One of the most important skills that historians and other scholars are expected to ace is the careful reading and evaluation of other scholars’ writings, also termed as a “critique”. Ideally, critiques provide much-needed feedback to scholars and help improve their thinking and writing. When disseminated in public forums (as against in academic journals), such critiques additionally introduce the general public to important contributions and limitations of scholars and their writing. Of course, a critique is never the last word and is only one among many perspectives, so it must always be taken with a pinch of salt.What follows now is a critique of an excellent study titled “Unequal Exchange and North-South Relations: Evidence from Global Trade Flows and the World Balance of Payments 1800-2025”, published last year. When the Europe-based economist and co-author Thomas Piketty announced the release of this paper, he wrote that “colonial extraction and unequal exchange have shaped two centuries of North-South inequality”. On social media, some people were quick to point out that this was already a well-known historical reality. In the paper, Piketty and lead author Gastón Nievas acknowledge that “while some of these facts are relatively well-known at a general level, the main novelty is that we are able to offer a systematic quantitative study”.Indeed as a general rule, novelty is a highly appreciated phenomenon in the scholarly world. The new global database which Piketty and colleagues have built up and maintained – World Historical Balance of Payments Database – powers their paper, and is available open access. New evidence and new interpretations always help us better understand the past and the present: provided, of course, that the novelty is genuine, the argumentation is robust, and authors generously acknowledge their scholarly debts, i.e., the work of others before them and around them. So while the novelty of the database and of the quantification it enables (including of the “invisible flows” of the world balance of payments) will surely make significant contributions to our understanding of global history, it is also true that in a conceptual and intellectual sense, Nievas and Piketty’s paper mostly reiterates what we already know, which is that the primary reason for the disproportionately high material wealth of Euro-America today is its past (and indeed continuing) plunder of the labour and natural resources of Global South peoples.As a scholar deeply invested in better understanding inequalities through a historical lens, Nievas and Piketty’s paper piqued my interest. On page 5 I found a helpful, succinct distillation of what they are arguing: “Unequal comparative development [of nations] largely stems from unequal exchange, in the sense that a different set of trade rules and institutions could have led to a different pattern of comparative development, and could contribute to do so in the future.” Neatly delineated by commas, the above sentence dabbles in the present, the (counterfactual) past, and the future in each of its three clauses. That a different set of rules in the past could have led to different current levels of development is an important point. It relates to one of the most fundamental ideas one learns while training as a historian: namely, contingency (often described as the opposite of inevitability). The authors are saying that the present division between “developed” and “developing” or “underdeveloped” countries are not inevitable; it is not based on a “natural” political economic evolution dictated by inherent merits and demerits of each nation, but instead originate in the past and present “unequal exchange” between nations. In fact, in a strong critique of modern capitalist systems and market fundamentalism – despite not describing them in those words – the authors say that “global economic relations appear to be characterized by persistent imbalances and power relations, rather than by self-correcting market mechanisms” [emphasis added].This is, however, the farthest the authors are willing to go in terms of a faithful description of colonial-era and current North-South inequalities (which is saying something, because they won’t even say “power asymmetries”, just plain “power relations”). So here we have a lengthy paper by leading scholars, providing meticulous numerical measures of the global political economy including “the role of colonial transfers… in the build-up of Europe’s foreign wealth”, but not once do we come across a robust, accurate description of colonial systems themselves. The entire paper skips any meaningful mention of white supremacy, racism, colonial violence, exploitation, drain, stealing and plunder – all fundamental hallmarks of the “imbalances and power relations” that the authors mention.The authors provide a justification for using the contextually meaningless term colonial transfers instead of a phrase like “colonial extraction”, but it reads like an unfortunate capitulation to the selective insistence of Global North academia on being “neutral”, whatever it means. They write that “we prefer to use the less loaded term of ‘transfers’” [emphasis added]. Perhaps in anticipation of the flak this strange position will elicit, they unhelpfully add: “it is clear that from a modern perspective this [colonial transfers] looks very much like colonial extraction” [emphasis added].Just as one can’t write a meaningful academic analysis of the metrics and economics of Europe’s Industrial Revolution by skipping foundational concepts and terms like “efficiency” and “productivity”, one also can’t write meaningfully about inequalities during colonialism by invisibilising the phenomena of “exploitation” and “plunder” that were foundational to those inequalities. Indeed the term “invisible” does a lot of work in the Nievas-Piketty paper. While on the one hand the authors rightly take credit for the importance of going beyond the “visible” ways in which European powers siphoned off resources from the South (e.g., trade in goods), their definition of “invisible flows” hides more than it reveals: “trade in services, foreign income and foreign transfers”. This gives most readers no clue about the sheer malice, greed and corruption that were involved in pumping those “invisible flows” out of the South into the North.Corruption was rife among colonial officials, many of whom stole money, commodities, art pieces, precious documents, treasures, etc. and brought them to Europe. If I understand it right, the authors have included these myriad and ingeniously corrupt misappropriations under “foreign transfers”. This does a disservice to anyone who is reading the paper for an accurate understanding of the “unequal exchange” alluded to in its title. It is in fact not difficult at all to write an economic analysis of the colonial period and to simultaneously be faithful to colonial history. Take, for instance, one of the papers which Nievas and Piketty cite liberally in the essay: Pilar Nogues-Marco’s Measuring Colonial Extraction: The East India Company’s Rule and the Drain of Wealth (1757–1858). Note how its title itself mentions “extraction” and “drain of wealth”. The abstract of that paper goes many steps further: “I conclude that available figures lend empirical support to the Marxist interpretation… that colonialism generated a steady drain of wealth and that this drain was responsible for Indian famines, poverty, inequality, and economic retardation.”Nievas and Piketty refrain from mentioning Karl Marx or the Marxian inspiration behind most of the existing rich scholarship without which their paper would not exist. Moreover – and this will come as a big shock to many – there is no mention of “capitalism” in the paper, even though both colonialism and Piketty’s scholarly oeuvre are intimately associated with that economic-cultural system! Most of the scholars who have worked on quantifying the economics of colonialism have been categorical about emphasising the direct relationship between colonialism and capitalism. The first line of Nogues-Marco’s abstract, for instance, is: “This paper revisits the relationship between capitalism and colonialism by examining the case of British India under East India Company rule (1757-1858).” The primary argument of the Aditya Mukherjee essay they cite, titled Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain, is that “the rise of capitalism in Europe was closely linked with Europe’s [colonial extractive] relationship with the rest of the world from about the 15th century.”The tepid language and the ostensibly “neutral” historical analysis in the otherwise stellar Nievas-Piketty paper reflect, among other things, a reluctance of many Global North (and some Global South) scholars to “perceive” colonialism. This wording was used by the Marxian scholar Irfan Habib 40 years ago, in the article Studying a Colonial Economy Without Perceiving Colonialism, to criticise a similar tendency among scholars of the so-called Cambridge school. Or to borrow from Gurminder Bhambra’s general critique of Piketty’s work, some scholars are engaged in “narrating inequality but eliding empire”.At the end of the day, the question we need to ask and answer is this: Are we interested in quantifying the past because we like to assign a numerical value to everything (“metric fixation”), or are we interested in quantification as one of many different ways to better understand human and social experiences? In case one’s interests are purely quantitative with little relation to human experience, then one’s analysis and proposed “solutions” will be extensively divorced from grassroots realities and people’s lives. There’s, after all, little point in meticulously quantifying the disastrous consequences of the white man’s mythical burden while simultaneously pampering the white man’s fragile sentiments.Kiran Kumbhar is a historian, teacher and former physician, currently affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania.In his column ‘Past Forward’, Kumbhar provides us with a rear-view mirror that ensures we drive straight ahead.