One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organised and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first was India. The second was England.
So begin's her Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire. My question is, how much poorer was the average Englishman in comparison to the Moghul peasant? Also, what was the literacy rate in England vs India in the 18th century?
The question of the income differences between Indians and Englishmen have been discussed before in various posts by /u/IconicJester and /u/wotan_weevil that might be of interest to you.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ksc5ac/shashi_tharoor_states_at_the_beginning_of_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/lw76oe/as_the_painstaking_statistical_work_ofmaddison/