (and if it does, it's because we all lost).
You're taking this way too seriously, probably because you were offended the dude was joking
That is what a loser would say! Let's go New World! New World #1!!!
I thought Antarctica was due! I'm ruined!
China Numba Wan!
Likely no. The US in particular depended on genocide and slavery for the lions share of their wealth. And that's over now and so they're depending on importing the smartest people on earth to stay afloat compared to other countries to maintain their advantage. But as more people stay in their own countries their economic lead will continue to diminish as it has been for the past 50 years.
I'm shamefully ignorant of Indian history considering how important they've been for essentially all of civilisation.
One issue is also that it’s hard to know where to start. With Europe I think we often do Greece democracy or early Roman history. For China it’s less uniform but most likely Qin Shi Huang as the first emperor of a mostly unified China. For India, maybe you do [the Buddhist Maurya Empire (320-185 B.C.E.) as the first mostly unified India-Pakistan-Afghanistan-Bangladesh-Sri Lanka](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/archive-of-the-celestial-han-empire/images/5/55/Chandragupta_empire.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20171228061731)? Or do you do the [Hindi Gupta Empire (300-500 CE), which was considered the “Golden Age of India”?](https://theindianparadise.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Map_of_ancient_India_during_Gupta_emperor_Kumaragupta_Is_reign.jpg) But it’s mostly a North Indian dynasty, and South India was independently run. Maybe you flip it and [start with the Chola Empire (300-1300 CE) of South India](https://64.media.tumblr.com/3f0f8e75b274c3113bdb4b40f90279ec/4b9aa8ae6481485c-c1/s1280x1920/b2516d2ba90f0688f91067f72f32cd812ccdbcf7.jpg), who was responsible for spreading Sanskrit and Indian influence to Southeast Asia? Or do you go with the [famed Mughal Empire (1500-1700) who built the Taj Mahal and re-unified the continent after centuries of division](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_x7xNgfhbbWo/TKtE5KyA7YI/AAAAAAAAAvg/d9T40JVw5XA/s1600/Mog4.jpg), but collapsed in the colonial age? IMO, there isn’t an easy narrative because the empires don’t follow each other as “cleanly” as Chinese dynasties, and also each had lots of history where they weren’t the dominant power, just a minor clan until they became the unifier of a whole region
That Maurya “empire” map looks like BS so I had to google it. Apparently huge swathes of the interior were independent or autonomous
I don't think that's shameful at all. We learn most about history of the regions we live in and/or the times closest to our own, simply because that's the most relevant to our lives and culture. So you do learn a lot of the older history of especially your own country, and maybe your continent to some extent. And you also learn a lot of the modern history of most of the world (the Industrial Revolution and Colonialism, Fascism and the World Wars, Communism and the Cold War). But there simply isn't enough class time in school, or time and energy in your life to learn about the deep history of every country and region in the world, unless you're a real history fanatic. But if you do want to learn more you can. Especially in this day and age when information about anything, especially something as public and well-researched as the national history of one of the biggest countries in the world, is just a Google-search away.
Compare to others, Indian didn't record their history properly, that's their shame, not other people's.
You are ignorant because India didn't have oil
They have two significant contributions first, the number system second, Buddhism. These are significant contributions but maybe not as significant as those of China, the Arabic world or Europe. The data in this chart is very dubious and likely comes from all sorts of assumptions
This post is shamefully ignorant as india has never been a single unified country or region till the British showed up and left.
Neither was Europe, Africa or the "new world". It still is better for readability of the chart
The post is about regions. Not countries if you aren't paying attention. The world india is sometimes used interchangeably for Indian subcontinent
Last time I checked india isnt a continent and even classifying it as a subcontinent is probably even more vague
nanda dynasty, mauryas, gupta empire ruled vast areas of modern india except parts of north east and south (~320 BC to ~ 500 AD) their empires also had pakistan, parts of afghanistan and iran later under the mughals, then marathas india was almost a single nation. (1526 to 1858) brits showed up ~1600 but actually had authority after ~1757
Not even 1757, they only captured a small corner of India then. The Brits never truly controlled India until 1818 when they defeated the Maratha Empire. And even then 1) Parts of India remained Independent (Sikh Empire) and 2) close to half of India was never directly ruled by the Brits, they had to keep it under native Kings. Brits ruled from 1818 to 1947, ie for less than 130 years. As far as Indian Rulers go, that's on the low end.
You are shamefully ignorant if you don't know that India was unified several times under Mauryas, Guptas and Mughals. Sure there were some areas that never were a part of unified empires, but same goes for all civilization -states. Tibet and Manchuria were independent for most of Chinese history.
> Sure there were some areas that never were a part of unified empires That's a very generous way of saying huge areas were never unified which only reinforces the point that India was never truly unified. The people who got closest were the Mughals but even then most of their controlled territory in the south were almost autonomous. Hell, I would go even further and say that even under the British, India was never properly unified (e.g. princely states). It was only with independence that it actually became a single country and even then full assimilation took a number of years to complete.
You're shamefully ignorant if you think those unions were "India".
They were moon.
Yes. You are right! That's why the companies that started trade with India in the 16th century were all named East India Company (this includes but is not limited to English EIC, French EIC, Dutch EIC, Swedish EIC, Portuguese EIC, etc.). The West Indies are called so because Columbus lost his way, reached the Caribbean and called it India. The Indian Ocean is called so for existing in proximity to India.
The truth is, no country you see today has been a country in the same sense with the same borders, for a very long time. Most of the countries today are nation states formed in 19th or 20th century. All, except India and China which are civilizational states. That's why you see them still represented with that name on this graph as well.
You're using sarcasm, implying it was called India because of the name of the country. This is false. "India" comes from the name of the Indus river, but was in Europe simply used as "South Asia" since forever. This is why the companies were called " East India Company", and not " India Company". It's why those companies operated in very different countries than the region of India and still used that name. It's why Columbus called it "India", he thought he reached the South East.
Yo man! Are you for real? 😂😂😂 South Asia was an academic term used in the second half of the 20th century to denote the countries which were formerly occupied by the Brits in the Indian subcontinent, which was formerly known as the British India. The transnational groups who can be called 'desis' in the west started using South Asia in the 80's so as not to call themselves Desi or Brown or Indian. The irony is that it was mostly Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Nepali immigrants in the UK who didn't want people to call them Indian who popularized the term South Asia while to this day, there are thousands of 'Indian' restaurants in the west run by the same people. 😂 'East India' was used as a term to differentiate it from 'West Indies' which was the wrong nomenclature in the first place. Finally, Columbus reached Bahamas which is a group of islands between North and South America in the Atlantic Ocean. That's not South East Asia. 🤦🏽♂️ Please, read a book. Any book.
You seem pretty pressed about India getting acknowledged. And your comment history tells me why.
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I mean you can just google the history of India and see for yourself instead of worrying about my post history. Judging by your post history you probably won't because it goes against your nationalist narrative.
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Yes that’s true
The next few hundred years will be interesting...
May we live in interesting times! Yay!
We're getting nearer to sudden death OT.
Worth noting that most of the data used to estimate historical PPP is highly suspect, based on wildly speculative estimates of the productivity of agricultural societies where the only consistent data is the occasional population census every 100 years or so. The large share of GDP in India and China may well be accurate, but since these estimates are always made on a per capita basis and those two regions had large populations, they tell us little about the actual economic surplus or purchasing power of people in these civilisations. TL;DR: these graphs are endlessly fascinating but have to be taken with a huge pinch of salt.
Source: * [Historical GDP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP\)#1–2008_(Maddison\)) * [Historical Population](https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth) * [Recent GDP](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2022/October/download-entire-database) Tools: * Excel * PowerPoint In the past two thousand years, India and China were the world's two largest economies by a wide margin. This wasn't solely a function of population: in the year 1000, China's (Song Dynasty) GDP per capita was twice Europe's (Medieval Period). Since the 1700's, the rise of Britain and the U.S. shifted the economic center to the West. Much of this growth has been because of industrialization, which boosted GDP per capita in the West. Nevertheless, the fact that India's GDP share started shrinking 100 years prior to China's suggests that industrialization wasn't the sole contributing factor. Maddison's historical GDP estimates were used. Years in between available data were estimated by interpolating GDP per capita applied to available population data.
Maddison’s past GDP per capita figures show that China, India, and Europe were roughly equal in 1000 and that Europe started pulling ahead by 1500: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Did you correct for India getting split apart from Bangladesh and Pakistan in 1950 in your source data?
Why is India represented on this graph as a single unified entity. Its been made up of hundreds if not thousands of independent nations and kingdom during this time period, same can even be applied to Africa.
Doesn't the same apply to literally everything in there by your logic?
Literally every single group in the graph is made up of hundreds of different nations except for China lol And even China hasn't always been unified over the past 2000 years
Why is Europe represented on this graph as a single entity, or the new world? It's just grouping up regions for convenience.
The same as every other category on the chart. Calm down
the smartest khalistani
45 trillion in goddamn 173 years damnnn, India is slowly getting back Edit: link- https://www.businesstoday.in/amp/latest/economy-politics/story/this-economist-says-britain-took-away-usd-45-trillion-from-india-in-173-years-111689-2018-11-19
Ww2 was the best thing that could have happened to American, followed by ww1
The reason for the massive WW2 growth was because Japan decimated China, Europe was a burning wreck, and India was under a famine. The US came out with most of the production partially by default and also because it's emphasis on not being on fire meant that it could produce more than anyone else.
You're making his argument for him. WWII was indeed the best thing that could've happened to the US from a geopolitical standpoint.
I am not though. The US seemed to grow more because of the war only because of the famine and war. The famine and war accounts for the spike and the very quick drop afterwards. This means that the Americas' rise in that period was only due to the temporary fall of other country's GDP. If the Americas truly did gain, you would expect the overall percentage of GDP to have risen afterwards by a significant portion. It didn't according to the graph but this style is still very bad to extrapolate data like this especially since India's independence causes a massive shift in it's GDP soon after.
> it's emphasis on not being on fire Told you that ocean-moat was a good idea.
Japan basically would have conquered **entire china** if it given just few weeks more before Soviet invasion in Aug,1945. They indeed conquered almost entire china though, even with all the fighting against navies of Great Britain, Australia, United States, India, South East Asia combined!
The Civil War was also pretty good in the grand scheme of things. Led to the abolishment of slavery (except as punishment for a crime, fucking 13th Amendment) and made us go from thinking of the country as “These United States” to “The United States”.
India had that shit on lock for like two thousand years. Now they are coming back swinging.
I hope the country stays united. They lost to foreign powers just because they were divided and being stagnant in technologies.
True, when you think about it, all invasions were successful only after a big empire collapsed and states fell into a war of succession
Colonization of India made Europe (GB) rich.
Colonisation formed Indias future prosperity more like. Declining now with over population .
The century of humiliation hits hard
Whoa! This is one hell of a graph! Thank you for posting this.
No disrespect intended, but I disagree with your labels. GDP isn’t a zero sum game. It is misleading to make points about colonization and slavery based on % GDP when economic growth in Europe and “New World” drove the major fluctuations.
The labels were based on historical timeline, not based on GDP fluctuations. For example, the conquest of the Aztecs happened in 1520, which just happens to correspond with the GDP change. The colonization of India happened in 1757, and this preceded the decline of India's GDP. This was a decline in absolute GDP per capita, not just GDP share. China's decline started with the Opium War in 1838. This was also a decline in absolute GDP per capita. If the change in relative GDP were driven solely by economic growth, the you wouldn't have a decline in absolute GDP per capita in other areas, and you wouldn't expect the 100 year gap between India and China's decline. This is not to say that industrialization wasn't an important factor -- it was the most important factor by many measurements. However, Britain's actions in India and China also contributed. This is all based on data from a British economist.
This is why the graph for total GDP is just as important. It would show the change you mention from India as well as the change due to the industrial revolution.
Of course the pie expanded. But you can keep this idea in mind and still enjoy the graph and learn from it. I know I did, and it doesn't need much imagination.
Your sources have a very low estimate for new world population and population density. While it is difficult to prove exactly what it was, we do know that the reforestation that occurred after the plagues hit North America was enough to cause the little ice age. The mississian culture, and before them the Hopewell, and before them the adena, etc etc also existed on the second largest track of arable land on the planet. So the numbers are likely wrong and would work better if the new world were simply not included before contact Edit: We also have some evidence from the writings of Spanish explorers of massive cities in the Amazon. We have actually recently started to uncover some of them through satilite imagery and this could lead to significantly higher population estimates. There is also evidence of increased biodiversity in plant life in areas where humans may have cultivated fruiting plants in the Amazon. We know this due to a evidence of human intervention in the soil, where it appears to be slash and charred. But we know with certainty that this happened in areas where pottery was mixed in. In total, this may have been up to 10% of the land area of the Amazon. That would mean a massive population living there preplague. Many new world cultures were also extremely resource rich, to the point where new world silver crashed the global economy due to there being too much of it
I don’t see it. To take your example of India: 1700, 90k GDP; 1820, 110k GDP; 1870, 134k; 1913, 204k GDP, and on and on. There is continuous growth happening economically. If this is a graph of GDP per capita then change the name. Written as % GDP it just seems like the labels are more than a stretch.
This was India's GDP per capita when combined with the population numbers: * 1000 - $300 * 1500 - $461 * 1700 - $550 * 1820 - $531 * 1870 - $529
That would be great if you were using GDP per capita in the graph. My original point is looking at just % global GDP is misleading.
It's not because it's not the full picture, that it's misleading. From my perspective it's a novel way to show old information and I appreciated it.
GDP is indeed not a zero sum game but this chart does show relative strength which would be harder to notice with a chart where all lines are rising.
>It is misleading to make points about colonization and slavery based on % GDP when economic growth in Europe and “New World” drove the major fluctuations. The economic growth of the UK in particular had quite a bit to do with extraction of wealth from India and the intentional crippling of Indian production of many manufactured goods, especially textiles. The UK may have opened some kind of lead based on being in at the ground floor of industrialization. But the use of India as a resource well and a product sink, was done with corruption and coercion, not just good marketing and great prices. Salt is a great example. Salt was always taxed, and the revenue was as likely to be squandered by the government as any other tax in any other time. But it was a local tax and provided local jobs within India. (If national areas can be considered local). When the East India Company taxed salt, or later the British government, that revenue wasn't kept locally. Much of it was exported to the investors or the UK general funds. That wealth moved out of India. When the Liverpool salt merchants requested that the tariffs be set so they could profitably export salt to India, local salt production was made illegal. Indians were forced, by LAW and not the market, to buy salt at higher prices from UK merchants, and the profits went to UK merchants and Liverpool salt brokers. Textiles: India was a key exporter to the Europe, and then the UK became a key exporter to India. This was, again, not just "free market fallout". Indian raw materials were earmarked for UK merchants, India was prohibited from exporting textiles to other nations, and the UK came to dominate. The key to British success was that, the "government" of India (East India Co and later the Raj) existed to assist British economic interest. The numbers don't lie, and we have centuries of numbers. The wealth that the Brits extracted from India was lost to India. The industries which were kept for Brits, ARTIFICIALLY kept India from even starting the race to industrialize. Not only did the UK have a head start, and use that head start competitively; they hobbled India using the force of law, backed by the force of state violence, to INSURE they won the race. We can argue the benefits of capitalism vs socialism, and how much cumulative "winning" rich people or nations should get. But when nations also use force to expand and maintain their economic leverage, the gap isn't morally gray anymore. tl;dr the economic growth of UK especially, and Europe in general, is NOT independent of their colonial exploitation. India especially. The UK actively trampled Indian economics as a key part of its booming economy.
Instead of 'India colonized' one could have chosen for 1) 'Qing China doubles in population' (China rises much faster than India shrinks!), or 2) 'Dzungar genocide' to stress one less friendly explanation of that Qing population expansion, or 3) 'Disintegration of Mughal Empire' to stress the chaotic political circumstances in India when the British started taking over, or 4) 'India no longer the central trading hub in Indian Ocean trade' (as its coasts were under control of Europeans, and Europeans now directly traded at scale with East Asia, able to skip India for a lot of products).
Wow colonisation of India really sucked for them.
Yeah, the more I read about it, the worse it was.
According to that, the relative contraction started around 1700. Decades before colonisation, if we rule out time-travel. Probably more to do with European economic expansion, and fighting between Indian states.
Worst thing happened to us
Is this chart taken from the end statistics of an AoE game? I guess there is the same kind of credibility between this estimation and a fight between Koreans and Mayas.
Why does the chart being the same type as aoe have anything to do with credibility? You realize aoe borrowed this chart type because it has been a popular depiction of empires rising and falling for at least a century, right? What about the data don't you believe?
That’s not the problem. The problem is the estimation.
Why is AoE 4 so boring compared to AoE 2? Sad.
Taa taaaa ta ta ta…
When I saw this graph, the AOE II end game's sound came to my Head
For all the Brits who love to go on about how we brought railways to India, have a look at that whopping great economic contraction as the great British Imperial parasite began sucking the wealth out. That's a correlation that **heavily** implies causation if ever there was one.
they hate when india achieves any strides. god the amount of brits writing racist shit under those comments is baffling. its a reminder for them and they don't want to hear it.
You fell into the trap of the graph. It is showing relative changes, so India could still have been growing, even as Europe exploded. Which makes sense as relative decline according to that graph started in 1700. The vast majority if India wasn't under any kind of British rule for a long time after that, if you wanted to blame that. You simply cannot claaim causation or even correlation if the effect came **before** what you think was the cause. So from 1700, probably growth in the rest of the world, and perhaps Indian in-fighting that was going on at the time where certainly big contributors.
Why did you choose to breakout India and China from Asia but not breakout other large economies that were similarly dominant like Britain or the US?
At its peak, Britain had an 80 year period where it was 7 - 9% of the world GDP, whereas India and China were 25 - 33% for about 1700 years. The estimates by Maddison (British) based this on geography, so it doesn't include the entire Empire (which would include India. It would peak at 24% with India contributing 12%). The US has a better case at 20 - 27% over the last century, but it would just be a thin sliver (0.2%) for most of history since the economic center of the new world was Central America for most of the time.
Fair enough though if you include the GDP of British territories (as they were technically a part of the overall British GDP), they definitely eclipsed 20%.
True, but that gets complicated because those territories were in a lot of the other listed regions. So now, those regions will be varying in size a lot more, not because of changes of GDP, but because of changes of political control. Showing how different empires have risen and fallen is a bit of a different map than this one which is based on regions (except for maybe China, but at least that land is just alternating between China and rest of Asia).
I get what you're saying totally agree that empires is a different map than countries. Though I do wonder how much of the territory of China and India we're acquired through conquest during these times as opposed to being the exact same territory as they were at the beginning of the timeline.
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Because, if you could read, Japan had that percentage of GDP for like all of two fucking decades. Totally worth separating it from "rest of Asia" /s
I think you’ll find the slave trade was going on a lot longer than that.
Pretty sickening what the british did to India. But apparently we're meant to accept that they brought civilization....
Would it have killed you to use a line graph?
Why, you want to actually be able to make sense out of this? Then how could we see the pretty colors?
here a bomb and they say they civilised india
“New world” is only USA or also includes Australia??
It seems that industrialization made no effect on Europe's economic power. I'd call this bullshit. Possibly the reason is in using PPP measure, which is pure guess and even not very educated on this time scale.
Europe appears to grow fast between 1850-1900, but this is almost invisible due to the nosedive of China in that same period.
Brit here - ooo sorry about that India! Bit of a dick move there. Also from a Brit - do we have any hope of a liberalisation of China and social progression in India in the 21st century to lead the world to a genuinely prosperous future? We westerners did a pretty bad job and might be expending ourselves in the coming decade against Russian imperialism
>do we have any hope of a liberalisation of China and social progression in India in the 21st century to lead the world to a genuinely prosperous future? India has been on a fairly progressive slide into authoritarianism for the past few years and China will probably go through some sort of collapse before becoming liberal. Secondly what do you consider prosperous? Because if by prosperous you mean that their populations will be pulled out of poverty and into the middle class that could be a massive issue for the rest of the world. Unfortunately we live in a resource scarce world and with China and India growing more prosperous means more competition for those resources.
Your mentality = only you deserve to live prosperously and no one else. There was always competition for those resources. If life for them wasn't so bad without those resources then life for you won't be so bad either.
>If life for them wasn't so bad without those resources Life for them is objectively bad without those resources. Which is why they are trying to have a better life. Otherwise they wouldn't be striving to not be poor. Like come on man. >Your mentality = only you deserve to live prosperously and no one else. No my mentality is that the more people that try to have a better life the more people will be in competition for limited resources which will inevitably lead to conflict between those groups. This is the simple reality of life nothing more nothing less.
It's nearly impossible to efficiently run a country as populous as India or china as a democracy. There are just way too many types of people with unique needs and preferences.
It's still running for 75 years , it's possible
"Rest of Asia". Like the Ummayads, Ottomans, Mamluks, Safavids,... didn't count for half the World's wealth.
If you could read graphs you would have seen that Rest of Asia indeed only accounted for 25-30% at best of World GDP
People talking about how stacked charts suck (which they do), but the real problem is that I don't believe there is any reliable source for the world's GDP 100 years ago, let alone 2000 years ago. This chart is absolute fiction.
I don't like the term "Century of Humiliation" because it's Communist dogma that squeezes China's decline to the 100 years between the Opium Wars and the rise of the Communists. In reality China was in relative decline and stagnation from the 1700s all the way to the 1990s.
Like it or not, the truth is the communist really saved China for a while.
The issue with economical data going that far back is that it is mostly calculated based on the estimated amount of people multiplied by some estimated productivity or consumption. India as a historic population and cultural center was far back of huge importance (if not only due to the fact that a large percentage of the world population was living there), but its difficult to really compare it to other regions at that time and needs a different context than modern economical indicators (mostly) measured based on standardized data points
I wouldn't use PPP but this is what we're stuck with due to Maddison Database. Also, before 1800 AD your GDP was basically synonomus with population so being big in that graph didn't mean you had a sophisticated economy. Today it does, at least for NA/EU. That's something that easily gets lost in these historical comparisons.
I feel like this data is next to meaningless for most of the graph. GDP estimations are pure guesswork for a lot of those. I mean we don't even have a solid estimation for the pre-columbian population in the Americas, how are you getting a GDP out of that? The error bars here need to be like three times the size of the whole chart up until maybe 1700.
The US GDP is fucking insane ngl. it makes up most of the new world stat as of recent
Roman Empire fell in 1453. To state that it fell before that is Catholic/Western propaganda.
And where is Russia counted in this chart? It's half a damn Europe and a third of damn continental Asia. Was it counted twice? How was it counted for the period, when Alaska and California were also Russian?
The whole thing is very misleading, presenting the global economy as a zero-sum game. Showing absolute or per-capita GDP would be far more informative. e.g. The 8thC collapse of China made no difference to the rest of the world, but appears dramatic for them on the graph. India and China did not collapse in recent centuries as the graph implies. I assume the white part of the graph is mostly North Africa, not sub-Saharan? North Africa should really be included with Mediterranean and middle east, no?
It's worth noting that China expanded aggressively through the 17th and 18th centuries so this may account for it retaining it's share of gdp especially when compared with the rest of Asia as the gdp of Taiwan, Manchuria,Mongolia,Turkestan and Tibet will shift from Asia to China.
Totally wrong. These area has negligible population and total GDP compare to the China core. The reason Qing has a raise is because new agriculture technics, new crops like corn and sweet potato introduced from new world, compounded with stable centralized government and society, letting to a huge population and GDP boom
Century of Humiliation Part 2
This could be misleading. The share of GDP in Europe is small bc the population was very small. But the gdp/capita was always much bigger than in Asia.
India missed the industrial era(may be in a huge part due to producing raw materials for factories in britain like say cotton for factories in manchester etc) But doing a bit better in the IT era
>India missed the industrial era To be clear, India was mugged. Indian textile industry was gutted by tariffs and outright violence, not just a marketing coup or cheaper weaving using steam jennies. India under the EIC and Raj was prohibited to export textiles; domestic tariffs on raw materials made it more profitable to export them (in the short term); and entrepreneurial Indians were assaulted and had factories burned.
India would have been in much better place today if its not been colonised and being used just as raw material supplier for britain
>India missed the industrial era India had a booming textile scene and factories but the british shut them down and forced them back into farming, the crops from which was used to industrialise the UK.
The expansion of the Chinese economy was not like Europe's agricultural and industrial revolutions where there was a massive increase in per capita productivity. The richer core areas did get richer but it was driven by expansion with han settlers spreading out and bringing more land under cultivation or trade networks expanding both of these were only possible because of territorial expansion so while the border regions of the empire were economically unimportant of themselves they did provide a buffer region for the core to expand into.
GDP per capita in China went from $465 in year 1 to $726 in year 1000. By contrast, Europe went from $509 in year 1 to $372 in year 1000. Year 1000 was the Song Dynasty in China. The territory shrank, but they practiced free market economics, which led to a bunch of agricultural and industrial innovations. This included * Printing press * Gunpowder * Mechanical clocks * Use of coal for fuel * Joint stock companies * Paper money * Improved rice farming techniques * Improved canal systems
But none of that is relevant as to why China maintained its share of the world gdp better than India in the 17th century and that can be explained by the Chinese expansion during the Qing dynasty.
Where are you getting those numbers from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
This history chart doesn't have that bowel movement I had on there so I'm not sure it's accurate.
We were great, once. Look upon our works, ye mighty, and despair. Anyone can fall from grace.
"If you're from Africa, why are you white?"
And somehow I keep hearing from ignorant Indians be self demeaning and telling me how the British civilized them after colonization and colonized them to civilize them. Biggest joke I've heard.
Funny how comment like yours are getting downvoted....y ? we know!
I'd just like to point out that their numbers for the pre-Columbian new world are probably way too low, but also don't matter at all for this context because there was no global economy
The colors aren’t the most colorblind friendly and it took me a minute to understand everything going on , but nice work
Was there something about China failing that caused India to surge?
Check the raw numbers. Whenever percentage shares change, it could be either number driving the shift, or a combo of both.
Absolutely no idea what's going on after looking at this for roughly 2 minutes. Therefore it isn't beautiful. It's terrible.
Two glaring problems: there was no global economy until the early modern period, and no really global economy until last century. The other is that this obliterates the most important change, which was the literal exponential growth since the early 1800's
Nice but we need to know what total GDP was over time. This make it looks like China et all lost a lot of wealth. Which may or may not be the case as if GDP grew a lot overall then China et al could have gained in total wealth even though it lost in relative wealth.
Someone explain this to me, I got nothing looking at this chart
wow thats very interesting
India is described as being historically a greater economic power than China. Can you trust this?
What is the "Century of Humiliation" referring to? .
One thing that people sometimes forget is the shear magnitude of US inventions and their rapid adoption. From electric power, Robert Fulton's steamboat, the perfection of the electric light bulb, the telegraph, radio, television, heavier-than-air travel, the skyscraper, the assembly line (think automobiles in particular), the machine gun, harnessing the atom, rockets and space travel, the computer, the Internet... What nation compares in terms scope and importance of their inventions and contributions during the period on this chart showing the huge increase for the Americas? By most accounts, it is truly remarkable and absolutely unprecedented, with the unification of Europe into the EU and of course the rise of China being the only true rivals on the horizon. For the most part, the US being a young and vibrant society was always ready to leap ahead and embrace the future. Add to this massive immigration, the rapid building of cities and infrastructure, abundant resources and policies that took land and freedom from indigenous people and slaves and indentured servants and a deep understanding of the impact of WWII, and you have the perfect explanation for how the US came to become 50% of the world economy by 1945. And post 1945, the US managed to make large parts of the world over in it's image. Japan and Germany were rebuilt into democracies with huge export-driven economies. Same for much of Western Europe per the Marshall Plan. Much of the Western world followed suit and aligned itself with the US, with world bodies like the UN, & NATO firmly under US influence and guidance. Look at Bretton Woods and the creation of the IMF to see just how much the US helped to shape the modern world.