Trade
Trade, Then and Now
Key statistic
£45 tn
Estimated cumulative economic transfer from India to Britain during colonial rule (Utsa Patnaik).
In July 2025, India and the United Kingdom signed a Free Trade Agreement — the first comprehensive trade deal between the two countries since Independence. The framing was of equals: two sovereign economies negotiating on their own terms.
That framing is worth taking seriously. But it is also worth examining. Because the last time India and Britain formalised a trading relationship, the terms were extraordinarily unequal — and the imprint of that inequality shaped Indian industry, Indian agriculture, and Indian labour for more than two centuries.
The Initiative examines this new agreement through the lens of that longer history. What did Britain extract in the colonial era, and how? What does a modern trade deal owe to that inheritance, if anything? How do you measure a fair deal — in market access, in intellectual property, in labour mobility, in reciprocity of investment?
These are not questions that have a single right answer. They are the questions any serious civic conversation about India’s economic future has to be willing to sit with.
“India today negotiates on near-equal footing. The terms still matter — and understanding what was extracted in the past is the only honest way to know what a fair deal looks like now.”
— The Roundtable, core message
