Economic historians, led by the redoubtable Angus Maddison, agree that in 1700 India and China accounted for roughly half of world income before suffering obliteration from colonialism and the rise of an industrialised West. Economic futurologists, led by Goldman Sachs’s BRICs report (Brazil, Russia, India and China, with the first two increasingly morphing into a footnote), concur that the world will revert back to a similar economic weighting during the course of the twenty-first century. 

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