South Asia is central to the book’s argument that world inequality cannot be explained by geography or natural resources alone. Its changing position in the global economy—from an historically prosperous region to one containing many of the world’s poor—illustrates how institutions, colonial expansion, and the uneven spread of industrialization can redirect economic trajectories.

Historical position and reversal

The book describes people in South Asia, especially on the Indian subcontinent, as once more prosperous than people in many other parts of Asia and certainly more prosperous than the peoples of Australia and New Zealand. That ordering later reversed: Japan, Singapore, and South Korea became Asia’s richest nations, while Australia and New Zealand surpassed almost all of Asia in prosperity. The contrast supports the book’s broader claim that present-day economic rankings are not fixed by climate or location.

The region also figures in the book’s account of persistent poverty. India and China benefited from Eurasia’s orientation and from rich assortments of plants and animals, yet most of the world’s poor people live in those two countries. The book argues that geographical explanations may help account for the movement of crops, animals, and innovations across continents, but cannot explain why some places within the same continental setting prospered while others did not.

Trade, colonial power, and institutions

South Asia’s earlier economic importance is especially visible in the history of textiles. India was the world’s largest producer and exporter of textiles in the eighteenth century. Indian calicoes and muslins reached European markets and were traded across Asia and into eastern Africa. The English East India Company carried these goods to the British Isles while seeking a monopoly over valuable Indian exports during the seventeenth century. Its competition with Portuguese and French interests formed part of a wider contest over trade and political power.

The book places this history within a larger account of Atlantic and colonial expansion. In England, overseas trade helped create a wealthy group of merchants who could press for limits on royal control; elsewhere, European commercial expansion imposed or strengthened extractive institutions. In the book’s interpretation, the same broad process that helped fuel European growth could undermine independent economies and curtail opportunities for development in other regions. South Asia’s commercial history therefore appears not as evidence of an inherent incapacity for prosperity, but as part of a changing and unequal system of trade and power.

Technology and the limits of geographic explanation

The book distinguishes the spread of useful technologies from the institutions that determine who can adopt and benefit from them. Eurasia’s east–west orientation helped crops, animals, and innovations travel across broad distances, and South Asia’s natural resources were part of that continental abundance. But such advantages do not explain why industrialization took root in some places and not others, or why the region’s earlier prosperity did not translate into a later position among the world’s richest economies.

South Asia thus serves as a comparative case in the book’s account of development reversals. Its history complicates any simple narrative in which geography dictates outcomes: regional prosperity changed, textile production connected the subcontinent to far-reaching markets, and colonial competition altered the institutional setting in which commerce unfolded. The decisive question is not merely what resources or technologies a place possesses, but how political and economic institutions shape access to trade, innovation, and the gains from growth.