As the economic power of the East rises, so that of the West declines. There can be no more telling parable of the new way that money sloshes around the world than the story of Blackburn Rovers, the English Premier League club which is about to be bought — the contract should be signed this month — by the Venkateshwara Hatcheries Group, better known to the Indian fast food consumer as Venky’s Chicken. Venky’s was founded in 1971 by the late B.V. Rao in a modest factory in Pune. Now his daughter and two sons run a company with a billion-dollar turnover and operations spread across 17 countries in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, one which sells more chickens to Russia than any other exporter. Broiler chickens, chickens that lay pathogen-free eggs, day-old chicks, nutritional supplements: out of them have come the profits that the purchase of Blackburn Rovers will barely dent. The cost, including repayment of the club’s £15 million debt and a budget for new players, is unlikely to be more than £46 million.

This is small beer (I struggle to avoid the phrase ‘chicken feed’) by the standards of the EPL, most of whose big clubs are now in foreign hands. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi paid £210 million for a 90 per cent share in Manchester City and thinks nothing of spending £32 million on a single new player. More recently, the American John Henry bought Liverpool for £300 million, despite Liverpool’s £350 million debt. In buying Blackburn, the Venky group become the first Indian owners of an EPL club, and while Blackburn lacks the lustre of, say, Manchester United or Chelsea, the club has a long and distinguished history. Founded in 1875, it was one of the original members of the Football League and had some splendid triumphs when Lancashire was still a forest of factory chimneys and Blackburn meant one word: cotton.

Here is an interesting full circle that should interest any economic historian. Blackburn Rovers would not exist without the dhoti. The club rose and prospered when Blackburn was the greatest cotton-weaving town in the world, and what it mainly wove was the cotton for dhotis. “This fabric was manufactured in the town and the surrounding district on a scale equal to the needs of the gigantic Indian population,” wrote the novelist, J.B. Priestley, in his travel account, English Journey. “It clothed the whole vast mad peninsula. Millions and millions of yards of dhootie cloth went streaming out of this valley.” The people who stood on the terraces to cheer on the Rovers would have been connected to dhotis in one way or another — as weavers, machine hands, packers and shippers — and the same went for the businessmen who funded the club. No dhotis, no money: no money, no audience for professional football.

Blackburn’s heyday lasted until the 1920s. When Priestley visited the town in 1933, he described a dramatic change: dhootie, he discovered, was now “the tragic word”. India was making more and more cotton for itself; worse, the Independence movement was boycotting British-made goods. “The whole Indian trade… was crumbling away; and the next thing they knew, firms went out of business, mills were idle, then empty, and folk by the street and by the town were thrown out of work.” Few people thought the dhootie trade would ever return, and of course it never did. That wasn’t quite the end of Blackburn’s cotton factories; many of them hung on until the 1960s, when they were re-equipped with new machinery and recruited labour from Pakistan, which accounts for the town’s large Muslim population (commentators who imagine that Venky’s ownership can connect the club to what they describe as Blackburn’s ‘Indian population’ may be making a mistake). But those factories too have closed, and the reasons that so many people settled in Blackburn — and watched the Blackburn Rovers — have long since disappeared. As early as the 1920s, the town prefigured the fate that lay in wait for the rest of industrial Britain.

What fascinated Priestley was how remote the threat to prosperity had once seemed — how, only a few years before, Blackburn people had thought of Gandhi, if they thought of him at all, as no more than a “rum little chap” who sat “spouting and spinning at a fatuous little wheel” several thousand miles away in India; and now, somehow, he had overturned their whole world. What Priestley neglects to mention is that Gandhi himself came to one of Blackburn’s satellite towns, Darwen, when he was attending the 1931 Round Table Conference in London. He visited a Darwen cotton mill at the invitation of the owner — the purpose, apparently, was to show him the misery caused by the Indian boycott, though the visit’s only legacy is a famous photograph which shows him surrounded by cheering mill workers. Why cheering? The likeliest explanation is that the photographer from the Northern Telegraph asked them to cheer and they didn’t mind obliging, because Gandhi by this time was a celebrity who wore an intriguing loin cloth, which the mill hands might or might not have recognized as a hand-woven example of the dress that had so recently kept Blackburn in paid employment.

As a novelist, Priestley isn’t much read now. His play, An Inspector Calls, survives on the school Eng Lit syllabus — which helps account for its commercial success as a West End revival — but very few people under the age of 60 would have read novels such as The Good Companions or Angel Pavement, which before the war established him as one of Britain’s most popular novelists. His English Journey shows him as both an observant and prescient writer. Here he is in 1933 on what he calls the “interdependence” of national economies, or what we would now call ‘globalization’: “There is no escape. We may be under fifty different national flags, but we are compelled to serve now under only the economic flag. We do not know who designed it and ran it up, but there it is, and the more often we try to desert from it the more brutally we shall be starved into submission. It is as if a supernatural being were determined to make this planet one whole or depopulate it. Lancashire is learning a lot about this queer interdependence of things.”

Even Priestley, however, could scarcely have foreseen that the Blackburn Rovers would one day be owned by an Indian chicken company. Truly — and this time I won’t avoid the tempting cliché — some old imperial chickens have come home to roost.

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I was sorry to learn that the Calcutta historian, Pradip Sinha, has died. Twenty years ago we were friends for a while — a friendship that became impossible to sustain over the distance between Ballygunge and north London, though once or twice a blue aerogramme came in the post. I can’t remember how we met. R.P. Gupta, that other great student of Bengali urban life, may have introduced us, or perhaps we bumped into each other on the steps of the National Library where we’d gone to smoke our cigarettes. (aerogrammes, Wills Gold Flake: this was a different age.) What I do remember is his great patience and kindness. Thanks to Pradip, I learned not to be too disappointed when my request slips for the National Library’s books came back marked “not found” or “too brittle” or “termite infested”. If a book came — and some did — the next great struggle was to stay awake while reading it. In a Calcutta April, the library’s ceiling fans sent a slow drift of warm air down towards the desks and easily transformed, say, the coal shipment records of the Bengal and Nagpur Railways into a delightful snooze. Here, too, Pradip showed me the ropes by encouraging a refreshing stroll around the gardens every hour or so.

He lived in a dark and, I have to say, rather melancholy house near Ballygunge station, where on a couple of occasions we (more certainly, I) drank too much rum and water. His now-dead father, N.K. Sinha, had been a prominent economic historian and perhaps this shaded Pradip’s estimation of his own gifts — Calcutta in Urban History, published in 1978, may be the only book that non-academics remember him by. But he had a lively interest in many things: the rajbaris of East Bengal, which he longed to see, and the need to look after and restore the neglected houses of north Calcutta. It was Pradip, in fact, who persuaded me to join the newly formed Calcutta Preservation Society. Does this body still exist? If so, I still belong to it, because Pradip did such a good job of persuasion that I stumped up 600 rupees and became a life member. He had an enchanting, all-embracing curiosity about his city’s history. I hope his spirit lives on.