Differant colonisation of India

One huge advantage that Britain got over all the other European powers was a (not quite) monopoly on saltpeter. The British could produce all the gunpowder they wanted, and used it for live training of soldiers and sailors. Other nations mostly didn't have enough, and suffered the consequences.

It's huge, and little known.
 
One huge advantage that Britain got over all the other European powers was a (not quite) monopoly on saltpeter. The British could produce all the gunpowder they wanted, and used it for live training of soldiers and sailors. Other nations mostly didn't have enough, and suffered the consequences.

It's huge, and little known.

I may be wrong, but isn't it wrongly turned - I heard its *India* who gave them an huge access to the ressources for massive gunpowder production, not the other way.
 
I think it would be in the interests of European powers to preserve South Indian states barring a British monopoly as OTL as a sort of "Concert of South India", time-delayed after the establishment of this ATL Concert of Europe. I think Hyderabad and Mysore would be the giants on either side of the Deccan and without a British monopoly (or in Hyderabad's case, more British support) will likely be able to conquer some coastline. It'd be interesting to see what the Carnatic ended up resembling, since a lot of that territory was contested between the British and French right up until the beginning of the Raj.

In terms of North India, there's so much that could happen. A strong British position in Bengal could help them expand into Orissa and Oudh, but depending on how the British fare in the south; and assuming they can no longer close India off to foreign powers, I don't know that they'd be able to expand too far west so easily as they did iotl. I have no idea what would happen to the Marathas or Sikhs in this case.

Something interesting to think about. Assuming a resilient set of successfully independent South Indian states*, one thinks that there would be effects on the 19th C European power balance. India wouldn't be closed to the other power and a resurgent post-Napoleonic France, along with Prussia and maybe even commercial interests from the US might well find the independent South Indian states profitable partners. The biggest contenders would be Mysore, of course, Hyderabad and possible Cochin and Travanacore. The latter two were already under British dominance but given the new situation this relationship might well no longer be one sided.

*I'm not speculating about North India- the situation there was very different- North India was in a state of upheaval following the Mughal collapse and the British were very quick to exploit this, leading to their almost total dominance of Bengal by this time period.
 
I may be wrong, but isn't it wrongly turned - I heard its *India* who gave them an huge access to the ressources for massive gunpowder production, not the other way.
Precisely. It was the British control of Indian saltpetre (Oops, I missed a step in that argument, sorry), that let them beat Napoleon. Basically.

Several nations having that access would massively change European history.
 
I think it would be in the interests of European powers to preserve South Indian states barring a British monopoly as OTL as a sort of "Concert of South India", time-delayed after the establishment of this ATL Concert of Europe. I think Hyderabad and Mysore would be the giants on either side of the Deccan and without a British monopoly (or in Hyderabad's case, more British support) will likely be able to conquer some coastline. It'd be interesting to see what the Carnatic ended up resembling, since a lot of that territory was contested between the British and French right up until the beginning of the Raj.

In terms of North India, there's so much that could happen. A strong British position in Bengal could help them expand into Orissa and Oudh, but depending on how the British fare in the south; and assuming they can no longer close India off to foreign powers, I don't know that they'd be able to expand too far west so easily as they did iotl. I have no idea what would happen to the Marathas or Sikhs in this case.

The Sikhs might well be able to consolidate their power. I suspect you'd see a Company state dominating Bengal and the plains of the Ganges but not much beyond that.
 
Essentially the reason that Britain took almost all of India boils down to her control of the seas- looking at the 18th C situation, the SOP was for European powers to try to cultivate client rulers and to use their forces to tip the balance. At this point in time there wasn't much of a tech advantage, so to speak. The average Indian army was using the same weapons as the average army back in Europe. The differences were mainly doctrinal- Indian commanders weren't familiar with how combined arms (in a crude sense) worked (i.e. using infantry, cavalry and artillery together). The tendency was for Indian rulers to invest a lot in artillery (I've read that some Indian state armies used far more cannon proportionately than did European armies). This meant that the Europeans could use their drilled and relatively disciplined sepoy infantry to help tip the balance since drilled infantry could be relied upon to advance in the face of artillery when necessary.

With the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, however, Britain managed to achieve total dominance of the seas. French clients in India were thus at a disadvantage against British clients who could still depend on Company infantry to come in and help.

This is, of course, a gross oversimplification but it does sort of sum up the military situation in late 18th C India.

An interesting observation was that some Indian rulers were beginning to raise their own properly drilled infantry- the Tipoo Sultan had a royal guard drilled and trained by French mercenary officers and IIRC some other rulers had Portuguese training officers too. However, these practices had only developed to the point where said drilled troops were being used as elite guards units. The theory and practice of using drilled European-style infantry as the main arm of battle hadn't quite caught on by the time the British were able to cut out the other European states. Non-British clients were quickly subdued and the British clients gladly accepted vassal status, paving the way for the future Raj.

IMO given 20 more years, European infantry training practices would have become institutional in Indian armies- the soldiers serving in those elite units of the 1790s would have been the sergeants training the entire army in the 1800s, giving them the ability to operate as effectively as Company infantry. European doctrine, once standard practice in India would have effectively neutralised European control of the Indian balance of power. Mysore, for example, with a fully Europeanised army would have easily been able to sweep aside the numerically inferior British (or French etc) forces in South India. The same would have been true for any other Indian state. IOTL, however, they didn't get that extra generation- Britain cut out France and defeated the largely unupdated Indian armies, elite drilled guards units being not enough to fight entire armies of drilled infantry. In an ATL, this would be interesting to explore. One suspects that Mysore would dominate South India.

It should be noted that in my Vijayanagar TL, I had something like this happen two hundred years earlier with the Empire of Vijayanagar adopting Portuguese pike and shot tactical doctrine enabling it to operate with a military advantage against the Deccan sultanates and against European forces of the time.

So...what if (and this is a POD I've discussed earlier, though not in relation to India) the Russian Czarina doesn't die in the middle of the Seven Years war and let half-mad Czar Paul piss away all the gains Russia made against Prussia (IIRC, Prussia was pretty close to surrendering before Paul Russia withdrew from the war). With Prussia gone, this pretty much guarantees a French victory on the Continent. Now, at the peace convention, how likely do you think it is for France to use its leverage from winning in Europe to force Britain to abandon its gains in South India, and concede it as a French sphere of influence? I don't think the British would necessarily honor such an agreement, but I can see it delaying their hegemony over India by..a generation or so, until the next big European war. Time enough, by your thesis, for the Indian armies to Europeanize their infantry.
 
So...what if (and this is a POD I've discussed earlier, though not in relation to India) the Russian Czarina doesn't die in the middle of the Seven Years war and let half-mad Czar Paul piss away all the gains Russia made against Prussia (IIRC, Prussia was pretty close to surrendering before Paul Russia withdrew from the war). With Prussia gone, this pretty much guarantees a French victory on the Continent. Now, at the peace convention, how likely do you think it is for France to use its leverage from winning in Europe to force Britain to abandon its gains in South India, and concede it as a French sphere of influence? I don't think the British would necessarily honor such an agreement, but I can see it delaying their hegemony over India by..a generation or so, until the next big European war. Time enough, by your thesis, for the Indian armies to Europeanize their infantry.

That's a possibility but how likely is it that Britain would agree? I don't think it would be politically tenable for any British government to simply give up claims in India.
 
Mirza, your point stands, but one not-so-minor nitpick: Tsar Paul was Peter III (the monarch you're likely referring to) and Catherine the Great's son.
 
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