After the Mongols, Why Didn't India Dominate the World?

Something that's been bugging me for a while but that I lack the knowledge to really start on researching, but why is it that, after the Mongol invasions and devastation of China and the Middle East, it was Europe and not India who would end up dominating the world by the 19th century?

Many people point out that Europe went (mostly) untouched by the Mongols and thus was spared their wrath, but the Indian subcontinent was, more or less, left untouched as well and was certainly at the time one of the major centers of world power and GDP. So, to repeat my question, why did India never rise out of this geopolitical mess and become the dominant world region instead of Europe?
 
India wasn't searching for resources. Without any impetus, why would she aggressively expand beyond her geographic boundaries? Politically India generally keeps an imperial system that is more reminiscent of the HRE than the Western European states that led Europe's global expansion.
 
It did to a certain extent. In the south of India, the Chola, Chera and Pandya dynasties did their bit in maritime power by making an empire in Indonesia and bringing their culture to the rest of S.E Asia.

The north was constantly embroiled in the political power struggles of the Turkic Delhi Sultanate and resources were put into re-uniting the realm every single time due to no clear system of inheritance.

And as said above, Timur did sack Delhi. There were also constant Mongol raids by Genghis' lieutenants.
 
lack of a strong centralized polity. Even the mughal state was not centralized when one looks at how autonomous the majority of rajas and nawabs behaved. Distance was another factor. India was a very large nation in comparison to say england or Framce amd transport and communication was difficult. it also did not help that the north was always subject to constant warfare and pillaging.

geography too was important for india given its position was home to a multitude of different languages and its geographic position made access to the new world difficult. as for expansion
Well that too was difficult. east Asia was blocked by the qing and himalayas while to the east the Nomads checked indian expansion. remember horses were not that widely used in the subcontinent due to unfavourable climate and so against invaders bred on horse and speed indian states had difficulty fighting them for every invading group eventualllly settles down.


In terms of coal india had lots of forests when compared to brtiain and so coal was not needed for fuel and coal research subsequently did mot develop that much.

For thse reasons from geographic to social to political factors India had trouble dominating.
 
The mongols may have devastated middle east but not china, china was still strong during Ming and early qing.
The Mongols did indeed devastate China. The northern Jin Dynasty was completely destroyed with estimates of dead in the millions, while the southern Song were ground down to nothing. While the Ming and Qing were certainly strong, that is more a testament to how well the Chinese state has survived devastations over its history and how powerful the Chinese really were. Still, it is not true that the Mongols didn't devastate China, just that China managed to recover while the Middle East, for various reasons, did not.
 
The Muslim invasion of India was a rather bloody affair that up ended a fair chunk of the subcontinent, and India was left fending off the Mongolians and their descendents for a couple centuries as they had riches all of Central Asia craved. Europe was mostly left alone after the first few attempts as an overly militarised back corner. The Mughal's were of Turk/Mongolian descent and conquered a good chunk of India in the 16th century, which just shows how long the Mongolians and other nomads kept attacking. India being a bit smaller than Europe means the bits further from the chaos of invasion weren't nearly as far as Spain or England were.
 
Many people point out that Europe went (mostly) untouched by the Mongols and thus was spared their wrath, but the Indian subcontinent was, more or less, left untouched as well ...

First of all, nobody knows why Europe became the dominant world region by the 19th century.
A hundred years ago it was crystal clear (at least for the guys like Rudyard Kipling or Adolf Hitler) - there was a simple answer to a simple question:
- "because the White Man is superior and the rest of the humankind is inferior".
But now looking at the successes of Japan/China/Korea/India even the pathological racists are somewhat embarrassed and unsure.

But the human mind cannot accept that some things have no explanation (so far) and it starts to look for anything, just anything:
and one of the explanations widely used in pop-culture - "because Europe was spared by the Mongols".
* Actually my hunch is that not being steamrolled by the Mongols might somehow help Europe. But it does not guarantee any region the world dominance, that's for sure.

The Muslim invasion of India was a rather bloody affair that up ended a fair chunk of the subcontinent, and India was left fending off the Mongolians and their descendents for a couple centuries as they had riches all of Central Asia craved.
Actually the first nomad invasion into India was some three-four thousand years ago which somehow coincided with the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization also known as the Harappan Civilization. These nomad Indo-European tribes from Central Asia called the "Aryans" were probably worse than the Mongols.

And since then these invasions went on a regular basis. They did not necessarily obliterated Indian civilizations, but surely did not help.

We all know how Attila the Hun traumatized European mentality and is remembered till nowadays as the scourge of God etc. etc.
Well imagine that there had been a few dozens of guys worse than Attila the Hun invading Europe in different periods of her history...
...Europe might have not become the world's dominant by the 19th century. Who knows?
 
no clear system of inheritance.
.

One of the biggest issues IMO, a lack of stable continuity upon a rulers death and resource draining wars of succession every time any raja/sultan/baldishaah died really halted progress in any major kingdom.
Give someone like Shah Jahan, Shivaji or maybe earlier monarchs he idea of a designated line of inheritance and it avoids much of the bloodshed, loss of time and resources succession wars caused.
 
One of the biggest issues IMO, a lack of stable continuity upon a rulers death and resource draining wars of succession every time any raja/sultan/baldishaah died really halted progress in any major kingdom.
Give someone like Shah Jahan, Shivaji or maybe earlier monarchs he idea of a designated line of inheritance and it avoids much of the bloodshed, loss of time and resources succession wars caused.

This has been one of the weirdest things about certain civilizations. In a nation that has hereditary leadership, how do you not have a method of transferring power without bloodshed? Especially if monarchy is an established tradition.

Back to India, I think geography was huge to its lack of taking over the world. They heavily influenced parts of Southeast Asia though but they didn't have easy access to the Pacific or Atlantic, which I think was key to Europe's success. Once Europe really got its hook into the Americas, it wasn't necessarily *over*, but it was definitely given a massive boost.
 

raharris1973

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Genghis and his first and second generation descendants spared India in the 1200s, but the Turks who created the Delhi Sultanate shortly before Genghis Khan's conquest spree, and the Timurid Turkomans in the late 1300s, did not spare India.

Now they didn't get into all of India, but together they did alot of devastation of the Indo-Gangetic plain.

Actually no Mughal conquest of the center and south and east would be kind of an interesting PoD, but still not likely to lead to Indian world domination. Can't say whether the Mughals ultimately eased or rendered more difficult the process of western conquest and British domination. That process itself had alot of luck involved, certainly more so than the conquest of the Americas, Australia, Oceania and sub-Saharan Africa.
 
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