The open-mouthed astonishment that what were once two of the poorest nations in the world could be seriously threatening to the USA’s global economic dominance is palpable on every page of this journalistic account of India and China’s economic reformation during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Author Robyn Meredith, foreign correspondent for Forbes magazine, has succeeded in packaging two complex histories as a neat and readable story. The calibre of her interviewees is impressive; global executives and world leaders feature alongside ordinary people whose own stories highlight just how sharply times are changing for these Asian giants.

The speed of the metamorphosis in China as portrayed here is especially astonishing. The generation raised under Mao Tse-tung was largely forced into hard labour, denied an education and their only hope of a better life was escape. For their children and grandchildren – Harry Potter-reading, tech-savvy and aspirational – there is no greater economic opportunity than at home (at least if that is a non-rural home).

India, meanwhile, is shown as an elephant, not a tiger, lumbering slowly but unstoppably into modernity. The book chronicles how Ghandi’s ideal of self-sufficiency that liberated the Indian people from British rule turned into economic shackles that kept the sub-continent poor, and how those shackles are now being broken.

One particularly interesting passage explains the interaction between the two: how Indian politicians have looked enviously at the astonishing rate at which the Chinese government introduced economic reforms, and have done their best to imitate them. But they knew that the cost the Chinese people paid for this overnight reform was more than democratic India would stand for: in China, one government dam-building project displaced 1.2 million people when 365 towns were consequently flooded.

Unsurprisingly, given her background in the US business press, the thrust of Meredith’s account is an attempt to divine how American companies can benefit from all of this. Rightly, she identifies China in particular as both an opportunity and a threat; an opportunity in that the economic boom offers US companies a rapidly expanding market; a threat because of the economic power China wields today, and the superpower status it will attain in the future.

The final irony is that India and China, which to varying degrees have built their success on the free market economics that are the American ideal, could now teach the West more than a few lessons on competitiveness and aspiration.