A consensus had formed in the nineteenth century whereby the differences between Europe and the rest of the world could be explained by stadial theory. Different regions were different because they were in different stages of civilisation. Stadial theory conveniently created a narrative that legitimised imperialism by critiquing irrationality and poverty in the rest of the world. Located in a subcontinent over seven thousand kilometres from their foreign rulers, Mahadev Govind Ranade and Romesh Chunder Dutt saw another stadial theory. They tweaked the European version to fit their understanding of India’s history and current reality in the late nineteenth century. Ranade and Dutt remade the theory by including a lower stage to which India had regressed due to imperialism, and an earlier, higher stage of civilisation where India had enjoyed greater progress than it did in the late nineteenth century. Ranade and Dutt, along with their fellow Indian economists, could thus refute the idea that India could not skip to a higher stage of civilisation, because they had already experienced great progress in the past. They did not need to wait to progress and to gain independence, like the stage theorists from Europe argued.

Chapter 3 – How societies change – presents some key examples of how historians, anthropologists, economists, and other academics have tried to come to grips with the agents and drivers of previous societal transformations. We cite examples of how the great Western transformation between 1500 and 1900 has been framed in different ways. Furthermore, we present two analogies of transformations: the abolition of slavery, and the replacement of horse transport in cities with automobile transport. This constitutes the basis for a typology of societal transformations based on the system levels and tempo of transformations.