In the medieval era travel and communication were slow enough that being behind on technology wasn't too bad because there was time to catch up before someone conquered you. In the modern era that was no longer the case. If you've ever played a historical strategy game you know what I'm talking about.
Additionally India and China were the wealthiest regions of the pre-industrial world. There's a reason Europeans went there instead of them going to Europe. They had things Europeans wanted, rather than the other way around.
India was already conquered by the Moguls by the time the British got there, so I guess they had to consolidate their own colonisation before looking to extend.
I mean maybe you could say the industrial revolution could only have happened in Britain, but that's awfully hard to prove. It also wasn't a pre-cursor to a lot of the empire.
> India was already conquered by the Moguls by the time the British got there
Like 200 years before that. India produced a quarter of the world's manufacturing output in 1750. [1] It was already prosperous when the British got there. That's why the British were there.
You're really going to tell me that if the British hadn't conquered them, they wouldn't have rapidly adopted the industrial revolution? Why not? Japan did.
> It also wasn't a pre-cursor to a lot of the empire
I don't know what that means. Britain's navy and army, as well as its advanced capital markets, were key to conquering so much of the world. Industrial capacity is fundamental to a strong navy and army in the modern world. Advanced capital markets generally develop to support industrial growth.
China, India, and most of the Middle East had effectively been conquered by descendants of horseback quasi-nomadic peoples at the start of the British colonial era. The Qing Dynasty (Manchurians), the Mughals (descendants of Tamerlane and the Mongol aristocracy of Genghis Khan), and the Ottoman Turks (former vassals to the Mongolian Ilkhanate and also Tamerlane). It can be argued these Central Asian warlord societies were not conducive to technological development.
That they lost control to some guys that had to travel around entire Africa to get there shows how incompetent and backwards thinking they were. It would be impossible to conquer 100m happy and productive people with just 1000 people even if the 1000 had a bit better guns, especially since the 100m happy and productive people easily could just reproduce the new modern guns.
That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies, both in refusing to adopting the superior European technology and by continuing to oppress their own people to such a degree that their people didn't really care much about a foreign power replacing their old tyrants.
> That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies
Agree. But that's exactly my point: they were prosperous pre-colonization. The point at which this thread started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50004651 argues that these places were incapable of creating prosperity and needed Europeans to teach them. That is simply incorrect and kind of racist.
They faltered at the wrong point in history and got colonized (or in China's case, merely bossed around - if that's inaccurate, sorry I'm not strong on Chinese history). As a result they lost out on a century of industrial, economic, cultural, and social growth and reform that happened in Europe.
You only have to look at Japan - never colonized, adopted Western technology and ideas organically, is economically advanced today - to see the counterfactual.
It wasn't universally due to lack of interest in guns (although in the Qing case, they actually did pull back on the use of firearms due to how poorly both the Ming Dynasty and Dzungar Mongols fared with the matchlock weapons of that era against strategic deployment of Qing horseback archery). India had an enormous arms manufacturing industry that included usage of rocket artillery, Timur absolutely loved using cannons, Ottoman matchlocks were considered the best in the world and even exported to China from the 1500s onward.
It wasn't the lack of arms or interest in arms, it was the lack of development of the sciences which had to flow through the patronage of those in authority. Britain had Newton and Newton co-invented calculus. The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery and higher precision manufacturing that by the Victorian Era could not be matched by Chinese or Indian workshops. The wealthy gentleman scientist and natural philosopher culture that developed the galvanic pile, the pressure cooker, astronomical telescopes, and the microscope was not something that could develop organically in these Eastern countries due to the political makeup of these empires (largely driven by descendants of nomadic warlords)
> The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery and higher precision manufacturing that by the Victorian Era could not be matched by Chinese or Indian workshops
By the Victorian Era India, at least, had substantially de-industrialized due to colonial policy.
> The wealthy gentleman scientist and natural philosopher culture that developed the galvanic pile, the pressure cooker, astronomical telescopes, and the microscope was not something that could develop organically in these Eastern countries
Why did they have to develop them organically? Europeans didn't invent gunpowder or algebra or the counting system.
"They" = the colonies? They were prevented from creating wealth.
What about before the colonisers got there? Nothing prevented them then.
Technologies usually aren't invented in the same place at the same time.
Where and when this happens are often accidents or confluences of history and geography.
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... makes a very good argument that the Industrial Revolution could only have begun in England. (EDIT: I wrote "Europe" earlier)
In the medieval era travel and communication were slow enough that being behind on technology wasn't too bad because there was time to catch up before someone conquered you. In the modern era that was no longer the case. If you've ever played a historical strategy game you know what I'm talking about.
Additionally India and China were the wealthiest regions of the pre-industrial world. There's a reason Europeans went there instead of them going to Europe. They had things Europeans wanted, rather than the other way around.
India was already conquered by the Moguls by the time the British got there, so I guess they had to consolidate their own colonisation before looking to extend.
I mean maybe you could say the industrial revolution could only have happened in Britain, but that's awfully hard to prove. It also wasn't a pre-cursor to a lot of the empire.
> India was already conquered by the Moguls by the time the British got there
Like 200 years before that. India produced a quarter of the world's manufacturing output in 1750. [1] It was already prosperous when the British got there. That's why the British were there.
You're really going to tell me that if the British hadn't conquered them, they wouldn't have rapidly adopted the industrial revolution? Why not? Japan did.
> It also wasn't a pre-cursor to a lot of the empire
I don't know what that means. Britain's navy and army, as well as its advanced capital markets, were key to conquering so much of the world. Industrial capacity is fundamental to a strong navy and army in the modern world. Advanced capital markets generally develop to support industrial growth.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_Empire#Economy
China, India, and most of the Middle East had effectively been conquered by descendants of horseback quasi-nomadic peoples at the start of the British colonial era. The Qing Dynasty (Manchurians), the Mughals (descendants of Tamerlane and the Mongol aristocracy of Genghis Khan), and the Ottoman Turks (former vassals to the Mongolian Ilkhanate and also Tamerlane). It can be argued these Central Asian warlord societies were not conducive to technological development.
> It can be argued these Central Asian warlord societies were not conducive to technological development
Why not? Their technology is part of what helped them conquer so much in the first place. What would make them so hostile to technology?
All 3 societies were among the leading powers of the world up until the 1800s, in addition to being productive and prosperous.
That they lost control to some guys that had to travel around entire Africa to get there shows how incompetent and backwards thinking they were. It would be impossible to conquer 100m happy and productive people with just 1000 people even if the 1000 had a bit better guns, especially since the 100m happy and productive people easily could just reproduce the new modern guns.
That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies, both in refusing to adopting the superior European technology and by continuing to oppress their own people to such a degree that their people didn't really care much about a foreign power replacing their old tyrants.
> That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies
Agree. But that's exactly my point: they were prosperous pre-colonization. The point at which this thread started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50004651 argues that these places were incapable of creating prosperity and needed Europeans to teach them. That is simply incorrect and kind of racist.
They faltered at the wrong point in history and got colonized (or in China's case, merely bossed around - if that's inaccurate, sorry I'm not strong on Chinese history). As a result they lost out on a century of industrial, economic, cultural, and social growth and reform that happened in Europe.
You only have to look at Japan - never colonized, adopted Western technology and ideas organically, is economically advanced today - to see the counterfactual.
It wasn't universally due to lack of interest in guns (although in the Qing case, they actually did pull back on the use of firearms due to how poorly both the Ming Dynasty and Dzungar Mongols fared with the matchlock weapons of that era against strategic deployment of Qing horseback archery). India had an enormous arms manufacturing industry that included usage of rocket artillery, Timur absolutely loved using cannons, Ottoman matchlocks were considered the best in the world and even exported to China from the 1500s onward.
It wasn't the lack of arms or interest in arms, it was the lack of development of the sciences which had to flow through the patronage of those in authority. Britain had Newton and Newton co-invented calculus. The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery and higher precision manufacturing that by the Victorian Era could not be matched by Chinese or Indian workshops. The wealthy gentleman scientist and natural philosopher culture that developed the galvanic pile, the pressure cooker, astronomical telescopes, and the microscope was not something that could develop organically in these Eastern countries due to the political makeup of these empires (largely driven by descendants of nomadic warlords)
> The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... See this for why the steam engine was invented where it was.
> The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery and higher precision manufacturing that by the Victorian Era could not be matched by Chinese or Indian workshops
By the Victorian Era India, at least, had substantially de-industrialized due to colonial policy.
> The wealthy gentleman scientist and natural philosopher culture that developed the galvanic pile, the pressure cooker, astronomical telescopes, and the microscope was not something that could develop organically in these Eastern countries
Why did they have to develop them organically? Europeans didn't invent gunpowder or algebra or the counting system.