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If India’s share of world income was 27 per cent in 1700, why was it only 5 per cent in 1950? If colonial rule shackled the Indian economy and frustrated its development, how has India emerged as a global economic superpower today? In this module, we will examine the history of the Indian subcontinent through the early modern and modern eras, focussing on India’s changing role and position in the global economy. The starting-point for the module is the establishment of the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century. The Mughals transformed India’s domestic and external economy, as evident from India’s centrality in trade and economic connections with the Islamic empires of Eurasia and with states and markets of the Indian Ocean world, from East Africa to China. At this time, following the discovery of the sea route from Europe to Asia via the Cape of Good Hope, Europeans – first the Portuguese and, after 1600, the Dutch and the English – also established economic relations with India. Following the establishment of the East India Company as a territorial power on the subcontinent after c. 1750, and the increasing integration of South Asia into the economy of the British Empire, India’s role and place in the global economy was transformed, and Indian nationalists decried the deindustrialisation and drain of wealth that was reducing India and her people to poverty. After Independence, Indian planners sought to reduce poverty through industrialisation and a series of five-year plans that came at considerable cost and with mixed success, arguably necessitating the liberalisation of the economy from the 1980s that has once again altered India’s role and place in the global economy.