[achow]

> Roughly speaking, China had the largest GDP in the world for more than 1000 years

For a continuous duration of nearly 1700 years from the year 1 CE, India was the world's largest economy, constituting 35 to 40% of the world GDP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India

[RandomThoughts3]

Yes, yes, we know that China and India are becoming extremely nationalistic and like to use their tendencies for historical revionism to find justifications for their new found imperialism. Still I’m not convinced we actually need a fight of propagandists here.

[namaria]

Estimating economy sizes and growth before a couple hundred years ago is at best an exercise in educated guessing.

[chubot]

OK I tracked down that claim to Michael Cembalest of JP Morgan, in a 2012 article

https://archive.is/kQNT4#selection-1577.155-1581.525

https://archive.is/Z2qEu

Although there are problems with the analysis that are mentioned in both articles:

A major caveat: If you looked at the chart in any depth, you probably noticed a big problem with it. The time periods between data points aren't equal -- in fact they are not close at all

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So, one way to read the graph, very broadly speaking, is that everything to the left of 1800 is an approximation of population distribution around the world and everything to the right of 1800 is a demonstration of productivity divergences around the world

But the analysis for China is equally flimsy, so I edited my comment to say "China and India" and "likely"

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TBH now that I see this data, I think both claims are a little flimsy. I was more referring to Dalio's analysis, which covers the last 500 years only, and probably got a few claims mixed up.

For some reason Dalio does not include India much in his analysis -- it is mostly focused on China, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the USA. That could be his bias, or perhaps a definitional issue with what counts as "India" (and similarly what counts as "China"), which is a difficult question over 500-1000 year time frames

[daymanstep]

Was India even a country before 1700? It's like saying "Asia was the largest economy"

[inglor_cz]

In a pre-industrial economy, size of your economy was dependent on a) having a lot of peasants, b) having a lot of reasonably fertile soil.

China and India between them counted for at least half of humanity during that period, and probably more. No wonder they were the largest economies.

[achow]

You are forgetting..

c) Having lots of ships, sailors and powerful army (many in Europe)

d) Being a trading hub (Italy)

e) Having access to lots of valuable metals, salt, gold (richest person in history was Mansa Musa, King of Mali)

[inglor_cz]

Statistical outliers like very rich kings or ports do attract attention, but there was no way to avoid low productivity of agriculture overall. At least 80 per cent of the population had to tend the crops, which lowered the average GDP of entire regions / countries.