Ruptures and Reallocation: The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Partition of India in the Long-Run World Economy, 1700–2022

Three ruptures are routinely credited with redrawing the economic map of the world: the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Partition of British India. This article asks how much of that redrawing shows up in the output record. Using the Maddison Project Database 2023, it estimates demeaned synthetic-control counterfactuals for France (1789), the Russian Empire and USSR (1914 and 1917) and undivided South Asia (1947), with in-space and in-time placebos, leave-one-out checks and a levels specification, and converts the gaps into counterfactual shares of world GDP. The three cases behave differently. France fell about 10% below its synthetic peers in the revolutionary decade, but the gap is within the placebo distribution (one-sided p = 0.33) and disappears under the Napoleonic regime. Russia lost 34% in 1917–1928, with a trough of −52% in 1920, and was 19% above its synthetic path by 1929–1940; the collapse is large but, with 33 placebo units, not statistically exceptional (p = 0.18). South Asia shows the largest and most significant gap (−43% to −56% per window, p = 0.03), but it opens during the Second World War, an in-time placebo detects divergence before 1947, and per-capita output barely changed between 1946 and 1950 (−1.4%). The Partition reallocated output among successor states rather than destroying it. The world-share effects are therefore uneven: −0.4 percentage points for France in 1820, −3.0 for Russia in 1920 and +4.5 by 1960, and −2.8 to −4.8 for South Asia in 1950–1990, a loss that cannot be assigned to the Partition alone.