"It is very likely that, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the average standard of living in Europe was a little bit lower than that of the rest of the world" - Bairoch.
The viewpoint that European countries surged ahead due to the industrial revolution rather than colonial oppression has been widely debunked.
The relevant question is not so much why the industrial revolution occurred first in England,Scotland and Belgium, but why other advanced regions of the eighteenth century failed to adapt their handicraft manufacturers to the new conditions of production and competition in the 19th century.
The looms of India and China were defeated not so much by market competition as they were forcibly dismantled by war,invasion, opium and a Lancashire-imposed system of one-way tariffs.
It is indisputable that from about 1780 or 1800 onward every serious attempt by a non western society to move into a fast lane of development or to regulate its terms of trade was met by a military as well as an economic response from London or a competing imperial capital.The victorians according to Brian Bond's calculations resorted to gunboat on at least 75 different occasions.
India was the greatest captive market in world history, rising from third to first place among consumers of British exports in the quarter century after 1870."British Rulers" writes Marcello De Cecco , "deliberately prevented Indians from becoming skilled mechanics, refused contracts to Indian firms which produced materials that could be got from England, and generally hindered the formation of an autonomous industrial structure in India"
Thanks to a Government Stores policy that reserved most government purchases to British products and by the monopoly of British agency houses in organizing the import-export trade, India was forced to absorb Britain's surplus of increasingly obsolescent and non-competitive industrial exports.By 1910 this included two-fifths or the UK's finished cotton goods and pharmeceuticals.
As a result observes de Cecco, Britain avoided "having to restructure her industry and was able to invest her capital in the countries where it gave the highest return".Thanks to India, "British financiers were not compelled to 'tie' their loans to British Exports because the Imperial outlet was always available for British products."
But how in the age of famine, could the Indian subcontinent afford to subsidize its conqueror's suddenly precarious commercial supremacy?.In a word it could'nt and India was force marched into the world market by revenue and irrigation policies that compelled farmers to produce for foreign consumption at the price of their own food security.By the turn of the century, India was supplying nearly a fifth of Britain's wheat consumption.
References
1. Late Victorian Holocausts: El nino famines and the making of the third world - Mike Davis
2. An economic history of India - Dietmar Rothermund
3. The international gold standard: Money and Empire - Marcello De Cecco