Five Centuries of Economic Growth in India: The Institutions Perspective

In this essay I present an analytical growth narrative of India since the sixteenth century. I argue that post independence economic performance is not entirely decoupled from the growth experiences in India during the Mughal and the colonial periods. Institutions perhaps play a key role in explaining economic performance over these periods. I present an analytical framework to understand how institutional change and other deep factors may have influenced economic performance in India during the pre-modern period, de-industrialisation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and post independence ‘Hindu Growth’ and boom. I argue that useful insights can be drawn by studying growth history of India in its entirety.