Industrialised Gupta Empire?

zhropkick

Banned
This is probably ASB, but let's pretend it's not ASB for a second and just highly unlikely.

Is there a way to get classical-era India, preferably under the Gupta Empire at its height, to industrialise? I'm not very knowledgeable on the subject of classical-era India, but seeing as most early industrialisation TLs come out of either Northeast Asia or Europe it does beg the question.

From what I understand India during this time had a healthy trade relationship with both East Asia and the Graeco-Roman World (spread of ideas and goods), a thriving literary culture (including scientific literature to an extent), a decent textile industry, one reasonably-unified political entity controlling much of the densely-populated Gangetic Plain and quite built-up urban areas compared to what came after.

Places like Bengal have decent coal reserves right next to natural waterways, making coal easier to transport and making the invention of a steam engine to be used as an underground water-pump pretty worthwhile for mining deeper pockets of coal there. It is similar to Britain in this regard. Most of the Ganges River was navigable until the 19th century, and along with that Indians have had the ability to dig canals since before 2000 BC.

I'm not sure how bad structural factors are though. The caste system, although it is less restrictive under the Guptas than it was during early modernity, is still there and might just present a challenge to industrial development. On the other hand, it is nowhere near chattel slavery and Ancient India as far as I'm aware tended to not practice chattel slavery. Free enterprise/guilds might be another problem - I'm not really aware of what the situation with them was in India, and the practice of free enterprise was pretty instrumental to industrialisation in OTL Northwestern Europe.

Would industrialisation have been possible in India during the reign of the Guptas, and if not why not?
 
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zhropkick

Banned
Because I want to bump this thread and I don't want to bump it obnoxiously, I think I'll mention some potential barriers and barrier-ish factors to industrialisation.

- No movable type printing. During the time of the Gupta Emperors India had woodblock printing, but movable type printing hadn't been invented anywhere yet. According to Wikipedia, a Buddhist master from the 4th century called the copying and keeping of scripture an essential religious practice, so it could be assumed that printing books and religious texts was at least somewhat commonplace in classical India during this time period. Admittedly, the Buddhists (who seem to have been most fond of printing things if we go by this tidbit of information) were on the decline under the Guptas as Hinduism rose to prominence, but the Gupta state was still pretty tolerant of Buddhism and at times would allow foreign Buddhist rulers to build temples in their territory.

Why am I talking about movable type printing? The answer is simple; as printing becomes less painstaking and more efficient, the spread of written information becomes faster and easier to do. Long-winded scientific journals and technical manuscripts become easier to copy and disseminate, making an Indian "scientific revolution" of sorts less of a stretch.

- Less advanced metallurgy. A lot of key advancements which helped kickstart the OTL industrial revolution were advancements in the field of metallurgy. Two I can think of off the top of my head are the Bessemer and puddling processes for producing steel and wrought iron respectively. Both processes were incredibly important because they made steel and wrought iron easier to produce and thus cheaper. Steel and wrought iron are the two metals used to manufacture steam engine boilers, so having them be easier to make and cheaper to buy is a good thing for industrialisation. Classical India knew what they were doing when it came to metallurgy (the iron pillar of Delhi still standing is a testament to this) but they clearly didn't get as far technologically as the British did.

- Lack of empiricism in mainstream Indian philosophy? This one's a barrier-ish. In OTL the scientific revolution in Europe was aided by a philosophical climate in which people valued empiricism and the scientific method. Indian philosophy tends to be far more mystical and metaphysics-focused, with the most reason and logic-based schools of thought in Buddhism for example being far closer to rationalism than they are to empiricism (although obviously equating then to western philosophy this simply doesn't do great justice to them, my point still stands). Of course there's schools of thought like Vaiśeṣika and Nyaya in Hinduism which share many characteristics with empiricism, but I don't know how prominent those schools of thought would have been in the contemporary intellectual climate of classical India. I've seen people on this forum say that rationalism from people like Plato becoming dominant held science in Greece back, and India has a lot of rationalistic or mystical strains of philosophy which are dominant and by this logic could do the same. Could the philosophical climate of classical India have slowed or prevented a potential scientific revolution if Indians developing movable type printing is the POD?

- The caste system? More recent research on Indian history suggests that the rigidity of the Indian caste system as we know it today is actually quite a late development. The two elements of caste in India, "Jaati" (birth into a social group, usually a profession) and "Varna" (attitudes and character) were, for much of Indian history, not conflated with each other as rigidly as they are today. From what I've seen people (Indians) say on the internet, the conflation of Jaati with Varna occurred at about the time Muslims entered the picture and reached its height during early modernity. In ancient and classical India it was pretty normal for people to do professions not associated with their caste if the need arose for it (war creating a need for soldiers or a shortage of labourers for example). If classical India is going to industrialise it will put huge strain on traditional social structures and conventions, just like industrialisation did in OTL Europe. The caste system will have to either adapt or die (probably the former at this point in history). I think that, given how much more flexible it was during antiquity if need be, India's caste system could very well survive by becoming more permissive and allowing people to adopt different professions when it was practical. Can it last forever? I dunno.

It does seem like the Guptas enforced a more restrictive take on the caste system than the states that came before them did, so if industrialisation were to hypothetically take off in India under their watch they could be in for a rude awakening. Could the fact that India was slowly moving towards a more rigid caste system during this era make industrialisation more of an uphill battle? Conflating birth and character makes it much harder for people born to soldiers, aristocrats or manual labourers to join the emerging factory-owning bourgeoisie, for instance.
 
Industrialisation doesn't have to go like a copy of britain. But all the obstacles you mention are not kill factors: there WAS empiricist philosophy in India; rigid occupational structures came along with wealthy, powerful and not always simply conservative economic institutions (shreni; I'll not call them guilds because it's a confusing analogy); metallurgy was very advanced in India, the leap did not require Western-like philosophy first because Chinese metallurgy knew of such ovens many centuries before Britain, so why not India, too?

I think the biggest obstacle to Gupta industrialisation has not been mentioned yet: the overall global economic downturn of that time period. When the Guptas reached their height, their advanced trade Partners to the West and North both disintegrated fast. Currency finds give testimony to Indian-Mediterranean trade more than halving during the time of the Guptas; with China, the Situation after the Han collapse may have been less severe, but we don't know exactly.

Indian expansion into SE Asia could not entirely Balance this out.

This created contracting long-distance markets. Under such a condition, an industrial revolution is highly unlikely.
 

zhropkick

Banned
Industrialisation doesn't have to go like a copy of britain. But all the obstacles you mention are not kill factors: there WAS empiricist philosophy in India; rigid occupational structures came along with wealthy, powerful and not always simply conservative economic institutions (shreni; I'll not call them guilds because it's a confusing analogy); metallurgy was very advanced in India, the leap did not require Western-like philosophy first because Chinese metallurgy knew of such ovens many centuries before Britain, so why not India, too?

I think the biggest obstacle to Gupta industrialisation has not been mentioned yet: the overall global economic downturn of that time period. When the Guptas reached their height, their advanced trade Partners to the West and North both disintegrated fast. Currency finds give testimony to Indian-Mediterranean trade more than halving during the time of the Guptas; with China, the Situation after the Han collapse may have been less severe, but we don't know exactly.

Indian expansion into SE Asia could not entirely Balance this out.

This created contracting long-distance markets. Under such a condition, an industrial revolution is highly unlikely.

Hmmm, good point.

If that's the case, how do you stop India's trade partners from declining, or at least slow/delay that decline enough to fit in a window of time in which industrialisation is more possible? Rome at least seems to have been pretty irreversibly stuffed for a long time judging by the decline in lead levels found in ice cores from that era. I'm not sure how inevitable China's economic decline would have been - how much of it was the fault of the Han dynasty falling apart exactly?

If that doesn't work, I was thinking the Indians could have gone for East Africa as well (Ptolemy and Pliny the Elder talked about coastal centers of commerce there a few centuries before the height of the Guptas) for a second, but then again I doubt they would've had the economic size to offset collapse even when combined with Southeast Asia. How promising is the Horn of Africa?

And if both of those don't work, why can't the Indians just create their own market on the subcontinent with the right PoDs?
 
The Horn of Africa is a tiny market by itself and primarily had strategic importance as a waystation by this time period.
I'm sure there are greater experts on the Three Kingdoms and Jin periods on this board, but as for Rome, avoiding the downturn is fairly difficult indeed and probably requires PoDs which would butterfly the Guptas (and maybe any similar empire, too).
India's economy was very self-sufficient, that is exactly the OTL situation. To move from OTL towards a much more dynamic situation, you could use an increase in long-distance trade. Now there was trade across the subcontinent along long-established routes and traditions, but yet again, while this had important effects on Indian OTL history, it wasn't enough to kickstart an industrial revolution. How would you increase it, when around you the shutters are coming down? Well, the Sassanids were doing well during this time period and urbanising heavily (by comparison), so that's more than nothing. But you'd still work against the tide.. compared to the climate of colonial expansion of OTL.
 
The main thing the Gupta's lack is a large economic surplus. In Europe before the Industrial Revolution, there was a huge economic surplus due to the new crops arriving from the Americas boosting agricultural productivity and populations.

Those larger populations could then eat up Europe's forests and make coal mining for domestic fuel profitable, the economic surplus enabled investments in expensive machinery, and the rest is history.

I really cannot see anything similar happening in Gupta India. They need much improved materials, greatly improved foundations of knowledge, a stronger state...

It's just too early and in the wrong part of the world.

I could imagine an industrial revolution happening maybe 300 years late in either Europe, China or India in a world without coal, once states were strong enough and science had advanced enough that planning an executing a big leap directly from agrarian economics to hydroelectric industrial economics became possible, and I could see an industrial revolution happening a little earlier if China, Mali or Europe had started the Colombian exchange early. This unfortunately doesn't fit into either category.

That's not to say that the Gupta couldn't be more advanced. Even better hand tools, for example, would produce big effects that would reverberate around the world.

fasquardon
 
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