CAGE Economic History

Was India once an affluent empire, later impoverished by British colonisation? Or was India never rich to begin with? More generally, what does historical data on wages and other economic indicators tell us about the broader story of the making of the modern world – a world with great affluence, but where much of the riches are still concentrated in the Western world. For over 20 years now, Stephe...

The tech gap between China and the West is closing fast. But why did the land that invented paper and gunpowder ever fall behind? Debin Ma is the world’s leading economic historian of East Asia. In this fourth episode of our Great Divergence series, he approaches the making of the modern world from an eastern perspective. We discuss why China fell behind, why Japan modernised early, and why East A...

Why was industrial modernity born in Europe and not, say, China? This is one of the most consequential questions about the origins of the modern world. Yet asking “why Europe” can mislead. The Industrial Revolution was not a European event. It was a British event. So why was the steam engine invented in Britain, and not France or Italy? Oxford professor Robert Allen has worked for decades trying t...

Several inventions mark the progress towards modernity - the Gutenberg printing press, the Galileo telescope, the Watt steam engine. But why was Europe the birthplace of so many of these?  Joel Mokyr, winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, thinks the cause was culture. For decades, he has asked economists to take intellectual history more seriously. Economies are shaped by new inventions, Mo...

Why did Western Europe become the richest region of the early modern world? Was the rise of the West powered by colonization, inventions, or something else entirely? And what happened to the medieval might of China and India? The term “great divergence” is increasingly used by historians who are bold enough to study this immense question, but who want to do it carefully, without falling into tradi...