India’s English Colony: The country’s per capita income is set to overtake Britain’s
BEFORE 1700, England (Britain didn’t yet exist) and the Indian subcontinent were broadly equally prosperous. According to economist-historian Angus Maddison and researchers at Warwick University, per capita income in India and England was between $600 and $800, adjusted in today’s money. By 1947, after 190 years of colonial rule in India, Britons were on average over 100 times wealthier than Indians.
The gap in 2026 has narrowed to five times. According to the IMF, Britain’s per capita income in 2026, measured by purchasing power parity (PPP), is $67,585. India’s per capita income (PPP) is $12,801. The disparity has fallen from 100:1 in 1947 to 5:1 today.
Britain’s economy is currently growing at 1 per cent a year. India’s economy is expanding at an average of 7 per cent a year. What will the numbers show in the next 25 years at the current pace of economic growth of the two countries?
Assuming stable populations and currencies, a decade-wise empirical computation was arrived at by feeding relevant parameters into an artificial intelligence (AI) engine.
2026: UK $67,585; India $12,801. Gap 5.2:1
2036: UK $70,696; India $25,377. Gap 2.8:1
2046: UK $78,093; India $49,918. Gap 1.6:1
2054: UK $84,561; India $86,702
Parity is thus reached by 2054 when India’s and Britain’s per capita income converge, as they once did in pre-colonial 1700. But by then the fabric of the India-UK relationship will have been transformed. India’s diaspora in Britain is already the wealthiest ethnic community in the UK. A recent study by the London School of Economics and Political Science reported that Indian-origin households in the UK have a median net worth of £206,000, higher than that of white British households (£177,000) and nearly double that of other Asian households (£125,000).
India is the second-largest investor in Britain after the US. Britain is the sixth-largest investor in India, with room to grow. The India-UK FTA will strengthen the economic and social relationship between the two countries. Politically, however, there are rough edges that need to be smoothed out.
If the anti-immigration ReformUK party, which currently leads Labour in opinion polls, comes to power in the next British general election due in 2029, those edges will become even rougher. A British version of white supremacist MAGA is gathering traction across Britain. The xenophobia is largely aimed at illegal immigration from Muslim countries. But the racist “England First” movement is increasingly popular in the poorer parts of England.
When the UK voted narrowly to leave the EU in a referendum in 2016, the English were supportive of Brexit; the Scots were not. If a referendum were held today, Britain would vote to stay. By leaving, economists say, Britain has lost ground to its European neighbours, the US, China—and India. The Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) calculates that the UK economy has lost up to 8 per cent of GDP over the past decade—an average reduction of 0.8 per cent a year—by leaving the EU.
When English buccaneer Sir Thomas Roe arrived in India in the 1600s, he was dazzled by the wealth of the Mughal court. The peasantry, Roe reported back home during the four years he spent in India between 1615 and 1619, were well-fed, well-shod, and prosperous by European standards.
Colonialism and slavery lifted England from a middle-income European island to the world’s wealthiest nation in less than 200 years. When he left India in 1619, Roe advised his countrymen to be patient in India. It was a ripe fruit, he said, but not yet ready for plucking. England’s patience was rewarded a century later, following the conquest of Bengal by Robert Clive in 1757. The loss of America in 1776 was compensated by the acquisition of India.
The two colonies were of course vastly different.
America was a European settler-colony, occupying a sparsely populated continent. India was an ancient civilisation, teaming with hundreds of millions of people who had seen invaders come and go and fallen into civilisational repose.
The tide, as it always does, has now turned. Britain is economically feeble and socially fractured. The Indian colony whose resources had once lifted Britain from penury in the 18th century is now a robust partner in the disorderly 21st century. As India’s economy prospers, London will serve India as a colonial outpost as Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay once served Britain.