India: The Empire Strikes Back

In the period between 1530 and 1690 Europe saw the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz. What does North India under the Mughals, with its huge physical resource base, have to show in the same period? Do we know of a single mathematician of note who flourished under the Mughals or for that matter under any Islamicate empire or kingdom of India?

So the Mughal court was opulent. Where are the great libraries, the universities where secular learning could be pursued?

So the Mughals had huge and hugely destructive armies. Did they produce competitive innovations in the technique of efficient warmaking? For that matter, did they ever suceed in pacifying the domains from which they extracted gigantic revenues?

Why shouldn’t we regard the Mughal period as one during which India stagnated while Europe raced ahead?

An attempt to deeducate the Ba Ba Blacksheep, the toata mainaas, and the Cantonment & Colony Kuttaas who feel proud to be westoxicated & take immense pleasure in self-loathing and self-derision.
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A Time-Line of Indian Economy

5 BC
Silver punch-marked coins were minted by the Mahajanapadas

1 AD
India's economy had a 32.9% share of world income, the largest in the world.

1000AD
India's economy had a 28.9% share of world income, the largest in the world.

1500AD

India's economy had a 24.5% share of world income, the second largest in the world after China, which had a 25% share.

1600 AD

India had an income of £17.5 million, under Akbar's Mughal Empire, in contrast to the entire treasury of Great Britain in 1800, which totalled £16 million.

1700AD

India's economy had a 24.4% share of world income, the largest in the world, under Aurangzeb's Mughal Empire.

Colonial period
East India Company
1793

1793 Cornwallis' Permanent Settlement Instituted in Bengal
1820
India's economy had a 16% share of world income, the second largest in the world after Japan [citation needed]

British Raj
1868

First estimation of India's national income by Dadabhai Naoroji
1870

India's economy had a 12.2% share of world income under the British Empire.
1913

India's economy had a 7.6% share of world income under the British Empire.


1943
Famine of Bengal

References
Maddison, Angus (2004). The World Economy: Historical Statistics. OECD. ISBN 92-64-10412-7. (See Sample Table.)
World Bank, July 1, 2006. PPP GDP 2005.
This article related or pertaining to the economy of India is a stub. See the WikiProject India for article coordination. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_economy_of_India"

Ama yaar Dalrymple,

One GurgaoN does not the whole of India make! And a bunch of overworked night owls haranguing Amrikkan and other goras at all the God-forsaken hours of the day and the night does not a stable industrial base create!

The Capitalistic system is a great equalizer by itself. It owes no national loyalties – it runs on the simple God given fuel of greed for profit. In an otherwise stable setup, what allows the profits to get realized, are the lower wages (strictly by comparison). This allows the industries to get set up – then the wages rise – and as the wages rise, the profit margin falls and sure enough, the companies start looking elsewhere for cheaper labor.

The Capitalistic system is VERY self-regulating.

What you are witnessing is the upside of a newly unshackled economy. Unfortunately, many of us are also only too familiar with its down side which will inevitably come. Therefore, invoking that “the days of the Sonay ki chiDia are here again” is rather premature!

Of course, the history of the Raj and the centuries preceding it make for fascinating reading all by themselves and we will be extremely happy to read your related works (even fiction, perhaps mostly fiction) that you can come up with – especially at the unbeatable Chowk prices that most of us pay! (Although you as a writer may be less happy with the exactly same level of chowk compensation – I am not counting the mug! (No, the mug does not refer to your head. (What do you mean they did not give you one yet? (Even Manto has got one!))))

There is no need to carry out this shotgun-wedding of the present day GurgaoN with those long-ago days of the Raj! The times of the Raj were different – some may remember with nostalgia, some with dread, most with boredom! On the whole, we are all better off living in the present times with an improved level of enlightenment!

William Dalrymple,

I think this site has been invaded – by YOU!

Three pieces in three days! What the heck are you, a writing machine or an author on autopilot?! :)

I have not seen anybody crank out so much redundant text in such a short time since….

Since, since….

Oh, forget it!

Now, tell us the truth.

Who the heck are you and where the heck have you been all these years?!

I mean, here was this site – gagging up on its own overabundance of sub continental wisdom – yet withering away for the lack of goraas – and there you were, you sneaky you – perhaps lurking yet too chicken to show your thobra! Absconding!

And now you show up and try to deluge us with words!

Anyway, like the proverbial two cats (in this case, one an eighth the size of the other (unless you count for ego, in which case the two are about the same size)) we of the subcontinent have been fighting over that piece of bread (Kashmir, you might think, and you would be wrong – we have been fighting over a bigger bread – the very justification for our existence as a secular or religion-based nation (No, you can not have it both ways!))

We have been fighting and fighting, without getting anywhere!

All we needed was that smart monkey to do justice to the two cats – and there you are! Just make sure you don’t gobble up the bread yourself.

And welcome to the chowk!

PS: pay no attention to jealous naysayers!

India before the 17th century was the biggest producer & exporter of iron & steel. Its heavy industry was quite unrivalled even by China.
If one reads even the food the baboons ate in the nineteenth century it would be enough for them to puke at the low level of "culture" that existed then among them.
For the benefit of slaves it it Willam D. himself who has given a complete account of all the above in his "Last Mughal".The slaves , because of their illiteracy in their own language, have no clue about themselves. William D obtained all that info. obtained from Urdu & Persian records, meticulously kept & still available, despite the plunder by the Baboons, and has made the slaves a bit "enlightened" now.

This is what happens to the Cantonment & Colony Kuttas from the Kennels of Mcaulay.

Such were the times before the Baboons brought their barbarity on the shores of Tehzeeb.

There is a lot more that can be written here but those who have been jaahilled by the westocixation can never ever understand all this because the worst form of slavery is the one of the mind..when the slave self-loathes himself &
writes himself off as nothing but a dog of the west.

Without colonization Britain would be a backwater third rate rat-fart piece of land, the Indians would have been fluorishing in North America, Australia would be heaven for the natives,South America would be prosperous and Africa would not be dying of AIDS, and the slave trade would never have reached the proportions it did due to such colonization, and India would be an economic powerhouse that would dwarf the European nations of the world, who would probably be still grovelling in their sewage without their contact with the Muslim world and the resulting rennaissance....There was zero good that came out of Colonization, ZERO, will the harms still affect us to this day, those who debate the good vs bad of colonization suffer from moth eaten morality where they justify barbarism, rape, slavery and racism of the kind never before seen in human history, all for the enrichment of the racially exclusive few. F, colonization, and the F the supporters of it like tahmed, and F the US elite that are continuing that same colonization today, and making the vast majority of the world suffer...

{"At their heights the Mughal Emperors were really rivalled only by their Ming counterparts in China. From the ramparts of the Fort, the Great Mughals ruled over most of India, all of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and great chunks of Afghanistan. Their armies were all but invincible; their palaces unparalleled; the domes of their many mosques quite literally glittered with gold. For their contemporaries in distant Europe they were potent symbols of power and wealth- connotations of course with which the word Mughal (or Mogul) is still loaded with today, even when divorced from its original Indian context."}

Bill,
Excellent tribute to one of the greatest dynasties the world has seen with six successive and successful father/son successions.
There is absolutely no point in bringing up the India/Pakistan nonsense or claim this as "Muslim" superiority or use right-wing Hindutva idiocy to consider this as an exploitation of "dhimmidom."
Please understand the Mughals as very able administrators in the age of their contemporaries - the Ottomans, the Safavids, the Hapsburgs, the Tudors, or the Bourbons.

While I don't agree that the cities of Lahore and Agra outpaced Constantinople or Venice (maybe London or Paris)or even Toledo in grandeur, one must acknowledge the advanced state of civilization in Mughal India during the 16th and 17th centuries. Mughal treatment of India was far far better than the Spanish Conquistadores' treatment of Incas, Aztecs, and other conquered peoples. And compared to today's rulers of Pakistan, the Mughals were certainly far more sovereign and independent.

#31 shahji, when the angrej amabsador gave shahjehan a ghode-ki-baggi (carrige) he was very impressed with its springs. europe indeed did have universities in 1600s, and roads and bridges and navigable cannals to transport salt and so on. chinese had professional administrative service as compared to indian which was weird and adhoc

#4 Posted by Folio on August 21, 2007 3:38:44 am
I shall add to what Harish said abt Indians.

I am an Indian who is proud of India and many of its acheivements but let me state clearly that the statistics you are quoting are pure bullsh!t. This email has been making rounds for at least the last 6-7 years (if not more). My guess is that some guy had a little too much time on his hands and came up with this. The original email had asked questions like "who is the CEO of Motorola?" "who is the CEO of Apple" implying that Indians held these top jobs. When I pointed out this glaring inaccuracy in one forum then all of a sudden that part vanished.

I don't place much emphasis on it being put on the Indian Foreign Service's website. Like most government departments they are manned by people who are intellectually lazy and did not bother to cross-check the facts.

However, for argument's sake let's say the figures are true. The bottom line is that why should India feel great if 36% of NASA staff is Indians. I would be happier if ISRO becomes another NASA. Instead of x% of employees in Intel, IBM, Microsoft being Indians, I would be proud if an Indian in India started such companies. When Indian doctors are able to win Nobel Prize for Medicine and do cutting edge research and technology.

"this nation had no universities, servicable metalled roads which could carry carriages, navigable waterways, irrigation sysetms, methodical agriculture, windmills, waterwheels, professional administrative service, effective revenue system, enterprenurial class or industry (industry was limited to producing luxury goods for the rulers). nothing to be proud of imo."
Neither did Europe 400 years ago or pre industrialisation or before rennaisence ....India had the advantage of eating the "cooked " meal.....Its all about time or kaal .there is always dukham after sukham and then again sukham

So all the present euphoria about gdp ,wealth and posperity is nothing more than what HAD been before

"nothing more than a return to the ancient equilibrium of world trade. Today, we Europeans are no longer the gun-toting, gunboat-riding...."

in 1600 india producing 22% of world gdp is one of the stupidest oft repeated canard. yes, indian rulers led immensly rich PERSONAL lifestyles compared to their counterparts elsewhere. but what did it mean to the indian nation? the sone ki chidiya was writhing with maggots struggling to survive.

this nation had no universities, servicable metalled roads which could carry carriages, navigable waterways, irrigation sysetms, methodical agriculture, windmills, waterwheels, professional administrative service, effective revenue system, enterprenurial class or industry (industry was limited to producing luxury goods for the rulers). nothing to be proud of imo.

Dear Author:

I don't know if you-a syndicated writer- read interacts from on-line Chowk. But, why did you choose the title-"The Empire Strikes Back" ?. Actually it was the title of an article written bu Pico Iyer in Time Magazine some years ago. It dealt with the literary contributions in English langauge by non-English writers and the rise of countries which were ruled by the the Bitish.!

Kamath
Aug21, 2007

Re: # 26
Vast majority are useless not up to job, India is better of putting money in primary education, rather than churning these robots out on a conveyor belt.
“Wait a second: this isn't what the picture is supposed to look like. For years, pundits and the press have been warning that the millions of engineers and scientists India and China produce each year would soon challenge the United States' technical superiority. Just a few months ago, the London-based think tank Demos warned in a report that "the center of gravity of innovation has started moving from the West to the East," and that China could become a "scientific superpower" by 2050. Indeed, the raw numbers are impressive. China cranked out more than 600,000 engineers in 2005 alone, and India produces nearly 500,000 technical grads annually.
But these stats only tell half the story. Many of the graduates can't find work, and corporate recruiters in both countries lament a dearth of qualified applicants. "Out of the huge number of engineering and science graduates that India produces, only 25 to 30 percent can be regarded as suitable," says Kiran Karnik, head of the National Association of Software and Services Companies. The reason? Underfunding and a range of other factors have produced serious educational crises in India and China. These problems could soon wreak havoc on their economies. To sustain their breakneck growth, the countries will need lots of high-quality engineers and scientists. Yet neither have enough reliable universities to produce them. M.A. Pai, who taught at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, warns that the "lack of highly trained people at the Ph.D. level in both sciences and engineering will be a serious setback to India becoming a knowledge economy."
newsweek

Re: # 2

Aslam dude, engineers supposedly work in factories/labs unlike scientists who supposedly invent.

Its payback time