Ram Madhav writes: India, making waves in the Indian Ocean

Angus Maddison, renowned British historian, in his monumental work The World Economy: Historical Statistics (2003), argued that India had been the largest economy in the world in the first millennium with a share of almost 33 per cent of the world's GDP. It began to decline with external invasions and colonisation and touched a low point during the British era in the 18th and 19th century. Some economists concluded that this record performance of the Indian economy in the first millennium, closely followed by China during the same period, was due to its population size. However, what many didn't take…