“The poverty of India was not a product of the Geography or of the lack of natural resources, it was mainly a product of the History of the last two centuries.”

The proposition is Nehru's in The Discovery of India, and it restates the central claim of the nationalist economists.

The evidence for it.

• The drain. Dadabhai Naoroji in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901) and R. C. Dutt in the Economic History of India argued that a large annual transfer left India as Home Charges, remittances and unrequited exports, financing British investment out of Indian savings.
• Deindustrialisation. Free trade after 1813 exposed handloom weavers to machine-made Lancashire cloth while Indian goods faced discriminatory duties in Britain. Bairoch's estimates show India's share of world manufacturing output collapsing from roughly a quarter in 1750 to about 2 per cent by 1900.
• Commercialisation without capitalisation. Cash crops, revenue in cash and the absence of investment in irrigation left agriculture stagnant; per capita income growth was close to zero over the colonial period, and famine mortality peaked under a regime committed to market non-interference.

The qualification. Morris D. Morris questioned whether the pre-colonial economy was as prosperous as assumed, and whether handloom decline was as complete or as rapid. Tirthankar Roy argues that geography and resource endowment did matter, and that the colonial state's failures were of omission — under-investment in health, education and water — rather than only extraction.

Judgement. The revisionists complicate the mechanism, not the outcome. India entered colonial rule as a major manufacturing economy and left it with mass poverty, a life expectancy near thirty and low literacy. Geography did not change in two centuries; policy did.