Prasannan ParthasarathiPrasannan Parthasarathi is a professor of South Asian history at Boston College. He is the author of The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants, and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Th Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which received the Jerry Bentley Book Prize of the World History Association. He is now working on a study of agriculture and the environment in nineteenth-century South India. His articles have appeared in Past and Present, the Journal of Social History, Modern Asian Studies, and International Labor and Working-Class History. He is a senior editor of International Labor and Working-Class History and served on the editorial board of the American Historical Review. He teaches with Juliet Schor a Complex Problem course titled “Planet in Peril.” Read More Read Less