Author and media entrepreneur Minhaz Merchant examines the long arc of global economic history and India’s resurgence in his forthcoming book Era of India: From Impoverished Colony to the World’s Third-Largest Economy, to be published by Vintage Books in January 2026.

In this wide-ranging and data-driven narrative, Merchant explores how, for much of recorded history, living standards across Europe, Asia, and Africa remained broadly comparable. He argues that the dramatic divergence in global wealth over the past four centuries coincided with European colonial expansion following the discovery of the New World in the Americas and Australasia.

By 1600, per capita incomes in Europe and Asia showed little disparity. By 1900, however, the gap had widened dramatically, with Europe emerging from centuries of plague and poverty into unprecedented prosperity. Era of India interrogates the causes of this transformation, questioning whether Europe’s rise was driven primarily by scientific progress and industrial innovation—or by centuries of extractive colonialism, including the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonization, which resulted in what Merchant describes as the largest transfer of wealth in human history from East to West.

The book also engages with the contemporary debate on colonial reparations, asking whether the West bears responsibility for the economic consequences of three centuries of overseas conquest and enslavement.

Drawing on empirical data and extensive historical documentation, Merchant traces India’s journey from an impoverished British colony in 1947 to its projected status as the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, and examines how this transformation is likely to reshape the global order over the next 25 years.

Era of India runs to 544 pages.

Minhaz Merchant is a veteran editor, publisher, and media entrepreneur, and the author of biographies of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and industrialist Aditya Vikram Birla. Era of India is his eighth book. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy Scholarship for Physics, he lives in Mumbai with his wife, artist Kahini Arte-Merchant.