Over the next twenty-five years, leading up to 2050, the world will undergo the most compelling transformation since the Industrial Revolution. New technologies, such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), will propel ancient civilisations such as China and India, which had led the world for millennia but lost their way. Europe will continue to decline. The United States (US) in the post-Trump era will change radically into a polyglot nation, fractured by race and ideology, hostile to immigrants and fearful that, by 2050, the White population will fall below 50 per cent for the first time in 400 years following the European colonisation of America.
America’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 1990 was USD 5.96 trillion. Britain’s GDP was USD 1.09 trillion. China’s GDP? A mere USD 0.36 trillion. India’s GDP: USD 0.32 trillion. The British economy in 1990 was larger than the combined economies of China and India. The US economy was 15 times larger than China’s. Today, India’s GDP has surged past Britain’s, while China’s economy is approaching America’s.
US President Donald Trump has, meanwhile, undermined an eighty-year-old Western world order. The order governed global institutions from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since the end of the Second World War in 1945. The US-led West controlled the levers of the world’s military and economic power.
That order began shifting in the early decades of the 21st century from the West to the East. The rise of China and India was a clear sign of the global centre of gravity moving towards Asia. Europe was in secular decline, its economic sclerosis masked by US military and financial guarantees. Those guarantees have expired.
President Trump’s recalibration with Russia and support for Israel’s territorial expansion in the Middle East are part of his worldview. Can this survive the end of Trump’s presidency in 2029? The Democratic Party has vowed to reverse some of Trump’s radical military and trade policies if they regain control of the Senate and the House of Representatives.
But the fundamental shift in the balance of power from the Western hemisphere to Asia is irreversible. A 300-year-long era of Western domination could be ending. As a future Great Power, India differs from both the former British and French empires, as well as the US and China. Impoverished at Independence in 1947, it has risen without colonising other countries, enslaving people from across oceans or being a brutal communist dictatorship.
Indians live on their own land, unlike Americans, Canadians and Australians of European descent. India is a democracy, unlike China. And unlike Europe’s colonial powers, it has never invaded and occupied territories overseas.
History is complicated, but the truth in the end is simple: Nations, like water, find their own level. The West emerged from centuries of brutal tribal warfare across the plains and forests of Europe to transform itself into a global leader of scientific discovery and master of the seas.
Post-renaissance Combination Of Colonial Conquest
Weapons of war allowed it to colonise, invade and enslave. The post-renaissance combination of colonial conquest, transatlantic slavery, science, the Industrial Revolution and democratic reforms at home gave rise to the golden age of the West.
From relative poverty, Europe rose to great wealth. In 1650, average levels of income across Europe and Asia were broadly similar. By 1850, the ‘Great Divergence’, propelled by invasive colonialism and transatlantic slavery on the one hand and industrialisation and technology on the other, had widened the income gap between Europeans and Asians. The key was revenue, largely from taxes imposed on captured colonies. The absence of revenue in the postcolonial era triggered the rise and fall of the Great Powers.
Trump seeks to usher in a new golden age of America. But his ‘America First’ policy is a throwback to Europe’s imperial age, where might was right. Trump is dismissive of today’s Europe but embraces its colonial impulse. That era, however, is over. The attempt to remake the US in the image of Europe’s imperial past has led to disorder overseas and divisions at home.
India, an ancient civilisation, had long fallen into repose. But Portuguese, French, Spanish and English merchants who set up trading centres along India’s long coastline, to the west and to the east, recognised its revenue potential. The English were the most commercially successful. Britain’s Industrial Revolution profited from tax revenue extracted from colonised India. It paid for the expansion of the British Empire and its global wars, as well as financing infrastructure in Victorian Britain. The Anglo-Saxon settlements in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand prospered lockstep with the British Empire.
History is cyclical. When exactly did the decline of the West begin? The point of singularity was 1914 when the first shots of the First World War were fired. At the time, the West was at its most powerful. The US, the British Empire and a rising Germany were the world’s three largest economies. Two ruinous intra-European wars in 1914–18 and 1939–45 dragged the rest of the world into what was essentially a conflict that harked back to Europe’s history of brutish tribal warfare between Anglo-Saxons, Gauls, Vikings and Slavs.
By 2030, for the first time in 300 years, no European country will be among the world’s three largest economies. The signs at first, though, were barely visible when, in 1914, Europe, as it had done for centuries, turned upon itself in the First World War. It would be only after the retreat of colonialism, forced on a fatigued Europe following the Second World War, that a major change in global power would begin to manifest itself.
Europe’s slow decline started with the end of tax revenue and the loss of a source of artificially low-priced raw materials and commodities from its Asian and African colonies. Britain, the principal beneficiary for centuries of colonial tax receipts, was the biggest loser when colonialism ended. It had balanced its books since the eighteenth century through extortionate revenue from India and other colonies in Asia and Africa. Today, Britain must balance its books with revenue from its own treasury rather than the treasuries of several dozen colonies, including resource-rich India, which contributed most to its wealth.
Till the 1920s, Britain still believed it could hold on to its Indian colony almost indefinitely. Protests against its rule were mostly peaceful. Britain, unlike Portugal in Goa, had been careful not to convert Hindus to Christianity. The British were in India for profit, not proselytisation.
In order to strengthen and prolong their rule in India, the British pitted Indians against Indians. The first caste census in India was initiated by Britain in 1871. Divisions by caste, endemic but quiescent in precolonial India, now came to the fore, dividing Indians, often violently.
The next target was religion. The British had noted carefully that the First War of Independence in 1857 had united Hindu and Muslim sepoys against the use of cartridges in new British rifles suspected to be greased with both pork and cow fat. Realising that a revenue-rich colony could slip out of its hands if Hindus and Muslims united on a larger scale, the British Crown took control of India from the East India Company (EIC) in 1858 and initiated a long-term strategy to sow discord between Muslims and Hindus.
They would, in time, find a willing accomplice in Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the All-India Muslim League. Having set up religion-based army regiments and Bombay Pentangular cricket tournaments among Europeans, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and Indian Christians, and Parsis, the British co-opted Jinnah to disrupt the freedom movement led by Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and others. When the ploy failed and Independence came, Britain continued to use Pakistan as a proxy to retain leverage over India.
The decline of the West and the rise of the rest were inevitable. The US will be a mixed-race majority country well before 2050. The White population is already a minority in several large American cities. Europe is economically stagnant. It has lost its centuries-long colonial revenue and must live off the reserves it accumulated over those centuries. They will not last forever.
Meanwhile, illegal immigration has polarised politics in both the US and Europe. It played a decisive role in the 2024 US presidential election. In Europe, race and religion form a potent mix. Cities, from London to Paris, rise to the call of the muezzin on Friday. Few attend Sunday mass. British and French politicians have resigned themselves to the growing influence of Islam in their societies.
Why did Europe’s strongest powers in the seventeenth century covet India? The English EIC, established in 1600, was among the first, eyeing trade in silk, spices and cotton that the subcontinent was renowned for. The French EIC (Compagnie Francaise des Indes Orientales), founded in 1664 under King Louis XIV, followed the English. The Dutch EIC came as well but was evicted after being beaten in battles with the rulers of Travancore in South India. The
The Portuguese were already in India, having discovered the potential of Bombay and Goa.
Four centuries later, Europe and its progeny, the US, once again covet India. By 2030, an estimated 70 per cent of Fortune 500 companies will have global capability centres (GCCs) located in India doing complex innovations in engineering, research and development (R&D), AI, synthetic biology, neural networks and machine learning.
From a subcontinent impoverished by centuries of exploitative and often brutal colonial rule, India is today once again the centre of gravity of global growth. In 1750, as economic historian Angus Maddison wrote, India accounted for 24 per cent of global GDP.
In 1947, after nearly 200 years of British rule, India accounted for 3 per cent of global GDP. But by 2050, India’s GDP will again account, measured by purchasing power parity (PPP), for over 20 per cent of global GDP. India was destitute upon Independence in 1947.3 It had 80 per cent poverty, 12 per cent literacy and an average life expectancy of thirty-two years. To rise from this morass—a rise that is still incomplete—into a democracy that will shortly be the world’s third-largest economy, is remarkable.
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