<P> The historian Jeffrey G. Williamson has argued that India went through a period of deindustrialization in the latter half of the 18th century as an indirect outcome of the collapse of the Mughal Empire, with British rule later causing further deindustrialization . According to Williamson, the decline of the Mughal Empire led to a decline in agricultural productivity, which drove up food prices, then nominal wages, and then textile prices, which led to India losing a share of the world textile market to Britain even before it had superior factory technology, though Indian textiles still maintained a competitive advantage over British textiles up until the 19th century . Economic historian Prasannan Parthasarathi, however, has argued that there wasn't any such economic decline for several post-Mughal states, notably Bengal Subah and the Kingdom of Mysore, which were comparable to Britain in the late 18th century, until British colonial policies caused deindustrialization . </P> <P> Stanford political scientist Gary W. Cox argues in a 2017 study, </P> <P> that Europe's political fragmentation interacted with her institutional innovations to foster substantial areas of "economic liberty," where European merchants could organize production freer of central regulation, faced fewer central restrictions on their shipping and pricing decisions, and paid lower tariffs and tolls than their counterparts elsewhere in Eurasia . When fragmentation afforded merchants multiple politically independent routes on which to ship their goods, European rulers refrained from imposing onerous regulations and levying arbitrary tolls, lest they lose mercantile traffic to competing realms . Fragmented control of trade routes magnified the spillover effects of political reforms . If parliament curbed arbitrary regulations and tolls in one realm, then neighboring rulers might have to respond in kind, even if they themselves remained without a parliament . Greater economic liberty, fostered by the interaction of fragmentation and reform, unleashed faster and more inter-connected urban growth . </P> <P> A 2017 study in the American Economic Review found that "globalization was the major driver of the economic divergence between the rich and the poor portions of the world in the years 1850 - 1900 ." The states that benefited from globalization were "characterised by strong constraints on executive power, a distinct feature of the institutional environment that has been demonstrated to favour private investment ." </P>

Spread of technology from china india and the middle east to europe