Start with Marx:
Karl Marx (1853),"The Future Results of British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune (August 8): The political unity... imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph. The native army, organized and trained by the British.... The free press.... From the Indian natives... educated at Calcutta under English superintendence, a fresh class is springing up, endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science. Steam has brought India into regular and rapid communication with Europe.... The day is not far distant when... the distance between England and India, measured by time, will be shortened to eight days, and when that once fabulous country will thus be actually annexed to the Western world....
[N]ow the ... millocracy have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance... [and] it is necessary... to gift her with means of irrigation and of internal communication. They intend now drawing a net of railroads over India....
I know that the English millocracy intend to endow India with railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminished expenses the cotton and other raw materials.... But... [y]ou cannot maintain a net of railways... without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways. The railway-system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry... the capacities and expertness of the native engineers in the Calcutta mint... the natives attached to the several steam engines in the Burdwan coal districts.... Mr. Campbell himself... is obliged to avow “that the great mass of the Indian people possesses a great industrial energy, is well fitted to accumulate capital, and remarkable for a mathematical clearness of head and talent for figures and exact sciences.” “Their intellects,” he says, “are excellent.”
Modern industry, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary divisions of labor, upon which rest the Indian castes.... All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people.... But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?...
The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world... universal intercourse... the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions.... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain...
What went wrong?
Lant Pritchett, "Divergence, Big Time":
Lewis: The Evolution of the International Economic Order:
"How did the world come to be divided into industrial countries and agricultural countries?"
rodrik: Getting Interventions Right: How Korea and Taiwan Grew Rich:
Neocolonial origins of economic development:
Role of the Cold War in Asia?
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