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Started reading Dharampal’s “Indian science and technology in 18th Century”. The Portuguese, British and the French seize control of the whole of western coast for large parts of the 18th C. Any product going out would have to go under huge tax strain while british products 1/n
would come in for nothing. The stupid Mughal rendering of our seas to Europeans is the most stupid economic strategy anyone could employ. So much so for “Mughals made India rich” ! As @authorAneesh has shown, Marathas found it difficult to replace the old administration 2/n
lock stock and barrel. They simply could not because these things take time. What the Marathas were fighting for was not “furthering of India’s culture” but ensuring it’s “preservation”. -> not criticism. It shows how bad Hindu condition was before that divine blesssing 3/n
on the hill forts of Shivneri did what he did. Hindus had literally lost every inch of land (except of course in Assam and Brahmadesh) ! Chatrapati was not starting from zero. He started from -100. By the time of Balaji Vishwanath, Marathas had managed to take back executive 5/n
control of India’s politics back from the foreigners. Any regime change does not expediate the damage done to and by the previous regime. As @authorAneesh has again shown, the Mughals showed no interest in funding and patronising sea faring activities ! Enjoyed the fruits tho
Jahangir gave the right to the English and Portuguese mercantiles to collect taxes on products that were made on the land that “HE RULED ON” ! If Mughals were patriotic, they would have cared. India’s steady fall in GDP and already debilitating fall in GDP per capita made it 7/n
difficult to invest in new industries and ventures. The Mughal state was only interested in rare gems, slave trade and Fatwas. Again as @authorAneesh and others have shown, Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal after a severe famine ! Europeans were already here studying locals 8/n
So as India started losing control of the Indian Ocean, the mercantilists naturally took over our strategic ports over by force. Mughals did not mind as long as they got the booze and they got to extract the wealth out of India. European mercantilists got rich collecting taxes !
India’s local politics, despite Maratha ascendancy was in complete chaos because Hindus had no generational memory of pro Hindu rule. As one notices, bureaucracies are hard to dismantle and convenient to retain however inefficient ! The British just bribed their way through !
Dharmpal touches upon all sectors of science and industry that immediately preceded the Industrial Age. Iron works in TN, Drill Husbandry, Bar Iron, Best Mortar and small pox inoculation. All this was happening in India as the British were slowly taking over India inch by inch !
Marathas only had a 110 years to rule. Peace was a pipe dream. They were fighting Ethiopian Islamist slaves, Persians, Afghans, Turks, British, Dutch, French, Portuguese and Indians who were converted. That any industry survived is a miracle ! Read Priya Satia’s “Empire of Guns
My point is that western claims that they won India by science is a strawman.They were pirates who first took control of the seas, exploited their monopoly on capital inflow into India and then waited for the right time for the Marathas to be exhausted to eventually bribe through
As Toynbee has shown, Culture (science and tech) flows towards the barbarian invader. Persian architecture (beams) & medicine (they got medicine from India) went from Persia to Greece after Alexander’s conquest like Geometry went from Egypt to Greece. Similarly much of the 11/n
science and technology that gave birth to the Industrial Age went from India to Britain. Surely by 1820’s Britain started making it’s basic tech and India with no capital to be invested fell behind. Indian scientists still kept working though.
Most Indian scientists in the mid and late 19th C and even the Japanese in 1860’s thought that what they were taking from the west was not western science but Indian. They just got it with a different story and philosophy.
Dharampal should be taught in schools. @HRDMinistry
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Dharampal should be taught in schools. @HRDMinistry
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would very much like an expert in navigation and sea faring to look into how the control of Indian oceans by the European mercantilists was exploited economically. Also don’t forget Europe stole a lot of gold from the Americas which obviously was used as capital for it’s industry
While chemical retorts, calculus, printing, gun powder, Mortar, Iron Bar, Vaccines, Ice, Iron manufacture were all invented and developed in India, China, Japan and Korea, the succeeding tech was developed in the west. Why the east industrialised later is because of colonisation
Notice how the best scientific work cruicial for the industrial revolution was done only in the west after they had completely destroyed science and industry elsewhere and Britain had established it’s barbaric rule over India. Those developments happened from 1840 onwards
No coincidence that only in this period India share of world GDP fell from 25% in 1790 to 1.6% in 1920. The chaos and social tension that such an economic destruction brings about is unprecedented ! Not to forget conversions by missionaries have been rampant since the 1800’s
It is absolutely stupid to assume that cultures that developed science and tech that were crucial for the beginning of the Industrial Age lacked the cultural milieu to develop science and tech that would sustain and progress it. Racist assumptions one would say !
Dharampal has looked at as many things as possible. I don’t know much about Science and tech in China in the 18th C ! If we do we could really bring about the history of science of that period with it’s politics to explain why the east fell behind.
I will end with an example: Britain is a wealthy country today and yet it cannot stop the take over of it’s public discourse and public spaces by immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. Reverse colonisation. Nothing to do with science and tech.
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