![]() ![]() But the vast differences between the rich and the poor, which the traveller would have noted wherever he went, were much more striking than these differences across regions. An observer at the time would have noticed that people, on average, were better off in Italy, China and England than in Japan or India. ![]() 1Īt the time of Ibn Battuta’s travels, India was not richer than the other parts of the world. Three centuries later, the same sentiment was expressed by the seventeenth century French diamond merchant Jean Baptiste Tavernier who wrote of the country:Įven in the smallest villages, rice, flour, butter, milk, beans and other vegetables, sugar and sweetmeats, dry and liquid, can be procured in abundance. Indeed, I have seen no region of the earth in which provisions are so plentiful.’Īnd he had seen much of the world, having travelled to China, west Africa, the Middle East and Europe. In the fourteenth century, the Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta described Bengal in India as ‘A country of great extent, and one in which rice is extremely abundant.
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