The Story of India by Michael Wood

Author:Michael Wood [Wood, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gnv64
ISBN: 9781448141463
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE BEGINNING OF A WORLD ECONOMY

It is at this time that we begin to detect the coming shape of a world economy. The Kushans inherited a run-down currency in the northwest, but they soon started to supplement the debased silver and copper coins with newly introduced gold coins on the weight standard of the Romans, which had a very wide circulation. Beautifully designed and minted, the coinage is one of the most fascinating and unexpected aspects of their rule, both practical and symbolic. Like later foreign dynasties – the Mughals and the British, for example – the Kushans aimed at a high-value currency that would enable large-scale commercial enterprise. Wholesale business could now be conducted in a vast area from Bactria to the Ganges basin, and perhaps in the internal economy of India part of the flow of bullion into southern parts from the Roman spice trade found its way north to be recoined by the Kushans.

Historical economists over the last twenty years or so have been attempting to calculate the history of the world economy based on a complex series of calculations and hypotheses, which by the time we get to AD 1500, begin to be more reliable. For the Kushan age it is largely a matter of guesswork based on such things as the widespread circulation of money, a population boom, and increased settlement, but the upshot is the first of a series of graphs of the rise of the world economy. Estimates for the population of India suggest that the subcontinent might have had 75 million in an entire world population of perhaps 250 million; so India perhaps had more than a quarter of the world’s people (the 2007 figure for the subcontinent is around a fifth of the world total). The estimated wealth of Kushan India in terms of gross domestic product (the total value of goods produced and services provided in one year) is nearly 30 per cent of the wealth of the world – more than Rome or Han China because of its dominant position in the Eurasian landmass at the centre of trade systems. In fact, India would retain this superiority until around 1500, when the European conquest of the New World gave the western European powers access to the natural resources of an entire continent and altered the balance of history away from the ancient civilizations of Asia.

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