ABSTRACT
Departing from Prebisch’s centre-periphery scheme and mainly based on the contributions of the Latin American authors Furtado and Caio Prado, in this chapter, we introduce some reflections on the process that transforms the Indian subcontinent, from a regional centre to a global periphery of the British Crown. Given the dimension and industrial development achieved by the Indian subcontinent at the beginning of the eighteenth century, its peripherisation was even more dramatic than the Latin American one. Indeed, this process is even broader than a deindustrialisation process. The Indian peripherisation implied the development of a set of coercive and non-coercive, price and no-price relationships between the British and the Indian subcontinent based on a) the logistics and trade control coordinated by British actors, such as the British East India Company (BEIC), b) the territorial penetration and urban restructuration of the Indian subcontinent, c) the structural change (in the export profile and in the internal sector composition) of the Indian economy, and d) the institutional, infrastructural, financial, and autonomous state expenditure subordination of the Indian subcontinent to the British needs and demands. Some final reflections comparing the Indian and the Latin American experience are introduced.
