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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I took it from Wikipedia, but you're right the reference for this on there comes from Maddison. The early 18th century was a bit of a misnomer from me, the Wiki reference used the date 1700 (technically still the 17th century) as the time of the takeover and indeed that was the height of their territorial/cultural power. The Mughals did decline during the 18th century but equally at the same time the Marathas were growing a lot and they still count as India.

I hadn't heard of Broadberry, I'll take a look.

On a further tangent, whether China > India or India > China specifically at 1700 is kind of whatever to me, potayto potahto; but the most egregious part of the Maddison statistics I find personally is its assessment of Song dynasty China as significantly behind India during its early-mid medieval period, when Song dynasty China was pretty much unquestionably the most advanced and richest economy in the world during its existence. I think that is indicative of poor methodology or better current understanding (and my understanding is as above: Maddison, being the first to even try to do comparative historical GDP reconstructions, made an assumption that is now getting revised).

I don’t blame you for using that data since it’s most easily available, but unfortunately things can be misleading sometimes, and the truth is often so much more interesting.