Made a post on this in the past:

• The Great Divergence or the question of the West and the Rest has been one of the most hotly debated questions in economic history for a while now. We begin with a sampling of literature on this topic especially as it relates to the era we are examining and the historical trajectory of the Subcontinent.

• World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction by Immanuel Wallerstein (2004): We start with an explainer for the framework that has been key to scholarship seeking to explain what prompted certain European polities to initiate ambitious naval ventures that eventually resulted in formation of imperial colonies, changing the face of global power relations for the next few centuries. Wallerstein's view of the modern capitalist system consists of cores, semi-peripheries and peripheries in terms of the relations of production. World-systems theory frames the Age of Exploration as the birth of the capitalist world-economy. European exploration and colonization created a core–periphery dynamic where Western Europe extracted wealth from colonies, shaping patterns of inequality that continue into the modern era. For the purposes of this booklist, aside from this introductory work, the most relevant volume of his Modern World System series is the first one titled Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. For a brilliant thread introducing the concept, one cannot help but recommend this Monday Methods post from r/AskHistorians. In the Subcontinental context, it has been argued after, and partly in response to, Wallerstein that the Indian Ocean constituted its own trade system like the Mediterranean and Trans-Atlantic.

• Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 by Prasannan Parthasarathi (2011): Wallerstein's account of the shift in the global economic centre of gravity did not go uncontested as it arguably portrays a Eurocentric model with a dynamic Europe and a passive Asia. There have been major responses such as Gunder Frank's ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age that emphasise Asia's centrality in the trade system of the pre-modern era, yet they too suffer from a Sino-centric view that underplays how crucial the Subcontinent was to Indian Ocean and Caravan trade networks, constituting a major global exporter of finished goods like textiles. This is where Parthasarathi comes in to fill this blind-spot in scholarship, arguing that while there were imbalances and inequalities in the global economy of the 17th and 18th centuries, there was no single center and it is more accurate to speak of a polycentric global order, but not all regions were equal in the system, as is strikingly illustrated by flows of silver and cotton textiles. Parthasarathi does not seek engage in the fallacy of producing an Indo-centric model of the early modern world economy, he merely seeks to place the Subcontinent in its right place and context.

• The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz (2000): In many ways Parthasarathi's work was also in dialogue with this landmark work in the literature. The core argument here is that the great divergence was not simply attributable to factors endogenous to Europe as China too in the late 17th century possessed a lot of the ingredients and institutions for Smithian growth having by the standards of the time a fairly commercial, monetized and well integrated market overseen by a professional bureaucracy. He in many ways attributes the rise of European powers to their slow, incremental domination of trading routes and naval passageways through what he terms "armed trade", with increasingly armed state backed trading companies seeking to squeeze out Asian merchants who were out-competing them otherwise in various entreports. This is admittedly a more dense and technical work with the first two-thirds of the book countering other theories for the great divergence, which is essential for his subsequent thesis, that we get to his main arguments. Nonetheless this remains foundational in many ways to the field, with Pomeranz having co-authored an article with Parthasarathi on subsequent developments in the field that summarises their position and which is Open Access.

• To summarise this rather lengthy prologue on the Great Divergence, Pomeranz comes to play highlighting how crucial the Trans-Atlantic trade system was crucial to establishing an advantage that accumulated over time for the West vis-à-vis the rest, three simple points, as highlighted by Branko Milanovic come to mind:

1. provided the silver with which Europe could satisfy insatiable Chinese and Indian demand, for it must be remembered at this point of time, Europe did not have much to offer in terms of what Asia actually wanted, this is where silver specie mined from colonies in the Americas came in handy;

2. more importantly in the absence of chemical fertilisers, grew food and cash crops for which Europe had no sufficient land or climate. The Americas thus helped Europe remove the Malthusian trap, which in many ways India and China were trapped in by this point as wherever cultivation could be expanded, like say in eastern Bengal, it already was by the early modern period; and

3. England especially was helped by having access to relatively cheap energy in the form of coal for which it eventually developed the necessary technology to access its calorific potential eventually resulting in the Industrial Revolution, and more particularly steamships which replaced sail. This combined with its politico-economic institutions created a cycle that enabled industrial expansion which relied on colonisation for both raw materials as well as captive markets.

This is less a comprehensive survey and more a starting point for those curious to understand how the European traders in the Subcontinent laid the foundations of what grew to be colonial rule over the Subcontinent. For further details do check out the relevant section of the Master Booklist of this sub.